by Tariq Ali
‘Thank you.’
It was early afternoon. Outside the sun was shining. Vlady was pacing up and down in his study. Should he ring Evelyne? Go for a walk? Sao had left over three hours ago and Vlady, sunk in his chair, had sat there thinking for a long time. For some people the past was like an abandoned country. Not for Vlady. It haunted him, weighed on him, entered his dreams, blotted out some days completely. The past had become an incubus. Gerhard’s way out had been a public suicide, but he was wrong. Wrong: death is not the only escape. The past can be rewritten, embraced, demystified, forgotten. That’s what people do most of the time. Vlady was too argumentative and too curious to contemplate death seriously. A world-historical suicide was an act of unbelievable arrogance.
Today, in Sao’s presence, he had been unable to repress his father-anxieties, which had tormented him since he was a child. Sometimes, Vlady would imagine what his relationship with a father might be like. Whole conversations would be constructed. His views on fatherhood were derived largely from fiction and, as a result, were not fixed. The opening pages of The Radetsky March, Joseph Roth’s masterpiece, were enough to put him in a truculent mood, banish all sentimental thoughts, and get him thanking history for depriving him of a father. Today his mood was different. Roth’s corrosive cynicism did not enter his thoughts at all. Instead, he was thinking of his son, Karl, and wondering to what extent his own failure as a father was related to his not having had one.
He sat down at his desk, cleared his typewriter and decided to write a letter to Karl. He might or might not complete the memoirs. They would probably remain a set of disjointed, chaotic memories of his life. Karl would understand; the boy had always been good at deciphering puzzles. In the meantime, thought Vlady, I owe him a letter.
My dear Karl,
After you rang on my birthday I was filled with remorse. Why hadn’t I been more warm? We, who were once so close, can only speak to each other in formal and strained tones. This pains me and hence this letter to you, my son. What can I write to you after a four-year gap? There is so much to tell you – and yet I don’t know where to start. Should I begin where it hurts the most? You think your mother left because I was having an affair with Evelyne. This is not true. Helge never elevated the personal above the political. This is a fact, Karl. It was an article of faith for your mother, your grandmother and myself
In any event I want you to know something. Your mother’s departure was the worst personal blow that I have suffered. I lost something very precious. After Gerhard’s death, it was Helge who was my closest friend and companion. We talked about everything (yes, including Evelyne). We consoled each other over the political and personal losses we suffered. Her decision to go to New York was so sudden, so extraordinary, that it left me speechless. I wanted to go down on my knees, to plead with her to stay, to tell her that life without her was unthinkable, but before I recovered from the shock she had gone.
There was one occasion when I felt so depressed that I contemplated following Gerhard’s example. Except that he parted company with our world for reasons of state and I, low in self-esteem and extremely lonely, was simply feeling sorry for myself
When you were ten or eleven, we took you to see Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. You loved the actor who played Macheath. He was an old friend of Gertrude and afterwards, when we went to his dressing room, he sang ‘Mac the Knife’ especially for you. Remember? He won’t he singing again. Like Gerhard, he too, took his own life. He had been in a state of depression ever since the return of the old order. Personally he had no problems – he had received acting offers from Hamburg, and was not short of money. He had no connections with the Stasi and nobody even accused him of that, hut he was unhappy. He simply could not hear to live in the new Germany. What he hated most was the undeniable fact that our people voted for the Christian Democrats, that everything had changed so quickly and there was no space left, at least in his lifetime, even to hope. So he decided that there was no point in living. Even in the darkest years of this century, when it seemed that the Third Reich might prevail over Europe, few people of our persuasion took such an extreme step. Why now? Because a heavy greyness is gnawing at our soul and some of us find it difficult to sing our swan songs to the hitter end. This century has been one of pain, ugliness and anguish.
Christian mythology regards suicide as a sin. Secular systems today treat suicide as a crime, which is ridiculous, for if the ‘crime’ is successful the perpetrator can never he punished. Christian fantasists are, at least, more consistent, since they believe in the migration of souls.
Their most gifted poet places ‘The Wood of the Suicides’ in the Seventh Circle of Hell, close to the centre of the Inferno. The trees and hushes in this wood have flowered from the souls of the suicides on earth and for Dante even the souls are polluted, for his wood has ‘No green leaves … no smooth branches … no fruit, hut thorns of poison.’
Why should we accept all this rubbish? Taking one’s own life is an extreme step and, of course, there are numerous examples of people driven to self-destruction by a momentary fit of insanity or a deep shock from which they imagine they could never recover. They need help, treatment, whatever. But there are others. Gerhard and Macheath, for example, who have thought about the matter long and hard and have come to the conclusion that they would rather die than live in this world. However painful it is for us, their survivors, they have a right to decide their own future. Individual self-determination! Do you agree? Will your children-yet-to-come agree? Who knows. Are you surprised that I think like this now? Do you think my rationale is intensely solipsistic and too existentialist? Do you think it runs counter to my socialist instincts which should compel me to regard people as part of a community, a network? Perhaps it does, hut this is an emergency, Karl. They have deliberately destroyed our self-respect, our dignity as human beings, and that has also rent our community asunder. Sometimes existential choices are the only solutions for individuals.
Try and understand your parents, Karl. You owe us at least that much. I know you’re angry. You feel wounded. You think that Helge and I were obsessed with the Idea, that it finally imploded, and this has made you suspicious of all ideas. And yet you know full well that our Idea was not the DDR. You can make many criticisms of Marx, but to hold him responsible for our so-called socialist experiences is unfair. Leave that to the demagogues.
I can imagine you reading this. DDR: the initials make you flinch now. And yet there were many who were prepared to try and make even this wretched system work. Your grandmother, Gertrude, for one – but not just her. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people who hoped that after the horrors of the war, they could build a decent house, with decent furniture. Alas, this was not to be. The foundations of the DDR were laid on the shoulders of the Red Army and the furniture which Ulbricht and Honecker found was third-hand junk – cast-offs from the Lubianka prison in Moscow. And yet, I ask myself: would they have permitted the Vietnamese or Turks to be burnt alive? I don’t think so, if only in order to preserve their law and order. Our sad country has made itself known for sending millions to the gas chamber during the fascist period. Burning foreign workers and their families is a new democratic privilege. I suppose we must get used to it, like everything else. Your leaders say it is a crime, but what of the police who let it happen and, worse, our citizens who stand idly by or cross the road just like their grandparents did on Kristallnacht in the thirties or when they saw Jews being carted off in trains to the camps? When ordinary people lose their humanity, it reflects badly on the state whose citizens they are.
When the demonstrations began in Dresden and Berlin, Helge and I were filled with joy. We believed that we could remove the filth from here without importing the muck from where you are now, but it was utopian. Bonn’s inevitable hegemony was predetermined by its economic strength. That we, of all people, should have failed to register this reality was an indication that we were stuck on the ninth cloud, loving the whole world. You
r mother was always a pillar of strength for me, a tree trunk I could lean against. We talked about everything. There were no secrets, except one, and that destroyed us in the end. I will tell you about it after we have become friends again. To tell you now would be to lose you forever and I don’t want that to happen. I feel lost without Helge, crippled, functioning with only half an engine, and could crash anytime. Do you understand what I’m saying?
There are times when I wonder whether I could ever have been the father you needed or wanted. I remember once when I hit you really hard on the face. I can’t remember now what you’d done and that alone indicates it must have been something trivial, some stupid challenge to my patriarchal authority. But I can remember the horror written on your face. You were about twelve. My unexpected violence was an act of total betrayal as far as you were concerned. You would not speak to me for a week. I really had to plead with you to forgive me. I often wondered where that blow came from. You see, not having known a father, my points of reference are limited. Paternal brutality is passed from father to son till the chain is broken, but I was not brutalized as a child and Gertrude insisted that Ludwik, your grandfather, was the kindest person she had ever known. I will tell you his story one day, when I know it all myself. Your Uncle Sao is helping me to trace the last details through his contacts with Moscow. Perhaps your son will be the one who will really be able to understand this century, from the distance of the next.
On the phone you invited me to visit you in Bonn. It’s not my favourite German city. Why don’t we meet in Munich next month? Leviné is buried there. I would like to see you, and also visit the Jewish cemetery. Pay a belated tribute to a good man, by-passed by history. I know how that feels. Except for the difference in time. Leviné lived when there was still hope. My generation has given up ‘all hope of ever seeing Heaven’. We are being led ‘into eternal darkness, ice and fire’, though I’m sure you don’t see it like that from your apartment in Bonn. Do you think this is just another of my romantic illusions: a utopia missed in a bygone decade ? You may think you’re right, but you’re wrong. Are you laughing?
I am.
Write to me soon.
Love,
Vlady.
(Your father!)
After he had typed out Karl’s address on the plain brown envelope, Vlady had second thoughts. Perhaps the letter would only annoy his son further, but Vlady was in no mood to confess everything. Not yet. Perhaps in a year’s time. Should he tear up the letter? Drop him a banal postcard instead? Pity Sao had left, or he could have asked his advice. In desperate situations like this Vlady consulted his bookshelves, in much the same fashion as those who are more mystically inclined approach an astrologer who usually tells them what they want to hear. Vlady decided on a poet. Pushkin. He climbed on a stool and gently removed a copy of the Collected Works from the top shelf, where the Russian poets all lived. He sat on the edge of his desk and opened the book. He was in luck today and began to read aloud:
a crowd of oppressive thoughts
Throngs my anguished mind; silently
Before me, Memory unfolds its long scroll;
And with loathing, reading the chronicle of my life,
I tremble and curse, and shed bitter tears,
But I do not wash away these sad lines.
Pushkin’s advice was followed. The envelope was sealed, stamped and posted. As he walked back from the letter-box, Vlady’s thoughts shifted to his mother.
‘Mutti, when did you fall in love with Father?’
She had been startled by the question, but had recovered immediately. ‘I think in Berlin. Yes, definitely. In a the bar off the Fürstenhof in Berlin.’
‘And did you travel together a lot?’
‘So many questions, Vlady. I never seem to be able to satisfy your curiosity. We travelled everywhere. Moscow, Paris, Berlin and, of course Vienna. I remember I had to deliver an important message to him in Vienna in 1934. We met at the Zentrale, even though it was packed with Nazi spies and Mussolini’s agents. Ludwik thought it was safe because they were mainly spying on each other, trying to find out whether the Austrian Nationalists would opt for Italy or Germany…’
Yes, Vlady thought, she always had a good story to divert his mind from what he really wanted to know. One day after he had been questioning her persistently, she told him that his father had first made love to her in Vienna, in her hotel room on a cold February morning, and they had stood naked at the window and watched the snow on the pavements.
The details had convinced Vlady at the time, but not now. Now he doubted everything she had ever told him. His mind was permanently engaged in an attempt to decipher what was true and distinguish it from the falsehoods which he now knew had dominated his conversations with Gertrude.
The world that had made his mother tell lies, the world that had compromised him morally, made him feel sick in himself, that world now lay in ruins. This fact alone should have made him feel happy. But he was not happy.
Twelve
IT WAS FEBRUARY 1934. Gertrude spent many months in Vienna that year, working directly for Ludwik and Teddy. She never forget what happened there and, of all her stories, this one never changed.
Vienna had begun to turn nasty. The Germans used to joke that the ‘Austrians were bad Nazis but good anti-Semites’. Gertrude once told me how a Jewish and non-Jewish member of the Socialist party were captured by some Brownshirts and locked up in a tiny room. Every half hour or so, the captors would rush into the room, stand on the table and piss on the heads of the two men. The Jewish socialist was forced to repeat rhythmically: ‘I am a stinking Jew’, while his friend was forced to repeat in tandem, ‘And I desire to become a German’. This went on for the whole night. Then the men were released.
David Frohmann wasn’t so lucky. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a watchmaker. One morning he noticed a group of young Brownshirts hovering outside his shop. One of them was the son of an old friend, a shopkeeper a few doors down. Frohmann was just about to open the shop. Before he could do so the Brownshirts kicked in the glass door and entered the shop. They smashed the display cabinets, grabbed Frohmann by the neck and rubbed his face in the broken glass. One of them, drunk on hatred, shouted ‘Let’s kill the Jew’. Frohmann, his face bleeding, writhed on the ground, trying to avoid their kicks. A bystander finally gave the alarm and the young thugs ran away. What they could not steal, they had wrecked.
Felix, wearing a fur hat with ear muffs, the top of his face covered by one of Ludwik’s old brown scarves, rushed home from school the day after this incident in a state of considerable agitation. His best friend, Erich Frohmann, who had missed school yesterday, had arrived late today and been tearful throughout lessons. On being teased by the school bully he had lashed out wildly.
Felix, upset for his friend, had fetched their teacher. During the lunch-break, Erich told Felix what had happened to his father the previous day. In hospital where he was being X-rayed and his wounds treated, he had suffered a heart attack. His condition was serious.
Erich’s mother had insisted he go to school while she kept vigil at his father’s bedside. After school that day, Felix had pleaded with his friend to come home with him, but Erich had refused, saying he was needed at the hospital.
For the first time Felix realized that the swastikas sprouting on almost every Viennese street meant danger and death. When Lisa opened the door of their apartment to let him in, Felix put his arms round her and burst into tears. She let him cry and gently stroked his head. When his sobs had subsided she questioned him gently and in a few short bursts Felix recounted the tragedy that had befallen his friend.
Lisa put on her coat and gloves. In Ludwik’s field of work it was an iron law that the family must not attract attention to itself or become too involved in local friendships, but she felt it was important for Felix that she behave like a normal human being and not conceal her maternal reflexes. Their son’s formative years could not be totally determined
by the exigencies of the Fourth Department. She took Felix by the arm.
‘Come. We’re going to see Erich and his father at the hospital.’
It was too late. Erich’s father was dead. Erich and his mother had already gone home. Lisa and Felix took a tram to Helengistadt.
Erich and his family lived in the Karl Marx Hof, apartment blocks designed for workers and constructed by the Socialist administration of Vienna. People stuck together here, looked after each other. There was a strong sense of belonging to one community. Solidarity prevailed against the other world, the world of profiteers and swastikas, the world of enemies. Otto Bauer, the Socialist leader, often boasted of this little oasis in the Austrian desert. Socialism in one locality. Its popularity with working-class families irritated the clerico-fascists. The bourgeoisie perceived ‘Red Vienna’ as a threat. If ever you go to Vienna, Karl, go and see these apartments and you will understand that public housing did not necessarily lead to urban squalor or socialist giantism, replete with 70-foot statues of Marx or Lenin.
News had spread and small groups of workers were standing at the entrance to Erich’s block, talking in hushed voices, their faces covered with sadness. Lisa and Felix climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the watchmaker had lived. The corridor was like a railway station. Human bodies everywhere. Erich’s apartment, too, was crowded.
One of the faces was only too familiar. At first, Lisa thought he was one of Ludwik’s old friends, but as she moved towards him she saw with a start that it was Julius Deutsch, the Commander of the Schutzbund, the volunteer defence force of the Austrian Socialist Party. His photograph often appeared in the right-wing press where he was portrayed as a Judeo-Bolshevik monster.
If only he were a monster, thought Lisa, as Deutsch made his farewells and left the apartment. As Erich saw Felix, he rushed through the crowded room and hugged his friend. The two boys disappeared. They were still wearing their school uniforms, white shirts, a tie, dark shorts that just reached their knees, and jackets that covered their shorts. Long stockings travelled to the knees from the other end. They went into Erich’s room and sat on the bed, staring at the wall in silence.