On the way home I tell Mama how much I like my life; I list all the people I love, not forgetting Arabella, whom we haven’t seen for a long time. She promises we’ll invite her to the house soon.
All my parents talk about at home now is Hitler. In the evenings they tell each other what they’ve learned from their friends during the day. My father has a friend who knows Hitler, Carl Schmitt, a serious writer who is sometimes a guest in our house. Between these visits, Carl Schmitt and Papa write to each other. Papa reads out his letters to us over breakfast. They’re all about politics, and Germany. I find them boring.
This evening my father and the duke are discussing the news. I listen in silence.
“This Schleicher isn’t such a bad chancellor,” says my father. “Hindenburg was shrewd to choose him for the job. The Nazis are backing off. Now that they’re in Parliament, people can see they don’t have a magic wand. They lost two million votes in the November 6 elections. Schleicher is pitting Hitler against his rival, Otto Strasser, and they’re tearing each other apart. Apparently our neighbor’s on the brink of suicide.”
“In the meantime his forces are keeping up their vile work,” the duke cautions. “There were more than a hundred thousand children, all in uniform, chanting Hitler’s name at the Hitler Youth National Congress in Potsdam on October first. Ernst Röhm’s SA prowl our cities by night. There’s talk of over two hundred political assassinations in the streets. Old Hindenburg hosts Hitler in his own home. That old fighter pilot, Hermann Göring, also rubs shoulders with him. To think he appointed that brute as president of the Reichstag. As for their friend Joseph Goebbels, the treacherous little runt, the so-called intellectual who runs their pestilential newspaper, Der Angriff. Do you know what he said? ‘We’re infiltrating the Reichstag like wolves in a sheepfold.’ Hardly reassuring, I must say!”
“It’s 1932, for goodness’ sake!” my father retorts. “People are informed. No one wants a dictatorship. No, I’m not worried.”
My mother has made me promise to stop telling people we’re Jewish. When I go to Rosie’s bedroom in the evenings, she keeps telling me the Jews aren’t a race but the people who practice a particular religion, and anyway we don’t have to take up the same religion as our parents, or have a faith at all. We’re born free to believe in God or not, and therefore to be Jewish or not. She explains that the Jews have been bullied for centuries, they were denied the right to own land, but they’re humans just like everyone else, and perhaps even more deserving because they’ve been constantly persecuted. She’s getting emotional, telling me I mustn’t be ashamed of being a Jew and citing the names of Jews who’ve achieved great things. She tells me about Karl Marx, whom she greatly admires, and recounts his whole life for me, and then Rosa Luxemburg’s—she was also a Jew.
“Hitler’s talking garbage. He says the Jews are all Communists, and then the next minute he claims they run the banks—but most of the banks in Germany are managed by Protestants! He says the Jews don’t want to share anything, when the man who campaigned most vigorously for spreading wealth around was Karl Marx—a professed Jew. As for Leon Trotsky, he was born into a Jewish family. Hitler criticizes them for other things too, of course. He claims the Communist revolution is a Jewish conspiracy! Even though Stalin, the leader of the USSR, isn’t Jewish, any more than other Communist leaders around the world are, Ernst Thälmann in Germany, Maurice Thorez in France. And what about Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of all time, and born in Germany, should we hate him because his parents grew up in the Jewish faith? And Sigmund Freud too, perhaps? You remember, I told you about him, he’s the man who heals people with words; he’s learning to understand dreams, and he says we keep all our memories inside us, even those we think we’ve forgotten. Hitler wants to ban books by these great men, to turn his back on their discoveries; he’s superstitious, illiterate and obsessed with dark forces that don’t exist. He’s like the barbarians who thought there were ogres in the woods and who loved warfare and sacking villages. He’s less sophisticated than the Greeks three thousand years back. You just remember, my little Bürschi, you must never be ashamed of who you are.”
Rosie’s bought a copy of Mein Kampf, and she shows it to me. It’s the book Hitler wrote, the book about his life. She’s underlined passages all the way through.
“I’ve never read anything as contemptible as this book, my little Bürschi. But don’t worry about it. We Spartacists will make sure he eats the dust.”
I cuddle up close to her and she kisses my forehead.
Today’s the first day of term at Gebeleschule, my new school. I’m worried I won’t know anyone and won’t have any friends. Luckily, Mama’s promised that Ralph will be there too. The birds woke me early this morning. Rosie had laid my clothes out ready yesterday, folded on the dresser. By the feet of the wicker chair I spot my new satchel, just like my father’s, but smaller. So shiny it reflects the light of the breaking dawn. I look out of the window. In the street, a guard is smoking a cigarette next to Hitler’s Mercedes. I’d never noticed it has a headlight in the middle of the radiator grille, like the eye of the Cyclops in the adventures of Ulysses. Rosie says that Hitler cowrote his book with his driver, proof that it’s a bad book. Is it the same man smoking outside my house now?
I hear noise from the kitchen, where my hot chocolate is being prepared. The smell of toast seeps under the door and I follow it all the way to Rosie.
Mama walks me to Gebeleschule. Children wait outside the gates, accompanied by their mothers or nannies. Ralph is there with his mother. She’s wearing a green dress, high heels, and a maroon hat that matches her dark red lips. She takes off a glove and shakes Mama’s hand. Ralph and I leave them. We have to join the others in our group, standing in straight lines in front of a door at the far end of the schoolyard. We’re lucky, we’re in the same class. I keep a firm grip on the handle of my leather satchel.
Our teacher is called Fräulein Weikl. She’s full of enthusiasm, all smiles as she flits from desk to desk, writes on the blackboard, rubs it out, writes some more. She’s pretty, her hair is even blonder than Ralph’s, almost white. Her eyes are so blue they seem to be lit from the inside. She’s much younger than my mother, almost like a big sister. Ralph doesn’t sit next to me but we meet up at break time, and we leave together at the end of the day. Rosie’s there with my snack, she kisses Ralph and we watch him leave in the back of his English car, a Rolls-Royce.
It’s Ralph’s birthday party this afternoon. We received the invitation in the mail. It said that afternoon tea would start at three o’clock and go on till six. At three o’clock precisely Rosie and I are outside the gate to the villa, a big green gate on the street. We go in and our footsteps crunch loudly on the gravel. The villa is set in a large flower-filled garden, and tall chestnut trees hide the upstairs windows. On the lawn stands a table covered with a white tablecloth, and there tartlets, cakes and fruit juices wait patiently. Children I’ve never met before are running around the garden. I’m still holding Rosie’s hand. We climb a staircase up to the house and step inside. Feeling intimidated, I keep my eyes on the hall floor: a checkerboard of black and white. The drawing room door stands open, and a woman with her back to us is playing Mozart on a grand piano, a minuet that I can play faultlessly. At the far end of the room, an old harp snoozes beside a tapestry hanging that Ralph has described to me: Narcissus admiring his reflection in the water just before he drowns, the nymph Echo on the edge of the woods trying to hold him back. The drawing room reminds me of Frederick the Great’s, the one that was reconstructed in The Flute Concert of Sans-Souci. At the end of the film, Frederick’s friend was executed on his father’s orders. My sister, Dorle, loved it, she said the actress, Renate Müller, was as beautiful as Marlene Dietrich.
Ralph has appeared. He wants to shake Rosie’s hand, but she kisses him as usual. He takes me by the shoulder and leads me off to introduce me to his parents. They’re sitting at the end of the drawing room, along with h
is grandparents—an old man who looks like Marshal von Hindenburg, and a woman as small and wizened as a mummy. First his mother greets me with a smile, extending her hand to me and addressing me formally as if talking to an adult. Standing beside her is Ralph’s father. He was a pilot in the war and Ralph has promised he’ll tell me about his adventures.
“Ralph, do introduce us to your little friend…And what is your name, sir?”
“Edgar…”
“Show your little friend how people greet me here.”
Ralph deposits a kiss on the end of his father’s nose. I imitate him; his father’s nose is cold.
“Could you tell us about your dogfights, Papa? I promised Edgar you would.”
And his father tells us all sorts of stories, how he perfected his first plane himself, and took off from a field below their castle in the country. He describes air battles, and how he worked out a way to detect enemy planes when they were hidden higher up in the clouds, against the sun. He would take a turkey with him and it would gobble when an enemy plane approached. Ralph’s father was caught and imprisoned. He was well treated by the French officers and met up with a childhood friend, Robert de B., who invited him to his mess in the evenings. While there, he gained weight and improved his French! He tells us about France and its food, describing its succulent desserts with their strange names: choux pastry treats named after lightning bolts, cream puffs named after nuns, and even a chocolate-coated delicacy called a “negro in a shirt”! He still frequently visits France on business. He tells us about the streets of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the Louvre Museum, and promises to take us one day. We’ll travel in a sleeping car or in the zeppelin. He asks me what my father does. When I tell him he’s an editor, and that my uncle Lion is a writer, I can tell he knows them. But he doesn’t comment further, and asks me whether I like reading. I say I love books, and he tells Ralph he should follow my example. He talks about various French authors. His favorite is Marcel Proust, who was a childhood friend of his. I recognize the name. My father’s often talked about him, and of Walter Benjamin. I ask Ralph’s father whether there’s a connection between the two writers.
“Aha! Herr Edgar’s a connoisseur. In fact, that’s almost right. They never met because Proust died shortly before the war. But Walter Benjamin has just translated his novel, with Franz Hessel, unless I’m mistaken. You should take an interest in literature, Ralph.”
I’ve flushed scarlet. And Ralph is a little embarrassed too. So I claim that Ralph is better at reading than me.
We don’t have school today, and Rosie’s taking me to the movies in a huge theater with red velvet seats: we’re going to see Mädchen in Uniform—a talkie! The lights have gone out, music fills the auditorium and the screen lights up. The film is set in a girls’ boarding school in Prussia, and the girls are the same age as Dorle. It’s a strange story, it makes my head spin. In the middle of the school there’s a staircase as tall as a building. Each floor is open to the staircase. The girls talk to each other from one story to the next, over the void. The heroine drinks alcohol, tells her schoolmistress she loves her, then wants to kill herself and climbs over the banister rail. She passes out and loses her grip, but she’s held back before she falls. The girls are disruptive, ganging up together and resisting their overly strict teachers.
As we leave the theater I say that tomorrow I’ll ask Ralph if he wants to gang up with me, like in the film. Right now, we’re meeting my father at the Fürstenhof Café on Kaunfingerstrasse. We find him on the first floor in a cloud of acrid smoke and a hubbub of male voices. He comes here every day for a cup of coffee topped with whipped cream, and to read the foreign papers. He translates the papers spread out before him for me: The Corriere della Sera from Italy, Le Temps from Switzerland and The Times from England. The pages are big, held on wooden poles, and on them are pictures of the crowds that flocked past our house the other day. There are also pictures of Hitler and other figures I recognize: Joseph Stalin and Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, as well as Mussolini. Rosie’s talked to me about him, and I say his name out loud when I see the picture.
“You must always remember these photographs, Bürschi,” Papa tells me.
I feel quite grown-up, I’m nine already. Next year I’ll be able to walk to school all on my own. I meet up with Ralph every day and we talk about everything. This morning I told him about the film. We sealed a pact: whatever happens in life, we’ll always be friends. I told him my secret about Rosie and me, and he swore never to tell anyone. He wants to be a Spartacist too. Along with other friends, we played rebelling slaves all day. Then the teacher asked me to stand at the front to recite a poem by Goethe, it’s the centenary of his death this year. I’d learned the poem carefully with Rosie: it’s the story of a boy, an apprentice sorcerer, whose master goes out. In his absence, the boy does something he’s never been allowed to do: he uses his powers and brings to life inanimate objects in the kitchen, but they soon ignore his orders and break everything in sight. To stop them, he decides to smash them up with an axe, which reminds me of the Fallbeil used on the Vampire of Düsseldorf, and of Frederick II, who was executed with an axe in The Flute Concert of Sans-Souci. As I recited the poem, I thought about the words I was saying, and I saw images. The verse reminded me of the Thomas Mann book on Papa’s desk, Mario and the Magician. Rosie’s told me about it, explaining that the magician, a hypnotist, is actually the dictator Benito Mussolini. Rosie said Hitler’s “a great master of hypnosis” like him.
My teacher said, “Well done,” and I realized I was miles away. That happens a lot. When I went back to my desk I noticed Ralph was staring at me. Later we were playing in a corner of the yard, and I told him the story of Mario the Magician, and how it was really about Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. I said that at home everyone keeps talking about the elections this Sunday. Ralph said it’s the same at his house, and there’s also a lot of talk about Hitler. Then he asked me what it feels like being Jewish.
“It doesn’t feel like anything…until someone talks about it. Then it makes me slightly ashamed. I know I shouldn’t be embarrassed, because it’s just a religion like any other. And I don’t yet know if I’m a Jew, anyway. I love Jesus. Even though I’m not completely sure I believe in God, or rather, that I’ve chosen the god I like best: in Greek times there were dozens of gods. At the end of the day, I’d rather be a Spartacist! With no god or master!”
“Me too. Hooray for Spartacists! Hooray for the slaves’ revolt!”
And then Ralph told me his secret. His parents are going to vote for Adolf Hitler.
Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them. In the first few weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas. Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear did I look around me more carefully in my new world, and then among other things I encountered the Jewish question.
—ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF, ON HIS EARLY YEARS IN VIENNA
We were at home. Mama was playing a piece by Handel, humming along in time as her fingers worked the keyboard. It was Sarabande, slow, drawn-out music. Next she played a piece that Elly Ney had performed at a concert Mama took me to. Elly Ney is a pianist, she’s one of the most famous in the world. I must have been the youngest spectator in the concert hall, and yet I knew every piece she played: Mozart’s Turkish March, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata…
Mama moved aside so I could sit at the piano and play. I chose a movement by Handel, Passacaglia, a piece that gets louder, then softer and then faster and faster. Mama told me I’ll be a great pianist one day, like Edwin Fischer, whom we’d heard performing the day before. As she stroked my hair and the back of my neck, the door opened.
“Hitler’s been appointed chancellor,” Papa announced.
I stopped playing for a moment, but then resumed the piece, with one ear on their conversation. Rosie came over
and Aunt Bobbie came downstairs with the duke. They were all silent. I started to play the Passacaglia again. Papa said he’d just spoken on the telephone with Uncle Lion, who was traveling abroad: an ambassador had advised him not to return to Germany for now. Papa asked me to go to my room because it was late. I sat at the end of my bed working on my model of a Märklin, a fighter plane that now stands on the dresser in my room.
In the last two days things have been happening quickly in Berlin, where my sister lives. I read about it in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, edited by an acquaintance of my father’s. Mama and Papa talk about it all the time and have given up trying to stop me listening.
“Hindenburg’s let him make Göring his minister for home affairs, you know the one,” Papa says, “that irascible aviator. An hour later he banned demonstrations, and insisted on monitoring every publication in the country. It’s beyond comprehension. It’s as if we were at war again. The old marshal has agreed that that madman Röhm’s wretched SA—that gang of thugs dressed up as soldiers—should be auxiliaries to the police force. Bandits responsible for enforcing order, what next! And why? I just can’t believe it! And do you know how many of them there are? Three million. And fifty thousand of them are now considered actual policemen. The same men who assassinated more than a hundred people last year!”
Hitler, My Neighbor Page 6