Hitler, My Neighbor

by Edgar Feuchtwanger

  “I thought he was a Nazi and very close to Hitler,” Rosie says. “I don’t understand anything anymore.”

  “Röhm wanted to take things much further than Hitler. He was brutal. The way the Nazis killed him was no less savage. They’re killing each other for power. Ernst Röhm was shot dead, along with all his companions. He was given the choice between suicide and execution. He didn’t have the courage to commit suicide.”

  I don’t know what I’d choose if I were asked. We pass Röhm’s house on our way to the park every day. It looks dead; the garden’s strewn with branches and leaves that fell in the storm. It’s like a ghost house. Through the windows you can make out large rooms that look a little emptier with each passing day. The life has drained out of the place.

  I’m now allowed to stay in the drawing room with my parents after dinner in the evening. They talk about their day, open mail, discuss the family. I tell them about school and show them my exercise books. They sign my marvelous drawing, a large swastika, beautifully colored in. I tell them that Ralph’s stopped talking to me. I was lonely at first. But I have a new friend now. His uncle is a conductor at the opera house. That’s what I’d like to be when I grow up.

  In the mornings Rosie and I sometimes walk to Papa’s office with him because it’s on the way to school. We walk past Hitler’s house, along the façade of the opera house, and say goodbye to Papa on the steps to his office building. The people who work there greet him with a “Good morning, sir.” He shakes them all by the hand and raises his hat. He makes me laugh: he reminds me of a clockwork toy, always repeating the same gesture. Next Rosie and I walk past a building site just opposite where my dentist is. It’s Hitler’s project, a big museum devoted to German art. We saw a photo of him in the papers, posing with the architect beside the first stones of the future building.

  Papa’s at home more and more frequently when I arrive back from school. His writer friends come to see him, and I show them in. I’ve been doing this since I was very little; Papa taught me how to greet them like a real English gentleman. I open the door and offer to take their hats and umbrellas. Rosie takes care of their coats. Then they sit on the sofa with Papa, and the guests smoke cigarettes. Werner Sombart has a beard exactly like Lenin’s, whose picture I’ve seen in Funk’s apartment; Martin Buber looks like a prophet; and Robert Michels wears a black glove on one hand. Papa ensures these guests don’t meet each other because they have differing views. Werner Sombart says the Nazis will boost Germany’s economy while Martin Buber is no longer allowed to work and is thinking of moving to Palestine. In the meantime he has started writing a new version of the Bible, a superhuman undertaking, according to Mama. Perhaps with his big white beard he actually looks like God. But Carl Schmitt, one of Papa’s favorite authors, hasn’t visited for a long time. I used to offer him cookies with his cup of tea, and he liked a dash of milk in it, like the English. Mama asks whether he might be ashamed of his former friend and editor because he’s a Jew. Papa doesn’t reply.

  To get to the lakes for our vacation this year, we took the train. Laden with suitcases, we squeezed together on the leather seats in the coach.

  We shared our compartment with another family. They were all blond. We were all dark. They didn’t speak. And neither did we. They had a boy my age, playing with a bag of marbles in his lap. I couldn’t see the marbles, but I heard them clinking together. I took my own bag from my pocket and we started talking at last, comparing our agates and taws. He had some I’d never seen and I had some he didn’t know. We swapped them. Then we shared our dessert. I had an apple and he an orange. Our mothers helped us cut them into quarters.

  His father sat in silence. Papa asked whether he’d like the newspaper he’d finished reading, and the man offered him a cigarette. My father, who doesn’t smoke, declined, and suggested they step outside the compartment together so as not to bother the women and children. The little boy, whose name was Karl, and I decided to spy on them. We hid in the corridor. They were leaning out of the window on their elbows, with the wind flattening their hair back. All of a sudden we passed another train and they leapt aside as it whistled shrilly. Their hair was all awry, Papa had ash on his shoulder. Karl and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  When we arrived they helped us unload our suitcases. Everyone was jolly but it wasn’t the end of the line so we had to be quick, the train was about to leave. The stationmaster blew his whistle, the locomotive replied with its own hooting sound, then drew away, hauling the coaches and with them our friends, who waved from the window.

  “You see, my darling, we’ll just have to get along,” Papa said to Mama.

  “But what makes you think they’re not Jews?” Mama asked.

  “He told me they weren’t. He’s a member of the Nazi Party. He said Hitler’s going to sort this all out: he doesn’t actually have anything against the Jews, and now that Röhm’s off his hands, he’s determined to bring those SA thugs to heel.”

  My father made inquiries at the station. He came back saying that a farmer would take us to Pöcking in his cart. We climbed into a sort of horse carriage. The farmer, an old man with a face as dark and shiny as tanned leather, cracked his whip, and we soon arrived at the villa my parents had rented.

  I love being back by the lakes for the summer. We go swimming every day.

  One day we stop at the little grocery store on our walk back to the house. The shop’s so dark that it takes a while to see anything. On the counter is a display of cheese, butter, bread, canned foods, sausages and jars full of candy. Two children are choosing treats with their nanny. They pay and then leave. I have one pfennig in my pocket and I ask the lady in black for a combination of different candy. She has a head like a mummy, her face all creased. She has a hoarse, bleating little voice and a regional accent. She must be a hundred years old. Apparently, she once met Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Mad King, and the composer Richard Wagner. She remembers when Napoleon died. She hands me a little bag with an assortment of hard candy, Lutschers and Kölnischen Brustbonbons, along with some sticks of licorice. When I go back outside I’m blinded by the sun. I spot the other children heading off along the pebbly road. The husband of the old lady who runs the store is standing by the door, talking to my father.

  “Poor little things,” he says, “Hitler had their father killed with Röhm. Edgar Julius Jung his name was, he used to come here every summer. His crime was writing the anti-Nazi speech given last month by Franz von Papen, one of Hitler’s predecessors as chancellor. He was very nearly executed too…”

  “Poor little things,” Papa agrees.

  Later my mother tells him it’s risky talking to strangers like that.

  “Oh, come on,” he says reassuringly, “you know perfectly well the shopkeeper’s on our side. His brother’s Oskar Maria Graf, the poet. He joked that his only regret since Hitler came to power was that Oskar’s books hadn’t been burned, because that must mean he’s not a good enough poet! Funny, isn’t it, don’t you think?”

  Mama doesn’t reply. She seems to be sulking. Papa puts his arms around her and we return to the villa.

  Mama’s wary of everyone. She whispers in public places and tells me not to talk in front of strangers. I feel we’re being watched when we walk in the street. We discuss other people behind their backs too. No one talks to anyone else, but everyone smiles, and we all know everything about everyone. It’s a bit like at school, where there are gangs, with bad boys and kind ones. For example, in the next-door villa there’s a Nazi musical conductor. I heard Mama saying he’s had giant swastikas put up around his opera house. Then she said she won’t be going to the opera anymore. In the mornings I see him in his swimming trunks, walking onto the pontoon at the end of his garden. He slips into the water and swims to the middle of the lake. His head grows so small, almost invisible. Then he comes slowly back. When he reaches the shore he doesn’t dry himself off right away. He does gymnastic exercises, then a headstand with his head on the gro
und and his legs thrust up to the sky. I’d like to be a conductor. And I wish I could swim to the middle of the lake.

  Gertrud von Le Fort, who has a large villa on the lakes, invites us for a cup of tea almost every day. I find her intimidating because she dresses like a lady in the Middle Ages, always in velvet, with powdery white makeup all over her face that makes me want to cough when I kiss her. She wears red on her lips and green on her eyelids, and her voice sounds like a creaking door. She always has candy for me, hidden in a silver tureen. Mama says she’s eccentric, and Papa says she’s one of the cleverest women writers in Germany, and perhaps the most interesting of the Catholics. She can claim the Pope himself as one of her admirers. When I tell Rosie about that, I think she’s going to faint.

  Gertrud von Le Fort sometimes reads to me. She recites boring poems to me, or relates stories from her childhood. In the old days she and her parents traveled for two whole days to reach the lakes. They left Munich hoisted up onto carriages drawn by two oxen. Other carts followed behind, full of trunks packed with hundreds of gowns. They would stop along the way for a picnic lunch, and then set off again. She often fell asleep on a bed that had been set up for her on top of the trunks, snuggled behind velvet drapes. She’s liked wearing velvet ever since. Occasionally I read to her too. I’ve read whole pages from my favorite book, the one I’m reading at the moment, Robinson Crusoe. I tell her my plans to go traveling with Ralph someday, to visit Saudi Arabia on a camel. And maybe to set up a new country, like Robinson Crusoe on his island. But Ralph’s no longer my friend. I don’t know why. Because I’m a Jew, perhaps, and he’s a Protestant. Gertrud von Le Fort isn’t Jewish either, but she listens to me. She’s Catholic, like Rosie. She loves Jesus, who was a Jew, and she doesn’t like the Nazis. I could tell from the face she made when there was talk of Adolf Hitler at lunchtime.

  “We don’t talk politics at mealtimes!” she snapped.

  I was miles away when she said that and her sharp voice startled me. She noticed, and winked at me.

  Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves; for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.

  —ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF

  Dorle is spending her vacation with us in Munich. The Christmas holidays are here and it’s snowing a lot outside. Dorle sleeps in my bedroom, on a little sofa that’s adapted as a bed. She keeps herself hidden from me the whole time. When she gets dressed or changes into her nightdress and dressing gown, she shuts herself in the bathroom. She’s as tall as Mama and has breasts like a woman, but she isn’t allowed to wear makeup or high heels. She wants to be a dancer and often talks about a film she’s seen, The Holy Mountain*1, in which a woman dances the whole time, beside the sea or at the top of a mountain, on the sand or in a blizzard. She shows me how the woman dances, jumping on the bed and then back to the ground. She wants to be a dancer, and a photographer, a mountaineer and a champion skier, to climb Mont Blanc and swim across lakes like Leni Riefenstahl, the actress in the film. Dorle says she’s the most beautiful actress in the world, and she may be Hitler’s girlfriend.

  Over the holidays we stay at home until late into the morning, then go out for a walk. We went skating today. Every winter an open-air ice rink is set up not far from home, between our neighbor’s house and Papa’s office. A few days before Dorle arrived, Aunt Bobbie took me there to watch a skating performance by the champion Sonja Henie. She’s so talented that she took part in the 1924 Olympic Games when she was just twelve years old. She came in last that time but since then she’s won everything. Her nickname is “the Queen of the Ice” or “the Pavlova of the Ice.” I’m sad that she’s Norwegian rather than German.

  We’ve been to the movies several times this week. We saw Curly Top with Shirley Temple. She’s seven years old and it’s her twenty-ninth film. In this one the kids wear dungarees and their hair’s all mussed up. They walk around with their hands in their pockets, swinging their shoulders. I copied them as we came out of the cinema. Rosie reprimanded me and Dorle laughed at me. We also went to see a film with Dorle’s idol, Leni Riefenstahl. Dorle admires her because she’s beautiful and can do everything.

  “She’s a modern woman,” Dorle says.

  We went to see her latest film, Triumph of the Will.*2 It’s set in Germany, it could even be just outside our house. It has endless shots of our neighbor Adolf Hitler and crowds of Nazis. The film opens with a plane flying over the city of Nuremberg, which isn’t far from here. They fly over rows of SA as tiny as ants, marching through the streets toward the cathedral. Then Hitler lands and everyone cheers. Children my age give him the salute we have to do each morning at school, reaching their right arm toward him, with the palm down and the fingers held tightly together as if for a dive. Hitler barely lifts his arm in response. Perhaps it gets tired from being raised all day long. The film is a talkie and it includes the tune we sing at school, “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” which describes the war we’ll fight one day, and the glory of the swastika and the Nazi flag. The composer was a young member of the Nazi Party who was assassinated by the Communists in 1930. When we left the movie theater I felt as strong as a soldier, balling my fists in my pockets and walking with my chest puffed out. I could feel the muscles in my arms and chest. If anyone had dared show a lack of respect for Dorle or Rosie, I’d have leapt to defend their honor. Walking through the streets like that, I dreamed I was destined to be a hero. I ran and jumped ahead of my protégées on the way home. Back at the apartment Papa pulled a funny face when we told him which movie we’d seen.

  I’m fascinated by the newsreels at the movies. Thanks to them, last summer I watched all the ceremonies Hitler arranged to mark Marshal von Hindenburg’s death. There were burning pyres, and men with rifles and helmets, holding torches aloft as they escorted the coffin, the whole scene wreathed in a cloud of dark smoke. Thousands of soldiers gathered in a fortified castle, a military procession brought the coffin into the central courtyard and it suddenly disappeared underground. Just then planes flew over the site in formation. A giant flag emblazoned with the Reichswehr cross hung over one of the fortified walls. Standing alone amid the generals and the women in black clothes and face veils was Hitler in his uniform with its cross-belt. He gave the funeral oration and then shook people’s hands in the sunshine. The news bulletin also announced that Hitler was now Führer and chancellor, and no one else would be succeeding the marshal. My father coughed out loud and then whispered something in Mama’s ear. I hope no one noticed.

  The holidays are over and Dorle has returned to Berlin. School starts again tomorrow. Lying in bed, I think back over this wonderful week, the films we’ve seen, and the American and German children we’ve watched on-screen. I prefer the Germans, but I wouldn’t like to have a dagger, a black shirt, a tie and an insignia, and still less join the Pimpfe or the Deutsches Jungvolk, in which you can enlist from the age of ten—my age. Ralph has the whole uniform, and after school he and some of the other boys do their exercises. On Saturdays they go hiking in the country, and they’re planning to camp out one night. I sometimes wonder whether I could leave my family and stop being a Jew, be just German like the others. I’d like to be free to decide who I am and be friends with Ralph again. Maybe we’ll be friends again tomorrow.

  The school days are long now. It’s still dark when we arrive in the morning.

  We step through the gates and into a different world. We wait in the schoolyard till the bell rings, then we line up in rows. It’s so cold that we exhale clouds of condensation through our nostrils. We’re not allowed to put our hands in our
pockets. I have woolen gloves but the tips of my fingers are frozen and my feet are icy. My shoes are wet from the snow. However much Rosie greases them in the evenings, nothing stops the moisture seeping into the leather.

  We go into the entrance hall and climb the large stone staircase. Talking is forbidden, the only sounds are stifled laughter and the drum of shoes on the floor. Muddy puddles form on the stairs and I always stroke the rabbit carved into the banister rail. On the second floor we turn left toward the classrooms, mine is the first one along the corridor. My desk is by the window, to the side. Lessons begin promptly. I often feel like sleeping, but that’s not allowed: if our teacher catches a boy daydreaming, he hurls a piece of chalk at him from the rostrum. It hit a classmate on the cheek once and he stifled his tears but couldn’t stop his lips quivering.

  We learn Latin and Greek, and I get the two languages confused. But I like learning and luckily I go over my work with Mama in the evenings. When I grow up I’ll speak every language, dead or alive, I’ll give conferences and be cheered, and when people ask me how I got there, I’ll describe the time I spent in this classroom. I must remember everything.

  Today our teacher tells us that Saarland has finally rejoined Germany. This small region was previously part of Germany but has been administered by France since 1918. Over 90 percent of its population wanted to be German again, and their wishes have finally been granted. So France is now a little smaller, and Germany a little bigger. And this means there are almost a million more Germans. I’m proud of my country.

  “Our Führer has conquered a country without firing a single shot,” our schoolmaster says. Then he tells us we must cheer our leader. We all stand up and cry, “Heil Hitler!”

  The following week our teacher tells us the Führer has decided Germany should have a substantial army, like the major nations. He’s going to reintroduce compulsory military service. Then we’ll have six hundred thousand soldiers. I look around at the others: they’re all smiling to themselves. As we all cheer Hitler again the bell rings, so we put our books away in silence, push our chairs under the desks, and leave without a sound, as we’re supposed to. In the schoolyard everyone whoops for joy, except for me.