Untitled Robert Lautner

by Robert Lautner

I moved through the bodies, a fairground maze of distorting mirrors. Crashed into them, sidled round skins of bones, breathed only when I had to.

  I repeated his name to all of them, repeated that help and food was coming. I was a raft to the drowning, all of them clinging to me. Fingers missing, feet gnarled or lost, stumps dragging. Dripping sores of flesh. Remnants of men, and I had not noticed the multitude of them that were naked. Not noticed because their genitals, as hairless as their heads, had begun to shrink back into their bodies. They were cheap puppets of men. Wood too expensive to make them fully. Keep them light for the strings that would lift them. I was moving through the under-earth of a cemetery. And children. There were children. Do not make me recall that. And still I called his name, did not run back to the gate. I thought of Paul. Thought of what he burned. Once it had been fat men with watch-chains and widows. Then it had become these. Then the camps decided they could do it for themselves. And I drew the ovens for them.

  I was in the barracks. Rows of shelves to the ceiling. Could not imagine that this was where humans slept. Suited more for a place where lost post would be abandoned. Pigeon-holes of a post-office.

  Called his name. Some heads moved in the shelves, eyes swivelled on me like the heads of dolls tipped back. I had to fight not to run, did not want to go further. And I had no hope then. The stench too strong, the symbolism of the flies too evident. Fifty-nine days since I saw him. Since I left him. I hoped they had shot him on his first dawn. Not this. Not this. Almost did not want to meet him.

  I walked out of there, back to the clamouring ghouls. Maybe he had done better. Hans Klein after all. This small place for new arrivals, Hans had said so himself when we came here together. A place for traitors, for diseased, the old and weak. But Hans Klein would light a Camel, straighten his tie, convince them he belonged in the main camp, the political barracks, that he was a personal friend of Colonel Pister, worked closely with the SS. Then he had walked out the next day, went back to the Topfs who had complained to our leader himself about the internment of such a faithful Party member.

  I walked with a wake of ghosts behind, saw Edward at the gate. The guards smiling and meek to the tall American. Another man with him, Eiden I assumed, the man now in charge, who allowed this to continue.

  I turned once more to the Little Camp, to the crowd. Would try one more thing. I cupped my hands to my mouth, bellowed as hard as I could.

  ‘I am Ernst Beck! Ernst Beck!’ I moved further in. ‘From Topf. From Erfurt. You saved my wife, Hans!’ Nothing. ‘Thank you. Thank you, Hans! Thank you, Herr Klein!’

  Nothing.

  I brushed the hands off me. Told them everything was going to be better now. Not all right. I could not promise that. Just better. Just different. Maybe never better. But it would be different. I made my way to the gate. Passed through it alone.

  ‘Any luck?’ Edward asked.

  ‘No. He is not here.’

  The man Eiden piped up. ‘Who are you looking for? I was in the commissary and records. I know most. Was he recent?’

  ‘A couple of months ago,’ I said. ‘His name was Hans Klein. His name is Hans Klein.’

  ‘From Topf?’

  I stepped closer. ‘Yes. You know him? That is him.’

  ‘He was never in the Little Camp.’

  I knew it. Knew that Klein would not allow such. He would have had supper with Colonel Pister, the colonel from Himmler’s motor-pool. The Topfs would have called. The one-legged monster would have barked down a telephone. Klein out before he loosed his tie, went home and loosed the top off a bottle of vermouth.

  Eiden snorted. Put a finger to his nose, hacked a shot of phlegm to the mud.

  ‘They shot him the morning after he arrived. Burned in the pits. The ovens broken. How did you know him?’

  I walked past Edward, past them. Clenched my fist against the old scar that was never there.

  ‘He was my boss.’

  Eiden sniffed, put his hands in his pockets. ‘Then he probably deserved it.’

  I slipped in the mud as I punched his jaw. The last violent act of my war.

  *

  My name is Ernst Beck. I grew up in Erfurt on the medieval bridge that you see in postcards. I studied at Erfurt University. Martin Luther went there.

  The first job I had in my life was drafting ovens for concentration camps. The second job I had was helping construct a report on the camp at Buchenwald.

  We brought eleven former inmates of the camp to Vienna to assist. Hans Klein not one of them. I am smoking Camels from his case and using his lighter, wearing a suit of the former head of our leader’s Youth regiments. He is in prison. The Geneva rules he ignored ensuring his food and treatment.

  I drew an oven that could burn hundreds a day. Not enough time for it to happen, and the newsreels showed the pits and the piles of corpses instead. Patton ordered movie cameras before ambulances. Knew no-one would believe otherwise. And I can only give the cruellest observation on that.

  Footage of a pile of ash would not have horrified the world for eternity.

  I know – know it in my own history – that our instinct is to deny. We sleep bad enough as is.

  This the year of my war.

  Chapter 61

  A fine house in a rural suburb of Gotha. Detached. Garden in front. A magnolia tree shading the porch. June now. The tree would have been budding in April.

  The surrender done. June and normality. Regaining normality. Bending things back into shape. Twisting the circles back to squares. Forming countries again as if nothing had happened, shaping new ones to suit the red-jackets, the Americans, the British.

  Roosevelt died the day after we entered Buchenwald, before Patton and Bradley got there, before the official liberation. Our leader and Mussolini and Roosevelt all gone within thirty days of each other, in one month. Three from the first war. Ended when the game they had started playing as youths rolled its last dice. The first war ended now. The board put away. Until the next throw. The spider of the first only a husk. It had eggs to hatch. And they had died now also. Eggs of their own.

  I pulled the doorbell, stood back. My hair had grown back to its strong blond, pomade smooth. I wore a suit and tie despite the Saturday. Felt it fitting. For delivering such a letter.

  The woman answering the door was not a maid. Somehow I had expected one. I took off my hat.

  ‘Frau Werra?’ I asked. She opened the door wider.

  ‘My name is Ernst Beck, Frau Werra.’ I did not need to say much else, she saw the letter in my hand. An official one sat behind her mantle clock or in a box atop the wardrobe, or in her son’s room, or in the attic for all I knew. Mine had more weight, she saw it hung heavy in my hand.

  ‘I was with Franz when he died,’ I said. Could not say it better than that. It was to be expected. Everything said plain now, understood to be so. Franz probably knew I could not post it. Knew his mother would need to see the last person who knew him, and I never thought otherwise. He would owe me the stamp.

  She almost did not take it. Her hand reached and drew away. She said what she had to.

  ‘Won’t … will you come in?’

  I put the letter to her hand.

  ‘I cannot stay. Franz gave me this. For you.’

  ‘His father is inside. He would …’

  I knew she wanted this. If I came into the house, walked his floors, somehow he would walk them. He was in the air about me, in my youth, in the blond hair and blue eyes. And I could stay. And that was the very reason I could not.

  ‘No. Thank you, mother. Would you come to the car for me, Frau Werra?’ I held out my hand to the path of her garden gate, to the car. She removed her apron, no-one in the street should see it.

  I took her to the car. Etta’s father had taught her to drive in our absence from each other. Considered it part of survival now. Should anything go against the neutrality of Zurich. And I had kept the little motorcycle that had saved me for the same. For the knock on the door.

>   ‘This is my wife, Etta.’ They shook hands through the open window. ‘Franz helped me speak to her. When she could not stay with me. When … when she had to leave.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ Read what she was not told.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Frau Werra,’ Etta beamed. ‘Ernst has told me much about your son.’

  I took the mother’s hands. The letter between.

  ‘Your son was a friend of mine.’ I spoke only to her eyes. ‘He defended to the end. When generals had surrendered like cowards he did not. Thank you. Thank you for raising a good German son.’

  She held me, and I let it. The last to know him. Wanted to breathe something from him.

  A moment of this, then she eased me away, hid her face as she walked back up her path.

  Every general should have to parade themselves in front of mothers.

  I got in the car.

  ‘What now?’ Etta asked, started the engine. The car, a small saloon loaned to us from the young lieutenant. Part of his reward. He had no need for it. Edward Tenenbaum now in Berlin. Reconstructing the mark. A banker now. A business not in the business of improving the world. Only concerned with saving the mark. Dividing a country.

  What now?

  Ludwig Topf killed himself when the Russians came to Erfurt. He would have stood over his huge desk as the beating came at his door, wondered at the plans they knew of that had not been burnt, the ovens not destroyed. Wondered how they knew.

  He did not shoot himself over what he had been complicit with. Wrote a note denying. He just did not want to meet the brothers and fathers of the Russians that knew. Put a pistol to his mouth. I hoped it was an Erfurt Luger.

  Ernst Topf fled to the West. They let him come. He came with enough money after all. Prüfer, Sander and the other engineers were imprisoned by the Russians. The end for them. For all the horrors of our prison camps you did not want to be a German in a Russian one.

  No-one called for me. I had given them the plan for an oven that might have never been built. But it showed intention. The foresight of a great plan. Something other than just controlling disease. A machine. That was enough to let me go free. Let me hold my wife again. I was only doing my job. As the men who planned to incinerate Dresden had only done theirs. But still, a job I would be shamed to deny being part of for the rest of my life.

  ‘I was only doing my job, my duty. Only following orders.’ But we lost. So they were the wrong orders. But there were those that said no, said, ‘I shall not’. Thousands of them. Their last words. But empathy for them lost in horror.

  A new Germany. Albeit one to be split in two, one that faced the same restrictions that had brought us to this. Another treaty against us. So no real matter, no real problem. The same problem. I had lived almost my whole life under it.

  You get older, and life is not about change, as you expected, not about adventure or aspiration, as you hoped. It is about asking please.

  Please let everything be the same, or please let everything be different. Just please let it not get harder. Harder or worse. This much money and no more. Or maybe more if it comes. And that will be the world from now on.

  The stones in your shoes.

  When you are a child and forced to go on a walk with your father on a Sunday. And you whine and can’t put on your shoes and there are stones in your shoes, little stones, chips of pebbles only, and you whine about them also. And your father stands above.

  ‘You are coming for a walk,’ he says. ‘Shake out the stones. Don’t complain,’ he says. ‘You will always get stones in your shoes.’

  I know that now. Know that I don’t want fewer stones in my shoes. I want no more stones. I am fine with the stones I have. Can walk with them. I can feel them, accept them. You get stones in your shoes. You don’t get them if you never walk.

  Etta shut off the engine, thought I had not heard her above it.

  ‘Ernst?’ she asked again. ‘What now?’

  Author’s Note

  It’s over two decades since I read an interview with one of the Topf descendants. After the unification of Germany many families and companies who had lost property in the years after the war were interested in reclaiming it or ensuring that business continued after unification. The only reason Dagmar Topf made the papers was because the factory and family villa she was interested in holding on to was now labelled as the workplace where the ‘engineers of the Final Solution’ designed the ovens for the concentration camps of the SS.

  The perspective of the article followed the vein of veiled disgust. Why would you want to retain that? Why wouldn’t you raze it to the ground?

  Dagmar Topf’s attitude was one that still rings around the world whenever those complicit with the Nazi regime appeal.

  They were only doing their jobs. They had to. What choice did they have?

  And it’s the same argument we hear today, still reeling from the aftershocks of fiscal and corporate irresponsibility which only aspired to one goal: to make as much money as possible out of deliberately making others poor and consciously, by economic model, creating generations yet to come forced to live in a precariat society where stability and constancy will be cultural relics.

  ‘I didn’t do anything that wasn’t in the rules.’ ‘I have done nothing illegal.’

  I was only doing my job.

  This is not a holocaust story, and only in its setting and circumstance is it intended to be an historical story. I wanted to ask, ‘What would you do?’

  Since the rise of technology and its erosion of borders and instant commerce, moral decisions can be distanced because we never have to visit the consequences of trade and cost, and increasingly the business of failure is a preferred model. We see companies bought and sold for single figures, assets stripped, pensions revoked, government backing of failure, whole towns bankrupted, and a handful of people walk off with millions. There is money in deliberate failure which no idealistic economist could ever have predicted or even dreamed of as something to aspire to for any society. Many of the world’s largest companies no longer make anything. The concept of production, of supporting the economy while still profiting, is not the model that modern capitalism requires. They make money by moving money, by devaluing the economy. Credit agencies now factor in the price of the inevitable government bailout for company schemes designed to fail as the bailout becomes part of the projected profits.

  The prominence of such practice leads all of us to the possibility that by merely working and consuming we can sometimes, to many degrees, be a part of a system which not only profits from exploitation, misery, conflict and failure but also actively encourages such by its reward, and to resist is to be told that you aren’t ‘aspirational’ enough. We only object because we are envious. So it is such with Ernst Beck.

  Solomon Asch, and especially Stanley Milgram’s experiments (the war still in their living memories) demonstrated that obedience, conformity, could be manufactured. Milgram’s infamous electric-shock experiments had their origins in two seemingly contradictory observations. One had been Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial where she was vilified for suggesting that Eichmann represented ‘the banality of evil’; a man simply doing his job, and that this is what we should fear. He was not the Devil doing the Devil’s work. The other was the TV show Candid Camera which in its American heyday would take its laughs from demonstrating the frailty of individuality against the easier state, even desire, of conformity and obedience. Laughed-at weakness.

  I wondered what it might be like to have worked in a company that laboured under SS contract, more specifically those that supplied and worked for the camps themselves. The ovens are a powerful reminder of the nature of the extreme; they still stand, are exhibited in silent abjectness, but someone was paid to design and build them. There is nothing guilty in building an oven, nothing evil with needing ovens for prisons, yet the ovens are a unifying symbol of what remains. Only what remains reminds. And we have learnt from this. Corporations a
nd governments have learnt from this.

  Should we be horrified that companies competed to supply them? Should we have expected the companies to question the quantity of ovens required? What corporation would question such today? I wonder if it is only with relief for the Allies that it was a German company that supplied; but wonder if that was simply down to logistics.

  We often hear that the modern corporate system appeals to a psychopathic personality, that its traits and methods warrant such and its electronic nature further removes any possibility of empathy. As such Hans Klein in the story represents this. It is only when the world encroaches on him personally that he questions, and Ernst Beck’s admiration of him, his aspiration is not misplaced today.

  Many companies, institutions, domestic and foreign, took payment and assisted the Nazi regime. From filing systems and their machines, to electricity and coal, gold belonging to governments in exile given up willingly, to motor engines and gas jets, to the refusal of countries to take Jewish refugees, but the thing that abhors the most are the ovens and what they represent. The others are unseen, smaller horrors. And companies and institutions remembered, learnt from this. And, after all, the doctrine, the dictatorship, did not fail because of the people objecting. To call Topf and Sons the engineers of the Final Solution is just as narrow as we insist things should be.

  Historically this is a work of fiction. I chose the name Ernst Beck in reference to the anthropologist Ernest Becker, and apart from the chief directors of the Topf factory and various camp commanders all other characters and situations are fictional. The timeline of the story however does follow the last year of the war in respect of the camps, the bombings and Ernst’s time in Waldkappel and Kassel. The continuous oven for mass use is not a work of fiction. It was never put into production, but they wanted it to exist. The horror of its possibility the starkest concept behind the story I could imagine. And I didn’t imagine it.

  When I started the story the question I wanted to ask was, ‘What would you do?’ During the work this gradually became, ‘What should you do? Now. Today.’ And I think this became the better, still relevant question in any modern parallel you wish for conjecture. There is no clear moment in the story for Ernst Beck to realise the implications of his work. There never is. It is, for all of us, only ever gradual and dawning, and only with hindsight do we pontificate on our own ethics and bravado. But if such an oven had come to exist, had been put to use, if the war had not closed as it did, if the conquerors had not brought the film cameras to the camps and the men and women that filmed, I don’t think I could have written this story. I don’t think I would want to write anything.