So Ania leaves home for the convent not because she wants to be a nun, but because she wants to go to Africa. The convent has a mission there, in the former Hapsburg colony of Namibia. She imagines herself teaching chubby native children how to read and boil their vegetables, and falling asleep under mosquito netting listening to monkeys’ cries. She hungers for an opportunity to see the wider world. And also to get out of Dortmund.
Ania does not ask her father what he thinks of her idea. She knows what his answer will be. For all his criticism of the current state of government, the Nazis and the Communists alike, Herr Doktor Fortzmann has never set foot outside Germany. It is his home, his Heimat, and, in his opinion, the only truly civilized nation on earth.
Since his wife’s death her father has become even more remote. At dinner they eat in silence, listening to the clink of their own cutlery. It makes her miss the days when he lectured her about the sins of the Communists, the glories of the kaiser, and his favorite German heroes—Hermann, Karl der Grosse, and General Bismarck. Even his patients are deserting him. The Nazis have opened a new hospital on the other side of town that provides free care for the factory’s workers. Herr Doktor Fortzmann locks himself in his study for whole afternoons, reading and scowling over the newspapers.
Meanwhile, the world beyond Ania’s stifled childhood home is blossoming. There is excitement in the air; it is a new day for Germany. The young Hitler—so handsome, so vibrant, and so unlike the tired old intellectuals who, for the past fifteen years, have muddled the nation through riots, unemployment, and political strife—has been named chancellor. The papers are full of his bold plans and ideas. He has the vision and energy to make Germany great. He has rounded up the Communists who burned down the Reichstag and averted the revolution so many Germans have feared for years. Even Herr Doktor Fortzmann gives him credit for this. And Frau Richter is an ardent supporter. Thank God for Herr Hitler, she says. He will save us from the Bolsheviks.
Under him, Germany is to be one nation rather than a collection of rivalrous factions sniping at one another in the face of defeat. Together, they will create the finest, strongest, and greatest civilization on earth! And Hitler says it is the young people who will accomplish this.
It would be death to stay locked up in the Fortzmann house.
On the day Ania leaves, Rainer Brandt waits for her on the corner. He is, what? Her friend? Her beau? Her unlikely confidant? There is no label that quite covers their relationship. She has known him since they were children. They have attended the same school and church. They have waited in the same lines for bread and gone to the same funerals and played at the same carnival games. His father, a bricklayer at the hospital, is a patient of Doktor Fortzmann’s. As children she and Rainer played backgammon in her father’s waiting room during old Herr Brandt’s weekly appointments.
“Last chance,” Rainer says, pulling himself off the low wall he has been sitting on. “Instead of joining those religious zealots, you can run away with me.”
“And go where?” Ania asks, trying to keep her voice light, though actually she feels as though she might collapse. She has said good-bye to no one—not her father, who would forbid her from leaving, or Frau Richter, who would cry and wring her hands. She is no longer a child, but she is still, effectively, running away.
Rainer takes her suitcase from her hands. “Why go to Africa when there are so many Germans who could use your help? Seriously.”
They have debated this often. Rainer is a recent convert to the Nazi Party. He plans to be on the front lines of Hitler’s wonderful new empire. He has already signed up to become a leader of a Landjahr Lager, or camp—part of a national service program in which young people spend a year on the land, developing the necessary skills they will need if Germany is to return, under Hitler, to a great agrarian society. Soon it will be compulsory for all the country’s youths. Rainer will be poised to rise in the program’s ranks.
Ania sees the beauty in his dream, but all the same, she would like to go abroad. She would like to travel farther than the German countryside. Africa beckons with its promise of lush jungles and primitive tribes.
“Just think of what you will miss here,” Rainer continues. “The beginning of a whole new Germany!”
“Oh, Rainer.” Ania sighs, unable to think of anything but her father sleeping like an old man on his narrow bed. She peeked in through his door on her way out and was surprised by how rumpled he looked, mouth open, snoring—his shirt loosened at the collar, his stockinged feet on the bedspread. “I’ve already chosen my path.”
Rainer lifts his eyebrows. He has always been a quiet boy, cowed by his family’s poverty, his father’s poor health, and his mother’s rough Swabian German. But now that he is a Nazi, he glows with an appealing, newfound confidence. Girls have begun to take note. He is not handsome—his face is too angular and long, and there is something truculent about his chin—but he is compellingly intense. And he has eyes for no one but Ania, his childhood friend.
“I give you three weeks in the convent,” he says, kicking a stone down the street. “You’ll come around.”
As it turns out, Ania lasts only two. The nuns in the cloister are realists. “You will be sick most of the time,” Sister Catherine tells her. “The people don’t speak German, so you must learn French. There are no potatoes. Everyone will want to touch your hair.”
Ania could not care less. She is familiar with discomfort and sickness. She is genuinely curious about the natives. The problem for her is God. “You must keep him close to your heart always,” says Sister Anne Marie. “If you don’t, he will forsake you.”
But when Ania tries to keep God close to her heart, she is filled not with warmth and reassurance, but with emptiness. Every night she says her prayers, and each morning she goes to chapel. She feels her habit rough against her elbows, the risers cold and hard against her knees, but she does not feel God. In his place she feels dread and fear of death. And this worries her. She is an earnest girl. She takes the nuns’ admonitions seriously. She is Herr Doktor Fortzmann’s daughter, after all.
On her second Saturday in the convent, Rainer invites her to come see a presentation of a local Landjahr lager. The day is bright and lovely, and the air outside the convent walls seems to crackle with energy. A great many people have assembled outside the city hall, and, unlike the cranky, embattled crowds she remembers from her youth, they are not here to fight or protest. They are here to celebrate. They want to capture a little corner of this new spirit of possibility and togetherness for themselves.
And the presentation is marvelous! The fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds on the improvised stage look happy, healthy, and innocent in their matching short pants and thin dark neckties, their hair cut with a flop of bangs in front. They march in remarkable unison and sing spirited songs and traditional ballads, paeans to the beauty of nature and the joys of wandering. They enact a skit they have written themselves about the great German hero Hermann overthrowing the Romans. The costumes are basic, the lines are not particularly poetic, but the acting is committed and they have even worked in a few good jokes. When it is over, the actors stand straight and tall beside their leader, a handsome young man who can’t be much older than Rainer, as he speaks about pride and self-control and discipline, and, most of all, togetherness—sons of steelworkers and department store owners, fishermen and nobles, all brought together through a year spent living on the land. Behind him, five boys wave Hitler Youth flags with their single, elegant lightning streak. It is, possibly, the most beautiful thing Ania has ever seen.
They close with a devotional song to mother Germany.
We are all connected, under our flag of solidarity
Since we found ourselves as one people
No one is alone anymore, we are all obliged,
God, our Leader, our blood.
Raised in our faith, happy in our work that everyone does
We all want to be as one
Germany, we are brightly standing by your
side
We want this high alliance seen in all our glory!
Ania is surprised to find tears filling her eyes. She has not realized, until this moment, how isolated she has been. She has been alone every moment of her life. She goes to sleep alone and wakes alone—she has no siblings since her brother died and no experience of a mother’s touch, nothing more than Frau Richter tsk-tsking about whether she has swallowed her spoonful of cod liver oil. And she imagined herself content in this solitude!
Before today, she has always understood togetherness as factional: the rioting groups of her postwar youth, drawn together only because of whatever they were against. But she is against nothing. And neither are these young people onstage, who seem so sincerely lifted by one another’s company. They are for something—for solidarity and Germany.
This must be what Hitler means when he says Kraft durch Freude: “strength through joy.” Strength through community and song and happiness. It is the opposite of everything Ania was raised to believe. The feeling she experiences at this realization can only be described as religious.
So? Rainer says, after the youth march offstage. She feels a thousand kilometers from the nuns, the musty, damp-smelling cloister, the whole creaky missionary enterprise.
Yes, Ania says, breathless. You’re right.
And so it is not as a conformist but as a rebel that Ania Fortzmann joins the Nazi Party.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dortmund, 1935
Ania and Rainer are married at city hall. She wears a sensible blue suit and he his best Landjahr leader uniform.
The solemnity of the occasion strikes Ania as funny. She feels like a child playing at being a grown-up. But Rainer is serious as death. He remains two steps ahead of her as they climb the building’s steps. Even when she hurries, he won’t quite allow her to catch up.
Following this new, stiff, and humorless Rainer, Ania feels the chill of doubt. Do you love him? her friend and gymnastics partner Ulrike asked her when Ania told her they were engaged. The question took Ania by surprise. She and Rainer have known each other since they were children. They share a passion for the work and for improving Germany’s future. And Rainer says he has always known he would marry her. His certainty is compelling. Ania is used to following the lead of opinionated men. But is she “in love”? She is not even sure what this means exactly. In novels, love seems to be a stormy and irrational thing, full of chaos and bodily urges. Ania has never experienced this. And it is not something she wants. What she wants is a partner.
She is marrying Rainer because as husband and wife, they can lead a lager together. They will be assigned their own troop of boys from all over the country. They will teach them how to till the land and grow vegetables and be proud, unpretentious, able-bodied citizens of the Reich. Never mind that neither she nor Rainer knows much of anything about farming. They have acquired some simple skills in their training and will work alongside local farmers. They will bring their passion for the movement and its ideals of togetherness, class equality, and national pride.
When Rainer reaches the top step, he turns and offers Ania his hand. “My almost husband,” she says, smiling and panting slightly. He steps back and gestures for her to precede him. Together, they make their way down to the musty basement and the town clerk who handles such matters.
Their first two lagers are idyllic, really. They are the best years of Ania’s life. She knows this is true, even much later when it is shameful to admit. Of course, in time, she will never say the best years of her life were spent running a Nazi youth program. Her sons would never forgive her; her daughter would die of shame. But truly, her memories of those first years are fairly benign: full of the clean, satisfying feeling of physical labor, the joy of song and dance, and the camaraderie of teamwork . . . When they are not busy with farm chores they engage in vigorous exercise. In accordance with Nazi philosophy, Ania and Rainer believe in the civilizing power of sports. What better way for young people to learn persistence, group allegiance, and self-sacrifice?
The first lager is in the south, outside Saarbrücken, in a beautiful country estate abandoned by its original owners. Abandoned, Ania will later realize, does not mean anything as lackadaisical as she imagined then. Vacated under duress is probably more accurate: the former owners were Jewish, and the Nuremberg laws now in place. But at the time, she grasps only that the owner was an imprudent debtor who has immigrated to America. Why would she look a gift horse in the mouth? The land around the estate belongs to a handful of prosperous local farmers, descendants of the serfs who originally tilled these same fields. How far Germany has come since those days! Rainer and the boys set off each morning to assist at one farm or another. There is much to do in the late summer and fall, and relatively little in the winter.
At night, like the dwarves in the famous fairy tale, they return to the lager, where Ania, their Snow White, has made a wholesome dinner and a pudding for dessert. They eat together at one long table, do their chores, and then assemble for songs, stories, and games.
The manor house is beyond beautiful with its grand high-ceilinged rooms, gilt moldings, and painted frescoes of Greek gods and solemn-faced cherubs. When Ania wakes each morning, she can step onto the private balcony off her bedroom and look out over the grounds: the charming overgrown lawn, the orchard with its pretty, blossoming trees, the tennis court (imagine!), and the impressive vegetable garden she has planted. It is hard work, certainly, but satisfying. She discovers she has a knack for coaxing strawberries from the cold earth and growing lush, deep green and red fronds of rhubarb, bumper crops of green beans and peas. In the Fortzmann house she never had a garden—there was only a scrubby plot of potatoes and gooseberries that fell under Frau Richter’s charge. The science of growing appeals to Ania, as does the physical labor. Rainer allows her to plan the boys’ fitness regimen. She challenges them to compete in hurdle jumping, sprints, even obstacle courses, which she bases on her favorite gymnastics troop exercises.
And the boys are sweet and fresh faced, younger than Ania imagined, only twelve and thirteen, on the cusp of their teen years. They are dear creatures, excited to be sprung from their homes in cities and from the boring, traditional subjects of Latin, arithmetic, literature, and geography.
In the evenings, when it’s hot, she and Rainer take the boys on the hay wagon to a nearby lake with cold black water that reflects the hillside and the sky. The boys make a game of swimming to a float and throwing one another off. The biggest, strongest boys are always “King.” Ania lies on her blanket on the grassy bank and watches their horseplay. Sometimes Rainer swims out and joins their wrestling, his pale, wiry body so different from theirs—more mature and also sharper somehow, harder and more determined, frizzled with fine black hairs.
She does not enjoy the physical element of their marriage, but she tolerates it. And Rainer himself is not an avid lover: He turns to her only sometimes, in the darkness, quickly and without preamble. Their lovemaking is over in a moment, and neither of them speak of it.
On Saturday nights, Rainer builds a wonderful bonfire and the boys sing and have contests—who can spring the fastest, jump the farthest, balance the longest on a fallen tree limb. Rainer is in his element here with so many adoring young people looking to him for guidance.
In the future, Ania’s daughter will send her son to an American summer camp. It’s all about archery and soccer and fishing and camping, how to be a good citizen and good friend, how to be a confident young man, she will tell Ania. She will say it in a wry tone that suggests she sees something amusing about this. But that’s beautiful, Ania will say. It’s like what we did in our lager.
Except they don’t teach them to kill Jews at Camp Wykona! her daughter will exclaim. My God, Mother! You can’t seriously compare a New England summer camp to a Nazi youth lager!
But we didn’t teach them to kill Jews, Ania will protest mildly. We didn’t even talk about Jews.
Her daughter will stare at her as
if she is insane.
But Hitler did, she will say, as if speaking to a child. Didn’t you hear what he was saying?
No, Ania will say, shaking her head. I was too busy. Or too stupid.
But this is not exactly true. She was busy, but she was not stupid. And she did listen to Hitler, though she does not recall what she actually heard. She remembers gathering around the radio in the elegant dining room with murals of pastoral farm scenes painted on the walls. She remembers the boys in their pajamas, exhausted from a day of physical exertion, sprawled across the wood floors, smelling of fresh hay and dust and clean sweat. There was great excitement about listening to the Führer. She remembers his exhortations and energy, his talk of building and unifying the Reich, the unique and wonderful qualities of the German Volk. But she does not remember the ugly quotes her daughter confronts her with.
Maybe because at the time what she heard did not seem radical.
Listening to the radio at that first lager in 1936, Ania believes Hitler’s assertion that Jews are rich businessmen who have profited from Germany’s troubles and taken the best jobs in Germany. And that those who are not rich, which is to say mostly the eastern Jews who have immigrated here from Poland, Romania, and the Baltic, are freeloaders and Bolsheviks. They are Trotsky followers, the same people who set the Reichstag on fire and created the “Bavarian Soviet Republic.” Her grasp of the details is vague, but she understands this last group of agitators is dangerous. She accepts this in the abstract, of course. The actual Jews she knows are different. Herr Goldblum, the grocer, or the Cornbluth girls from her grammar school, for example, are neither rich nor Bolshevik. They are kind, ordinary people who happen to belong to a bad group. But how can Hitler know who is a “good Jew” and who isn’t? Easier to evict them all and prevent infiltration. Where they will go—back to Poland, Romania, wherever they came from? America? Israel? Madagascar?—is not Ania’s concern.
The Women in the Castle Page 23
