Hitler, My Neighbor

by Edgar Feuchtwanger

  Hitler can’t do anything about what people think. He can’t govern my ideas and see the world going on inside my head. He doesn’t know how I feel. We’re free in our own homes and in ourselves. At the synagogue we study philosophy; the stories in the Torah are full of twists and contradictory morals. We read them and discuss them, thinking about them in depth in the warm light of our study room. Rabbi Glaser teaches us to think for ourselves but also to embrace everyone else’s ideas. The stories are complex and wonderful. I dream I’m David, Moses or Samson. I was born into a cradle drifting on the Nile, my long hair makes me invincible. During these classes, time stands still and I find I’m in Egypt leading a people across seas and deserts, I’m a warrior adored by the masses, striding out under the sun with his hair flowing in the wind. Then I walk home on my usual route, like a legendary soldier protected by invisible armor. The Nazis don’t notice me; I watch them openly, no longer afraid of them.

  Dorle now lives with her Swiss boyfriend in an apartment in Lausanne, and Monsieur Duvoisin has written to my father to ask for his daughter’s hand. Papa reads the letter to us solemnly. I think he’s going to explode, and he does but not with rage—with joy. Thanks to her marriage, Dorle will have a different nationality and can make a life for herself in Switzerland. Mama thinks she’s very young, but Papa doesn’t listen to her. In the old days Dorle would have been just the age for a girl to be married and besides, love knows no age boundaries. He adds that we have no choice so we should look on the bright side of things. My father will go to the wedding but my mother’s decided to stay here to look after me. Switzerland wouldn’t give us three visas, anyway, for fear we’re planning to immigrate there illegally. Papa takes the wedding announcement with him when he goes to ask for a visa from the Swiss consulate. And has no trouble securing one.

  It was all over very quickly. My father was back almost before he’d left. It reminded me of when he came back from Palestine. His face was tanned and he brought presents—a Swiss cuckoo clock, Swiss chocolate and Swiss postcards. He described the wedding in great detail and with obvious delight. First came the ceremony at the town hall, then in church. Dorle was dressed all in white. Her husband, a very elegant young man, made the best of impressions on my father. Everyone had dinner in a large restaurant. Papa said that while he was abroad he was struck by how much life here has changed, and he thought perhaps we should all go and live in Switzerland. Five of his eight brothers and sisters have already left: Lion is in France, Henny and Medi in Palestine, and Bella has just moved to Prague in Czechoslovakia, with his brother Martin. Uncle Berthold, “Bubbi,” is still here in Munich, as is Fritz. Franziska is in Berlin with her husband, Herr Diamant, and their two children. On my mother’s side, Heinrich is in Paris, and we’re still sending him parcels of things he left behind. He’s effectively moving house by mail! Only her brother Richard is still in Germany, and so is Richard’s ex-wife, Lise Bernheimer, and their daughter, Ingrid. Six have gone, four are still here: more than half of my uncles and aunts have left Germany.

  “But Switzerland would never give us three visas in one go,” says Mama. “How about Great Britain?”

  “We’d have the same problem, and I don’t speak a word of English.”

  “France, then!” Mama exclaims. “We could join Lion.”

  “But we’ve already discussed this. With Lion and Marta, there are just the two of them. For the last two years they’ve been living like luxury tourists in hotels or villas on the Côte d’Azur. They don’t have work visas either. They have the same status as every other immigrant with no papers. They’re just lucky to have money and a lot of friends. Lion’s books have never enjoyed such good sales abroad. Whereas we would have no income.”

  “It’s difficult here too!” Mama retorts.

  “But we have a roof over our heads, furniture, books, friends. I’m part of a community here, I give conferences, I run a newspaper. We’d have absolutely nothing there, and we’d be nobodies.”

  My father grimaces and clutches at his stomach.

  “Have you made an appointment with the doctor, my darling?” Mama asks. “It seems to be getting worse.”

  “Yes, I’m going next week.”

  It’s snowed a lot this year, but the winter is over and the weather’s getting warmer and sunnier. The tennis courts at the back of our house are open. We can hear balls bouncing, the catgut twang of rackets, the muffled thud of felt on beaten earth. There are no leaves on the trees, just buds, and I watch matches through them. The players, dressed in white, keep score in English. Before, I used to play tennis with my mother. She taught me to serve and come up to the net to volley. We played matches and she kept the score. She’d make me run all over the court, hitting a ball to the right, then one to the left, a long one, then a short one. My shots sailed high in the sky. Hers followed a sort of invisible straight line and I had to run to return them. When was that? During vacations maybe? Or in the afternoons? Rosie used to bring us freshly made lemonade in a wicker-clad thermos…

  We’re not allowed to play on the public courts anymore.

  My father is to have an operation to remove a stomach ulcer. Not very serious, the doctor said, a minor operation. Even so, my parents have decided to send me to Berlin while he convalesces, so that he can really rest. Or for some other reason. I don’t know. Aunt Bella’s going to take me to Berlin by train, and we’ll stay with Aunt Franziska. Aunt Bella lives in Prague. She entered into a “marriage of convenience” to get papers. Her husband—well, her sham husband—is a friend who was happy to help her out. His name’s Traubkatz.

  Bella and I are on the Berlin train, sitting facing each other by the window. There are eight passengers in our compartment, four on each seat. I’m the only child because it’s not school vacation so children are all in school. My doctor gave me a fake sick note and my parents wrote to my school. They said I have glandular fever, which is a disorder of the blood, and that I need to rest at home. If there’s any problem, we’ll say I’ve gone to Berlin for tests. My aunt keeps my papers safe in her handbag, along with the invitation to stay with Franziska. Bella herself doesn’t need papers to travel: she has her Czech passport with the name Bella Traubkatz.

  This is my first trip to Berlin. At last I’m going to see the German capital. Through the window I watch electric wires rising and falling like waves, from one pylon to the next. Aunt Bella has opened the window slightly because there’s a farm laborer in our compartment with hens in a wicker cage. He and his hens smell terrible. The other passengers, all businessmen in suits, are reading the paper in silence. It’s funny, they’re all holding the same paper, opened wide, sitting with their right leg crossed over the left knee, in identical formation. It’s as if there’s just one man and his image is reflected in mirrors. I smile to myself as I drift off to sleep.

  Aunt Franziska is waiting for us at the station. We follow her through the crowd to a taxi stand where we take a cab to her house. I’ve never seen so many people in a train station or in the street, or so many cars, shops, bicycles, motorbikes, coaches, trams, buses, young women, children, street peddlers, newspaper salesmen, shops, posters, neon lights, bars, restaurants, banks, cafés, terrace seating, rattan chairs or taverns. There’s more of everything.

  It’s from here in Berlin that Hitler is threatening the world. And yet the capital feels less Nazi-influenced than our little city of Munich. The sidewalks aren’t stiff with SS officers or children in uniform. I don’t see any caricatures of Jews on the sides of buses, or racist posters.

  Aunt Franziska’s apartment is similar to ours. It’s huge and warm, full of books and adorned with paintings. I’m staying in the younger child’s room, Bella in the elder’s. It’s the first time I’ve slept alone far from my parents. Before going to bed this evening, Aunt Bella told me about her life in Prague. She said she’s free, as she used to be in Germany, free to live the life she chooses, and she feels sure that someday we’ll all meet up in Prague or somewhere else. We
can live together, happy and carefree, her brothers and sister and their friends, including my parents and me. She sat on the edge of my bed and talked to me in the dark. I could hear the smile in her voice, and her eyes were bound to be shining as she described her happy childhood in Munich and her memories of school, she even mentioned the names of friends she played with when she was my age. She described the people in Prague, where Jews are seen as ordinary citizens. With her passport she can travel all over the world. She was very persuasive: we must get visas, and then passports for another country, any country, and we must go, leave Germany as soon as possible, before it’s too late. I lay there for a long time listening to her singsong voice as she described the world she lives in, the shops where she buys her clothes, the restaurants she goes to, and others she’ll visit in the future, in Paris, London and New York. I pictured the life she’ll lead, and I imagined her getting married in a long white dress. I felt her hand on my cheek and her lips on my forehead in the warm darkness.

  Aunt Franziska is caring and attentive. When we arrived yesterday, the dinner table was already set. She served us cold meat and sauerkraut. Then when she showed me my bedroom, the bedsheets had been turned back specially for me, my clothes put away in the dresser, my toilet case waiting on the shelf above the basin in the bathroom, my toothbrush out ready.

  Breakfast this morning is served in the living room. I arrive wearing the bathrobe provided for me, it was waiting for me, folded on my bedroom chair. The three of us—Bella, Franziska and I—have breakfast together. I haven’t seen Franziska’s husband, he came home late last night and has already left for work this morning. Although he’s a Jew, he’s allowed to continue his business deals in Berlin.

  I’m happy to be here. There are sounds of car horns from the street and the trundle of buses and trams. I can’t wait to go out. Someone rings at the door and I immediately recognize a voice: it’s Aunt Lilly, my father’s first wife, Dorle’s mother. I run out into the hall and hug her.

  “You just wait, my little Edgar, my Bürschi. The two of us are going to have such fun without your parents and without Dorle now she’s married. Did you know she’s having a baby? No? Well, it will be born in six months. And here am I all alone, or almost. There is Lewandoski. Well, I’ll explain. In fact, he has a candy factory—imagine that! And you just so happen to be invited to go visit! Isn’t that wonderful? Oh my, how you’ve grown…”

  I hug her close and breathe in her perfume, the Parisian perfume she’s always worn; I’ve known it all my life from when she’s held me in her arms like this. She takes my shoulders and stands back to look at me, she ruffles my hair with her hands, then straightens it and hugs me again. She’s wearing makeup. With her red lips, blue eyelids and over-powdered face, she reminds me of the paintings I saw at my cousins the Bernheimers’, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Manets or Monets, I don’t remember now, I get them all muddled up. She looks like those women from the last century whose dresses are full of lace, their hats decorated with real flowers, their lips red and their eyes heavily made up. I notice her breasts barely covered by a silk wrap. Embarrassed, I huddle against her and look away.

  Berlin is like paradise. I don’t feel Jewish here. I’ve spent the whole week with Aunt Lilly. We visited the factory owned by Herr Lewandoski, her fiancé, and when we arrived he ran down the staircase to the doorman’s hut where we were waiting. He kissed Aunt Lilly’s rings, making her laugh like a child, then showed us up to his office, which is made entirely of wood. It’s modern art, he told us. The bookshelves, cupboards and mirror frames looked as if they’d been sculpted from a single piece of highly polished oak. I thought of the advertising posters for big transatlantic steamers. The room was like a large cabin on a ship. Then we had our factory visit, and everywhere we went men in blue coveralls greeted Herr Lewandoski. We reached the machine room dominated by great steel vats filled with a bubbling concoction that would produce candy. Sugar is transported to the vats in huge paper sacks and these sacks are emptied into metal chutes. The sugar spills into the vats, and mechanical arms combine it with water while the temperature rises. Then it undergoes a complicated journey through tubes, along conveyor belts and over steel slats positioned by operators—in white coveralls this time—who monitor needles turning on dials. At the end of this journey a long black, white, blue or red paste emerges. Other machines cut it up and women package the candy in pretty paper wrappers decorated with the factory’s logo. When I came away my pockets were bulging with candy. Aunt Lilly walked like a queen and the workers looked away out of respect.

  In the course of a week we’ve explored the whole city on foot, by tram or by taxi: the Brandenburg Gate, the avenues, the museums. We visited Frederick the Great’s Palace in Potsdam. I had a Viennese hot chocolate in a café where a band was playing: jazz, Aunt Lilly told me. We watched an American film, a musical. Then Aunt Lilly and Aunt Franziska took Bella and me to the station, the vacation was over. That was when I remembered Papa was ill and we had to go back to Munich, where school would be waiting for me. My old life would start again, opposite Hitler’s house.

  The apartment is dark. My mother’s playing piano and the door to my parents’ bedroom is ajar. My father’s in bed asleep, his hair awry. He looks like an old man. He hasn’t got up for a week. I bring him his supper on a tray and sit beside him, but he doesn’t talk. A smell of medicine hangs over the whole house. It’s gray outside and raining. The tune my mother’s playing is ominous, gloomy. I can hear the floorboards creak and the wind outside. I don’t like going to school anymore, but it’s worse at home. I’m bored, my parents are sad, I don’t have any friends, or brothers and sisters, I’m alone. The au pair’s hardly ever here. In the early days she talked to me and told me her secrets. She wanted to meet a young man, get married, have children, she dreamed of meeting a Catholic, or maybe a Protestant, so her children wouldn’t be Jewish, like her—”But Protestants are the worst anti-Semites,” she confided another time. She now has a fiancé and doesn’t tell me anything. All I know is he’s Jewish.

  Their children’s lives will be as miserable as mine.

  I hope my father isn’t going to die.

  Papa’s condition has improved. He’s himself again. He works as much as he did when he was running a building full of offices, bellowing all day long, dictating letters to a woman who comes more and more frequently, and sending me out to the letter box. He gets angry, issues orders, makes telephone calls. I picture our neighbor busying himself too in his office on the other side of the street. I wonder which of the two gets the most done. Of course Hitler’s running a whole country, he changes laws, initiates new directives, barks on the radio, pretends to consult Il Duce in Italy, coaxes the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, stands up to Joseph Stalin, instigates huge building projects, has freeways built so he can travel faster from his apartment to his Eagle’s Nest in the Alps, rearms the nation, gathers huge crowds, appeals to old ladies and young girls, and never stops coming and going in the street outside our house. But my father has a new idea every second too. He scrawls them on blocks of paper, corresponds with writers, broaches new subjects for his newspaper, writes letters of complaint, calls lawyers and intellectuals who are acquaintances of his, some still working, others retired, gulping down a bowl of soup brought to him on a tray, a pencil behind his ear, the telephone receiver wedged between his shoulder and his neck. He’s toiling against Adolf Hitler, “while there’s still time.” The people he writes to are in Palestine, London, Paris, New York, Lausanne, Rome and Berlin. He starts going out into the city again, meets his contacts in parks. What if it were possible? What if the Führer could be brought down? When I wake in the mornings he’s already up. He barely looks at me over his glasses, kisses me absentmindedly, then dives back into his international newspapers. He comments on the news to my mother and tells her how he plans to influence events. Then he writes to everyone he knows, from the now Nazi and all-powerful Carl Schmitt, who was an author of his and so loved it
when I served him tea, down to his own brothers, the eldest of whom, Lion, has actually recently met Joseph Stalin for a proposed book.

  “I read his interview with Stalin in the paper, and I know exactly how he’ll write his book!” he roars at Mama. “But he’s wrong. Stalin’s no Father of the People—oh, the naivete!”

  When my father leaves the house with his hurried purposeful step, wearing a suit exactly like those our neighbor wears—when Hitler’s not dressed up as a general, that is—I imagine them fighting it out hand to hand, and wonder which of the two would prevail.

  It’s my bar mitzvah today. I’m standing alone at the bimah. There are benches to the left of the door with men sitting on them, my father in the front row. On the right are the women, including my mother. The synagogue is full but I don’t recognize the faces. I intone the sacred texts taught by Glaser, with my father watching me. He’s promised me that from this day on I’ll be a man.

  I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

  Gradually I began to hate them.

  —ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF

  We’ve stopped celebrating Christmas. My parents used to want me to believe in Santa Claus, like other children; Rosie would be busy for a whole week, cutting up paper decorations and felt in every color. She and Mama hung holly on the door and ribbons at the windows. It all seems so long ago! On my way home from school recently I’ve seen people hurrying through the cold, eager to get home to their family gatherings. Through those candlelit windows I spied trees hung with garlands and baubles.