CONRAD DEHMEL’S STORY
as told by
JOHN WELLFLEET

I have now reached a long gap in the records and will have to rely on Conrad Dehmel’s diaries and notebooks, on some of his professional publications, on letters, photographs, and the occasional patch of narrative by himself.

Contrary to what his grandfather had believed, that First Great War did not destroy Europe. It was followed by such an explosion of intellectual and artistic energy you could almost believe that the slaughter of all those millions of young men had served as a fertilizer to some of the survivors. So much happened in those years. So much passion was spent. Everywhere new oceans of knowledge were discovered and eager men dove into them.

The year the Dehmel family moved to Bremen, Conrad’s parents had another son they called Siegfried. His mother was now forty years old, the birth was as difficult as it was unexpected, and it left the mother weak for several years afterwards. Siegfried was physically robust, his hair even blonder than his father’s, his temperament was cheerful and boisterous, and by the time he was five he was playing with toy warships in the family bathtub and was determined to join the navy as soon as he was old enough. To his father, Siegfried was a greater joy than Conrad ever was.

Eight years after Siegfried’s birth, Conrad matriculated from the gymnasium and went to the first of his three universities. It was at Göttingen that he made his doctorate. His field was History and for him History seems to have included nearly everything connected with the human race. As his working tools he used “four and a half languages,” the half-language at that time being English.

The work-load of those German students would have emptied the classrooms of any university I ever knew. The best ones did hardly anything but work and some of the scientists spent whole weeks in their laboratories, dozing a few hours at a time on camp cots when they had experiments cooking. Conrad prepared himself for his career like an athlete training for the Olympic Games. He got up at 0600 hours every morning and spent twenty minutes in vigorous calisthenics. Sunday was his walking day and no matter what the weather he usually covered about thirty-five kilometers. Often he took an early train in order to walk in the Harz Mountains.

On weekdays he did nothing but study, and the routine was much the same with his friends. Their sole recreations were the occasional concert or a night with a girl, but they were seldom companions of their girls as we were with ours. One of Conrad’s friends, a philosophy student, went to a brothel every Saturday night: “Sleeping with a girl you like is a waste of spiritual energy. Going to bed with a poule is a release of it.”

Usually these students quit work around 2200 hours and went to the beer halls, but not even there did they relax. They talked shop together and the mathematicians and physicists worked out equations on the backs of their beer mats and discussed them while they sipped their beer and nibbled their pretzels. After they went home, the waiters collected the beer mats on the chance that the equations were valuable and they could sell them.

A weird place a German university in those far-off days. As Conrad later admitted, “We lost our heads completely. We were sure that we were going to change the world. It was such a marvellous time for Science that it seemed certain that humanity at last might make a quantum-leap forward. The politicians, the generals, the old hierarchical orders who had made and lost the war were finished – kaput. A wonderful new world was dawning and we would be its creators and high priests.”

The historians also called themselves scientists and they no more trusted the literary historians who reported the past than they trusted the newspapers that reported the present. What they wanted was hard evidence – documents, inscriptions, artefacts, the leavings in ancient tombs, chemical analyses of old coinages, papyri, lost alphabets. It was a great time for archaeology and Conrad twice joined digging expeditions in the old Middle East. The historians of this time were more interested in what had destroyed civilizations than in what had created them, apparently believing that if men could discover the mistakes of the past they could prevent politicians from repeating them in the future. When he was older, Conrad would admit that in his university years he became totally blind to the present.

This was a bad present for most of Europe and for Germany it was a terrible one. Not many students were like Conrad and his friends. They were young, they were frustrated, they were angry, and they wanted fast action. Some of them joined political and duelling clubs. Some of them drilled at night in the secret armies and many of them hated the new freedom. “Wir scheissen auf die Freiheit” (we shit on freedom) – this was one of their slogans. But Conrad and his scientific friends not only despised people like these, they ignored them.

When the time came for his doctoral thesis, he decided to base it on the papyri collections his grandfather had described to him. They had been found in the Sahara Desert west of the river Nile a few years before the First Great War. Though Conrad was to go far beyond this early work, he must have retained an affection for it because I myself heard him speak of it more than once. The only thing that interested me about those papyri was the story of how they were found. I liked the story so much that now I’m suspicious of it, but for what it’s worth, here it is.

One day an English archaeologist was exploring the desert on a camel looking for signs of buried monuments when the camel stumbled on a protruding rock and he fell off the animal’s back. When he got to his feet he noticed that the rock was marble, so he took his spade and dug around it and the top of an arch emerged from the sand. This could mean one of two things. Either it was the top of a solitary temple or under the sand were the ruins of a lost city.

A few years later a digging expedition came out from England and a city it turned out to be, a sizable one in ruins, and the rock on which the camel had stumbled was the pinnacle of the civic theater. The rest of the remains were what might have been expected: a stadium, public baths, some official buildings in partial ruin, the lines and even the names of a maze of streets. The only valuable discovery was made in the city dump. Here were dug out thousands of papyri accumulated over several centuries. They were covered with Greek writing in violet ink, many were torn or mutilated, but the dry sands of the desert had preserved the writing and most of them were legible enough to be read or restored by the same kind of ingenuity required by code-breakers in wartime. There were enough papyri to keep several platoons of scholars busy for more than seventy years.

When I was young this kind of material would have bored me to death, but now Conrad’s description of it gives me an eerie feeling. Suppose André and his friends succeed in building a new city, how new will it really be? I won’t live long enough to begin to answer that question, but certainly the resemblances between this vanished city and some cities I knew in my youth are embarrassingly close. It was a collection of ghettos. One district was a ghetto in the original meaning of the word, for it was known officially as “The Jewish Quarter.” And sure enough, evidence turned up in the papyri that when things went sour the majority blamed the Jews for it and beat them up.

Studying Conrad’s notes and trying to decipher the German of his thesis, I found myself reading about a community of perhaps a hundred thousand people living out their life-spans in their own little corner of a huge power structure which pretended to rule the known world. The papyri showed life as ordinary people have lived it in all ages – thousands of mortgages, bills of sale and purchase, inventories of small and big merchants, of stewards and managers, notices of sheriffs and auction sales, bills of lading for the flat-bottomed boats that took on cargo at the city docks and sailed down the canal to the Nile and then down the river to the great city at its mouth. Even beyond, sometimes; even as far as Naples. There were many personal letters, quick glimpses into obscure private lives, some poignant, some ridiculous. There were many edicts from the Central Bureaucracy in language even more pompous than we got from ours. And as time passed, there was a deluge of appeals for relief against tax collectors and the labor organizers of the Bureaucracy.

By the time I had worked my way through Conrad’s monograph I had acquired a fellow feeling for these vanished folk. This was their little plot of earth and it had been good earth. What for more than fourteen subsequent centuries was an unmapped waste of drifting sand, in their time had been a prosperous farm country with thousands of hectares under cultivation, watered by inundations from the Nile fed into it by a complex system of irrigation canals. In its earlier years the city was prosperous. It had its own town council, its banks dealt in a reliable currency. It even had a social and athletic club and I was amused to discover that its membership was rigidly restricted. No Jew or lower-class person had a chance of getting into it.

If left to itself, this city might have prospered indefinitely, but of course it was not left to itself. About two centuries after the record began, the control of the Central Bureaucracy was up for grabs and between them the politicians and the military ruined the whole district. Just before the final collapse, the city’s population reached its highest point and the people were proud of how big it was. The crowds swarming into the stadium broke all previous attendance records. Where did all this urban population come from? It could only have come from abandoned farms. Finally the currency collapsed and was worth nothing and soon afterwards the record ceased for an entire century.

When it resumed it revealed a new kind of world uncannily still. The town council had vanished and so had the middle class. The city’s principal buildings were now filled with nuns and monks – some thirty thousand of them altogether. As for the farmland, all of it was now the personal property of a single family headed by a man who spent most of his time in the imperial capital and came home only to supervise his stewards, oversee his rent collectors, and exercise his race horses in the stadium. Conrad records this letter written by one of the boss-man’s tenants:

“To Apion, my kind lord, lover of Christ and the poor, all esteemed and most magnificent patrician and duke of the Thebaid, from Anoup your miserable slave on your estate called Phraka, I, your miserable slave, desire by this petition for mercy to bring to your lordship’s attention that I serve my kind lord as my fathers and forefathers did and pay the taxes every year.”

In a footnote to this document, Conrad wrote: “Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a tool-making animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.” When Conrad made a point, he always underlined it.

A few years after Anoup wrote this letter the record ceases entirely. The Arabs came in and destroyed the last remnant of the old Bureaucracy. Did they massacre the inhabitants? There is no proof that they did. Did the people simply give up the place and move somewhere else? Nobody knows that, either. All that is known for sure is that for nearly fourteen centuries the sands of the desert blew in steadily and buried the place. If the Englishman’s camel had not stumbled on the pinnacle of the civic theatre nobody would have heard of its existence; not a word about the magnificent duke who was such a lover of Christ and the poor, to say nothing of Anoup. What will André make of this little story, I wonder?

But for Conrad Dehmel his study of this lost city was the overture to the entire course of his future life. His monograph was given a first-class rating by his professors and after it was published it came to the notice of a famous historian who wrote him a letter of congratulation. This man was a Russian of vast learning who had emigrated to America to avoid being liquidated by the new bureaucracy that had taken over his own country. When Conrad wrote to thank him for his letter, he asked if he himself might go to America to study under him. The Russian offered a better prospect.

At that time the largest collection of papyri in the world was housed in London in a famous place called the British Museum and the man who had found the papyri was now the Professor of Papyrology in Oxford. The Russian arranged with this professor that Conrad should be granted a fellowship to study in London. He promised Conrad that if his work in England was successful, he would recommend him to a post in the Grosser Kurfürst Institut in Berlin. Anyone with a good post there was supposed to be set for the rest of his life.

In a time when the whole world was nearly broke and jobs were as scarce as snowballs in August, this would have been heady stuff for any ambitious young man and Conrad had become exceedingly ambitious. He noted in his diary that his entire life’s work leaped before him in a kind of map. After the papyri and routine studies in Politics and Economics, he would concentrate for several years on the history of art. Then he would set out to complete what he called “My Grand Design.” He would harmonize traditional History with the new findings in Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology and out of the mixture he would develop a new Moral Philosophy based on a combination of all these elements. Quoting an earlier German professor, he wrote in his diary: “I know where I stand now, but it may take the rest of my life to build the roads to take me there.”

None of this will make any sense to André Gervais or anyone else of his age. It makes no sense to me, either. The Germans of that time were famous for their addiction to grandiose projects and the time would come when even Conrad would ask himself what real difference there is between the ambition of a man who sets out to conquer all the people in the world and that of the one who sets out to conquer all the knowledge in it.

The trouble with Conrad was that he had put so much of himself into his academic work that he knew hardly anything else. At twenty-five he was still a virgin. Now with a fine job and what looked like a sure future he could afford to marry and the time for marriage had come.

TWO

Eva Schmidt was the only daughter of a minor provincial industrialist. All I know of him is that he spoiled his daughter, suffered from chronic constipation, and went annually to the sulfur baths at Wiesbaden. Conrad had met Eva through one of her three brothers whom he knew in the university. There are no photographs of her, but Conrad later described her as a picture-postcard Germanic beauty with flaxen hair, a light skin, and the kind of figure they called vollschlank, which meant simultaneously buxom and slim. I knew a few German girls and one of them was great to know and another was very good, but they were of a much later generation. In Conrad’s youth a German bourgeois girl was supposed to have no future outside marriage. Eva was twenty-four, her father reeked with money, and if Conrad had not been so engrossed with his books and documents it might have occurred to him that if nobody had wanted to marry Eva before, there must have been a good reason.

After a wedding much too expensive for his taste, they spent a two-weeks honeymoon in Paris before setting out for London. Conrad was reticent about his personal life and he has left me with only a few facts about his time with Eva. I assume that the honeymoon was a sexual disaster and that what followed in London was worse.

His working routine would have been pretty awful for any young wife even if she loved him, was intelligent, and had some inner resources of her own. Eva was invincibly stupid and sexually frustrated. In London Conrad worked eight hours a day in the Museum on those ancient papyri documents and in the evenings he read learned books connected with his work. He had assumed that Eva would keep herself busy seeing the London sights and learning English, but she had no interest in London and detested all the English people she met. She learned no more of their language than was necessary to do some elementary shopping.

This provincial heiress had grown up in a large house with servants and she thought it degraded her to have to live in a small flat in Bloomsbury. As she had never learned to cook, they ate most of their meals in cheap restaurants in Soho. It was even worse when it came to entertainments. Eva knew too little English to follow a play or a movie. Conrad loved classical music and she liked Viennese waltzes and second-rate jazz. After three orgasmless months, Eva discovered herself pregnant and the marriage collapsed. By this time she loathed Conrad and decided to escape from him. Without telling him she was pregnant, she left for home, spent a few days with her parents, and then went to Berlin for an abortion.

During the next two months Conrad wrote her a letter three times a week and she answered none of them. Finally he returned to Germany and found her just where he expected, at home with her family. There must have been some ugly scenes before he finally concluded that the only solution was divorce.

It was at this point that he discovered just what he had got himself into. Eva screamed at him that if he wanted a divorce he would have to pay for it. The price she named was more than he could afford, and she knew it. He had ruined her entire life, she said. No man would want her after what she had been through on account of him, and so on and so on.

I don’t know what the German divorce laws were at this time and Conrad did not mention them in any of the material he left. Though he was a baptized Catholic he no longer belonged to any formal religion. Eva was probably a lapsed Lutheran, so religion was no impediment to divorce providing they both wished it. I would have guessed that he could have divorced her for desertion, but as the decision seems to have depended on her, I can only suppose that she had some legality on her side. Anyway, he went back to London.

I wish I could say that Eva Schmidt merely entered Conrad’s life and left it, as a person may enter a hotel by the front door and go out by the back. Certainly he believed that this was what she had done and though he felt mortified and ill-used, he must have been relieved not to have her around any more. He never expected to see her again, but it did not turn out that way. Some years later they met each other in Germany, and in circumstances where she had all the advantages and he had none.

Conrad’s experience with Eva, and much more his love for the next woman in his life, saved him while still young from turning into the intellectual dinosaur he was well on his way to becoming. I can say this for him, he was willing to learn from experience even though he never got over his compulsion to make big generalizations. Here is one of them:

“If History is the study of men in society, I can thank Eva Schmidt for teaching me something most historians ignore, namely that fifty percent of the human race is composed of females.”

On the same page in the diary follows another notation that raised my eyebrows a little:

“It is reasonably certain that Henry VIII contracted syphilis when he was a young man and this could explain much that otherwise is mysterious. When young, Henry was amiable. Could not the megalomania and cruelty of his later years be explained by the fact that the disease in its third degree damaged his brain and made him paranoiac? The beheading of his wives made him famous, but it was of minor historical importance compared to the megalomania that refused to accept the authority of the Pope. This led, of course, to the policy of aloofness from Europe and the establishment of the Church of England. Hence it follows that this unknown woman who shared her disease with Henry was an extremely important historical agent. What would the Archbishop of Canterbury say if it were proved that the Church of England would never have existed had it not been for a wandering spirochete?”

As this singular pensée followed his previous reference to Eva Schmidt, I toyed with the notion that Conrad himself might have picked up a dose from a London prostitute after she left him. But I don’t really believe it. It was just another of the ways in which his over-complicated brain tended to work.

Now, before I continue, I must deal with an exasperating problem that has nagged me ever since I began this record. It concerns the dating.

As anyone old enough to remember will recall, the old dating system in which I grew up was abolished twenty-five years ago and replaced by the new one which took off from that particular year, which became our Year One. This was part of the Bureaucracy’s plan to obliterate the past. It was tied in with their Diagram. They calculated that after enough time had elapsed, the Past would be reduced to such a jumble of legends, propaganda, and inaccurate memories that none of the younger people would be able to think about it even if they wished to, or blame the Bureaucracy for having cheated them. For a while this colossal fraud seemed to be working; it worked well enough to make me wonder whether I myself had really lived through what I had seen. Until I met André Gervais I thought they had got away with it. Now it seems they haven’t.

Anyway, in our present system I am writing in the year 25. But as almost everything I write about happened during the old system, I will use the old system in my story and hope that any younger people who read it will at least be intrigued by the novelty.

I now resume in the year that used to be known officially as the nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-fourth year of Our Lord. André knows who Our Lord was because I lent him my Bible and he was fascinated by the Four Gospels. That Jesus Christ had lived more than two thousand years ago was something he could not grasp because he had never had the chance to understand time and its passage. The name of Christ he had always known. Everyone knows it and uses it, for it has survived as a swear word. If any of my readers are curious, all they have to do is to change the date 1934 to what in derision I call 80 BTB; that is, eighty years before this Third Bureaucracy abolished the old system.

THREE

One dank autumn night after Eva left him, Conrad Dehmel went to a concert in a famous London auditorium which a few years later was destroyed by bombs dropped from German aircraft. During the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony he sat immersed in the music, his eyes closed, his chin resting on the heel of his hand. When the first movement ended and he opened his eyes, they came to rest on a young woman in the cello section. All through the allegretto which followed his eyes never left her.

By this time Conrad had made a variety of friends in London. Some of them were English, but his closest friends were Germans and Austrians who had come to London to escape the bureaucracies in their own countries. A few of these were musicians. Three weeks after the concert he met this young cellist at a Sunday supper party given in honor of an exiled Austrian pianist who had been playing in London. Eva Schmidt had made Conrad cautious of women, but by nature he seems to have been a romantic and I certainly know that when his emotions were aroused he was the least cautious of men. He fell in love with Hanna Erlich and it was the real thing.

I can envy him. For though I have made love to more women than I can remember, and to some whose faces and bodies I remember but whose names I have forgotten, though I was very fond of Valerie and truly loved Joanne, I never fell in love in my entire life. No salmon ever sang in the streets for me because of any girl I knew; no sky ever blazed with Perseids. A psychiatrist once congratulated me for this, calling me a realist free of illusions. He was a fool. Even before I was thirty I understood that this was the price I had paid for becoming promiscuous at fourteen with girls as promiscuous as myself.

Like most Germans and Japanese, Conrad was a camera buff and I have more than forty small photos of Hanna Erlich. In most of these pictures she has a happy expression, in some a piquant and enquiring smile, in a few others a deep reflectiveness suggesting the sadness of a civilized person at the end of her civilization but still refusing to believe it. Her brows slant up delicately into a wide forehead. Her nose is too slim and artistocratic to have been a thoroughly satisfactory organ, for it pinched her antrums and she often suffered from sinus headaches. Conrad said she seemed tall because she carried herself well, but when I examined a picture of the two of them standing together I noted that the crown of her head was no higher than the lobe of his ear and he was not an especially tall man. In her teens she had studied ballet and she moved with a grace and litheness that were a revelation to him after the climsy stiffness of Eva Schmidt. He said that her voice was a rich contralto with a throb in it. Though she was only twenty-five years old, her hair was a rich silver shot through with darker tracings like the pure old silver that does not reflect the light but absorbs it. If I had ever met a woman like her when I was young I would have been wild for her, but by now you probably know me well enough to understand that I’d never have had a chance with her.

Hanna’s family was a part of the mosaic of old Europe that even in my youth was still a legend. The Erlichs were entwined with a long European experience going back into the past for centuries. My continent, the democratic continent, never had known anything comparable.

Hanna’s paternal grandfather had been born a Conservative Jew, but he became agnostic and all but two of his grandchildren married gentiles. The old man took ironic pleasure in reminding his Jewish brethren that he was much more a typical Jew than they were: “If every one of Father Abraham’s descendants had married only Jews, there’d be more of us in the world today than Chinese.” Yet all the Erlichs were proud of their Jewish genes and traced their lineage back to the aristocratic family that had emigrated from Spain centuries earlier to escape being burned alive by the Christians.

The first of Hanna’s purely Jewish ancestors to become German was the descendant of one of these refugees from Spain. He was a Polish citizen and held the chair of Chemistry in a famous Polish university. A Prussian king invited him to settle and teach Chemistry in Berlin, and from this time onward the Erlichs were integrated into the Teutonic core of old Europe. All of them prospered and some of them became distinguished.

Hanna’s father was a doctor who had served as a surgeon in the First Great War and this changed the course of the rest of his life. The physical mutilations had been horrifying enough, but what seemed far worse to Dr. Erlich was the state of mind which had brought on the war in the first place. Even before 1914 he had been interested in the teachings of Sigmund Freud and had audited some of his lectures in Vienna. Now he returned to Vienna and became Freud’s pupil for several years. The name of Freud can mean nothing to André Gervais, as I found out when I tried to describe him to André as a “mind doctor.” Dr. Erlich finally left Freud because he could not accept Freud’s insistence that the main cause of aggression is sexual. He went to Berlin and practised psychiatry on his own.

The Erlichs were a far more stimulating family than any I ever knew. They loved to argue and discuss with each other and they had much to argue and talk about because they were involved in most of the important areas of Central European life in the last years of its glory. Hanna’s Uncle Karl had married into an old Swiss family, had become a Swiss citizen, and was the director of a large bank in Zurich. A great-uncle had for a time been Minister of Finance in Austria, an older cousin was a physician and professor of Medicine in Cologne, and her father’s oldest brother, a senior partner in one of the great German shipping companies, made his home in Hamburg. His youngest brother, Hanna’s Uncle Helmuth, was a professional soldier. During the war he had reached the rank of full colonel, had won several decorations for valor, and now was a major-general in the small but exceedingly efficient army of the young German Republic.

Every Christmas the families reunited, entertaining and being entertained in rotation in each other’s homes. Much music was played and after the women had gone to bed the men relaxed with their cigars and kirsch and argued about everything that interested them. Each was a proved professional in his field, but all assumed that the ultimately important things were art, science, music, and literature, and they agreed that with the exception of science, none of these should be confined to national borders even in wartime. They had intimate friends in five different countries and all of them were fluent in at least three languages. The major-general spoke five, including Russian.

As I think I have indicated, Conrad was a pretty conventional young man at this stage of his life, but coming from a family like the Erlichs, Hanna had been living on a different plane from his. She was the first truly modern woman Conrad had ever met, and in a time and country where most women were systematically kept down, she was an astonishment to him. She was even more disciplined than he was, but she had no sexual hang-ups whatever. She was never promiscuous and would have felt contempt for the way my sister and I lived when we were young. Just when she and Conrad became lovers I don’t know, but it was probably a month or so after they first met. Soon he was asking her to marry him. His work was going so well that his post at the Institut in Berlin seemed reasonably certain and then he would have enough money to buy off Eva Schmidt. But Hanna would not consider marriage and refused for a reason that Conrad, incredibly, refused to take seriously.

For Hanna knew, as Conrad’s ambition and concentration on his work had blocked him from knowing, that huge events and appalling personalities were poised to intervene in the personal lives of every living soul in Europe. Love as Conrad understood it meant permanence. Love as Hanna understood it in that particular time meant love in impermanence.

It is bizarre for me to have to think of Hitler again. So many books were written about him that some of them must still be around. Even André has heard his name, though it means no more to him than Attila or Torquemada meant to me when I was André’s age. My parents’ generation never tired of talking about him and his war and they bored most of us to death. But when political troubles began in my own country when I was still a boy, I knew that Uncle Conrad was much more worried than most of our own people were. I remember hearing him say to Mother, “The tragedy was that hardly any of us took Hitler seriously until it was too late. I should know, for I was just as blind as the others.”

But there was one person in this story who took Hitler seriously even before he gained power and this was Hanna’s father. When she was spending Christmas with her family, and all the relations were there as usual, Dr. Erlich asked her one evening after dinner to come into the library with him.

He asked her what people in England thought of Hitler and she said they didn’t take him seriously. He asked what she herself thought of him and she said she had thought very little about him. Hanna and her father were exceptionally close, so close that her mother may have resented it. When she absorbed the expression on his face she felt frightened.

“What I’m seeing, Hanna, is something only one other person I know is seeing. What I’m seeing is something unthinkably terrible. This man is soon going to become this country’s dictator.”

She looked at him incredulously. He nodded and went on. “There’s a limit to what the human mind can stand. Too many calamities have happened too fast. The war was lost. The Treaty was terrible. The middle classes lost all their savings in the inflation. Still the people held together, and two years ago most of them were working. Then pouf – inside a few months everything fell apart and now there are at least seven million Germans out of work.”

“But it’s the same everywhere else. Look at England. Even America.”

“That doesn’t make it the same. England is an old nation, but Germany has never been sure of herself as a nation. She’s falling back onto what she always was – a collection of tribes. America? If an American is out of work he may feel guilty. He certainly will feel angry. But a German out of work feels sick in his mind.”

A silence fell between them and finally the doctor said, “If I were to tell you that the neurotic symptoms of a large number of my patients are becoming alarmingly similar to Hitler’s, would that seem important to you?”

She looked at the sadness in his face and nodded, “Yes, it would. If you said it.”

“You see, this republic of ours never grew out of the people. It was imposed on them by victors who have totally discredited themselves. Now it’s falling apart.” He paused, looked away, and said very quietly, “Germany is on the verge of a mass psychosis and Hitler is going to be its catalyst.”

She still could not really believe him. She said what most people were saying, “But this little man, he’s been nobody all his life.”

“That’s just it, Hanna. Most people in Germany have been made to feel like nobodies. The young believe that nobody wants them. But Hitler wants them and he will find them. He’s probably found enough of them already.”

How can I describe this man Hitler to André and his friends? A squat figure, an unsavory face, a ridiculous moustache, short legs, a backside shaped like a basket, a raucous, uncouth voice – I read somewhere that he had only a single testicle.

Hanna asked what her soldier-uncle thought of Hitler and her father smiled wearily.

“Your Uncle Helmuth is a civilized man. Unfortunately, civilized men will be the last to recognize what I’ve been seeing. He tells me the Officers’ Corps is now the best since Gneisenau and I’d take his professional opinion that it is. No wonder I’ve not been sleeping well. There’s only one man I know among the officers who sees what I’m seeing. You’ve met him. He’s often been at our house. You’ve played chamber music with him.”

“Admiral Canaris? Does he agree with what you’re telling me?”

“But Wilhelm is alone.” He pointed his pipe at her. “I ask you never to mention – not to anyone – never mention anything I may ever tell you in private about Wilhelm Canaris. Yes, indeed he’s alone. The rest of our officers are the most professionally professional men in the whole of Europe. They have no idea how isolated and arrogant they are. All but a few of them despise Hitler, but he sees through them like plate glass. When he gets power – and I say when, not if – the first thing he will demand is a huge army. Can you imagine any professional soldier objecting to that? It would not be unpleasant to your Uncle Helmuth if he were promoted to lieutenant-general and commanded a corps. They’ll all be promoted. All the sergeants will become lieutenants, all the lieutenants will become majors, and so on.”

She sat silent for nearly a minute; they both sat silent.

Then Hanna said, “I suppose Uncle Helmuth thinks the army will be able to use him and then control him.”

“He hasn’t told me that.”

“But he thinks it?”

“Probably. But I tell you, the army won’t have a chance with him. Those generals follow the rule-book, but Hitler talks directly to the volcano underneath the rules. Nothing in their experience has prepared them for a man like this. When has anyone in this country known how to strike straight through the rules to what lies underneath them? It’s as clear as daylight to me what has happened to this man. When he gets power he will make it happen to the whole country.”

“But what has happened to him? To me he’s just a crazy little man who talks nonsense. What has happened to him?”

“I wonder if even you will believe me. A total inversion of his original character – that’s what has happened to him. I’ve seen it in a few patients – generally they were criminals. None of them had abilities but this man has incredible abilities. Let me put it to you like this.

“Using our ghastly professional jargon, let’s start with the preposterous German authoritarian superego that demands more of people than any individual can fulfill. You know it yourself. The soldier who is supposed to be incapable of fear because he’s a German. The philosopher who is never satisfied to understand a few things perfectly but must set out to understand everything in creation. The planner who is expected – and who expects himself – to foresee every possible difficulty before it occurs. One could go on and on.” He paused. “In Hitler, this impossibly tyrannic superego has combined with a particularly ferocious and cruel id to crush out his original ego as though it had been caught between a hammer and an anvil. Adolf Hitler the little corporal? Adolf Hitler the dreamer and failed artist? This man has literally ceased to exist and an entirely different man has been born.”

Hanna listened in silence and when her father stopped talking neither of them spoke for nearly a minute.

Finally she said, “So he’s insane – is that what you’re telling me?”

“Psychotic certainly, but so far his psychosis is under control. It’s working for him. It’s what gives him his incredible self-confidence. He has a perfect eye for everyone’s weakness – especially for the weaknesses of the powerful.”

The doctor went on to say that he took another war for granted and that it would not be pleasant to have to pray that his country would lose it.

“For when he comes to power he will be absolute, and he will act with such speed that nobody will believe it. But Hanna, there’s something else and it’s why I beg you to return to England and stay there.”

Then he began talking about Hitler’s obsession with the Jews and he asked her to remember that in Hitler’s eyes the long service of their family would mean nothing whatever.

“I’m one-half Jewish and you’re one-quarter Jewish, but in Hitler’s country we will all be Jews whether we’ve practised the religion or not.”

He talked to her for nearly an hour more. Finally she asked him if he himself intended to emigrate and practise in another country.

“Your mother wants me to leave, but not even she believes what I believe. As she has no Jewish blood – as Hitler would put it – she’d be safe enough. At least for a while. At my age I feel it would be professionally dishonorable for a psychiatrist to walk away at the moment when a psychotic is about to become his country’s ruler. But you’re too young, Hanna. You could do nothing here. Your whole life is before you and you have a duty to that.”

When Hanna returned to England her father’s warning seemed unreal. The English had far too many troubles of their own to worry about Adolf Hitler. Only five weeks after Hanna had left her father, Hitler not only gained power, but gained it legally. There must have been some people in England who were concerned, but Hanna never met any. Just as her father had predicted, he acted with lightning speed. He drove the communists underground and soon he would destroy them. He began to get the unemployed off the streets and back to work. Knowing that no other nation would agree, he even proposed universal disarmament. As for his attitude to Jews, most foreigners and even many Germans refused to take it seriously.

Now I come to Conrad. He had certainly known about Hitler and the Nazis but had thought of them as a bunch of ignorant crackpots. Like nearly everyone else, he refused to believe they were serious about the Jews. When Hanna tried to warn him, he reminded her that Jews were in control of many of the key positions in universities, hospitals, and the law. This had caused inevitable resentment, he said. It had caused resentment in Austria for years. But – as my generation would have put it – what was new in that?

Hanna gave up arguing with him and suggested that he write to his father. He did so, asking him specifically if Hitler really meant what he was saying against the Jews. He got an instant reply warning him never to ask such questions again, never to utter any kind of criticism against a leader who was Germany’s savior.

A letter like this would have told the mature Conrad all he needed to know, but Conrad was not mature then. As Dr. Erlich had said to Hanna, trained men of reason are the last to recognize the bared teeth of the human ape when it appears before them. Half a century later, when I was young, it was the same story all over again.

Matters came to a head between Conrad and Hanna in the summer of that same year. He had finally published the results of his long researches and within his narrow speciality they had been well received. The famous Russian scholar wrote him a letter of praise. He also wrote to the Director of the Grosser Kurfürst Institut in Berlin, and in August of that year Conrad received a letter informing him that a post on its staff was his for the asking.

Now for the first time in his life Conrad could look forward to financial security and even to a modest fame. Having finished his work with the papyri, he was ready to enter the world of Renaissance art. Full of joy and deeply in love, seeing his Grand Design developing just as he had planned it, he asked Hanna to dine with him in celebration. This time it would not be Soho and a carafon of Chianti, it would be the Savoy and champagne.

It was not until dinner was over that the roof fell in on his head. He was sitting relaxed sipping Turkish coffee, looking at Hanna and feeling like a sailor who had finally come to harbor after a long and dangerous voyage. Then he realized that Hanna had been silent during the whole evening and that her eyes across the table were remote and on her face was an expression of withdrawal he had never seen before. His euphoria began to evaporate. He reached across the table and closed his hand over hers, but there was no responding pressure.

“Hanna darling, what’s the matter?”

She looked back at him and said, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so happy for you.”

Then she looked away and he felt a chill.

“There seems to be something I don’t understand,” he said.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. He saw her make a compulsive movement, take a handkerchief out of her bag, and wipe her eyes.

“Is it something I’ve done? Is it something I’ve said?”

She shook her head violently, “No!”

“Then what is it? Has something happened at home? Are your parents all right?”

She turned to him in a surge of grief. “I should have insisted on making you understand long ago. I tried in so many ways but you never heard me. Don’t think I blame you. Don’t think that, please don’t. I was so happy and happiness is going to become so rare. I’ve had such happiness with you I’ll remember it for what’s left of my life.”

He stared at her in total incomprehension. “For what’s left of your life! What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

“What I’ve been trying to tell you for so long and you couldn’t listen. I didn’t say wouldn’t. I said couldn’t. Oh my God, but I understand you. Yes, I do. Nearly everyone in Europe is like you, but to accept what I accept – they can’t.”

He was hurt, bewildered. “I seem to have lost you.”

“It’s me who has lost you.” She was panting with emotion. “Haven’t I told you, dear – haven’t I told you I can never go back to Germany the way things are now? Haven’t I asked you to try to find a post in America?” She bowed her head, put her face in her hands, and said, “No, all that I said isn’t true. I only wished you to do it for your own sake. I wouldn’t have gone to America with you, either.”

“Hanna!” He was shocked. He thought something had happened to her mind and he had always assumed that she was more mature than himself. “Hanna, you’ve either told me too much or you’ve told me too little.”

“Can’t you for once let me be a woman? Can’t you?”

Later in his diary Conrad wrote that his intuitions knew exactly what she was trying to tell him but that he could not accept it. For if he did accept it, what would become of the ambitions of more than ten years, ambitions much deeper than a mere post in a famous institute? He was barely able to realize that the true reason for his relentless work had been a drive to release himself from his father without making his father despise him.

Hanna said, “You’d set your heart on it. It was to be your liberation. Now you’ve got it.”

He exploded into the usual rationalizations of nearly everyone at the time, including the most hard-boiled statesmen in the world. He stopped talking when he saw the expression on her face.

“What does your Uncle Helmuth think?” he said.

“I don’t know what he thinks now. A year ago he thought exactly as you told me your father thinks.”

“Aren’t both of them in a better position to know than you or I?” She smiled desperately. “Of all the heroines of antiquity, the one I’ve most pitied was Cassandra. I’m not calling myself a Cassandra. I’m calling my father one. Uncle Helmuth? I’d take his opinion on music and rose-growing and even on soldiering if he ever mentioned that – which he never has to me.”

He sat silently and she watched his face.

Quietly she said, “What about the Jews, Conrad?”

He winced. There was nothing to answer to that question now. She pushed back her chair and rose.

“Let’s go outside into the air while it’s still light,” she said. Holding hands they strolled down to the Thames Embankment in the twilight of a summer evening, sensing the majesty of the grand old city that most people still thought of as the capital of the world.

“I’ll be sorry to leave London,” he said.

“I’ll be even sorrier to see you go. I’ll be very sad to see you go.” His nerves tightened again. “I’m shaken. I thought I understood you.”

She pressed his hand. “And so you have! Understood me as I never dared hope I’d be understood by any man. Body and soul when we’ve loved you’ve understood me.”

They leaned in silence against the parapet, their arms about each other’s waists, he feeling her hip’s curve through the light dress she was wearing, she knowing that the beauty he had discovered in her own body had become sacred to this man. They watched the lights on the moving water and their gaze followed a late excursion boat passing downriver toward Greenwich.

“The tide is going out,” she said.

“Do you mean that symbolically?”

“I was just looking at it. It’s drawing out fast.”

He remembered his grandfather’s words about the gods leaving Troy and again was aware of the pressure of her hand on his own.

“Please don’t be offended, Conrad. You’re a scholar and I’m only a musician, but when I was in the university I used to hear professors and students talking about history just as I’ve heard you talk about it. For me, it’s made by men, and I’m afraid professors seldom meet the kind of men who make it. I’ve met a few. My father and my uncles have met many. But none of them has met a man like the one who’s making history in Germany now. I suppose you know his police have you in their files?”

“Why should they bother about me?”

“Oh, Conrad, where have you been living?”

He stared bleakly at the river and the lights coming on in the city. Recalling the evening a few months later, he was to write that he knew that what she was telling him was the truth, but he knew it only in the way that a man knows that one day he is going to die.

Hanna was talking again. She was telling him some of what her father had told her, that Hitler’s psychosis was still under control and that it would remain so just as long as he was successful, as long as he received the echo from the people that he was the genius he felt himself to be.

Conrad almost exploded. “Him a genius! You tell me your father believes that?”

She gave up. She knew how it had been with him and so many others for a long time, that the word “genius” was sacred and applied only to men like Goethe and Beethoven.

They found an empty bench and watched the lights grow brighter as the last glimmer of twilight vanished into a moonless night. They sat there and listened to London, to the sonorous rumble of London as I myself would listen to it nearly two generations later with Valerie and in that very place. With Valerie who now was dead, along with much of London itself. What a marvellous name for a city was London! Rolling, deep-toned, fuller in sound than Roma and almost as heavy with experience.

Conrad began talking. “Do you remember that man from Munich we met last year, the one who’d been in New York? How he said that he resented New York because it made him feel like nothing, but that when London gave him the same feeling he couldn’t resent it?”

He drew her closer, turned her head to his own, kissed her, and felt the warmth of her breast.

“No darling, in spite of what your father says and with all respect to him, Hitler won’t be able to get away with it. I know our generals are political children and our admirals aren’t even that, but even if they can’t control him, there are others who can and will. The French have been stupid and malicious about Germany, but they’ll certainly know how to look after themselves. And finally there’s England. There’s London. It’s still the capital of the world.”

“Have you ever lived in France?” she asked quietly.

“Only for a fortnight with Eva.”

“I’ve spent a year and a half in Paris and I tell you the French will do nothing but quarrel among themselves. As for England, she seems tired to me, but perhaps she’s only confused. My Uncle Helmuth, by the way, has the greatest respect for England. As he puts it, she still has one more good war in her. He also thinks – or thought – that for this reason Hitler won’t provoke her.”

He touched her cheek and found it moist with tears. “Hanna dear – why do you cry?”

“I’m sorry, Conrad. I’m terribly sorry but I can’t –” she choked back a sob and said, “It’s going to be an awful time we’ll have to live in. It’s a terrible time to have fallen in love, and I have! I have! The millions of people who are falling in love all over Europe and don’t know what I know! I envy them because they don’t know.” She straightened, her voice steadied, and she looked out over the river. “Who signed this letter you got from the Institut?”

“The chairman of the board.”

“Had you ever heard of his name before?”

Startled, he asked why she had asked such a question. She repeated it.

“No, I never heard of him, but board chairmen come and go. He’s somebody appointed by the government. The Grosser Kurfürst has always been a state institution.”

“So Professor Rosenthal didn’t sign the letter?”

“Why should he have signed it? It wasn’t in his province.”

“Do you really believe your Professor Rosenthal will keep his directorship much longer?”

With this she reached him hard, for Erwin Rosenthal was the man under whom Conrad had intended to work in Berlin. He was the world’s greatest living art historian. He was also a Jew. Conrad protested to her.

“The very fact that Rosenthal is still there proves that the situation isn’t so bad as you think.”

She rose to her feet. “Then go, Conrad, for you’ll never believe me till you see for yourself. You have decided to go home. Your life is yours, as I’ve often told you. So go home and see for yourself.”

He was so disappointed that his mind felt bruised by her words. Later he would record that when he heard her say this it was as though she had planted a time-bomb in the foundations of his life.

“Hanna, is this your way of telling me you’ll never go home?”

“For my father and brother and sister I will go home if they need me. I’ve begged all of them but my father to leave. I understand why he’s decided to stay. He tells me that Mother would be in no immediate danger because in Mother there’s no Jewish blood – as these crazy barbarians would put it.”

Again he was astonished. “But none of you have been Jewish for a century!”

“We’ve never denied our Jewish ancestors. Why should we? Incidentally, it would do us no good if we did.”

“Hanna – this anti-Jewish talk of his, it’s only propaganda. It’s been going on in Europe for centuries. Propaganda, that’s all.”

“Indeed it is,” she said softly, “and horribly successful propaganda. How many Christians like Jews as Jews? Individual Jews – often. But Jews as Jews? How many Jews like gentiles as gentiles? Individual gentiles, often.” She paused and said, “Look at me, Conrad!”

He looked at her.

“Just why did you – you yourself – think it important to mention that my family had not been Jewish for a century?”

He could not answer this because he could not deny what her question meant. She put her hand on his wrist and continued.

“It’s far more than that, of course. Far worse. Not even the Jews in Germany can bring themselves to believe what’s going to happen to them. It’s too incredible to believe it. My father is certain that Hitler’s obsession with the Jews is the key to his psychosis. He thinks it’s the one thing about which he’s entirely sincere.”

“So you’re telling me he’s mad?”

“What is ‘mad’? A word.”

“Well, if he’s insane, how has he been able to do what he’s done? Seventy million Germans aren’t insane.”

“Neither are the frock-coated Victorian gentlemen who run the French and British governments. They’re saying just what you’re saying. He can’t be insane because look what he’s doing. He can’t be insane because he’s pulled a great nation out of despair and he’s getting the people back to work. And of course they don’t want to discourage him because he’s cleaning the communists out, and with the communists destroyed, their investments will be safe.”

There was a long silence between them. London rumbled reassuringly around them. He felt tears in his eyes.

“But what of us, Hanna? What of us?”

“I will marry you if you can get rid of Eva. But I won’t live in Germany with you and I won’t even think of marrying you until you’ve gone home and seen for yourself. If I talked you into abandoning your ambition you’d resent me for the rest of your life.”

“I’d never do that.”

“You’re human, Conrad. Indeed you’d resent me if that’s what you thought had happened. So go home, Conrad. Go home and make up your own mind after you’ve seen it there.”

That summer the weather was hot over most of Europe and before Conrad left England they spent a week together on the Channel shore of the Isle of Wight in a small cottage lent them by one of Eva’s friends. The south coast of England swarmed with holiday-makers but they had a small private beach to themselves. The transatlantic liners of the time passed close to the shore on their way in and out of Southampton and one night a huge one hove into view. High on her masthead shone the lights of an enormous swastika and they both knew what that ship was. She was the swiftest vessel on the oceans and she was calling at Southampton on her return voyage from New York.

In Conrad’s diary of that week, the last peaceful one he was ever to spend with Hanna, occurred this single line: “We made love every day and all the goodness of life was in it.”

The week ended, they returned to London, he packed his bags, packed his books into massive wooden boxes and nailed down the covers on their tops. Hanna went down to the station to see him off on the boat train. When the train started he leaned out the window of his compartment waving to her. The sun streamed through the open cleft in the station roof making a partial rainbow in the smoke and steam. It fell on her silver hair and as the train gathered speed he watched her grow tiny, but he still could see the little flicker of white from the handkerchief she was waving to him.

FOUR

The ship that took Conrad home was another German liner making Southampton its port of call en route from New York. He had not been aboard more than an hour before he felt the tension.

There were passengers returning after many years in the Americas to serve the new Germany. He saw a group of arrogant, loud young men, some of them with Latin features, who had been born in Argentina and were coming to Germany to enlist in the Nazi army. They all wore swastikas in their buttonholes. At dinner that night Conrad’s waiter informed him that he was hoping to rejoin the navy, that he had served in the last war and had been in one of the battle cruisers at the Skaggerak. Noting Conrad’s name on his placecard, he said, “Herr Doktor, our chief gunnery officer had the same name as yours.” He named the ship.

“He was my father,” Conrad said.

“Korvettenkapitän Dehmel ist Ihr Vater! Wie geht es ihm? He was the best gunnery officer in the fleet. Nobody who was not there could know how good he was.”

The waiter stood very erect when he took the order, and the others at the table looked at Conrad with respect.

Afterwards, strolling through the ship, Conrad noticed an elderly Jewish couple huddled in a corner and wondered why they were going to Germany. Their faces were expressionless but they seemed afraid. He crossed to where they were sitting, bowed, and invited them to a cognac. The old man seemed grateful.

“You are very kind. For myself, I will take only soda water, but for my wife a small kirsch would be good. Indeed you are kind and I would like you to let me pay. The waiter refused to serve me.”

Conrad looked over his shoulder, beckoned to the waiter, who came over grudgingly.

“A kirsch for the lady, a soda water for the gentleman, and a cognac for me.”

The waiter hesitated. Conrad stared at him and said, “I have given you my order.”

He turned back to the old couple.

“I am a professor of History,” he said. “Or should I say, I am about to become one. Do I intrude?”

“You are very kind, Herr Doktor.”

An uneasy silence followed and finally Conrad broke it. “Have you been long in America?”

“Two years,” the old lady said. “We have a son there.”

“I have not been in Germany for quite a long time, but I read the newspapers. I am curious why you should be returning?”

The old man shrugged. “It is necessary for business reasons. Also, two of our sons and our daughter and our grandchildren are there.”

The waiter came with the drinks, set them down with a truculent air, and Conrad paid him.

“If I need you again,” he said to the waiter, “I will call you.”

Turning to the elderly couple he said, “I am not a Nazi and you may talk freely. I am engaged to a German-Jewish girl who is now in England.”

“It is better that you should not become conspicuous by talking with us,” the woman said.

He realized that she meant it; realized also that his sitting there made them conspicuous, so after downing his cognac he rose, said good night, and went out on deck.

The ship was now steaming in the twilight through the Straits, England hazy to the north, France a little clearer to the south, and as they passed the lights of Calais, Conrad saw a passenger spit in the direction of France.

He paced the deck until darkness fell, saw the lights flickering from many other ships, and smiled ruefully as he remembered that this very expanse of water had not so long ago been known in England as “the German ocean.” As they steered deeper into the North Sea a wind rose and the ship began to heave violently in the shallow waters. He went down to his cabin and heard somebody vomiting in the stateroom next to his own and though he was not seasick himself it was long past midnight before he finally fell asleep.

The next day they were in the Bight and the sea was calm again and the only white water he saw was the foam of quick swells breaking against the rock of Heligoland. Soon afterwards his short voyage ended at Cuxhaven with the band playing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” and several hundred passengers standing at attention while they roared out the chorus of the Teutonic hymn. Then they jostled each other against the railing, waving down at a sea of relatives who were waving back from the dock.

It took him more than two hours to clear customs and immigration. There must have been a hundred expressionless men in black uniforms and helmets and he wondered what would be the fate of the Jewish couple he had spoken to the day before. Probably nothing more than rudeness and harassing delays. When his own turn came the immigration official greeted him cordially.

“Congratulations, Herr Doktor, on coming home. Germany needs men like you.”

Customs took longer and his trunks and boxes of books were searched carefully. Then the tops of the packing cases containing the books were smartly nailed back into place and he was through. But still more time had to be spent putting the trunks and packing cases into storage until he could find an address in Berlin to which they could be sent.

By the time the boat train reached Hamburg it was late in the afternoon and when he came out of the station carrying his two suitcases he saw the streets filled with burly men in brown shirts and breeches. There had been a big Nazi rally that day and it had just broken up. Banners were stretched across the streets from lamppost to lamppost bearing political slogans in huge gothic letters. Pictures of Hitler stared like ikons out of the shop windows. Sitting in a taxi on his way to a hotel he thought there must be great fear in the city because only a few years ago Hamburg had been the chief communist stronghold in Germany. He registered in the hotel and after dinner he walked for an hour without seeing anything important.

The next afternoon the train that took him to Berlin had three cars packed with soldiers, strong young men in the old field-gray. They were having a happy time, their faces were flushed, and their singing was like thunder. He reached Berlin just before sunset, registered in a small hotel in a side street, and after dinner again went out to walk the streets. He did not wish to go to his parents’ until he had sensed the atmosphere by himself.

The last time he had been in Berlin the city was a mirror of despair. There were many beggars and in Germany begging was the ultimate disgrace. But it was not these he had noticed, it was the prostitutes. Swarms of them along the sidewalks of the Friedrich-strasse, females on one side of the street and young males on the other with painted lips and mascaraed eyes. On that evening he had been walking with a student friend who was an economist and his friend had remarked that the surest test of a nation’s economic condition was the price of a whore. He spoke to one of the girls and asked her price.

“Four marks,” she had replied.

Now there was not a whore in sight and he wondered where they were. He passed a cabaret that seemed vaguely familiar and on an impulse he turned back and went up the stairs to see what it was like now. There wasn’t much to see: a few middle-aged men sipping drinks and talking little, three entertainers idle in front of their instruments on a tiny stage in a corner, some semi-private booths called séparés where men could take girls for two marks and they could rub one another. Tonight the booths were empty but there were three hard-faced blondes at the bar who seemed to be waiting for customers.

He sat down at a table and ordered a beer. The girls at the bar turned around on their stools and one of them beckoned him to join them. He paid no attention and after a few minutes the biggest blonde came over, planted herself on a chair at his table, and asked if he was alone.

“Do you see anyone else with me?” he said.

“It’s still early. The show hasn’t begun yet. If you stay till eleven o’clock you can see us all naked. Lebende Bilder. In public we’re not allowed to move our hips. We stand like statues. But you should see how we can move in private. Will you stay till midnight?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “I can get off for a little while so long as I’m back here before eleven o’clock. I have a place near here. Why don’t you come? I can give you a good time.”

She named her price and said she was very good because he could see for himself she was a big girl and a lot of woman. She said she was unusual because she could adjust herself to all sizes. Not many girls could do that, but she had always been able to do it. It came naturally to her because she liked it so much. She would do anything he wanted but for some of the things the price would naturally be higher.

A waiter had come over and was standing by the table and he asked him to bring the girl a beer. The man came back with an opened bottle of bad champagne, filled two glasses, and put the bottle in an ice bucket on the table between them.

“I ordered a beer,” Conrad said.

The waiter smiled. “But this is a lady. She drinks only champagne.”

“So that’s how it is. All right, how much?”

He named the price; Conrad paid him and noted that the markup was only a hundred percent. In a place like this he had expected it to be more. Business must be bad, and looking about at the nearly empty cabaret, he guessed that it was very bad. He asked the girl where she came from and she said from Breslau.

“You’re English, aren’t you?” she said next.

“Why do you think that?”

“I can always tell an Englishman. An Englishman’s clothes are always so chic. We like Englishmen here. How do you speak such good German? If it wasn’t for your clothes I’d have thought you were a born German.”

“I made my studies at a German university.”

A small-time political informer, of course. What revolution no matter how noble had ever neglected to enlist the whores? He left her with the champagne and walked for another half-hour. Berlin was hard and naked under a full moon and there were few people on the streets near his hotel. Suddenly he heard loud voices and just ahead of him some big men in brown shirts and breeches were erupting onto the sidewalk from an underground ratskeller. They were all in early middle age, thick through the chest and hips, and the bellies of three of them bulged out over their belts. He smelled stale beer and they stared at him with stupid and automatic hostility as he passed. The original wave of the movement, he thought, the first of the bully boys, the beefsteaks brown outside and red inside. Suddenly he was seeing history instead of reading about it. Smelling it, too. Unseen behind these goons would be the young ones coming up, lean, hard, cold, and trained.

The hotel lobby was empty except for the night porter. Conrad said good night and asked for his key. Only then did he notice behind the desk a colored photograph of the Leader and under it was printed a jingle:

Trittst du als Deutscher hier hinein
Soll stets dein Gruss Heil Hitler sein.

The porter was bigger than any one of the Brown Shirts he had passed on his way here: a brutal body, an ex-bouncer for sure, in the last war probably a corporal and now a Blockwart. He must have weighed at least 110 kilograms and Conrad took in the beetling eyebrows, the thick-fleshed face creased into a permanent scowl, the square moustache, the shaven head the color of cement with a few veins showing livid between the skin and the bone. A single spike of pepper-and-salt hair jutted up from his scalp just over the center of the forehead. With the key in his hand he stared at Conrad.

“Heil Hitler!” he barked.

“Danke, gute Nacht.”

The porter’s mouth opened so wide that Conrad saw its red roof. His thick thumb jerked backwards over his shoulder in the direction of the Leader’s picture and he bellowed, “Heil Hitler!”

Conrad looked back at him levelly, but he felt the fear of the civilized man in the presence of the barbarian. Before Hitler had taken charge, it would have been inconceivable that a man like this porter could have talked like this to a gentleman. But Conrad was also his father’s son. I, who had no father I ever knew, could I ever have responded to a man like this as he did?

“You will speak to me properly,” Conrad said.

The porter stared at him.

“You are insolent,” Conrad said. “I have just returned from London. I have not been in Germany for a long time. What’s the matter with you?”

The porter looked at him and laughed sneeringly. “Your passport!”

“I presented my passport when I registered. I left it in my room.”

The porter bent over the register and Conrad watched his thumb travel backward over the list of guests and finally stop. Then he looked up with a smile and the smile was not pleasant.

“Sie sind Herr Dehmel?”

“Herr Doktor Dehmel.”

“A German name and a German passport. Heil Hitler!”

They looked at each other and Conrad shrugged. “If you insist.”

“Then say it.”

“Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany. Didn’t you know that? Now, give me the key.”

The porter looked at him dumbly and handed the key over. Conrad went to the elevator cage, pulled open the folding metal door, went inside, closed it, and creaked slowly up to the third floor. He was unnerved because he had felt such a useless fury against the man, and when he rose and turned on the light he took his diary out of his suitcase and sat down at the little table. This is what he wrote:

“Hanna was right and I was blind. I have come home to the unthinkable. You can smell the fear and the rottenness. It reeks like the smell of stale boiled cabbage in a slum. It is unthinkable to know that it is dangerous to be writing these words. Hanna was right again. I knew more than I know now about the reality of history when I was a child and Father came home after the great battle. Now history has stepped out of the books and documents and is looking me over. I can smell her breath but I can’t read what’s in her eyes. I’m afraid of her. I’m afraid of myself. I’m afraid she will make me know I’m a coward.”

He tried to write more but nothing came, so he stowed the diary away in his suitcase under some dirty clothes, locked the suitcase, and put the key in his pocket. He turned out the light, went to the open window, and leaned out. Opposite was the wall of another building, a small, cheap hotel similar to his own. A light flashed on and he saw a man and a woman enter a room. The man was stout and heavy and so was the woman. Without even looking at each other they took off their clothes, the woman lay down on the bed and spread her thick legs, and the man followed her. With the light still burning they fornicated. It was quickly over. The man rose, washed himself at a small basin, and put on his clothes without speaking. Then he nodded to the woman lying on the bed and went out the door. When he was gone she sat up, brushed her teeth, yawned, put on a nightdress, and yawned again. Conrad saw her hand move to the switch, the light vanished, and again he was confronted by a dark, blank wall.

FIVE

The next morning he phoned his mother. Three weeks earlier she had written to tell him that she had a spare room where he could sleep until he found an apartment of his own.

“Are you well, Mother?”

“Nothing to complain of, certainly, at my age.”

“Your voice sounds tired, Mother.”

“I must make it sound better for you. Dear Conrad, it’s so good to hear you again. Are you well?”

“Never better,” he lied.

He asked about his father and she said he was working twelve hours a day and had been in Kiel for the past ten days. He would be home soon but she did not know when. He asked about his young brother Siegfried, whom he hardly knew as a person, and she said she would tell him about Siegfried when he arrived at the apartment.

He went down carrying his suitcase and asked the day porter to call him a taxi. The day porter was a thin, gray-haired, stoop-shouldered man with a racking cough. Conrad asked him if he was well and after another shuddering cough the man said, “It is nothing new. The mustard gas.”

“I have been in England for several years and have met some men there who experienced the mustard gas.”

“Natürlich.”

When Conrad said “Guten Tag” the porter said “Grüss Gott.”

“Are you from Bavaria?” Conrad said.

“My mother was. I was born in Baden.”

“Freiburg?”

“No, Offenburg.”

“That’s where they have the big statue of the Englishman Sir Francis Drake, isn’t it?”

“The first man who brought the potato to Europe. Yes.”

Conrad knew that Drake was not the first man to bring the potato to Europe but for once he restrained himself from talking like a teacher and saying that the Spaniards had brought it from Peru.

“Eine schöne Stadt, Offenburg. I am from Freiburg.”

“Eine schöne Stadt.”

Conrad felt better when he went outside into the sunlight and hailed a taxi. On the way to his mother he looked intently out the window and Berlin in the sunshine was a different city from Berlin in the night. It was brisk, full of purpose, and not too many uniforms were on the sidewalks. The streets were cleaner than the streets of London, but there was nothing remarkable about that. They had always been clean. The first time he was in Berlin he had seen a street-cleaning machine spraying the pavement in the middle of a blinding rainstorm. He paid off the taxi and entered the four-story building where his parents lived, and when he examined the small register of the tenants he saw that they lived on the top floor.

His mother looked older than she had three years ago, more withdrawn, her expression resigned and sad, but her kiss was as warm as ever when they embraced.

“Well, Conrad, are you glad to be home?”

He understood that the question was not routine. He sat down, filled his pipe, and puffed it alight.

“I don’t know yet. But tell me about yourself. Are you playing as well as ever?”

She lifted her right hand. “The arthritis has come to me finally. So far it’s only in the wrist but it will be sure to spread to the fingers. Then of course I won’t be able to play at all. However, this is to be expected. Meanwhile the important news with us is that your father is going to be promoted to rear-admiral. It should be official any time now.”

He put another match to his pipe, shook it out, and set it down in an ash tray.

“Are you happy about it?”

Her slim shoulders moved in a half-shrug. “For him, yes. He feels vindicated. You were such a little boy when the news came about the great battle. Do you remember it?”

“I’ll never forget it. I remember everything each one of the neighbors said about it. And I remember even better how Father looked when he came home on leave two months later.”

“He has not been forgotten by his old comrades. One of them is now the Grand Admiral. The Grand Admiral stood on the bridge beside Admiral Hipper on that day.”

“Is Father happy?”

“As I said, he feels vindicated. He’s never been so busy in his life.” She smiled again, this time in wry amusement. “I was never studious myself, but here I am with a studious husband and a studious son. But they both study such different things.”

“When will Father be home?”

“I can never be sure of his movements and neither can he, but he should be home soon. As I told you, he’s in Kiel at present. They are making great plans for the navy and some of your father’s ideas have been adopted.”

Conrad puffed his pipe slowly, then held it in his palm and looked out the window.

“Mother,” he said, still looking out the window, “I know I must have seemed unkind. I mean, seeing so little of you these last half-dozen years. I can’t talk about it, Mother. I only hope you understood.”

“Yes, I understood. I was sad, yes, but I know you pretty well, Conrad.”

He drew on his pipe several times more, then swung his head back and faced her.

“I’d like to talk to Father now. Do you think he’ll talk to me – really talk to me?”

“You’re his oldest son. Of course you should talk to him.”

“I want to ask him if they’re going to make the same mistakes they made the last time.”

“If you ask him that, he’ll tell you they have studied all the old mistakes and won’t repeat them.”

“I heard him say something like that when I was a child. He said it the night you played the Goldberg Variations. I’ve never forgotten the expression on his face when he said it.”

She did not reply and there was a silence of almost a minute before Conrad broke it.

“Mother, no country in Europe wants war except Germany.”

“The people don’t want it. I don’t want it.”

“Not even the young?”

She sighed. “They have no idea of what war is like.”

“All this talk about not repeating the old mistakes – don’t they realize that the only mistake that mattered the last time was that the war happened at all? Don’t the soldiers and sailors understand that?”

“If you asked your father that question, I suppose you know what his answer would be?”

“That he is a sailor and that politics is the business of the government?”

She nodded.

“Does he trust Hitler?”

“I truly can’t say yes or no to that. He never makes it necessary to ask him. What he does say is, look at Germany now and remember what it was like before Hitler became the Chancellor. Many people say that. In Germany everyone is working again. So your father says, the facts speak.”

“Soon there will be new facts and they’ll speak, too.”

“Conrad, please! There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can say except that he is my husband.”

She asked if he was ready for coffee and while she was making it he stood up and looked out the window appraisingly. Certainly this was the best apartment his parents had ever lived in and this was the best district, though for him it had none of the loveliness of Freiburg by the little Dreisam. When she returned with the coffee he asked about his young brother Siegfried, whom he hardly knew.

“I have not seen him all summer. He’s still in camp with the Hitler Jugend.”

“So Siegfried swallows all this?”

“All the youth believe in it. Poor children, they have no choice. But Siegfried is enthusiastic. He’s very proud to belong to the Hitler Jugend. He has always been strong and he loves the training.”

Frau Dehmel sipped her coffee and sat with folded hands.

“So,” Conrad said. “If war comes, Siegfried will be just the right age for the first battles.”

“He is already assigned to the navy.”

“I’m glad it’s not the army. The navy won’t be strong enough to fight for years.”

With no change of expression, she said, “Siegfried intends to serve in submarines. He’s fascinated by them. He dreams of torpedoing ships. He loves to study technical things about submarines. One torpedo, one ship. Twelve ships sunk on every voyage. That’s the way he talks about it.”

“Oh, my God! So it’s going to be just the same as the last time.”

Conrad relit his pipe and walked to the window feeling unnatural. Looking out the window with his back to her he asked if she would play something for him.

“I play so badly now.”

“Does it hurt your wrist to play?”

“Not too much.”

She rose from the chair, went to the piano, and sat for a moment with her head bowed, thinking. He would always remember her in this posture. Then she lifted her hands and began playing one of the last Beethoven sonatas, the one in A-major that begins with a quiet, rippling contemplation, and he remembered that this was what she had played for his grandfather that night in his childhood after he had brought home the rabbits. She finished and he said it was lovely. She said it was lovely only in her mind and returned to her chair.

“When I knew you were coming home,” she said, “I visited the Institut. The public doors are closed for the rest of the month because they’re making renovations inside. You will have to enter by the door leading into the basement. You will find somebody there who will take you to Professor Rosenthal.”

“Have you met Professor Rosenthal?”

“I didn’t ask to meet him.”

“Why not?”

“I thought it best not to.”

She left him again to get their lunch. She had everything ready and only ten minutes elapsed before she came in with a soufflé, delicious after the restaurant meals he had been eating in London. He thought of Hanna and wanted to tell his mother about her, but instead he asked if she had heard anything of Eva Schmidt. Her expression hardened.

“She came here three weeks ago and asked a number of questions about you. I have the impression that you would have little difficulty in getting a divorce from her now.”

“So she wants to marry somebody else?”

“She didn’t say that, but it was obvious to me that she does, so I made some discreet enquiries. He’s an officer in the Gestapo. I suppose you know what that means?”

“Are they as bad as they’re supposed to be?”

“Much worse. Your father is worried about them because Himmler is using the secret police as a cloak to build a private army of his own. The regular army officers despise them, of course. Your father’s not afraid of the Gestapo on his own account, but he’s afraid they’ll disgrace the country. He didn’t believe me when I told him that it won’t be long before the officers in all the services will be afraid of them.” She looked at him and she had never seemed more serious. “For your own protection you must tell me this truly – does Eva hate you very much?”

“I think she despises me.”

“Don’t be surprised if I say that I hope that’s true, but I don’t really believe it. Soon after she came home from London she became a Hitler Girl, but she’s beyond that now. She’s the mistress of this Gestapo officer. He’s very important and he has an evil reputation. He’s a married man with children and Eva is stupid enough to believe that he will leave his wife to marry her. You mentioned a girl you met in London but you told me nothing about her. Is she English?”

“No, German.”

I can imagine the shy smile with which Conrad continued. He was always shy about his personal feelings.

“How the man who was obtuse enough to marry Eva Schmidt should have been lucky enough to discover Hanna Erlich I can’t understand. She’s been wonderful, Mother.”

Her face tightened. “Erlich, did you say? That’s frequently a Jewish name.”

“None of them have been practising Jews for nearly a century. Her mother isn’t Jewish at all.”

“That might not make much difference. By the way, your father knows a Major-General Erlich. Is there a connection?”

“He’s Hanna’s uncle. She’s connected with some very interesting people.”

His mother seemed relieved, but not entirely so. “If a Wehr-macht general is her uncle, that could make her safe – for a while, at least. I can’t help hearing a lot of professional service gossip. The high command still believes it can control the government. I hope they’re right, but I’m only a woman. Anyway, General Erlich has a very good reputation in the service.”

“Hanna’s father is Dr. Erlich, the psychiatrist. I’ve never met him, but he sounds like a fascinating man. Some things Hanna tells me about his ideas seem strange, though. He believes that the thing Hitler is most of all sincere about is this craziness about the Jews. Do you think he’s right?”

She compressed her lips and laid her hand on Conrad’s knee. “It’s safe for you to talk like that here, but in public you must never speak of him as ‘Hitler.’ Only as the Führer.”

“Hanna says she will never return to Germany while he’s in power except on one condition – if her family needs her. Do you think she’s exaggerating?”

“Do I think? Most of us have decided that the best thing is not to think at all. As you know, your father has nothing against the Jews, but he becomes very uncomfortable if I ever ask him about that aspect of Hitler’s government.”

A long silence fell between them and finally his mother broke it.

“I’ve never interfered with your life, Conrad. I don’t want to worry you or make you change your habits, but I have to tell you this. You have always been outspoken and I’ve loved you for that. But you’ve also had a tendency to think aloud. Now please listen to me, carefully. You’ve been away so long that you simply don’t understand how things are here. Don’t mention certain words in public. Don’t mention the word ‘Russia’ in a bus or a streetcar. It is best not to talk about politics at all. But if you do – and I suppose you will do it – make sure you know who you’re talking with. And make sure it’s in a public park or a room with the doors locked.”

His expression froze as their eyes locked.

“Has it really come to this?”

“It came to this very quickly. Suddenly it was here. You know that slogan of theirs – ‘Today we have Germany, tomorrow the whole world’? We didn’t take it seriously. It seemed too insane. But the young believe it now. For them it’s a certainty. If you say something often enough and loud enough –” she lifted her hands in the old gesture and let them drop in her lap, “for the young the program is all settled. They believe that every detail has been worked out. The Leader is infallible and the young follow him – like Siegfried, deliriously happy.”

He sat in silence and remembered Hanna saying that Hitler was a genius. He looked at his watch and rose to leave for the Institut. Then he looked down at his mother and felt sad and helpless, knowing she loved his father and therefore had to accept what her husband wanted against all her better judgement. He wondered if there are many things more destructive that one person can do to another than what his father’s one-track mind was doing to his mother. He looked at her steadily and full of pity.

“Mother?” he said quietly.

“Yes, Conrad?”

“I have been very stupid these past years. Trying to escape, I suppose. Escape into the safety of History and now into – well, as you said, I’ve been living in England. What’s happening here seems unreal in England. If I’ve been living there, a German, and couldn’t really believe it, why should anyone be surprised that the English believe it even less? But when they finally do believe it –”

She said nothing. He bent, caressed her cheeks with his fingertips, and kissed her forehead. He felt a profound and helpless love for her.

“Mother?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me something. Do they think here – I mean the Nazis – do they think the English are stupid because they’re so casual?”

“How do I know what they think?”

“At the moment the English leaders are old and blind. But there are other English – I’ve met some of them – and they’re terrifyingly intelligent. They’re never more dangerous, these men, than when they seem casual. Does Father understand that?”

The son and the mother looked at each other and later Conrad recorded this in his diary:

“At last I was growing out of the intellectual cocoon I’d been living in ever since I went to the university. This was the first time it had ever occurred to me that it might be interesting to understand my mother and her thoughts. Like most sons who have had a loving mother, I had taken her for granted. Now for the first time I was watching her tragedy.

“She had understanding, deep and experienced, but she had no authority. She had two sons she loved and who loved her, but they were diametrically opposed. She had a husband she loved and who loved her, but their interests were so different they might have been living on different planets. She had loved her country and now her country had become Hitler’s. She had an understanding so total that she had resigned herself to the fact that her understanding made no difference.

“Tears filled my eyes and I embraced her and she welcomed it. Then she stood apart from me and said quietly, ‘I love your father. I love Siegfried and I love you. To you I am closest, but this is a luxury I cannot afford to show.’ We had been such a disciplined family that such intimacy was rare with us. You, dear Stephanie, also belonged to a disciplined family, but in your family it was the mother who was dominant. It was easier for your mother than for mine.

“Then Mother said, ‘I don’t know if this matters, but your father has always agreed with what you said about the English. He thinks the best of them are the most intelligent people in the world. So he tells me that just because they’re intelligent, England will be either neutral or Germany’s ally.’

“I said, ‘Oh my God!’

“Then I kissed her on the forehead and said that I had to leave.”

When he reached the Grosser Kurfürst Institut he entered by the back door as his mother had told him, descended to the basement, and after wandering through many corridors found the porter in a glassed-in cubicle equipped with a small telephone switchboard. The man looked almost as big and brutal as the night porter of his hotel and he was reading a Nazi tabloid called Der Stürmer. Behind him was the same picture he had seen in the hotel and the same slogan:

Trittst du als Deutscher hier hinein
Soll stets dein Gruss Heil Hitler sein.

He dispensed with any kind of greeting and asked the porter how he could find the chambers of Professor Rosenthal. The man laid down his paper and stared at him truculently.

“What do you want with Rosenthal?”

“I am Dr. Dehmel. I have come here from London to work with Professor Rosenthal.”

The porter’s heavy face broke open into an insolent smile. “Well, Herr Doktor, if you want to see Rosenthal, you’d better see him now. Follow me.”

Behind the broad and muscular rump of the porter, his pants an acid green exuding a faint smell of masculine sweat, he plodded up one flight of metal stairs and two flights of marble stairs and followed down a long corridor to a large door, which the porter jerked open without knocking.

“Rosenthal!” he bellowed. “Are you still there, Rosenthal? Come here.”

A small, delicately formed man emerged from an inner room. Professor Rosenthal looked about fifty years old, had graying hair and large, humorous eyes, and was immaculately dressed in a light-gray suit. He spoke to Conrad as though the porter were not there.

“And you, I believe, are Dr. Conrad Dehmel? I’m so happy to meet you at last.”

“He says he’s Dehmel,” the porter barked.

“And so he is,” said the professor.

Conrad turned to the porter and said quietly, “You are very rude and very insolent. In future when you speak in my presence you will be polite.”

The big man was taken aback; his mouth opened and stayed open while he thought of something to say.

Conrad looked straight at him and said, “It might interest you to know, porter, that I am well acquainted with some people you should respect. My father is a close associate of the Grand Admiral of the Reich. I have told you to be courteous. Now, have you understood?”

The stupid face solidified, clarified, and the hulking body crashed to attention.

“Bestimmt, Herr Doktor!”

“That’s better. Now I request you to leave us.”

“Hitler!” the man barked, went about face, and marched away like a soldier. Professor Rosenthal closed the door, locked it, and turned to Conrad with a smile.

“That was nicely done, Dehmel. I had forgotten that your father is a naval officer.”

“I believe he will soon be a rear-admiral.”

“Even if he wasn’t, that blockhead would have believed you. You spoke your lines very well indeed. Suddenly I feel much better. Shall we sit down and talk quietly?”

The professor seated himself erect and small behind an inlaid seventeenth-century desk, his fingertips pressed together. Conrad sat in a comfortable chair opposite him.

“So, my dear Dehmel, you have been living in England while most of this was going on here. How long is it since you returned?”

“I reached Berlin only last night.”

“And already you see how it is here?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“As a Roman historian you should have little difficulty believing it. If you give a barbarian a centimeter, he immediately demands a meter. Give him a meter and he demands a kilometer.” The expressive hands dropped to the desk. “You have seen already how it is with me. But I wonder if you know how it is with yourself?”

“With myself?”

Though the professor smiled again, he was looking at Conrad very carefully. He waited for Conrad to speak.

“Herr Professor,” Conrad said, “how is it possible that a man like that porter could dare speak to you like that?”

“You know, I suppose, that I am a Jew.”

“But a man like you, sir!”

“Fortunately I have some influential friends and at the moment the authorities do not think it worth their while to make me a minor cause célèbre. In other words, I don’t expect to be arrested within the next few days. But let me tell you, Dehmel, if I were to continue to stay here much longer I would soon find myself in a camp. As it is, they have merely dismissed me. I had been expecting it for some time, but the dismissal arrived only two days ago. I immediately wrote to tell you this, but you must have left London before my letter arrived.”

Conrad stared at the great scholar he had honored so long and there was nothing he could think of saying.

“I wonder how long it will be,” the professor remarked, “before Europe understands that these people intend to do exactly what they say? It is quite fantastic. At least ninety percent of this nation have entirely ceased to think.” He rose from his desk. “Perhaps it would be better if we went into the inner room. That oaf may return and put his ear to the keyhole.”

Conrad followed him and saw many closed packing cases lying on the floor and one still open, half filled with books.

“As you see,” the professor said, “I have almost finished packing. I intensely dislike doing things in a hurry, but these last two days I have been in a very great hurry. Somebody may change his mind about my exit visa. If nobody does, I will be in Brussels within forty-eight hours. Thank God – or thank my wife’s foresight – she and my three children have been there since last May.”

Conrad glanced at the packing cases. “At any rate they allow you to take out your property.”

“Not entirely. They will let me take out five hundred marks. The rest of my savings, except for a small sum I deposited in a Brussels bank two years ago, they will confiscate under the cover of what one of their officials told me is an emigration tax. It is difficult to accommodate one’s self to the mentality of these people. They allow me to take out my books, though they could sell them abroad. But then, as you must have heard, they burn books these days and some of the books they have burned were extremely valuable. Remember Danton? ‘In the face of the kings of Europe we throw the head of a king.’ For them it would be, ‘In the face of civilization we blow the smoke of burning books.’ And speaking of smoke, would you care to smoke yourself? I don’t smoke any more, but by all means do so if you feel like it.”

Conrad took out his pipe, stuffed it, lit it, and felt terrible.

“Sir,” he said slowly, “what I have just seen and heard sickens me. For years I’ve looked forward to working under you. Possibly even with you. Apart from your learning” – he hoped the professor would not think him unctuous – “it’s also your style. There’s delight and wonder in the style of your scholarship, Herr Professor. It was the proudest moment of my life when you accepted me.”

“Thank you, Dehmel. Ever since my friend Rostovtzev wrote to me about you, I had been looking forward to working with you. You’re an excellent scholar for your age.” He shrugged. “Basic scholarship is absolutely essential, but of course it’s only a tool to help us understand larger things. You may go far with experience. I’d have liked to go a few steps of the way with you, but it seems impossible.”

Feeling every moment more miserable, Conrad said, “You do me too much honor.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Professor Rosenthal quietly. “Many things remain to be seen.”

There was something in Rosenthal’s expression that made Conrad feel even more uncomfortable.

“Sir,” he said, “I can’t imagine anyone being able to fill your position here. But I suppose I must ask you who has been nominated to it.”

The professor, his face grave, was silent while he studied Conrad. Then he nodded as though he were nodding to himself.

“It is, of course, possible that they merely wished to surprise you. They enjoy surprising people. Surprising people has been the secret of their success so far.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“Are you sure you don’t?”

Conrad was completely confused. Then, with an expression the like of which Conrad had never seen, Rosenthal confronted him.

“Since you say you don’t know who my successor is, I will tell you. It’s you.”

“What!”

The professor’s face was stern. “You heard me, Dehmel.”

“But sir, this is incredible. This is absolutely impossible. I knew nothing of it. Do you believe I would have come here if I’d known that?”

The older man’s face, which for an instant has been as implacable as the face of a judge of Israel, softened and became urbane again.

“Forgive me, Dehmel.”

“For what, sir?”

“For being careful. I didn’t really believe that you knew. But these days –” he shrugged slightly, “these days to be sure even of a certainty seems a dangerous luxury. Forgive me, anyway. Of course you didn’t know.”

“Sir, believe me, if I had known – I don’t know what to say.” The professor laughed quietly, then uproariously.

“I see nothing to laugh at, sir,” said Conrad.

“If you were my age, you would. Perhaps after a few more years you will understand why I laugh. For one thing, you are going to receive a salary much higher than you anticipated. They told me the figure, and it’s thirty percent more than I ever received in my life. As the Devil is supposed to have said to Faust, the world is yours.”

Conrad flushed and said, “Professor Rosenthal, if a Jew can’t help being what he was born, neither can a German. That’s not fair.”

The professor ceased smiling. “Touché, mon cher Dehmel.”

“But why me? That’s what I can’t understand. Why do they appoint me?”

“I didn’t understand it either, but since you told me that your father is about to become an admiral, perhaps that explains it.”

Conrad sat erect and looked straight into the professor’s eyes. “My father has been a naval officer for all of his adult life, but he’s never been a Nazi and he isn’t one now.”

“Hardly any of our naval officers are Nazis, but they are certainly officers.”

The wise Jewish face looked into the earnest, wounded eyes of the young German and Conrad did not speak.

“You are an officer’s son,” the professor said reflectively. “Officers here obey orders. Therefore it might be assumed that you would do the same. That’s the logical explanation.” He shook his head. “Which is why I don’t believe it’s the right one. Nothing here is normal, Dehmel. What we have here is the logic of Alice in Wonderland – a book I’m sure none of them have read. Logical conclusions proceeding from absurd hypotheses. Logic can never explain the Nazis. Why, for instance, do they take such elaborate steps to demonstrate that their monstrous crimes are legal? Frankly, I have no idea why they appointed you. What I do know is that you’ll find yourself in a very strange situation.”

“An impossible one.”

Still holding his distance a little, the professor went on: “However, for a young man wishing to become an historian, this could be a unique opportunity.”

Conrad continued silent and the professor surveyed him.

“Providing, of course, that you survive. Providing, again, that any world survives that may be interested in history and truth. There is only a single historian alive today who has had the experience to understand these people. That’s Rostovtzev, of course. He saw Lenin in action. He even met him personally. The rest of us have studied historical texts that never dealt with people like the Nazis.”

Rosenthal put his fingertips together and contemplated them. Had he imbued himself so deeply with the art of the Renaissance that he had absorbed the gestures of a bishop? Conrad wondered. Rosenthal continued.

“All the European foreign offices are floundering because they’re dealing with something they’ve never had to deal with before. They can’t bring themselves to accept that a maniac from the flophouses of Vienna has become the total will of a modern civilized nation. Das Land der Dichter und Denker! They think he’s only playing politics. And by God, so he is! And what politics! Kleiner Mann, was nun? The little people love him.”

Conrad remained silent, remembering bitterly what Hanna had told him in London.

The professor continued to think aloud. “At least these Nazis have made some of our high-flown survivals of nineteenth-century academics wonder what they were talking about when they became portentous about what they call ‘the dignity of history.’ The only dignity I ever found in political history was the incredible capacity of ordinary people to survive what governments have done to them. Most of our German scholars lost little time in losing their dignity lately. But who am I to blame them? We were all trained to be rationalists, n’est-ce pas? Not the stuff out of which martyrs are made, Dehmel. The Nazis knew that not many of that sort would risk torture for the sake of an idea.”

“Bruno did.”

“Bruno was in holy orders. But Galileo didn’t, and who has blamed him for not giving the priests the pleasure of burning him alive? One can die for the love of a dear one. For a very dear one, I can imagine a man betraying his soul. But to die for an abstract principle that will probably be proved wrong after we’re dead? It would have done science no good if Galileo had gone to the stake.” He paused. “I have been very lucky. Because I’m a Jew, the Nazis absolved me from the necessity of making a moral choice. But for an echt German like Heisenberg the dilemma may become a terrible one.”

Suddenly, Conrad shouted, “No!”

“No to what, Dehmel?”

“I refuse to accept this position. Me, coming here to be a student under a great man and then to be asked to take his place! I refuse, I tell you. I refuse. I also would like to have a little dignity.”

Again the professor placed his thin elbows on the table with the fingertips touching. Watching those subtle, experienced eyes observing his own, Conrad suddenly realized that Rosenthal was beginning to like him.

Rosenthal smiled. “You know, Dehmel, I’m beginning to think that our pompous friend Spengler should be taken seriously. His reasons for his theory about the decline of the West are typically romantic, and explain nothing. But his conclusions? If Hitler loses this war he’s going to make – and in gloomier moments I’m not sure that he will – what is the world going to be like thirty or forty years from now? Will there be anyone left who will even understand what ethics are? Or will they only consider expediencies?”

Conrad had nothing to say. He was too miserable, too shocked, and above all too ashamed of himself for having been so confident in his own intelligence. Two days of Hitler’s Germany!

Years later in Canada he wrote it down:

“They humbled me for the rest of my life. My old dream of earning the right to belong to civilization as its interpreter vanished. What was needed now was not to belong to the old civilization, but to survive this nihilism in order to preserve the seeds of a new civilization. My response to the challenge was not intellectual. It was purely physical. It was animalistic. As they would say today in English, so I thought then. Fuck you bastards! I’m going to survive you.”

But the professor was speaking. “We must be practical. Please try to listen to me. I know why you’re disturbed, but in conscience I must advise you to make no issue about the position they’re giving you. You must accept it.” He held up his hand as Conrad was about to protest. “A moment, please. I don’t think you have any choice. The administration will be no problem for you because the Institut has been taken over by the party and functionaries will manage it. As for the history of art, there are only two arts they’re interested in. One is the art of controlling the masses and the other is the art of war. A month ago one of them was here and told me the Führer has a great interest in art so long as it’s Aryan art. I had to listen to it with a straight face.”

“Does Hitler really care about art?”

The professor smiled. “You seem to have forgotten that he once was an artist himself.”

Conrad made a gesture of contempt and the professor smiled again. “Have you seen any of his pictures?”

“No.”

“I have. Some of his watercolors are very delicately done.”

“Do you really mean this?”

“So delicately done that they scared me. The contrast between those sentimental, petit bourgeois pictures and what the rest of the man is – my God, Dehmel, the split in his personality must be appalling.”

Conrad looked out the window to a pigeon bobbing its head as it strutted along the window ledge. The bird suddenly took off and flew out of sight and Conrad looked back again to Professor Rosenthal.

“In other words, you’re telling me he’s insane.”

“If he loses his war he’ll certainly be called insane. But if he wins it?” He shrugged. “As for his henchmen, hardly one of them would get a job with any responsible business company in the land. By themselves they’re scum. But they’re gamblers and he gives them the confidence to believe they can’t lose. Are you familiar with the work of Professor Oster in Princeton?”

“Isn’t he the comparative philologist?”

“That’s the man. He and I have had a correspondence for quite a few years and thanks to him I expect to be going to America soon. I have been offered a post in the Flexner Institute in Princeton. But to return to Oster.

“He understands some fifty languages, but what sets him apart is that he has used them to study the common denominators in cultures. It seems important to Oster that in every culture – even in subcultures – gambling has always been a favorite pastime.”

Conrad had no idea where this was leading and said so. The professor continued.

“Like most of us, I had assumed that gambling is simply a stupid habit leading to a waste of time and money. But as Oster sees it, gambling for pleasure is a sport and like all sports it’s a sublimation of a profound instinct. Without it we’d still be in the trees. The biggest gamble in our evolution must have happened when our forebears came out of the trees and took their chances on the ground with the snakes and the lions. If these pedants who talk about the ‘laws of history’ understood the role of the gambling instinct, maybe they’d understand what makes history. Hitler and his gang, every man-jack of them, they’re not only gamblers but gamblers on an enormous scale and so far they’ve been lucky. And against them what do we see? Not one among the present leaders of France and England. Not one among our German communists.” He gave a contemptuous shrug. “Lenin was a prime gambler, but Thaelmann and the rest of our communists were doctrinaire bureaucrats. That’s why they’re dead or in concentration camps.”

Conrad was confused and said nothing. Neither did the professor, and Conrad interpreted his silence as a signal that the interview was over. He looked at his watch, got to his feet, and apologized for having overstayed his time. But the professor had been thinking of something else.

“Not at all, Dehmel. My packing is almost finished and I was hoping you’d have lunch with me.”

“I’d be honored, sir, but surely –”

Rosenthal waved the protest aside. “My last lunch in Berlin – I would not like to take it alone. But as it would be difficult to talk of serious business while we’re walking to the restaurant, and inadvisable to talk seriously about anything when we get there, I think there are a few matters I should tell you before we leave.”

Conrad sat down again and said, “When I told you I intended to refuse this position, I meant it.”

“And when I advised you not to refuse, I also meant it.”

“But why?”

“Take my word for it.”

Thinking of Hanna again, realizing even more what a blunder he had made in coming home, he said, “Why can’t I go to America myself?”

“Because you didn’t think of it before you came home and accepted a job here.” The professor twinkled. “However, when in the course of human events – as the Americans would say – you should wish to come to America at a time when it would be safe for you to escape from here, don’t hesitate to let me know. My friend Einstein has also been invited to Princeton. I’ll be seeing him in Brussels in a few days.”

“Will even Einstein have to leave Europe?”

“Yes, and for stronger reasons than any of the rest of us. You know, Dehmel, Einstein is the least worldly man I have ever met. He’s not at all like me. Now I suppose I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in an ivory tower working on the history of art, and I assure you that the ivory tower is not a habitat that suits my temperament. For Einstein, of course, it would be perfect. He could continue to dream in higher mathematics and play his violin badly and listen to Mozart played well and take his rambles in the countryside and forget where he was after he had lost himself in contemplation of a wildflower or a snowflake. Such a life would be perfect for Einstein and this I find sad. Because for him of all people the ivory tower will be impossible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You were in Göttingen, were you not? Surely you know what the physicists are up to these days? I was told that you know Heisenberg personally.”

“I met him several times, but I can’t claim to know him.”

“As I mentioned before, I pity Heisenberg. Such an aristocratic mind must despise the Nazis, but the Nazis will crave his knowledge. At any rate, those marvellously innocent, intricate equations of Einstein’s finally resolved themselves into a single conclusion so small that it could be printed in large letters on a postage stamp. Yet out of that equation there may come – I’m told by experts that it’s sure to come – the means of producing a small sample of the primal force which exploded the original matter of the universe. I don’t have to tell you that at no period in the history of the world could it have come at a worse time than now.”

Conrad sat still, his mind churning. The professor then remarked that there were some details about the Institut that he should tell him and for the next half-hour he gave a factual description of the organization as it had been during his own time there. He then discussed some of the men who would be Conrad’s colleagues and finally Conrad interrupted him.

“But these men are all senior to me by years. It would be intolerable for them to have a young man like me as their Director.”

“Under normal circumstances it certainly would be intolerable, but the present circumstances aren’t normal. All but two of them are frightened men. The two who aren’t have a great admiration for the military, and for Hitler. But there are three men who I think will be reasonable.”

Conrad shook his head. “No, I can’t.”

“I’m not saying it will be pleasant for you. But if you are tactful and very careful, there are at least three colleagues who would understand and even respect your personal position. Before I leave, I intend to speak to them about you.”

“Sir, this grows worse and worse.”

“You will discover ways. I suppose you know that the department which now controls this institution is the Ministry of Public Enlightenment?”

“Goebbels?”

“Of course.”

Conrad felt sick. He also felt more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

“Is there no way I can get out of this? I’m determined to refuse it. I’d be in an impossible situation.”

The professor, who had managed most of the time to look cheerful, now looked grim.

“Dehmel, I’ve decided that I like you. I’ve warned you twice not to refuse. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. These people are insecure. If you refuse they will take it very personally.”

Conrad looked at the floor, his pipe cold in his hand. “When am I supposed to begin working here?”

“On the first day of next week.”

Conrad looked up, feeling sudden relief. “In that case I’ll return to England tomorrow.”

“Poor man! Do you seriously believe you would be allowed to leave?”

“Would they know?”

“They would know, all right. You are a German citizen and that makes you a property of the state. You accepted a position here while you were still abroad. You may be sure they have made many enquiries about you before you came home. Now, by coming home, you have signalled to them that you have accepted them and approve of them.” Suddenly Rosenthal laughed. “By God, that could be the reason why they appointed you Director!”

Conrad was aghast and felt weak at the back of the knees.

“Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that your father’s rank had anything to do with their decision. Men like Goebbels have a fanatical hatred and jealousy of the old military and naval castes. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what their motives were. You’re here, and they won’t let you go.”

Conrad was breathing heavily. “But what can I do? What can I do now?”

“Learn to dissimulate, like millions of others. You know the old tag – qui non vult dissimulare, non potest regnare. In your case it will not be a matter of dissimulating in order to rule, but in order to survive. It won’t come easily to you, which is one reason why I like you. But I’m afraid you have no other choice.”

A long silence fell between them and Conrad sensed the older man’s sadness. This man whose work he had reverenced, on whom he had pinned so many of his own hopes – it was shattering to see him treated like this and talking like this. He thought of Hanna and wondered whether he would ever see her again. She had known the truth, had told him the truth, had even warned him that Rosenthal would be dismissed, but because he had been so set in the tradition of the old German scholarship he had refused to believe her. He could almost hear the clang of the gate as it shut on him.

Professor Rosenthal had risen to his feet and was smiling again. “Alors, mon cher Dehmel, allons au déjeuner.”

SIX

Two days later Conrad rented a small furnished apartment not far from his parents. All he had to do to settle in was to order his book boxes from the station, unpack them, and hang up and put into drawers his clothes. If he had to get out in a hurry his books would have to be sacrificed.

The next evening his mother telephoned to say that his father had returned from Kiel and wished to see him, but that he was very tired and would have to be at his desk at 0730 hours the next morning. Conrad was to meet him in the Admiralty at l145 hours and he wondered what this might mean. His father was so methodical that he must have a reason for such a particular time.

It was another bright morning with a cool breeze flooding the streets as Conrad walked through central Berlin toward the Admiralty. There was a tang of autumn in the air and this clear wind had blown down across the Baltic from Scandinavia. Tension had been growing in him steadily since he had said good-bye to Professor Rosenthal and he hoped that a brisk walk would ease some of it. Under his present circumstances a meeting with his father might easily be traumatic.

When he reached the Admiralty the warrant officer on duty at the doors was expecting him. He was a rugged, cheerful, brown-faced sailor in his middle forties and when Conrad told him he had an appointment with Captain Dehmel, he smiled broadly.

“Rear-Admiral Dehmel, Herr Doktor. Your father’s promotion became official this morning and we’re very happy about it here. I had the honor to serve in the same ship with your Herr Vater in the war. I served in ‘Bertha turret’ – she was the second one forward and the only one that was not destroyed. Your Herr Vater was the finest gunnery officer in the fleet.”

“That says much.”

“With respect, Herr Doktor, it says more than anyone who was not there could ever know.”

“A sailor I met on the Albert Ballin on the way home told me the same thing.”

“And now he’s Rear-Admiral.”

Conrad was passed on to another sailor who led him to his father’s room. A male secretary was inside, a lieutenant in uniform, who asked him to take a seat and said that the Rear-Admiral would be back very soon. Five minutes later he was. Conrad rose, father and son shook hands, and whatever emotion the father felt on seeing his son after these years was compressed into a single sentence:

“I’m glad you decided to come home.”

Conrad congratulated his father on his new rank, Gottfried Dehmel nodded, and they both sat down, the father behind his desk. He turned to the lieutenant and said, “Dismissed for two hours, Richter.” The lieutenant left the room and the father surveyed the son and the son the father.

Gottfried Dehmel had reached the time in a lean man’s life when at last his age was beginning to show. The scar on his cheekbone where the sailor had struck him now seemed a natural part of his face. His forehead was at least an inch higher than it had been three years ago, his hair was grizzled, and he had shaved off his moustache and small, spiked beard. He had never been a heavy man, but now his body was so wiry it made Conrad think of “a network of finely integrated nerves held in place by the armor of lean, hard muscles.” He asked his father if his back still troubled him.

“Much less. I have found a Swedish physiotherapist who has done wonders. The sciatic pain has gone and he has taught me exercises to control the muscles which support the spinal column. Much more is known about backs these days. How did you find your mother?”

“As always.”

“Yes,” Gottfried Dehmel said quietly, “as always.” He looked down at his desk and toyed with a pencil. “I have been told that you have been appointed Director of the Institut.” He raised his officer’s eyes and looked at Conrad severely. “Is this correct?”

“It seems that it’s true, but it’s not correct.”

“It certainly isn’t. You must refuse it.”

“I told Professor Rosenthal that I wished to refuse it.”

“Then you have not refused it officially?”

“He told me I’m in no position to do so. He said that Dr. Goebbels would take a refusal as a deliberate insubordination and insult.”

The Rear-Admiral’s face gave an involuntary twitch of disgust. He looked down at his desk and again the fingers of his right hand toyed with a pencil.

“There are some things these days that I don’t –” he decided not to finish the sentence and changed it to another. “However, you can avoid this embarrassment if you volunteer for the services.”

“I have not been trained for the services, Father.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the routine services. I was thinking of the Intelligence. A scholar’s training is just what’s required there. Thank God the Abwehr has been retained by the navy. Its Chief is a most remarkable man. In the last war he served in the Dresden and later in submarines and Intelligence. I suppose you know the record of the Dresden?”

“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”

Gottfried Dehmel frowned. “People forget too quickly. She was the only light cruiser to escape when the English finished off poor von Spee in the South Atlantic. She dodged the English for nearly four months until they trapped her at Juan Fernandez Island. Her entire crew was interned by the Chilean authorities and put in a camp on the island. This officer escaped to the mainland and walked through the Andes in winter. He reached Buenos Aires and got passage back to Europe on a neutral ship. After that he began his intelligence work in Spain. A man very rare, Conrad, very remarkable.” He glanced at his watch. “I will introduce you to him at 1230 hours. We may even have lunch together, the three of us. We hold the same rank, but he is senior to me and much more influential.”

“But I have no intention –”

“We can discuss that later. Meanwhile, I believe you have little confidence in our navy. Well, let me assure you that if you serve as I suggest, you will become a part of something far more valuable to your country than you realize. I’m permitted to show you certain things on the understanding that you don’t talk to anyone else about them. Will you give me your word?”

“That will depend on what you tell me.”

“It will be nothing dishonorable or political.”

“Then I give you my word.”

“Intelligence, to begin with. Ours was generally bad in the last war and the English made fools of it. Let me promise you it won’t be bad the next time.”

Gottfried Dehmel went on to describe the kind of navy he and his brother officers were planning. He never raised his voice but his eyes shone with pride as he spoke. There would be five, possibly eight, of the most powerful battleships ever built, ships so strong they boggled the mind. They would be constructed of specially hardened steel and would be divided into so many watertight compartments that a torpedo on their flanks would be no more dangerous than a bee sting.

(Conrad’s note: “I had a vision of hundreds of men frying like pork in those labyrinths of specially hardened steel when great shells pierced their armor and exploded inside. In the case of two of them, this is precisely what happened a few years later.”)

His father was going on: Two super-battleships faster and stronger than anything the English had would be ready in eighteen months. The three ships the English called pocket battleships were ready even now. Splendid new heavy cruisers, more than two hundred submarines, even aircraft carriers much more modern than the antiquated ones the English had. As the English would have to disperse their ships to guard their trade routes, a fast German squadron could pick its own moment to break out. It could concentrate at sea and be refuelled and revictualled by supply ships. It would be fast enough to avoid any stronger concentration and strong enough to destroy any force weaker. In this way England could be starved into making peace. But above all there would be a signalling system unlike anything ever known. It would be lightning fast, it would be infallible, and its codes would be unbreakable. This was the ultimate secret weapon the Leader had spoken about. Its details, of course, he could not reveal to anyone.

Conrad listened to this, watched the pride in his father’s face, and felt despair.

“How long will it take to produce this navy?” he asked finally.

“Six or seven years.”

“The way Hitler’s going, do you seriously believe you’re going to have those six or seven years?”

“Get into the habit of calling him the Führer and don’t judge him by some of his favorites like Goering and Goebbels. He made that promise to the Grand Admiral. No matter what the provocation, the Führer will keep out of a major war until the fleet is ready.”

“Did the Grand Admiral believe him?”

“Why do you persist in asking questions like that?”

“I have been trained to ask questions, Father. Now I’ll ask you another. Do you think the English will do nothing while all this is going on?”

Gottfried Dehmel made a gesture of impatience. “How many times do people have to be told that the last thing we want is a war with England? And the last thing England wants is a war with us.”

“Then why in God’s name all this preparation?”

His father surveyed him with the quiet smile of an unsubtle man who thinks he is being farsighted.

“For centuries the English have been the most aggressive nation on earth. But what is England now? A tired, divided country. Their socialists hate us, naturally. But their aristocrats hate their socialists worse than they hate anyone else. I don’t mean the English like us. They have never liked any foreign country. But they’re shrewd enough to know that Germany is their only shield against Bolshevism. They don’t want to see us stronger than themselves, but they have no choice in the matter. Therefore” – Gottfried Dehmel smiled triumphantly – “if we have a strong navy and profess friendship, the English ruling classes will insist on remaining neutral. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if they became our ally against the East.”

Conrad said nothing and thought, Oh my God what a people we are! Will we ever understand what we do to ourselves?

His father rose to his feet. “Come,” he said, “I have permission to show you something.”

He opened a door in the rear of his study and switched on a light, and Conrad followed him into a small room where he saw what looked like a miniature navy.

“Models of the ships we intend to build,” Gottfried Dehmel said. “Some of them are built already.”

Each miniature ship-model was mounted on a wooden stand with its name engraved beneath it. Looking at the names, Conrad remarked that at least six ships bearing the same names had been sunk in the last war. Then he noticed that most of the cruisers and battleships had identical outlines and asked his father why this was so.

“So you noticed that!” His father was pleased but shy about it. “It was my own idea that their outlines should be identical. Any gunnery officer would see the point of it. In wartime conditions at sea, it is almost impossible to estimate the size of a ship merely by looking at it. At ten thousand meters a heavy cruiser can easily be mistaken for a capital ship and vice versa if their outlines are similar. I’ll give you an example. At the Skaggerak my ship destroyed the British Invincible. Her guns were as heavy as ours but we knew she had no protective armor. If we hit her, we knew our shells would penetrate and explode inside her. We also knew she was attached to their main battle fleet. Now if this ship had carried two funnels instead of three, we would have known she was a stronger ship than ours and have sheered off. But we recognized her immediately, we engaged at close range, and we blew her up with a single salvo. So you see the value of this idea. When I proposed it some years ago to our present Grand Admiral he saw it, too. But staff officers are always conservative and we had a long struggle before the idea was accepted.”

This was a long speech for Gottfried Dehmel and Conrad listened to it unhappily. His father passed his hand lovingly over the outline of one of the giant ships.

“The keels of two ships of this class have already been laid. Isn’t she beautiful? Fully loaded she’ll be forty-eight thousand tons. She’ll have a complement of about twenty-five hundred officers and men. Ships even larger are on the drawing boards.”

The very image of compact, massive, brutal power, Conrad thought as he looked at this model. Yet she was graceful because of her flared bows and perfect symmetry. He turned away, his father snapped off the light and closed the door, and they returned to his office and sat down again.

“Are you planning to serve at sea again, Father?”

“If the war comes soon enough – yes, I’m sure they’ll give me a command.”

“So the plan is to fight England again?”

Sitting behind his desk, Gottfried Dehmel rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You’ve just returned from England, so tell me. Do they want another war with us?”

Conrad wondered what was the use of saying anything, but he tried.

“Of course the English want no war. But if anything’s calculated to make them fight, it’s this great navy you’re planning. Nobody wants war but Germany.”

His father replied irritably: “Don’t you even read the newspapers? We have a naval treaty with England.”

“Which Hitler will break the moment it suits him.”

“The Führer.” His father became more irritable. “We build this navy as a guarantee of peace with England, which means peace with western Europe. You’re a scholar. You know what the Romans said. If you want peace, prepare war.”

“The English have also studied Roman history, Father.”

“Conrad,” Gottfried Dehmel said earnestly, “I wish us to agree with one another. Germany wants no war with Europe. Russia is the ultimate enemy of Europe. It has always been our destiny to defend Europe against those barbarians. It’s so long since we’ve talked together I don’t understand you. You seem to forget that my family came from North Germany. For centuries we Prussians kept the barbarians out. All Germany demands is that our position should be accepted. All Europe understands this. Even the French understand it. Hasn’t the Führer obtained everything he demanded without firing a shot? What he has demanded, and will demand, is nothing more than Germany has earned and what Europe needs. Did you meet any Englishmen except professors?”

“Some, but their professors aren’t like our professors.”

Gottfried Dehmel frowned. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. But still, they’re only professors.” His chin jerked up. “I ask you – who is there who can frustrate Germany’s destiny now?”

“God, perhaps.”

“I have already told you that in the navy we are religious men and I can’t understand what you mean by that statement.”

“It was hopeless,” Conrad wrote that night in his diary. “My father was beyond recall. I had known it ever since our last night in Freiburg, just as I had known that he was totally honorable. Being myself a German I understood him in his emotions. But being his son, I was devastated.”

Conrad said quietly, “This is all very logical, Father. Before I came home I might have argued logically as you have been doing. It didn’t take me long to know that logic is helpless in this country now.” He looked his father in the eyes. “How do you reconcile your honor with what this man is doing to the Jews?”

As though an electrode had been touched to a different part of his brain, Gottfried Dehmel’s expression changed. He sat down and again toyed with his pencil.

“The role of anyone who has been trained to serve his country as a soldier or a sailor is very difficult. The Jews? Yes, the Führer’s opinion of them is not a secret.”

Conrad said nothing.

“But within our service we can be responsible only to the service and the nation. There are some excellent Jewish officers in the navy and the Grand Admiral has no intention of dismissing them.”

“In that case will not Hitler dismiss the Grand Admiral?”

“The Führer.” Gottfried Dehmel frowned and shook his head. “He is a genius and Germany is his life. Because he is a genius, we accept that he has certain peculiarities. Also, because he is a genius, we know that he needs the navy. The Nazis are not religious. I don’t deny that. But as I told you, we in the navy are religious men and divine service is held in all our ships. We have our own traditions, which to some extent are shared with the army, but still they are different, and between the two of us, I wish the Grand Admiral was in charge of the nation’s strategy.” He paused. “Now let me tell you this. When the Führer inspected our newest ship, we received him with the traditional naval salute, not with the Nazi salute, and he accepted it. So! Does that answer your question?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand your attitude at all.”

“It grieves me, Father, that you don’t. But I’m afraid you never will.”

Gottfried Dehmel looked at his wristwatch and rose. “Now, Conrad, it is time for us to meet the Admiral.”

Conrad also rose and in a quick explosion of lonely affection, the father put his arm about his son’s shoulder.

“I wish you to understand that I’m proud of you, Conrad. It’s a scholar’s duty to ask difficult questions. The admiral we’re going to meet is familiar with your work and that has made me proud. It was he, not I, who requested this meeting. How splendid it will be, Conrad, if you and I can work together, you in your métier, I in mine!”

The austere man’s voice broke and tears filled his eyes. “My son, I loved you before you were born.”

In his diary Conrad was to write later, “One of the most horrible of all human tragedies is surely this, that an honorable man’s devotion to his profession can lay his life and honor wide open to a scoundrel. At last I understood how right Hanna had been when she said that a terrible time was coming. It was already here. My father in opposition to Hitler? The Grand Admiral in opposition? The gods were laughing at them as they swallowed the bait whole.

“But immediately after this thought came to me, I met a man who had swallowed no bait.”

SEVEN

The rear-admiral who was the chief of the Intelligence Service of the nation was a year younger than Gottfried Dehmel, but in comparison to him his father seemed to Conrad like a schoolboy. The Admiral was short and bowed in the shoulders, yet seemed sturdy and enduring, even though Conrad sensed that when younger he had suffered from ill health. His thin silver hair was brushed flat across the top of a high forehead and the sensitive lobes of his long ears fitted closely to his skull. The eyes made a mystery of his face. Most of the time they were veiled, but at moments they could flash open unnervingly bright blue. When he bade his guests welcome he spoke with a slight lisp.

While he and Gottfried Dehmel exchanged commonplaces, Conrad was silent and observed his host. He felt drawn to him instantly and did not understand why. The Admiral’s study, for that was what he called it, was more like the room of an absent-minded professor than like that of a man of power and mystery. Its shelves were littered with papers, there was a camp cot in a corner, and on his desk was a model of an obsolete light cruiser. Conrad supposed it was the Admiral’s old ship, the famous Dresden.

Suddenly Conrad was aware that the Admiral’s eyes had opened wide and were concentrated on himself. For an instant he had the sensation that his entire personality was being filtered through those eyes into an exceedingly subtle and calculating brain behind them. Then the Admiral smiled and his eyes became a turtle’s.

“I have much looked forward to meeting you, Herr Doktor,” he said.

Conrad felt instantly at ease with him. “Thank you, sir. I’m as flattered as I’m surprised.”

The Admiral rose and turned to Conrad’s father. “I suggest we go to lunch now, Dehmel. As I told you, I’m interested in your son’s scholarly work and I understand he’s just returned from England. One is interested in intelligent people who have just returned from England.”

They left the room, went downstairs, and passed through a gauntlet of salutes to a staff car waiting at the door with two small naval flags mounted on its front fenders. A warrant officer with his hand at the salute opened and closed the door for them and they drove off. When they reached their restaurant the maître d’hôtel greeted them obsequiously and showed them to a table in the rear far corner. The tables near them were empty.

The Admiral said drily, “Lately some of our friends have been planting deaf-mutes in places like this to read people’s lips.” They took their seats and he changed the subject. “I hope you care for asparagus. I confess to a lifelong weakness for it.”

So they started with golden asparagus au gratin, passed on through Vichyssoise to Heligoland lobster and then to fruit. During the luncheon the Admiral encouraged both Conrad and his father to talk, but spoke so little himself that Conrad wondered whether he was listening to a word they said. It was not until the fruit that he emerged.

“Herr Doktor,” he said as he peeled an apple, looking at the apple while he spoke, “did you like the English?”

“Most of the ones I worked with I liked.”

“You were fortunate. I have liked few English I have met, but this may have been because of my profession. I have always wished to like them because I admire them. Their philosophers are not up in the clouds as so many of ours are. They are instinctively Aristotelian. They understand that the highest morality is to consult one’s own interests and this leads them to examine with shrewdness what their interests really are. The best of them know that this way of living requires intelligence and immense mental discipline.” He paused, smiled faintly, and went on, “I am always disappointed when an Englishman behaves like a scoundrel. I have known some who have done that. But generally speaking, one must respect them. They eat lightly at lunch. We and the French eat far too much in the middle of the day.”

Clearly the Admiral never ate too much at any time of the day. He had ordered a bottle of exceptional Moselle, but took only a single glass of it. The Dehmels followed his example and when lunch was over and they rose from the table, the bottle was more than half full. They were driven back to the Tirpitzufer and when they arrived the Admiral turned to Conrad’s father.

“Could you spare me your son for a short time? I’d like to talk with him.”

“Certainly, my dear Canaris.” Gottfried Dehmel smiled happily and to Conrad he said, “I forgot to tell you that the Herr Admiral is also an exceptional scholar.”

“A very weak scholar. An amateur merely. A student – yes, I would admit that.”

Alone in the untidy office with this strange character who seemed so un-German and un-military, Conrad wondered what all this was about. He was offered a cigar and said he preferred a pipe. The Admiral lit a most fragrant cigar and contemplated Conrad through a thin veil of smoke.

“You know, Dehmel, I have always thought of myself as a European. Have you?”

Conrad smiled and felt at home. “Yes, sir, I also.”

“Three centuries ago my family was not German, but of course there was no Germany then. Apart from the English and the Scandinavians, we were all Europeans then.”

“My grandfather used to tell me the same thing, sir, when I was a child. He was born in Strassburg when it was under the French, but he did his professional work in Freiburg-im-Breisgau.”

“So I understand.”

The Admiral contemplated his cigar and said that he had read some of Conrad’s publications and had found them interesting. He asked how much further his work had gone in England and Conrad spoke of it for several minutes. He even ended by saying a few words about his Grand Design.

Canaris looked at him almost affectionately. He smiled and said, “Yes, of course. It is excellent to aim for the sky when one is young. Then perhaps one may acquire the energy to do a few small things of value.” He smiled again. “You know, Dehmel, I find epigraphy and papyrology very satisfying just in themselves. That’s where you find the human raw stuff that never changes and saves the world from its geniuses. Those inscriptions that old megalomaniac Mommsen collected! They’re windows on centuries of domestic scenes. You know them all, I’m sure. That one on the tombstone of the Roman soldier: ‘Here I lie, Marcus Manlius of the 22nd Legion. I ate a lot, I drank a lot, I loved a lot of women. Nobody can take this away from me.’ Those Roman tombstone formulas to dead wives from widowers: ‘With whom I lived for so many years without a single quarrel – sine ulla querella.’ A record of the real world, Dehmel. A record of the undefeatable human being who has had to live under governments.” In what seemed to be an afterthought, but wasn’t, he added, “What was done to Professor Rosenthal was a scandal.”

Conrad hesitated, then blurted out, “Sir, can you help me? You seem to know all about this situation at the Institut. What should I do now?”

“About accepting the directorship?”

“That was the last thing I ever dreamed of, but I was told I may have no choice.”

“Did Professor Rosenthal tell you that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He told you correctly. The minister in charge is a very venomous man.”

“Did you know Professor Rosenthal personally, sir?”

“Intimately, and for many years. It was through him that I learned about your work.”

Conrad had not realized that Rosenthal had thought so highly of him and flushed slightly.

“I suppose,” the Admiral said, “you are wondering why I could not save Rosenthal. There was no chance of that. He prevented Goebbels from looting a priceless manuscript that belonged to the Vatican and nobody could preserve his position after that. The best I could do was to make it possible for him to leave the country with his life.”

There was another silence and Conrad restrained himself from breaking it until the Admiral spoke again.

“I sympathize with you, Dehmel. This is a sad time for scholarship here. It’s a sad time for everything we value. However, your training may play a protective role until better times come. I can’t be confident that they’ll come, but one must hope.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“They know that scholars with your kind of training could be useful to them. There is a British epigraphist I have met.” He mentioned the man’s name. “He was born in Scotland but on his mother’s side he is a direct descendant of Marcus Niebuhr. Did you meet him in England?”

“I was introduced to him once in Oxford, but we had no conversation.”

“He’s still doing meticulous work in deciphering and reconstructing fragments of old Greek inscriptions. He has an incredible memory and an uncanny knack of finding missing links in the evidence. He is a very gentle person. Outside of his profession he appears as naive as a child.” The Admiral smiled ruefully. “Those English! In the last war this childlike man did us a great deal of damage. Well do I know it! For a time I was his opponent. He broke a vital Turkish code and this played its part in some of our disasters in the Middle Eastern theater. The French gave him a Legion of Honor. The English gave him nothing.” The Admiral looked at Conrad with a faint smile. “Well?”

Conrad thought carefully before saying anything. He remembered his father’s suggestion that he join the Intelligence Service and he did not like the idea at all. As though reading his thoughts, the Admiral spoke again.

“A place could certainly be found for you in my service, but not in the code department. Mathematicians are needed for most of the codes now in use. All great mathematicians tend to be eccentric. As one might expect, the English are by far the most eccentric of them all. For the Leader this could be very bad. However, our service employs all kinds of people and a place could be found for you in it. I don’t think you’d enjoy it. Our generals are excellent tacticians, but any kind of understanding of long-range strategy is beyond all of them except one. The Grand Admiral understands strategy well, but the navy here is minor compared to the army and the air force and if war comes he’ll be up against a navy four times larger.” The blue eyes fixed themselves on Conrad. “Does my candor disturb you?”

It not only disturbed Conrad, it frightened him.

“I was about to say, sir” – Conrad hesitated, then plunged – “you mentioned Intelligence. I don’t think I’d care to serve the military plans of this government. Even less its cultural policies.”

The Admiral made no comment.

“Is it true, sir, what I have been told, that all military preparations have been perfectly calculated? That a master plan exists and that everything is ready?”

The little admiral hunched forward as though the weight of his head had increased.

“In what major war has everything been successfully calculated in advance? Our Leader has some remarkable intuitions, but more than once he has said that he advances into the future with the sure step of a sleepwalker.” He shrugged. “There can be no question that he is a genius of a kind. However, though geniuses have won many campaigns, I can think of only three who have made and won great wars.”

The next silence lasted until Conrad broke it.

“My father has told me there are great plans for the navy.”

“Prodigious plans,” said the Admiral drily. “Now let’s talk of more congenial things.”

For the next half-hour they discussed various scholars of ancient and modern history and Conrad felt like a student undergoing an oral examination. Then the Admiral changed the subject again.

“I am acquainted with Major-General Helmuth Erlich,” he said. Conrad started slightly and the Admiral permitted himself a faint smile.

“An able man, but not so interesting as his brother, the psychiatrist.”

This was said so suddenly, yet so naturally, that for a moment Conrad suspected a trap. Again his instinct told him not to dissemble.

“Sir, is there anything you don’t know?”

“I know too little and too much. I also find myself in an uncomfortable position, but I am used to it. Occupying uncomfortable positions has been what our Leader would call my destiny.” He looked sideways out the window. “Have you ever thought, Dehmel – this is a serious moral question – have you ever thought how it is with men who believe that the only way they can defend honor is by being dishonest?”

Conrad had often thought of it; he was thinking of it now. He did not say anything.

“However, in such a situation I suppose one’s duty to one’s country’s welfare is the thread that most men cling to. It’s not enough, of course.” He changed the subject again. “I understand that you are engaged to Dr. Erlich’s daughter?”

“If I had my way I’d be married to her now.”

The Admiral nodded.

“Is her family safe here, sir?”

“For the time being, yes.”

“But in the future?”

“Who knows? Or perhaps I should ask you how much of the future you have in mind? As I foresee it – and I don’t foresee it clearly – the time will come when nobody will be safe in it.”

“If her family is in danger,” Conrad said, “Hanna told me she intends to return to Germany.”

The brilliant blue eyes looked directly into Conrad’s. “And so she will. I know your fiancée. Yes, she would do it.”

“What would you advise me to do now, sir?”

“For the time being – that’s what many of us say these days, for the time being – I’d advise you to accept the directorship. As Professor Rosenthal told you, you have little choice in the matter anyway. Later on, circumstances are sure to change. When they do, please feel free to come to me if you think it would be helpful.”

The Admiral rose, nodded gently; Conrad bowed as he shook hands and left the Tirpitzufer in a daze.

EIGHT

The next week Conrad took up his post as Director of the Grosser Kurfürst Institut. Three days after he had settled into his office and had had barely enough time to learn the names of the senior members of his staff, he was ordered to report to a department of the military bureaucracy. There he found waiting for him a straight-backed major-general in full uniform with a pale, coarse-featured face that looked as if it had been frozen stiff years ago. The general looked him over and said curtly that he had received assurances that he, Conrad Dehmel, was reliable.

“I have been told that you have a professor in your Institut who is an expert in the art and history of the Mongol peoples? Is this true?”

“That would be Professor Heidkamp.”

“Are you acquainted with his work?”

“Only with the general nature of it.”

“I am informed that this professor has made a detailed study of the political and military methods of Genghis Khan. You are to tell him that we require him to make a brief summary of Genghis’s military methods, especially his use of cavalry. Has your father ever discussed military matters with you?”

“Naval matters a little. He doesn’t profess to know much about the army.”

“But at least you understand that though strategic and tactical realities never change, weapons do. You understand that the last war was unsuccessful because machine guns and barbed wire neutralized the cavalry and made victory impossible. In the next war the role of the cavalry will be taken by tanks which can ignore machine guns and barbed wire. As Genghis was the greatest cavalry commander who ever lived, we require a precise analysis of his methods. I wish to have this analysis within a week.”

The general then dismissed Conrad as though he were a subordinate officer and Conrad returned to the Institut longing for somebody with whom he could safely laugh hysterically. He called Professor Heidkamp to his study, apologized for disturbing him, and told him what the general wanted.

Heidkamp was a stringy, stoop-shouldered, bald-headed man, nearsighted, with a shuffling walk and a breath that Conrad could smell halfway across the room. When he heard what the general wanted, he burst into a cackle of ecstasy.

“So! So-o-o! It’s what I’ve always dreamed of. At last the importance of my work is recognized! And by the General Staff! What do I care now about dummkopf professors? The General Staff!” He thrust forward two thin hands and grasped Conrad’s. “Herr Direktor, Heil Hitler! Gott sei Dank, a German is my Director! Herr Direktor, thank you very much!”

Two days later, Heidkamp’s summary was on Conrad’s desk and he read it with disgust. He knew little about the Mongols except that their name had been a horror word for centuries among the peoples of eastern Europe. Now it appeared that their example was going to be used by Hitler’s Germany. He read and reread the summary With a feeling of increasing contempt for its author. This miserable little man was not only marinated in his subject, he was intoxicated by it.

Here it was, though, the old horror story. Brash treachery followed by raw terror. First spies, posing as ambassadors, appeared to look over the lay of the land. Then came merchants to open up trade and spread stories about the invincible ferocity of the Mongols. Then followed the armies. When they invested a city, many citizens were so paralyzed with terror that they killed their wives and daughters and committed suicide. If a walled city offered resistance, every single inhabitant was butchered. After a few such examples it was assumed that no cities would resist, but some of those that surrendered without a fight fared little better.

This part of the professor’s report Conrad read with scant interest, but soon he came to the specific tactics of the Mongol armies. Their cavalry probed the lines of the defenders until they found the weak point (the professor’s word for it was Schwerpunkt – the hard point – and for the victims this was exactly what it was). Massed archers saturated the hard point with a bombardment of arrows, then the cavalry charged through it in column like a battering ram, killing everyone in its narrow path. Once through, the cavalry columns fanned outwards and back again, swirled around and around until the enemy was encircled. The enemy was then destroyed by archers on horseback and dismounted riders who went in to finish them off with spears and swords. There were seldom any survivors.

The professor’s report ended with a slavering appeal: “I am only a poor scholar, but this has been my subject for years. For me, Herrn Generalen, your request for my help has justified a long life of lonely study. I have always yearned to serve my country, the greatest in the world. In profound humility and in the greatest hope, I can swear before God that against tactics like these no army has ever survived. If today, with tanks and total ruthlessness, these same tactics are followed, they will be as invincible as they were when the great Genghis invented them. Heil Hitler!”

So this miserable little man thinks he will become immortal as the architect of victory in the next war, Conrad thought. The entire episode worried him so much that he asked the Admiral for a few minutes of his time. Canaris glanced through Heidkamp’s summary and handed the papers back to Conrad with a mischievous smile.

“It occurred to me that something like this might be useful to you,” he said.

“To me?”

“You cooperated instantly, so this may relax their suspicions a little.”

“But if they suspected me, why did they insist that I be the Director?”

“You are not dealing with normal people, Dehmel. Among other elements in his make-up, the minister is a failed scholar even though he did make his doctorate at Heidelberg.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“The motive behind your appointment is obvious enough. Professor Rosenthal nominated you for a fellowship in the Institut and I have explained to you why Goebbels hates him. What could have wounded Rosenthal more than to have you – a beginner – immediately put into his place?” The Admiral held up his hand. “Rosenthal is far too big a man to hold this against you. As for this staff-general who ordered you to get that report written, he is a general only because he was one of the original party members. In the last war he was a sergeant. One stripe above our Leader, one might say. He wants to make himself important. It so happens that Genghis Khan’s tactics as described by your professor correspond pretty closely to those our generals intend to use anyway. This general knows this. He also knows that in the war plan Genghis’s name is not mentioned. Obviously he hopes to get the credit for having discovered it.”

This is one of the two incidents Conrad recorded of his activities as Director of the Institut. The other occurred in the summer before the war broke out, in the third year after he had left London. He was ordered to go to Paris to represent the Institut in some kind of international conference on culture and the arts. It was not a mission that he relished. In Paris he was treated with contempt by most of the French scholars he met because he was a German who obviously collaborated with the Nazis. One Frenchman, a communist, called him to his face a running dog of fascism.

But there was another scholar who was very friendly and seemed much superior to the rest. He was a tall, young-looking professor from Oxford whose name was familiar to Conrad. He twice invited Conrad to drinks and they discussed Conrad’s work in England. This man’s subject was Modern History, but he knew personally all the men with whom Conrad had worked in the British Museum. He also had a high opinion of Professor Rosenthal. Finally he told Conrad he would very much like to visit the Grosser Kurfürst Institut.

By this time Conrad’s antennae had become sensitive, and on his return to Berlin he reported his meeting with the Englishman to the Admiral.

“Invite him at once,” the Admiral said, “and let me know when he’s coming.”

A few weeks later the Englishman arrived and it turned out that he also had friends in the Berlin Rot-Weiss Tennis Club, for he was a doubles player with an international reputation. After a few days of talking with Conrad and his colleagues, he said good-bye and left the premises in a private car driven by a chauffeur. Conrad guessed that his next port of call would be the Admiral’s apartment. It was not until long after the war that Conrad discovered that this professor was one of the most efficient of all the operators in the British Secret Service.

The visit to Paris could have been Conrad’s opportunity to defect and go to Hanna in England, but if he did so, he knew there would be reprisals against his parents. He telephoned her from Paris and was told by the landlord of her old apartment that she had moved and had left no forwarding address. Then he called the office of the orchestra and asked if she was still attached to it. She was, but at the moment was on holiday somewhere in Scotland.

His frustration was total. He had written her several letters and he supposed she had received them because they were not returned. They had been very cautious letters. In nearly three years he had received no word at all from her and he was hurt and bewildered. He thought she might at least have arranged with her Uncle Karl in Switzerland to get a letter to him. The sudden thought occurred to him that Hanna might believe he had gone over to the Nazis, for this was a time when few people knew what to believe of anyone.

A few weeks after his return from Paris, he received a formal notice from a government department that his marriage with Eva Schmidt had been dissolved. Simply that. Again he was puzzled until he remembered his mother telling him that Eva had become the mistress of an important officer in the Gestapo.

Shortly after this, the war broke out and the trap closed on him. He had known all along that war was inevitable, yet when it came he admitted – like millions of others – that he had not been able to believe it in his emotions. He wondered if he would be called up for military service, but no call came.

The German armies won their first campaign in a few weeks and seemed invincible, but after the victory, Conrad’s father was glum and ill at ease. “Things are happening in Poland I did not believe possible,” he said, and refused to elaborate. He had no need to. Conrad also knew that the Nazi police had begun a systematic massacre of the leading men of that country.

“Only then did I realize that they were sincere in their insane racial ideas,” he wrote in one of his diaries. “How hard it is to accept that an insane evil can be real.”

Gottfried Dehmel was finding it even harder to accept it. For more than twenty years it had been an article of faith with him that his navy was an honorable service which had been smirched by revolutionists and betrayed into surrender by the peace treaty. After a long and difficult career he was now a rear-admiral. He had become a consummate professional and in the first winter of the war he was given an independent command for the first time in his life. It was a small, fast, powerful squadron and his orders were to break out into the Atlantic and attack British convoys. He was also forbidden to engage if he encountered a convoy escorted by a British heavy ship. His task was to raid, not to fight, for if his ship were damaged in a fight it would be slowed down and unable to escape the concentrations the British would certainly send out to get it.

He led his squadron north through rain, heavy fogs, and finally through snowstorms until he was far north of the Arctic Circle. Then he steered west and finally south and began quartering the ocean for prey.

Two weeks passed during which he saw nothing but the cold gray waves of the North Atlantic. He refuelled from a pair of cruising supply ships and continued his search. The Atlantic remained wide and empty but he was sure he would find something and the next week he did. He shot up and sank on three successive days three lone merchant ships, in each case making sure the crews were taken off in boats and given enough blankets, food, and water for a chance of life. Then, just as he was turning for home, came a morning when a cloud of smoke five kilometers wide grew up into the sky over the western horizon, soon to be followed by the masts and hulls of more than forty ships.

This was the moment Gottfried Dehmel had been waiting for. He fanned out his squadron and was closing the convoy at full speed when he saw in the middle of it a massive battleship. He recognized her type instantly; he had seen her sister ship twenty-four years earlier when his squadron charged the British line at the Skaggerak. He knew her guns were heavier than his, but she was old and slow and her guns were probably old, too. He was sure he could sink her and was maneuvering to fire a broadside when his flag captain reminded him of the orders not to engage a ship of that power. He cursed. While one of his cruisers exchanged fire with an English destroyer, he signalled the squadron to break off and used his superior speed to run over the horizon for home. On his arrival at Wilhelmshaven he was met on the dock by the Grand Admiral, who pinned another decoration on his chest on the orders of the Leader. He was mortified.

“I could have come home with a much better victory than von Spee’s,” he told the Grand Admiral. “In God’s will, why didn’t you let me fight?”

He was ashamed to have to accept the medal and when he read about the affair in an English newspaper which had entered the country from Sweden he was so enraged he could hardly speak:

“An enemy squadron centered on their newest and most powerful battle cruiser, supported by two of their most modern cruisers, met one of our convoys in the Atlantic. The convoy was escorted by a single battleship and a few destroyers. The moment the German admiral saw a puff of smoke from our battleship’s funnel, he turned tail and ran for home, just as the Germans always did in the last war.”

This was the last time Gottfried Dehmel was allowed to go to sea. He was so angry that the Grand Admiral was afraid that if he let him out again he would disobey orders and fight against any combination of ships he encountered. Meanwhile, Conrad’s younger brother Siegfried had been at sea almost continuously as first officer in a submarine that destroyed more than forty thousand tons of shipping in a period of six months. Though he was still very young, he was soon given his own boat and during the next year and a half he became a national hero. His single boat did the British more harm than the whole of his father’s surface fleet put together.

The war went on. Victory after victory for Hitler until Germany became master of the whole continent. Conrad felt he was living in a vacuum of total unreality, that the Institut had become a prison where the work he did was as meaningless as the work of convicts in jails.

One morning when he was clearing his desk of the usual traffic in bumf the buzzer sounded and it was the porter calling from downstairs. Conrad had fired the Blockwart who had been there when he met Professor Rosenthal. This man was quiet, elderly, and courteous.

“A lady is here who wishes to see you, Herr Doktor. She calls herself Fräulein Lindenau and she says she knows you.”

Conrad knew nobody of that name, but he asked the porter to send the lady up. When he heard the knock and opened his door he turned pale. Hanna Erlich was standing there.

She came in, he closed the door, and they searched each other’s eyes. Six years had passed since they had parted and now the world was worse than even Hanna had anticipated. They joined hands, kissed each other lightly, drew back, closed again in a fierce embrace. But there was no intimacy in it. An invisible line had been drawn between them. She sat down in an armchair and he behind his desk. He thought she looked at least ten years older since last he had seen her. Hanna wondered if she would ever know him again. He wondered the same of her.

She said almost formally, “I hope you understand that it was for your own safety that I didn’t answer your letters.”

He had a sick feeling as he realized he was resenting her. “Surely you could have written me something. You didn’t have to sign your name. I would have recognized your handwriting. Even after the war began, you could have got some message to me through your Uncle Karl in Zurich.” She said nothing and a new idea occurred to him. “Or was it for your own safety?”

She said coldly, “If I was thinking of that, why am I here?”

“You were right, of course – what you told me in London. I hadn’t been home two days before I understood how right you were. I thought I let you know that in the first letter I sent you.”

“I understood. You wouldn’t have had to spell it out. You were never stupid, Conrad. Merely at times unobservant.”

In an unnatural silence they continued to watch one another. Then he understood why she had come home.

“Has it happened to your family?”

“My father was arrested six weeks ago.”

“How did you learn this?”

“My Uncle Karl in Zurich. Uncle Helmuth kept in touch with Father, so he knew when the arrest was made. There was an agreement that if it happened he would telephone Uncle Karl and speak a sentence which would be a signal. Then Uncle Karl would let me know.”

“What of your brother and sister?”

“They went to America before the war began.”

“So now there’s only your father and mother and uncle here? Where is your father?”

“In Dachau.”

“Oh, my God!”

(This was one of the concentration camps I told André about, one of the worst.)

“Did they send him to Dachau simply because his grandfather was a Jew?”

“The actual charge was grand treason.”

Conrad’s hands were shaking as he tried to light his pipe. “Was it real, or did they invent it?”

“One of his patients turned out to be a police spy. He pretended to have a nervous breakdown because of what’s happening here. He was not the only patient who came to Father for that reason.”

Conrad’s pipe was now drawing but the hand that held it still shook.

“The police seized all of Father’s files. What this has led to in the case of other patients I don’t know. But I’m sure he would never have kept files on patients who were critical of the régime.”

“Was there nothing your military uncle could do?”

She was unnaturally calm; frozen calm as people can be when they have heard a death sentence.

“Uncle Helmuth has not been arrested yet. But when Father was arrested my uncle was demoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in a line regiment.”

“An invitation to take the old German choice and get himself killed on the battlefield?”

“I suppose so.”

There was a silence. Then she said, “I see you have learned, Conrad. But what have you learned?”

He still did not understand the cause of her reticence. “Have you spoken with your Uncle Helmuth since you came home?”

“Not yet. I must be very careful. I suppose I can see him somehow. Uncle Karl is my only real hope now. He has a strong position in Switzerland. Quite a few of your government people have secret accounts in his bank.”

“My government people! Did I actually hear you say that?”

She ignored his shock and continued in an expressionless voice. She told him that on her Uncle Karl’s advice she had obtained a Swiss citizenship a few months before the war broke out. Otherwise the English would have interned her as an enemy alien. Quite a few of her old friends – and of Conrad’s also – had been shipped out to Canada.

“I don’t blame the English,” she said. “Their backs were against the wall and they had no time to sort out the good from the bad. There were probably no bad ones. So the first of all the anti-Nazis were arrested by the only country that’s fighting Hitler.”

He was silent for nearly a minute. Then he said, “Why did you change your name, Hanna?”

“I didn’t change it when I first took out Swiss citizenship. But now with my real name I might not have been admitted to Germany and would certainly have been suspect if I did. Uncle Karl made the arrangements. In matters like these the Swiss are very good, especially if they’re bankers, as Uncle Karl is.”

“How did you go from England to Switzerland?”

“The way many do these days. I took a ship to Lisbon. Then by train to Switzerland.”

She told him she had a new life story and a new profession. She was attached to the Swiss Red Cross.

Conrad shook his head. “They’d never let anyone in the Red Cross visit one of their camps.”

“Naturally, but it’s a cover.”

A thin one, he thought, if the police began to sniff. He rose and looked out the window at the bare branches of the lindens. A thin drizzle of cold rain was falling and the sidewalks and pavements glistened. He came back to his chair.

“Have you any hope of seeing your father?”

“At least I know he’s alive.”

“You know this through your Uncle Helmuth?”

“Uncle Helmuth can tell me nothing now. I know it through a man much more important.”

Conrad, who had been slumped in his chair, jerked upright. “Is this man Admiral Canaris?”

It was her turn to start. “What made you mention that name?” “I happen to have met him. My father introduced me. The Admiral told me he knows you and that he’s a friend of your father’s. He admires you very much, Hanna.”

When he said this her entire manner changed and in a flash he understood why. He became bitterly hard-angry.

“So all along you’ve been wondering where I stand – is that it? You know, because I told you in a letter, that Professor Rosenthal had been dismissed just as you assured me he would be. Didn’t you understand that in a letter that would be opened and read, I could say no more than that I had been made Director in his place? Didn’t you realize I had no choice?”

Her face had softened and there were tears in her eyes. “It’s been horrible. I’ve been horrible.”

He said nothing and waited.

“You say you had no choice,” she said. “Isn’t that what they’ve all said? Yes, indeed I asked myself how you could have taken Rosenthal’s place. I’d never met anyone who’d so set his heart on a position as you’d set yours on this Institut. In London you met many of our friends who were refugees. After you left it was dreadful for me. Apparently two people can love each other as beautifully as we did and still remain strangers. I didn’t know what to think. So I wondered if you’d been hypnotized by him just as your father was. For that matter as a lot of Englishmen and Frenchmen were.”

He felt that a great weight had been lifted off him. He spoke very quietly.

“It was Germany that hypnotized my father, Hanna. Germany and the defeat in the last war. I wasn’t hypnotized at all. I was merely blinded because I’d buried myself in books. In two days – in less time than that – I knew I’d made a terrible mistake in coming home. But it was too late. I did everything I could to avoid the directorship. Professor Rosenthal told me I had no choice. Admiral Canaris said the same. It’s no more my fault that I was born pure German than it’s your merit that your grandfather was a Jew. I never forgot you for a single day all these years. You may think of me what you like.”

She lowered her eyes but she did not weep. She was too strong and too sad and determined for that.

She said very simply, “Let’s try to forgive each other. We’ve never been married, but that’s what married people have to do with each other again and again – so I’m told.”

He became businesslike. He asked where she was staying and she gave him the name of a small hotel he knew.

“It would have been safer if you’d registered in the Adlon. A Blockwart in one of those little hotels is more dangerous than a dozen policemen in a large one.”

“I’ve seen him. He’s a stupid brute.”

“All the more dangerous to someone like you.”

He rose, went around the corner of his desk, put both hands into hers and drew her to her feet.

“Eva divorced me a year ago,” he said. “Will you marry me, Hanna?”

Her large eyes opened and so did her full lips. She put her arms about his neck and he felt her breasts against his chest. Then she drew away and sat down again.

“I didn’t come home to get married, Conrad.”

He returned to his desk. His pipe had gone out and he lit a match and puffed it alight and became businesslike again.

“Have you any plans about your father?”

“Not yet.”

“I suppose you realize that by yourself you can do nothing? If you make enquiries about him you’ll either blow your cover and be arrested as a spy or be told to mind your own business and take the next train back to Switzerland. There’s only one thing I can think of. I must tell Admiral Canaris you’ve come home and see what he can do.”

“He knows that already.”

Her face, he was thinking, now looks more Jewish than it ever did before. Why not? She was relearning what dozens of generations of Jews had learned for centuries from the savagery of Christians.

“It’s strange, unnatural, and terrible here,” she said. “The people go about the streets and look normal. Everything that’s real is hidden and is never mentioned. Do they know it’s there – all those people on the streets, do they know it?”

“How are you taking me, Hanna? I have the right to ask that. How are you taking me?”

She said nothing.

“All right, then, you won’t answer. So listen. I’ve learned more about what goes on in this country than you could possibly have learned in England. For one thing, there’s a silent civil war between the regular armed forces and the Nazi party’s army.” He made a violent gesture as though he were throwing away something slimy and loathsome. “My father won’t discuss it, but in his job he must be going through hell. As for my title as Director here, it means nothing. I hate it. I guessed that sooner or later you’d come home. That may be why I’ve stayed here.”

She looked at him with clear eyes. “Conrad dear, I said let’s forgive each other. But I think I should never have come to see you.”

“Thank God you did.”

“When I decided to return I swore I’d never put you into danger. But I longed to see you and here I am.”

“Thank God you are.”

They both rose and embraced and his hand traced the curve of her hip. He led her to the window and they looked out at the lindens in the rain.

“It looks so normal, doesn’t it?” he said. “So normal those people think it will always be like this. But the time will come, and sooner than you may think, when those buildings and those trees will be blasted and burned to cinders.”

He went back to his chair and she to hers.

“Listen carefully, Hanna dear. A few days after I returned, my father introduced me to Admiral Canaris. It was at Canaris’s request because he was an old friend of Professor Rosenthal. I was vain enough to believe what he told me – that it was because he was interested in my work. Tell me, how well did he know your father? How well did he know you?”

“They were close friends for many years. There was a great affection between them. They both knew so many secrets and it made them lonely with ordinary people. He was always charming and delightful with me. I often played chamber music with him.”

“Do you know anything of Canaris’s politics now? Anything definite?”

She put the tip of her index finger to her lips. “My Uncle Karl told me – no, I can’t say to anyone what he told me. Not even to you can I say it.”

He looked back at her steadily. “You don’t have to. He has told me nothing definite, but I can guess. The stakes he is playing for are terrifyingly high and he can’t jeopardize them even for his dearest friends. So let’s let it go at that.”

Conrad smiled with some bitterness. Now he knew definitely that it had been solely on Hanna’s account that the Admiral had protected him. This also explained the charade about Genghis Khan and that Scheissfresser, Professor Heidkamp.

He said quietly to Hanna, “However, quite apart from Canaris, there’s also my family. As you know, my father is a rear-admiral. My young brother Siegfried, whom I hardly know at all, is fanatically Führertreu and has become a national hero. So I can assume that at the moment I’m not suspected. At least I can try to do something for your people, Hanna. And first, I beg you to leave that hotel at once. If the Blockwart sees you there a few times more he’ll be certain to ferret around. He’s probably searched your drawers and luggage already. Do your clothes all have Swiss labels?”

“Most of them.”

“I suppose no English labels?”

“Of course not.”

“Then please go back, pay your bill, collect your baggage, and take a taxi to my apartment. Do you need money?”

“No, thanks. I’ve just come from Uncle Karl.”

“I’ll give you my address.”

He wrote it down on a card, phoned the porter to order a taxi for her, and waited until she left. Then he went into one of his biweekly meetings with his staff that never accomplished anything important but had to be held. Three-quarters of his colleagues now detested him because Professor Heidkamp approved of him.

That night after they had eaten, the invisible wall between Hanna and himself seemed to have disappeared, but they soon found that something more subtle than a wall had taken its place. When they went to bed to make love, Conrad was devastated to find himself impotent. She was gentle with him and told him not to let it trouble him.

After a time he said, “I’m trying to understand this. It’s been such a long time and I’ve dreamed of this every night before I fell asleep. Every nuance of your face and eyes and body I know better now than when we were together in England. The memory crystallizes everything. Now all I can see is how you are more beautiful than I’d even been able to guess before. God damn it, you’ve got into my mind and I seem to have lost you in my senses. I can’t understand it, Hanna. I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

Naturally I wonder if there had been other women in his life during those years of separation. To me it would seem abnormal if there were none. And if Hanna had been like the women I knew in my own young days – but I don’t suppose she was.

Hanna said, “It will come back. I know how it is with you. It’s with me, too. I gave you no help at all.”

Toward midnight he had relaxed enough to recover and they made love with a fierce desperation, but there was no gentle peace in the aftermath. It would have been astonishing if there had been. When things are terrible and uncertain, what’s the use of sex except as an escape? In such a time, what is a deep love but a commitment that can numb the senses? Hanna must have understood this before he did, for Conrad records that she actually said it.

“It would be easier for both of us if we just liked one another as acquaintances.” She also said, “Please God you won’t hate me before all this is over.”

“I love you more than I ever did,” he said.

It was not a sentimental phrase. For me it has the ring of literal truth because I experienced something similar myself just before the Great Fear. That love can defeat the joy of love is one of the diabolical ambiguities many of us have to live with.