Sleep evading him, he turned as so often to that afternoon in the Carlton Tea Rooms in Munich, springtime 1932. He had gone there only because the Café Luitpold across the street, which he preferred, was full of SA men, and so it was surprising to find Hitler in the tea room with some of his – what could you call them? – not colleagues, surely – henchmen, disciples? Strange to find that the Nazi leader had seemingly chosen not to be surrounded by his Brownshirt thugs.
For a moment Klaus had come close to walking out. Then he thought: no, this is interesting, a chance to observe the man from close quarters.
The Führer was eating strawberry tarts, stuffing them into his mouth one after the other. (Klaus too was fond of these tarts – the pastries at the Carlton were exceptionally good – but it would be years before he could enjoy one again.)
What struck him was not only Hitler’s greed, but his insignificance. He was right about the greed – the man looked, as he later wrote, like “a gluttonous rat” – and that greed would be satisfied by nothing – it was all-consuming. But as for the insignificance which led Klaus to write that this flabby and foul little man with no marks of greatness would never come to power, well, that alas was a different story… “You’re a failure”, he had thought, “a grubby little failure…”
He was close enough to overhear some of the conversation, which to his surprise was about the theatre and the actress Therese Giehse, who was a friend of both Klaus and Erika, but especially Erika.
“She’s very talented,” someone said, “but you must know that she is Jewish, Not altogether Jewish, I admit, but there’s a bit of the Jew in her…”
“That’s absurd,” Hitler said, “just nasty gossip. Do you suppose I can’t tell the difference between a filthy Jewish clown and a great German artist.”
Well, you’re a fool then, Klaus thought happily, a pretentious and absurd idiot, for Therese would have laughed to hear him. She was proud to be purely Jewish.
Yes, he could still laugh at Hitler then. He could even decide that Hitler looked just like a notorious serial killer called Haarmann who invited a succession of street-boys to his apartment in Hanover from which they never emerged alive. It was a good private joke to compare Hitler to Haarmann, but now he thought: I got that right anyway, serial killer par excellence, even if his own nasty little paws were never soiled with his victims’ blood. Millions of victims and the dictator’s paws smelling only of eau de cologne!
And the Germans, his own people as he had reluctantly to acknowledge, were they accomplices or, as many of them believed in the desolation of the war-ruined Reich, Hitler’s first victims? They were both, of course, and many of them willing victims of his lies as well as eager accomplices in the horrors he decreed. You couldn’t get away from that. Klaus – and Erika – had dreamed and written of “the Other Germany”, their Germany, a land of artists and intellectuals, of professors and lawyers, engineers and honest businessmen, decent workers and peasants, a civilised country, which may never have existed, or if it had – and surely they weren’t entirely wrong? – had surrendered its judgement, its intellect, its soul, to a raving monster preaching hate and destruction.
He had never understood how this could be, but he knew that he had both overestimated and underestimated the people from whom he sprang.
And some who should have belonged to “the Other Germany” had been among the first to betray it.
He thought for instance of his friend, the novelist W. E. Suskind, a charming man who was in the habit of writing delightful stories about the girls he fell in love with. Suskind had stayed in Germany, even written to Klaus in his first or second year of exile entreating him to return. Have you gone off your head? Suskind had asked, become some sort of republican fanatic? Why don’t you look at what is actually happening here in Germany rather than listening to our enemies’ propaganda? Life under Hitler is enchanting and exciting. Do you think that I would still be here if it was dishonourable to remain in Germany? Can’t you trust me and trust my judgement?
Trust him? He felt sorry for him when he learned that he had agreed to become editor of a literary magazine, sponsored and financed by Dr Goebbels…
Or there was Willi. He turned over in bed as he thought of Willi, whom he had picked up one afternoon in the Tiergarten: a blond open-faced boy with a slightly snub nose, well-muscled, “swimmer’s build” as they said in advertisements. His father had been killed at Verdun and Willi was an only child. He did some casual labouring and was happy to rent himself out. “My mother’s got this cough,” he would say, “I think it’s consumption…” It always worked. He grinned when he said that. On the other hand it happened to be true. They had good times together, not only in bed where Willi was eager and uncomplicated, romping like a puppy. They were fond of each other and Willi never minded Klaus’s teasing which was, as a matter of fact, rather cruel, playing on the boy’s ignorance. “So what?” Willi would say when Klaus told him some monstrously fanciful false fact. “Doesn’t matter to me.” He liked Klaus enough to introduce him to his mother, who also took to him. “You’ve got a good friend there, Willi,” she said. “See you don’t lose him with your nonsense.” Klaus liked her too, had no illusions she didn’t understand the relationship between him and her adored but irritating son, didn’t know very well what they got up to together. Klaus took him on trips, to the seaside for instance and not only because Willi looked marvellously sexy in his bathing-costume. As Klaus lay back, head on a rolled towel, and watched his boy stride up the beach, he thought of the Magician’s old Aschenbach and the Polish lad in Venice and knew he had the better of it. Once when he was in Paris, Willi, on a whim, only minutes after receiving a postcard from him, took the night-train, sitting up in third class, burst into his hotel room, flung himself on him, and covered his face with kisses. Klaus felt his sex stir at the memory, so many years old.
Willi had possessed, despite the life he led, the freshness of innocence. Klaus thought him safe from the vile intoxicating rhetoric that poisoned the air of Germany. Then one day, when he had returned to Berlin after a few weeks or months away, he encountered him in the Alexanderplatz wearing the black uniform of the SS.
“What’s come over you?” he said, “why are you wearing these monkey clothes?”
He was shocked and partly, he had to confess, because in that uniform Willi looked more beautiful, more attractive, more enticingly sexy than ever.
For a moment a shadow of what might have been embarrassment crossed the boy’s face.
“So what?” he said. “So what? It’s not for the fun of it, but a guy has to live…”
“But not like that,” Klaus said. “You know I’m always…”
“Ready to rent me?”
“That’s not what I meant. You know that.”
“OK, I know that. But so what? You’re not going to be about for ever, are you, and besides what’s good enough for millions of Germans is good enough for me. We’re going to be the bosses, Klaus.”
“You, Willi, a boss? I don’t think so. Do you believe in all that nonsense the Nazis spout? Do you really believe it?”
Willi smiled, the same sweet smile he had always smiled.
“So what if I don’t believe it?” he said. “Who does, anyway? I don’t give a damn. Who cares what I believe or don’t believe? It doesn’t matter, Klaus. You’re clever, you should know that. But they’re going to be the bosses, and that’s all there is to it. You’re either for them or they’re against you. Besides, it’s not what you think. There are lots of chaps like me in the SS, good guys, fun. You don’t understand, Klaus, clever as you are. I’m a German and this is what Germany is going to be. Isn’t that clear enough?”
“Oh yes,” Klaus had said, “it’s clear, horribly clear.”
He was about to turn away, when Willi touched him on the arm and said, “Don’t be mad at me, we’ve had good times together, and I’m still fond of you. Look after yourself, and if you ever find you need a friend in the Party, well, you know where to reach me…”
Where to reach him…
Where indeed? In a mass grave at Stalingrad perhaps? And what crimes would that once happy and innocent boy have committed, even willingly? And if by chance he had survived, what memories would assail him?
Klaus got out of bed, poured two inches of whisky into a smeared glass, took a sleeping pill, and, waiting for it to work, sat by the window looking out on the wet street and a weeping sky.