When the young people had left and the doors were locked for the night, only thirteen had signed up to audition.
“Each scene has a different cast of characters,” Suse commiserated, “so it is possible with thirteen if some take on double roles.”
“It’s their lack of purpose…” Falk complained.
Elisabeth was studying the sign-up sheet. “No one has asked for the Cashier.”
Falk threw up his hands. “Only the most important part.”
“They’re just shy,” said Dietrich. “I mean, look at the script. The Cashier’s speeches aren’t just long, they’re very dense. If you’d never performed in public before, would you want to take it on?”
Suse clapped her hands. “I’ve an idea! You could play the Cashier, Falk.”
“I didn’t plan on acting, Suse. It should be their play.”
“But listen. If they see you perform, they’ll learn so much just from watching you. You can teach by example.”
He hesitated. “Well. What do you lot think?”
Dietrich and Elisabeth had moved away and begun discussing where to go for cake and coffee. They stared at him.
“Falk to play the Cashier,” Suse said, making gestures behind Falk’s back to her brother.
“Of course,” Dietrich said. “Why not?”
“No one’s signed for the Stout Gentleman either,” Falk said.
“They’re all far too starved to play a stout man,” said Suse.
Falk said, “You could do it, Dietrich.”
“Me?”
“Suse told me you loved to act when you were in school.”
“Yes, but—”
“Dietrich is not stout,” Elisabeth said loyally.
“He’s a large man,” said Falk, “and he has the face for the part. You could wear a bit more padding, Dietrich, and be the very image of a greedy capitalist.”
“Thanks very much,” Dietrich said.
It was settled. Suse would help with costumes and lights, and Elisabeth would be stage manager. They exited the front door, stepped through a curtain of snow into a circle of streetlight, faced one another, each couple aware of the other as audience. Falk and Suse stood apart, feigning indifference as they began to imagine the approaching pleasures of the bed. Dietrich folded Elisabeth’s arm through his, formally, said goodnight, and led her away. It was as though the eighteenth century bid farewell to the twentieth.
Dietrich and Elisabeth walked in silence. Beneath each streetlamp she glanced at his illumined face, hoping to see something in it she had been longing for, something she had seen in the faces of Falk and Suse just now. But instead the familiar melancholy was there.
“Did Falk hurt your feelings?” she asked.
He shook his head slightly.
“You never tell me how you really feel,” Elisabeth said.
He didn’t reply.
“I want to be close to you,” she said, “and you make it so difficult.”
They stopped at the top of the steps at the U-Bahn station in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz.
She said, “You draw into yourself and won’t let anyone near. I have an acquaintance who teaches at the university. He says there’s more than your politics to isolate you from others. The students who do come to you, who are drawn to your theology, are also in awe. They think you feel superior, that you won’t deign to grow close to anyone inferior. It puts people off.”
He turned his face away from her.
“Why can’t a person be who he is?” he said.
She reached out and touched his arm. “I told you this because I care about you. Dietrich, I believe I’m falling in love with you.”
He didn’t move, didn’t answer. After a moment, she left him, making her way down the concrete steps to the train platform. He didn’t follow.
HE SOMETIMES THOUGHT his depressions were not limited to his own mind but were part of the times. The economy was depressed, the German people were depressed, the government was paralyzed by depression. Where once his moods had only driven him to his room, he now took to the streets, as though searching for the causes of his infirmity, or perhaps for fellow sufferers. So he went out on the night Hitler was named chancellor, the night Berlin seemed to throw off its ennui and exult, even the doubters, even the enemies, to come alive again because everything had begun.
No one in the family accompanied him. Sabine and Gerhard were lying low in Göttingen, frightened. Very few Jews would go abroad that night in Germany. Suse was with Falk, who was equally cautious, for he was known in some circles for his Bolshevik sympathies. The other Bonhoeffers would not associate themselves with so vulgar a show, and the mother and father retired early to read Dostoevsky in bed, secure in the knowledge that a buffoon like Hitler could not last long. Only Hans von Dohnanyi had seemed consumed by events. He returned home early from the Foreign Office and, while Christel gave the children their cocoa and biscuits, sat in the study of the house in Sacrow, before a blazing fire, and committed a foot-high stack of documents to the flames. As he watched the white sheets turn livid and then shrivel into black wafers, he laid his plans.
Dietrich would know nothing of this yet, not as he traipsed to the Grunewald station and took the train to Friedrichstraße. The cars were jammed with revelers, many of them sporting swastika armbands or waving the red-white-and-black flag. He had not supposed there would be so many. At Friedrichstraße the crowds swept him up and carried him to Unter den Linden. Everyone seemed to know there would be a parade, though none had been announced, and that it would pass beneath the Brandenburg Gate. They jostled and pushed for a place along the sidewalk, or climbed stone horses and perched on their rumps, holding on to the frozen riders for support.
Then he entered a sorcerer’s fantasy. A lake of torchlight rippling like the Havel in a high wind, filling the width of Unter den Linden. The chants Sieg-heil Sieg-heil Ju-den raus Ju-den raus and above all the drums, which lodged inside his head, and ran down his spine like a pointed finger. The door of the university thrown open and light streaming from within, blotted out now and then by faceless gnomes, backs bent, entering and leaving with stacks of books in their arms. The bonfire in the university courtyard.
He drew closer and saw the gnomes were students casting volume after volume on the fire, reveling in their newfound freedom. From now on, they would read what they liked. When Dietrich grabbed a young man laden with books and asked what in God’s name he was doing, he was shoved rudely against a stone pillar and hit the back of his head so hard he nearly blacked out. But an SS band was passing by and the music brought him around.
He would never admit to anyone, not then or later, that he loved the drums, that they stirred him and roused him and made him long to join the marchers just as Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra had once led him to the Cats Corner. For the first time in his life as he leaned against that pillar and watched the students rush past him and felt the drums raise a lump in his throat and draw him toward the street, he began to distrust music.
After a while he wandered to the Ludwigkirchplatz. He had not seen Elisabeth for weeks, except at the club (where they were civil and restrained, to the disappointment of Suse), not since that night she left him standing in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. She was a long time in answering his knock, and before opening the door, asked in a low voice, “Who is it?”
When he answered she opened the door quietly and stood looking at him, but did not move to let him in. Her face was drawn with worry, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.
“What do you want?” she asked. “I would have thought you’d be safe and sound in the Grunewald.”
“I didn’t want to be safe tonight,” he said.
Only then did she step aside and let him enter.
Even in her flat, windows shut against the cold, they could hear the drums.
“My head is throbbing,” he said.
She sat beside him. He huddled, seemed to invite comforting. When she pulled him close, her f
ingers touched the sticky patch on the back of his head.
“What happened?”
“I was shoved against a pillar and hit my head.”
She went for a cloth and a bowl of hot water. He leaned against the sofa and shut his eyes. When she returned she pressed the wet cloth to the back of his head without speaking, then pulled his face to her lap while she gently wiped the caked blood from his blond hair.
“It’s not very deep,” she said. “But you’ve got a lump.”
He didn’t try to sit up. She watched him for a time, then put aside the wet cloth and stroked his temple, traced the outline of his mouth with the tip of a finger.
“I have never meant to keep things from you,” he murmured. “I sometimes feel I have nothing to give anyone. It’s this damned melancholy. My father says it has to do with the chemistry of the brain, but to me it seems a spiritual illness.”
Her fingers smoothed the damp hair from his forehead. “You keep saying that. Can anyone be spiritually whole?”
“I don’t know. I have a friend in America, a Negro, who is faithful, or seems so to me. Though he is no saint.”
She considered this. “Do you love this man?”
“Yes.”
“What of me?” she asked. “Do you love me?”
He sat up, embarrassed, and began to adjust the spindly gold frames of his glasses.
“This is not the time,” she said, a hint of coolness in her voice, “to love a Negro in America or a Jewess in the Fatherland. And yet if you are to find what you seek, Dietrich, you shall have to face up to love.”
He turned from her, his body hunched forward. “There is love,” he said, “and there is desire. I’m trying to discern the difference.”
“Both are gifts from God.”
“And yet love does not threaten chastity, whereas desire can confuse—”
She reached out and placed her hand on his cheek. “Sometimes,” she said, “you think too much. And on such a night as this—”
He suddenly pulled her to him, sliding down until they lay full length upon the sofa. He gasped like a man being pulled underwater. “What are we doing?”
She unbuttoned his shirt and hid her face against his shoulder. “Making a safe place,” she said.
ON THE MORNING of February 1, Elisabeth Hildebrandt turns on her radio. Dietrich is to broadcast a talk as part of a regular series of university lectures. Elisabeth sits at her dressing table, before the mirror, arranging her hair. The radio crackles and she twists the knob slightly. She hears an announcer from Reich Broadcasting, the RRG, then Dietrich’s voice enters the bedroom.
…my subject is “The Younger Generation’s Changed View of the Concept of Führer.”…
Elisabeth brushes her hair back from her forehead…. the narcissism which often accompanies youth can be corrupted by old men…
She pictures him at the Broadcasting House in the Potsdamer Straße, seated before a bank of gauges with waving needles, hunched over his notes.
…authority is necessary but must be properly constituted. It is a necessary corrective to both selfish individualism and smothering collectivism…
She smiles. “Falk will hate that part,” she says to the radio…. but when a people, a nation, make an idol of authority, then the leader shall become a misleader—
She has just caught her hair above her ear with a barrette when the radio crackles and falls silent save for a low hiss. The room is suddenly bereft of Dietrich.
In the Broadcasting House he is still talking intently, anxious not to stumble over a word.
…The leader who makes an idol of himself and his office mocks God.
Then he looks up and sees the needles are frozen and the red light on the board has gone out. He looks through the glass wall at the technician in the next room. When Dietrich gathers his notes and leaves, he stops beside the man’s desk.
“Was I cut off?”
The technician shrugs without removing his headphones. “If you were, it was done upstairs,” he says. “Don’t complain to me.” He turns away and begins to sort through a stack of record albums. Without looking up, he says, “It may be just as well for you if you were.”
Doppelgänger
SS-OBERSTURMFÜHRER ALOIS BAUER, having grown with the century, turns thirty-three in February of 1933. He believes this, coinciding as it does with the coming to power of the Führer, is auspicious, and celebrates with a visit to the Prussian State Library in Unter den Linden.
He has been once before, in 1931. Then he made the same request he proposes for today, to view the original manuscript of his favorite work of Mozart’s, the Mass in C Minor. In 1931, the request was denied.
Now he enters once more and asks for the curator of the manuscript collection. He is ushered at once to a long table beside a window overlooking the courtyard. A small, balding man in a gray suit approaches nervously.
“The Mass in C Minor,” Bauer says. “Mozart. You have the original manuscript in your possession.”
“We do, Herr Obersturmführer.”
“I would like to look at it. It’s a special favorite of mine, you see.”
The curator notes the death’s-head ring on the left hand, which rests comfortably on the tabletop, the black-handled knife and pistol in the belt, the officer’s insignia and double S’s like bolts of lightning on the uniform collar.
“Certainly. You may wait here.”
Bauer smiles and nods his thanks.
The manuscript, when it arrives in a plain white folder, has turned the color of old butter and is brittle with age. Bauer touches it reverently. “Shouldn’t it be under glass?” he asks.
“We haven’t room to display everything in that way. It is kept in a climate-controlled vault, and of course it is rarely handled.”
Bauer lays the folder flat on the table and carefully slides out a manuscript page with the tip of his finger, admiring the shapely notes like spiders in the web of treble and bass staffs. At the Domine he begins to hum softly, nodding his head slightly in time to an internal rhythm. He pauses at the end of the Et Incarnatus Est.
“Where’s the Sanctus? The Benedictus?”
The curator shrugs. “No one knows. They did come into the library’s possession with the rest of the manuscript, but they disappeared sometime before the turn of the century.”
Bauer whispers, “But it is the most beautiful part of the Mass.”
“It has been reconstructed using the notes of Johann Anton André, a famed musical historian who owned the manuscript before it came to us.”
“Reconstructed! Then it might not be as Mozart meant it to be. And yet…” He stands suddenly. “You have not guarded this treasure, Herr Curator. Not as you should.”
The curator turns pale. “It was before my time,” he stammers.
“Nevertheless. The Mass in C Minor deserves better than this—” he waves his arm—“this dusty sepulcher.”
And he walks out, near tears, leaving the shaken curator to gingerly return the manuscript to its folder.
THE PLAYBILL READ
FROM MORN TO MIDNIGHT
A drama of modern life by
Georg Kaiser
Saturday, February 12
8:00 p.m.
CHARLOTTENBURG YOUTH CLUB
Schloß Straße 63
Admission 10 pfennigs; free for the unemployed
The young people were dispatched to post the notices on sidewalk pillars in every neighborhood from Neukölln to Tegel. There the thin gray sheets buffeted by wind and sleet melted into layers of old playbills and political posters, announcements of art exhibits, concerts, lectures, rallies. The tattered thirteen-year accumulation of the Republic. Some playbills, Falk Harnack noticed on his walks near the Technical University, had been defaced by swastikas.
He mentioned this to Otto Linke, a young Communist from a tenement in Marsstraße whose father had built locomotives for Borsig but was now unemployed. Otto was an exceptionally homely young man, with splayed
ears peaked at their crests like a bat’s, but with a gift for ignoring his odd appearance. He would be playing the roles of the Manager in Scene One and the Policeman in Scene Seven. He said, “I know who is drawing swastikas on posters in Tegel. They come here as well.”
“Not here to the youth club?”
“Of course. Some of them live in my building.”
“Why would workers support a party that despises them?”
“The Nazis have been helping with our rent strike. Not as much as the Communists, but almost. And they bring food. Some people say they’re after the same thing as the Communists, but they’re more patriotic. They don’t answer to the Russians.”
“That’s preposterous!”
Otto shrugged. “I’m just telling you.”
That was why Falk announced without warning at rehearsal, “Is anyone in this cast a Nazi sympathizer?”
There was a moment of stunned silence as they looked up from their dog-eared scripts. Elisabeth was the first to recover.
“You know we don’t bring politics into the club,” she said.
“This is not about politics,” Falk said, “this is about fascism. I will not have a fascist in this play.” He looked around. “Any admirer of Hitler in this room should leave now.”
Two boys in the back who had the parts of soldiers nudged each other and stood up. One walked to the door with his head down. The other stopped near Falk, dropped his script on the floor, and said “Heil Hitler” in a low, taunting voice.
“Get out,” Falk said.
Dietrich said, “Wait. We must talk about this.”
The boy, who had joined his friend at the door, turned and glared at Falk. “It’s a stupid play anyway. Enjoy it while you can, Bolshies. Your days are numbered.” Then they stalked out.
Everyone began to talk at the same time, the young people among themselves, Dietrich Elisabeth and Suse remonstrating with Falk. Four other youths slipped out, one of them flipping a Nazi salute behind Falk’s back.
Saints and Villains Page 13