Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  He had always worked hard and shone at school, but because Ello was a psychologist he redoubled his efforts at science, not least because she sometimes helped him with biology. He started getting grade 1s in science class tests, something long achieved in history, English and German.

  Ello behaved like a pal with Kaspar, with frequent punches on the arm and other horseplay. Kaspar genially worshipped the ground she walked on, which Ello let herself feel flattered by. The feelings on both sides were healthy, honest, open and positive. They were a gain for both of them, and that is how everybody perceived them.

  Magda’s feelings for Rudi, however, were altogether more turbulent, more troubled, and darker. She was a plain, stodgy, fifteen-year-old; no boy had ever shown the slightest interest in her. She was also not very bright. But she had been, until then, firmly grounded, content to be remorselessly quotidian, to plod along from day to day. Falling uncontrollably in love with Rudi cost her all perspective, all her balance and all her previous contentment. She cried herself to sleep over him, and seriously hoped he would ‘wait for her’.

  Everybody behaved well: Lotte warned Kaspar not to tease Magda, and he didn’t.

  Glaser policed his tendency to the blunt remark. Rudi, the Glaser parents agreed, was ‘superb’. He broached the problem to Lotte, when they were alone. He offered to take Magda and Kaspar out together, now and again. As Magda was by then starving herself in an attempt to lose weight to make herself more attractive to him, Lotte agreed. It was a masterstroke.

  The three of them went to Munich Theatre’s brave one-night revival of Krenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf, condemned by name in Mein Kampf. The Nazis had attacked the original production with stink-bombs. The powerfully-built Kaspar was half-hoping for a fight, so he could show off his boxing prowess, but keeping news of the performance quiet allowed it to pass off without incident.

  They also went to see Erika Mann and Werner Fink in one of their last performances at the Pepper Mill – a political cabaret, just behind the Hofbräuhaus. Political cabaret was born in Schwabing; they at least saw it die there, thanks to Rudi.

  They drank beer at the Turks Head, where the journalists from the satirical magazine Simplicissimus once had their Stammtisch. Rudi came to two SAJ – Young Social Democrat – musical evenings, with the Glaser parents, to hear Kaspar play the flute. They were the last performances before the Hitler Youth took over the SAJ.

  On the second of them, Ello turned up, late, unannounced and without having bought a ticket in advance. Kaspar had never played so well. On that evening, all parties felt that the von Hesserts had become honorary members of the Glaser family.

  Chapter Two

  With Buchner withdrawing from the sale, there was no obstacle to Lange buying Frau Ballat out. Rudi went to see him alone. The meeting was frosty, but Rudi persuaded Lange to revert to the original purchase price, with no punitive reductions for delay. Sale of the Weintraub Gallery, the paintings and the villa was agreed.

  The money was paid into an account controlled by Glaser, at the main Dresdener Bank in Promenadeplatz. Glaser would send 200 marks a month – the maximum allowed – to England, as soon as Frau Ballat was settled. She intended to live in Middlesex, with a second cousin.

  Frau Ballat’s extensive porcelain collection was put in store in Glaser’s name. Martin Brüchwiller, of Brüchwiller Brothers Auction House, advised him to offer it for sale piece by piece, in case it attracted attention as a Jewish collection. This Glaser did, paying the proceeds into Frau Ballat’s account.

  More time consuming were the emigration formalities. Glaser first established with the authorities that the Jewish emigrant was leaving for an approved destination. Next, he arranged for Frau Ballat’s relative in Middlesex to provide an affidavit, confirming her intention to receive the emigrant. Frau Ballat then had to register with the police twice a day. Glaser arranged police registration at the Main Police Station, at Ettstrasse.

  But the next steps in the procedure left him baffled and splenetic with rage: ‘I’m one of the leading lawyers in Munich,’ he yelled at Lotte over the dinner table. ‘And I’m damned if I can work out how she pays the Jewish Assets Levy, or gets a Clearance Certificate.’

  The Clearance Certificate, confirming that Frau Ballat currently owed the authorities nothing in the way of state taxes, surcharges, fines, fees and expenses, was finally obtained after payment of a hefty bribe. Rudi paid it – Frau Ballat never knew. Reich Flight Tax of 20,259 Reichsmarks was paid, plus a Jewish Assets Levy of 26,738 Reichsmarks. Every item of value to be taken to England had to have a separate permit from the Foreign Exchange Office.

  The police pathologist, Katherina Bandl, unexpectedly involved herself. She smoothed Frau Ballat’s way at the initial police registration. It then emerged that, somehow or other, she knew the ropes on emigration procedure better than Glaser and von Hessert.

  Her huge figure and air of authority cowed petty officials, who she did not hesitate to drop in on, unannounced, and then bawl at, until she got what she wanted. She even made a friend of Frau Ballat. When Lange lost patience and ejected the former professor from her villa, Bandl put her up in her flat, where she lived alone, except for the dachshund, Mitzi.

  The very last delay was the Foreign Stamp, to be marked in Frau Ballat’s passport. It was finally produced after another bribe, again paid without Frau Ballat’s knowledge by Rudi.

  *

  One sticky airless day, the formalities were finally complete. Glaser, Rudi and Katherina Bandl saw Frau Ballat off at the Hauptbahnhof, along with her friend, Elsa Marx, from Franz-Josef Strasse. It was an emotional occasion. But there was a final hitch, after the train had pulled in, which threatened to stop Frau Ballat leaving. Noticing her Jewish appearance, a train official demanded to see her passport, as she was about to board. He saw the Foreign Stamp in it and summoned two policemen standing nearby.

  ‘Emigrant’s Passport,’ the train official said, nodding at Frau Ballat.

  The police searched some of her luggage and found items of jewellery.

  ‘Jewish bitch!’ One of the policemen yelled at Frau Ballat. ‘Trying to smuggle out jewellery.’

  Glaser politely pointed out that Frau Ballat had the necessary permit to take the jewellery out, arranged by the Foreign Exchange Office. Frau Ballat produced the permit.

  ‘We’ll have to check that with Berlin,’ said one of the police, taking the document. ‘Go home and we’ll let you know.’

  Any delay would mean the Foreign Stamp would expire, and they would have to start all over again. A heated discussion started up, on the platform, as Frau Ballat’s train belched steam. Rudi evoked the von Hessert name, but even that failed to move the officials. Glaser then lost his temper, inveighing against bureaucracy and haranguing the two policemen. Frau Bandl pulled him away. Only Bandl’s quick-thinking mention of Frau Ballat’s status as a war widow stopped the former professor being ordered off the platform altogether.

  Elsa Marx, white with fear at all the screaming and yelling, started to shake and then to cry. Rudi put a comforting arm round her, enveloping the tiny woman. Murmuring in her ear, he gently persuaded her to go home. After a tearful hug with Zipporah Ballat, she walked away, sobbing her heart out, finally breaking into a run as she left the platform.

  The porters, who had waited until now, leaning on their trolleys, dispassionately watching events unfold, finally lost patience. They dumped Frau Ballat’s luggage at the carriage steps, and walked off.

  The police withdrew ‘for consultation’. They came back with a typed form for Frau Ballat to sign. It was a prepared pro-forma with only the word jewels written in. It became clear that the whole charade had been put on solely to raise the sixty Reichsmark fine the policemen now demanded. This would be split three ways – the train official getting his share – as soon as Frau Ballat and her party were out of sight.

  The form presented to Frau Ballat ran as follows:

  I am a Jewish thief and have tr
ied to rob Germany by taking German wealth out of the country. I hereby confess that the jewels found on me do not belong to me, and that in trying to take them out I wished to inflict injury on Germany. Furthermore, I promise not to try to re-enter Germany.

  Frau Ballat signed. With Rudi, Frau Bandl and Glaser frantically helping her to load her luggage, she boarded the train with seconds to spare. Her last words on German soil, as she leaned out the carriage window were: ‘Well, at least the train’s heated.’ And with that, Germany’s foremost scholar of the Enlightenment left the country of her birth, never to return.

  Chapter Three

  Glaser was waiting in his office in hat and mackintosh, carrying his cane and feeling foolish. He and Rudi were due at the new camp at Dachau, where Sepp Kunde had been transferred, because of his communist past. But Rudi had not appeared.

  The probationer was becoming worryingly erratic and unreliable these days. He was late for court appearances and had even missed one or two altogether. He had received a formal warning as to his future behaviour from a judge. Glaser suspected him of being a secret drinker. Suppressing his anger, he telephoned the von Hessert villa. A maid told him that young Herr von Hessert was not available. He banged the receiver down and a call came through from Frau Sauer.

  The Chief Inspector’s wife was curiously insistent that Glaser visit her immediately. There was a note of crowing triumph in her voice. He told Frau Sauer he would be with her shortly. Then he telephoned the Dachau camp and left a message for the Commandant, Herr Wäckerle, rearranging their interview with Sepp Kunde for three o’clock that afternoon.

  As he drove up to Sauer’s lilac-washed villa, he hoped to speak to the maid – the one who had mentioned Forster so enigmatically last time. But when he knocked, the mistress of the house opened the door herself. Glaser remembered Frau Ballat’s suspicion that the Chief Inspector beat her. There was indeed an old bruise, faint and yellow, at the base of her neck.

  ‘Come with me,’ Frau Sauer said, and started to lead the way up the stairs.

  ‘Frau Sauer!’ said Glaser testily. ‘I would greatly prefer to hear what you have to say down here.’

  Frau Sauer stared at him. ‘There’s a good reason ... Oh! Can’t you manage ...?’ She stared at Glaser’s cane.

  Glaser, piqued, started to follow her. He assumed there was something upstairs she wanted to show him. ‘Yes, I can manage. Thank you. But there had better be a good reason, as you say.’

  He made his way up the stairs, then followed her along the landing, into the master bedroom. Sauer lay in bed, his huge upper body billowing in a white nightshirt above a quilt that covered him to his waist. His face was wrenched down to the right, one side of his walrus moustache almost under the other. The right side of his body was stiff.

  ‘My dear Chief Inspector ...’ Glaser said.

  ‘He can’t speak!’ crowed Frau Sauer gleefully. ‘He can’t move either! If I didn’t feed him ... he’d die!’ She chortled to herself.

  The Chief Inspector remained immobile.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be in hospital?’ Glaser asked.

  Frau Sauer shrugged. ‘He’ll be all right. More’s the pity. I’ve got something to tell you,’ she added, grinning at him.

  Glaser hesitated. This ruse was clearly designed to torment her husband. But he remembered Sauer buying up Jewish property – that tour in the limousine. And anyway, he was too tired from the journey up the stairs to go down again immediately.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve got the information you want. You know. When you came here before? I can tell you what you want to know.’

  ‘Go on,’ Glaser said.

  Frau Sauer pointed at her husband. ‘He stole drawings, he did. Stole them from Hitler’s place. They were dirty drawings. Three of them. Dirty. Hitler did them.’ She sucked her cheeks in.

  ‘Frau Sauer, I insist that we go downstairs.’

  Glaser led the way back to the Sauer drawing room, with its Regency-stripe wallpaper and clashing Bauhaus furniture. He sat, uninvited, in what had clearly been Sauer’s chair, still marked from the indentations of the heavy man’s body. ‘When did this alleged theft take place?’ he grunted.

  Frau Sauer sat opposite him, the unpleasant smile still in place but her back upright, as if she was not used to sitting in her own drawing room. Glaser realised that this was probably the case.

  ‘A couple of years ago,’ she replied to his question. ‘When that girl died at Hitler’s place. See ... the evening after he was there,’ Frau Sauer jerked a thumb upwards to indicate who was meant by ‘he’. She dropped her voice dramatically. ‘I saw him put drawings in our safe.’

  ‘How do you know Hitler did them?’

  ‘I asked my husband. I called him a dirty bugger for having the drawings. Of course he hit me. But I asked him again. Then he told me these drawings were worth a fortune because Hitler did them. Next day he put them in a vault in the bank. He said if anything happened to him, I was to go to a newspaper with them. I forget which one, now.’

  ‘Münchener Post, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, that was it. He was ever so scared when he took the drawings out of the vault again. That was when he sold them to Herr Weintraub.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I saw Herr Weintraub come round here late one night. I saw him come in, from the bedroom window. I asked my husband what was going on. I said he might as well tell me, in case I said the wrong thing. He said the old Jew was going out of the country, where he could sell the drawings on for even more. You know what Jews are like.’

  Glaser gave her a withering look, then sighed. A man of Ascher Weintraub’s sensibilities reduced to this tawdry trade – tears pricked his eyes. And the drawings had been in the same safe, in Ascher’s office, as the Marc painting. Glaser felt that the Expressionist had been sullied by association, just as Ascher Weintraub had.

  But at least there was now a motive for the murder that made sense. The motive, however, hardly matched the suspect arrested for the crime.

  Chapter Four

  Glaser thought of Dachau as an idyllic artist colony with a castle, where they used to go for picnics when the kids were little. It was also the scene of one of his worst quarrels with the rest of the family.

  Kaspar was eight, at the time, and Magda five. Glaser had abandoned a family picnic, to go off and visit one of his painter friends, Lovis Corinth. Corinth was an old man, he was ill, he was lonely. Glaser felt unable to cut the visit short, once the old painter had embarked on his stories.

  When he finally returned, it was early evening. The family outing was ruined. Magda was howling, Kaspar shivering with cold and miserable. It was one of the few times Lotte had bawled Glaser out in front of the children. She had slapped him in the face. Kaspar had tried to hit him too, to protect his darling Mama from hurt or harm. Plus ça change, Glaser thought wryly.

  *

  He had no idea what to expect as he and von Hessert drove to the new camp at Dachau, a place he knew as the Pumf – a long-derelict powder and munitions factory. He knew the torture cellars, set up willy-nilly by individual SA-troops, were proving embarrassing to the Nazis, now Hitler was Chancellor. This new camp, people were saying, was a way of streamlining the terror.

  They certainly shouted its existence from the rooftops. No doubt because there was little point having an instrument of terror nobody knew about. Indeed, on the very day the camp was opened, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten joyfully reported that around sixty communists had been placed in custody there. Glaser promptly cancelled his subscription to the MNN; a one-time opposition newspaper, until its supervisory board had been taken over by the Nazis.

  As they approached the entrance, Glaser slowed the green Opel-Frosch to walking pace. Some scruffy village children were giving each other a leg-up, to try to peer over the top of the concrete wall. The big wooden gates were open. The sentry peered at them as they drove up. Glaser slowed further, to a near stop, but the sentry w
aved them through.

  They parked just inside the wall, on rough, unmade ground, and stepped out of the car.

  It was a blustery spring afternoon. The wind was whipping noisily across the surrounding flat peat-bog into the exposed camp. Von Hessert shivered so violently, Glaser looked at him in alarm.

  To their right, a group of ten or so prisoners, clearly just arrived, stood patiently near the lorry which had brought them. Two Bavarian police stood near them, looking bored. In front of the lawyers, a huge concrete parade ground was dotted with prisoners, standing to attention, out in the open. They had shaven heads and were wearing thin white linen shirts and trousers, flapping in the wind.

  Glaser and von Hessert made their way into the camp. There were half-a-dozen or so white stone communal barracks, once storage warehouses for munitions – low buildings with steep, so-called saddle-roofs. Glaser peered through the windows of one, while von Hessert stared into the distance.

  There were narrow two-tier rows of bunks inside, along with crudely made wooden tables and benches. On the wall was a fresco of the blue – white colours of Bavaria, with the slogan Practise Comradeship scrawled in black underneath. Glaser looked at von Hessert, who was breathing heavily and would not meet his eye.

  All the roads were still unmade, covered in pebbles and larger chunks of stone. To the lawyers’ left, there was a company of prisoners harnessed to a massive roller, trying to pull it forward. As they strained against the leather harnesses, the roller inched forward over the road. Guards with whips drove the prisoners on.

  The lawyers stopped a guard and asked the way to the Commandant’s office. On the way, they passed the canteen. Glaser looked through the window. On the plaster walls were crude painted caricatures of Social Democrat and communist politicians. The ones facing Glaser were labelled Rathenau and Erzberger.

  Matthias Erzberger was a Swabian politician who had been sent to sign the armistice marking the end of the war. Being the signatory of the German surrender had made him an object of hatred. A Freikorps band assassinated him in the Black Forest, the year before they killed Rathenau, the Jewish Foreign Minister.