‘There is nothing safer than a zeppelin’
There wasn’t very much upholstery remaining; that’s why the sound of the piano echoed from the dirt-encrusted gilded angels in the domed ceiling, and down through the derelict space at the back of the dress circle where once had stood a beautiful oak counter and an elaborate mirrored bar.
Once it had been a big theatre. Now it wasn’t really a theatre at all in the sense that that word is used in London, Paris, or New York. It had suffered at the hands of rioters and thieves. Back in 1920 a Freikorps had used it as their barracks, and after that the Reichswehr had stored here ammunition that the generals had wanted to hide from the Allied Armistice Commission. One of the most talented and avant-garde of the new producer-directors had leased it for a year and, when the rent was due, ripped out and sold off fixtures, fittings and floor coverings to get out of debt. So now it was a cold, draughty, uncomfortable shell. And it smelled of the cats that ran wild in the cellars. But even now, in the winter of 1929, the coldest winter in memory, people would still pay to come here if the show was good enough.
It was almost midnight; the runthrough and some last-moment auditions had finished. Almost everyone had gone home. The stage and auditorium were totally dark except for one dim electric bulb hanging very low on one side of the stage to illuminate the piano. The theatre was empty but for the piano player and the woman leaning over him to see the scrawled script and manuscript notes from which he was playing.
‘I adore it,’ said Lottie, starting to hum, following the melody her husband was playing on the piano.
‘Yes, it’s a wonderful melody.’ Peter was dressed in a dark grey lounge suit with a bowler hat perched on the back of his head. It was not the way he’d ordinarily have worn his hat, but Peter had seen one of the Americans like that, and he now sometimes imitated it.
‘And there are words, aren’t there?’ She was wearing a gigantic golden-coloured fur coat. It was too cold here to take it off.
‘You know Brecht: the words always come first, then Kurt writes the music.’ Peter sang; his voice was tuneful but soft and unsure: ‘Oh, the shark has lovely teeth, dear, and they cut you like a knife. . . .’
‘Oh, stop. Why does he always write such stupid lyrics?’
‘He’s a poet.’
‘You all kowtow to him too much.’
‘I don’t think so. You should see him directing actors, Lottie. Silly little girls become like stars when he talks to them.’
‘I love to watch you playing piano; you are so happy.’
‘It was your idea, Lottie. I’d given up all ideas of ever playing again. But now I sometimes think I’d like to leave Father and go into show business.’ He inserted silly, skilful cadenzas into the music.
‘I hope you’re not serious, Peter darling. These people are paupers. And you’ve got a wife and daughter to look after.’
‘I know, Lottie. I wasn’t serious. If I worked in the theatre full-time, maybe I wouldn’t find it so interesting and exciting. But it’s a privilege to work with the great names: Piscator, Brecht, Kurt and all the rest of them: Reinhardt, Jannings, Peter Lorre. . . .’ He changed to play a few bars from ‘Moon of Alabama’ and made it into something foolishly grand. Then he stopped suddenly. ‘I could never have taken that job in California and left all this behind; you know that, don’t you?’
‘I know it now, but at the time I didn’t know working with Brecht mattered so much to you. You’re getting quite famous.’
‘No, I’m not getting famous, except as the piano player with a half-finger missing.’ He rearranged the pages in front of him, took off his glasses, looked up at her, and smiled. She hadn’t yet got used to seeing him in his horn-rimmed reading glasses. Peter hadn’t got used to them, either, and now he briefly rubbed the little red marks they’d left on each side of his nose. ‘They use me because I’m cheap: in fact, free.’
‘That’s not true, darling. The way you sight-read from all those scribbled notes and make a piano sound like a full band is a miracle.’
‘It’s good enough for auditions and first rehearsals, and that’s the exciting bit. Once the show is put on, I’m less interested in it.’
‘But how do you remain so good-tempered about all this communist propaganda? I remember a time when you would have walked out on songs like the ones in Mahagonny. They’re not only communist but anti-American, too.’
‘Does that annoy you?’ He was genuinely concerned, and she was touched by it.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘sometimes it does. Brecht is a pig, and his ignorance about America is phenomenal. Why does he always write about things he doesn’t know about?’
‘He’s not a politician, darling. He’s a poet. I don’t think much about the content of the songs, and I don’t think the audiences do, either. People come to be entertained. They come to escape the misery for a couple of hours of fantasy. Brecht makes “Amerika” a place for his fantasies.’
‘You’re too nice, Peter.’ She pulled the collar of the fur coat closer about her neck.
‘Being married suits me. This damned piano is already going out of tune again. Look at that. . . .’ He tapped a dead note.
‘I love you.’
He looked up, pursed his lips to show her he loved her, too, and continued playing.
She went to get his coat, gloves and cane from the chair where he’d carefully set them. She knew he’d sit here playing the piano for another hour or so if she didn’t drag him away.
Peter Winter could easily have been playing his own piano in his own comfortable home – Lottie had bought him a fine Bechstein grand for his thirty-third birthday – but he seemed to get some special sort of pleasure from playing this neglected old instrument, just because it was on the stage in this famous old theatre. Peter would have denied it strenuously had she said so, but he was unmistakably ‘stage struck’. She’d seen it happen before. Her stepmother had wasted years dancing, desperate to get into show business. The house in California was still filled with photos of her in her stage costume. Lottie had always suspected that it was her stepmother who’d bullied her father into letting the movie people build hideous studios on their beautiful orange groves.
She put Peter’s hat level on his head and draped his overcoat across his shoulders. ‘Come along, darling, or I’ll start to think you don’t like to be at home.’
He kissed her. ‘It’s a wonderful home, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be than at home with you and little Helena. And soon your parents will be here to see what a wonderful wife and mother you are.’
‘I wish they weren’t coming on that wretched airship. I have nightmares about it.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. There is nothing safer than a zeppelin. They’ve been flying for twenty-nine years off and on, and not one passenger has ever been hurt. You can’t say that about trains, cars, or ocean liners.’
‘What about all the people killed in the war? What about you and your injured hand?’
He frowned. ‘That was different. They weren’t passengers: they were soldiers and sailors, and there were guns firing at them. No one is going to be firing at the Graf Zeppelin.’
‘Suppose they’re ill? Mother can’t even handle a sea voyage comfortably.’
‘This flight around the world will make the Zeppelin company front-page news everywhere. Already the flight to Palestine was in the English and American newspapers; think what they’ll say about it, going completely round the world, stopping only at Tokyo, Los Angeles and Lakehurst, New Jersey.’
‘They’re not young any more, Peter.’
‘They’ll go from Los Angeles to Friedrichshafen in one week, having had a weekend in New York. It’s a miracle, Lottie. There will only be about twenty passengers; my father had the devil of a job getting two tickets for them. Most of them are reserved for important government officials or journalists.’
‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, darling. It was a wonderful idea, and Daddy is terribly pleased about it. He says it’s made him the most celebrated man in California.’
‘Invest this five dollars with me’
The Graf Zeppelin gleamed in the sunshine. This astounding flying machine was almost one year old. The airship first took to the air in September 1928, and since then it had attracted the attention of the whole world. But none of its previous flights had been more dramatic than this one. This was the final leg of a journey that had taken the great airship fully round the world. It had sailed almost silently across a thousand miles of Russia’s wastelands, the angry Pacific Ocean, the pale American prairies, and the grey Atlantic waters. In the crowded streets of New York and Tokyo, just as in the quiet tundra and swampland, people had craned their necks and cheered the big silver fish as it floated along at a steady eighty-five miles per hour, awesome and unstoppable. Now, before dark, the airship would be back home again.
The breakfast things had been cleared away, and there was nothing to do but look down at the German countryside and work up an appetite for the lunch. The chef had been chosen from among all the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s cooks, and the wines were suited to the excellent food that came from the small but well-equipped electric kitchen.
The Graf Zeppelin cruised at fifteen hundred feet, its shadow darting across forest and farmland. It was late summer; the sky was blue and the air was clear, so that below them the trees, farm buildings, and animals looked like toys.
‘I just don’t want the flight to end,’ said Mrs Danziger as their airship crossed Germany, heading towards the Bodensee and the Zeppelin company’s base at Friedrichshafen.
Her husband chuckled. ‘Didn’t I tell you so?’ Mr Simon Danziger was a white-haired, rotund, somewhat cherubic little man in a pale-peach-coloured suit that was unmistakably Californian.
‘If anyone had told me it would be so smooth . . .’ The sentence tailed away, as many of her sentences and ideas did. ‘And the engines, so quiet.’
As the shiny silver airship had neared its destination, she had begun to worry about her hair. Back home she went to the hairdresser three times a week. She hated the idea of greeting her daughter and her son-in-law – and perhaps other members of his family – with her hair not properly permed by someone she could rely on.
She looked round the cabin. This room was no larger than the big reception room at their home – or what they preferred to call ‘the ranch house’ – in Ventura County. But it had accommodated twenty passengers for the whole flight. Here they’d been served their three meals a day, and this had been the only place to sit apart from the very cramped two berth cabins. Of course she’d taken the tour of the airship from stem to stern – all of them had done that, just to vary the monotony of staring down at the green-grey ocean for hour after hour. But one tour of the zeppelin was enough for her. After that she’d spent most of the time sitting here in the large cabin, talking to the other passengers or to the airship’s officers.
It had been a wonderful surprise to find that one of the passengers who joined the airship at Lakehurst, New Jersey, was the son of an old friend as well as being the uncle of Lottie’s husband: Major Glenn Rensselaer. He didn’t normally use the army rank, but it proved useful when pulling strings to get a ticket for this record-breaking flight. As he’d explained modestly, and without describing the dangers and skills of his work with the British fliers, most of his wartime service had been spent as a civilian. But in the final few months of 1918 he’d been officially gazetted to the U.S. Army so that his knowledge of the German aviation industry could be available to the Armistice Commission. Nowadays he remained on the Reserve.
Glenn Rensselaer was a brawny man who, despite his approaching fiftieth birthday, was as childishly excited by the flight as anyone aboard. He still had lots of hair, and the blue ‘Rensselaer eyes’ were large and sincere. In many ways he was like his father, Cyrus, except that no one would mistake Glenn for a successful painter, as people had his father when he was fifty. Glenn had the leathery look of the outdoors. And, quite apart from not looking like an artist, Glenn didn’t even look successful: his clothes were neither of top quality nor well fitting. He wore a dark-grey-striped suit that yielded nothing to the well-established fashion of boxy shoulders and ‘Oxford-bag’ trousers. It was the sort of outfit that could be bought in a department store, such as Wertheims in Berlin, which is where he’d bought it.
Glenn Rensselaer was a sociable man, and he’d conversed at length with every passenger on the airship by the last day of the flight. Most of the people aboard had some special interest in aviation, whether as serving officers, government employees, or journalists, and Glenn was interested to hear their opinions of the zeppelin. The Danzigers were almost the only people aboard who were not professionally interested in the workings of the airship, and with them Glenn’s conversation was about the family into which their daughter Lottie had married, and about the granddaughter they were so anxious to see. Glenn Rensselaer’s son, Cyrus, was eight years old, a beautiful, happy child, and the table was littered with snapshots.
But Glenn spent a great deal of the time twiddling his thumbs, drinking strong coffee and fidgeting with tableware. Like many of the other passengers, he found the total ban against smoking irksome. But with a few million cubic metres of highly flammable hydrogen close above their heads, he had no quarrel with this regulation.
‘My husband, Simon, feels it the way you do,’ explained Mrs Danziger. ‘He smokes cigars. Ever since we first met he’s been in the habit of lighting up one of his big Havanas after lunch, and again after dinner. I never remember him skipping one except when he’s been sick – not until now, that is.’
‘Nita,’ Mr Danziger told his wife, ‘you’ll have to have all our mail ready within the hour, or else it won’t be accepted by the airship post office.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ his wife said to Glenn Rensselaer. ‘When Simon heard that you could mail letters aboard, he had his office address envelopes for all our friends and Simon’s business associates. Over one hundred letters.’
‘Two for each,’ said Mr Danziger proudly. ‘One letter mailed on each sector. Mail sent on the Los Angeles–to–Lakehurst sector got different postmarks from the mail posted on the transatlantic leg. I’d say a lot of those folks will treasure a souvenir like that. Who knows, in time maybe it will become valuable.’
‘Simon collects German stamps,’ said Mrs Danziger. ‘The mail sent on those first trips of the airship last year is already valuable.’
‘Not really valuable,’ protested Simon Danziger.
‘Doubled in price,’ insisted his wife. ‘I’d like to see the rest of our investments do as well.’
‘Well, you’d be surprised to know, honey, that we have quite a few investments that look like they’ll do much better than that before this year is through. The New York stock market is running wild lately.’
‘Simon takes care of that kind of thing,’ said Mrs Danziger vaguely. ‘I’ve got no head for figures.’ She laughed. ‘Never did have.’
Glenn Rensselaer said, ‘Some folks are getting a little worried about the market. Many stock prices are rocketing way past what they are worth in earnings: that’s a dangerous sign.’
‘I don’t get you,’ said Danziger.
Glenn hesitated. Talking about money was not something he enjoyed. He said, ‘I use a rough rule of thumb that a stock should be valued at about ten times its earnings. Now I’m watching folks pay fifty times the annual earnings! Radio Corporation of America went from eighty-five to four hundred and twenty points – and RCA never paid a dividend at all!’
Danziger smiled. ‘Isn’t it enough that the share prices keep going up?’
‘Not if the stock is not really worth the price.’
‘Stocks are worth whatever they will fetch,’ said Mr Danziger authoritatively. ‘The government stick to a cheap money policy because it’s good for business. Well, darn it, it is good for business, and people are buying stocks as fast as they can. That’s the American way; that’s what I believe in.’
‘I don’t have much in the way of savings,’ said Glenn Rensselaer, ‘but a couple of months back my father told me to put everything into government bonds, and I did just that.’
‘Your father is an old friend of mine, as you know. I never go to New York without we have lunch together. And Nita will tell you how much I admire his savvy as a businessman,’ said Danziger. ‘But businessmen get cautious. I’d say your father has become too cautious, Glenn. You take my advice, my friend. Take what money you’ve got and make a little cash while the chance is there. Any time at all, the government will decide to let interest rates go up, but meanwhile Wall Street is the place to put your money, not government bonds.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Glenn and smiled. He was obviously unconvinced.
Glenn’s manner provoked Danziger to elaborate. He asked Glenn for a five-dollar bill and put it on the table to smooth it with the side of his hand. ‘Now, I want you to invest this five dollars with me – I did the same thing with my nephew last Christmas; it’s an object lesson – and in six months I’ll return it to you plus what it’s made on the market.’
‘That’s mighty nice of you, but . . .’
Simon Danziger was enjoying himself. He chuckled to admit that it was a somewhat childish game. ‘Write your name right there on the bill, and some address where I can reach you in six months, and date it . . . You’ll see your profit and it will surprise you.’
‘Well, okay, Mr Danziger.’ Glenn recognized in Simon Danziger the zeal of the newly converted.
Mrs Danziger was more perceptive: she saw Glenn’s embarrassment. ‘I’ll get our mail together,’ she said, ‘and leave you men to talk business.’ She stood up. ‘Do you have any mail for the postal clerk, Mr Rensselaer?’
‘No, I don’t have any mail. I’m not much good at writing letters, I’m afraid. I never got the hang of it.’
‘You know the Winter family well, Mr Rensselaer,’ said Simon Danziger once the two men were left alone. ‘I must admit that I find the prospect of meeting them for the first time very daunting. Have you got any tips for me?’ He tried to make it sound like a joke, but there was no mistaking the serious note in his voice.
‘I’m sure you’ll like your son-in-law, Mr Danziger. Peter Winter is a very sincere young man.’
‘And from the photos we’ve seen, a handsome man, too.’ He carefully placed Glenn’s five-dollar bill in his wallet.
‘Yes, that’s true. And his mother is a truly wonderful woman.’
‘No doubt about that,’ said Danziger, ‘every letter my daughter writes is singing your sister’s praises. I’d say that without your sister Lottie would have found it much more difficult to settle down over there in Berlin.’
Glenn was cautious: it was a two-edged compliment. ‘I guess your wife would have preferred her to come home.’
‘Sure. We both would. But a wife has to arrange her life around her husband’s business affairs. Nita knows that: everyone knows it. No, Nita appreciates the way your sister went out of her way to be so nice to our Lottie. It was a comfort to us both.’
‘The Winters are a swell family. Of course, Harald – Peter’s father – is well known throughout Germany.’
‘A self-made man, so I hear. Started out with just a handful of cash and parlayed it into a fortune.’
‘Some of the stories are exaggerated,’ said Glenn. ‘Harald Winter wasn’t a pauper when he started out . . .’
‘. . . and he’s not sitting on a fortune now,’ Danziger finished the sentence. ‘Is that what you were going to say?’
‘German industry has gone through tough times,’ said Glenn, choosing his words carefully. ‘Winter’s corporations made a mint of money in the war, but when Germany lost, a lot of debts went unpaid. There were two factories in Alsace, so when Alsace became a part of France, those assets were lost. After the war, strikes, riots and revolution turned Germany upside down, and he’s only lately got himself back on his feet.’
‘The way I heard it, Harald Winter made a killing in the great inflation of 1923.’
‘That’s correct, but in 1924, after the new money was introduced, the government demanded repayments from businesses that had profited too well on government loans. Harald Winter had to pay out on some of those old deals.’
‘You don’t say? We’ve never heard anything about that.’
‘Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr Danziger. Harald Winter is a very rich and successful businessman, but he has his ups and downs. Lately he’s been facing a lot of criticism from his codirectors. He could be ousted. I’m telling you all this so you realize that he needs his son Peter to handle some of the problems he’s up against.’
‘That’s real nice of you, Mr Rensselaer. Maybe you know that a few years back Peter was offered a vice-presidency with a Los Angeles bank. My wife and I were mighty disappointed that they didn’t come and live in California.’
‘I’m sure you were.’
‘But now for the first time I see the refusal in another light. The boy was being loyal to his father, and I respect him all the more for that.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But my daughter wrote and told me that you’d advised him against taking that job.’
Glenn was flustered. He fingered one of the snapshots of his eight-year-old son and laid it upon another, like a man playing patience. He hadn’t reckoned that Peter would tell his wife, and that she would tell her parents. ‘Well . . . they were expecting the baby.’
‘As I understand it, you had confidential information about that bank, and you made a special trip to tell Peter that a job with them could prove disappointing.’
Glenn bit his lip. This was a new aspect of Simon Danziger: he could be tough. ‘That’s correct. My advice was to stay with his father.’
‘And he took your advice, but the bank is flourishing, the way I hear it.’
‘You are right. I was being overcautious, I guess.’
‘Just like with your treasury bonds?’ Danziger turned his head to watch the countryside unrolling beneath them. It was rich, fertile land, green and lush in a way the California landscape never was. Yet this German earth was regimented in small rectangular parcels that varied little in size or shape.
‘Just like that,’ said Glenn.
‘I guess caution runs in the Rensselaer blood,’ said Danziger.
Glenn smiled and said nothing. He just couldn’t decide how much of it was hostility. Maybe none. Maybe Danziger should just be taken at face value, like a T-bill.
‘You can’t just make them disappear’
Mr Simon Danziger was variously described as a man of infinite sense and good judgement and as a cunning, parasitic loafer. This disagreement came from the way that Simon Danziger lived solely on profits and interest from his investments. At one time he’d tried to take personal control of the companies in which he invested, but found it both confusing and dull. From time to time he’d even bought small businesses, including three hotels, so that he could occupy himself with the decisions of management. Although this was more interesting for him, he’d seldom been able to contribute any ideas that bore fruit in prestige or profits. Now he let other people earn the money and didn’t interfere with them.
Yet time never passed slowly for Simon Danziger: he was seldom if ever bored. He enjoyed long country walks; carefully planned dinner parties and the conversation around his table; arranging, and rearranging, ‘writing up’, and adding to the collection of German stamps he’d inherited from his father; tending his small but elaborate garden; writing long letters (many of them to fellow stamp-collectors); and, above all else, reading.
Danziger was a voracious and omnivorous reader. A bookstore owner in Santa Barbara had come to know the Danzigers so well that he chose books and shipped them a dozen or more at a time. Seldom did his selection earn a complaint. Most of the books were, in the broadest sense, either art, biographical, or historical, books that helped the Danzigers ‘stay in touch with culture’ from their home on the far side of the world.
So the Danzigers didn’t come to Europe unprepared. A visit with them to the Greek and Egyptian collections of the New Museum left Peter Winter exhausted: his in-laws moved from room to room at a snail’s pace and discussed each exhibit in wearying detail.
‘I told you not to go!’ Lottie reminded her husband with a laugh as he sank down in an armchair and sighed deeply. They were waiting in the sitting room of her parents’ large, luxurious suite on the fourth floor of the Adlon Hotel. ‘My father has a pathological craving for culture; it’s a disease endemic to certain regions of California.’
‘They never get tired.’
‘Do you know how long it takes on the train from Los Angeles to Chicago? And even then you are only in Chicago. My parents are starved for culture: starved!’ Lottie was standing at the window watching the traffic in Pariser Platz. It had been raining, and the fallen leaves stuck flat and shiny on the road, like newly minted gold coins. She loved this view; it summed up Berlin for her. Across the Platz was the Brandenburg Gate and the long, long avenue that went right through the Tiergarten. ‘I wish we lived on this side of town; don’t you, darling?’
‘Only the other day you were telling your mother that all the smartest restaurants and chic shops were in Ku-damm.’
‘I didn’t say they weren’t, Peter. But this old part of town is the real Berlin. Unter den Linden, the palace, the Reichstag – these are the places that make the city unique.’
Peter rubbed his face. ‘How I’ll stay awake through the concert, I don’t know.’
‘It’s Bruckner, darling – sudden, loud and discordant. Bruckner wrote music for people who might be tempted by sleep.’
‘I wish you’d seen your father when he first caught sight of the Queen Nefertiti bust. I was watching him. His eyes popped wide open. He shouted out loud. “Golly!” he said, just like that: “Golly!”’
‘I felt like saying “golly” myself when I first saw it.’
‘And he knows everything there is to know about Greek vases. Far more than I care to hear about, in fact.’
She laughed. ‘Poor darling.’
‘Furthermore, your father actually corrected me on something I said about the Royal House of Hohenzollern. He knows more about even German history than I do.’
‘Well, you don’t know much about German history. . . . I don’t know why you are so astonished. I told you what my crazy parents were like long before they came.’
‘Yes, you did, Lottie darling. I just didn’t believe you. And, Lottie, you must remind me to speak with the dining-room manager downstairs before we sit down. I’m the host tonight. It would be an absolute disaster if the cost of the dinner tonight went on your father’s bill. If Uncle Glenn gets back from Hamburg in time there will be eighteen of us, quite a crowd. It’s sure to go on very late, and I must be in the office tomorrow – I’ve missed so many days since your parents arrived, and tomorrow there’s an important board meeting.’ He stopped. It was better not to tell her of the acrimonious disputes in the board room as an energetic group of directors fought to take control of the holding company. It wasn’t the money. Papa had enough shares to give him a comfortable income, but the blow to Harald Winter’s pride would be terrible to see. Peter prayed it wouldn’t happen.
Lottie murmured assent, still looking out the window. ‘I hope Mother will be ready in time. I have to take a bath and change and I have someone coming in to fix my hair.’ Coming across Pariser Platz she saw a group of SA men, in their brownshirt uniforms and high boots, marching behind a swastika flag. She turned away from the window and looked at her watch. ‘Your brother won’t come in his uniform, will he?’
‘Uniform? Pauli? He’s put on too much weight to fit into that these days.’
‘You said he’d become a brownshirt.’
‘No, darling. I said he’d joined the Nazi Party.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
‘No, the SA, with their brownshirt uniforms, are quite separate. They’re a rabble that that dreadful Captain Röhm recruited from Freikorps riffraff and chronic unemployed. They are closely allied to Hitler’s Nazi Party, but there’s a lot of friction between them.’
‘It’s a fine distinction, isn’t it?’
‘No. The Nazi Party is a political party, like the socialists, the communists, the Centre Party, and so on. They don’t wear uniforms, perhaps just a small circular swastika badge in the buttonhole.’
‘I wish your brother wasn’t a member.’
Peter shrugged. ‘You know Pauli by now, Lottie. He’s not exactly a zealot, is he? Pauli has even less interest in politics than I do. He joined the party because nowadays he gets almost his entire income from them. He thought it would look bad if he continued to say he didn’t want to join. As a lawyer, you see, he has to be told many party secrets.’
‘I wish your brother had some other kind of work. He is a nice boy: I like him.’
‘I know. I told my father that we should have him in the family business, but things are difficult right now, and this job with the Nazis has been the making of him. When he got out of law school I wasn’t even sure he’d be able to scratch a living. But now he’s becoming quite influential in Berlin politics.’
‘Pauli is?’
‘Oh, I don’t mean he’ll ever be a politician, but he has the ear of the Berlin party chiefs. Anyone who wants a favour from Goebbels or Strasser or from SA Leader Daluege goes to Pauli Winter. He’s becoming a go-between for the Nazis and many of the top people.’
‘It’s the anti-Jewish propaganda that is so wicked.’
‘I don’t give that any attention.’
‘You won’t forget that your daughter, Helena, is half Jewish, will you, Peter?’
‘It’s just their strategy. Pauli knows these people, and he says that it’s only for vote-catching. Everyone knows that the anti-Jewish nonsense will all be dropped if they get any nearer to a majority in the Reichstag. In the coming year they’ll begin to eliminate it from the programme.’
‘What programme? They haven’t got a programme, except hating the Jews.’
‘Nothing is going to happen to the Jews, Lottie. Don’t get upset on that account. Look around you: the German economy would collapse without the Jews.’
‘But do the Nazis know that?’
Peter looked at his wife with concern. He hadn’t realized how much the Nazi propaganda affected her. It was, of course, the presence in Berlin of her parents. Suddenly she was having to explain to them things she’d previously avoided thinking about. ‘Well, anyway,’ said Peter in an effort to relax her and end these childish fears. ‘How can they get rid of the Jews? They’re Germans; they live here, don’t they? You can’t just make them disappear.’
‘Colonel Horner commanding’
The harvest had been gathered and it was the time of year when, since history began, the warrior had earned his pay. The water in the broad river flowed sluggishly through the rolling landscape, sweeping round the meadow that rose gently towards the tree-clad slopes where the gleaming birches had already shed their leaves. A whistle blew three times, and before the last blast ended three soldiers ran forward, disappearing into the drifting smoke and then reappearing as an unexpected gust of wind clawed the smoke aside to reveal a platoon of engineers at the waterside. From them came the noise of a generator as the soldiers inflated supports of a pontoon bridge to improvise a raft.
A large grey-painted saloon car, its engine warmed and ready, started at the first swing of a starting handle and, still wielding the handle, a helmeted officer clamped a boot onto the running board of the accelerating motor, heaved himself into the passenger seat, and slammed the door.
The car slid on the wet grass before its heavy-duty tyres took a grip. By the time the car reached the water’s edge, the combat engineers had ramps in position. The car rolled onto the raft, the weight of it making water wash right over the inflated rubber supports. At the stern of the raft an engineer manipulated an outboard motor.
By the time the car was on the raft and secured, another grey-painted car was coming across the meadow. And then a third. They’d been concealed behind the cottages near the broken, half-submerged timber jetty where once there had been a ferryboat.
The men in the command post watched every move. ‘The first tank is ready to go,’ said the young Leutnant. His name was Rudolf von Kleindorf, and he was the baby-faced second son of an aristocratic World War I general. Von Kleindorf had not graduated from cadet school in time to serve on active duty, and now he showed an exaggerated respect for men like Horner, who’d fought in the war.
‘Not enough smoke,’ said Oberleutnant Alex Horner, who was, for the purpose of this exercise, a colonel commanding a battalion of tanks. ‘Where are the smoke troops?’
‘That’s all the smoke we have,’ said von Kleindorf, his ‘chief of staff’.
‘Damn!’ said Horner. ‘Set fire to one of those dirty little timber huts. Get fuel from the transport people – plenty of oil. Make black smoke. If the enemy see those rafts they’ll guess this is the Schwerpunkt and that our efforts upstream are a feint.’
‘There are people living in those huts,’ protested the ‘chief of staff’.
‘It can’t be helped: we need the smoke.’
Von Kleindorf energetically turned the handle of the field telephone and spoke into it, ordering the houses fired. But the officer at the other end said it was impossible. All of his motor transport was being used as ‘tanks’. He could send men on bicycles, but it would take time to fill containers with fuel, and they would be difficult to carry by bike.
Alex Horner cursed again when he heard the reply.
‘They are Arbeitakommandos,’ said von Kleindorf to explain the shortcomings of the transport unit. The AK were a secret reserve army formed from the remnants of the Freikorps. Formerly disguised as labour associations and sports societies, they were now dressed in army-style uniforms and under the command of Lieutenant Colonel von Bock, chief of staff of the 3rd Reichswehr Division. Officially the AK were civilian labourers assigned to help the hundred-thousand-man army that the peace treaty permitted, but when there were no prying eyes around they became soldiers.
‘Get the tanks going,’ said Horner. The smoke was thinning still more by now, and through his binoculars he could see the defenders on the other bank. If he could see them from the command post on the hillside, it was a reasonable guess that they could see the rafts. Out of sight, upstream, they’d soon be dragging into position the six wheelbarrows that were their assigned high-velocity antitank guns.
‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ said Horner, who was not given to such displays of emotion.
Within three hours the battle was decided, the river crossing had been repulsed, the defenders had won.
‘It was a good idea,’ said von Kleindorf in an effort to comfort his commander. ‘No one ever thought of making the pontoon-bridge components into rafts before. If the transport company had fired the houses . . .’
Alex Horner’s face gave no sign of any emotion whatsoever. ‘Who is the commander of the AK down there?’
Von Kleindorf consulted his notebook. ‘Brand. He’s described here as a Sturmbannführer. A Sturmbann is a brownshirt battalion. The equivalent rank is major,’ he added, to warn Horner that the AK officer outranked him.
Horner said nothing.
Brand. It was a common enough name, but the officer who eventually appeared was the same tormentor Alex Horner had known so long ago and never forgotten.
‘You sent for me, Oberleutnant?’ Sturmbannführer Heinrich Brand asked formally. He had not changed much, the same ‘Crazy Heini’, with his plucked eyebrows and the beady, quick-moving little eyes placed too close on each side of his thin nose. Impeccably turned out: Iron Cross first class on his pocket and swagger stick in his hand. The only false notes were the nicotine-stained fingers and, more noticeably, the greying moustache, its lower part dyed yellow by the cigarettes he constantly smoked.
‘Where was the staff transport, Brand?’ asked von Kleindorf. Brand stared at his questioner. Brand was in his mid-forties and a senior SA man, but these two kids – junior officers, neither of them even thirty – treated him like dirt. He recognized Horner, of course, and he knew that Horner recognized him. It was typical of these arrogant Prussian swine that Horner, the so-called commander, should remain aloof and silent, in the manner of some senior general out of the history books.
‘Not available, Leutnant,’ said Brand. He didn’t smile, but he let them see that he did not intent to apologize. ‘Leutnant’ that was the brownshirt style. Not ‘Herr Leutnant’ – that damned nonsense was finished.
‘The commander’s written orders were that one motor vehicle was to be kept for the transport staff.’
‘It was in use.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I was visiting the bridging unit.’
‘Why?’
‘To inspect them. Most of them are my men.’
‘Are your AK men all brownshirts, Brand?’
‘Yes, Leutnant, and all from Bavaria.’ It wasn’t exactly true – nearly half of them were from the Ruhr – but he knew that the reply would get up the nose of these two Prussians. Brand saw no reason to stand rigidly to attention. As the AK commander, he should be treated with respect. He slapped his leg with the swagger stick. ‘The SA now outnumber the army,’ he told them gratuitously.
Von Kleindorf said nothing. Horner’s face was set like granite.
‘When we come to power,’ Brand told them, ‘the Sturmabteilung will become the nation’s only bearer of arms. We will be a new sort of army.’
‘Will it deliberately disobey orders, as you did today?’ von Kleindorf asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t as he saw the satisfaction in Brand’s face.
Brand gave no reply, and with ill-concealed anger von Kleindorf dismissed him. Brand saluted with a studied care that was insolent. He had no regrets. He didn’t mind if his deliberate flouting of orders had caused the failure of the river crossing. The sun was sinking fast for Prussian stereotypes like Horner and von Kleindorf. A National Socialist order was about to dawn. Brand had the warm glow of the believer, and such men suffer no self-doubts.
It took until nightfall for the battlefield to be restored to the villagers who lived upon it. Not knowing how narrowly their homes had escaped extinction by fire, the residents of the cottages near the disused ferry gave the tired soldiers bits of hard homemade sausage and old dark bread.
Oberleutnant Alex Horner went to report to the ‘divisional commander’ – Captain Niemann, a severe-looking man who’d ended the war as a hussar colonel and had taken the demotion to stay in the peacetime army. Then they began the night march back to barracks. It was a long journey. The men soon settled into that march time that trained infantry can sustain for hour after hour. The crunch of jackboot on loose-surface country road produced a rhythm that lulled the mind, and dulled the aches and pains that more casual walking brings.
The rearmost infantryman carried the oil lantern that regulations prescribed as a necessary precaution against traffic accidents, but the moon provided light enough for Oberleutnant Horner and von Kleindorf to see the whole column as they trudged on through villages where barking dogs greeted them as strangers. Horner and von Kleindorf were mounted on chargers – fine, big beasts that snorted and sneezed and danced and did not know that their role in war was to be confined to the symbolic and ornamental.
‘Did you know that Kerl?’ von Kleindorf asked, dropping, for the first time since the exercise had begun, the role of chief of staff.
‘I was with him in the war,’ replied Alex Horner.
‘He was in your regiment? An officer?’ said von Kleindorf incredulously. Brand’s surly manner and coarse accent were an unlikely asset for the mess of a smart regiment.
‘No, I was in his,’ said Horner.
‘Oh, the Bavarian Reserves you told me about.’
‘That’s it,’ said Horner.
‘Poor you,’ said von Kleindorf. ‘You don’t think those SA ruffians could really become a part of the army, do you?’
‘Not while I’m in it,’ said Horner. All the time he was thinking of the days to come: inquests, post-mortems, reports and conferences. Alex Horner’s failed river crossing was unlikely to come out well.
‘What battalion is this?’ It was the voice of Captain Niemann, out of the darkness. He was moving up to the front of his ‘division’.
‘First Heavy Panzer Battalion,’ said Horner, keeping to the terminology of the exercise. ‘Colonel Horner commanding.’ It was absurd, of course. He looked at his marching column: in manpower it was scarcely a company. With an army of only a hundred thousand men it would be difficult – after finding the support and lines of communication troops – to put together a couple of decent infantry divisions, let alone the panzer units, motorized infantry, and so on that this exercise envisaged. But if Captain Niemann was determined to hold on to his phantom division until the last moment, who could really blame him?
‘Goodnight, Herr General,’ said Horner.
‘Your financial adviser resigns’
Veronica had kept the Winters’ house true to the splendid fin de siècle style. Over the years there had been new furniture, furnishings and carpets, but the style was unchanged. Now, as the 1930s approached, she was conscious of the way that the gloomy drawing room, of which she’d always been so proud, was to her brother’s American eyes like a museum.
The windows were heavily draped in yellow silk with chocolate-brown tassels, so that only limited daylight could fall upon the Oriental carpets. There was scarcely a glimpse of the patterned wallpaper, for the pictures, paintings and carefully posed sepia family-portrait photographs were crowded together with ornamental plates and fans. Small pieces of chinaware, ivory and silver bric-à-brac crowded the huge mirrored mantel-shelf, and were carefully arranged on side tables and in glass-fronted cabinets, so that Glenn Rensselaer was in constant fear of knocking something over.
‘Harald should retire,’ Veronica told her brother.
‘He’s only fifty-nine; he’s not sick, is he?’
‘He’s tired and he’s bored and he’s apprehensive.’
‘About the business?’
‘About the world, about Germany, about the things that are happening here. Go ahead and smoke, Glenn. I can see you’re dying to.’
‘I’m not sure I understand you, sis,’ said Glenn Rensselaer. ‘Yes, I would love to smoke, if you’re sure you don’t mind.’ He reached into the pocket of the suit he’d bought specially for this trip. He wanted to look smart for his sister, and on the shopwindow dummy this Glenurquhart check looked very presentable. But now, on him, it was already baggy and rumpled. He was getting out his pipe and tobacco pouch when there was a tap at the door. A chambermaid, complete with starched cap and apron, came in to attend to the stove. She fed coal into it and deftly swept the coal dust into a pan that she took away with her.
Only when the servant was gone did Veronica answer. ‘Unemployment is on the rise again.’
‘Everyone says Germany is booming.’
‘The boom has ended. Harald is predicting three million unemployed this coming winter, and he’s usually right about such things. He thinks more unemployment will immensely strengthen the communists and the Nazis.’
‘Probably.’
‘And the Nazis are asking Harald for money. He’s resisted so far, but most of the other big companies are making contributions to them.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t be so naïve, Glenn. Because they don’t want the communists to come to power and seize the factories. But for Harald there is a further complication: he has to consider Peter and Lottie.’
‘Well, he won’t be helping Lottie and little Helena by financing the Nazis and bringing them into power, will he?’
‘The Nazis will list Harald’s companies among those with “Jewish management” unless he donates a substantial sum to them. That could mean boycotts and demonstrations . . . strikes too, perhaps.’
‘Does Peter know?’
‘Peter is urging Harald to resist, but most of the other directors insist upon paying. It could probably be arranged that the payments be tax-deductible, so it wouldn’t cost the company anything.’
‘Poor Harald.’
‘Until now he’s resisted the Nazis, but they are becoming much more powerful every week. A severe winter and more unemployment might change everything for the worse.’
‘Has Harald spoken to Pauli about this?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Glenn. You must promise – Harald would die rather than ask Pauli for any sort of favour. The argument they had that night at Pauli’s birthday party has never really healed.’
‘I’m sure Pauli bears his father no ill will,’ Glenn told her. ‘The other night, at the party for the Danzigers, they seemed to be on good terms.’
‘Pauli forgets the hurtful things he says, but his father doesn’t.’
Glenn puffed away at his pipe. ‘Back home they think that at long last Germans have come to see the advantages of parliamentary democracy.’
‘That will take a long time. The single voice of a strong emperor has always been to the German taste. Germans find the argument and conflict of our sort of politics confusing and disturbing. They don’t like debate: they want decisions.’
‘You should know them by now, sis. You’ve lived here a long time.’
‘Too long, perhaps,’ she said.
‘Is that so?’
‘I’ve been thinking about going home, Glenn.’
‘The folks would be bowled over. Dad’s seventy-eight this year; I think he’s given up all hope of seeing you again.’
‘Tell me about Dad.’
‘Dot looks after him.’
‘What is she like?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think she’s a schemer. She had her three sons take the family name, and Dad put a lot of money into that bank to get partnerships for them. Her eldest son’s little boy stays with us, and Dad seems more interested in him than in my little boy.’ He looked up and smiled at her. It was not like Glenn to express any kind of grievance. ‘Yes, you should go home.’
‘Perhaps I was wrong to wait so long, but at previous times I could see no way. . . .’
‘A visit, you mean?’
‘I don’t know, Glenn. I love Harald and the two boys. And Lottie has become like a daughter to me. I would miss them all so much. And yet. . . .’
‘What is it, sis?’
‘I don’t want to die here, Glenn.’
‘Die? What are you talking about? You are only’ – his brow furrowed as he quickly added five years to his own age to calculate – ‘fifty-four. You have half a lifetime in front of you.’
‘I know. I have no fears of death, or any premonition. It’s just that I’d like to live out my old age in America. Does that sound crazy?’
‘No, sis. Of course I understand. I know many people who feel exactly that way after living overseas. Have you spoken to Harald about this?’
‘He’d be so terribly hurt, Glenn.’
‘But you are unhappy.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Would Harald go, too?’
‘Not for a prolonged stay. In America he’d be like a fish out of water. His English is not very good, and he remains the most German German I’ve ever met.’
It was not the first time that Veronica had discussed with Glenn the idea of returning to America. Each time she did so it was from some new aspect, and each time Glenn started off believing her. But, as in previous discussions of this kind, Glenn ended in doubt. Eventually he decided that she would never go back. She lacked the desire, the energy, that would be needed to sever herself, however briefly, from her life here in Berlin.
But Glenn saw how much his sister needed this curious fantasy about going home, and he was prepared to indulge her, despite the way her conversation went round and round, the deceptions and the self-deceptions and the devious ways she invented to temporize. He resolved that next time they spoke he’d confront her with the contradictions.
* * *
But the next conversation that Glenn Rensselaer had with his sister was under very different circumstances. It took place on the afternoon of Friday, October 25. Rensselaer had arrived at the emergency department of the Charité Hospital in response to a telephone call from the manager of the Adlon Hotel. A policeman had come to the hotel to bring news that one of their guests – Herr Simon Danziger – had been injured in a traffic accident.
It was said by people who know about such matters that Potsdamer Platz had become the busiest traffic intersection in the whole of Europe. Cars, delivery vans and heavy trucks entered the Platz from a dozen different directions. Navigating across this mad whirlpool of motors and horse-drawn carts came the clanking streetcars, and everywhere deft cyclists and even more nimble pedestrians dashed through the torrent of traffic.
It was here – at the intersection with the recently named Friedrich Ebert Strasse – that, at eleven-fifty that Friday morning, Herr Simon Danziger was struck by a horse-drawn dray laden with twenty-six barrels of dark beer from the Neukölln brewery.
He was still conscious, and in great pain, while they rushed him to the Charité Hospital in the taxi from which he’d just alighted. He was prepared hurriedly and taken to an operating theatre on the top floor for major surgery.
The complex that is the Charité sprawls across Berlin’s Mitte. These forbidding old buildings make up a grey stone fortress wedged between the slow-moving oily waster of the river Spree and the canal. There was no waiting room, and Glenn Rensselaer spent the first half-hour standing awkwardly amongst the outpatients in a cold and draughty upstairs corridor. From here he enjoyed the view of a cobbled courtyard where two mechanics delved into the entrails of a Magirus ambulance.
Glenn Rensselaer felt conspicuous in his long fur-lined overcoat, homburg, grey gloves, and silver-topped cane. The poorly dressed people on the benches were hunched against the cold and stiff with their aches and pains. They looked at him with detached curiosity, as they looked at the senior medical staff who strode through, or at the sheet-covered trolleys that came clanking past them, dragged by men in soiled white coats and glistening rubber aprons. Only two green-uniformed policemen seemed relaxed and at ease. They stood by the door, smoking cigarettes that they concealed inside half-clenched fists, and blew smoke at the ceiling.
The next person to arrive was his sister, Veronica. She wore a magnificent sable coat that was adorned, as was her hat, with flecks of newly fallen snow. She was escorted by a fluttering little hospital official. He wore a frock coat, carried wads of official-looking papers, called her Frau Doktor Winter, and bowed his head continually to expose a balding patch on the top of his skull.
Veronica called to her brother and he joined them, to be shown into a warm office where there was the privacy and comfort that the fluttery man felt should be provided for the highly esteemed Frau Doktor.
‘Are you family?’ the fluttery man inquired.
‘No, not family,’ said Glenn.
‘No, of course not, of course not!’ said the man, and was especially flustered at the idea of it.
Veronica was seated in the soft visitors’ chair, and Glenn in the swivel chair behind the desk, when he returned to bring them the duty surgeon’s prognosis. After a long description of Danziger’s mortal injuries – a litany that Glenn couldn’t understand and to which Veronica closed her ears – he said that there was no chance that Herr Simon Danziger could survive. He would expire, the man predicted – looking down mournfully at the papers in his hands – within the hour.
‘Poor devil!’ said Glenn Rensselaer when the man had departed.
‘He was so full of life,’ said his sister.
‘I was thinking of the driver of the beer dray.’
‘Yes, for him, too,’ said Veronica doubtfully.
There was a long silence. ‘Danziger went bust,’ said Rensselaer. ‘The first telegrams went out last Saturday night, calling in the margins. Danziger had sunk every last red cent into stocks on the New York exchange. We talked about it on the airship coming over.’
‘The “crash” – I saw it in the papers, but I don’t really understand . . .’
‘Suckers kept buying: up and up and up and up it went. It had to go bang, and it crashed last weekend.’
‘And they didn’t know it was about to happen?’
‘Everyone on the exchange knew, unless they were plumb stupid. But the market makes money on every deal. The brokers will come out of this disaster richer than ever.’
Veronica said, ‘You’re saying Mr Danziger deliberately stepped in front of . . . No, Glenn, no. That’s too awful.’
‘I sure won’t say it to Lottie or to Mrs Danziger, but I’d bet a million bucks against an old shirt-stud that that’s the truth of it.’
‘He was bankrupt?’
‘Just about, I’d say. He told me that he’d scraped together every last asset he could find to play the market. Dad sent me a long telegram when the market closed on Monday. Told me what was happening behind the scenes. The time difference meant that I had the telegram soon after midnight.’
‘Did you tell Mr Danziger?’
‘I phoned him at the Adlon and read Dad’s telegram to him, leaving out the names of Wall Street tycoons who’d died by their own hand since the news broke. It was about one o’clock in the morning, Tuesday. I must have woken him up. He just grunted a thanks. I guess he’d already heard from his own broker. It was too late to do anything by then. That was the last time I spoke with him. I said to call me if I could help but he never did.’
‘It’s ghastly,’ said Veronica. ‘How will Mrs Danziger manage?’
‘I don’t know. All she has is some shares in a movie studio, and that’s not an asset easy to dispose of,’ said Glenn. He was thinking of his nephew Peter. If there was no prospect of an inheritance for Lottie, Peter was going to be tied to his father, and the safe, well-paid job there.
‘I wonder if she’ll have enough money to settle her bill at the Adlon. I’d better offer her those two rooms on the third floor. Will she want the funeral here in Berlin, do you think?’
‘I don’t think she has a lot of choice.’
Mrs Danziger would have preferred to take her husband’s body back to America, and Lottie wanted her father buried with appropriate ceremony in the old Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, behind the Rote Rathaus, where the great Moses Mendelssohn was interred, but both ideas proved impracticable. Instead the funeral was held at the big Jewish cemetery at Weissensee.
Some people said that Pauli cared too much for his job with the Nazis to be seen at a Jewish funeral, but they were wrong. Pauli attended the funeral, dressed soberly in the dark suit he wore when attending the criminal courts. What’s more, Pauli took a few moments at the funeral to do his father a favour. He told his father, in strictest confidence, that the Nazis would be more than satisfied with a quarter of the amount of money they were demanding from Winter Metal Alloys.
Mrs Danziger was pleased to accept Veronica’s offer of accommodation, and Glenn Rensselaer settled her bill at the Adlon. She stayed until after Christmas, not wishing to face the California party season alone.
It was a few days before Christmas when Mrs Danziger had a letter from the insurance company that covered her husband’s life policy. It said that they would pay. Glenn Rensselaer breathed a sigh and flushed down the toilet the five-dollar bill that Mr Danziger had sent him just before he died. Had the assessors seen the cryptic note that accompanied it – ‘Dear Glenn, Your financial adviser resigns as of today. Please give my apologies to all concerned with the results. I did the best I could – Simon Danziger’ – they might not have been so willing to categorize his death as accidental.
By the time Mrs Danziger took the train to Bremerhaven to catch the S.S. Albert Ballin for New York, some of Harald Winter’s pessimistic forecasts were coming true. And the effects of the New York crash came rippling into the European countries, so that their already unstable economies were buffeted by the storms.
In the month of January 1930 alone, the number of unemployed Germans rose from one and a half million to almost two and a half. In Berlin the factories were laying off workers at such a rate that in many parts of the city the streets were crowded with unemployed. They stood and stared vacantly about them, not knowing how to cope with their misery. Farms within walking distance of the city, as so many farms still were, had armed men guarding their crops.
The coalition government declared that there was not enough money to pay the normal unemployment benefit without incurring a deficit of about a hundred million dollars. This financial and political crisìs came soon after the tenth anniversary of Germany’s changeover to parliamentary democratic government. It wasn’t easy to argue with those who said that the communists or the Nazis would do better.
Almost three years earlier, in 1927, the hundredth anniversary of the death of Ludwig van Beethoven, Artur Schnabel had created a sensation in Berlin by playing the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. It took seven Sunday-afternoon concerts, and Schnabel performed them in the Volksbühne, a theatre club created by means of trade-union financing and more usually associated with the radical left.
Schnabel’s great success had an effect upon the Berlin musical establishment. It changed Erich Hennig’s life. In February 1930, largely as a result of the continuous prompting of his wife, Lisl, Erich Hennig played Mozart piano sonatas before an invited audience.
In some ways it was a mistake. Erich Hennig did not have the subtle and disciplined lyricism that Mozart requires. Hennig was at his best supplying the more robust demands of Beethoven’s piano concertos. But Hennig’s two concerts were by no means a failure. His mother-in-law sent the invitations, and Frau Wisliceny was still a name to be reckoned with in the bitter and Byzantine power struggle that had always characterized Berlin’s cultural life.
Those who might have dared to condemn Hennig’s interpretation of Mozart were not present at the performances, and any comment they made was condemned as sour grapes. Hennig’s Mozart was competent and charming and provided a turning point in Hennig’s career. Until now he’d worked for a music publisher, but now he was signed by an agent. With three pupils, and the promise of more performance fees, Hennig left his dull office job and became a professional musician.
And as his career changed, so did his political allegiances. Until this time he’d been a left-wing radical, regularly to be seen at Communist Party meetings. But beginning with his Mozart recitals, Hennig’s political activities were less in evidence. The hammer-and-sickle badge was not displayed in the lapel of the black suit he wore when at the keyboard, and the bright-red tie was replaced by a quieter, patterned one chosen by his mother-in-law.
Other, more far-reaching changes dated from Hennig’s Mozart recitals in February 1930. It was Pauli’s presence at the recital hall off Ku-damm that caused Frau Wisliceny to invite him regularly to her house. Not always to her ‘salon’, for Pauli Winter was not, and would never claim to be, an intellectual. ‘Mozart is about as far as I go,’ he told Frau Wisliceny, and anyone else who tried to discuss music with him.
He was welcome in many places nowadays, for Pauli Winter was not the little Pauli who had marched off to war. For one thing, he went everywhere nowadays in a smart black Horch convertible. On weekdays, on official business, the car was driven by a stern-faced young man wearing shiny high boots, breeches and a brown shirt with swastika armband.
Pauli Winter enjoyed going to Frau Wisliceny’s gatherings. She chose her guests carefully, so they were always people who reacted favourably to Pauli’s jokes and chatter. Usually, after tea, Frau Wisliceny would persuade him to do some conjuring tricks. He’d feign reluctance, but she knew he enjoyed doing the tricks, because he always managed to have some new ones prepared. And his tricks were never silent. Four kings inserted into a deck became ‘four Turkish-carpet merchants arriving at their warehouse’. There was always a funny story, and the end of the trick brought not only a gasp of surprise but also a hoot of laughter.
Pauli had the enviable ability to walk into a room filled with strangers confident that he’d make new friends: and he almost invariably did. Pauli could peel layers from a stranger and release some surprising prisoner trapped inside a reputation. No one but Pauli could have persuaded the pompous Erich Hennig to play a silly song like ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas!’ and have got a revered actor like Emil Jannings to sing the nonsensical words.
Pauli’s enemies said that he always wanted easy praise and appreciation. His father, on more than one occasion, warned him with that classic aphorism ‘Applause is the spur of noble minds, and the aim of weak ones,’ but Pauli was undaunted. Pauli was Pauli, and his nature was not so easily changed.
As with most successful entertainers, his disarming casualness concealed the great care with which he watched his audience. He knew which people present gave themselves to his jokes, tricks and stories and which were determined to remain unimpressed. So he knew that Inge enjoyed them more than most.
And Frau Wisliceny appreciated the sight of Inge laughing. If only Lottie had not had her wedding reception at the Wisliceny house. She was their guest and there was no avoiding it, but the preparations for the wedding had turned the knife that was in Inge’s heart. Her mother had wept for her, and began to doubt if Inge would ever be happy again. It was weeks before she would even leave the house, and her mother suffered with her. It was an agony greatly worsened by the unwillingness of either woman to admit that it existed. Sometimes Frau Wisliceny wondered if Peter Winter ever realized the consuming adoration that Inge had for him. Perhaps he did, for he seemed to contrive that he and Inge didn’t meet at dinners or parties or any other gatherings.
So Frau Wisliceny was pleased to see that Pauli enjoyed entertaining Inge and some of his tricks seemed to be prepared for her alone. And when Inge went, several times a week, to the Romanische Café to join Pauli in his frugal lunch, or even when the lunches became less frugal and of longer duration, no one gave it any serious attention. Frau Wisliceny was relieved to see that Inge was once again taking an interest in the outside world. She guessed – rightly – that many of those early conversations were devoted exclusively to discussions about Peter.
It helped, of course. Pauli was a good listener, and it was far easier to explain her love of Peter to him, for he loved his brother, too. Neither of them considered any possible romantic developments of their meetings, even when the talk of Peter had dwindled to almost nothing. They enjoyed each other’s company, and everyone knew that Pauli had lots of girlfriends: noisy, pretty, gregarious girls, none of them like the serious, beautiful and intellectual Inge. She wasn’t Pauli Winter’s sort of girl. And yet Pauli was not blind to Inge’s beauty. Her green, luminous eyes that could look so deep and so lonely, her long neck, long slim arms and pale unblemished skin like porcelain made her someone he was proud to be seen with. And Inge discovered in Pauli someone she’d never known about, a man who was able to make her forget for a moment the ache she felt for Peter.
It was Pauli’s blonde waitress at the Romanische Café who changed everything. She regularly exchanged vulgar jokes with all her male customers. One day she greeted Inge and Pauli with a typical Berlin joke that speculated on what they would be doing that afternoon following their lunch of a dozen oysters each and a bottle of Sekt.
Pauli was embarrassed but to his surprise Inge responded by telling her in Berlin argot just how much she was looking forward to just such an outcome. A new relationship began immediately. The following day they went to Friedländer Brothers, next door to the Hotel Bristol, and chose a ring. And then to the ‘tea dance’ at the roof garden of the Eden Hotel.
Pauli could dance well when he wanted to, and now he wanted to. Within two weeks Inge and Pauli were officially engaged, and their marriage followed in May.
* * *
There was no opposition from the families. Any reservations that the Wislicenys might have entertained about Pauli’s philistine tastes or political affiliations were entirely removed by Inge’s obvious happiness. And all the Winter family agreed that Inge Wisliceny was a catch beyond any that Pauli could rightfully have expected.
Peter’s wife, Lottie, was determined to remain Inge’s friend, and despite the reservations that Inge at first showed, it was Lottie, far more than Frau Wisliceny, who helped Inge plan the wedding.
It was a spectacular event. Pauli’s friend Alex Horner pulled strings at Bendlerstrasse and arranged for Pauli Winter to be registered as an Oberleutnant of the Reserve so that he could have a military guard of honour at the ceremony. Each young officer was matched with a beautifully dressed bridesmaid, in the traditional German style. The couple came down the steps of the church under a canopy of drawn swords. This was Lottie’s idea: since, as she pointed out, such a ceremony demanded that Pauli wear an army uniform, he could not possibly get married wearing the brown shirt and swastika of the SA, in which he’d recently been given honorary rank. Not even Dr Goebbels, the Berlin party leader, would insist that anything could be more glorious for a German than to be married in army officer’s uniform. And Pauli, with his wonderful blond hair, was the archetypal ‘Aryan’ that Nazi mythology so admired.
Lottie and Inge had worked hard at the guest list to see that the reception was not only for the family but also a reunion of Pauli’s old friends. There were men who’d been cadets at Lichterfelde with him, half a dozen men of his 1918 storm company, as well as close friends like Fritz Esser.
The presents were in keeping with the grandeur of the ceremony and reception. Richard Fischer gave the couple a twenty-place antique Meissen dinner service that had been in his family for several generations. Inge had refused Richard’s marriage proposal, and now she wondered if this was his way of telling her that he’d never marry anyone else.
Harald and Veronica Winter gave them a large Mercedes tourer, as well as having the house on the Obersalzberg extensively extended and redecorated in preparation for their honeymoon there. Until this time it had been little more than a hunting lodge, with heavy rustic furniture and cheap printed fabrics. But now it became a country house, with a large dining room, a huge sitting room and no fewer than five small but comfortable bedrooms. And, wonder upon wonder, Veronica, using the cheque sent by her parents, had insisted upon an example of transatlantic profligacy: each bedroom had its own bathroom! This extraordinary extravagance had made the house one of the wonders of the Obersalzberg. Pauli took great pleasure in showing his house to his bride, and to his great delight and Veronica’s relief, she fell in love with it. She cherished it, and its proximity to the holiday home that Adolf Hitler used, and made Pauli promise to take her there regularly in winter and in summer, too.