The Furies: Heinrich Hildebrandt
How was I to know, or to find out, how much my friends had suffered (if they had suffered at all) or whether they had suffered enough? If, as doctrine has it, man is perfected by suffering, none of my friends had suffered enough, for none of them, I could see, even in my imperfect knowledge of them, was perfect.
Seven of them ducked my question. My question, which I framed very carefully and put to them in a variety of ways in the last weeks of our conversations, was, “What did you do that was wrong, as you understand right and wrong, and what didn’t you do that was right?” The instinct that throws instant ramparts around the self-love of all of us came into immediate operation; my friends, in response, spoke of what was legal or illegal, or what was popular or unpopular, or what others did or didn’t do, or what was provoked or unprovoked. But I was interested, at this point, in none of these things. “Who knows the secret heart?” I was trying to know the secret heart; I knew all about Versailles and the Polish Corridor and the inflation, the unemployment, the Communists, the Jews, and the Talmud.
The eighth of my friends, young Rupprecht, the Hitler Youth leader, having taken upon himself (or having affected to take) sovereign responsibility for every first and last injustice of the whole Hitler regime, was no better able to enlighten me than Herr Schwenke, the old Fanatiker, who, when I was at last able to divert him, with my insistent last question, from Versailles, the Polish Corridor, etc., said, “I have never done anything wrong to any man.” “Never?” said I, just to hear myself say it. “Never,” said he, just to hear himself say it. But two of my friends, Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, and Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, enlightened me, in their own time, in their own ways, without my having asked them my question.
Fear and advantage, Hildebrandt had said, were his reasons for becoming a National Socialist in 1937, a late “March violet” indeed. “Were there,” I said, on another occasion, “any other reasons you joined?” He said nothing and then began to blush. “I—,” he began, blushing fully, and then he said, “No, no others.” It was a long time before I learned all Herr Hildebrandt’s reasons for being a Nazi.
“I might have got by without joining,” he said more than once. “I don’t know. I might have taken my chances. Others did, I mean other teachers in the high school.”
“How many?”
“Let me see. We had thirty-five teachers. Only four, well, five, were fully convinced Nazis. But, of these five, one could be argued with openly, in the teachers’ conference room; and only one was a real fanatic, who might denounce a colleague to the authorities.”
“Did he?”
“There was never any evidence that he did, but we had to be careful around him.”
“How many of the thirty-five never joined the Party?”
“Five, but not all for the same reason. Three of the five were very religious. The teachers were all Protestants, of course, but only half a dozen, at most, were really religious; these were all anti-Nazi, these half-dozen, but only three of them held out. One of the three was the history teacher (now the director of the school), very nationalistic, very Prussian, but a strong churchman. He stood near the anti-Nazi Confessional Church, but he couldn’t join it, of course, or he’d have lost his job. Then there was the theology teacher, who also taught modern languages; he was the best teacher in the school; apart from his religious opposition, his knowledge of foreign cultures made him anti-Nazi. The third was the mathematics teacher, absolutely unworldly but profoundly pietistic, a member of the Moravian sect.”
“And the two who were nonreligious and didn’t join?”
“One was a historian. He was not an atheist, you understand, just a historian. He was a nonjoiner, of anything. He was nonpolitical. He was strongly critical of Nazism, but always on a detached, theoretical basis. Nobody bothered him; nobody paid any attention to him. And vice versa. The other nonbeliever was really the truest believer of them all. He was a biologist and a rebel against a religious background. He had no trouble perverting Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ into Nazi racism—he was the only teacher in the whole school who believed it.”
“Why didn’t he join the Party?”
“He hated the local Kreisleiter, the County Leader of the Party, whose father had been a theologian and who himself never left the Church. The hatred was mutual. That’s why the biologist never joined. Now he’s an ‘anti-Nazi.’”
“And you?”
“Yes,” he said, blushing a little again. “I joined. I had my past, of course, in East Prussia. All sorts of care had been taken to bury it, but—one never knew. I had been active in the old Staatspartei, the successor of the Democratic Party in 1930. After 1930 I had lectured regularly at the local folk high school, the adult education program, which was promoted and largely attended by Social Democrats and Communists. In my book program, on the radio, I had praised the works of ‘treasonable’ writers after the Nazis took power.
“For eight years I held the rank of Studienassessor. It carries no tenure with it. After 1933 my name was not even included in the list of candidates for Studienrat, the rank which is usually given after five years of high-school teaching. The spring the Nazis took power, I was dismissed from my radio program and from my adult-school lectureship. Then I was transferred from the city to one small school after another. So I resigned, very quietly, and came here, to Hesse. My father, through an old Army friend of his here, got me the appointment in Kronenberg. But still I was not promoted, and I was afraid that something was suspected. I waited two years, and then I joined the Party. I was promoted to Studienrat and got married.”
“And Frau Hildebrandt?” I said. I watched for the blush, but there was none; it (whatever it was) wasn’t Frau Hildebrandt.
“Eva went just the other way from me. In 1933 she was for Hitler. Of course, she was much younger than I and her family was petty nobility, who were all in the old Nationalist Party, which threw its weight, at the end, to the Nazis. But she adored the Jewish Professor Neumann at Kiel—who didn’t?—and the day of the book-burning there he instructed the secretary of his philosophy seminar to give his books to the students. Eva got three of Neumann’s own books, her proudest possession—and still she believed in Nazism. She was what we call begeistert, bewitched.
“We first met in 1938, at the Casino, in Kassel, for officers and their families. The young men—we weren’t so young any more—all went there with their parents. I was with my parents, she with hers; our fathers were both retired officers and old acquaintances. It happened to be on January 30, the anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, but that was only an accident; the Casino society was by no means Nazi. We danced, which I was not very good at”—he blushed, just a little—“but a month later I gave a talk there and she came, and ‘fell for me.’
“I was already a Party member. She was really nonpolitical, at heart. It’s funny; I, with my knowledge of politics, I became more and more Nazi, and she became less and less. After the synagogue burning, at the end of ’38, she was strongly anti-Nazi. She got out Neumann’s books and cried. I told her she didn’t understand these things. She didn’t, either, but she knew them, sensed them, better than I did—or than I was willing to. From then on, until I went into the Army in ’39, we quarreled all the time. But now it’s all right.” (It was, too. I had met the Hildebrandt family frequently.)
“She never quit the Party, of course. She had joined in ’37, too, not until then; she was a teacher, and she did it to hold her job. But women are braver than men, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said (still wondering what it was, besides “fear and advantage,” that had made a Nazi of Herr Hildebrandt).
“It’s because—well, they don’t face things the same way men do. They assume that the man will find a way to support the family. They could be stronger Nazis or stronger anti-Nazis than men, without thinking too much about it. Most of them.” I thought I saw a faint blush, at this last, but it was late afternoon in the winter. I turned the lights on.
Hildebrandt had no guilt about his “Nazi” teaching of literature. “One could talk about other things, outside the textbooks, and there was ‘un-German’ literature that had been overlooked, such as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, which we read openly in class. The Buddenbrooks, too; it was not specifically forbidden, but everybody knew that the Nazis hated Thomas Mann.
“Privately, certain students read Jewish authors—it went without saying that they were not to be read—like Wasser-mann, Werfel, Zweig, and wrote papers on them, brought them to me, and I accepted them for credit, although they were not discussed in class. And I gave them French and English literature, more so than before, although to do so was one of those vague betrayals of the ‘new spirit’; still, it had not been specifically forbidden. Of course, I always said, to protect myself (but I said it in such a way that I hoped the students would see through it), that the foreign works we read were only a reflection of German literature. So, you see, Herr Professor, a man could show some—some independence, even, so to say, secretly.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Many of the students—the best of them—understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today.”
“In the best?”
“Yes. The others, the great majority, are disillusioned now, but that is something else. You see, the young people, and, yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those years. People outside Germany seem to think that ‘the Germans’ came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonsense that passed for truth. It is a very bad mistake, a very dangerous mistake, to think this. The fact, I think, is that most Germans came to believe everything, absolutely everything; but the rest, those who saw through the nonsense, came to believe nothing, absolutely nothing. These last, the best, are the cynics now, young and old.”
“And the others, the believers?”
“Well, the old among them are, I suppose you would say, the hopeless now. The younger, those who were teen-agers then—I don’t know what to say about them except that they have lost their old illusions and see nothing new to turn to. This is dangerous, both for them and for the world ten or twenty years from now. They need, well, to be born again, somehow.”
I asked Herr Hildebrandt if he could recollect specific instances of his own “dumb-show game,” and the next time we met he spoke of them. “In Shakespeare, for instance, only Macbeth and, of course, The Merchant of Venice, which I never assigned, were recommended. But, again, nothing was forbidden, although Hamlet was denounced as embodying the ‘fiabbiness of soul’ that the Nazis condemned in Russian writers like Dostoevski and Tolstoi, the ‘soft Slavic soul’ that in Tolstoi even went so far as pacifism. So in Shakespeare I could assign A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which in normal times I should not have bothered with, just so that I could say to the students, ‘The music for this was written by Mendelssohn. Your parents all know the music. Mendelssohn was a Jew. We don’t play his music any more.’ Perhaps that was not much to say, but it was something, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said, “certainly…. Tell me, Herr Hildebrandt, what about Julius Caesar?”
He smiled very, very wryly. “Julius Caesar? No … no.”
“Was it forbidden?”
“Not that I remember. But that is not the way it was. Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”
“You spoke of giving certain students books by Jewish authors,” I said, on another occasion. “How did you know which students you could trust not to denounce you?”
“Oh, one judges, from person to person. I may say generally that one would be safe in giving such books to Mischlinge [mongrels, half-Jews] and those from known liberal families. People who were so far under suspicion would never denounce one, because they would not be believed—people, that is, who were clearly beyond currying favor with the authorities. It was like complaining to Jews about the regime; it was safe.”
“I can imagine,” I said, “that some Jews would have resented being a sort of secret wailing wall for people who had something on their minds that they did not dare to say openly.” I knew he would blush a little, and he did. “Yes. I think most Jews resented it, very deeply. That was why some people didn’t do it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“In those times,” he went on, “a student could have denounced me, but it would have been hard to make a case against me, because I was, well, clever in the way I did these things. But, even if I had been denounced, I could have got off, almost certainly, if my past were not revealed, because I was a Party member. You may say that it is a rationalization—I know it is, myself—but a Party member could get away with something, not much, but something. A non-Nazi would not dare to violate the rules. At least none in our school did.”
“Were there any spies in the classes?” I said.
“No, unless students volunteered to be informers. The regime regarded informers as patriots, of course, but you know how students would feel; young people despise that kind of thing. There certainly were no spies, or even regular informers, that I heard of in our school. Not before the war, anyway. And certainly not during the war (although I was away in the Army except for my furlough in ’40, after the fall of France). During the war even anti-Nazi teachers would not criticize the regime. Once the war began, all this ended. We were ‘one folk.’ We could not separate the regime from our country then.”
“The July 20 conspirators did.”
“Yes … yes, they did. They did.”
I knew he was blushing, as he did so easily, but I did not look up. I was waiting—perhaps I only imagine it now, long afterward—for something that would bring his blush to a boil. I had a long time to wait.
He showed me the government manual for upper-school teaching, issued in 1938. Under Literatur there was this: “Of course, only such selections should be chosen as point in the direction of the New Germany, help prepare the new world outlook [Weltanschauung], or give instances of its innermost will. As we recognize only the vigorous as educationally valuable, everything must be avoided that weakens or discourages manliness. The thought of race will stand out strongest with a vivid knowledge of Teutonism.” And then, apparently as subjects for study: “The nation as a community of fate and struggle. The struggle for living space. Soldiery (Army, Navy, Air Corps). Heroism. War poetry. The soldier of the World War as a legendary figure and a moral force. Woman in the World War. The community of National Socialist struggle. Leadership, comradeship. The fight of the German nation on our frontiers and abroad. Colonies.”
“That was all,” said Herr Hildebrandt, “although, of course, all these things would be explicated, but still not in detail, in the publications or meetings of the Lehrerbund, the Nazi teacher organization. But it was all very sloppy and vague. Under those headings one could teach almost anything—except, maybe, All Quiet on the Western Front!”
“Why was it so sloppy?” I said.
“Partly because the Nazification of the secondary schools was known to be difficult. They were stronger and better organized professionally than the primary schools. There the teachcrs were much more insecure, and also more susceptible, because, having to teach everything, they had been trained thoroughly in nothing. This half-educated condition made them excellent Nazi material; they could be ‘taught’ anything fast. We had a joke in those days: ‘What is speed?’—‘Speed is an instant so short that a grade-school teacher hasn’t time to change his politics.’
“Then, too, the primary schools were more important to the regime. There they could reach all the children of the country, while we, in the high schools, had only one-fourth of them. So the primary schools had to be brought into line first, the secondary schools later. They never finished the job, but in another ten years, maybe even five, they would have.”
“So soon?”
“So soon. One may say overnight. Resistance is low in a dictatorship. And this was, or would have become, an efficient dictatorship, even in cultural matters. There it was weakest, at the beginning, because the oldest and most trusted Nazis were uncultivated men, except for a few freaks like Rosenberg. And wherever there was a ‘deserving’ Party member and no other place could be found for him, he would be dumped into education. The Nazi ‘educators’ were illiterate, from Rust, the Minister of Education, on down. They did not know what they wanted or where to find it. Putting ignorant ‘reliables,’ from politics or business, over the educators was also part of the Nazi way of humiliating education and bringing it into popular contempt.
“Then, too, the Party education bosses did not know themselves when the Party line would change, and they were afraid of being caught on the wrong side when it did. Any author might suddenly prove to be ‘decadent,’ although, incidentally, when one hears so much of Goethe now as an anti-Nazi symbol, one recalls that all (almost all, certainly) of Goethe was recommended. His universalism was not so powerful or direct as to embarrass National Socialism. I do not mean to make light of the greatest genius of all, but if he had lived a century longer he might have wished to rewrite every word so that he could not be used by the Nazis.”
“It might have ruined his poetry, Herr Studienrat.”
He smiled at my form of address, and emphasized his: “Yes, Herr Professor, but now we sound like the classroom. I was speaking, oh, yes, of the sudden changes in the Party line. There were not so many, except the great ones, which you know of, like the Russian pact of ’39, and these did not immediately affect us. The difficulty was that changes could not be predicted. Living writers, unless they were Party hacks, could not be recommended at all, because they might turn anti-Nazi or be found to have been anti-Nazi or Communistic.
“It was not what a man wrote, but what his politics were (or were accused of being) that counted with the Nazis. Hans Grimm, for instance, was a great Party favorite because of his story, Volk ohne Raum, ‘A People without Living Space’; then he became critical of the Nazis and had to be anathematized and his books forbidden—no matter what they contained. By the way, even Wilhelm Tell was suddenly forbidden during the war, at the time when it was thought that Switzerland might be attacked.
“In history, in biology, and in economics the teaching program was much more elaborate than it was in literature, and much stricter. These subjects were really rewritten. They had to be. But literature could not so easily be rewritten to order. The rewritten subjects were the worst nonsense, and, of course, the cynicism of the teachers and the better students was worst there. Every student had to take a biology examination to be graduated, and the biology course was a complete distortion of Mendelianism to prove that heredity was everything; such technical materials were most effective, of course, because the student had never met them before.
“But mathematics was the most interesting case. You would think that nothing could be done with such a ‘pure’ subject, but just this subject was handled very cleverly, and I often wondered who in the Party was so clever. I remember well, because Eva, my wife, taught mathematics. The problems to be assigned were all given, but they would almost all be taken from such subjects as ballistics or military deployment, or from architecture, with Nazi memorials or monuments as examples, or from interest rates—‘A Jew lent RM 500 @ 12% interest…. ’—or from population ratios. The students would be given the problem of projecting population curves of the ‘Teutonic,’ ‘Roman,’ and ‘Slavic’ peoples of Europe, with the question: ‘What would be their relative sizes in 1960? What danger do you recognize for the Teutonic peoples in this?’
“Everything depended, actually, on the director of the school, everything, that is, outside the textbooks. The director of ours was a Nazi, of course, but not a real one, not a Fanatiker. He would tell the district superintendent, when he came for an inspection, that everything was all right, and the superintendent was too busy, and too unsure of himself academically, to look closer. And everything was all right, if what is meant is the absence of talk or teaching against the government. That’s the same in America, I think—everywhere.”
Herr Hildebrandt’s hardest experience was, I felt, somewhere outside his school work. He told me, fairly freely, how hard it was to sit with fellow-members of the Party in a café and hear them vituperate Jews in ignorant passion. “I would sit there,” he said, “and say nothing. This was not heroic, and yet it was something, a little something. A wild Fanatiker like your friend Schwenke, seeing that I never said anything in agreement, might have taken it into his head to denounce me, and my past, which would have been fatal, might have come out.”
Once, in 1938 in a café in Baden-Baden, he saw a family of Jews from Kronenberg. “I was wearing my Party insignia and sitting with some Party men. Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I ‘belonged,’ and the pleasure of ‘belonging,’ so soon after feeling excluded, isolated, is very great. Maybe in America you don’t have these feelings; in that case you are very lucky, but also, in that case, you may have difficulty in understanding what it was like for men like me here.
“Still—I didn’t want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia. I never wore it at home, except for special events, where there were no Jews. The uniform and insignia were a sort of anti-Semitism in themselves, and I was not an—an anti-Semite. It hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them. So, when I saw these Jews in the café, I tried to sit so that they wouldn’t see me. When I think of that now, I still blush.”
“Did they see you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, blushing.
Prompted by the blush this time, I thought that I might hit upon Herr Hildebrandt’s secret, if he had one. But the tack I took turned out to be empty.
“When were you really disillusioned with National Socialism?” I said in a later conversation.
The blush again; deeper, this time. “Only after the war-really.”
“That discourages me,” I said, “because you are so much more sensitive than most people, and this makes me realize how hard it must be, under such conditions, for people, even sensitive people, to see what is going on around them.” He continued to blush, but my blush-detector told me that this was not it.
“It’s all so well masqueraded,” he said, “the bad always mixed up with the good and the harmless, and you tell yourself that you are making up for the bad by doing a few little things like speaking of Mendelssohn in class.”
“And so you were,” I said.
“No. No,” he said, shaking his head, “but that is very kind of you to say. No, I would not be honest with you if I told you that I was always an anti-Nazi, that I always thought and felt like an anti-Nazi. It is so easy these days to say ‘anti-Nazi’ and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.
“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. I wanted to be able to sleep nights—”
“Weren’t you?” I said.
“Not in the period when I was deciding whether to join; but after the decision it was better, always better. I enjoyed doing those little things at school, ‘defying’ the Party, not because what I did was right (that, too, of course) but because I showed I was clever and, above all, because I ‘belonged.’ I belonged to the new ‘nobility,’ and the nobility can get away with certain things just because they are the nobility; merely getting away with them proves that they are the nobility, even to themselves. So I slept.”
It was near the end of our many, many conversations that I said, “Those Jews you saw in the café, in Baden-Baden that time, when you tried not to have them see you; who were they, Herr Hildebrandt, do you remember?”
The needle on my blush-detector jumped. “Yes. Yes, of course, I remember. They were friends of the Wolff family, my—my relatives.”
“Wolff?”
“Yes.”
“Here in Kronenberg?”
“Yes. At the University.”
“Professor Wolff? Eberhard Wolff?”
“Yes.”
“But he was a Jew.”
“Yes.”
“How were they related to you, Herr Hildebrandt?”
“Oh, not by blood. Professor Wolff was Jewish, his wife three-quarters Jewish. Their son Erich married my cousin Sibylle.”
“Sibylle,” I said. “That’s a very pretty—”
My two small boys broke into the room, to get their afternoon cake. Being small American boys, they did not say, “Guten Tag, Herr Studienrat,” they said, ‘Tag’; but, being small boys in Germany, they did have the decency to shake hands all around before grabbing for the cake.
A few visits later I reverted to the Wolff family, and again the needle jumped. The Wolffs were closely related to the most illustrious Jewish name in Germany, and intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in this great family had been common. The Wolff home in Kronenberg was a great, ancient pile on the Schlossweg, the beautiful wooded area of old mansions on the hill, beyond the Castle. I knew that the aged Frau Professor Wolff (Frau Geheimrat Wolff, her eminent husband having borne the additional eminence of “Geheimrat,” or distinguished professor) still lived, alone with a servant, in the family home.
What I learned, without much difficulty (indeed, he spoke with understandable pride, although the blush remained), was that Herr Hildebrandt had saved the Wolffs’ home during the Third Reich by arranging for the transfer of its ownership to another “Aryan” in-law in a pretended sale. Hildebrandt had been a frequent visitor at the Wolffs’ before he joined the Party; then his visits dropped off and, finally, when the ownership of the home was transferred, although the family still lived there, stopped altogether. Why?
“I felt uncomfortable,” said the teacher. “You may well believe that. I wanted to talk about the current situation and to try to explain my position, but Professor Wolff, who was quite old, would never let me talk about such things. He would not tolerate talk about National Socialism, against it or for it.
“I had always felt very much at home there. Everyone did who came. It was like the old times of books, music, poetry, art; another age. And it never changed. But after I joined the Party I felt out of place. When other people were there—it was a great house, with many friends—I knew that I was always the only Nazi. The others were not open anti-Nazis, of course, but the fact that they were there spoke for itself. And the talk always avoided politics. It did everywhere, in those days. It was—well, at the worst, it was simply that, if you had not been present when somebody said something against the regime, there was no danger of anything’s being forced out of you later on. So nobody talked politics, not among non-Nazis.
“When I was there alone, after I joined the Party, it was still worse. I played chess with the Professor, or we listened to music, and he never spoke, except politely. And I knew I couldn’t speak, to say (at least to try to say) how I felt. So the visits became formal, and then stopped.”
“But you saved his home.”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t that make you feel better?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because with him I wanted to say how I felt, and he wouldn’t let me.”
On one of our last visits—Herr Hildebrandt was at my house—he said, “Herr Mayer” (he had, with my help, got over calling me “Herr Professor”), “there is something else I should like to tell you about.”
“Please,” I said. The blush was coming up again.
“It was at the end of 1940, when I came back on leave. My wife was almost eight months pregnant, and we were living in two furnished rooms. Housing was very short. We heard an apartment was available, but only on the way there did we learn that it was the apartment of the lawyer, Dr. Stern. Have you heard of him?”
“Yes,” I said. “Herr Damm, the Kreisamtsleiter, told me he once saved the Sterns’ apartment for them, when an SA leader tried to get it. And Policeman Hofmeister mentioned them, too.”
The blush mounted sharply. “Did Hofmeister tell you about the—the deportation of the Sterns?”
“No, except to say that they were deported and how bad he felt about it.” The blush subsided a little, I thought.
“Well,” said Hildebrandt, “it was a lovely apartment. We spoke in a very friendly way with the Sterns (his wife and daughter were there) and they with us. We said that we had not come as Nazis, and we explained our situation. They believed us, obviously, and Dr. Stern said he wanted to move anyway to be nearer their friends and relatives. (Most of the Jews in Kronenberg had moved into the old Bertholdstrasse; I forget what new name the Nazis gave it, but it was not a formal, compulsory ghetto.)
“We assumed that, now that Dr. Stern could have only Jews for clients, and the Jews were becoming so poor, he could no longer afford the apartment. I felt bad, very bad, and Eva felt worse; she was already so strongly anti-Nazi, and here she felt that her condition was responsible for driving these people from their home, for our wanting an apartment so badly. It was very embarrassing. ‘Still,’ I said to myself, ‘if we don’t take it, someone else will,’ and just then Dr. Stern said: ‘If you don’t take it, Herr Studienrat, someone else will.’ So we—we took it.”
The blush remained level.
It was getting on for evening again, and the room was growing dark. I was fumbling around, in my memory, and in my imagination. There was something connected with Jews, with the Wolffs, possibly with the Sterns, that Herr Hildebrandt wanted (or didn’t want) to tell me.
“The Wolffs,” I said, groping. “How was it you said you were related to them?”
“Erich Wolff, Eberhard’s son,” said the teacher. “He was a lawyer. But he’d wanted to be a musician. He played the piano, and I played the violin, and in my first two years in Kronenberg, before I joined the Party, we played duets together sometimes. He was married to—my cousin.”
“Of course,” I said, “Sibylle, the beautiful name.”
I didn’t need the light; I could feel the heat.
“What became of Erich?” I asked.
“He went to Italy, in ’39, and died there. Of a heart attack. Or suicide. We don’t know which.”
“And his wife, Sibylle?”
This was it.
“She stayed here.”
“Did you see her, after you stopped seeing the Wolffs?”
“Yes.”
“How did she feel about your being in the Party?”
“She—she advised me to join. Not exactly advised, but accepted my reasons. She saw the necessity. She agreed with me that I might be able to help the Wolffs that way. I was to keep them advised—through her—of all developments and of any dangers and do what I could. She thought that might be helpful. And it was, up to a point.”
“Up to a point?”
“Yes.”
“She went on seeing her father- and mother-in-law, of course?”
“Oh, yes. We would be talking and she would say, ‘You must excuse me now, I am going up to the Schlossweg, to the Wolffs’, to gaukeln.’ Gaukeln means ‘juggle,’ but it also means ‘talk without saying anything,’ ‘beat around the bush.’ It meant she was going to the Wolffs’ and pretend, as one always did there now, that everything was the same as always.”
“Do you know if she talked to the Wolffs about you?”
“She–tried.”
“But you yourself never saw them again, after you joined the Party or after you arranged the ‘sale’ of their house?”
“No. Well—once. It was they that I saw in the café, in Baden-Baden that time, when I told you that it was friends of theirs that I saw. It was they I did not want to see me.”
“When was that?”
“In ’39, just before the war. I knew they were there, because my wife and Sibylle and I had driven down together, and, after we’d got rooms and gone out again in Sibylle’s car, she stopped in front of another hotel and said to me, ‘You’d better get out now.’ It meant that the Wolffs were there, and she didn’t want them to have to meet me.”
“Or, maybe, you to have to meet them.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that Sibylle would rather you hadn’t joined the Party, even to help protect the family?”
“I think so, yes…. Yes.”
“Do you think she was right, Herr Hildebrandt?”
“I—. I don’t know, Herr Professor.” (I noticed the lapse back to “Herr Professor.”)
“I’d like to meet her,” I said.
“She’s dead,” said Herr Hildebrandt.
It was dark in the room now, but I still tried to take notes, just a few words (the way a reporter does) to remind me, so that I could fill them out afterward. In the dark my writing ran all over the paper.
“Dead?”
“Yes. She worked in the ‘underground,’ Herr Mayer, to help people escape from Germany. That’s why she stayed. Her husband was more than half Jewish; he couldn’t help her. In ’42, before the Sterns were deported, sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then to the ‘East,’ she was trying to arrange their escape into Italy. She must have been somewhere on the Swiss-Italian border. The Gestapo got her.”
“And—?”
“Her family was told that she had been arrested and hanged herself in the jail at Constance.”
“Had she?”
“No.” This came like a shot. “No. She would not have hanged herself. Unless—unless things had reached the point where she knew she might talk without knowing it and endanger others.”
I could not see Herr Hildebrandt now.
“Did she—did they—have any children?”
“A son.”
“What happened to him?”
“I—.” He stopped, and then resumed. “I—arranged it so that I was appointed his guardian. He’s in the university now.”
My wife rapped at the door to say it was time for dinner and to ask Herr Hildebrandt if he’d stay. He said “No,” and I went to the front door with him without turning on the lights.