The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “How many times in the past year have you met Mr. Brecht?”

  “I see him sometimes at gatherings of the German cultural community, but we have no lengthy conversations.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am a private man. My attention is focused on my work and my family. As anyone will tell you, I am not social.”

  “Can you tell us the content of even the shortest conversation between you and Mr. Brecht?”

  “It might strike you as peculiar, but we do not even talk about literature, let alone politics. We might talk about the weather. I genuinely mean that. Our conversations are casual and polite. We are Germans. It is not in our nature to be garrulous. We are writers. It is in our nature to be guarded.”

  “You are being guarded now?”

  “Anyone being interviewed by the FBI is guarded.”

  The interrogation continued for another hour, mentioning Thomas’s relationship with the Roosevelts and the Meyers as though it caused suspicion, circling around the number of times Thomas had met Brecht and his opinion of Brecht as a playwright.

  The last questions were, he thought, the strangest of all.

  “If I use the phrase ‘the working class,’ what does that mean to you?” the younger one asked.

  “I lived in Munich in 1918 when there was a Soviet revolution in the city. It was the time before inflation. We lived very well in the city at that time. We feared this revolution, just as we later feared fascism. The revolution came to nothing but it was done in the name of the working class.”

  “Where is that working class now?”

  “With the Nazis.”

  “Would Mr. Brecht agree with you?”

  “You will have to ask him.”

  “We are asking you.”

  “I think he may have views on that question that are more subtle than mine.”

  * * *

  One evening at a gathering of Germans in Santa Monica, most of them composers or musicians, Thomas noticed the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom he had met briefly some time before. They now had a short and friendly conversation.

  Thomas began to attend social events where he thought Schoenberg might be. Of all the German-speaking artists, he thought, Schoenberg was the most important.

  In his invention of the twelve-tone system, Schoenberg had established the theory of atonality in classical composition most clearly. German music had been fundamentally altered by him.

  Thomas did not want to become close to him, or discuss his work with him. Instead, he wanted to observe him, get an impression of him. From the beginning, from the very first encounter, he almost knew what he was doing.

  For his novel, he was imagining a composer living in Germany in the 1920s, a man who had signed a pact with some dark force so that his great ambition could be realized. He saw the shape of the book he would write about this composer. His narrator would be called Zeitblom; he would be a German humanist and friend of a famous composer. Zeitblom, in the novel, would be the one watching, noticing and sifting. The other protagonist, the genius composer, would be a dark, unknowable figure, haunted. He would bring destruction with him, including, eventually, the destruction of himself. Knowing him would wither the souls of those around him.

  Thomas smiled at the thought that the sweet Californian skies, the beautiful soft mornings when he could breakfast in the garden, the abundance, the blameless beauty, had not conspired to alter his mind. Rather, the gray skies, the rainy springs, the long winters, the raked light on the Isar River, or the recalcitrant weather of Lübeck, had forged a sensibility so solid that it could not be transformed or even affected by this extended spell in paradise. Thus, his novel would show no sign that he had ever been away from Germany.

  * * *

  Thomas and Katia followed the news each day, reading the morning papers and listening to the radio at lunchtime and in the evening; he noticed that their mood could be swiftly transformed by a setback or a victory. When the Axis forces were briefly successful on the Eastern Front, they were despondent, but when news came of successful Allied bombings in the Ruhr, on Berlin and Hamburg, they started to imagine that the war would soon be over.

  Also, the letters and phone calls that came from the children could depress them or put them in good humor. Elisabeth followed the war, especially on the Italian front, with close attention. And the phone calls from Monika, who had gone to New York, were almost funny, filled with her misadventures and her disagreements with landlords and taxi drivers. It was a relief sometimes that she did not mention the war.

  “She is fighting her own little war,” Katia said.

  Since Michael did not try to keep in touch, Katia started to call Gret, who allowed Frido to come on the line to speak to his grandfather. Golo was in London working with the German-language division of the American Broadcasting Service. His letters were as meticulously composed as Erika’s were untidy, with her spidery handwriting down the margins. Klaus wrote less often than the others. Sometimes it seemed that his letters were written very late at night, with many sentences deleted by the army censor.

  In her phone calls, Agnes Meyer told Thomas to be careful with every word he said, even in private. There were some in Washington who were now planning the complete destruction of Germany, ensuring that all its industries would be put beyond use forever, and that its people would be ruled by the Allied victors. Soon, she said, he would be needed to speak out against this.

  * * *

  In December 1944, Nelly took an overdose of pills. Heinrich discovered her unconscious. She died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. When he found her, Heinrich said, she was peaceful and beautiful.

  The German writers still living in Los Angeles came to her funeral, including Brecht and Döblin. There was a brief service, with Heinrich wiping his tears away. When he set about walking away alone, Thomas indicated to Katia, who followed him and brought him back to Pacific Palisades in their car. He lay on the sofa after lunch, and then they took him home.

  After her death, Heinrich spoke about Nelly incessantly; he described her kindheartedness, how she cared for him as no one else ever did.

  “In America, she could not manage,” he said. “She could not manage America.”

  He got comfort, he told them, from touching and smelling her clothes and did not give anything away that had belonged to her. In the mornings, he worked, and then, he said, he spent the rest of the day thinking about her. Everything after her death, he said, was different.

  He told Thomas and Katia that he had received a letter from a friend who wrote that, in this terrible time for the world, she wished only for a well-ventilated tomb, a soft coffin with a bed lamp above for reading and, most emphatically, no memories. He felt the same, he said. Except the part about the memories. He would like to have his memories.

  * * *

  Thomas was due to give a lecture at the end of May 1945, to be entitled “Germany and the Germans,” as part of his role at the Library of Congress. While he did not expect the president or the First Lady to be in attendance, he presumed that they would read the lecture, as it was to be printed in advance. He wrote with Roosevelt in mind, knowing from Agnes Meyer that the president was still more preoccupied in defeating Japan and had not applied his mind in any detail to the future of Europe.

  Germany would have to be defeated, Thomas thought, and forced to recognize its own crimes. Everyone who held office would have to be put on trial. The country itself was already in ruins.

  “The Nazis have ensured,” he wrote, “that the body of the Reich will not be rescued alive; it can only fall apart, piece by piece. There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown.”

  Even when he took a walk with Katia by the ocean, he was in silent dialogue with Roosevelt, thinking about what he would say to him were they to mee
t in Washington. Thus, in April, when news came of Roosevelt’s death, he was despondent. No one else, he believed, would be able to steer the Allies towards maintaining a balanced approach to Germany. Without Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill would do their worst. He did not credit Truman with any of Roosevelt’s gifts.

  For a while, he wondered if his lecture in Washington should not be a panegyric for the dead president, but Agnes Meyer warned him that this would serve only to make enemies in the Truman camp.

  What he wished to say was, he thought, perhaps too complex to matter in this time of simple polarities. He was insisting that all Germans were to blame; he wished to argue that German culture and the German language contained the seeds of the Nazis, but they also contained the seeds of a new democracy that could be brought into being now, a fully German democracy. For his example, he went to Martin Luther as an incarnation of the German spirit, an exponent of freedom who was also a set of opposites in which each element contained its own undoing. Luther was rational, but his speech could be intemperate. He was a reformer, but his response to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524 was insane. He had in him all the fury and foolishness that inspired the Nazis, but he also contained a willingness to change, to see reason, to want the sort of progress that might inspire a new Germany.

  Luther contained extremes, he wrote, but also healing dualities; the German people were made in his image. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing of the country and its history.

  He sighed as he read over the lecture. What influence he had in Washington depended on the idea that Roosevelt approved of him, saw him as a rational man who would be at his most useful now that disputes about good and evil should be replaced by more pragmatic discussions. Once Roosevelt was gone, the kind of argument Thomas wished to make, invoking the past in all its intricacies, attempting to make subtle statements about the present, would be seen as obscure, irrelevant by those who had replaced him.

  Thomas resolved that he would go to Washington and put himself through the motions of speaking as though it might matter, but he knew that he would not be alone in seeing the event as an empty spectacle.

  * * *

  The moment the news came that Hitler was dead and that Germany had finally surrendered, Thomas called Heinrich with the intention of inviting him to supper and having him spend the night. These days, on the phone, Heinrich seemed exhausted, his voice weak. This time, however, he wanted an argument.

  “Now we’ll see the English and the Americans for what they are,” he said.

  “Maybe we’ll see the Germans too,” Thomas said. “There will be trials.”

  “They will make the country into one big America. The thought of the troops giving candy to children makes me sick.”

  “If I had a choice…” Thomas began and then stopped.

  “Between?” Heinrich asked. “A choice between?”

  “Between having my country liberated by the Americans or the Russians—”

  “You would take the candy,” Heinrich interrupted.

  When Thomas told Katia that Heinrich did not wish to join them, she said that she would go and see him in the next few days.

  “We have champagne,” she said, “but I thought it could wait until some of the children are here. I often dreamed that I would like to celebrate Hitler’s downfall by having an ordinary evening. We could have one of the evenings that Hitler never wanted us to have.”

  “Ordinary?” Thomas asked. “After all that’s happened?”

  “Just one night,” Katia said. “We will pretend. In the meantime, I have the Riesling from the Domaine Weinbach that we like so much. It is being chilled as we speak.”

  Chapter 15 Los Angeles, 1945

  The structure of the novel was now clear in his mind. It would be narrated by the self-effacing German humanist Serenus Zeitblom, a friend from childhood of the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Allowing Zeitblom to tell the story meant, Thomas believed, that the narrative could, at times, be personal and emotional as well as biased. While Zeitblom was sincere and trustworthy, his vision was limited, his powers of analysis circumscribed.

  Zeitblom, writing in a doomed Germany, would begin the later chapters with an account of the actual progress of the war. He was Thomas’s double, milder than the author, but living through the same years, the years of Hitler, hearing the same news. Both author and fictional narrator were alert to a time in the future, a time when Germany would be destroyed and ready to be remade, when a book like the one being composed might have a place in the world. While Zeitblom feared a German defeat, he feared a German victory even more.

  He opposed the triumph of German arms, because what gave rise to Hitler repelled every element in his own decent spirit. If fascism survived, the work of his friend the composer would be buried, a ban would rest upon this new music for perhaps a hundred years; the music would miss its own age and only in a later one receive the honor that was its due.

  Each day, in the time leading up to Hitler’s downfall, as Thomas noted the news, he felt Zeitblom’s presence. He imagined Zeitblom slowly realizing, as he did, that Hitler’s reign was coming to an end. He had Zeitblom register, in his narrative, “our shattered, battered cities falling like ripe plums.”

  As he wrote, he had dream readers, of whom his own narrator was one. They were the secret Germans, the ones in internal exile, or they were the Germans of the future, in a country emerging from the ashes of the conflagration. In the books he had written since 1936, when his work was banned in Germany, he had been unsure if anyone at all would read them in the language in which he wrote them. They were written for an audience he could not imagine. Now, as he worked for readers who lived in the shadows or might emerge into daylight in the future, he could use a tone that was hurt and hushed, and create an atmosphere as someone might light a vaulted space with candles.

  * * *

  When the war ended, both Klaus and Erika were in Germany, Klaus in uniform working for Stars and Stripes, the army magazine, writing about the German cities in the aftermath of surrender, Erika reporting on a defeated Germany for the BBC. Golo was also in Germany, charged with setting up a radio station in Frankfurt. From Munich, Klaus wrote to his parents to say that the city had been transformed into a gigantic cemetery. Only with difficulty, he said, could he find his way through once-familiar streets. Large swathes of the city had been razed to the ground or reduced to rubble. He had dreamed of approaching the old family house on Poschingerstrasse, throwing out whatever Nazi official was living there and moving back into his old room. But there was not even a door in place on which to knock. The house was a shell. It had been used as a sort of brothel during the war, he learned, designed to produce Aryan babies.

  Erika was one of the few allowed to see the Nuremberg prisoners in their cells. When the identity of their visitor was later disclosed to the captive Nazis, a few of them, she heard, regretted that they had not been able to have a serious talk with her. “I would have explained everything to her,” Goering had cried out. “The Mann case was handled all wrong. I would have handled it differently.” Erika, on informing her father of this, added that he had missed his chance to live in a castle and have his wife wear diamonds, with Wagner’s music blaring all around.

  Klaus, using his army pass, went to Prague to see if he could find Mimi and Goschi. After a long search, he located them, and wrote a detailed letter to his uncle about their condition. Heinrich came to see Thomas and Katia to show them the letter. Goschi, Klaus wrote, had nearly starved during the war, but she had not been detained. Her mother, on the other hand, had spent several years in Terezín and was lucky to survive. Klaus could hardly recognize the beautiful Mimi, he wrote. She had suffered a stroke. Most of her hair and many of her teeth had fallen out. She could barely speak and her hearing was affected too. That she was still alive appeared miraculous. She and her daughter were completely destitute.

  Klaus wrote to his mother asking her to send them food packages, clothing and money, but not to write
in German, as it was not a popular language in Prague.

  * * *

  Thomas knew that Heinrich still had constant worries about money. It struck him that his brother might return to Germany, especially if the eastern part of the country were to be under Russian control. He thought of offering him money for the fare. Now, having been shown the letter from Klaus, he watched his brother walk away, with shoulders hunched in grief. Heinrich blamed himself for what had happened to Mimi.

  Thomas noticed how heated the tone of Klaus’s letters became. His account of meetings with Franz Lehár and Richard Strauss, neither of whom suffered from any guilt about having lived comfortably in Germany as the war went on, made Klaus seem almost unhinged. When he had asked Strauss if he had ever considered leaving, Strauss had asked why he would have left a country that had eighty opera houses. Klaus relayed this to his parents in capital letters with many exclamation marks.

  Klaus did an interview with an unrepentant Winifred Wagner for the army magazine. She spoke about Hitler’s Austrian charm, his generosity and his marvelous sense of humour. Klaus wrote home to say that he had believed the views quoted in his article would cause outrage but that no one appeared to have even noticed.

  He sent clippings from his Stars and Stripes pieces: “I felt a stranger in my former fatherland. There is an abyss separating me from those who used to be my countrymen. Wherever I went in Germany, the melancholy tune and nostalgic leitmotivs followed me: You can’t go home again.”

  Klaus was able to find out what had happened to his friends: many had been tortured, others had been murdered. He saw how some people who had collaborated with the regime slowly began to acquire positions of influence. He wrote to his parents to emphasize that the German people did not understand that their present calamity was the direct, inevitable consequence of what they, as a collective body, had done to the world.