'Is that a joke?'
'Perhaps you're right, and life will get better under Hitler.'
'That's what people are saying. Some don't care for him, of course, the Jews and the profiteers. But Hitler means business, you can tell that from the way he speaks. He's the only one up there in Berlin with the welfare of the ordinary people at heart. What do you suppose Schleicher and Papen and the rest are interested in? Lining their own pockets. Look at that disgraceful Osthilfe affair.'
'What about the Communists?'
'Oh, the Communists! They take their orders from Moscow. Hitler will soon put paid to them, thank God. They frighten the life out of me.'
She threw her half-finished cigarette into the gutter as we reached the main road. Jeff was in the Cord just round the corner. 'Hey, do you know what?' He opened the driver's door. 'I just got through to Berlin. The Reichstag's gone up in smoke. The whole town's out in the streets looking at it. It started around nine this evening, the sky's as red as dawn and they're expecting the dome to fall in any minute.'
I translated the news to Magda. 'A pity the deputies weren't all inside,' she said.
We dropped her at the Sphinx, Jeff not bothering to switch off the engine. She hurried inside to find another customer. As she waved from the doorway with its camels and palm trees, I raised my right arm and called jokingly, 'Heil Hitler'. She returned a smile, the first I had seen from her. I never encountered this early supporter of Hitler again. But she was a Slav, and doubtless ended with a red line ruled through her name in a concentration camp.
7
The Red Crown brewery was in Barmen, the opposite end of Wuppertal to the I G Farben works. It was a much smaller but equally hybrid collection of wood and red brick, exhaling the same black smoke from its tall chimneys. The brewing was done in a tall narrow building with Gothic windows and turrets, like a self-confident chapel in South Wales. It had been there since the 1870s, breathing its spicy smell over the area like a genial benediction.
My cupboard-like laboratory was on the top floor of the administration block, over the office which Jeff Beckerman shared with Herr Fritsch, the manager in the butterfly collar. When I arrived at eight-thirty the morning after our jaunt to Cologne, I was surprised to find Jeff in the lab already. He was smoking a Chesterfield and holding a bottle I recognized as a famous brand of London gin.
'Hey, that Reichstag fire's sure started something,' he greeted me excitedly. 'I've just been on to our agent in Berlin. They've got the man who set it alight. He's a Dutchman, called van der Lubbe or something-a Communist, well known to the police. That's raised hell, naturally. The Storm Troopers are out everywhere, rounding up the Communists and shouting the State's in danger. There's a rumour that the police have already got Torgler.' He was the leader of the Communist party in the Reichstag. 'They reckon to lay their hands on the other ringleaders before the day's out.'
I unwound my Trinity scarf. 'So, the Communists have obliged Herr Hitler as the Jesuits obliged King James.' Jeff looked puzzled. 'The Gunpowder Plot-Guy Fawkes,' I explained. 'It needs a genius for mismanagement, starting out to blow up the seat of authority and ending up being burnt annually in effigy.'
'It won't be effigies of the Communists going up in smoke. Hitler's been waiting his chance to rub them out ever since he took over. My God, how Germany fascinates me! Like I was fascinated by a nigger's corpse they fished out of the Hudson one day when I was a kid. It was bloated, looking like it might explode any minute, with slugs crawling out of it.' As he spoke, Jeff was swilling out a laboratory beaker under the tap of my square sink. 'I want you to try this gin.'
'It's too early.'
'Only a sip. Take it neat.' He handed me the beaker.
'God, how foul!' I spat the mouthful into the sink. 'It tastes like petrol.'
Jeff was amused. 'Maybe it is. I got it off one of your countrymen. It looks like the genuine article, OK? I guess a lot of people in the States would have paid good money for it. That's the racket. They reckon only one bottle of smuggled gin in a hundred is real.'
Times were hard for bootleggers, like everyone else. Jeff's father had bought the Red Crown Brewery in May 1931, and a fair share of the brew went by dray to Rotterdam and Hamburg then Toronto or Tampico, bribery greasing a path for it across the frontiers. A bottle of Red Crown in New York must have cost more than a bottle of good claret in Wuppertal, but Americans relished a wholesome German beer. It amuses me in America today seeing imported Red Crown advertised in the colour supplements as indicating the educated taste of its drinkers.
'You know my old man's permitted to handle alcohol by the United States Government, because he runs a chemical plant,' Jeff continued, while I rubbed my smarting lips with a handkerchief. 'A lot of it's on the level, he sells his products dirt cheap just to keep the Federal permits going. Of course, the Government puts all sorts of crap in the alcohol to make it undrinkable. You've heard of "boiling"?' I shook my head. 'You redistill the industrial alcohol, but it doesn't always work out. I want you to find a way of redistilling what's in this gin bottle, so we can get ninety per cent pure alcohol from it.'
'You've a delicate consideration for the health of your customers.'
'Oh, bull!' He laughed. 'We make better gin, we charge double price. I can pick up these bottles and forged labels anywhere.'
I objected. I told him I wasn't a bootlegger. There was always the chance of blindness or death from drinking impure alcohol, a possibility I did not want on my conscience. Jeff coloured, his thick bar of eyebrow drawn into a scowl. I always felt nervous of courting his anger. But he unexpectedly gave a nod and said, 'You're right, I guess. I pay you. Hitler pays the S.A. But it's no excuse for them giving him value for his money.' He stared at the deceptive bottle in his hand, ending from the doorway, 'Anyway, it's a sure bet they're going to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, Roosevelt's saying it's a cause of the Depression.'
He left me to work. My job was to analyse samples of beer for sugars, chlorides, contaminants like copper or iron from the pipes and vats, for acidity and of course for the degree of alcohol. I usually started my morning by lighting the pair of Bunsen burners to reinforce the sluggish central heating, but the weather had turned mild overnight and everything was dripping. 'Hitler's weather,' Gerda had observed on the Schwebebahn. 'It's always fine when he wants to make a big speech. People will think he can order that about, too.'
That morning I had something more important in mind than the analysis of beer. I pulled up a tall stool and sat at the lab bench, spreading on the heavily stained wood the sheet of paper I had taken from Magda. It was headed in Gothic type, _Nr. des untersuchenden Laboratoriums Prof. Dr. Domagk._
Scribbled figures gave the reference number of the experiment. Underneath came a printed table.
_Giftigkeit pro 20g Maus a) intravenous % lebt tot b) subkutan % lebt tot c) per os % lebt tot._
More figures had been scribbled to show the percentage living and dying after Domagk had dosed his infected twenty-gram mice-either intravenously, subcutaneously, or through a minute stomach-tube, as I had seen performed in the labs at Cambridge. Below was a list of twenty-five common bacteria, the causes of diseases like pneumonia, TB, gonorrhoea or meningitis. Top of the list was the streptococcus, the germ in beadlike chains which I had seen down the microscope in Domagk's study. A pencilled note against its name said in German, _Organisms taken from patient dying of septicaemia. Given in dilution 1:1000 in broth. All twelve treated mice alive!!_ At the bottom came _Wuppertal-Elberfeld,_ 24 Dez 1932, the Unterschrift a large scrawled initial _D._
It was a jotted laboratory note, intended for eyes which had read a thousand similar, discarded after incorporation in the report on a string of experiments. I doubted if anyone had missed it. So the mice in Domagk's cages, suffering the equivalent of fatal human blood-poisoning, were being saved by the red azo-sulphonamide dye mentioned by Magda. I was getting to know more that was going on inside I G Farben than any inhabitant of Wuppertal.
There
were some reference books left by my predecessor, an elderly chemist with Franz Josef mutton-chop whiskers who had dropped dead in the laboratory two years previously. I was not hopeful of finding much to brush up my knowledge of the sulphonamide compounds. Oppenheimer's _Der Fermente ihre Wirkungen,_ published in 1928 at Leipzig, yielded only the pleasant discovery of Frederick Gowland Hopkins writing about _Das Schwefel-System_-Hoppy on sulphur. Then I opened a book I had hardly noticed. It was a lucky find. It bore an inscription on the flyleaf to my predecessor from a brother-chemist working across town at the Farbenfabriken, and was on the chemistry of dyes.
I translated to myself a section headed _The Sulphonamide Group,_ which started, _P Gelmo of Vienna in 1908 synthesized 4-aminobenzine-sulphonamide_ (J. prakt. Chem. 77,372).
There followed the formula. This was basically a benzine ring, the familiar six-sided lozenge. At its north point, hydrogen and nitrogen combined as a 'radical', written in chemist's shorthand H2N. At the south, hydrogen and nitrogen were combined with oxygen and sulphur as a 'sulphamino radical', SO2NH2. The reference was to the German _Journal of Practical Chemistry, _which I could easily look up at Cambridge-if I ever got back there. I had never heard of the Austrian chemist Gelmo. But now I knew that he had invented sulphonamide when Gerhard Domagk was still a child.
A familiar name illuminated the next paragraph.
_In 1909, H Hцrlein of I G Farbenfabriken patented the first azo dyestuffs, which contained the sulphonamide group. These dyes showed remarkable fastness in the repeated washing and milling of the material. Hцrlein attributed this to a strong affinity between the sulphonamide dye and the protein of the wool._
No wonder the Hindenburg-like Professor Hцrlein had been in Domagk's lab, watching over the progress of his protйgй launched on a new career. The article continued about chrysoidin, a reddish dye popular at the time in gargles and for cleaning up wounds. A Dr Eisenberg in 1913 had shown that it might kill bacteria on the surface of the body, like carbolic or any other disinfectant. But not inside it, as quinine killed the parasite causing malaria.
The section ended,
_In 1919, the Americans M Heidelberger and W A Jacobs independently found that azo compounds could be effective against bacteria _in vitro. (J. Amer. chem. Soc., 41, 2145)_ Their paper noted that azo compounds were being further tested for their action against bacteria by their co-worker Wollstein, whose report would be published later._
It never was. Scientific enthusiasm is as volatile as many of its products.
I straightened up on my stool. Now I had a chain of facts. The obscure Viennese chemist Gelmo had invented sulphonamide in 1908. The following year Professor Hцrlein turned it into a red dye of laundry-defying tenacity. A German scientist just before the Great War and a pair of American ones just after it had half-heartedly tried sulphonamide to kill germs in test-tubes. And now Professor Domagk was using it to kill germs inside living mice.
If there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, there is an ebb which must be philosophically faced as final. Had I seen the significance of those twelve mice-had I also seen the significance of a spore which my own carelessness once left growing on a plate of bacteria-I should have been acclaimed for the benefaction of both sulphonamide drugs and penicillin, noosed by my Sovereign with the blue and crimson ribbon of the Order of Merit, and presented with the blue and gold folder of the Nobel Prize, which resembles the menu of a de luxe restaurant. I did not see Domagk's mountains towering on the horizon. I thought it simply a clever experiment to show that dyes could kill bacteria. The concept of everyday 'chemotherapy' was then as difficult to grasp as everyday flights into space. That Christmas Eve of 1932, when Gerhard Domagk saw his mice were alive and jotted down double exclamation marks, was a day God shifted a piece upon the chess board of the world. On January 30th, it was the move of the Devil.
I was certain that I G Farben would have patented the drug derived from their dye. Or rather, all possible processes of its manufacture, German patent law protecting neither our beer nor I G Farben's chemicals in themselves. Before leaving for the day, I found the list of newly registered patents which Jeff kept in his office. I ran my finger down the columns until struck by the word 'Wuppertal'.
_Nr. 607537, Patentiert im Deutschen Reich vom 25 Dezember 1932. Dr Fritz Mietzsch in Wuppertal-Barmen unde Dr Josef Klarer in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. I G Farbenindustrie Akt.-Ges._
They had patented sulphonamide, but this told nothing to me or the rest of the world. I G Farben patented every brainchild born in a fragmentary caul of exploitation.
I joined the crowd flooding from the brewery, lunch tins over their shoulders, starting through the gathering darkness on foot or bicycle, lighting their pipes and cigarettes-smoking at work being forbidden on pain of instant dismissal. The newsboys were yelling. On my way to the Schwebebahn I paid my fifteen pfennigs for a special edition of the Wuppertaler Zeitung. There were big black headlines.
There seemed to be big black headlines every day in Germany at the time. They announced that President Hindenburg had signed a decree to defend the Reich against Communism. The German people were to be saved from this peril by suspending those sections of the constitution which guaranteed their civil liberties. Germans were henceforward forbidden to express any opinion they cared to, and so were their newspapers. Meetings of any kind were banned. Letters could be opened, telephones tapped. The police could arrest and search as they wished, the courts could condemn to decapitation any armed disturber of the peace. After the night's outrage of the Reichstag fire, these measures were pressed upon the President as essential by his new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
8
Campaigning from inside the Government, Goebbels exploited the State radio to the last decibel. From the wireless set at home, from loudspeakers rigged to lamp-posts in streets thick with red-white-and-black swastika banners, the Nazis blared their simple election message-a Vote for Hitler was a vote for the glorious tomorrow which belonged to Germany, a vote against was an invitation to the Communists to lay hands on every German and all his property. This was despite Communists being arrested by the lorry-load, to be beaten, tortured and slain, along with anyone else the Nazis did not care for. The Reichstag fire singed everybody in Germany.
But the German electorate was ungrateful for the energy which the Nazis expended on it. Hitler neither lost the election nor won. He had 288 seats in the Reichstag, needing the cohesion of his 52 German Nationalist allies to scrape a miserable majority of 16. The Catholic middle classes in west and south Germany had deserted their old parties for the Nazis, but still only 44 per cent of Germans voted for him. Those who did, through their good or selfish reasons, had to accept-and accept responsibility for-his policies to their gruesome limits. In Parliament, opposition to Hitler was divided, jealous, bitter and irreconcilable. Along these fatal flaws, democracy in Germany disintegrated.
I should have noticed one change in the Dieffenbachs' household. Most people read the local papers in Germany, but the Dieffenbachs' _Kцlnische Zeitung_ became replaced by the _Volkischer Beobachter_-the old _Mьnchener Beobachter_-published by Max Amann's press empire in Berlin. This was a running mate to Goebbels' _Der Angriff,_ 'Attack', first put out in 1927. The masthead title of Amann's 'National Observer' was punctuated by an eagle-crowned swastika and underscored with _Editor, Adolf Hitler._ The issue of Friday, March 24 had a photograph of the editor on the front page, in his brown shirt and Sam Browne belt, addressing the rehoused Reichstag from the stage of the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. At either hand, dark-suited, butterfly-collared officials scribbled respectfully. Behind, the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Gцring, surveyed the behaviour of his assembled deputies through a pair of binoculars.
The editor seemed to have little time for the duties of his chair. Glaring headlines in Gothic type announced that Adolf Hitler had been given unfettered power over Germany, by the votes of 441 deputies against 94. The paper did not mention
those arrested, or prevented from entering, or the streets outside packed with Storm Troopers yelling, 'Full powers or else-!'
So the new Reichstag had stayed in business for just eighteen days. I turned the pages. Max Reinhardt was directing von Hofmannathal's _Das Salzburger grosse Welttheater_ at the _Deutsches Theater,_ Oscar's Elephant Review began at eight-fifteen every evening at the Winter Garden, Dr Dralle was advertising his lavender soap at 55 pfennigs a bar, and there were terrible floods in New Zealand. The puppets danced, the rain fell, the fuse was lit to blow a hole in the middle of the twentieth century.
The grey Rhineland winter was shading into spring, the gardens livened by the flower which sounds beautiful in any language_-Osterglocken, jonquille,_ daffodil. The following Sunday was Dr Dieffenbach's fifty-third birthday. He had been called to a consultation in Bonn, a small town bisected by the railway in which they said only three things ever happened-it was raining, the crossing-gates were shut, or both together. He was too poor a master of his own time to arrange a party, but I gathered that we were to dine _en famille_ unusually well from venison with Kдrntner Serviettenklцsse, savoury dumplings served in a cloth.
The doctor was indulged to be extensively reminiscent. We had been talking at table about the Oxford Union resolution passed the previous month, _This House Will in no Circumstances Fight for its King and Country._ It had been jubilantly reported in Germany as another illustration of the degeneracy of the British Empire, were one needed. Dr Dieffenbach was singularly tolerant.
'It was just a frivolity, a _jeu d'esprit,'_ he dismissed it. 'Students need an occasional outrage to save them being dulled to death with work. When I went to Kiel University from the Gymnasium to take my Tentamen Physicum, the first medical examination, I was stuffed full of Greek and Latin like a Perigord goose with corn. That was in 1898, when we were properly educated.' Dr Dieffenbach was bearded, fat and jovial, resembling King Edward VII, with whom he shared the quest for excellence in food, wine and cigars, if not women. 'A couple of years afterwards, the Government flouted the opinion of us doctors and let medical students go to university before even finishing their Gymnasium, which half demolished the intellectual level of our profession. At the same time, they let women become doctors, which completed the ruination.'
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