by Michael Dean
The notices had billed the speaker as ‘Our popular guest from England, Captain John Hodge.’ Popular? Hodge supposed he was. The Yanks gave every indication of liking him as much as he liked them.
Just as he thought that, Hodge’s least favourite American soldier drifted into the lounge.
‘Hi, captain,’ called out the bespectacled Brad Carpenter. ‘I’m a little early. Thought I’d get myself a good seat.’ He nodded at the five rows of chairs that had been put out for the talk, all, as yet, empty. Facing them was a desk and two chairs for himself and Lindsay. Even Lindsay wasn’t here yet.
‘How are the German lessons going?’ Hodge asked Carpenter.
‘What German lessons?’
Hodge’s heart sank. His worst fears were confirmed. Of course Barbara had been getting dressed before she let him in this afternoon. And it was Carpenter who had undressed her.
‘I thought you were having German lessons with Barbara Ketz,’ Hodge said. ‘You know, when I saw you this afternoon? Coming out of the Ketz flat?’
‘Oh yeah. Sorry. I thought you meant on the base. Yuh, German lessons are going fine.’
It was not very convincing.
*
Ten minutes before the advertised start of his talk, only Carpenter and one other US soldier were sitting waiting. Just as Hodge was looking for a dignified way to call it off, another ten soldiers turned up in a gaggle together. Then Lindsay appeared and took his place at the front. As if that were a signal, a crowd of troops filed in at once. Two privates were sent out for more chairs.
Hodge sat down at the front. Lindsay stood to begin his introduction, the buzz of happy talk dying down respectfully as soon as he started. Lindsay had shrewdly allowed beer during the talk, offering the first one free. Most of the audience were swigging beer from bottles.
‘Good evening, soldiers. Thank you for coming,’ Lindsay began.
‘You’re welcome, captain,’ called out Corporal de Lorio, the ‘there goes another bloody hound’ man. Hodge thought if there was going be trouble, maybe out-and-out barracking, it would come from him.
Lindsay gave a tight smile at de Lorio’s intervention. He mimed shooting de Lorio, which got a laugh. The mood was good.
‘I guess by now you all know Captain John Hodge of the Essex Regiment of the British army. And I hope some of you know that Captain Hodge is here to find a Nazi high-up. A high-up we believe may be with the Werwolf, who are still fighting us. The paintings he wants to talk to you about have a strong link to that man, Karl Wagner. So when you look out for these paintings, you help one of our important operations here at Flak Barracks. So, with no further ado … Do they say that in England, John?’ Lindsay turned to Hodge with a smile.
‘Yes, captain. We invented it.’
That got a laugh.
‘As with everything, I guess,’ Lindsay said, as deadpan as Hodge.
‘Pretty much. Except Hershey Bars.’
More laughter. Somebody called out, ‘And Budweiser.’
Hodge nodded. ‘And Budweiser.’
When Lindsay sat down and Hodge stood, the audience was with him, well-disposed. He remembered a phrase his father had used when he was an infant, entering his first art competition. ‘It’s yours to lose.’
In the event, Hodge had won, though his father was no longer alive when the result came through. Perhaps because of that, he then won every other art competition he ever entered, culminating in a scholarship to the prestigious Slade School of Art.
‘Thank you,’ Hodge began briskly and loudly. ‘I want to thank Captain Lindsay for that introduction and for much else since I have been here at Flak Barracks.’ To Hodge’s surprise that got a round of applause, starting at the mention of Lindsay’s name.
‘Karl Wagner, owner of the Stern in Mompelgardstrasse, was Hitler’s personal bodyguard. In late 1937 he stole nine paintings. They had all been in one room at an exhibition the Nazis held to vilify and denigrate art they did not agree with.’
‘Hold on, captain,’ called out de Lorio. ‘You’re saying the Nazis put these paintings in an exhibition. But they hate them, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Then why not just destroy them? Why the exhibition?’
Hodge nodded. ‘Good question. Hitler wanted everything he saw as a threat not only destroyed but denigrated, humiliated, made nothing. It was like a rape. It was the rape of a culture.’ The room went quiet. ‘That’s one part of the answer. The other part is plunder. The Nazi regime was the biggest kleptocracy the world has ever seen. They were magpies and thieves. They plundered Europe for booty. Hitler wanted to sell these paintings after he had mocked them. Wagner stole nine of them from Hitler before he had the chance. Have I answered your question, corporal?’
‘Yes, sir, you have.’ De Lorio nearly came to attention in his seat.
Lindsay shot Hodge a quick look and a smile, clearly flashing a ‘well done.’
‘I want to give a quick description of the paintings we are looking for. The paintings we suspect are somewhere in Ludwigsburg.’
This was the part Hodge had been dreading. Would even art students sit through a verbal description of nine paintings, with only relatively crude copies on the wall to accompany them?
Lindsay spoke. ‘Excuse me a moment, captain. Will the two soldiers at the end of the first row take those thumb tacks out of the pictures on the wall and pass the pictures along the lines while Captain Hodge is speaking. You look at the pictures, soldiers, you pass each one along, and you don’t stop listening to Captain Hodge. With me?’
There was a shouted, ‘Sir!’ from the two soldiers at the end of the first row, who efficiently undid all Hodge’s work with the drawing pins. Hodge was grateful though. Hands on was better. He should have thought of that himself.
And now the moment of truth, the description of the paintings. A least he could group them, as there were four painters in all, not nine.
‘OK. Staring with the two by Marc Chagall, one shows a rabbi with a full beard with a prayer book in front of him. He’s making a whimsical gesture with his left hand.’ Hodge showed the gesture. ‘Chagall once painted a portrait of himself with seven fingers on his right hand. Do you know what he was saying by that?’
Hodge paused. There was total silence, complete attention.
‘He was saying “Who’s a clever boy, then?”’ That got a laugh, a big one. ‘The other Chagall is called Winter. It’s much smaller and shows the people of the village where he was born, Vitebsk in Russia, coping with a hard winter. The house and the people look child-like against the massive force of the snow.’
‘Like in the mid-west,’ one of the soldiers called out.
Hodge nodded. ‘Yes. Or like any snow culture where the snow dominates.’
So far so good. The buzz of appreciation as the pictures were passed round was apparently strongest at Jankel Adler’s Cat Breeder. They liked it. Hodge was delighted. So did he.
Hodge departed from his notes, changing the way he had intended to group the paintings. ‘Yes, Jankel Adler’s Cat Breeder and his Mother and Daughter are scenes from everyday life, like Chagall’s Winter. But with Lasar Segal’s Feast of Purim you again see an open celebration of specifically Jewish life, as with Chagall’s rabbi, as with Segall’s other painting, The Eternal Wanderer.’
One of the soldiers obligingly held up Feast of Purim. ‘Who’s the woman in the picture, sir?’ he called out, a little nervously.
‘That is Esther,’ Hodge said. ‘Esther in the Jewish festival of Purim is a resistance figure, along with Mordecai she delivered the Jews from oppression by the Persians. The story is told in the Book of Esther, the longest book in the Old Testament.’
‘Captain. May I add something to that?’
‘Be my guest, Sergeant Rubin.’
‘The Jews use the word megillah for any long story. You know, when someone won’t shut up. That word refers to megillas Esther, the book of Esther, the longest book in the bible.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant Rubin, I didn’t know that,’ Hodge said.
‘You’re welcome, sir.’
‘Of course, I haven’t been able to do justice to any of these great paintings with my crude copies. But I think the one who has lost most at my hands is Hans Feibusch, who I must admit I had never heard of before I started this quest. Feibusch painted a lot of murals and, like Chagall and other Expressionists, was a great colourist. He …’
Lindsay was holding up a hand. ‘A moment please, captain. You just used a word I am not familiar with. We’re just a load of hick Americans here.’ That got a good-natured laugh. ‘Did you say “Expressionists” captain? Explain, please.’
‘With pleasure, captain. The term was first used in 1910 by Roger Fry. He’s English, gentlemen. We were first again.’ That got some catcalls, but they were good-natured.
Hodge noticed Brad Carpenter sneaking out, at this point, but he was only the second who had left the talk.
‘In Mein Kampf, Hitler’s turgid tale of his life, with some theoretical stuff mostly written by Hess, Hitler dated the end of art at 1910, the year Expressionism began. And I can understand why.’ That got them. There was silence again. ‘Expressionists, whose paintings I deeply love, use colour to paint emotion. They don’t paint the object, they paint what the painter feels about the object. That by the way is a quotation from the father of Expressionism, the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Anybody know him?’
Three or four hands went up, including Danny Rubin and Richie Manson.
‘Good,’ Hodge resumed. Edvard Munch bravely stood up to the Nazis when they occupied his country. Now, this use of colour and emotion creates a huge personal statement, a statement of individualism. The painter is saying that every object in life is full of life and so is precious. It was this full-of-life quality that so enraged Hitler.’
There were now so many questions, so many hands in the air, so much hubbub, that Lindsay called them to order.
‘OK. Alright soldiers. One at a time. You, private Santos. You were first, I think. Then Sergeant Rubin. After that, put your hands up again. Yes, Santos.’
‘Thank you, Captain Lindsay. Captain Hodge, you said this Norwegian guy, the painter, Munch, you said he fought the Nazis. Was he a resistance fighter?’
‘No, he wasn’t. But the only reason he wasn’t was his age. He was a very old man by the time the Nazis invaded Norway. Otherwise, I have no doubt he would have taken up arms as other famous Norwegians did, like the explorer Thor Heyardahl, for example. You see, the Nazis needed the famous Edvard Munch on their side. He would have been a big propaganda coup. But he refused to join their Nazi organisation for artists. So they threatened to destroy all his paintings.’
It had gone deathly silent in the hall. The paintings were no longer being passed round. Nobody said a word. Finally Lindsay spoke for all of them.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
Hodge’s voice was raw. ‘Munch, even more than most artists, liked to keep all his pictures near him. So when the Nazis threatened to burn them he would have lost nearly everything he had painted – the life’s work of a very great artist. But he faced them down.
‘An old man of eighty or so. He faced them down. The Nazis backed down, not Munch. In the end, they did not dare destroy his paintings. He was too well-known, all over the world. But I still think his defiance was one of the bravest acts I have ever heard of.’
Hodge paused. He sipped the water he had been provided with. The hubbub started up again. The paintings were being passed round.
‘So, sir,’ Rubin said, ‘it was some quality in the paintings themselves that enraged the Nazis. Not necessarily that they had been painted by Jews. Have I got that right?’
‘The quick answer, Danny, is yes. For one thing, only a small minority of the paintings on display at the so-called Exhibition of Shame in 1937 were by Jewish painters. Most of them were in this one room – so nine paintings. But a better answer is that we need to clear some time to talk about this over a beer.’
That got a cheer.
Rubin said ‘You’re on, sir.’
‘But I tell you this, Danny. For now. And it’s just my theory. Well, no – I won’t bullshit you. It’s only just occurred to me.’ More laughter. ‘Whatever qualities of life the Expressionist paintings have, I think the Jews have it, too. Or at least the Nazis perceived them to have it. Now, don’t forget what I said about plunder. There was that aspect too. But the Nazis wanted to stamp out life and colour and energy …’
Hodge came to a halt. It had all gone so well. He thought if this was a film there would have been a standing ovation. There was not. But there was a massive and obviously sincere thunder of applause when Lindsay called for it. And soldiers came up to him afterwards with questions well into the night.
Chapter 10
Ludwigsburg Friday August 24, 1945
Next day it was raining sheets. Not that polite, almost apologetic, London rain Hodge had grown up with – stop, start, excuse me; stop, start again. This was southern rain, wholehearted, as if in angry reaction to the days of humid sunshine which had preceded it.
Lying in bed, hung-over and tired, his mouth as furred up as his brain after last night’s success, Hodge cursed out loud. Would rain make today’s two operations more difficult?
Logically, you could find a tunnel and perhaps men hiding in it as well in rain as in sunshine. But would rain deter a gang of dyed-in-the-wool Nazis from trying to dynamite a viaduct which carried traffic, communications and water? Perhaps. Could you lay dynamite in a downpour? Hodge had no idea.
The rain of course might stop later in the day – not that it showed any sign at all of doing that. But Hodge still had an uneasy feeling that the important events of this day had started badly. It was going wrong already. Was this a premonition?
Hodge had arranged to meet Lindsay and his men and Barbara outside the Stern at two in the afternoon. Lindsay had wanted him to travel there with the soldiers, he had wanted to travel there with Barbara. Barbara had insisted on making her own way.
At a quarter to two, Hodge parked his US army jeep at the top end of Rosenstrasse. This was out of sight of the Stern, but from here he could see Lindsay and his men arriving. Five minutes later, three US army jeeps drove along Mompelgardstrasse, crossing the top of Rosenstrasse.
Hodge started the jeep. It coughed but would not start. He gave it some choke then frantically pressed the starter button again. More turning over, then nothing. The jeep had been unreliable ever since Holzbauer’s speedy but obviously makeshift repair, at his garage. It was even worse in the rain. And it was still raining.
Cursing, Hodge abandoned the jeep and made his way at a brisk trot up Rosenstrasse then right to the end of Mompelgardstrasse. At this point, Mompelgardstrasse ended in a T-junction.
Situated right on this junction, the Stern inn was the last building before the open ground round the palace. If there really was a tunnel from the Stern to the palace, it would run only four hundred yards or so, under the scrubby grass, to reach the palace doors.
The dull yellow-baroque eighteenth-century façade of the palace was lovely even in the rain. Hodge wished he was visiting it, about to enjoy the frescoes and paintings inside, perhaps even take in an opera performance in the chapel, instead of being about to look for a tunnel with loot and Nazis in it.
And the tunnel had better be there. Given the way the information about it had emerged, Lindsay would be incandescent if this was all Scotch Mist.
Trying to keep some dignity as he trotted along in the rain, Hodge came to a halt by the US army jeeps. Lindsay nodded coolly to him as he got out of his jeep, his uniform shirt going dark in seconds as it got soaked in the rain. His men clambered out. They had helmets on. There were ten of them, all armed with rifles.
Barbara hurried up to them, along Mompelgardstrasse. She was dressed in her thick winter coat which must have been too warm for her, but was all she had to keep off the rain. There was
a silk scarf tied over her head.
‘What the hell is she doing here?’ Lindsay’s jaw jutted at Hodge.
‘I thought she might come in handy, as an interpreter. And local knowledge.’
‘I told you to keep this quiet. I suppose half the goddam town knows we’re coming.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Fair, my ass. This is a military operation, Captain.’
Lindsay struggled in the rain to get his helmet on. Then he sent five men round the back of the inn. He ignored Barbara and Hodge.
‘How are you?’ Hodge asked Barbara, tenderly.
She looked up at him warmly, clearly grateful for his care. ‘I’m OK. But being back here…’ She tailed off, leaving Hodge to wonder what she meant.
‘How’s the cold?’ he said, solicitously.
‘What?’
‘Last time I saw you, you had a cold.’
She laughed, her eyes dancing, obviously pleased to see him. ‘I’m OK.’
He had a wild desire to ask her out, to arrange a date there and then. But instead they both followed Lindsay and five of his men in through the Stern’s front door.
Hodge had no idea what to expect. A pub in England would have been closed at this time of the afternoon, but the Stern was jam-packed. A handful of locals sat at the bar, with others playing cards or drinking at the tables and wood-banquettes. A pall of cigarette smoke hung under the ceiling.
There was a high-pitched babble of noise which cut off dead as soon as the soldiers burst in. Behind the bar was a large, embittered looking woman dressed in black who was of an age to be Frau Wagner.
‘United States Army,’ Lindsay shouted. ‘Do not move.’
The soldiers fanned out, covering the drinkers and the bar with their rifles. Neither the drinkers nor probable Frau Wagner looked particularly surprised, let alone alarmed.
Then all the drinkers, the card-players and loungers at the inn turned to look at one old man. He was sitting on his own, well away from everybody else, nursing his beer. It was if someone had flicked a switch, or sent a secret signal. Or as if everybody in the inn was controlled by the same force.
