Hitler, My Neighbor

by Edgar Feuchtwanger

  The dentist asked me to sit in the big chair. Then “Marlene” reclined the chair and smiled at me as I glided backward. She had green eyes and long black eyelashes. I could smell her perfume stealing throughout the room, and felt her sleeve brush past my face. The spotlight went on and now all I could see were the facets of glass around the bulb…and the dentist’s very pink face. He told me to open my mouth, and eased a cold instrument inside. I felt him lightly tap my teeth, holding my lips open with his fingers. To keep my mind off this, I looked at the nurse. She was smiling at me, her red lips slightly parted, and there was a black dot drawn onto her cheek, just above her mouth. Her teeth were the color of clouds. I wondered whether Hitler thought she was pretty.

  The examination was soon over. The dentist said everything was in order and moments later we were back out in the street. On the way home, newspaper salesmen trumpeted that the Vampire of Düsseldorf had been arrested. I would be able to play outside by myself again now. A zeppelin flew across the sky. It disappeared behind a building with a red roof, a typical Munich roof. I thought about the nurse again, about the dentist, and Adolf Hitler.

  Rosie is in the kitchen reading the paper, which has the whole story of the Vampire, with pictures. Peter Kürten killed at least ten people, only one of them an adult, whom he battered with a hammer. His parents were poor. He had twelve brothers and sisters. Even as a child, he’d drowned two of his friends. As an adult, he stabbed and strangled his other victims. The papers mention that the Vampire was a trade unionist, and Rosie explains that a trade union is a group of workers who come together to get better working conditions in their factory.

  “Factory workers have terrible lives,” she adds. “They set off for work when it’s still dark and come home to go to bed with no dinner. They die before they’ve had time to grow old. If your father had been a factory worker, he might already be dead and you would never have known him.”

  I often wonder what it must be like being an orphan. Rosie says that since Black Thursday all the orphanages are full: the poor abandon their babies because they can’t feed them. Just before the war, Kürten was sentenced to several years in prison so he avoided going to the front, and as soon as he was out he started strangling children again. This time he should be condemned to death.

  The paper also has a photograph of Marshal von Hindenburg. His mustache is shaggy as sheep’s wool and curves up his face, and you can see all twenty of his medals. He’s a hero, his face even appears on stamps. He’s already fought two wars against France. He won the first, in 1870. And if people had listened to him he would have triumphed in the second, the 1914–1918 war. Uncle Berthold told me that the marshal fought all his battles alongside another great strategist, Erich Ludendorff; together they were invincible. They were nicknamed the “Dioskouri,” like the twins Castor and Pollux, heroes in my book on Greek mythology. Uncle Berthold showed me color pictures in an illustrated magazine. One was of the two men marching through the streets in their spiked helmets. Another showed them studying military maps on a big table.

  “When those two were around, the German army was the strongest in the world,” Uncle Berthold sighed.

  But when I spoke to Rosie about it, she disagreed: “If it weren’t for them, the war would have ended sooner and fewer men would have died. And, anyway, Ludendorff is no better than Hitler, they’re both in it for themselves! But at least Hindenburg says it as it is: Hitler’s just a lowly corporal from Bohemia.”

  Hindenburg is eighty-five and he’s president of the republic. He hasn’t actually been in the post long: he retired after the war and was living peacefully in the country when his former brothers-in-arms came and asked him to come back to power. He was seventy-seven, his wife had just died, he was bored. Rosie’s told me she remembers seeing trucks in the street carrying busts of him, followed by men singing about his glorious return and announcing the German army’s revenge on the Weimar leftists.

  The Weimar Coalition was responsible for signing the peace treaty with France, not giving the “Dioskouri” time to win the war—that’s something Uncle Berthold’s already told me. Because of them, Germany’s sinking into poverty and its war veterans, like my uncle, have never managed to find work again. I felt proud telling Rosie about it, but she claimed my uncle was talking nonsense.

  “War never made anyone happy, my little Bürschi,” she said. “Weimar isn’t a coalition, it’s a republic, a democracy, giving people the right to vote. Even women have had the vote since 1918. Thanks to Weimar, Germany is ahead of the rest of the world.”

  Rosie looked as if she was holding back tears. She told me about her fiancé who never came home from the trenches in Verdun, sliced open by a Frenchman’s bayonet. I said I wished I could avenge him.

  “No, Bürschi,” Rosie replied. “You must never wish for another person to die. The Frenchman died alongside him on the battlefield. One day I’ll go and lay a flower for both of them.”

  The Vampire of Düsseldorf has been condemned to death. He’s to be beheaded. I’m glad, even though it’s wrong to want another person to die. I often think of his victims and of the parents of the children he killed. They must cry day and night. Still, I wouldn’t want to see the Vampire having his neck cut by an axe. Newspaper kiosks in the street show pictures of a man skulking in the shadows; they’re taken from a film that will soon be released in movie theaters. It’s just called M and it’s the story of the Vampire of Düsseldorf. I won’t be allowed to watch it, I know, because they’ll say I’m too young. I wish I were a big boy!

  My father was at home today and he sent me on an errand: to take a book to Thomas Mann. I couldn’t wait to go to his house because my parents had often described the gigantic villa filled with astonishing things. Thomas Mann makes up stories for grown-ups; he writes books by hand on paper, then gives them to an editor—someone who does the same job as my father—who has the book printed on heavy machines.

  Rosie went ahead of me along the path that runs the length of the field behind our building. This morning I was dressed like a little sailor, in a sailor suit with a collar, a peacoat and a flat hat. I was allowed to take my butterfly net. The sun was pounding. Luckily, Rosie had taken a flask of water with a few drops of grenadine syrup in it. I didn’t spot any butterflies even though the sky was blue and I could see a long way. Bees and flies danced in the sunlight, birds flew in flocks. I was bored. I should have taken my hoop.

  At last we arrived at the villa hidden behind a wall of ivy. Rosie rang the doorbell and a man came to let us in. I instantly knew it wasn’t Thomas Mann because he was wearing servant’s clothes. He took us to the garden and Rosie explained why we were here. Through the villa’s windows I saw a man watching us, his hair slicked back over his head. He smoothed his mustache with one hand and held a cigarette in the other. It was hot outside, I could feel sweat running down my back. How cool it must have been inside! I was proud I’d come all that way on foot, and I was still holding the book, which my father had wrapped up in paper and tied with string. I’d promised Papa I’d say hello to Thomas Mann for him. I knew he’d tell me I’d done well. But the servant took the book, thanked us and showed us back to the door without inviting us in. The villa looked to me as if it was enchanted with its huge white stone staircase and its high castle windows. There were children playing on a swing behind the house. Their laughter wafted over to us, carried on the wind. We could hear a river flowing nearby and the buzz of bees…

  Why hadn’t I been invited in? I felt like crying. Rosie didn’t dare ring the bell again, and we went home. On the way back she told me who Thomas Mann was, one of the most famous writers in Germany, like Uncle Lion, who was a friend of his. His books describe the beautiful things in life, they explore the world of children in the old days, of Germany before the Great War. In those days women wore flouncy dresses, and wide hats with flowers on them, and they sheltered from the sun behind parasols. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature: he’s the greatest writer in
the world.

  Rosie’s reading to me from the newspaper. At six o’clock in the morning yesterday, July 2, 1931, the Vampire of Düsseldorf was decapitated in a Cologne prison. In the end his executioners opted for a Fallbeil. It’s a sort of guillotine with a blade as sharp as a razor fitted into two runners. His last words were: “I only hope I’ll have time to hear the blood spurt from my body.” I keep wondering whether his head actually heard anything from inside the basket it rolled into. Rosie tells me about the film, M, which she’s been to see. It reminded her of The Threepenny Opera with all those good-for-nothings living their own lives outside the law, and thinking their community of crooks better than the bourgeoisie. I don’t want to listen. I look out of the window and see the curtain move opposite. Tomorrow we’re going on vacation to our friends the Siegels on the lakes. I’ll be reunited with their daughter, my dear friend Beate.

  We go boating every day with my father or Beate’s, and then she and I catch grasshoppers and keep them in colonies. We also catch butterflies but we release them.

  I don’t want to go home or back to school. I often tell Mama that all I want is to stay with her and Papa and Beate. She smiles at me, reminds me I love school and tells me about my first day there. I wasn’t frightened and I didn’t cry, unlike the other children who didn’t want to leave their mothers. I wasn’t afraid of exploring a new world, I was curious. I remember our teacher, Herr Pichelmann, with his white uniform like my dentist’s, and his violin, which he would play to the pupils in his class. Thanks to him, I can read and write. My best friend at school is called Ralph. He’s lucky. A chauffeur comes to pick him up from school every day; he climbs into his long black car, as big as our cousins the Bernheimers’, and, sitting alone on the backseat, he waves goodbye to me through the window.

  I’d like to live here, on the lakes, but I’m also looking forward to seeing Ralph again. Mama has started packing our bags. We’ll be going home soon.

  The vacation was so long that when we arrived home I’d forgotten Rosie’s face. She was waiting for us in the street, by the front door. I didn’t recognize her, I thought she was someone else. And yet she was wearing her usual clothes, a long black dress and a white apron. But she’d changed her haircut. It was shorter. She hugged me tight, Papa and Mama shook her hand and we went upstairs. They asked her what had been going on in the city.

  “It’s getting worse and worse. Demonstrations outside the house every day! In favor of Hitler one day, against him the next. In the morning his supporters come streaming past under his window with their arms raised, and in the evening it’s the other side coming through brandishing their fists. Clashes between the demonstrations are more and more violent. They count the dead after each rally. And the rest of the time, there are beggars ringing at the door again and again. With all these elections going on the city’s on tenterhooks.”

  Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word “Jew” with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious quarrels occurred in my presence.

  At that time I did not think anything else of the question.

  —ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF

  Rosie’s bedroom is next to mine. I sometimes go in to see her in the evening and we sit on her bed. The two of us have a secret: she reads the books from Papa’s library and tells me about them. She explains everything, and I remember the things she tells me, stories my parents discuss, thinking I don’t understand. Rosie talks to me about politics. She and I are Spartacists. The Spartacists are old-style Communists; they wanted to create a world with no distinctions between rich and poor. Their name comes from the gladiator Spartacus, who freed slaves in Roman times. Rosie confides in me with things she doesn’t tell anyone else. She has the same name as her idol Rosa Luxemburg, the leading German Spartacist. Rosie shows me a photo of her idol in a newspaper hidden under her bed. Rosa Luxemburg was against war and against the monarchy, she didn’t want the Germans and French to fight, she thought all men were brothers. She would have liked to do away with frontiers, kings, differences. Our emperor Wilhelm II put her in prison for her ideas. He declared war on France, my uncle Berthold fought, and Rosie’s fiancé died. When Rosa Luxemburg came out of prison she led a revolution and forced the emperor to step down, and the fighting stopped at last. That was the best day of Rosie’s life. But later, friends of the emperor, military men, assassinated Rosa Luxemburg in the hope of resuming the fight. Since then, Rosie’s stopped telling people she’s a Spartacist. Except me. I wish I were Spartacus the gladiator and I could lead an army of slaves to defeat anyone who wants war.

  Last week crowds of demonstrators poured past our house. Rosie and I watched them from up in my bedroom. Waves of Nazis flowed between our house and Hitler’s. They kept coming all day long. Hitler’s SA marched in nice straight lines, like a real army, all wearing red armbands with a white circle and a swastika in the center. They held their arms outstretched toward their leader’s room, calling his name, bellowing “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!” and the windows reverberated like drums to this endless roar. Aunt Bobbie and the duke came down to watch, and we all huddled together behind that fragile window.

  “They’re savages,” Aunt Bobbie said.

  “Idiots,” the duke added.

  “They’re so young. Look, they’re not even fifteen,” Aunt Bobbie whispered. “As if shouting in the streets is all you need do to solve our problems! Verdun wasn’t enough for them. They want to fight too, to end up like their fathers and uncles. The glory of killing or being killed. And this hatred of Jews, it’s monstrous!”

  “Vulgar,” said the duke, adjusting his monocle. “Your daughter should talk some sense into her man, my dear.”

  “But she loves him! And you know she doesn’t understand anything about politics. Neither does he, for that matter. I think he only mingles with the Nazis for business.”

  “For business?”

  “Yes, if Hitler ever comes to power, we’d still have to keep the factories going. They say he’s preparing to launch major military commands.”

  “Heaven preserve us.”

  Rosie’s more cheerful. Since this morning we’ve been watching a different crowd processing along our street. It’s flowing like a river, like wavelets before the prow of a boat. They’re Rosie’s friends this time. She’s proud, convinced that these men and women will avert another war in Europe. There seem to me to be so many of them, and they look untidy, they don’t know how to march in step. Their uniforms are mismatched, dyed different shades of green. They turn at the end of the street, stop outside Hitler’s house and thrust their fists toward the sky.

  Rosie’s been reading the newspaper to me this evening. Her eyes are all red. She’s been crying. Papa is pacing back and forth between the drawing room window and the front door. He stops by the papers spread out on the desk, and says to my mother:

  “Old Hindenburg has beaten Hitler, yes, but with only fifty-three percent of the vote! Can you imagine? And now the Nazis have two hundred and thirty seats in the Reichstag. They’ve become the largest force in the country. There are six million unemployed in the streets: that’s one in three. Hindenburg will have to appoint him as chancellor. How else can he govern? And to think he secured German nationality only this year! And everyone’s joining him: Fritz Thyssen’s introduced him to the most powerful industrialists in Düsseldorf. He’s told them that democracy is what’s causing the crisis, and they believe him! And meanwhile the damnable SA are assassinating people. They killed another sixteen poor boys in the streets of Hamburg on July 17. Hitler has the nerve to ask for mercy for the murderers who are facing the death penalty. Apparently Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank, is going to support him. Everyone will think the Nazis have credible economic solutions. As if cutting us off from the world, closing the borders and planning for war could
make the world a better place.”

  “Schacht? But we know him!” Mama exclaims.

  She looks through the album for a group photograph: my parents posing with other people outside a large building. The picture was taken in Switzerland, in Zurich, at a congress to which Schacht and my father were both invited. Papa is up on the right-hand side, Hjalmar Schacht in the middle, my mother toward the bottom on the left, with the wives.

  Every time we walk past the opera house my mother promises to take me to see something. And today we’re here to see William Tell, a matinee performance. That’s what they call the Sunday performances for children. It’s actually the afternoon and there are hardly any children.

  I’ve never seen such a beautiful place. The walls, seats and floor are in red velvet with gold trimmings. The two of us are like a courting couple. I’m wearing a man’s suit, a white shirt, a tie and black leather shoes. Sadly my flannel knickerbockers are making my calves itch. Mama is wearing a beautiful green dress that I chose for her. There are war widows dressed in black and lots of invalids wounded in the trenches. One of them has no legs. I noticed in the intermission when the whole audience stood up, except him. His upper half was just like everyone else, with a face like an actor, a very thin mustache and hair greased back over his head, but below his tummy there was nothing. In the bar there was a man with a hook instead of a hand, and when we came back to sit down, a man with a leather nose held the door to the circle open for me. Then the performers took up the story again. I recognize some passages that Mama has played on the piano, then I fall asleep, lulled by the music.