The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “This is growing,” he said, “and it is disciplined. They are fighting elections and running a semi-official army at the same time.”

  “They have no support,” Thomas said.

  “That is not true. I can show you every day what their support is. It is not happening in secret.”

  Thomas and Katia made a pact not to mention the Nobel Prize and to silence anyone who raised the subject. But the night before the announcement, he lay awake thinking how much he wanted this prize and how much he saw that as a defect in his own character. He should not want it, he told himself; it would perhaps bring him readers, but it would also bring him trouble.

  In the morning, he heard the telephone ring and he waited for Katia or Golo to appear. When they did not, he smiled at how sure he had been that the prize was his. When Katia came to the door with a tray and coffee for both of them, he presumed that she was preparing to console him. She did not speak until she was sitting down, with the door closed.

  “The phone will start ringing in about two minutes and the journalists will be at the door. I thought we’d have a quiet time until then. We won’t get another chance for a while.”

  He was already engaged to do readings in the Rhineland; other events were now added, including a celebratory dinner in Munich and a ceremony at Bonn University. The crowds who filled the hall were the same people who had come to his readings since the war, but now the atmosphere in the halls was high with expectation, as though he could deliver the audience from the fear and failure all around them.

  In his introductions, he did not speak of politics, but his very presence as a German who stood above the fray and wrote books that were admired all over the world made these events feel like shadowy gatherings of the opposition, where the untainted soul of Germany could find respite.

  In the liberal newspapers, as Golo told him, the prize was seen as a vindication not only of his work but of the idea that he represented the life of the mind in his own country. The celebrations were a rebuke, one of the papers wrote, against dark forces that were threatening his native land.

  When Golo showed him the Illustrierter Beobachter, which was controlled by Hitler, he read a more incendiary version of something he already knew. The award marked him further for the Nazis. The very culture he had represented since the war—bourgeois, cosmopolitan, balanced, unpassionate—was the very one that they were most determined to destroy. The tone he used in his prose—ponderous, ceremonious, civilized—was the precise opposite of the tone they wielded.

  The battles they were fighting included one for cultural hegemony. A lyric poem written by a Jew or a left-wing writer could offend them as much as a thriving Jewish business. A famous novelist could come into their sights as much as an unfriendly foreign country or a Jewish banker. Not only did they want to control streets and government buildings, banks and businesses, they wanted to re-create the Germany of the future. If they could not hold the lyric poem to account, or the novel, then the future of German culture could easily slip from their hands, and it was that future that concerned them as much as the present.

  These conclusions struck him most forcefully when he sat alone in his study in Munich in the evening. He did not think for a moment that the Nazis would ever take power. Some days they were merely a nuisance, representing a coarseness that was entering every aspect of life. Waiters were not as polite in restaurants as they used to be. The staff in the bookshops he favored were not as compliant. Katia complained much more about finding suitable household help. The post, he was sure, was slower.

  But these were minor irritants. He did not think too much about the uniformed thugs on the streets because he spent little time on the streets. The presence of the Nazis in any German polity of the future was hardly worth arguing about. As they had come from nowhere, he believed, they would soon fade away. He believed that the struggle would be between socialism and social democracy.

  A few years earlier, when Golo became interested in political philosophy, he had enjoyed debating with him how the gap between the two might be reconciled. Now the discussions with Golo were all about the differences between the Nazis and the Italian Fascists, about the slow and insidious way the National Socialists had moved to the very center of the public imagination without winning any elections or softening their tone in order to win more support. When he tried to interest Golo in socialism and social democracy, Golo shrugged and said:

  “Just because Heinrich and Erika and Klaus think that Hitler threatens us all does not mean it isn’t true.”

  “I never said it isn’t true.”

  “I am glad to hear that.”

  * * *

  Erika and Klaus, he saw, got energy from the vulgarity and viciousness of their enemies. They had traveled to the United States, where they were met by a horde of curious journalists who wished to interview them. They were given shelter by their friend Ricki Hallgarten, who was living in New York and introduced them to the pleasures of the city—some of which, Erika wrote in a letter, could not be revealed even to her own dear parents. They crossed America by train, and then made their journey into a trip around the world, visiting Japan, Korea and Russia, writing a book together about their experiences, a book that ended with their gloomy arrival home, into a Prussian landscape in the pale light of dawn when, under the watchful eye of the police, they had to stop laughing and take life seriously.

  In fact, they were not met on arrival, Thomas remembered, by the police, but by their parents and their siblings. They did not return to Berlin, but to Munich. In their first days home, they were almost children again. While usually he or their mother had to remind them to censor themselves at the family table, this time all their stories of their escapades throughout the world were filled with innocent adventure, as though they had been a couple of siblings from a folktale let loose in a world where they were looked after by many kind strangers and avoided all calamity by a stroke of luck.

  Soon they disappeared to become adults again. When Ricki Hallgarten returned from America, Erika wrote a children’s book that he illustrated, and, Katia informed Thomas, Klaus and he became lovers. Klaus was now publishing one or two works of fiction every year. Erika became famous throughout Germany for her short articles about what being a new woman meant. She loved being photographed driving a car, flashing her short hair and expressing opinions on sex and politics that were combative and controversial. She and Ricki took part in a ten-day car race that they won, Erika writing articles from their resting places.

  Just as Thomas and Katia were settling into a serene late middle age, Erika and Klaus were finding life more exciting. They were planning a trip in two cars from Germany to Persia in the company of Ricki and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a friend of Erika.

  * * *

  For Thomas, the change from complacency to shock was a swift one. The year after his Nobel Prize, the Nazis got six and a half million votes compared to eight hundred thousand just two years earlier. But their support, he believed, could dissolve as easily as it had surged. The emptiness of the National Socialist promises, in his opinion, would surely come home to people. If only Golo could stop showing him lurid and portentous articles in obscure publications, then he could get on with his work in peace.

  A few months later, however, the transformation that had taken place in Germany while he was busy writing and traveling to give lectures and readings came to him as an unforgettable image. He had agreed to deliver a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin called “An Appeal to Reason.” The title might not have been provocative at any other time, but it was now. He prepared the lecture carefully, becoming angrier as he wrote, and also more certain that these words needed to be spoken.

  He still believed that he was speaking to the middle one of the three Germanies that he had identified. He expected the Beethovensaal to be filled with thoughtful people who spent the winter evenings reading books. He presumed that they would deplore, as he did, the turning away from the principles that made a civili
zed society, which were, as he named them, “liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress.” He took the view that his audience despised what he called “the gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, populist fairground barking” and that they agreed with him that National Socialism offered “a politics of the grotesque, replete with reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement-park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetitions of monotonous slogans until everyone foamed at the mouth.” He called on the audience to support the Social Democrats, as the most rational and progressive party in German politics.

  It was a full house and the response as he began was appreciative. He was glad that Erika and Klaus were in the audience as well as Katia. When he described the state of feeling in Germany that might become “a menace to the world” and added that Nazism was “a colossus with clay feet,” a man in the audience stood up and demanded to be heard.

  Thomas had never been interrupted before. He was unsure what to do. He hesitated and then pointed to the man, encouraging him to speak.

  Shouting loud enough to be heard all over the hall, the man called him a liar and an enemy of the people. There were murmurs of disapproval from the audience. Thomas was relieved that he had a script. He was determined not to falter. He knew there were sentiments coming to which the audience who admired his work would assent but that would further enrage the man who had interrupted him.

  He saw that there were dissenters all over the hall, and they were ready to shout abuse and catcall at every chance. It was clear that they were organized, and had come here to prevent him speaking. They now started to shout him down. Several of them moved from their seats towards the podium as the majority of the audience sat silently. His interrupters had been strategically placed. They were all young men. What he noted every time he looked up from his speech was their belligerent presence in the hall.

  As he continued to speak, Thomas was handed a note, warning him to shorten his speech, to finish before tensions rose further. He decided that he could not do that. It was not merely that such a retreat would be reported widely as an ignominious capitulation but he could not see how he and Katia and the others might depart if the protesters felt that they had made him afraid of them.

  He went on to attack Nazi ideology with greater vehemence as the heckling became even more widespread in the hall and more heated. Instead of individuals shouting abuse, groups of them began to sing songs and hurl insults. As he came to the end, Thomas could barely be heard at all.

  Once he had finished, it was obvious that it would not be easy to make a safe exit. He saw Katia signaling to him to go over to the side. There he found the conductor Bruno Walter and his wife, who, familiar with the elaborate system of stairs and corridors in the building, carefully guided him and Katia to the neighboring building, close to which Walter had left his car.

  Thomas understood that he would never be able to speak in Germany again without fear of a repetition as long as the Nazis were in the ascendant. No one who wished to hear him would deem it safe to attend one of his events. He agreed to have his speech printed and was pleased that it went into three editions, but knew that it made no difference. He was marked. When Golo offered to show him the reports of his lecture in the National Socialist newspaper, he declined. He knew what they would have to say about him.

  He carried on writing, but he was aware that he would be noticed were he even to venture onto the streets of Munich. When he and Katia took their walk by the river, they were wary. He thought the task of opposing the Nazis a worthy one and believed that they would be defeated. Inflation had unsettled the country, he saw, and there would be many swings from one faction to another, from one ideology to another, before there was stability. But that night in Berlin had alerted him as nothing else did to the fact that his own exalted literary reputation did not place him in an unassailable position. He would not be allowed to speak his mind when he wished. His Germany, the one to which he addressed his readings, had lost its place at the center.

  Erika and Klaus were stirred into further bursts of eloquence by the danger all around them. While being shouted down in Berlin had made their father unwilling to partake in more events, they became even braver as the Nazi menace grew more intense.

  Klaus wrote a second play for four actors, two men and two women, but this time the tone was darker, more ominous; there seemed more at stake than love as a game of pleasure. Now the young characters were fighting for their lives. Drugs for them did not offer release but suggested doom. Love was a tangled attempt to possess the other, death a sort of freedom.

  Klaus and Erika and Ricki Hallgarten continued to make final preparations for their trip to Persia. Thomas and Katia had come to admire Ricki, who spoke to them with the same debonair ease as he did to their two eldest children. Klaus, in Ricki’s company, became more thoughtful, less prone to offering extreme opinions that might irritate his father.

  In those months, however, all of them harbored extreme opinions about the National Socialists. At meals Thomas listened to heated invective. Nonetheless, he was surprised by Ricki’s tone as he denounced Hitler.

  “Everything is lost! We are doomed! The whole lot of us. They will destroy everything. Books, pictures, everything. No one will be safe.”

  He then did an extreme imitation of one of Hitler’s interminable rants.

  “Don’t you see what is happening?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  The day before the planned departure, Ricki, Erika, Klaus and Annemarie Schwarzenbach went to a Bavarian newsreel company to make a film about their journey. For the cameras, Klaus and Erika sat in the car; the other two set about repairing some imaginary damage. They laughed so much when Ricki suggested that Klaus should be filmed mending a puncture that the filming had to be stopped.

  It was arranged that, after spending a final night with their families, they would set out at three o’clock the next afternoon. At noon, however, news came that Ricki had shot himself in the heart, having traveled to Utting on the Ammersee, where he kept a small apartment. He left a note addressed to the local police station giving Katia’s name and phone number with the suggestion that the police contact Frau Mann so that she could break the news to his parents.

  That night, Erika and Klaus were speechless at the table. For some time, they had been in a state of elation. Klaus had been worried that the trip would put pressure on his delicate relationship with Ricki, but Ricki had managed to reassure him by making love, Erika told Katia, in a new way that had excited them both. Klaus was to embark on a journey with the two people in the world that he loved most. In the days beforehand, he could not sit still. Every time Thomas saw Erika, she had the map of their route in front of her and a pile of guidebooks and dictionaries. She was issuing commands to an empty room. She had already worked out the titles of articles she would publish and had plans for a book all four travelers would write together.

  When they went to the apartment where Ricki had died, they saw that the wall above his bed was splattered with blood. Confronted with his dead body and the blood, Erika began to scream. She was still screaming when Klaus took her home.

  Katia found Thomas in his study.

  “I don’t know why Ricki gave my name to the police. As soon as my knock was answered, I knew that I would destroy the Hallgartens’ lives. And Erika must stop screaming. You must come out of your study and insist that she stop!”

  In the days that followed, Thomas tried to talk to Erika and Klaus about the deaths of his own two sisters, how those two suicides were also shocking and inexplicable, but they seemed unable to understand. They could not connect Ricki’s death with any other death. Even when he went into detail about where he was and how he felt when Carla and Lula died, neither of them paid attention. It was as though their own lives had a brightness, a richness, a vividness that no other life could measure up to. Ricki could not be compared to their aunts whom no one had ever heard of.

  “You don’t understand,” Erika sa
id to him over and over. “You don’t understand.”

  Chapter 8 Lugano, 1933

  When the Reichstag fire happened in February 1933, Thomas and Katia were in Arosa in Switzerland on holiday. Each day, they heard further news of mass arrests and attacks on people in the street. When the National Assembly elections took place a week later, Thomas’s first instinct was to return to Munich as soon as possible to make sure that the house would not be ransacked. If it became necessary, he thought, they could make plans to rent the house, or even sell it, and quietly remove their assets to Switzerland.

  He was shocked to hear Katia tell a fellow guest in the hotel that they could not go back to Munich.

  When he suggested that they decide what to do only when they had spoken to Erika, Katia insisted that calling the house would be dangerous. They should not even say where they were. He sat close to her as she put in a call. He listened as Erika answered. Katia spoke in code, asking her daughter if it would be a good time for spring cleaning.

  “No, no,” Erika replied, “and besides the weather is terrible. Just stay there for a little while; you’re not missing a thing.”

  Erika and Klaus left Munich as soon as they could. Only Golo was now in the house. It puzzled them that his letters had an air of normality, as though the rise of the regime was no longer news. He told them that he had heard a rumor that Erika had been arrested and was being held in the concentration camp at Dachau, but he now knew that this was not true. Golo added that he had also met his uncle Viktor, who told him how pleased he was to get a promotion in the bank where he worked. He wondered if his uncle might have taken the job of a Jewish colleague.

  Katia found them a house for rent in Lugano, where they were joined by Monika and Elisabeth. Michael was at a Swiss boarding school. Soon they were also joined by Erika, who smoked more than usual and drank a lot at night and was first up in the morning to get the newspapers. Her voice filled the house; she was more like a relative sent to scold them than their eldest daughter who had become, like them, a refugee. Since Erika knew the names of even the most minor regional governors in Germany, she took them through the changes that were being ruthlessly implemented. She spent the rest of the morning writing to friends and allies all over the world. She made many phone calls. The rumor of her incarceration in Dachau was conveyed by her with a strange relish to everyone. She threatened to defy the authorities by driving back to Munich to rescue the manuscripts of her father’s books, but, at her mother’s insistence, she agreed not to attempt such a dangerous mission. Later, however, Thomas was amused to hear her describe the journey as if she had actually made it, outwitting Nazi border guards and returning with a tranche of precious papers under the driver’s seat of her car.