I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit. The Reichsminister seemed to have three or four closely typed pages still to get through. I started gently to move toward one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as! t just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving toward the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the...--This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance. When I got back to listening to Goebbels he was onto point seven, which did not seem very different from point one.
I slept heavily that night and woke to heartburn about half past eight. I would not, I decided, that day visit the studios of Tobis and Johannisthal and Grunewald and Froelich and Neubabelsberg. If they wanted me to pay for my air trip and accommodation I would, a free Mensch. I would go to see Fritz Kalbus at Wehmayr Verlag and draw my royalties and go back to Paris. I rang room service and requested bicarbonate of soda and a cannikin of mocha and some dry toast. While I was belching heartily the front desk called to say that there was a lady downstairs for me. I assumed it was an escort with car sent by Toni Quadflieg, and I passed on my regrets that I was too ill to participate in the day's program. No no, it was a lady downstairs who wished to come upstairs, a friend of mine by the name of Fraulein Auronzo. Auronzo first rang no bell then set a whole belfry clanging. Of course. I might have known. Please send her up.
Concetta Campanati nee Auronzo looked very thin and very old but very vigourous. It was a vigour of the will and not at all of the body, wherein, I could divine, the growth that ate her monopolised all vigour. We kissed each other. Coffee? She would have some, yes. She sat, no longer elegant but dressed as for hard work in mustard tweed and lisle stockings. "I thought," I said, "you might he in Berlin."
"I've been here only a week. Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg. I started off in Munich and then kept moving north. Here, I think, I shall finish."
"How did you--"
"The Volkische Beobachter. Haven't you seen it yet?" She took it, rolled to a baton, from a workmanlike brown satchel. "It says an interview here on arrival. You seem to have been attacking the American Jews. I don't believe it, of course. They twist everything. Here, read."
"No, I don't think I will. I m sick enough already."
"Sick? But you've seen nothing yet. Nothing at all."
"What precisely have you been doing? You realize we've all worried. I mean, just going off, no address, very vague. Not that we don't. I mean, courage. Almost Hortense's last word before I left her in New York. She's separated from Domenico, by the way. She'd had enough. Even Carlo didn't talk about the sacred bonds of matrimony. But we won't talk about that. What precisely?"
She drank some coffee. It was mostly real coffee at that time, with only a whiff of pounded acorns. "They all seem a very long way away. Don't forget to give them all my dearest love. Even stupid Domenico. He's not bad, he's just stupid." And then, "There's no time to give you the whole story. It began in Chiasso with my bank manager, a Jew. A discussion about investments. We got friendly, he's a widower. He said this was no time to talk about safe money, not the way things were. If there was any spare money about, he said, it ought to be used to get Jews out of Germany. Big Jews, writers, scientists. The Nazis confiscate and then kindly let some of them out. But only on condition that they pay special imposts to the state. It's monstrous, a kind of dirty joke. They've already paid up. Now they have to find the money for this tax and the other tax. The taxes have horrible long names, sneering names. That's where the Davidsbundler comes in."
"The--" The name was familiar. I caught an image of Domenico playing something on his Paris piano. That was it, Schumann. The March of the David gang against the Philistines. But that had been just art. "Yes, yes, I see. Working from Switzerland?"
"The trouble is they have to have somewhere to go. And nobody wants them. Not unless they're very very big. Or have families somewhere. Nobody seems to like the Jews. Somebody said that all Hitler's done is to do what other people only talk about doing. I'd like to make the Jews crawl, somebody says, and that's that. But Hitler actually does it. Only it isn't crawling. There are these work camps and worse. Trucks coming to decent respectable Jewish houses in the middle of the night and taking people oft. Nothing in the newspapers. Nobody cares. No justice for the Jews, meaning they're literally outside the law. It's going to get worse. I saw Jewish heads smashed in Dresden. What can we do about the small Jews with no international reputation, the little clerks and the watch repairers?" Her face twisted a moment as with referred pain. But, of course, it was her own. She fumbled in her satchel and brought out a glass cylinder of tablets. "Could I have a little water?"
"Of course." Bringing her a glass, I said, "How is it? I mean, how are you?"
"The times's coming," she said, having swallowed, "to make an end of it. No, no," she said, seeing my jaw drop, "I'm still a kind of daughter of the Church. I wouldn't," with her old irony, "want to endanger my immortal soul. I'm not," she said, as though rebutting a proposal of my own, "going to die in one of their work camps which are really death camps. There's nothing wrong with dying spectacularly. Christ did it."
"Nobody," I said, "can touch you for anything. I take it you're armed with an American passport. I mean, you gave your name as Auronzo. Nobody could touch you as an Italian either. Surely the name Campanati means something. What do you mean--die spectac--"
"Campanati," she said, "is not too popular a name in the new bright lands of oppression. Carlo, I gather, has been what they term indiscreet."
"Carlo," I said, and nearly said: who now knows all, "has been speaking out, no more. A priest's duty he called it, his own voice not the official one of the Holy See. But the Pope has been speaking out too."
"The Pope is vague and full of generalities. Carlo has been bringing in blood and bones and talking of casting out the devil."
"How did you learn about this?"
"You can see the American papers in the consulates. One of these radio talks was reported in the Washington Post. Have you actually heard him?"
"He was very good. Guest on this weekly program run by Father Somebody. He didn't have him long. He stole Father Macwhatsisname's thunder. Look," I said, "I don't like this talk about dying."
"A lot of people are dying. I saw a Jewish girl of ten with her head smashed. That was outside Leipzig. These people are murderers. And they haven't really started yet."
"It's not only the Jews, is it?"
"Ah, no. Not only the Jews. Have you heard of the Brown Houses? No, of course not. Hedemannstrasse and Papenstrasse, the Ulap. God, the hypocrisy. Doctor Goebbels telling the International Penal and Prison Congress all about humane rehabilitation--here in Berlin."
"You seem very well informed, Concetta."
"I am. And you're going to be very well informed too. And you're going to inform anybody who's prepared to listen. You're the writer in the family."
I groaned inwardly. "I let poor Raffaele down, didn't I? Scribbling my shopgirl romances instead of attacking the gangsters. But what good cou
ld I have done?"
"People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know."
The telephone buzzed. It was a discreet noise here in the Adlon, Venusberg not Valkyrie. Toni Quadflieg, querulous rather. Message about my crankhood received. But I was expected, he said, on the studio tour to be present. I wanted to blast obscenities but I kept calm. Crank, I said, crank crank. You will be well for Hitlerjunge Quex today evening? Crank crank, and I crashed down the handset.
Concetta said, "Why did you come?"
"Invited. All paid. Film based on book of mine. Royalties to be collected and spent. Curiosity."
"Who have you met?"
"Goebbels. French and American and Viking admirers of the regime. Film People. Mrs. Goebbels."
She nodded. "There'll be a lot of the big ones at this Horst Wessel premiere." She got up painfully and went over to the escritoire where the telephone was. Next to the telephone was a bulky folder with, on the cover, a film projector flashing a swastika onto a screen. The program. Film personalities. Synopses, cast lists. Very thorough and comprehensive. She brought the folder back to her chair; standing seemed to take a lot out of her. "Here it is. Thursday evening Eight o'clock. God, what an obscenity.
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen
S. A. marschiert mit mutig festem Schritt.
A ponce and a cornerboy and his dying word is 'Deutschland!' Ken, don't go to that abomination."
"I have to see the worst, don't I?"
"Don't go. Leave this place. But take this stuff with you." She dropped the folder to the carpet, red turkey, and let its glossy unbound contents fan out. The stuff she meant was what she now took from her satchel, a buff quarto envelope, legal and solid, the size of an eighty-thousand-word typescript ready to be mailed. "It's all in here," she said.
"What's in here?" I took it.
"Disposition of things," she said vaguely. "Domenico will be disappointed, no money for him, a, bit in trust for the twins, very little. The Davidsbundler gets the bulk of the estate, Dr. Nussbaum in Chiasso has everything organized. As for the other things, that's facts. One or two photographs, personal stories. If you still feel sick don't look yet. Don't open up till you get back. Back where?"
"Paris. But not for long. I thought of taking chambers in Albany. What is all this?"
"Whatever it is, publish. I'm egoistic enough to want to be remembered. Other names--there aren't any other names but there are a few helpers, quite a few. They have to go on living. I think you can be trusted."
"Concetta! How can you say that?" The hurt was sharp.
"It's a question of your trade. You deal too much with unreality. Don't make a novel out of all this."
"Novels can be more real than--"
"These are bad bad times. This is the worst century that history has ever known. And we're only a third of the way through it. There have to be martyrs and witnesses."
"They're the same thing, you know."
"You see what I mean," she said kindly. "A certain tendency to frivolity. I know that martyr means witness. You're too used to dealing with words." She suddenly writhed and I saw for the first time the evil of pain: that face, comely still despite age and disease, had ceased to be comely. "I have to use your--It may take quite a little--Jesus--" Shocked, I helped her toward the Abort. It was clear that she was past muscular control.
CHAPTER 48
If I may anticipate, I did what had to be done with Concetta's material in 1937, in London, having taken over from Aldous and Maria Huxley Apartment E2 in Albany, Piccadilly, they, with their son Matthew and Gerald Heard, sailing into American exile on the Normandie on April 7 in that year. I had finished with Paris, which was animated by political broils and smelt of various kinds of corruption. Concetta's big buff envelope contained photographs of men and women recently emerged from places of torture and interrogation on Hedemannstrasse and Papenstrasse and other houses of correction, some facts about Buchenwald near Weimar, a concentration camp set up as early as 1934, and other well-attested evidence of atrocities mostly committed by the Schutzstaffel or SS as it was affectionately called by its members. In comparison with what was to be discovered later, Concetta's revelations of Nazi diabolism were fairly mild but, as Carlo was to point out to me, evil must never be measured quantitatively: to shove the face of a rabbi into his own shit and let him suffocate was evil enough. The millions we were to hear about later, Jews and Slays and gipsies and Aryan defectors, still form a body of ghosts too vast to impinge in palpable horror on the imagination, and one of the photographs Concetta had obtained remained and remains for me a sufficient testimony to German Faustianism, or soul-selling for secular power. The face is that of a woman schoolteacher, a pure Teuton from Bitterfeld, who had taught some traditional humanist doctrine now heterodox and, betrayed by members of the Hitlerjugend in her class, been subjected to a brief course of rehabilitation. The face was virtually mouthless. A black toothless pulp under a broken nose would no longer be able to recite Goethe; an eye was missing and an ear had been cut off. This was merely what had been a face. For the body the photograph was not able to speak.
Concetta knew that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was only one aspect of the infamous philosophy of the satanic regime, but she had the foresight to envision it as the most spectacular of their achievements. The Crystal Night or night of the smashing, which inaugurated post factum the official mass pogrom, did not take place until November 9, 1938 (two days after Herschel Grynszpan killed an official of the German Embassy in Paris), and the threefold disposal of the Jews--(a) seize their property (b) exploit them as slaves (3) kill, despoil, process had not yet been presented as a formula, nor had it begun to conflict with the wasteful Final Solution of which Heinrich Himmler (God forgive me; wait for the next chapter) was already dreaming. Concetta, as an Aryan, to use their sickening pseudoscientific cant, and as a Christian, already was well enough qualified to identify herself with millions who were in purely ideological conflict with the regime, a conflict very speedily resolved, but she elected to be considered Jewish and worked for the Jews as an adoptive sister or mother.
Her attempt to have herself accepted as a Jew by the very officials who were persecuting Jews was, on the evidence of the diary which formed a major part of the material she entrusted to me, more comic than heroic. In Hanover, by dint of loud German, the flashing of her Italian passport, and intimations of urgent messages from Rome, she had persuaded underlings at the 55 headquarters to admit her to the presence of a certain Oberbannfuhrer Hummel. At first properly polite to one who seemed to represent herself as a senior official of a sister party of villains, Hummel allowed his jaw to drop progressively as he heard what he took to be a kind of madness or, more probably, a dangerous trickery masquerading as madness. For she said that Judaism was not a matter of race, since there were no physiognomic or hematic indices which could distinguish Jews from, say, Germans; Judaism was a matter of faith and she, though born an American Italian Catholic, had decided to adopt the faith of Abraham and Moses. What did he, the Oberbannfuhrer, propose to do about it? Nothing, he said: he had no authority as yet to persecute foreign nationals of the Jewish faith. Ah, she riposted, so it was only German Jews--who had sinned against the light? No no, the Nazi ethnologists accepted that the Jews of the entire mondial Diaspora formed a homogeneous body infinitely dangerous to the cause of Aryan civilization, but Germany recognized the unfortunate limitations of its own purificatory or punitive authority. Limitations, she said, which will not last forever? No no, it was hoped not. So then Germany was to declare war in time on the Jews of other nations, which meant, of course, the entirety of those nations, since it would be unthinkable to segregate, in the more civilised nations, Jews from Gentiles? May I tell my friends in America that Germany is already contemplating war? No no no. (He was a very stupid Oberbannfuhrer.) Good, she said, so I shall report your imperfect anti-Semitism to the appropriate autho
rities in Berlin. No no no. Very well, persecute me. As a Jew I demand to be persecuted. I shall sit outside in that corridor that smells of SS carbolic and await persecution. I have, of course, already informed the Berlin correspondents of the major American newspapers of my conversion. They will be interested to learn what you propose to do. Concetta was not exactly thrown out but she was persuaded to leave through threats of prosecution for trespass on private, or SS, property.
It was sad to have to report that Concetta did not meet, from the Jews she contacted in eastern Germany, the cooperation she had, in her capacity of willing helper, the right to expect. For many of the Jews mistrusted her posture of conversion, regarding it in some instances as a frivolous blasphemy. Like the Nazi theorists themselves, they considered that the Jews were a race different from other races and, moreover, a very special race, a chosen race on which God, to show his exclusive affection, had willed suffering. In a sense, it sometimes seemed to her, the Nazis and the Jews had been made for each other: no nut without a cracker, no cracker without a nut. A little old lady whose luggage was too innocent to be inspected as she crossed the border at Basle, she had been lucky enough to have her suitcase opened by the Zoll only twice, and on those occasions she had not been carrying arms. She brought altogether something like thirty lightweight Webley-Wilkinsons and Smith and Wessons into Germany from Switzerland, complete with ammunition. Her view was that, when SS rank and file, drunk and euphoric, tried to break into decent Jewish homes on a Saturday night, they should be resisted with the odd bullet and that would soon cool them down. With the elder Jews this advocation of violence was abominable, but some of the younger Jews actually wounded and even killed various of their oppressors (a Sturmbannfuhrer was found shot on a rubbish heap in Finsterwalde), though the retribution was terrible. Concetta's other schemes included the importation of SS uniforms with insignia of high rank (made by a tailor in Zug), to be worn by young courageous Jews representing themselves as visiting brass and ready to deflect arrogantly acts of persecution with alleged changes of policy in Berlin. All this, alas, was mere play and dangerous play too. Totally harmless, pathetically so, were the little pamphlets she had had prepared (one of them written, and very perfunctorily, by the long exiled Hesse) and printed in Geneva--on Hitler's Jewish ancestry with genealogical table, a plea from Himmler's dying Jewish mother to stop this nonsense, a letter to the world from a dying Jewish child. Concetta did most good with money, which rides over even the most perverse ideology. It may be yet money that will save the world. But no man or woman was then able to arrest a process which seemed as much willed by the destroyed as by the destroyers.
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