Winter, page 36
‘I haven’t got enough food.’
‘You have far too much. You always order far too much food: enough for double the numbers we invite. Sometimes I think it must be that you had an impoverished childhood.’
‘Izzy. How could you do this to me? Do you hate me so much?’
‘My darling, how could you say such a thing?’
‘You’d better tell me about him, so that I don’t say the wrong thing.’
‘He came to the surgery a week ago. In pain. A hairline crack in an upper front tooth. I saw immediately that it was a root canal.’
‘Izzy, I haven’t got time for one of your lectures on modern dentistry.’
‘An Englishman. Twenty-three years old. Born to poor parents…’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘His teeth are in terrible condition. Poor parents, there is no doubt. He works for Dornier. A clever young man, very quick and amusing. He came today for a final checkup. I had a cancellation, so I was able to chat with him. On an impulse I invited him. Be nice to him, Lily.’
‘Am I ever anything but nice? I am too nice, that’s my trouble. And what happens? I end up married to an inconsiderate brute who wants to make my hair turn grey. Why didn’t you phone and tell me there was an extra man? I could have invited Lisl Hennig. Her husband is giving a recital in Breslau and won’t be back until the weekend.’
‘Ah, the door. Someone must be very early.’
‘Izzy, it’s not funny to try to make me more nervous than I already am. It’s the fish.’
‘I know,’ said Isaac. ‘You have hours yet.’
‘I haven’t even chosen what to wear.’
‘You look lovely just as you are, my darling.’ He put his arms round her.
‘Izzy. Stop it. One of the servants might come in.’
Dr Isaac Volkmann’s ‘experiment’ seemed to work well. Volkmann was not a man who attempted such things without being confident of the outcome. He was about the same age as Pauli and had been with him in the Storm Battalion during the closing weeks of the war. He’d met him again after the war, and Pauli had been one of his very first patients; Peter Winter came to him soon after. Peter’s contacts with the theatre world had brought Isaac some of his first celebrated patients. Isaac Volkmann felt obliged to both men, and the trouble he’d taken for tonight’s reconciliation was a measure of his feeling about them both.
The brothers, and their respective wives, Lottie and Inge, talked and laughed together as if there had never been a difference of opinion about the visit to Adolf Hitler’s private residence. Peter’s wife, Lottie, just over the hurdle of her thirtieth birthday, had dispensed with the fringe she’d had for so long and let her lustrous black, wavy hair grow long enough to cover her ears. She wore a mustard-yellow silk-georgette dress with metallic-gold embroidery, a daring sort of colour that only the exuberant Lottie could carry off with such style. And, never outdone, Inge, who had kept her hair short and boyish ever since bobbed hair had become fashionable, wore a conservative sleeveless black dress and a double rope of real pearls. Peter was slimmer, and his gaunt appearance suited him. His features had become more pointed with age – a hatchet face – unmistakably German. He looked, Inge noticed, more handsome than ever. The two brothers were in dinner jackets, like their host, but the Englishman, full of apologies, had arrived in a lounge suit, the most formal clothes he possessed.
Over the fresh asparagus the conversation was mostly about the new film about Frederick the Great. Otto Gebühr, who’d played Frederick the Great in the UFA comedy film Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci, was to repeat this role in the more serious film Der Choral von Leuthen. As Peter Winter said, the actor might not have been an exact likeness of that eighteenth-century monarch, but he was exactly what every German wanted to believe Frederick was like. Pauli, typically provocative, said that Richard Tauber, the singer from the Metropole Theatre, would be much better in the role of Frederick the Great. It was Lottie, of course, who said sarcastically that she could think of someone who could play the role of Frederick the Great better than either. The laughter was restrained. There was no need for her to say whom she had in mind. This was election day, and even when Hitler’s name was kept out of the conversation, he was not far from everyone’s thoughts.
‘He won’t win,’ said Pauli. ‘That’s obvious even to the Führer himself. But he’ll show the world that a great many Germans want him as their leader.’ He passed the melted butter to Lottie without taking any. He was getting fat, and tonight he’d had trouble getting into his evening-dress trousers.
‘What are you betting?’ said Peter. ‘A third of the votes?’ Peter could take melted butter, and all the other good things of life, and still remain slim. Why do some people get fat so easily? Peter looked lanky, long-haired, and ‘artistic’: floppy bow tie and saffron-coloured silk handkerchief in his top pocket. The handkerchief exactly matched his wife’s dress. It really was too much. Peter tried to look like the theatrical crowd with which he spent so much time. His American grandfather was just the same: he loved to be mistaken for a painter.
‘Yes, and anything up to fifty per cent for Hindenburg. The rest for the communist,’ said Pauli in a voice that he kept flat and unemotional.
‘It makes me shudder,’ said Volkmann. ‘The thought of your Nazis getting into power…’
‘You’ve nothing to fear, Issac,’ said Pauli.
‘Are you crazy, Pauli?’ said Isaac Volkmann. ‘Outside the department stores I see your brownshirts carrying signs saying, “Don’t buy from Jews”. How long before I have a brownshirt on my doorstep saying, “Don’t have your teeth fixed by a Jew”?’
‘They’re just signs,’ said Pauli. He was embarrassed.
‘They’re not just signs, Pauli. While I was passing Wertheims last week, I saw a couple of customers getting punched by brownshirt bully-boys just because they insisted on going in.’ Volkmann’s face had gone red: it always did when he became excited.
‘Then they should have gone to the police,’ said Pauli. ‘We don’t claim to be above the law.’
‘When will you open your eyes, Pauli?’ said Isaac. He had stopped, knife and fork in mid-air, eyes wide open and fixed on Pauli, his old army comrade. He wanted to make him understand the validity of his fears. ‘Two policemen stood there and watched it happen. They did nothing. Germans can’t rely on their police any more. It’s tragic.’
No one said anything. Volkmann became calmer and ate some asparagus. ‘What do you think of all this, Mr Samson?’ Volkmann asked his English guest. Brian Samson was a handsome young man with light-brown wavy hair and the sort of straggling, lopsided moustache that young men are sometimes tempted to grow. He would have been very handsome except for the ruddy complexion that so often afflicts the British. He wore a grey worsted suit of English styling. The suit was of good enough quality, thought Volkmann, but how he would have liked to tell the young man that a celluloid collar – even a brand-new white one – spoiled everything. However, Volkmann knew enough about the world to know that Samson’s plain blue silk tie explained a great deal about this young man. He’d met enough Englishmen who mattered to know that the men who made the decisions in England wore ties with stripes or patterns: ‘old school ties’, the English called them. And Samson’s hands were a worker’s hands: scarred and calloused, with oil and dirt that seemed to be under the skin, so that no amount of scrubbing would make them like the hands of a gentleman.
‘I don’t know what to think, Herr Doktor….’
‘Isaac. Call me Isaac, as my friends do.’
‘I’m an engineer. Designing, costing and testing prototypes is about as much as my brain can deal with. I like things I can measure on a micrometer and calculate on a slide rule. I just haven’t got the time, let alone the inclination, for politics.’
There was confusion as three or four of the guests started to reply together and then stopped; everyone laughed.
‘We all have a solution, you see,’ said Isaac, speaking to Samson, ‘but we all have a different one. That’s what’s troubling us in Germany.’
‘I’ve never been very religious,’ said Samson. ‘My mother was a Roman Catholic and my father a Church of England Protestant, so they compromised by bringing me up as an agnostic….’ He laughed briefly, as if perhaps he resented what his parents had done. ‘So I can’t follow Hitler’s religious persecution of the Jews. I don’t see what the Nazis can hope to gain from it.’
‘It’s not religious persecution,’ said Lottie, ‘it’s racial.’
‘You’ll have to explain the difference,’ said Samson.
‘We’ve had persecution of the Jews in Europe for centuries,’ said Lottie. ‘But in the old days, if a Jew converted to the Christian faith the persecution ended. Hitler offers no such respite. Hitler hates the Jews because they are of Jewish race, not because of some subtle distinctions in their beliefs about God.’
She stopped, but it was obvious that Lottie had more to say. Lottie glanced at Peter. She was always worried about embarrassing him. It was difficult to know when he was upset, and she still felt guilty about getting him to leave the house on the Obersalzberg so precipitately that Christmas. Peter smiled at her. He knew she was using the presence of the English guest as an excuse to air her fear and anger, but it was better that she did so.
‘You can’t leave it like that,’ said Samson. ‘Explain, please.’ Samson was an experienced and trained observer, so he noticed the way Lottie kept her husband always in view. There was nothing obvious about it, but Samson decided he’d never seen a woman so desperately in love, and he felt an irrational pang of jealousy for Peter Winter. He wondered if Winter realized how lucky he was.
Lottie said, ‘Hitler’s Nazism, like Mussolini’s Fascism, is a society at war. Its members are asked to make sacrifices and obey orders and put up with all kinds of indignities and deprivations because the society is at war’. She looked quickly round the table to see how the others were taking it. Everyone except Inge was looking at her: Inge was concentrating on her plate. ‘Nietzsche worshipped the warrior. He said that the only role for man was fighting, and the only role for women giving birth to warriors. In order to swallow that sort of garbage, you have to persuade yourself that you are at war, threatened by a cunning and merciless enemy. Hitler has provided that enemy. Hitler’s Germany, if it ever came, would be permanently at war with the Jew.’
‘I hope you’re wrong, Mrs Winter,’ said Samson.
Pauli laughed. He could not take that sort of intellectualization seriously. He said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t all read between the lines. You don’t pick your way through every line of the Communist Party manifesto. You don’t take seriously every promise and threat in the speeches of the Social Democrats. It’s only Hitler that you treat like a bogeyman. But Hitler is just as cunning a politician as the others. He knows how to handle a crowd and tell them the things they want to hear. Once in power he’ll do what all politicians do once they’ve achieved their ambition: he’ll drop all these nonsensical points. He’d make a good chancellor, the only man strong enough to stand up for Germany against the rest of the world.’
Lottie said, ‘I don’t know why you need someone to stand up for Germany. The world’s treating Germany generously, if you ask me.’
‘Come down from the mountain, Lottie,’ said Isaac Volkmann good-humouredly. ‘Look at the Versailles Treaty and you’ll see how “generously” the world is treating us.’ He glanced at the others for support. Even Samson nodded.
Lottie said, ‘Have you forgotten the terms Germany inflicted on France after winning the Franco-Prussian War?’
‘Even worse, yes, but that was a long time ago,’ said Lily Volkmann, whose schooldays were nearer than those of most of the others present.
Lottie smiled. It was just what she expected them to say. ‘Then look at the terms Germany forced on the Russians when they stopped fighting in 1917. Look at the enormous areas of Russia the army occupied. Compared with that treaty, the terms the Allies drew up were lenient.’
‘That’s all history now,’ said Dr Volkmann dismissively. ‘It’s not relevant.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Lottie emphatically. ‘German schools are the root of all the problems. German schoolteachers have always taught that Germans are racially superior and destined to rule Europe. No sooner was the war over than the Weimar government encouraged schools to say that Britain, France and Russia had forced Germany to go to war. Kaiser Wilhelm II appears in classrooms as an apostle of world peace. From that kind of baloney it’s a short step to anti-Semitism.’
‘You exaggerate, Lottie,’ said Inge gently.
Lottie smiled bitterly at her. ‘You know I don’t,’ she said.
Frau Volkmann pressed a hidden buzzer to signal that the servants should come in and clear the dishes and serve the next course.
As a relief from the emotive political arguments, Isaac Volkmann asked leading questions of his English guest. Brian Samson told them of his childhood, which he’d spent as the only child of two domestic servants in a baronial estate in England’s Midlands. When his father’s employer bought a Rolls-Royce motorcar, Samson’s father had been sent to the factory in Derby for a course in driving and maintenance. At that time such an instructional course for the customer’s servant was included in the purchase price of the car. The young boy was thrilled at his father’s good fortune and took a passionate interest in the wonderful car, so that by the time he left school, at fourteen, he was skilled enough to get a job in the local garage. Since then he’d studied at night school and got an intermediate engineering exam. But the chance of a job in the design department of the Dornier diesel-engine factory on the Bodensee persuaded him to defer taking his final exams for a year or two. Now he spoke excellent German (and had picked up adequate French on side trips to France) and was wondering whether to go back to England at all.
‘If you get tired of your present job, Samson, come and see me,’ said Peter Winter. ‘We need skilled men in the factory my father’s company is building in Bremen. You’d have good prospects.’
‘What sort of work would that be, Herr Winter?’
Winter continued removing the bone from his grilled sole. Then, encouraged by Samson’s earlier remark that he was not interested in politics: ‘Aircraft engines. Very high-power, water-cooled, in-line designs … fuel injection, but petrol, not diesel.’
Samson was immediately interested. ‘For fighter planes for the air force?’
Without looking up from his fish, Peter said, ‘There is no air force; the Versailles Treaty forbids it. Our engines go for export to Sweden and other countries.’
‘I have no objection to helping Germany build aircraft engines for export or for any other purpose, Herr Winter. The engines you describe are exactly what I have been working on. I’d be grateful for any introduction you can arrange.’
Peter Winter passed a business card to Samson. ‘Come and see me. Phone me next week, and my secretary will make an appointment for us. Lunch, if you’re free.’
‘That would be very convenient,’ said Samson. He had no illusions about the lunch, or the job he was being offered. The Winter companies had only recently gone into aircraft-engine design. An ex-employee of Dornier could provide them with all sorts of information, including what their rival was up to. Peter Winter would sound him out over lunch. That was how these things worked: it was like espionage.
‘Good,’ said Peter.
Until now there had been nothing to indicate it was election day. But now from the street outside came the sounds of marching men, and then some shouting. Bayerischer Platz, around the corner, was a favourite assembly place for the Nazi parades and rallies.
‘Can the results be known already?’ said Lily Volkmann. She asked her husband: he always seemed to know everything.
‘Far too early,’ said Dr Volkmann.
There were more shouts. No one got up from the table. Peter Winter said, ‘Tomorrow I will join the Social Democrats.’
Pauli said, ‘We’ve had the Social Democrats since the war ended, and what has that got us but millions of unemployed, and streets not safe to walk down?’
‘Was that more shouting in the street?’ said Lily Volkmann nervously.
‘It was more like screaming,’ said Brian Samson.
Dr Volkmann poured more wine. No one spoke, and no one got up to look out the window.
‘Would I know his name?’
For Pauli the dinner party with his brother was nothing short of rejuvenating. And the next day Peter phoned him and invited him to lunch at the luxurious wine restaurant that Lutter and Wegener (whose restaurant in the Gendarmenmarkt had been famous since the eighteenth century) had now opened in the West End of the city.
Their lunch was modest enough, and they drank no more than a bottle of Rhine wine and some French brandy, but Pauli was grateful for a chance to talk at length with his brother. He told him about his troubles at work. He’d been moved away from Party Headquarters to a dark little office near the Tempelhof S-Bahn station. It was a long way from his home in Pankow, and now that he no longer had a car and driver, he spent hours every day on the train. He had no secretary, either. These things were all said to be part of an attempt to cut back the expenses, but Pauli had seen the order that specifically named Paul Winter as one of the staff who didn’t need either a secretary or an assistant. There had been many complaints. Most of Pauli’s co-workers said the economies were Dr Josef Goebbels’s idea but Pauli didn’t believe it. It was Brand, of course, trying to force him out, or perhaps hoping that Pauli would complain or do something silly to get even with him.
‘Then, for God’s sake, leave them, Pauli,’ his brother urged. ‘We can always find a job for you somewhere in the firm.’
‘Another lawyer! You’ve got them coming out of your ears already. I’ve heard you say so.’
‘We’ll get rid of someone.’ Peter had always been ruthless about such things. He didn’t see it as a moral question; it was just a matter of administration.
