Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  During 1939 and 1940 a certain tension, amounting even to bitterness, arises between father and son. Heinrich is now back home, having come down from the three mountains of the Western world and, at a distance of four hours by train, is occupied somewhere draining marshes, capable though he has meanwhile become—at the insistence of his father, who has paid a Spanish Jesuit tutor a fat fee for the purpose—of reading Cervantes in the original. Between June and September the son visits the family some seven times, between the end of September 1939 and the beginning of 1940 some five times, and has refused to make use of the frankly proffered “pull” of his father, for whom it “would have been no trick” (all quotations from Hoyser, Sr., and Lotte) to have him “transferred to a more suitable job” or to effect his discharge once and for all as a war-essential employee. What kind of son is this who, when asked at the breakfast table about his health and what life in the army is like, draws from his pocket a book entitled: Reibert, Handbook of Army Regulations, Edition for Tank Gunners, revised by a Major Allmendiger, and proceeds to read a section from it that he has not yet committed to a letter: a dissertation covering nearly five pages headed “Military Salutes” and describing in detail every type of salute to be performed while walking, lying, standing, on horseback, and in an automobile, and who salutes whom and how? It must be borne in mind that this father is not one who spends all his time sitting around the house waiting for his son’s visits; this is a father who now has a government aircraft at his disposal (Leni enjoys flying enormously!) and, as a man occupied with matters of great, sometimes extreme, sometimes supreme, importance, must get out of commitments as occasion arises, cancel important engagements, cancel appointments with cabinet ministers (!), often by using threadbare excuses (dentist, etc.), so as not to miss seeing his beloved son—and who then has to listen to a passage on regulation saluting by some fellow called Reibert, revised by a certain Major Allmendiger, being read aloud to him by a beloved son whom he really wanted to see as director of the History of Art (or at least Archeological) Institute in Rome or Florence?

  Is any further comment required on the fact that these “coffee gatherings,” these breakfasts and midday dinners, became “for all concerned not merely uncomfortable but increasingly agonizing, nerve-racking, and finally ghastly” (Lotte Hoyser)? Lotte Hoyser, née Berntgen, then aged twenty-six, daughter-in-law of the much-quoted manager and head bookkeeper Otto Hoyser, worked as a secretary for Gruyten, who also for a time took on her husband Wilhelm Hoyser as a draftsman. Since Lotte was already in Gruyten’s employ during the crucial months of 1939 and was sometimes present at the coffee gatherings with the son who was on leave, her assessment of Gruyten himself, whom she described as “simply fascinating but in those days, when you got right down to it, a crook,” ought perhaps to be mentioned only marginally. Old Hoyser loves to hint at the “erotic but of course platonic relationship” between his daughter-in-law and Gruyten, Sr., “in whose erotic sphere of interest she naturally belonged, since they were barely fourteen years apart in age.” Theories have even been voiced (strangely enough by Leni, although not directly, only indirectly, confirmed by the unreliable Heinrich Pfeiffer) that “even in those days Lotte probably represented a genuine temptation for Father, by which I don’t mean she was a temptress.” In any event, Lotte describes the family coffee parties, for which Gruyten, Sr., sometimes flew in from Berlin or Munich, even from Warsaw, it is said, as “simply ghastly,” “downright unbearable.” M.v.D. describes them—the meals—as “horrible, simply horrible,” while Leni’s only comment is “awful, awful, awful.”

  The evidence is, even from so prejudiced a witness as M.v.D., that these leave-periods “simply destroyed” Mrs. Gruyten; “what went on there was just too much for her.” Lotte Hoyser speaks unequivocally of an “intellectual variation of patricide” and maintains that the politically destructive motive for quoting from the aforesaid Reibert had “hit Gruyten hard because he was in the thick of politics, was often hearing of, had often heard of, top political secrets such as the construction of barracks in the Rhineland long before it was occupied and the planned construction of giant air-raid shelters—and this was precisely why he didn’t want to hear about politics at home.”

  Leni experienced these bitter nine months not quite so overwhelmingly, possibly not quite so attentively, as did other observers. She had meanwhile—approximately in July 1939—yielded to a man, no, she would have yielded to him had he asked her; true, she did not know whether this was really the right man, the one whom she was so ardently awaiting, but she did know that she would not find out until he had asked her. It was her cousin, Erhard Schweigert, son of the Langemarck victim and the lady who maintained that he had looked as if he had fallen at the Battle of Langemarck. Erhard, “because of a hypersensitive nervous disposition” (his mother), had failed to scale as rugged an educational barrier as matriculation; furthermore, he had been temporarily sent home from as remorseless an institution as the Reich Labor Service and was now aiming for what he regarded as the “repulsive” (his own word, according to M.v.D.) profession of grade-school teacher, having taken the first step by starting to study at home for an aptitude test. But then in the end he was drafted into that rugged institution where he met his cousin Heinrich, who took him under his wing and, while they were both on leave, tried quite openly to pair him off with his sister Leni. He bought them movie tickets with which he “sent them off” (M.v.D.), he arranged to meet them after the show “but then didn’t turn up” (see above). Since this meant that Erhard spent not only the greater part of his leave but his entire leave with the Gruytens, paying only brief sporadic visits to his mother, the latter is still bitter about it; with outright indignation she rejected the possibility that a love affair “with serious intentions” might have existed between her son and Leni. “No, no, and again no—that Oh-well girl—no!” Now, if one thing is certain it is the indisputable fact that right from the first leave—in about May 1939—Erhard absolutely adored Leni; there are tried-and-true witnesses to this: in particular Lotte Hoyser, who frankly admits that “Erhard would certainly have been better than what came later, anyway than what came in 1941. Maybe not better than what came in 1943.” On her own admission she repeatedly tried to entice Leni and Erhard into her apartment, to leave them alone there “so that—damn it all—it would finally happen. For God’s sake, the boy was twenty-two, healthy, unusually thoughtful and kind. Leni was seventeen and a bit, and she was—I tell you straight—she was ripe for love, she was a woman, a marvelous woman even in those days, but the shyness of that Erhard was something you wouldn’t believe.”

  At this point, in order to avoid misunderstandings again, or yet again, it is necessary to describe Lotte Hoyser. Born 1913, height five feet four and a half inches, weight 122 pounds, graying brown hair; powder-dry, dialectically inclined if not trained, she may be called a person of remarkable candor, even more candid than Margret. Since she lived with Gruyten on fairly intimate terms during the Erhard period, she would seem to be a far more reliable witness than Miss van Doorn, who, in everything concerning Leni, inclines to iconolatry. Lotte, when queried about her controversial relationship with Gruyten, Sr., spoke candidly about that too: “Well, something might have developed between us two even in those days, I admit, he might have developed into what he became in ’45; I disapproved of almost everything he did, but could understand it, if you know what I mean. His wife was too timid, besides she was scared by all that armaments stuff, it filled her with panic, paralyzed her; if she’d been an active woman and less of a daydreamer she would’ve hidden her son somewhere in Spain in some monastery or maybe in that land of the Fenians where she could’ve made a trip to see everything for herself, and in the same way, of course, it would’ve been possible to put my husband and Erhard beyond the reach of German history. Don’t get me wrong: Helene Gruyten was not only nice, she was kind and clever, but history was too much for her, if you know what I mean, too much—whether it was politics or t
he business or the appalling self-destruction that boy was deliberately heading for. It’s true, of course, what others have told you” (Margret’s name was not betrayed. Au.). “He had devoured the whole Western world—and what was he left with? A little pile of shit, if you ask me, and he was confronted with that indescribable crap. Too much Bamberg Rider and too little Peasants’ War. Even when I was a kid of fourteen in night school, back in 1927, I had a course in the sociopolitical background to the Peasants’ War and took all kinds of notes—and I know, of course, that the Bamberg Rider has nothing to do with the Peasants’ War—but I ask you, cut off his curls and give him a shave—and what’ve you got? A pretty cheap and sentimental Saint Joseph. In other words: too much Bamberg Rider in the boy and too much Rosa Alchemica—she once gave me that to read, it was really beautiful, she was a marvelous woman all right, and probably all she needed was a few hormone injections; and the boy, Heinrich: that was a boy to fall in love with, that’s for sure, and I don’t suppose there was a woman for miles around who didn’t give a strange little smile when she saw him; it’s only a few smart homosexuals and women, you know, who can smell a poet. Of course it was sheer suicide the way he was carrying on, no question, and sometimes I wonder why he dragged Erhard into it—but maybe Erhard wanted to be dragged into it. One can’t tell, two Bamberg Riders who wanted to die together, and God knows they did: they put them up against a wall, and you know what Heinrich shouted before they shot him? ‘Shit on Germany.’ And that was the end of an education and an upbringing that must have been unique, and since he was in that shit army maybe it was the best thing: God knows there were enough chances of dying between April 1940 and May 1945. The old man had plenty of pull and got hold of the file, some old general or other wangled it, but he never opened it, he just asked me to tell him the gist of it: what had happened was that those two boys simply offered to sell a whole antiaircraft cannon to the Danes, or rather, they wanted its fictitious scrap value, something in the neighborhood of five marks, and d’you know what that quiet, shy Erhard said during the trial? ‘We are dying for an honorable profession, for the arms trade.’ ”

  The Au. felt the necessity of paying another visit to Mr. Werner von Hoffgau, aged fifty-five, who, “after being temporarily employed by the Federal Army, at whose disposal I had placed my experiences in an official capacity as a construction expert,” was now living in a wing of the little moated castle that had belonged to his ancestors and in which he maintained a small architect’s office “that serves peaceful purposes only, i.e., designing housing estates.” One must picture von H. (who did not voluntarily describe himself as unvital, but might have) as a gentle, gray-haired person, a bachelor, for whom, in the Au.’s modest opinion, the “architect’s office” is only an excuse to spend hours watching the swans in the moat and the activities inside and outside the leased estate, to go for walks through the meadows (more precisely: sugar-beet fields), to glower at the sky whenever another of those Starfighters flies overhead; who avoids associating with his brother (who lives in the castle) “on account of certain transactions he wangled, using my name but without my knowledge, in the department I then headed.” Von H.’s plumpish, sensitive features reveal bitterness, not of a personal kind, rather an abstract moral bitterness which, so it seemed to the Au., he deadens with a drink that, when consumed in quantity, is among the most dangerous: old sherry. In any event, the Au. discovered a surprisingly large number of empty sherry bottles on the garbage heap and a surprisingly large number of full ones in von H.’s “draftsman’s cabinet.” It required numerous visits to the village inn to obtain, at least in colportage form, the information that was refused by von H. with the words “my lips are sealed.”

  The following is the synopsis of conversations conducted by the Au. with approximately ten Hoffgausen villagers during three visits to the inn; the sympathy of the villagers was clearly on the side of the unvital Werner, their esteem, their respect, expressed in almost trembling voices, on the side of the apparently very vital brother Arnold. Apparently—according to the villagers—Arnold, with the aid of Christian-Democrat deputies, bankers, and lobbyists representing various groups in the defense committee, and by exerting sufficient pressure on the Minister of Defense himself, had managed to persuade the planning board for the construction of military airfields, of which his brother was head, to choose the “famous and ancient Hoffgau Forest,” plus the requisite large number of adjacent fields, as the site for a NATO airfield. That—according to statements made by the villagers—had been a “fifty-, forty-, at the very least thirty-million-mark deal,” and all this took place (villager Bernhard Hecker, farmer) “in his department against his wishes with the approval of the defense committee.”

  Hoffgau, “forever indebted to Gruyten because he saved me as a young man from that German Army by making me his personal adviser, although, when the going got really tough for him later on, I could at least do him a favor in return,” hesitated a while before giving any information on the mysterious Heinrich-Erhard affair. “Since it seems to mean so much to you I’ll let you in on what happened. Mrs. Hoyser never knew about the whole dossier, or about the whole problem. All she got to see was the transcript of the trial, and an incomplete one at that, and the report of the lieutenant in command of the firing squad. As a matter of fact, the affair was so complicated that I’m going to have a hard time reconstructing it just the way it was. Let’s see now, Gruyten’s son refused his father’s protection, but Gruyten protected him against his will and saw to it—an easy matter for him—that first of all he and his cousin were transferred to a paymaster’s office in Lübeck, a couple of days after the occupation of Denmark. Now he—Mr. Gruyten senior, that is—hadn’t reckoned with the obstinacy of his son who, it’s true, went to Lübeck with his cousin but when he got there saw what he had landed up in and returned at once to Denmark, with no marching orders, no transfer—that, leniently interpreted, was going Absent Without Leave, strictly interpreted, was desertion. That could have been fixed up; what couldn’t be fixed up was that the two boys tried to sell an antitank cannon to a Dane, and although the Dane didn’t take up the offer—it would have been suicide, of course, and utterly futile—that was a crime, and no amount of protection could help, nothing could help them now, and the inevitable happened. I’ll be frank with you and admit that, even as Gruyten’s personal adviser, and although we had large projects under way in Denmark at the time and knew almost all the generals personally, I had trouble getting at the dossier, and when I’d read it I passed it on—well, let’s say, in an expurgated or, if you like, edited version to Mrs. Hoyser, who was Gruyten’s secretary, for it contained a good many references to ‘crooked deals’—and I wanted to spare him that.”

  Lotte H., who has to heave a sigh whenever she thinks of giving up her attractive little apartment with its roof garden in the center of town, had to sigh and light cigarette after cigarette, keep passing her hand swiftly over her smooth, cropped gray hair, and sip repeatedly at her coffee when she spoke “about that affair.” “Yes. Yes. They’re dead all right, no doubt about that, whether because of desertion or because they tried to flog that cannon—they’re dead, and I don’t know whether that was what they really wanted. I always felt there was a good deal of romancing about the whole thing, and I could imagine that they were quite surprised and shocked as they stood there against the wall and heard the order ‘Ready—Aim!’ When all’s said and done, Erhard had Leni, and Heinrich, well—he could have had any girl. It seems pretty German to me, what those two boys did, and right there too, in Denmark, where our really big projects were getting under way at the time. Oh well. Let’s call it ‘symbolllism,’ if you like, with three l’s, please. But it wasn’t that with my husband, who was sent to his death near Amiens a few days later; he’d have liked to live, and not just symbolically either; and he wouldn’t have liked to die symbolically either, he was scared, that’s all, there was a lot of good in him but they destroyed that in the seminary he went
to till he was sixteen to study for the priesthood, till he finally realized that that’s all a lot of crap, only it was too late. And he never lost that wretched complex of not having finished high school—they’d drilled that into him too; then we met in the Free Youth, with ‘Brothers, toward sunlight, toward freedom’ and so on, and we even knew the last verse—‘Brothers, take hold of your rifles, On to the last final fight, To Communism all honor, To it be all power and might’—the only thing was, of course, that no one had taught us that the Communism of 1897 was a different matter from the Communism of ’27–’28—and my Wilhelm, he wasn’t the kind to have ever taken hold of a rifle, never, and it was for those idiots that he had to do it, and they allowed him the privilege of being killed for that crap—there were even people in the firm who claimed that his own father, with Gruyten’s approval, took Wilhelm’s name off the list of war-essential employees, and there were even mutterings about Uriah’s wife, but I couldn’t and never could have—you can’t deceive a loyal person like Wilhelm, I couldn’t do it even right after he was dead. And now about Gruyten. Yes, something might have developed between us, even in those days. The thing that fascinated me about him was how that tall bony country boy with the plebeian features turned into a tall bony man, a distinguished-looking gentleman, not a contractor, not an architect—a strategist, if you ask me. And that was the thing about him, apart from his tall thin boniness, that fascinated me: that talent for strategy. He might just as easily have become a banker, without ‘understanding’ the first thing about money, if you know what I mean. He had a map of Europe hanging on the wall of his office, used to stick pins in it and sometimes a little flag, and a glance was enough for him—he never bothered with details. And of course he had one very effective trick he’d simply pinched from Napoleon—I believe the only book he ever read was a pretty stupid biography of Napoleon—the trick was so simple, maybe it wasn’t even a trick, maybe there was even a bit of genuine sentiment in it. He had started in ’29, a bit on the grand side, with forty workers, foremen, and so on—and he managed, in spite of the Depression, to hang on to them all, not to fire a single one of them, and he knew every bank trick in the book, he had no scruples about stringing along his creditors, even borrowed at exorbitant rates—and so by 1933 he had about forty men who simply thought the world of him, even the Communists among them, and he thought the world of them and helped them out in all their troubles, even their political ones, and you can imagine that over the next few years they all worked their way up into pretty good jobs, just like Napoleon’s sergeants; he’d hand over whole projects to them, and he knew every one of them by name, every last one of them, even the names of their wives and kids, he’d ask after them every time he saw them, with all the details—he knew, for instance, when one of the kids had to repeat a year in school, and so on. And when he got to a construction site and saw a bottleneck he’d grab a shovel or a pick, he even drove a truck in an emergency—and he always pitched right in where help was really needed. The rest you can imagine for yourself. And another secret: money meant nothing to him. He needed it, of course, for props: clothes, cars, getting about, now and again a big party, but as soon as it came in, the big money, it was immediately reinvested, and debts were incurred over and above that. ‘Owe money, owe money, Lotte,’ he said to me once, ‘that’s the only way.’ And now for his wife: yes, she was the one who saw ‘what he had in him’—right, but what he had in him and what came of it simply sent her into a panic; she wanted to make a big man of him, to run a big house, and so on, but she didn’t want to be married to the chief of a general staff. If you’ll let me put it in a funny way I think maybe you’ll understand: he was the abstract one and she was the realist, though it may’ve seemed the other way round. My God, I thought it was criminal, what he was doing: building fortifications and airfields and headquarters for that bunch, and whenever I go to Holland or Denmark I see the fortifications still standing there along the beach, the ones we built, and I feel sick—and yet you know: it was a time of power, an era for power, and he was a man of power to whom power itself meant nothing, no more than money did. For him the appeal lay in the game, he was a gambler all right—but he was too vulnerable: they had the boy, and that boy didn’t want to be kept out of the dirt.”