by Colm Toibin
“Who helped them escape?” Agnes asked.
“Winifred Wagner did,” Katia said. “My father loved Wagner’s music. He and his parents were the first patrons of Bayreuth. That might seem like a fantasy now—Jews paying for Wagner—but that is how we lived. And she remembered it, Wagner’s daughter-in-law. My father accepted help from her. He had no choice. I hope not to thank her if ever the chance comes. Too much has happened for that. I despise her.”
Katia sounded grand and everyone at the table was impressed by her tone. Katia and he, Thomas thought, had become so used to being Germans in America, always aware how much casual suspicion they could provoke. Now Katia had discarded any humility or caution she might have worn. She caused the table to fall silent. Even the senator studied her with a look of mild, Midwestern awe.
* * *
They returned to California to find Klaus there waiting for his call-up. He had been, to their surprise, finally accepted into the army. The winter days were warm and they were heartened to see him up early, reading the newspapers in the garden. In the evening, he was relaxed, ready to argue with Golo and his father about the progress of the war without becoming ill-tempered.
Earlier in the year, 150 tons of incendiary bombs had been dropped on Lübeck, resulting in many civilian casualties. The medieval center had largely been destroyed, including the cathedral and the Marienkirche, and also the Mann family house on Mengstrasse.
“There has to be a stronger movement,” Klaus said at the dinner table, “to denounce these bombings of civilian targets.”
“The people of Lübeck,” Thomas replied quietly, “have been among the most devout Nazis.”
It was easier to make this argument than try to describe what it meant for him to have the actual streets in which his parents and grandparents walked, streets that were etched in his memory and came often to him in dreams, obliterated in one night.
“And so you incinerate them? You burn their children too?” Klaus asked. “You fight the war like Nazis?”
Thomas pictured Mengstrasse at night, how calm and prosperous it looked. He wished Katia would intervene to stop Klaus talking.
“If we use their tactics, what is the difference between us and them?” Klaus asked.
Thomas put down his knife and fork.
“The difference is in me,” he said. “I am from there. Those are my streets. But it grew barbarous and I have fled from there. And I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to feel. I wish I had your certainty.”
“I wish you did too,” Klaus replied.
* * *
The house in Pacific Palisades, Thomas often believed, was a mistake. Even before a visitor entered the building itself, it was evident that too much money had been lavished on the gardens.
And then the house was like something from a magazine, a showcase. He felt most embarrassed by it when he considered it from his brother’s perspective. Heinrich and Nelly were living in a dingy apartment. They had bought their secondhand car on a hire-purchase scheme and were frequently behind with payments, as they were with rent. While Thomas gave his brother a stipend, he knew it was not enough. A few times as they sat in the garden, he noticed Heinrich lift his gaze towards the large building and look around. Heinrich did not need to speak. The distance between his brother’s conspicuous comfort and his own misery was all too apparent.
Thomas blamed the poet, the one who had barely spoken at Agnes Meyer’s in Washington, the one with the Scandinavian wife, for spreading the news about what Katia had said at the Meyers’ dinner table. Greatly exaggerated, it was repeated to Thomas as an argument that had occurred over dinner in the White House itself, with the Roosevelts both at the table. It was reported that Katia had said that Germany should be left to burn and then reduced to producing vegetables. It could become the farm of Europe, she was reported to have said, with all its industrial zones cemented over.
Even Heinrich, when he heard the story, thought it was true.
* * *
Agnes Meyer continued to correspond with Thomas, announcing in one letter that all three of his sons should be fighting on behalf of the Allies. She was perplexed as to why Klaus had not yet seen combat. And Golo, she was informed, was working in propaganda. It was the least the Manns could do, she said, to become more actively engaged, considering how generous the United States had been to the family. When Thomas replied to her sharply, she wrote back as if she had just received one of his regular admiring letters, adding her delight at the defeat of the German forces in Stalingrad and the announcement by Churchill and Roosevelt that they would only accept unconditional surrender.
Soon afterwards, Agnes called and asked him to see a young man who would presently get in touch with him. When Thomas asked the young man’s name, she said that she could not disclose it, but he would contact the Manns, needing to see both Thomas and Katia together, and no one else. He would give Agnes’s name when he got in touch.
It was probably another of Agnes’s ways of trying to be interesting, he presumed, so he thought nothing of it, not even saying anything about it to Katia.
A week later, when Thomas was napping, Monika called his name. When he dressed and went downstairs, he found Katia at the door of his study.
“There is a boy here. He says he knows Agnes Meyer. He says that we agreed to see him.”
The boy, who must have been in his late teens, was wearing a yarmulke. He seemed unusually self-possessed as he stood in the hallway. When Katia invited him into the main room, he followed her and then pointed to Monika.
“I need to see Mr. and Mrs. Mann alone.”
For a second, Thomas thought that he must be selling something, but that thought was quickly dispelled by the boy’s gravity.
When Monika left the room, Katia asked him if he wanted water or tea or coffee but he shook his head.
“It is policy not to accept refreshment.”
The young man was so proper and serious that Thomas wondered now if he had not come for some religious reason. He spoke German like a native.
“My job is to visit prominent people so that they know what is happening to us in Europe.”
“I have made some speeches on the topic,” Thomas said. “And broadcasts.”
“We have read your speeches.”
“Is there something wrong?” Katia asked. “Is there something we don’t know?”
“Yes, there is. That is why I have come to speak to you. It is now fully apparent to us that there is an agenda, agreed at the highest level, to organize the complete destruction of the Jews in Europe.”
“In the concentration camps?” Thomas asked.
“That is what the camps are for. They are not for work, or for imprisonment. They are for annihilation. Murder on an industrial scale. They are using gas. It is quick and efficient and silent. The plan is that every single person of Jewish heritage in Europe will be murdered. They want the children as much as the adults. The plan is to have no Jews in Europe.”
There was an air of sudden unreality in the room once these words were spoken. The large, high, comfortable space, walled in by plate glass, partitions cladded in varnished wood, the furniture chosen to match the design, seemed to muffle the meaning of the words.
“You know what a difficult position the president is in?” Thomas asked. “There is strong opposition to the taking in of refugees.”
As soon as he said this, he knew how heartless and foolish it had sounded.
“I have no interest in the president or his position,” the young man said. “It is too late anyway for refugees. People are dead.”
“What do you want from us?” Thomas asked. He tried to make his tone soft, concerned, kind.
“We want you to have known, when the future comes. We want you not to be able to say that you did not know.”
“Who else are you seeing in Los Angeles?” Thomas asked.
“That is none of your business, sir.”
His tone, Thomas thought, had become o
penly rude.
He seemed too young to be bearing news of such import.
“Were you raised in the faith?” the young man gently asked Katia.
“No. I did not even know we were Jewish when I was a small girl.”
“Do you wish you had been raised in the faith?”
“Yes, sometimes. But my father did not want us to live apart from those around us.”
“They are making no distinctions between those who did not go to the synagogue and those who did.”
“I know that.”
“In the future, if there is any future, there will be no Jews in Europe. You will walk through the cities on the Sabbath and see only ghosts.”
“We will not go back,” Katia said.
The boy indicated to Katia that she should accompany him to the garden so that he could take leave of them.
* * *
The next morning, Thomas put in a call to the president’s office, making it clear that, while he did not need to speak to Roosevelt personally, he did wish to speak to someone at a very senior level on a matter of some importance.
When a return call came, he relayed to the official what their young visitor had told them about the camps.
“I wish to know if the information I received is correct.”
The official told him he would call him back.
The following day, he received a call from Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state, who spoke first in a friendly way about Thomas’s and Katia’s applications for American citizenship. He then responded to a question about the president’s health without saying anything too informative. As he started to inquire after his family, Thomas cut him short. He asked Berle if he could address the question of the camps.
“Things are worse than we imagined,” Berle said. “Much worse. The scenario you outlined to my colleague during your call is one that we now know to be the case.”
“How many people know this?”
“It is known. Soon it will be widely known.”
* * *
Thomas’s broadcasts to Germany were arranged by the BBC. At the beginning, he was asked to write out a speech and have it recorded by a German-speaking announcer in London, but now he himself recorded a speech in Los Angeles; the record was sent to New York and transferred by telephone to another record in London and then played before the microphone.
“It feels like magic,” he told Katia, “but it is not. It is the result of those lovely English words—‘organization,’ ‘determination.’ ”
He tried to imagine someone in Germany isolated and afraid. Somewhere in a dark house or a dark apartment, listening with the volume down low so the neighbors could not hear. While he could address Americans in his faltering English, now he could speak a public German. Using the language of reason, of humanism, he could appeal to a common sense of decency.
“A German writer,” he said, “speaks to you whose work and person have been outlawed by your rulers. Therefore I am glad to take the opportunity which the English radio service has offered me to report to you from time to time about all that I see here in America, the great and free country in which I have found a homestead.”
There were occasions when he could not keep his anger in check at the obedience of ordinary Germans, which grew, he thought, more unpardonable from day to day.
“Since what my fellow countrymen,” he stated, “are inflicting upon humanity is so atrocious, so unforgettable, then I cannot conceive how they will be able to live in the future among brother peoples of the earth as equal among equals.”
He wondered if anyone listening remembered the tone that he had taken during the previous war and asked themselves if he could possibly be the same man, as he insisted now that Germany was a nation like any other, with ordinary advantages and ordinary faults, unexceptional.
“That is the way it should be,” he said. “Germany is not, by its nature, special. It is surrounded by its enemies now only because it made those enemies. And its barbaric acts against the Jewish population have placed it beyond redemption. To be rescued, it will have to be defeated.”
If he could change his views so radically, this should be a way of encouraging some of his compatriots to rethink their politics too. If he could come to his senses, then so could others.
In the recording studio, he tried to keep his tone measured and calm. He hoped that the occasional trembling in his voice might be enough to let listeners know the depth of his feeling.
* * *
When, later in the year, Erika returned, there was a letter waiting for her from the FBI, which wished to interview her, wanting to know the names of anyone in America who had been involved in the anti-fascist movement in Germany before 1933.
Katia said that Erika must have left the two men who came to interview her well shaken, as she had observed them from the veranda as they departed from the interview. They looked rather happy that it was over, Katia said.
Erika, for some days, veered from being in a rage, wanting to write articles about her ordeal, or give lectures or interviews about it, to becoming irritable at the least thing.
“The questions they asked! How ill-informed they are! And how persistent and lacking in even the smallest delicacy.”
From the last phrase, Thomas divined that they had asked her about her relations with women.
He was almost relieved when a letter came on FBI notepaper asking him to make himself available for an interview that would best take place at his own domicile. His presence on their list of interviewees might lessen Erika’s feeling that she was being singled out.
“If they ask me any questions about you,” he said to Erika, “I shall say that I am your poor innocent father and no one ever tells me anything.”
“They will accuse you of communism,” she said.
“Brecht will be overjoyed.”
When the appointment was made, and the two men, one fresh-faced and eager-looking and the other older and dour, came to the house, he decided to see them in his study. The main room seemed too preposterously Californian for an interview with the FBI about anti-fascism. The atmosphere in his study might encourage them to be respectful.
As soon as all three were seated, the older one took him through his rights in a deadpan voice. Thomas explained that they would have to speak slowly and forgive him his struggle with the language that was not his native one.
“We can understand you perfectly,” the older man said.
“And I can understand you too.”
They made clear then that they were here to find out about Bertolt Brecht and his associates and Thomas realized that he would be in a difficult position no matter what he said. Brecht had certainly been hard to avoid in the circle of German exiles on the west coast, but his contempt for Thomas and his work was also widely known. Although his visitors promised complete confidentiality, he suspected that news of this encounter would leak out. He thought of contacting Brecht before the end of the day to let him know that this meeting had occurred, or doing so through Heinrich, who was in regular contact with Brecht.
“Do you know if Mr. Brecht is a Communist?” the older man asked.
“I do not know about people’s political sympathies unless they let me know about them and Mr. Brecht has never discussed such things with me.”
He found the rage he felt at the questions caused his English to become more confident and accurate.
“You know the First Lady?”
“And the president indeed.”
“Can you state that they are not Communists?”
“It would be surprising, would it not?”
“So, can you state that Bertolt Brecht is not a Communist?”
“It would be surprising.”
“Why would it be surprising?” the younger one asked.
“If he were a Communist, he would surely have gone to the Soviet Union, where Communists are welcome rather than come to the United States where they are not welcome. I think that speaks for itself.”
Thomas hesitated for a moment. He did not want to disparage Brecht’s work to these two men. It would open too many other questions.
“In Munich his work was performed sometimes, but he was not very popular in Bavaria.”
“We understand that this Mr. Brecht is a regular visitor to this house.”
“He has never been to this house. He may see my brother, but he is not part of our world.”
“Yes, we know that he is close to your brother. Do you and your brother have the same political views?”
“No two people have the same political views.”
“In the United States, some people are Democrats, others Republicans.”
“Yes, but they will not have the same view on every single matter.”
“Is your brother a Communist?”
“No.”
“Your daughter?”
“Which one?”
“Erika.”
“She is not a Communist.”
“I am asking you again if you are familiar with Mr. Brecht’s work.”
“I am not.”
“Why not?”
“I am a novelist. He is a playwright and a poet.”
“Do novelists not read plays and poems?”
“His plays and poems are not quite to my taste.”
“Why not?”
“They are not for me. Many others admire them greatly. There is no particular reason. In the same way that some people like movies, and others like baseball.”
He saw them look at each other, and knew that they thought he was patronizing them.
“We would ask you to take this matter very seriously,” the younger one said.
He nodded and smiled. If this were happening in any country in Europe now, he would have reason to be afraid. All he had to do here, however, was play a game with these two men, make sure to tell them nothing that was patently untrue, and not insult their intelligence, but also say nothing that might damage Brecht or open up the question of their hostility to each other.