Of the people who gathered in the spare room late in the afternoon, Johann knew only two: the Sauter sisters. They had a little cottage on the road to Nonnenhorn, right after the house with the tower. When he and Father delivered coal to them, his father always had to come into the living room and drink a cup of maté tea, and then Johann had to take from a plate a soft something of uncertain color that was as good as not sweet at all—maybe a slice of dried apple. Johann said hello to the two Miss Sauters and was pleased they remembered him. Today, the spare room smelled like the Sauters’ house. They were all drinking rose hip, peppermint, or chamomile tea. Last week at the kaffeeklatsch, the whole house smelled of coffee. Johann’s favorite meeting was the kaffeeklatsch. He was allowed to eat as many donuts and pieces of Bienenstich as he liked.
After Elsa had served the beverages, Father stood up and said that when he sent out the invitations to this gathering on the day after Epiphany, he could not have known that the next to last day of January would be such an unsettled one. He had worked out what he had to say long before this January, which was becoming more ominous with each passing day. His desire to speak here today had its basis in all the troubles they had had to endure since 1914. For years he had been keeping a record of what was going on in the world and had put his reactions down on paper. But before he told them what he saw himself compelled to do after all he had experienced, he had another announcement to make, something that had only reached his ears this noon on the telephone: his friend Hartmut Schulz, about whom he had spoken to some of those present today, was dead. Two weeks ago, Hartmut Schulz had taken his own life. Hartmut’s father had not deemed it necessary to inform him until today. Herr Schulz senior had been most anxious to let him know that he had succeeded in burying his son in a military cemetery, since his unfortunate deed could thus be acknowledged as a result of the war. Father said he had met Hartmut in a French POW camp in 1918. Everything he wanted to say and suggest today ensued from Hartmut’s biography: repatriation 1919, study of Lutheran theology, pastor in a small town in Swabia, doubts about his calling to the ministry, near to despair, finds a woman from the Youth Movement who for a while writes his sermons for him—Hartmut always said those sermons were half Midsummer Night celebration, half Pietism, assertive and vague at the same time. He gives up his post, gets a divorce. Takes a job as tutor in the home of an eccentric millionaire in Arosa. But not for long. They said he had a harmful influence on their children. In the meantime, his path had led him to theosophy. He opens a health food store in Oberstaufen that sells Graham bread, vitamin cream, herbal tea, soybean sprouts, and peanut butter. Invents a magnetizing apparatus no one is willing to invest in, goes into bankruptcy. Kills himself. Just last fall, Hartmut Schulz had ridden his bicycle all through Switzerland, knocking on the doors of Illuminati in Basel, Rosicrucians in Überlingen, cosmosophists, neo-theosophists, magnetopaths, natural healers in Teufen, Urnäsch, and Gais. Sympathy everywhere, but no help anywhere. “Dear friends,” said Father, “if you agree, I propose that we name the theosophical community we intend to found today the Hartmut Schulz Circle. Our goal is to escape all suffocating divisions, or as Jakob Böhme says in his Theosophic Epistles: It is time to seek oneself. It was a religious transgression to split the self into a body and a soul, and ever since, we have gone astray, we Europeans. Perhaps just in time, natural science has also discovered that the entire evolution of humankind is preserved in twelve chromosomes. The fact that those twelve chromosomes correspond to the twelve houses of the zodiac will come as a surprise only to someone who subjects himself to suffocating divisions. Everything proceeds from Oneness. Jakob Böhme granted only to the Devil a separate, strangulating will, so that the Devil—whose name is Separator—vegetates away, devoid of light, unperfused by the fluid from which the universe developed and continues to exist. Materiality is nothing in and of itself, not a substance but an oscillation that is in harmony or disharmony. We can call that which maintains the oscillation whatever we want. Franz Anton Mesmer calls it Fluid. He used the word Magnetism for the attraction and repulsion constantly occurring within us. Magnetism, he says, is an invisible fire, the result of the reciprocity between two poles. Ebb and flow, the terrestrial breath, is such a result. The universe is a result of that reciprocity. The fluid of this reciprocity is de spiritu quodam subtilissimo, finer than the rays of light, heat, or sound. Most emphatically at work on the nervous substrate of all life, but also even on so-called lifeless things like iron or glass. We are a part of this movement, subject to it, multiplying and amplifying it. It suffices for one human to be beside or facing another to have an effect on him, to engender in him one’s own special and characteristic potential. But the fullness and entirety of the planetary influence on every one of our cells is also always at work. Always take everything into account. Plant trees when the moon is waxing, cut them down when the moon is waning. Swedenborg traces illness back to the sins of mankind. We expose the word sin to reciprocity until it is no longer a word but a movement. To think without words, that is our goal. For as Jakob Böhme says, conjecture and opinion only lead to discord. But to think without words, to think as Franz Anton Mesmer tried to learn and teach a hundred and fifty years ago, that we can learn from the East, from the ancient Brahmin of Marapur, leader of the school of Uttara Mimamsa wisdom, who teaches the indivisibility of being and thinking. I recall to your minds the second legend of Rabindranath Tagore. The first legend ended ‘ . . . each in his own way—each in his own way.’ In the second legend, the boy Rabindranath is sitting before his father’s house and sees a zebu and a donkey standing side by side. He sees the zebu tenderly licking the donkey’s coat. And the boy is overcome by an epiphany. Pervaded by universal feeling, he begins to sing without words. Someone who overhears him says he sang, ‘I must love—must love.’ As students of the wisdom of Gautama, of the Buddha, the model for the dissolution of form and structure, we know what we no longer say, what we no longer need to say when we know it, yet doubting ourselves, we must say again and again that—”
At that moment, the door from the restaurant was flung open and in strode, in his brown shirt, Herr Brugger with two other Brownshirts behind him, Ludwig Brand and Schulze Max. Ignoring the meeting in progress in the spare room, they began to push open both sides of the folding partition. Even while Father was still speaking, it had gotten so loud in the restaurant that he had to repeat sentences two or three times. Each time he had gestured with one hand toward the source of the babble of voices. Now, he managed a last, “N’etam mama. You do not belong to me, you do not belong to me. Uttered to everything: to the world, to our fellow man, to ourselves.”
Father sat down. A few people clapped. Herr Minn came over and told Father that they really didn’t mean to disrupt his meeting. On the other hand, this was one of the greatest, most joyful days in the last thousand years of German history, and now the day was to be crowned with a speech by Joseph Goebbels, one of the most faithful companions of Adolf Hitler, who from this day forward was to be the chancellor of the German Reich. No one—no person of good will—should be left out on a day like this. “Let’s put an end to anything that divides us, cuts us off, any misguided competition. We’re all comrades in the Volk, men and women together. Down with whatever divides us!”
There were cries of Bravo from both rooms. Everyone crowded around the radio that sat on top of the shelves of glasses behind the bar. You had to be as tall as Elsa or Mother to reach the dials. For a long time, they heard nothing but the sound of marching feet. Then an announcer came on to say that for hours, tens—no, hundreds of thousands had been marching past the Reich Chancellery, that young people had climbed the trees between the chancellery and the Hotel Kaiserhof and were chanting in chorus, declaring their love and devotion to the Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. And now, Dr. Joseph Goebbels would address the German people from the balcony of the chancellery.
As soon as Dr. Goebbels began to speak, Johann felt shivers running down his bac
k such as he felt only in church when Herr Grübel sang the Benedictus, or when he watched the volunteer firemen train and his father, a squad leader and master hoseman, gave the order, Water on! His father wore a brass helmet shiny as pure gold and topped by a little brass post and a gleaming ball when he gave the command, Water on! When Mina said that in the picture, Johann looked as good as any prince, he immediately thought of his father with the golden helmet and the shiny gold post and shiny gold ball. No other fireman’s helmet had a ball, only his father’s. It was true that after every practice, Johann had to rub and rub the helmet with Sidol brass polish until it gleamed, but when the water rushed forward in the hose, swelling the flat tube with a swishing sound until it was as firm and smooth as steel, and then shot juddering out of the nozzle that Tone Messmer held fast with both hands and pointed at the onion tower that had been chosen to practice on this time, and when the water then pelted down on the onion tower and church roof, the shivers wouldn’t stop running down Johann’s back.
From the first, Dr. Joseph Goebbels’s voice was cracking. He informed them that there were hundreds of thousands marching by to demonstrate their love and devotion to the beloved Führer. And that the hundreds and hundreds of thousands were carrying torches, burning torches, and that now they were all happy, all the SA men and Hitler Youth, yes, all the people who were comrades in the Volk, mothers and fathers carrying their children in their arms and holding them up toward the Führer’s window, yes, now everyone was happy and he, Goebbels himself, was immeasurably happy. This was the rebirth of the nation in a frenzy of enthusiasm. And then he cried at the top of his voice that now the Führer and Reich Chancellor was appearing at his window, only a few yards away from where the aged Reich President, that mythic hero General Field Marshal von Hindenburg, could be seen, and now, now, there was nothing more to hold them back, Germany had awakened at last, one wanted to laugh and cry, and that’s why people were singing. He would join the song surging up from hundreds and hundreds of thousands of throats, the Horst Wessel Song, “Aloft the flag, our close-set ranks are marching. . . .”
The people in the restaurant sang along. Herr Brugger, Herr Minn, little Herr Häckelsmiller, Schulze Max, and the other Brownshirts stuck out their right arms. Fräulein Agnes too, of course. And next to her, Frau Fürst. Johann was bowled over that Frau Fürst was singing, and how she sang! Her mouth, stitched shut by pain, now wide open in song. Gradually, non-uniformed people stuck out their right arms, too. Not Father. But over by the bar, his mother did. She didn’t stretch out her whole arm, just her forearm. Whenever she stood still somewhere, speaking or listening, his mother would always hold her left forearm across her body, below her chest, and rest her right elbow in her left palm, so that her right hand ended up just below her chin. If she laughed, she would raise her right hand and cover her mouth with it. She didn’t want anyone to see her laughing mouth. If someone wanted to imitate his mother, all they had to do was strike this pose: left forearm across the body, right elbow in the left hand, right hand at the chin or covering the mouth to hide laughter. And now, she just kept that pose and took her right hand away from her chin, not to put it in front of her mouth (which wasn’t laughing), but to leave it hanging in the air next to her cheek and chin.
Herr Seehahn had of course stood up too and was now stretching his pasty-white right hand quite far out. But since Herr Seehahn could say his text without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, Herr Minn went over to Herr Seehahn and—since he thought Herr Seehahn could then more easily sing along—carefully removed the cigarette from his mouth and laid it in an ashtray, but without stubbing it out. Instead of his medal from the Holy See, Herr Seehahn was wearing his party pin today. But he was sticking to his usual text—Johann could tell from the way he moved his lips. Mother had never put on the party pin Herr Minn had brought over to the house on Epiphany. She wasn’t wearing it today, either.
When the song ended, Father leaned over from behind Johann and whispered into his ear, “Come along now.” In one hand Father held his papers and in the other, the little black case. They threaded their way cautiously to the door from the spare room into the central hallway.
Niklaus and Hanse Luis were sitting in the kitchen drinking beer. From the bottle. Mina behind the stove, the Princess at the sink. Hanse Luis jumped up as Johann and Father came in, raised his crooked right hand to the place where his hat brim should have been, and said, “Beg to report, two fillies at work, two bums drinkin’ beer.” “As you were,” said Father in the same tone. He had it on good authority, said Hanse Luis, that he wasn’t personally qualified to give the new salute because his paw was so crooked. But since he’d rather go swimming with a millstone than cause any trouble, he’d made himself scarce when the arm-stretching began and came to keep Niklaus company, who hadn’t even gotten out of his foot rags from the last war. Some guy had asked him where you could find an ass these days, and Hanse Luis, who used an ass to plow his tiny patch of dirt, had told him: only in Austria.
Father said, “Isn’t that the truth.”
And Hanse Luis: “An Austrian on Bismarck’s throne.”
Mina said, “No politics in here!”
And Hanse Luis responded, “Etz bin i gemuent, hot der Spatz g’seet, wo’n d’Katz Bodestieg nuuftrage hot.”
And the Princess, furiously, from her sink, “Jetzt bin ich gemeint, hat der Spatz gesagt, als ihn die Katze die Dachbodentreppe hinauftrug”—She must mean me, said the sparrow, as the cat carried him up the attic stairs.
But the whole time, Hanse Luis had been listening with one ear to the radio voice drifting in from the hallway. He turned to the Princess and said in the precise accents of Dr. Goebbels, “When some people die, their mouth has to be killed off in a separate operation.” At that moment, Herr Brugger came through the open kitchen door.
“Aha,” he said, “the wise guys are holding their own caucus.” Hanse Luis immediately fell into a coughing fit. Johann had never seen anyone cough like that before. He threw his head forward and back and his eyes were bugging out of his head. Luckily, he was able to put his stogie into the ashtray just in time. He could barely bring out a few words between bouts of coughing. They amounted to: he hadn’t wanted to interrupt Goebbels’s speech with his whooping cough. “Hanse Luis can find an excuse faster than a mouse finds a hole,” said Herr Brugger.
“A good cough means a long life,” said Mina from the stove where she was still busy frying bratwurst. She said it in the same tone the priest used when he said Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.
Hanse Luis said, “Worthless has a longer life.” And he stood up and said, “Gnats in January on the farm, fodder may well come to harm. ’Bye all!” And was gone.
“I prefer Heil Hitler,” said Herr Brugger, turned around, and continued down the hall to the lavatory.
“Come, Johann,” said Father. “Time for bed.”
Father was still holding the little case with the magnetizing apparatus in one hand and his papers in the other. Together they mounted the stairs that creaked under every step.
Josef was reading Robinson Crusoe. When Johann started to tell him everything that had happened, he didn’t want to hear about it. He preferred Robinson Crusoe. Then Johann lay down in bed and listened to what wafted up from the restaurant: radio announcers, marching feet, chanting voices, and again and again from what they called throats without number, Sieg heil! The guardian angel in the picture holding his hand over the child on the bridge without a railing now looked like he was listening to the noises, too. Apparently, what you hear determines what you see.
PART TWO
The Miracle of Wasserburg
CHAPTER ONE
The Past as Present
CAN ANYTHING BE AS TRANSPARENT as a village that no longer exists? Wallflowers in bloom welling up out of shoemaker Gierer’s low-lying garden. A pudgy tailor, sweating and crying in his grass skirt, does a dance on top of the regulars’ table to get people to look at him. Herr Gierer drives eac
h wooden nail into the leather sole with a single blow. The man Mother addresses as Battist sits right down at one of the two tables by the windows facing the station. This Battist (the p in his name must have been replaced by a second t) is their first guest on this Sunday morning. And as long as he’s the only customer, he talks to Johann’s mother. He talks and Johann’s mother listens. As soon as Schmitt the tinsmith comes in (his thirst having held off and allowed him to sleep a little longer since it’s Sunday morning), Battist clams up. The third guest on this Sunday is the blondest blond of the whole village: Semper Hagen’s Fritz. Evidently his apprenticeship with the master tinsmith is in effect even on Sunday morning. Semper Hagen’s Fritz is as good as entirely silent as long as he’s sitting next to his master. Today’s lesson is clearly about learning to drink. It was Helmer’s Hermine who first asked him how he’d chosen tinsmithing as a profession, and he told her he wanted to be able to make himself a tin wreath for his grave so he could hear the rain. When you tell Helmer’s Hermine you’ve already heard that one from Hanse Luis, she says, “And who do you think he heard it from? Me.”
The fourth guest at the regular’s table: Herr Schlegel. Herr Schlegel has barely sat down when Hagen’s Fritz—already a journeyman tinsmith, after all—says in a fresh voice: “Pernambuco?”
But the builder replies quite cheerily: “Seventy-seven and a half hours!”
And Hagen’s Fritz, even more cheeky: “Lakehurst to Fried-richshafen?”
And Herr Schlegel: “Fifty-five hours.”
“And?” cries Fritz.
“You rascal!” says Herr Schlegel. Which means he’s impressed that Fritz wants to know the Zeppelin’s flight times down to the last minute.
“Come on, out with it!” cries Fritz.
“Twenty-three minutes,” says Herr Schlegel as Luise serves him his glass of lake wine. Taking his sweet time, he picks it up and begins a sip that doesn’t end until the glass is empty. He must not have had a single drop of wine all last night.
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