THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  The cauldron of German democracy, which had been simmering fitfully for fourteen years since its flame was lit in the haunts of Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, came furiously to the boil that Saturday when I first met Gerhard Domagk. And nobody realized that the brew was already poisoned. No party had a majority in the Reichstag, though the Nazis-which was slang, to match 'Sozi' for Socialist-were the biggest, after advancing sensationally to 230 seats in the elections of the previous July. They always seemed to be having elections in Germany. During the past year, the Rhineland had seen five-two for the reinstatement of President Hindenburg, another for a Prussian parliament which vanished almost immediately in a local _coup d'йtat,_ and two more for the Reichstag. They were neither the decorous cricket match contests of England nor the raucous carnivals of America. They were violent, bloody and murderous. Since the collapse of Hermann Mailer's coalition government in 1930, there was still democracy in Germany. But it was democracy gone mad, like a man gripped with mania, who performs life's normal functions of sitting, standing and speaking with a fury which seems liable to tear him to pieces.

  Over the same period, Berlin had seen three Reich chancellors. The austere Catholic Heinrich Brьning had been ousted in May by a fifty-four year old political dilettante, the 'gentleman showjumper' Franz von Papen, lion faced and serpent hearted. His name was already known to the world, from being thrown out of Washington early in the Great War, a neutral diplomat trying to blow up the United States railroads. The gentleman showjumper recruited other gentlemen to his 'Barons' Cabinet' from the fashionable Herrenklub in the Vosstrasse of Berlin, as British prime ministers enlisted their schoolfriends from Eton. But before Christmas, sly von Papen was outfoxed by the affable, sharp-nosed, portly 'Socialist General' Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in German meant 'Artful Dodger', very appropriately.

  To discredit his predecessor, Chancellor von Schleicher fired the haystack of the Osthilfe scandal, which had diverted millions of marks for 'agricultural relief in East Prussia into the pockets of the estate-owning Junkers. But as so hearteningly happens in politics, the flames had blown back on him. That Saturday morning he had resigned after fifty-seven days of office, in which he complained he had been betrayed fifty-seven times. The same Saturday the Government of France fell too, even more precociously, a sinister coincidence for the sore continent of Europe.

  All weekend Berlin wriggled with intrigue like a fisherman's tin of worms, from which a new Imperial Chancellor had needs to be pulled by the President. Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was phlegmatic, narrow, devious, benevolent, fearsomely moustached, the eternal victor of Tannenberg over the Russians in the first months of the Great War, the heroic embodiment of Militafromm-his countrymen's exasperating awe of the sword. Hindenburg had displaced the first President of the brand-new Republic, Friedrich Ebert. He was put up to the job by his old crony Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, who felt the country would be better presided over by a shade from the Hohenzollern monarchy than a saddler from Heidelberg. Hindenburg was voted to power by Germans with no love of a republic at any price, he had officiated for eight years impartially, incorruptibly and ineffectively, and his mind was now dimmed with the mists of eighty-six winters.

  At eleven-thirty on the Monday morning-half an hour late through a last-minute squabble over the tantalizingly ripened fruits of office-a ragbag of politicians trooped from the room of State Secretary Otto von Meissner to the audience chamber of the Presidential Palace in Berlin. Only three of the dozen were Nazis, all subdued in dark suits. There was the beetle-browed shy policeman Wilhelm Frick, who had spied on his own headquarters at Munich. Hermann Gцring, with a pearl tie-pin. And Adolf Hitler, displaying nothing more minatory than a party badge in his lapel.

  The gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen did the honours of introduction. The President leaning on his stick, grown pettishly impatient, vitalized the new Imperial Cabinet by breathing upon it a few platitudes. He had still to appoint his new Chancellor. The office had been the gift of Kaiser Wilhelm, the Weimar constitution had subjected it to the Reichstag, but there were hands ready to twist the constitution into any desired shape. The appointment was open to doubt until sealed by the oath of office. Goebbels and the other top Nazis were waiting in the nearby Kaiserhof Hotel, extremely nervously. Only the previous Thursday, Hindenburg had sworn again that he would never invest with the mantle of Bismarck a Bohemian corporal. He never even offered Hitler a chair when he called.

  But Hindenburg saw the corporal as a prisoner in a coalition. He would be defused. He would be disposed of. Only a fortnight previously, von Schleicher had declared Hitler no longer a danger, nor even a political problem, but a thing of the past. So had the Socialist messiah Harold Laski in London. The corporal became the Chancellor. Later, he became the President. He was the last before Adenauer. In between, the world entered times when God and his saints slept, as men once said about those of King Stephen.

  I was unaware of stepping across three days which shakily bridged the new Europe from the old. I was far more concerned taking Gerda to the pictures. This was partly because the trivia of human existence continue with the resilience of human life itself. And partly because citizens of the British Empire had the reputation for walking the world with an air of supreme indifference towards the natives.

  We went to the cinema the following Thursday night. Gerda changed from her habitual serge to a blue and white cotton dress in bold stripes reaching almost to her ankles, which I self-flatteringly suspected to be new and perhaps even bought for the occasion. A small round fur-trimmed hat turned her disquietingly from a good-looking schoolmistress to a pretty girl. The family and the two maids gathered in the hall to wave us off. We might have been starting on our honeymoon.

  We took the Schwebebahn for ten stops to the Old Market station across at Barmen. We found the market square itself packed with an excited crowd. There was another Nazi demonstration, a march of the Sturmabteilungen, the SA, Hitler's Storm Troopers, the Brownshirts. Germany had been locked for years in a brawl of private armies, the Sturmabteilungen against the Communists' Rote Frontkampfer, squads of the ex-Servicemen's Stahlhelm and the Social Democrats' Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold waiting to be at somebody's throat in the sidelines. The Storm Troopers of 1933 well outnumbered the troops of the German army. They were recruited from street corners and given clothing, food and a sense of identity, when the Government signally failed to provide all three. England had luckily rid herself of such bands with the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. America escaped them-the Civil War was a far more official affair. Ulster suffers them to the day I write. Much that I then saw in Germany reminded me of Ireland during the worst of the Troubles, which coloured the daily papers of my childhood.

  We could hardly move in the square. Everyone was shouting and jerking their right arms into the Nazi salute. The Storm Troopers wore brown shirts, breeches and jackboots, the Sam Browne leather crossbelt of British officers and the peaked cap of American baseball players. Germans bathe voluptuously in the warmth of crowds, losing their identity and insecurity. They love and honour uniforms, they instinctively obey rank. I stood on the pavement, tucking my Trinity scarf into my lapels against the cold. I remembered the story about the extras in a German war film, lunching in the AGFA studio canteen, automatically dividing into actors playing officers at the head of the table and other ranks below the salt.

  The Brownshirts were of course nothing like the clean-cut stern-faced ranks of the party photographs and posters. In common with the rest of mankind, Storm Troopers came in all sizes, skinny and paunchy, lanky and dwarfish, adolescent and middle-aged. People in the crowd were singing snatches of the _Horst Wessel Lied,_ the Nazi anthem written by a Berlin pastor's son who went to the bad and got himself killed in the streets, and achieved like many other stupid people only martyrdom. The tune's one virtue seemed to me a capability of being sung by absolutely everybody, like _It's a Long Way to Tipperary._

  They tramped in columns o
f four, at their heads drummers and flags. The swastika had been familiar enough in German streets since the summer of 1920, when it was suggested to Hitler as an emblem by his dentist, and run into a flag on a housewife's sewing-machine. As Gerda half-saluted and half-waved, I noticed her eyes wide and brilliant in the gaslight. 'You see,' she said excitedly, stimulated by the show and infected with the surrounding emotion, 'now we can start taking pride in our country again.'

  My only feeling was pain that foreigners behaved in so exaggerated a manner. It occurred to neither of us that the force embodied in that procession would shortly leave Europe strewn with corpses like autumn leaves, as casually to be gathered and burnt.

  We pushed our way through the onlookers. I bought Gerda some chocolate. We sat at the back of the cinema and she let me hold her hand, which soon became very damp. She stared at the Hollywood musical with the same innocent admiration as at the marching Storm Troopers. Anonymous and unseen in the darkness, she became unnaturally-or perhaps naturally-girlish. It may have been Wirklichkeitsflucht, a flight from reality, from the joyless and inhibited life of an ill-paid State employee in the rigid society of Wuppertal, forever whispering over its fences and peeping through its lace curtains. Nazism itself had foundations of the same fantasy.

  Then something happened, an incident so trivial and unhurtful in its gruesome context that it invited only forgetfulness. But hair-triggers fire heavy charges in the human mind. Perhaps it saved a ripe soul from the Nazis.

  The Nazis disapproved of _Blondie of the Follies._ It was American, it was bourgeoise, it was degenerate, it had the fingerprints of Jews all over it. They had a well-tried technique for exhibiting such displeasure. In summer, they loosed moths which flew into the limelight. In winter, they let free mice or rats. We were in for a different demonstration. Two men in raincoats, to which they had added swastika armbands, jumped to the stage with its screen amid the potted palms, and ripped the material to ribbons with sheath-knives. The projector flickered out. The house lights went up. Everybody fell dumb. Once visible, the pair appeared as barely grown boys, who contented themselves with flinging jeers at the heads of the audience and made off. Within a month or two, such cinematic entertainments were to be banished from German soil, until Betty Grable arrived on the heels of the American Army.

  I turned to see what Gerda had made of it. She was in tears, biting her knuckles, shaking with anger. 'Oh! The swine,' she cried in disappointment. 'The swine, spoiling my evening.'

  'Perhaps we can get our money back,' I suggested, taking the practical view.

  'Why did they want to do that? _Why did they? _I was so enjoying it.'

  'Let's go and have some coffee instead.'

  'It was all so innocent, so nice. Why did they want to spoil it?' she repeated furiously.

  'The film doesn't fit in with their politics, I suppose.'

  'What have politics to do with going to the cinema?' she demanded. 'I've been looking forward to this evening, ever since I first thought you were trying to ask me.'

  We had a cup of coffee and went home. Naturally, we never got our money back. But Gerda remembered the evening. She laughed when I reminded her last summer, in the little gravel and shrub garden of her house near the Zoo at Wuppertal, a town now as bright and glittering in the smokeless air as Wordsworth's London, the Wupper between banks of well clipped municipal grass beneath the Schwebebahn as sweetly flowing as Edmund Spenser's Thames. Wuppertal has become so clean and odourless she says it is like living in a convalescent hospital.

  5

  The big black dog became a monster with eyes of firelit emeralds, the white steep-roofed cottage which it guarded dazzled us for a second then reeled into the darkness. We sped through a cramped village with an angular, elegantly spired church and past farmhouses cheerlessly black, countrymen the world over turning their backs on the night. On a hill I caught the turreted outline of a schloss, ahead wet bare trees, snow falling thinly between them and swirling on the ground as it never did in England, broad sheaves of telephone wires undulating gently from post to post as far as we could see. It was about eight in the evening of Monday February 27, a fortnight after my excursion with Gerda. Jeff Beckerman was taking me for a night out in Cologne. The distance was about thirty miles, the road running south along the River Wupper through Solingen, a town famous like Sheffield for scissors and knives. The autobahn still lay in the mind of Germany's new ruler, with a lot of other things.

  Jeff Beckerman laughed. 'You're scared.'

  'I'm not used to motoring,' I said shortly. My father could never have owned a car, even when Mr Morris of Oxford was putting wheels under the British masses.

  'She could do a hundred miles an hour, if the road was good.'

  I watched uneasily as the speedometer needle hovered round sixty. Jeff drove a car which I had never heard of before nor seen since, a Cord L29 Phaeton which he had shipped extravagantly from America in contempt for the Bugattis and Bentleys, the Delahayes and Alfas, which fulfilled the need for mobility and cutting a dash among Europe's young bloods. It was long and white, its silvery headlights a foot across, its running boards merging into a pair of front mudguards as elegant as an actress's eyebrows. I am a mechanical ignoramus, but I gathered that it was designed by a man called Erret Lobban Cord to be propelled through the front wheels, and that our whitewall-tyred spares were strapped either side of the enormous flat bonnet because these front wheels had a tendency to fall off.

  'Berlin was _fantastiche, _utterly _fantastiche.'_ The word had just superseded _wunderbar_ in Jeff Beckerman's conversation. 'Berlin's nothing like Wuppertal. It's nothing like the rest of Germany. It's like America, only more like America than America could ever dare-you get me? Berlin's _real. _The skin's torn off, you can see the raw flesh and nerves underneath. I had the feeling that no one was playing a part, not the girls in the cabarets, the pimps and the crooks, they _revel_ in what they're doing. Even the whores put their heart and soul into their job.'

  My employer did not spend much time in Wuppertal. He preferred leaving his brewery to Herr Fritsch, the grey-faced elderly manager in his pince-nez and 'butterfly', as the Germans called a wing collar. Jeff was interested in Germany, in the bouncy way he was interested in women or his car. He regarded his exile as an educative jaunt before returning to New York and getting down to the serious business of making a million. 'What about our brown-shifted friends?' I asked. 'Didn't they spoil your fun?'

  'Why should they, old man?' Jeff often used this expression which is sprinkled on English conversation like salt, but always getting it a little wrong by putting the emphasis on the end, sounding slightly sneering. 'You don't have to walk into trouble, neither in Berlin nor Chicago.'

  'You don't rate Adolf Hitler's gangsters more dangerous than Al Capone's?'

  'I don't. Capone runs a gang of crooks, Hitler's are disciplined like the Army.' With his teeth, he pulled off his leather gauntlet, a reflector of chiselled red glass on the back-the latest thing for displaying driving signals. From the pocket of his ankle-length black leather motoring coat, a trophy from Berlin, he produced a packet of Chesterfields. 'What are the newspapers saying about Hitler in England?'

  'I don't know. My mother sends me the _Sunday Graphic_ every week, but it seems filled with pictures of the Royal Family.'

  I lit the cigarette jutting from his full lips. Jeff was five or six years older than me, red faced and too fleshy, but still giving the impression of an athlete. He wore his brown hair _en brosse,_ his heavy eyebrows transecting his face as a single bar. He enjoyed a long-standing intimacy with money, which reduced it to a reckoning in his daily plans no more intrusive than breathing. Like many Americans, his life was a tropical sea of hedonism traversed by occasional icebergs of puritanism. His father owned chemical companies in New York State-but of course he was making a fortune from bootlegging. The Beckermans brewed beer long before dropping their final 'n' en route from Hamburg to Ellis Island, and would brew it again when American thirs
ts might be legally slaked.

  Jeff enjoyed a simultaneous reverence and contempt for academics with First Class degrees like myself. He respected me as the only man in Wuppertal with whom he could hold an intelligent conversation. But he would have offhandedly packed me home with barely the fare in my pocket. He could be very simple or very shrewd, equally infuriatingly. He might have inhabited the America of Scott Fitzgerald, which vanished in a similar puff of misunderstanding, ridicule, nostalgia and shame as the British Empire. _The Great Gatsby_ had been on bookshelves for seven years, but I doubt if he had read it. Jeff only read books which helped him to get on.

  The journey was bone-shaking, snow seeping round the celluloid side-screen. Jeff had lent me his raccoon coat, and I still wore my Trinity scarf. The road ran close to the huge pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, a blue circle in the sky as tall as the factory chimneys which supported it proclaiming twice BAYER, the words crossed at the Y.

  Kцln glittered in the diamonds of a road sign. I had not returned there since New Year's Eve, when I had changed trains at the Hauptbahnhof in the shadow of its dazzling skyscraper of a cathedral. Jeff took the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine, the river which flows through the German soul.

  He cursed. The far end of the bridge was blocked by another of the uniformed processions which crawled like worms over the body of Germany. This one presented 'the torchlight red on sweaty faces'. The Brown Shirts were stamping between the Cathedral and the Tankgasse, small knots of spectators in the falling snow raising arms through enthusiasm or prudence, while flankers pressed pamphlets upon them.