Winter, page 24
‘That might be a lot of beer, Fritz.’
‘It’s not a trick?’ said Esser, his face suddenly darkening.
‘You have my word,’ said Alex Horner formally. He clicked his heels.
‘My friend is a Prussian stuffed-shirt,’ Pauli told Esser, ‘but under that shirt there is a goodhearted fellow.’
‘I’ll trust you,’ said Esser. It seemed a long time since he’d trusted anyone very much, but now he wanted to shed the worries of the day and forget, forget, forget. Let those know-it-alls of the committee continue their arguments without him. ‘Where shall we drink?’ Just to be on the safe side, he strapped a belt and pistol around his waist. He ran his hand over his bristly hair and felt his scalp damp with sweat, then plonked his cap back on his head.
Pauli had his answer ready: ‘There’s a Kneipe behind the Spittelmarkt: Guggenheimer’s place. Know it?’
The choice of venue reassured Fritz Esser. Guggenheimer was a Jew with half a dozen children, all of whom attended the university, with varying degrees of success. His bar was a student hangout with cheap food and strong beer. All sorts of odd people went there. It was the sort of place that a sailor, a Freikorps man and a smartly dressed civilian might be able to drink together without getting unwelcome attention.
Alex stole a glance at his friend. Had it all been planned by Pauli? He could be devious and cunning: it was a part of his nature that few people knew. And yet Pauli was sincere, too; that was what so beguiled Esser.
‘The pay is not important,’ said Pauli Winter after several tankards of Guggenheimer’s best dark beer had been consumed. ‘It’s the comradeship: men you can trust with your life. Good fellows, every one of them. But the money is good, too. Every volunteer has a daily basic pay of forty marks, and now the government are adding another five. Then there’s the food: two hundred grams of meat and seventy-five grams of butter and a quarter-litre of wine. Plenty of beer and cigarettes, too.’ He held up his beer. ‘In our canteen this would cost us almost nothing. But a lot of the men join because Freikorps service counts towards their pension. Take you, Fritz,’ he added, as if taking an example entirely at random. ‘You’d be taken into the Freikorps at your present naval rank and pay – in fact, you’d become my sergeant major, because I’m getting my own company next month – and your Freikorps service counts towards your pension. Plus the regular family allowance will immediately start again for your parents. How are they, by the way?’
‘My father is not well,’ said Fritz Esser absent-mindedly.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Pauli. It was a part of Pauli’s charm that he could express his genuine sorrow that the ‘pig man’ was unwell, then immediately continue his description of life in the Freikorps, without seeming uncaring. ‘People who can handle the administration side are difficult to find. The storm battalions were not noted for their paperwork. But now we can only get pay, allowances, food and all the other supplies we need if the office work is properly done. These socialists are all bureaucrats, you see; we have to play their game.’
‘Why do we have to play their game?’ Esser inquired. ‘I don’t trust this government.’
Alex nodded agreement and leaned forward to hear Pauli’s reply.
‘For the time being,’ said Pauli. ‘When the right time comes, Germany will have proper leadership.’
‘An emperor?’ asked Alex Horner.
‘Perhaps,’ said Pauli. ‘But somehow I think we’ve seen the end of the House of Hohenzollern. His Highness lacked the qualities of a true Prussian soldier-king, and no one who’s seen the Crown Prince at close quarters would hope he’d be any better.’
‘Heartily agreed,’ said Alex Horner, and belched. Esser took off his old patched jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. His bare arms were covered with tattoos: serpents, girls’ names and expressions of fidelity in elaborate scrollwork.
‘Get more beer,’ said Pauli.
‘It’s my turn,’ said Fritz Esser. He was the oldest of the three men and determined to pay his way. He got up and walked to the counter with only the slightest unsteadiness.
With Esser out of earshot, Alex Horner whispered, ‘You’ll never recruit this wretch to your damned Freikorps Graf.’ Alex didn’t like Captain Graf, the diminutive homosexual who ran his private army like some medieval war-lord, but he was cautious about voicing such thoughts to Pauli who’d become something of an apologist for this strange man.
‘There’s not one there who could take on the job of a sergeant major,’ said Pauli.
‘Not one where?’
‘In the company that I’ll take over next month. Good soldiers, good fighters, good comrades, but no skewer upon which I can fix them.’
‘You’ll never do it, Pauli. The fellow’s a Spartacist.’
‘He’ll see reason,’ said Pauli complacently. ‘Fritz is a sensible fellow.’
‘You mad fool. Did you have this in mind right from the start?’
Before Pauli answered, Esser was back with three foaming steins of beer. He slammed them on the table. ‘Drink, drink, drink,’ he urged. He looked round to see who was seated nearby. ‘And then there are a couple of things you must tell me about this Freikorps business.’
Fortified with several litres of Guggenheimer’s beer, the trio went down Leipziger Strasse, visiting various bars, until they turned north along Friedrichstrasse, where the nightlife was even more raucous: male and female prostitutes mingling with beggars, drunks, and pickpockets, and from every side the frantic sounds of recently arrived American jazz.
Fritz Esser never went back to the Imperial Palace. When, early on that Christmas Eve morning, the army’s artillery opened fire on the palace, Esser didn’t even hear the gunfire, for he was in an upstairs room over a club behind the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre, asleep in the arms of a half-undressed nightclub hostess.
As 1918 tottered to a close, Fritz Esser was enrolled in the Freikorps. On the other side of the city, Liebknecht joined his Spartakusbund to the Independent Socialists and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, called his new political entity the Communist Party of Germany, and began arming his supporters.
Everywhere in Berlin the madness continued: lines of hungry people formed outside the bakers’ shops, and butchers’, too, and stared into expensive restaurants, where war profiteers and their gloriously attired women gobbled champagne and caviar. On the Western Front the Allies had stopped fighting but their naval blockade continued, and thousands of Germans died of malnutrition. Throughout Europe the influenza virus decimated the tired and hungry population; it brought death to seventeen hundred Berliners in a single day.
Whatever reservations Fritz Esser had had about serving under the command of his young friend they soon evaporated as Pauli Winter led his company across the rooftops of Wilhelmstrasse despite Spartacist snipers across the street. Soon Pauli had repaid any debt he owed Esser for hauling him from the sea so long ago. More than once Pauli saved his sergeant major from death or injury. Once his strong arms saved Esser from sliding off the rain-swept slates into the street below. Esser had followed Graf and the others along the ridge of a saddleback roof. It required balance, daring and speed, and Fritz Esser, burdened with rifle, bandoliers, and a heavy bag of grenades, had none of these in adequate amounts. He slipped on the icy ridge tiles, and his rifle went across the slates and down into the street far below. As Esser started to fall, Pauli grabbed him by the greatcoat collar and held him spread-eagled across the steep roof, while men on the roof on the far side of Wilhelmstrasse fired at him. Only with great difficulty was the unfortunately heavyweight Esser dragged to safety. Pauli laughed about it. Under fire the clumsy Pauli became another man: not just commander of ‘Winter Company’, he was also the most audacious and skilled fighting man in that very formidable unit, Freikorps Graf.
Once, during the heavy fighting in the centre of the city, the two men met briefly with Leutnant Alex Horner. It was during the violent fighting of January 11, 1919, when Freikorps units battled their way into the Police Headquarters on Alexanderplatz, where Spartacist resistance was fierce. It was something of a massacre. The defenders’ morale was weakening as they realized that Liebknecht’s communists were not going to win power by force. Pauli and Esser were amongst the first inside the Police Headquarters courtyard. Esser lobbed a stick grenade through a downstairs window, and both men scrambled into the smoke-filled wreckage; the others followed without hesitation. Now the defenders fell back, room by room, floor by floor, but the merciless Freikorpskämpfer slaughtered everyone they found.
Alex Horner protested at the slaughter. He took his formal objections to Captain Graf. But the Freikorps men were in no mood to listen to technicalities from the regular army. They left no one alive.
The regular army, too, had men who gave no quarter. A few days later an informer reported the presence of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht in a middle-class apartment in Wilmersdorf. The captive pair were taken to the Eden Hotel, near the Memorial Church, which the Horse Guards were using as their head quarters. After a brutal interrogation they were murdered, and with their deaths ‘Spartacus week’ ended.
During this respite the Freikorps reformed and refitted, and Lieutenant Pauli Winter lost his sergeant major. Fritz Esser had, in his brief service with his company, shown only moderate aptitude for infantry tactics, and unless Pauli was at his side he didn’t have the combat experience or the reckless bravery that most of the others showed. But there had been time to recognize the administrative skills he’d learned during his naval service. Fritz Esser was promoted to be an assistant to the battalion adjutant. Then, just two weeks later, after the adjutant was hospitalized, Esser was made battalion adjutant.
Whatever extravagant claims are made for the democratic style of the Freikorps units, there was strong opposition to making Esser an officer. So he became adjutant with that strange compromise rank that the German army invented for such social dilemmas. He was made a Feldwebel-Leutnant, so that he could do an officer’s job with officer’s badges and shoulder straps and officer’s pay without being the social equal of his peers. It was an arrangement that made all concerned very satisfied.
The man that Fritz Esser now worked alongside was Captain Georg Graf, and he was not an easy man to get along with. Despite first appearances, the little Munich-born career officer with big ears, red nose, and unconcealed homosexual preferences wasn’t a figure of fun to anyone who’d fought alongside him, anywhere from Verdun to Alexanderplatz. He was mercurial, violent and unforgiving.
Fritz Esser and Captain Graf – both men difficult and argumentative by nature – worked amicably together. Pauli Winter teased Esser that Graf had fallen in love with him, because that idea made the unmistakably heterosexual Esser nervous. Esser stoically replied that he admired Graf for his physical bravery under fire and appreciated the very real concern he showed for the men under his command. But, whatever the exact nature of the relationship, the mutual regard Esser and Graf showed for each other was genuine and lasting. And that was just as well, for Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser became Graf’s de facto second in command. When Graf was not available, Esser was always consulted. ‘What would Captain Graf probably want…?’ The question was always phrased in such a way that Esser gave an opinion rather than an order, but his underlying authority was undisputed, and Graf supported his adjutant’s decisions, whatever his true feelings may have been.
Feldwebel-Leutnant Esser’s assignment to Headquarters did not mean there was any change in the relationship between him and Pauli Winter. They were very close. Esser was grateful to Pauli for bringing him into the battalion, and though Esser could never replace his brother, Peter, in the role of mentor and protector, or Alex Horner as conscience and example, Fritz Esser was the most priceless of companions. Fritz could be outrageously funny, and he had a sharp eye for the sort of cant and humbug that the new socialist government plentifully supplied every day. Fritz was not a committed socialist; nor was he a communist or a Marxist. And whatever was the political creed that bound the Freikorps men together, Fritz Esser had no heartfelt devotion to that, either. Fritz Esser was an anarchist by both conviction and nature, and Pauli found his anarchistic attitude towards life not only amusing but illuminating and instructive, too.
When Freikorps Graf moved out of Berlin, first to Halle and then to Munich, Esser’s role as quartermaster, mother superior, slave-master and general factotum earned the respect of the entire battalion. En route there was always a hot evening meal ready, a dry place to sleep, and some sort of breakfast, too. Every soldier in the battalion had well-repaired boots and fifty rounds of ammunition in a bandolier in case there was trouble with the local populations, who sometimes preferred their communist committees to the freebooting warriors. And if sometimes they had to march too far, then that was because not even the amazing Fritz could keep all the ancient trucks in good enough repair to transport a battalion of men. Besides, soldiers marched – everyone knew that. Freikorpstruppen liked to march and shoot and sleep rough; that was why they were in the Freikorps. People who didn’t like such hardships and the comradeship that went with them remained civilians, and all good Freikorpskämpfer despised civilians of every political creed.
1922
‘Berlin is so far away and I miss you so much’
The Austrian countryside was bleak and cold, and by five o’clock in the afternoon the darkening sky was streaked with the red light of the setting sun. Martha Somló and Harald Winter had skated round and round long after all the other skaters – villagers mostly; the Viennese did not come this far to find ice – had gone.
She loved the hiss of the blades cutting into the ice, and the way her face tingled in the cold wind. She loved the harmony with which they moved together, and she enjoyed Harry’s arm firmly around her waist as they raced across the ice at reckless speed.
The dinner they were served in the private rooms upstairs at the White Horse was simple country food, but there was nothing better than a veal stew on a cold winter evening. They had their warm apple strudel, and tiny glasses of powerful Schwarzbeer schnapps from the nearby farm, while sitting in front of a roaring log fire. The logs were trimmings from the orchard, the smoke smelled of the fruit, and the sap still inside the wood made the fire crack and bang and throw sparks.
‘Must you go back tomorrow?’ she asked. They had been in bed. Now she was sitting on the floor by his feet, naked except for an ornate gypsy-style shawl that she’d wrapped herself into. He’d made her scrub off all the powder, cream, and lipstick. He cared nothing about the new fashions: in Harald Winter’s world only whores and chorus girls painted their faces.
‘I shouldn’t have stayed so long,’ said Harald Winter.
‘Why are you selling the bank?’ Every time she passed the bank in Ringstrasse she felt proud of knowing Harry.
‘Only my share of the bank.’ He stared into the fire as if hoping to see a bright future there.
‘Why?’
‘It will make no difference to us, little one. I will still come to Vienna.’ He touched her hair gently, and she closed her eyes as he stroked her head.
‘But not so often.’
‘I am not rich any more,’ said Winter. He was rich, of course, very rich by the standards that most people employ to measure wealth. But he could not provide Martha with the luxuries – the carriage and servants – that she’d once enjoyed, and he felt humiliated by his economies.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She turned to look at him by the light of the flames. He looked tired and ill, but she knew now that Harald Winter’s business setbacks affected him in the way that other men are affected by infirmities or disease. ‘I’ll always be here waiting.’
‘I’m setting up a trust fund for you in Switzerland,’ he said. ‘It will be enough to live comfortably whatever happens.’
‘You are a wonderful man, Harry. What would I do without you?’
‘Many people say things will get even worse. Some of the banks might crash. It’s better to sell.’
‘Berlin is so far away, Harry, and I miss you so much.’ He leaned forward and bent over to kiss her. If only it could be like this forever, he thought. But, just as quickly, the thought was gone. Harald Winter would find life like this unendurable after a week or so, and he was sensible enough to know that.
1924
‘Who are those dreadful men?’
The birthday party that Harald and Veronica Winter put on for their younger son, Pauli’s twenty-fourth birthday was the first real birthday party he’d had since he was a child. Although unsaid, it was his parent’s celebration of Pauli Winter’s first term at university, his return to civilian life. The lovely old house was ablaze with lights and noisy with the excited chatter of more than fifty guests and a ten-piece dance band. In a grim sort of joke that was typically berlinerisch, the invitations were overprinted upon billion-mark banknotes. Back before the war, an unskilled worker in one of Harald Winter’s factories earned twenty-five marks a week, but the staggering inflation of the previous year had seen the value of Germany’s paper money plunge to a point where one U.S. dollar bought over two and a half billion marks. Foreigners came across the border from Holland and Czechoslovakia and bought land and mansions with handfuls of hard currency. Then finally the madness ended. The Reichsbank issued its new Rentenmarks, one of which was worth one billion in the old currency. As if in celebration, Aschingers, the famous restaurant near the Friedrichstrasse railway station, offered one main dish, a glass of beer, a dessert, and as many rolls as you cared to eat for just one new mark. Inflation had stopped.
As the smoke cleared, it was apparent that the middle classes had suffered most: in the final few terrible weeks most people’s life savings totalled not enough to buy a postage stamp. But some Germans had not suffered. Harald Winter had almost doubled his fortune. Like many industrialists, he was allowed to borrow from the Reichsbank, which, in the manner of most government departments, reacted very slowly to the events of the day. Thus, even when the Reichsbank was charging its top rate of interest, Harald Winter could continue borrowing and repaying at rates far, far below that of inflation. And by 1924 the five-million-Reichsmark debt due to his father-in-law was nothing like enough to buy a meal in Aschingers. It could be renegotiated to almost anything Harald Winter decided.
