Winter, page 33
‘But you are unhappy.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Would Harald go, too?’
‘Not for a prolonged stay. In America he’d be like a fish out of water. His English is not very good, and he remains the most German German I’ve ever met.’
It was not the first time that Veronica had discussed with Glenn the idea of returning to America. Each time she did so it was from some new aspect, and each time Glenn started off believing her. But, as in previous discussions of this kind, Glenn ended in doubt. Eventually he decided that she would never go back. She lacked the desire, the energy, that would be needed to sever herself, however briefly, from her life here in Berlin.
But Glenn saw how much his sister needed this curious fantasy about going home, and he was prepared to indulge her, despite the way her conversation went round and round, the deceptions and the self-deceptions and the devious ways she invented to temporize. He resolved that next time they spoke he’d confront her with the contradictions.
But the next conversation that Glenn Rensselaer had with his sister was under very different circumstances. It took place on the afternoon of Friday, October 25. Rensselaer had arrived at the emergency department of the Charité Hospital in response to a telephone call from the manager of the Adlon Hotel. A policeman had come to the hotel to bring news that one of their guests – Herr Simon Danziger – had been injured in a traffic accident.
It was said by people who know about such matters that Potsdamer Platz had become the busiest traffic intersection in the whole of Europe. Cars, delivery vans and heavy trucks entered the Platz from a dozen different directions. Navigating across this mad whirlpool of motors and horse-drawn carts came the clanking streetcars, and everywhere deft cyclists and even more nimble pedestrians dashed through the torrent of traffic.
It was here – at the intersection with the recently named Friedrich Ebert Strasse – that, at eleven-fifty that Friday morning, Herr Simon Danziger was struck by a horse-drawn dray laden with twenty-six barrels of dark beer from the Neukölln brewery.
He was still conscious, and in great pain, while they rushed him to the Charité Hospital in the taxi from which he’d just alighted. He was prepared hurriedly and taken to an operating theatre on the top floor for major surgery.
The complex that is the Charité sprawls across Berlin’s Mitte. These forbidding old buildings make up a grey stone fortress wedged between the slow-moving oily water of the river Spree and the canal. There was no waiting room, and Glenn Rensselaer spent the first half-hour standing awkwardly amongst the outpatients in a cold and draughty upstairs corridor. From here he enjoyed the view of a cobbled courtyard where two mechanics delved into the entrails of a Magirus ambulance.
Glenn Rensselaer felt conspicuous in his long fur-lined overcoat, homburg, grey gloves, and silver-topped cane. The poorly dressed people on the benches were hunched against the cold and stiff with their aches and pains. They looked at him with detached curiosity, as they looked at the senior medical staff who strode through, or at the sheet-covered trolleys that came clanking past them, dragged by men in soiled white coats and glistening rubber aprons. Only two green-uniformed policemen seemed relaxed and at ease. They stood by the door, smoking cigarettes that they concealed inside half-clenched fists, and blew smoke at the ceiling.
The next person to arrive was his sister, Veronica. She wore a magnificent sable coat that was adorned, as was her hat, with flecks of newly fallen snow. She was escorted by a fluttering little hospital official. He wore a frock coat, carried wads of official-looking papers, called her Frau Doktor Winter, and bowed his head continually to expose a balding patch on the top of his skull.
Veronica called to her brother and he joined them, to be shown into a warm office where there was the privacy and comfort that the fluttery man felt should be provided for the highly esteemed Frau Doktor.
‘Are you family?’ the fluttery man inquired.
‘No, not family,’ said Glenn.
‘No, of course not, of course not!’ said the man, and was especially flustered at the idea of it.
Veronica was seated in the soft visitors’ chair, and Glenn in the swivel chair behind the desk, when he returned to bring them the duty surgeon’s prognosis. After a long description of Danziger’s mortal injuries – a litany that Glenn couldn’t understand and to which Veronica closed her ears – he said that there was no chance that Herr Simon Danziger could survive. He would expire, the man predicted – looking down mournfully at the papers in his hands – within the hour.
‘Poor devil!’ said Glenn Rensselaer when the man had departed.
‘He was so full of life,’ said his sister.
‘I was thinking of the driver of the beer dray.’
‘Yes, for him, too,’ said Veronica doubtfully.
There was a long silence. ‘Danziger went bust,’ said Rensselaer. ‘The first telegrams went out last Saturday night, calling in the margins. Danziger had sunk every last red cent into stocks on the New York exchange. We talked about it on the airship coming over.’
‘The “crash” – I saw it in the papers, but I don’t really understand…’
‘Suckers kept buying: up and up and up and up it went. It had to go bang, and it crashed last weekend.’
‘And they didn’t know it was about to happen?’
‘Everyone on the exchange knew, unless they were plumb stupid. But the market makes money on every deal. The brokers will come out of this disaster richer than ever.’
Veronica said, ‘You’re saying Mr Danziger deliberately stepped in front of … No, Glenn, no. That’s too awful.’
‘I sure won’t say it to Lottie or to Mrs Danziger, but I’d bet a million bucks against an old shirt-stud that that’s the truth of it.’
‘He was bankrupt?’
‘Just about, I’d say. He told me that he’d scraped together every last asset he could find to play the market. Dad sent me a long telegram when the market closed on Monday. Told me what was happening behind the scenes. The time difference meant that I had the telegram soon after midnight.’
‘Did you tell Mr Danziger?’
‘I phoned him at the Adlon and read Dad’s telegram to him, leaving out the names of Wall Street tycoons who’d died by their own hand since the news broke. It was about one o’clock in the morning, Tuesday. I must have woken him up. He just grunted a thanks. I guess he’d already heard from his own broker. It was too late to do anything by then. That was the last time I spoke with him. I said to call me if I could help but he never did.’
‘It’s ghastly,’ said Veronica. ‘How will Mrs Danziger manage?’
‘I don’t know. All she has is some shares in a movie studio, and that’s not an asset easy to dispose of,’ said Glenn. He was thinking of his nephew Peter. If there was no prospect of an inheritance for Lottie, Peter was going to be tied to his father, and the safe, well-paid job there.
‘I wonder if she’ll have enough money to settle her bill at the Adlon. I’d better offer her those two rooms on the third floor. Will she want the funeral here in Berlin, do you think?’
‘I don’t think she has a lot of choice.’
Mrs Danziger would have preferred to take her husband’s body back to America, and Lottie wanted her father buried with appropriate ceremony in the old Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, behind the Rote Rathaus, where the great Moses Mendelssohn was interred, but both ideas proved impracticable. Instead the funeral was held at the big Jewish cemetery at Weissensee.
Some people said that Pauli cared too much for his job with the Nazis to be seen at a Jewish funeral, but they were wrong. Pauli attended the funeral, dressed soberly in the dark suit he wore when attending the criminal courts. What’s more, Pauli took a few moments at the funeral to do his father a favour. He told his father, in strictest confidence, that the Nazis would be more than satisfied with a quarter of the amount of money they were demanding from Winter Metal Alloys.
Mrs Danziger was pleased to accept Veronica’s offer of accommodation, and Glenn Rensselaer settled her bill at the Adlon. She stayed until after Christmas, not wishing to face the California party season alone.
It was a few days before Christmas when Mrs Danziger had a letter from the insurance company that covered her husband’s life policy. It said that they would pay. Glenn Rensselaer breathed a sigh and flushed down the toilet the five-dollar bill that Mr Danziger had sent him just before he died. Had the assessors seen the cryptic note that accompanied it – ‘Dear Glenn, Your financial adviser resigns as of today. Please give my apologies to all concerned with the results. I did the best I could – Simon Danziger’ – they might not have been so willing to categorize his death as accidental.
By the time Mrs Danziger took the train to Bremerhaven to catch the S.S. Albert Ballin for New York, some of Harald Winter’s pessimistic forecasts were coming true. And the effects of the New York crash came rippling into the European countries, so that their already unstable economies were buffeted by the storms.
In the month of January 1930 alone, the number of unemployed Germans rose from one and a half million to almost two and a half. In Berlin the factories were laying off workers at such a rate that in many parts of the city the streets were crowded with unemployed. They stood and stared vacantly about them, not knowing how to cope with their misery. Farms within walking distance of the city, as so many farms still were, had armed men guarding their crops.
The coalition government declared that there was not enough money to pay the normal unemployment benefit without incurring a deficit of about a hundred million dollars. This financial and political crisìs came soon after the tenth anniversary of Germany’s changeover to parliamentary democratic government. It wasn’t easy to argue with those who said that the communists or the Nazis would do better.
Almost three years earlier, in 1927, the hundredth anniversary of the death of Ludwig van Beethoven, Artur Schnabel had created a sensation in Berlin by playing the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. It took seven Sunday-afternoon concerts, and Schnabel performed them in the Volksbühne, a theatre club created by means of trade-union financing and more usually associated with the radical left.
Schnabel’s great success had an effect upon the Berlin musical establishment. It changed Erich Hennig’s life. In February 1930, largely as a result of the continuous prompting of his wife, Lisl, Erich Hennig played Mozart piano sonatas before an invited audience.
In some ways it was a mistake. Erich Hennig did not have the subtle and disciplined lyricism that Mozart requires. Hennig was at his best supplying the more robust demands of Beethoven’s piano concertos. But Hennig’s two concerts were by no means a failure. His mother-in-law sent the invitations, and Frau Wisliceny was still a name to be reckoned with in the bitter and Byzantine power struggle that had always characterized Berlin’s cultural life.
Those who might have dared to condemn Hennig’s interpretation of Mozart were not present at the performances, and any comment they made was condemned as sour grapes. Hennig’s Mozart was competent and charming and provided a turning point in Hennig’s career. Until now he’d worked for a music publisher, but now he was signed by an agent. With three pupils, and the promise of more performance fees, Hennig left his dull office job and became a professional musician.
And as his career changed, so did his political allegiances. Until this time he’d been a left-wing radical, regularly to be seen at Communist Party meetings. But beginning with his Mozart recitals, Hennig’s political activities were less in evidence. The hammer-and-sickle badge was not displayed in the lapel of the black suit he wore when at the keyboard, and the bright-red tie was replaced by a quieter, patterned one chosen by his mother-in-law.
Other, more far-reaching changes dated from Hennig’s Mozart recitals in February 1930. It was Pauli’s presence at the recital hall off Ku-damm that caused Frau Wisliceny to invite him regularly to her house. Not always to her ‘salon’, for Pauli Winter was not, and would never claim to be, an intellectual. ‘Mozart is about as far as I go,’ he told Frau Wisliceny, and anyone else who tried to discuss music with him.
He was welcome in many places nowadays, for Pauli Winter was not the little Pauli who had marched off to war. For one thing, he went everywhere nowadays in a smart black Horch convertible. On weekdays, on official business, the car was driven by a stern-faced young man wearing shiny high boots, breeches and a brown shirt with swastika armband.
Pauli Winter enjoyed going to Frau Wisliceny’s gatherings. She chose her guests carefully, so they were always people who reacted favourably to Pauli’s jokes and chatter. Usually, after tea, Frau Wisliceny would persuade him to do some conjuring tricks. He’d feign reluctance, but she knew he enjoyed doing the tricks, because he always managed to have some new ones prepared. And his tricks were never silent. Four kings inserted into a deck became ‘four Turkish-carpet merchants arriving at their warehouse’. There was always a funny story, and the end of the trick brought not only a gasp of surprise but also a hoot of laughter.
Pauli had the enviable ability to walk into a room filled with strangers confident that he’d make new friends: and he almost invariably did. Pauli could peel layers from a stranger and release some surprising prisoner trapped inside a reputation. No one but Pauli could have persuaded the pompous Erich Hennig to play a silly song like ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas!’ and have got a revered actor like Emil Jannings to sing the nonsensical words.
Pauli’s enemies said that he always wanted easy praise and appreciation. His father, on more than one occasion, warned him with that classic aphorism ‘Applause is the spur of noble minds, and the aim of weak ones,’ but Pauli was undaunted. Pauli was Pauli, and his nature was not so easily changed.
As with most successful entertainers, his disarming casualness concealed the great care with which he watched his audience. He knew which people present gave themselves to his jokes, tricks and stories and which were determined to remain unimpressed. So he knew that Inge enjoyed them more than most.
And Frau Wisliceny appreciated the sight of Inge laughing. If only Lottie had not had her wedding reception at the Wisliceny house. She was their guest and there was no avoiding it, but the preparations for the wedding had turned the knife that was in Inge’s heart. Her mother had wept for her, and began to doubt if Inge would ever be happy again. It was weeks before she would even leave the house, and her mother suffered with her. It was an agony greatly worsened by the unwillingness of either woman to admit that it existed. Sometimes Frau Wisliceny wondered if Peter Winter ever realized the consuming adoration that Inge had for him. Perhaps he did, for he seemed to contrive that he and Inge didn’t meet at dinners or parties or any other gatherings.
So Frau Wisliceny was pleased to see that Pauli enjoyed entertaining Inge and some of his tricks seemed to be prepared for her alone. And when Inge went, several times a week, to the Romanische Café to join Pauli in his frugal lunch, or even when the lunches became less frugal and of longer duration, no one gave it any serious attention. Frau Wisliceny was relieved to see that Inge was once again taking an interest in the outside world. She guessed – rightly – that many of those early conversations were devoted exclusively to discussions about Peter.
It helped, of course. Pauli was a good listener, and it was far easier to explain her love of Peter to him, for he loved his brother, too. Neither of them considered any possible romantic developments of their meetings, even when the talk of Peter had dwindled to almost nothing. They enjoyed each other’s company, and everyone knew that Pauli had lots of girlfriends: noisy, pretty, gregarious girls, none of them like the serious, beautiful and intellectual Inge. She wasn’t Pauli Winter’s sort of girl. And yet Pauli was not blind to Inge’s beauty. Her green, luminous eyes that could look so deep and so lonely, her long neck, long slim arms and pale unblemished skin like porcelain made her someone he was proud to be seen with. And Inge discovered in Pauli someone she’d never known about, a man who was able to make her forget for a moment the ache she felt for Peter.
It was Pauli’s blonde waitress at the Romanische Café who changed everything. She regularly exchanged vulgar jokes with all her male customers. One day she greeted Inge and Pauli with a typical Berlin joke that speculated on what they would be doing that afternoon following their lunch of a dozen oysters each and a bottle of Sekt.
Pauli was embarrassed but to his surprise Inge responded by telling her in Berlin argot just how much she was looking forward to just such an outcome. A new relationship began immediately. The following day they went to Friedländer Brothers, next door to the Hotel Bristol, and chose a ring. And then to the ‘tea dance’ at the roof garden of the Eden Hotel. Pauli could dance well when he wanted to, and now he wanted to. Within two weeks Inge and Pauli were officially engaged, and their marriage followed in May.
There was no opposition from the families. Any reservations that the Wislicenys might have entertained about Pauli’s philistine tastes or political affiliations were entirely removed by Inge’s obvious happiness. And all the Winter family agreed that Inge Wisliceny was a catch beyond any that Pauli could rightfully have expected.
Peter’s wife, Lottie, was determined to remain Inge’s friend, and despite the reservations that Inge at first showed, it was Lottie, far more than Frau Wisliceny, who helped Inge plan the wedding.
It was a spectacular event. Pauli’s friend Alex Horner pulled strings at Bendlerstrasse and arranged for Pauli Winter to be registered as an Oberleutnant of the Reserve so that he could have a military guard of honour at the ceremony. Each young officer was matched with a beautifully dressed bridesmaid, in the traditional German style. The couple came down the steps of the church under a canopy of drawn swords. This was Lottie’s idea: since, as she pointed out, such a ceremony demanded that Pauli wear an army uniform, he could not possibly get married wearing the brown shirt and swastika of the SA, in which he’d recently been given honorary rank. Not even Dr Goebbels, the Berlin party leader, would insist that anything could be more glorious for a German than to be married in army officer’s uniform. And Pauli, with his wonderful blond hair, was the archetypal ‘Aryan’ that Nazi mythology so admired.
