Then she was at my side again. ‘I’m sure you want to see it,’ she said. ‘Come.’ She led me around the back of the theatre, through the empty corridors, up to the lighting box. When the technician saw me he stood up, smiling and bowing, shuffled over to make room.
After a time I learned to be the person they thought I was. I was needed everywhere to speak, to sit on committees, to lend my name to causes, to interpret the times. I dined in the best restaurants, bought fine clothes. But I knew there were two parts of me, the public man and the private being, and they would not, ever, quite fit back together.
RUTH
It gives me a kind of vertigo, to be inside Toller, looking at Dora. I see her, and I see at the same time the effect she had on men. Dora was sincere and straightforward and practical; she never flirted. Because she played no games, men felt most fully themselves with her, as though there were no difference between their inner and outer lives.
I remember her going to Leipzig to see the premiere of Masses and Man. She told me she had managed to meet Toller afterwards, but she would never have painted the scene like that. Though she later shared so many things with me, back then she would have considered it the betrayal of an intimacy that she fully expected to have.
Intimacy. The first time Hans and I made love we went to a hotel by one of the Berlin lakes. We had bought cheap rings at a flea market.
‘Shall we go down to tea?’ Hans asked.
We stood on our room’s balcony, overlooking the terrace. The wind had set everything in motion; the lake was roiling, alive. Hans moved behind me, took my hips in his hands. Below us, white-gloved staff wheeled gleaming, chrome-hooped trolleys of cakes between the tables, their cloths ballooning like sails. Drinks waiters stood stiff as pins, as if to hold the whole scene down, scratching orders onto paper. Somewhere we couldn’t see, a band played, the wind snatching away most of the notes, throwing back only the odd, undersized bar. I looked down on the shining plates, the sun-caught forks, the wheeling, turning chrome. Right below me, a gust ruffled a man’s dark hair against the grain, from nape to crown, like the parting of fur. Next to him, a jewelled hand emerged from under a white, wide-brimmed hat, brushed a crumb from a child’s cheek. I wished I’d brought my camera.
‘I don’t feel like tea,’ I said. I turned around to him and he moved backwards, into our room. I was suddenly caught in a play of muslin and wind. I unwound myself, fighting and laughing, from the attentions of the slip-curtain.
Hans was standing there, tall and soft-skinned, his blue eyes just looking. Hands loose by his sides. I knew there had been experimenting with boys–why would there not be? It was much like experimenting with yourself, and we believed in freedom of choice of all kinds. Now, though, we had chosen each other.
‘It’s like a scene in a Brueghel painting down there,’ I said. ‘After a village wedding. All feasting and chatter and music.’
‘You think so?’ He shook the hair out of his eyes, relieved, I think now, that the time had not quite come. His physical shyness was unexpected, and it made me love him more. ‘I don’t. Brueghel painted ordinary people. This is more like the upper deck of that English Titanic. All the privileged ones ignoring what they’re sailing into.’
I slipped off my shoes.
‘I mean,’ he stepped backwards again, ‘it simply can’t go on that a privileged class totters about here having coffee to music when those waiters live hand to mouth. What bothers me–’ I started to unbutton my blouse–‘what bothers me m-most, is that those waiters will organise their whole lives so as to appear clean and pressed and healthy here and not upset the clientele!’ He held out his hands, fingers splayed. ‘The real conditions of their life are probably shared rooms and bedbugs, carbuncles below the collar-line and hot meals only once a week! This is the kind of workers’ complicity in their own m-misery that must be stopped.’
‘Not right this minute it doesn’t,’ I said, and I took his hands.
In the night I woke. The moon, reflected off the surface of the lake, played on the ceiling, where a large plasterwork vine curled around itself in graceful, overplayed whorls of leaves and tendrils, bearing at unnaturally regular intervals fat bunches of grapes. Hans slept. I counted the bunches (eleven), traced my eyes over the vine, finding the beginning and the end, then the end and the beginning.
I put on a robe and went downstairs, across the empty terrace with its cleared tables, across the promenade, down the stone steps to the lake. The black water opened in silver ripples to let me in. It was cool, but it was the consistency of silk, water with moon in it. It wrapped around my new body, to my chin. I was liberated now, from preciousness and sniggered mystery. I was a known quantity to myself, free to do with that whatever I liked.
When Hans and I decided to marry we spent a long weekend with my parents at the villa in Königsdorf. My mother was suspicious at first. What could this beautiful man possibly see in me, she thought, apart from my money? She was fine and blond and I had thrown to the sire: thick-lipped and dark. When she saw Hans she had no faith that such a man could love me either.
I watched her watching him with her small, pale-blue eyes, noticing how carefully he was dressed–the blue and yellow argyle sweater, two-tone shoes. She made the whole weekend a test. When artichokes were served Hans said, ‘Delicious!’ though I doubt he’d seen one before. Mother waited till he picked up his knife and fork then intoned, ‘Art-i-chokes,’ ostentatiously peeling a petal with two fingers to show how it was done. When Hans took the tongs and bent to retrieve a coal that had fallen from the fireplace she said, ‘No,’ as if he were Chinese or a dog she was training, and rang for the maid. While he smarted the ember burnt a hole through the carpet, suffusing the room with the bitter smell of singeing wool.
One morning after breakfast Mother said to me, ‘What lashes the boy has. One would think he was wearing kohl.’
I said nothing, so as not to give her the satisfaction. At some level, the cruelty of a parent to their child–for her disdain of him was a strike at me–is shameful to the child. We wish our mother to be kind not just because it hurts us when she is not, but because the deviation from motherliness is abnormal, something to be hidden. Hans had grown up in a small house in Nienburg, where his father was the local pastor. What Mother condemned as nouveau riche tastelessness I saw as the best effort of a young man to free himself from dour origins. Mother wanted it both ways: while I was unworthy of him, he was unworthy of our family.
In my family no one performed manual tasks of any kind, ever. Nor did we practise any religion. My father worked hard in his lumber concern, but as its owner and lord; my mother’s idleness was proof of his success. We were Germany’s Enlightenment Jews, secular, educated, and more Prussian than the Prussians. I wanted to get away from the repressed cruelty of it, the deafening amounts of denial.
In Hans’s family, while his mother cooked and mended, his father wrote sermons about the day of reckoning and the end of the world. ‘What does it profit a man,’ Pastor Wesemann would thunder, ‘that he build up his house in this world…’ while Mrs Wesemann stewed fruit, pickled cucumbers, covered a broken window with brown paper until they could afford a glazier. Hans’s life had been shaped on the one hand by the honest, practical necessity of manual labour, and on the other by its utter pointlessness when faced with the coming apocalypse. This mortal veil, he used to joke, was ripped up by his father every Sunday and darned by his mother on the Monday. Later, after Hitler came to power, Pastor Wesemann found that the National Socialist ideas about the coming of the thousand-year Reich dovetailed nicely with his own millenarian beliefs, and he installed a maroon Bakelite swastika on his altar as sign of his double devotion. Hans had at least as much to run from as I did.
He tried hard, but towards the end of our visit Hans came to feel like the parvenu Mother saw him as. ‘She hates m-me,’ he muttered in the garden. By the Sunday he had started to pause heavily at the beginning of a sentence, like a gramophone record
stuck in a groove. Mother waited for each utterance with an expression of sympathetic victory, as if the delay were the confession of falsehood she had been awaiting since Friday.
My father was kinder. He would have liked for me to marry a Jew, but this boy–though a pacifist–was a war veteran, and of good heart, and Father did not see so many reasons why I might not be loved.
When it was over we caught the train back to Berlin. I’d always felt that even the geography of my family’s part of the world–the rumpled mountains dense with coal and riddled with tunnels–was darkly complicated. Once back in northern Germany, the earth smoothed out, grew flat and free and calm, a sea of clear green right up to the coast.
In the dining car I tried to coax Hans out of his funk with an impersonation of my mother. ‘Oh, I am a Prussian of infinite control and reason.’ I held my nose up and my neck long. ‘Which is why I am per-fec-tly willing to burn a hole in my Persian carpet for the sheer pleasure of teaching you your place.’
Hans was slumped back in his seat, turning a pack of cards over and over on the table with one hand. He stared out the window. He was beautiful–the picture, in fact, of what I would have thought my mother wanted for me. Excepting only, perhaps, that the effort showed a little: his cravat too neatly tied, trousers a bit flashy. Sometimes the imitation is brighter than the real. That didn’t bother me since I’d loved him even before I’d laid eyes on him. I wasn’t sure if my mocking my mother would ease his humiliation or rub it in. But when he looked back at me he was smiling. Hans was always careful not to denigrate my parents directly to me.
‘Nous allons épater les bourgeois,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got to eat first.’ He picked up the menu. ‘Artichokes, anyone?’
I grinned. In Hans I had found an ally who would help me scorn the values of duty and obedience as well as the privilege I had been born into. He watched it all more closely than I.
Our wedding reception was at the best hotel in Breslau, the nearest big town. All our friends came, Dora with Walter, Bertie and the others. On the steps of the town hall they threw confetti and petals and shouted our party’s slogan, ‘A threefold Red Front!’ It wasn’t perhaps the most romantic hurrah, but it was the alliance we most craved: between the Social Democrats, the Communists and us.
Hans and I moved into the apartment in Berlin. My father paid for it as part of the wed-ding settlement, along with our steel and chrome chairs, cornflower-blue carpets and sleek wedding bed.
In the big city Hans’s journalistic career went from strength to strength. Still, though he never spoke of it, I knew he felt it was tainted by the Toller episode. He had asked a man to betray his co-prisoners and accept release. None of us had thought of that beforehand, but Hans had been the one whose career got a boost. Dora’s criticism lodged deep in him.
Hans tried to make it up in his columns. They started off humorously, but the closer the Nazis came to power, the more bitter and baiting they became. And the more brave.
When General Ludendorff, who had run the war–along with the country, as a supply store for it–claimed in his memoirs that he ‘won the war’ Hans quipped, ‘He did win it too; only the German people lost it because they were so careless as to starve to death before victory was achieved.’ Hans reported on the Berlin lavatory attendant who was arrested because she’d replaced her regular supply of toilet paper with a stack of left-wing newspapers for the enlightenment of her clientele. He made friends with the famous bachelor actor Edgar Reiz and with him took on the challenge from an English publication to determine whether Berlin was, as the paper claimed, the most ‘depraved and vicious’ city on the Continent.
‘For research purposes only,’ Hans wrote, he and Edgar trawled through girl-bars, boy-bars, gin palaces, cabarets, the foyers of fancy hotels. Early in the morning they found themselves at Magnus Hirschfeld’s esteemed Institute for Sexology near the Tiergarten, where the great man himself, portly and feminine behind his cravat and his little round glasses, explained ‘in his caressing lisp’ that ‘there is no such thing as depravity’. ‘Something,’ Hans noted with relish, ‘the English have well known all along.’
In 1928 he went to hear Hitler–then a leader of an opposition party–and wrote one of his most notorious pieces. As a boy, Hans had overcome the worst of his stutter by watching closely how people’s lips moved, and prethinking each of his own sentences to the end before he began them. This had trained him to notice things others didn’t, which was useful for a reporter. Hans told his readers how, at the Sportpalast, the microphone had failed. After some halting and repeating himself, Hitler, furious, threw the thing to one side. ‘And there was born,’ as Hans put it, ‘The Great Adolf’s famous bellowing technique. “The bastardisation of peoples has begun!” Herr Hitler cried. “The negroidisation of culture, of customs–not only of blood–strides forward.”’ Hans wrote that the crowd murmured its agreement, feeling itself as one with the Leader against these unseen, viral enemies.
He then recounted how he had attended the reception for Hitler held after the event in a private apartment. ‘We were searched for weapons on entry,’ he wrote. In the sa-lon, he found the Leader holding forth on ‘this rotten parliamentarianism! This cancer of the German people.’ And railing against Berlin for the ‘terrible promiscuity of its semi-Slavic population’.
Standing at the back of the crowd, Hans coughed politely. ‘And are you married, Herr Hitler?’ he inquired. The air turned to ice. The acolytes glared. Hans backed away. ‘I saluted at the door with my raised arm and energetically said “Heil” and “Sieg”,’ he wrote, ‘and only realised when it was too late that I had raised my left instead of my right arm. And as I put on my coat in the hallway, I could hear Adolf say, “What an unpleasant person! Who was that anyway?” No one was able to tell him, and I hurried away before they tried to ask me personally.’
The Nazi Party sued for libel.
There was some confusion at Die Welt am Montag. Hans’s editor swore that the piece had been submitted as a factual report. He had not been told, he said, that it was a hoax.
‘It was ridiculous enough,’ Hans scoffed to me. ‘I didn’t think I needed to spell it out.’ Reality was becoming so silly, we thought, that intelligent people could no longer tell the difference between a report and a satire.
Fortunately, the Nazi Party lost the case and had to pay costs. Some of Hans’s more pedestrian colleagues grumbled about journalistic ethics–even fraud! But to others he was a hero: he’d taken on the Nazis and he’d won.
From then on he felt protected.
Although Hans directed his satire broadly at Hitler it was Goebbels who inspired in him a particular, personal vitriol. The Propaganda Minister he baited like a bear. Perhaps it was their shared small-town heritage, or the fact that for both men it was their skill with words that had lifted them out of it. Hans became Goebbels’ public nemesis, never referring to him by name, only as ‘that distinctly Semitic-looking male’, who ‘under normal circumstances would have been an energetic teacher at the girls’ school in Euskirchen’. Goebbels had written a novel called Michael, which Hans only ever and always called Michael the Ignored.
In one infamous piece, Hans invented a visit to Goebbels’ godmother in his hometown of Rheydt on the Rhine. Surrounded by pots of artificial flowers, he listened to the old woman reminisce:
Oh, dear sir… I don’t know what the boy’s problem is with the Jews. He used to play so nicely with the Katz children, whose father, a butcher, lived right around the corner… But he could never keep his mouth shut. The boy always had to have the last word.
Goebbels lost his cool. He hit back in the Nazi Party’s paper, Der Angriff, at ‘a certain Galician, Hans Wesemann’, who, when he was refused an interview with Adolf Hitler, ‘composed one with his dirty paws. Now,’ Goebbels wrote, ‘this noble scribbler is fouling the provinces with the excrement of his sick brain.’
‘Not bad,’ Hans said over eggs at breakfast, ‘“excrement of his sick brain?
??.’ We looked at each other across the top of our newspapers. ‘But then again,’ we said together, ‘he is, of course, a novelist.’
The more famous Hans became, the more outrageous his pieces, and the more the Nazis hated him.
A construction vehicle is delivering long pieces of timber up the next-door driveway, a red cloth tied around their ends as a caution to traffic.
I can see myself clearly at the window of our Berlin flat, way back on the evening Hitler took control, with my red flag out. The boys and the torches and the wonky swastikas were frightening, but they were also ridiculous. We had not thought through what it meant that these rednecks had made their lists; that they had individuals in their cross-hairs, and that those individuals were us.
While Hans became famous in Berlin I completed my studies at the university. Over time, I wrote a dissertation on Goethe’s love poetry for my PhD so I would be qualified to teach. But mostly I spent the days behind my camera. I discovered that a photograph might reveal qualities of objects I had not seen when I snapped it. It was as if the sheer physical heft of my subject, its weight and beauty in the world, overcame me in its presence, allowing it to keep its allusive properties to itself. I photographed matches in close-up, heavy-headed and scattered like chance. A stairwell from below, curving back on itself like a concertinaed fan. My own feet on a bed, the shorter leg crossed over the other. I photographed a handwritten note on a bollard–‘HUNGER!’ with a postbox number for donations. I snapped a woman in our yard holding a half-naked infant on her hip, fingers pressing his fat thigh like luxury. I caught Hans, eyes closed, neck stretched back over the rim of the bathtub, shadows revealing the architecture of his face.