Werner Nehmann was summoned to 20 Hermann Goering Strasse in an early evening phone call from the Ministry of Propaganda. The call came from one of the secretaries in Goebbels’ private office, an old-stager in the Promi called Birgit.
‘Why the invitation?’ he asked on the phone.
‘I’ve no idea. The Minister said ten o’clock. He’s still on the way back from München. I’m sending a car to Tempelhof.’
Nehmann was still living at Guram’s apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse. His Georgian friend’s business empire had lately expanded to France and he was currently occupying a handsome three-storey house in Tours while he cornered the market for quality vintages from the Loire Valley.
Nehmann hung up and glanced at his watch. Still early, barely seven o’clock. For the next couple of hours or so, over a glass or two of Sekt from Guram’s personal cellar, he worked on a couple of articles he owed Das Reich, Goebbels’ weekly offering to neutral countries abroad. Then, as darkness fell, and the city centre’s Blockwarten began to police the nightly blackout, he checked his own curtains and headed for the street.
Goebbels’ official Berlin residence was a ten-minute stroll away. With no raids anticipated, the late evening traffic was slightly heavier than usual and staff, uniformed or otherwise, were still emerging from the Reich ministries at the upper end of the Wilhelmstrasse. Hermann Goering Strasse was on the left, two streets from Hitler’s Chancellery.
Number 20 lay behind a high wall, a three-storey building with the faux-classical features favoured in the upper levels of the Reich. Nehmann paused a moment to light a cheroot, acknowledging the nod of recognition from the sentry who stood guard at the iron gate. After a multimillion Reichsmark renovation, the Minister of Propaganda had been living here since the beginning of the war. Add three more properties outside the city – two on Schwanenwerder, an idyllic island on the River Havel, and another at Bogensee – and Nehmann began to wonder how Goebbels ever made up his mind where to sleep at night.
Recently, out of curiosity as well as a sense of mischief, Nehmann had acquired a copy of the Minister’s first and only published novel, penned when he was twenty-five. It featured a troubled hero called Michael Voorman and it was, everyone quietly agreed, a pile of Scheisse, but what had caught Nehmann’s eye was Voorman’s principled rejection of materialism. What really mattered to the apprentice novelist was faith, and justice, and the pathway to a better future. What the author sought to avoid were the showy baubles of contemporary German life.
Nehmann ground the remains of his cheroot underfoot and stepped towards the gate. An early fantasy, he thought, amused as ever by where this level of deceit might lead a man.
A member of Goebbels’ staff, alerted by the sentry, was already waiting at the mansion’s open door. Another familiar face.
‘He’s back, Hildegard?’
‘Ten minutes ago. He’s in his study. You know the way.’
She stood aside and let him into the house before closing the door behind them. The ground floor offered a banqueting hall, reception rooms and the overpowering scent of furniture polish. Nehmann, who had no taste for public events, had successfully resisted a number of invitations in the early days of the war without damaging his access to the master of the house. He knew that Goebbels had assigned him the role of court jester, as well as maverick journalist, and he was more than content to keep the grind of official business at arm’s length. He also knew from contacts deep in the Promi that Goebbels regarded his take on the world as scurrilous, subversive and frequently brilliant, three reasons – he suspected – to explain the immunity he appeared to have won for himself. Recently, the Minister had given him a nickname, der Über. It was shorthand for der Überlebende. The survivor.
The grand staircase, the signature boast of so many Berlin renovations up and down the Wilhelmstrasse, was hung with fine art looted from galleries in France. Nehmann, as ever, paused beside a canvas by Courbet. He’d first seen this masterpiece a decade ago. It was hanging in a gallery on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, and even then – barely able to eat on his meagre earnings from satirical scribblings – he’d regarded it as sublime. The fall of light on the white bones of the cliff face at Étretat. The seemingly artless brushstrokes that gave the rearing breakers both depth and menace. The scurry of clouds on the far horizon. You could taste the wind, smell the ocean, and every time he took another look it seemed to offer a fresh message. Tonight, he thought, it carries a warning. Never take anything for granted.
Goebbels was working in a small study on the second floor, a private space he regarded as sacrosanct. Nehmann knocked and announced himself.
‘Come…’
Goebbels was sitting in a leather armchair beside a desk, leafing through a sheaf of notes. He was wearing a suit but he’d discarded the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He glanced briefly up, then waved Nehmann into the other chair. No words of welcome; nothing to break his concentration.
Nehmann knew better than to interrupt his master. With his senior staff at the Promi, the Minister had never been less than imperious, and recently he’d been insisting on regular 11 a.m. meetings to tighten his grip on every full stop and comma that emerged from the Ministry. Nehmann was mercifully spared this daily inquisition but word around the building suggested that the pressure on Goebbels was beginning to show, and, looking at him now, Nehmann knew that the rumours were true.
Although they’d spoken on the phone a number of times over the past weeks, he hadn’t seen Goebbels in the flesh since mid-April. The Minister had a face and a slightly skeletal physical presence you wouldn’t forget: high forehead, thin lips, coal-black eyes. For a small man, his voice was surprisingly deep and at his many public appearances he used it to some effect. With his repertoire of gestures – the pointing index finger, the clenched fist, the hammering on the lectern, the planting of arms akimbo – he had the ability to transcend the confines of both his body and his trademark leather jacket. For Werner Nehmann this was yet further proof of the powers of levitation, but here and now, watching Goebbels’ pencil race from line to line, he sensed the Reich’s favourite dwarf was in serious trouble.
He looked even thinner than usual and scarlet shell bursts of eczema had appeared on the bareness of his forearms. There was another sign of stress, too: one highly polished shoe tap-tapping on the looted Gobelin carpet.
‘You’re lucky, Nehmann.’ The Minister didn’t look up.
‘Tell me why?’
‘I like it that you don’t dress for dinner.’
‘I’m here to eat?’
‘You’re here to listen. And to drink. And as it happens I brought back some fine Weisswurst from München.’ He glanced up at last. ‘You think that might be acceptable?’
Nehmann nodded. Weisswurst was a Bavarian sausage, an irresistible marriage of minced veal and pork back bacon. Goebbels knew that Nehmann adored it.
Goebbels lifted a telephone on the table by his chair and muttered an order. Then he gestured at the notes on his lap.
‘We’re running out of grain seed. Can you believe that? I can explain anything within reason. I can turn defeat into victory, I can make angels dance on the head of a pin. Offer me enough money and I can even raise a thin cheer for that snout-wipe Ribbentrop. But a loaf that turns out to be half-barley? In a country like this?’
Nehmann mentioned potatoes as a substitute for grain seed. At short notice it was the only suggestion he could muster. Kartoffelbrot. Kartoffelomelett. A Spanish tortilla on every man’s table.
‘Nein?’
‘Nein. This swinish weather has done for the potatoes, too. So far we’ve had the measure of every single enemy. And now we surrender to the fucking rain?’
Nehmann could only agree. Lately, the weather had been evil. Even back home in Svengati, where the mountains made for serious weather, he’d never seen so much water.
One of the kitchen staff appeared at the door with a tray. As well as a pile of fat Weisswurst, Goebbels had ordered a bottle of champagne. He gave it to Nehmann to pop the cork and then watched him pour.
‘A toast, my friend.’ Goebbels reached for a glass.
‘To what?’
‘To Trappenjagd.’ He frowned. ‘The Kerch Peninsula? Key to the Crimea? You haven’t heard? Manstein cleaned out what’s left of the Soviets yesterday afternoon. The Führer’s planning a major speech. I may even say something myself.’
The two men clinked glasses. Then Goebbels sat back.
‘You don’t listen to the radio any more?’
‘Not today.’
‘But I thought your Coquette’ – a thin smile – ‘has been otherwise engaged?’
Goebbels, who lived for gossip, obviously knew that Hedvika had started an affair with an Italian film director but Nehmann didn’t rise to the bait.
‘She’s shooting in Franconia.’ Nehmann nodded at a pile of scripts on Goebbels’ desk. ‘I have my life to myself.’
Goebbels held his gaze, said nothing. Every night, to Nehmann’s certain knowledge, the Minister devoted time he couldn’t afford to going through pre-production movie scripts. The sight of the ministerial green ink in the margins of scene after scene in these scripts had driven a whole generation of film directors crazy yet in this corner of his empire, as in the others, the little man insisted on total control. A disease, Nehmann thought. And at this rate, probably terminal.
Goebbels was talking about his unhappiness with the Propaganda Companies, yet another innovation for which he claimed sole credit. Nehmann had accompanied one of these outfits during last year’s lightning descent on the luckless French. Goebbels, who treated everything in life as a lamp post, wanted to cock his leg and put his personal scent on the probability of a quick German victory. The Propaganda Companies – film crews and journalists – bounced along in the wake of the Panzer columns, raiding the battlefield for images and interviews to send home. Thus, within days, cinema audiences across the Reich would be treated to victory after victory, an epic movie told onscreen in real time, and all of it thanks to the little genius at the head of the Promi. Given the cannibalism within the upper reaches of the Reich, rival warlords were quick to spot the countless benefits of sharing these spoils of Hitler’s war, and now, it seemed, Goebbels was facing a serious turf battle with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
‘The man’s a fool, an impostor,’ he said, reaching for a sausage. ‘He has the ear of Hitler because he bought off the Russians for a couple of years, but tell me this: what on earth does the man know about propaganda?’
‘He lies,’ Nehmann pointed out. ‘All the time.’
‘Yes, but what lies. Paper lies. The thinnest of lies. The most obvious of lies. Ribbentrop is an impostor. He married his fortune. He stole his title. He has a dentist’s smile. Even his staff say so.’
Nehmann nodded and emptied his glass. He hadn’t been summoned here to listen to Goebbels beating up his many enemies. There had to be another reason.
‘So what happens next, Herr Minister?’
‘What happens next, my friend, we owe to General Manstein. The Führer believes that Trappenjagd is just an hors d’oeuvre. The main course is yet to come. He’s as sensitive to the grain crisis as I am, and he believes the people deserve a little glimpse of what awaits us. The news footage from the Crimea arrives tomorrow. Ribbentrop is trying to get his hands on it. He won’t succeed. He thinks it’s due at Tempelhof just before noon and that’s because we’ve planted all the clues. In reality, it’ll arrive at Schönwalde around nine in the morning and you, my friend, will be on hand to collect it. I’ll be supervising the edit myself. The music is already written, and the earlier battle footage is already cut. Half a day’s hard work and we can start sending out the prints. Radio is fine. Radio is a godsend. But in the end, it’s pictures that count. You agree?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘I know. Tact was never part of my job. I speak the truth as I see it. Not a particle more, not a particle less. Pictures, Werner.’ He made an oblong frame with his long fingers. ‘Pictures. Ja? You agree?’