by Michael Dean
‘Why do you ask?’ said his mother.
‘Because I want to know.’
‘Yes. You always wanted to know. Curiosity. It cost you dearly.’ She nodded at his leg, stretched out in front of him in the rocking chair.
‘So tell me.’
The old lady sipped her wine: Along with the two other Jewish general practitioners in Ludwigsburg, Dr Pintus’s practice, in Mathildenstrasse, in the centre of town, had been picketed in April. This followed a Nazi advertisement in the local newspaper, demanding a boycott of Jewish doctors, lawyers and businesses – Ludwigsburg’s four Jewish horse-traders had also been singled out.
‘He’s still practising,’ Frau Glaser finished up. ‘Just about. I still go. There are only a few patients left, though.’
Glaser pictured the dreamy, short-sighted doctor – whose own health was fragile. He used to visit the farmers in the outlying villages in the depths of winter. Glaser saw him, in his mind’s eye, as he had seen him then, with red bowtie peeping out above his scarf and coat, as children attached ropes to his home-made sled and pulled him along over metre-high snow. The kiddies took it in turns to jump up on the sled behind him, then off again to do a bit more pulling.
The homespun Swabian farmers were protective of their bookish doctor. He used the du form to them, as he did with everybody he spoke to. They treated him with kid gloves, while he took on some of their coarse bluntness:
‘Will I get better, doctor?’
‘No. You’ve lived off the fat of the land; now the fat of the land will live off you.’
*
Glaser changed the subject. ‘Have there been any messages for me?’
‘Here? No.’
‘Very well. Tomorrow I shall go to the exhibition.’
His mother stared at him. ‘The art exhibition? In Stuttgart?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re crazy!’
‘I want to see it for myself,’ Glaser said.
‘Curiosity,’ Old Frau Glaser murmured. ‘You think you can do anything. You think you can fly. You mark my words. It’ll finish you yet.’
Chapter Ten
Stuttgart City Gallery, in Kronprinzen Palais, was a place Glaser had always loved. His first pocket money had been spent on train fare from Ludwigsburg to look at the paintings. Sometimes he went alone; sometimes with a classmate.
Later, he took girlfriends there. He insisted they separate, to look at the art, and meet up afterwards, at the exit. They then crossed the road, arm in arm, to the Gartenhaus Café.
Over coffee and cakes, they discussed the paintings, the artists, compared their likes and dislikes, and what had moved them and what had not. The young Glaser had not minded if his companion had different tastes to him. He liked a good argument. But if the girl had no opinions at all, he quickly lost interest in her.
In those early days, Glaser’s father – Alois Glaser, the distinguished lawyer and jurist – was on the Supervisory Board of the gallery. The curator, Count Claus von Baudissin, was a frequent visitor to the Glaser home. At least, he was until he joined the Nazi Party and embraced Jew-hatred. Then the Glaser parents cut him off. Baudissin had recently been seconded to an SS-brigade; Himmler was appointing art experts to every SS combat group. Just before he left, he had set up this exhibition.
There was a banner across the gallery’s grimy neoclassical facade, proclaiming the ‘Exhibition of Shame’. Glaser shook his head in weary disbelief at the title: The Spirit of November: Art in the Service of Decay. ‘November’ referred to the ‘November Criminals’ – Hitler’s recombinable conspiracy of Jews, Marxists and Social Democrats, who were supposed to have lost Germany the war, in November 1918.
The man who had actually lost Germany the war – even more so than Hindenburg, his commanding officer, who was now President – was General Ludendorff. Ludendorff had sued for peace too early, calling for the November Armistice. Uniquely in the history of warfare, thousands of undefeated soldiers, bewildered at the surrender, had marched back home in formation, with their weapons intact. Many of them went straight into the various Freikorps units.
Glaser imagined himself buttonholing Hitler, and telling him this: ‘Herr Hitler, the man responsible for losing Germany the war was marching right next to you, at the Beer Hall Putsch – Erich Ludendorff. It wasn’t the Jews. It wasn’t the Marxists. It wasn’t the Social Democrats. To avenge Germany’s defeat, all you had to do was turn round and shoot him.’
Would it have made any difference? Probably not.
*
Entrance to the exhibition was free, though only those over twenty-one were allowed in, presumably because of the corrupting effect of what was on show. Glaser joined a lengthy queue of visitors, stretching to the end of the block.
Having reached the entrance, he eased his way through the crush to read the exhibition’s aims, set out in hand-painted black Gothic script on a wooden panel, just inside the door:
The exhibition means to give, at the outset of a new age for the German people, a first-hand survey of the gruesome last chapter of those decades of cultural decadence that preceded the great change.
The spacious exhibition rooms, so familiar from his youth, had been reduced by trelliswork structures, creating cramped rooms within rooms. The visitor was crowded right up against the paintings, which had been hung close together, crooked, and at odd heights, on rough burlap stretched over the trelliswork. They were poorly lit, by light from distant windows. Comments about them were painted on notices pinned to the burlap, in large red or black lettering, with plenty of exclamation marks.
The first comment Glaser read was next to Oskar Schlemmer’s portrait, Paracelsus: The Lawgiver. It said ‘Your taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this daub.’ It quoted a huge amount paid by the gallery for the painting. The price had been converted to the old Reichsmark value, before the mid-1920s currency reform, to make it look extortionate.
As Glaser knew well, Paracelsus: The Lawgiver had been bought for the gallery by Baudissin five years ago. It had not excited any comment then, either about the work itself or the price paid for it. Glaser rather liked it.
But as he stood, admiring the stylised, rounded, white face of Paracelsus, pointing at himself, in that intriguingly self-referential, individualised way, a middle-aged couple read the scrawled comments about it, and started complaining about this ‘swindle’ by ‘Jew art dealers’.
Glaser walked on, along trelliswork fencing which corralled him and the crowd around him into the next area. A small space had been dedicated to the work of Jewish artists.
One of the many myths Hitler had managed to establish in the public mind was that there were not many Jewish painters. Jankel Adler, Marc Chagall and Lasar Segall were represented, and vilified, here, but the Nazis had missed, or did not know about, Chaim Soutine, David Bomberg or, closer to home, Katz, Ludwig and Else Meidner, Haizmann, Freundlich and many others.
Max Liebermann, formerly President of the Prussian Academy of Arts, was a Jew, but not really an Expressionist. Would he be represented? Glaser looked round the ghastly little fenced cubicle. He wasn’t, but that might have been an oversight, not policy.
Glaser looked at Philipp Bauknecht’s Three Herdsmen. The bright colours of its Expressionist treatment, and perhaps the shepherds being pictured in earnest discussion, provoked the commentary in red capital letters next to it: ‘German sons of the soil, the Yid view.’ Glaser shook his head.
The next room was dedicated to ‘the progressive collapse of sensitivity to form and colour.’ Glaser joined a knot of visitors, to see what it was they were talking about, with such evident derision. It was Lovis Corinth’s Ecce Homo. Corinth had taught August Macke in his early days. Glaser was heavy-hearted at seeing him represented here.
‘He’s making fun of us,’ Glaser heard someone say. The handwritten information told the public that Ecce Homo had been painted after Corinth had had a stroke. Glaser knew that some of his paintings, done before the stroke, had been accepted an
d approved of by the Nazis.
Political paintings were featured in the next area – not a subject which moved Glaser, particularly. There was a quotation from the communist Georg Grosz on a daubed notice: ‘How does the artist rise in the bourgeoisie? By cheating.’ Grosz’s sketch Blood is the Best Sauce showed soldiers bayoneting workers, while two square-headed bourgeois tucked into a huge meal with wine, in the foreground.
Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, toward Grosz, not the Nazis, Glaser wondered what the wine was, and whether it was a good vintage. The Nazi-scrawled legend above the drawing read ‘Grosz’s satires on the family and society are intended to whip up hatred.’
Grosz probably would not have disagreed with that.
The crowds were a little thinner, further on into the exhibition. They were quiet at the sight of ‘moral degeneracy, harlots and pimps.’ Labelled ‘Deriding German Womanhood’, nudes by Karl Hofer, Kirchner, Paul Kleinschmidt and Otto Muller were bunched up in two uneven rows. Glaser felt that German womanhood was better served by them than by the empty, though equally explicit, nudes of Hitler’s pet artist, Adolf Ziegler – affectionately known as The Prince Of Pubic Hair.
Glaser looked round for a favourite of his, Dix’s brothel scene, The Salon. He had mixed feelings about not finding it here. He thought it showed tenderness and compassion for women. Dix painted breasts, in their manifold variety and beauty, as well as anyone Glaser had ever seen. But Dix appeared further on. His powerful anti-war paintings were condemned as unpatriotic and treasonable.
Glaser had a soft spot for Otto Dix, an artist of great creativity and originality, fundamentally incapable of painting a boring line or colour. Dix often painted artificial limbs – piles of them sometimes – and amputees. This actually amused Glaser. Here, the biting War Cripples was held up for condemnation. It showed four stylised beings made grotesque by war. One had two pegs for feet, one one peg, one was in a wheelchair and one, pushing the wheelchair, was displaying the card showing him registered as war-wounded.
Glaser hoped Dix was safe, and surviving. He had been dismissed from his teaching post – as had Oskar Schlemmer, Käthe Kollwitz; the local artist, Willi Baumeister; and Beckmann and Hofer and Max Liebermann and Pechstein. Some – like Beckmann – had got out. Many of them, Glaser knew, were surviving in the Third Reich by what was being called ‘inner emigration’ They stayed in their homes as much as possible, relying on relatives for food, hardly moving, hardly daring to breathe.
In the next room, Glaser thought of Schultze-Naumburg’s work of breaking down the distinction between image-making and art – which in effect was the abolition of art. All the scrawled captions here used the vocabulary of biology, parasitology and illness to attack Expressionist painting. Glaser read one of them:
It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth’s sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength.
The crowd were noticeably quieter here. Was there a sense of regret? Glaser could only hope so. He looked at Otto Mueller’s Gypsy Woman, who was a negress. Enough, on its own, to make the work an object of vilification.
Glaser was growing weary; thinking of heading for the exit. Then he saw a picture by Edvard Munch. Munch’s The Sick Child was regarded as the first Expressionist masterpiece. ‘It’s not the chair that should be painted,’ Munch had written, ‘but what the artist has felt at the sight of it.’ Expressionists paint from the inside, out. In the translation from Norwegian Glaser had read, Munch called this ‘Seelemalerei – soul art.’
But even so, Glaser had not expected to find his work here. Munch really was Nordic. He was not only blond, blue-eyed and tall, but considerably better-looking than anybody in the Nazi hierarchy – not a particularly high bar to reach, admittedly. He had also been presented with the Goethe Medal for Science and Art, just last year, by President Hindenburg.
But then Glaser remembered: Adolf Ziegler – in his capacity as head of the Munich Academy – had pronounced that the work, not the acceptability of the artist, was paramount in assessing racial deviance.
So, high up on the wall, tilted at an angle, was The Kiss – a study in the cobalt blue Munch favoured. A couple were merged in passion, kissing behind a blue curtain, while tiny figures of passers-by went about their lives in a blue street.
Glaser loved the clandestine element in the couple’s love. They were right to hide their love. All great love, he believed, must be hidden, to protect it. Lotte often rebuked him for being too closed in on himself – too secretive. But, in the deepest matters, this secrecy was essential. And never more so than in these terrible times, when the very goodness of life itself was being seized, tossed in mockery, and smashed.
Glaser had had enough and made his way through the crowds to the exit. He almost missed it. He saw it on his way out, when he wasn’t even looking at the paintings any more. He stopped in front of Blue Horses, suddenly happy. Here was the soul of Franz Marc, fused with the soul of animals and landscape. It was moving and beautiful. Truly beautiful. For the first time in a long time Glaser felt there was hope. As long as there were horses, blue horses, there was hope.
*
Glaser left the exhibition and took a taxi to Poppenweiler. Was it curiosity, as his mother kept saying? Maybe. That or defiance. The smell of manure all over the single street assailed him. He was glad he had brought his silver-topped black cane, Lotte’s present to him, as he made his way gingerly over to the barn. There was nobody about.
Even the horses in the fields didn’t look up at him.
He went into the huge, dark Dutch barn. The last time he had been here, he was eighteen, the same age Kaspar was now. He looked up. There was a lower hayloft and a higher one, up where the roof narrowed. For a second he felt sick and giddy. He waited until it cleared.
Emmi Raschke had been in his class at school in Ludwigsburg. She was the most beautiful girl he or anybody else had ever seen. She was so beautiful it burdened her; it made her sad. He never understood why she chose him – not until now. Now, with the intensity of coming doom, he felt he had only to open his mind, and the very universe itself would give up its secrets for him to understand.
Emmi Raschke was not only beautiful, she was also witty. She was always making jokes; it came naturally to her. Nobody laughed much, because nobody ever listened to her. She was the Beautiful One; she was not allowed to be anything else. But Gerhard Glaser had listened. He had laughed at her jokes – he had always appreciated humour.
So he had won Emmi, the beauty. And when he had been sent to Munich for treatment, as a partial amputee, he had won another beauty. The schoolgirl Lotte Bachhuber had been visiting her father, in the same hospital ward. Who would have thought it? They had kept in touch until he finished his law studies. They wrote; they visited each other. Then he had come to Munich to practise law and marry her.
Glaser leaned on his cane and looked up, overcoming the dizziness this time. He had just made love to Emmi, on a blazing August day, after the harvest. It was his first time and hers, and it had been wonderful. A triumph. She had screamed her love and pleasure at his possession of her. All the world lay at his feet. He had forgotten, that was all, that they had gone up to the top loft, not the lower one, to be more secret. He had roared his love for life, and star-jumped through the air. All the way down. And landed with his entire weight on his left leg.
Chapter Eleven
When Glaser returned home from Poppenweiler, a note was waiting for him on the Kerner dresser.
‘Who is it from?’ he asked his mother, before he opened it.
‘I don’t know. I found it on the mat in the hall. It’s addressed to you.’
The note said. ‘See you at the Station Restaurant at two o’clock tomorrow. I’ll bring everything you need for the journey. Your friend, Kurt.’
There was an afternoon train from Stuttgart to Munich. He was clearly intende
d to be on it. ‘I shall be leaving tomorrow, Mama,’ Glaser said.
‘Yes,’ old Frau Glaser replied. ‘I thought you might be.’
Just as Glaser was leaving next day, his mother presented him with a heavily wrapped parcel. Glaser was irritated. The note from Sepp Kunde hinted that he should bring nothing with him, as the dynamite, presumably in a case of some sort, would be given to him.
‘Open it,’ Frau Glaser said.
‘What here? Now?’ They were standing in the hallway. The taxi was waiting outside.
‘Yes.’
Glaser was about to protest. Then he understood. His mother thought she might never see him again. He tore impatiently at the paper, sealed round the gift. Inside, was an exquisite Seraphia de Becké faience dish; Ludwigsburg pottery, flower pattern, centred on an open red rose. The choice had been carefully made. Since boyhood, Glaser had preferred the lower-fired, cheaper, pottery-ware to the refined cobalt-blue patterned porcelain.
‘Thank you, Mama,’ he said. He clumsily rewrapped his gift and went out to the taxi. As it drove off, he realised he had forgotten to say goodbye.
*
The station restaurant occupied more than half of the area of Ludwigsburg station. It was a ponderous portal to travel, with a high-arched ceiling and massive dusty windows. Glaser nursed a glass of opaque new wine and a slice of onion tart, as he waited for Sepp Kunde. His present from his mother lay awkwardly in his lap, its brown paper coming undone. There were more waiters and waitresses than customers, but even so Kunde’s appearance out of nowhere, at his table, startled him. He was carrying a large workers’ case.
‘Gerhard, how nice to see you again, after so long.’
A wave of irritation swamped Glaser at Kunde’s easy manner. He had held the power of life and death over this man at their first meeting, at the Dachau camp, and now he was presuming to treat him like one of his comrades. They were using the du form with each other, but Kunde had rather forced that at the meeting with the communists.
