by Tessa de Loo
In the autumn Hitler called the farmers together at Bückeberg near Hamelen to celebrate the harvest festival. Uncle Heinrich went along, curious despite himself. After he got back he fell into a gruesome week-long silence. Trustworthy people had become scarce in the village; the only person he could ultimately disclose his news to was Anna. Millions of farmers from the whole country had flocked together on that day, he recounted. In Lower Saxony, the Teutonic heartland full of holy oaks where the spirit of Widukind roamed about, they had waited on both sides of the road where the march would take place. Uncle Heinrich stood among them. He had read Mein Kampf, he knew that the author wanted to put its contents into practice word for word, he knew who would be coming past on parade. But what did happen was beyond his wildest fantasies. The Führer’s appearance, perfectly stage-managed from beginning to end by carefully chosen artists, exceeded those of Nero, Augustus and Caesar put together. The crowds began to cheer, songs flowed through the ranks, a frenzied passion caught hold of the masses, red-white-black banners fluttered against a purple sky. Unanimous adoration went out to the single magical figure in whose hands the fate of the whole nation lay. Uncle Heinrich fought against the pull of the seduction as though he had fallen straight into a whirlpool in the Lippe. Gasping for breath, he wrested himself free from the gigantic, heaving, clamouring body and fled. ‘They will follow him blindly,’ he predicted, ‘this Pied Piper of Hamelen. To the abyss.’
The Pied Piper’s lust for power was tangible everywhere; not even the Archbishop of Paderborn was spared. He was arranging a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary on a Sunday; the BDM promptly organized a gathering on the same Sunday. ‘Fine,’ said the archbishop, ‘then we’ll arrange the pilgrimage for the following Sunday.’ The BDM followed his example. The Archbishop was not dismayed, and once more rearranged the event, his footsteps again followed by the BDM. Eventually the pilgrimage was postponed indefinitely. Anna’s patience was exhausted. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked at the next opportunity, ‘sabotaging the pilgrimage?’ ‘What do you mean?’ the leader of the BDM looked at her inanely. ‘We’re not doing anything.’ Anna said severely, ‘We are Catholics, we really do want to go there.’ The others nodded in agreement. The leader shrugged her shoulders. ‘I know nothing about it.’ ‘You’re lying! You’ve thwarted the Archbishop of Paderborn intentionally. You are an underhand mob. I don’t go along with it. I am a Catholic first and only after that a member of the BDM.’ The leader’s mock innocence was driving Anna into a blind rage. ‘You’re lying!’ She pushed her chair back – the feet slid across the floor – and walked up to the woman, who hid her uncertainty behind a sheepish smile. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with someone who lies,’ cried Anna, ‘goodbye.’ She went out without the Hitler salute, the door closed behind her with a bang. All chairs were immediately pushed back, the entire complement of the local section of the BDM stood up and left the room; the leader remained, her hands raised in astonishment, deserted. Jacobsmeyer’s assignment had been completed: the BDM had disbanded itself in this village.
Anna was just cleaning the pig shed, putting straw down, taking the muck out, when a large black Mercedes drove into the yard, a small flag with a swastika on the bonnet. Who have we here, she thought, walking into the yard inquisitively. A sturdy woman got out, in a uniform richly decorated with badges. A real high-up, Anna could see, a Gauführerin. The driver stayed inside the car and stared glassily ahead. After a haughty glance at the farming things, and looking past Anna, the woman stuck her arm out towards Uncle Heinrich. ‘Heil Hitler. I am looking for Anna Bamberg.’ Uncle Heinrich looked at her with weary suspicion and said nothing. Crossly, as though she had accidentally addressed a deaf mute, she turned to Anna. ‘Heil Hitler. Are you Anna Bamberg?’ ‘Yes.’ Anna’s figure was assessed from on high, from head to toe – her muddy overall, her unpainted clogs. ‘Are you the one who excelled at writing press reports?’ she asked sceptically. ‘Yes,’ Anna wiped her nose on her sleeve, ‘did you by any chance think I couldn’t read or write because I clean out the pig shed?’ The woman ignored her remark. The way her body had been crammed into the uniform was almost pathetic – the tension of the compressed flesh transferred itself to her fixed, controlled expression. She had come to call Anna to order: how could Anna break up the BDM just like that? ‘Just like that?’ said Anna. ‘You are liars, that’s what, just like that. I will have nothing more to do with it. Leave me in peace, I’ve got work to do.’ She turned, picked up her muck cart and called over her shoulder: ‘The Reichsnährstand is the first rank in the Third Reich.’ She heard the Mercedes door slam sharply behind her.
‘Ça vous a plu?’ asked the waitress, bending towards them with a smile.
‘Non, non, je ne veux plus,’ Lotte said hurriedly.
Anna began to laugh. ‘She was asking if you liked it.’
Yes, of course Lotte liked it. She blushed. What in heaven’s name had she eaten? She had been chewing and swallowing automatically, absorbed by Anna’s account. The enemy image that she had been fostering for years was coming increasingly under review. Everything was upside down – the alcohol had not yet worn off, the plentiful meal was taking a toll, inviolable certainties were crumbling. Two pairs of eyes looked at her expectantly – what dessert would she like? A list of sweets was rattled off, she could not understand another word of French. Coffee, she just wanted coffee.
‘So you see,’ Anna was indefatigably picking up the thread again, ‘how Hitler caused a furore among us in the village. I’ll tell you something else. A couple of years ago on a trip, by chance I went back to the Wewelsburg, you know, where we used to go for picnics with farm carts. In the war Himmler selected that castle to establish a cultural centre for the Third Reich. He had a tower built of gigantic dimensions, of diabolical beauty, a symbol of power. They could do that, the Nazis. More than four hundred people died in the construction of that monument. The cemetery where they are buried was obliterated later on. The irony is that people flock there now from all over the world – everyone is overawed by its beauty. Himmler’s scheme still works, that’s the gruesome thing. They should paint that tower bright red; they should paint the Jews’ martyrdom on it.’
Lotte looked around startled. Anna was becoming louder as she got more excited. The last sentences resounded provocatively through the sedate, salmon pink space. She gave Anna hand signals to turn the volume down a little.
Anna took the hint. ‘Oh well,’ she continued more softly, ‘since the political relationships have changed they have set up a little war museum there. I looked around it a bit. There were all sorts of things on display. Right away I discovered two ballot papers from our village, neatly framed. One from 30 January when Hitler came to power and one from March in the same year on the occasion of a constitutional amendment that empowered him to make regulations, thus bypassing the parliament. My heart stood still. Uncle Heinrich seems to have been badly mistaken – at that time he thought there were only a few idiots in the village with National Socialist sympathies. From those papers it was evident that on 30 January one-quarter of our fellow villagers had already voted for Hitler; two months later it was already two-thirds. The farmers, the baker, the greengrocer, Uncle Heinrich’s card-playing chums – suddenly they appeared in a different light. I was shocked, after all those years. It was lurking there all that time but he didn’t know it.’
She rested her hand on Lotte’s and looked at her with concern. ‘Sometimes I worry that it is repeating itself. That ridiculous “One Nation” clamour for reunification, the rising nationalism. I never thought people would still be susceptible to that idiocy, in a Europe where you can fly from Cologne to Paris in an hour, to Rome in two hours. It bothers me. I don’t want to be a Cassandra, but …’
‘It’s different for us,’ Lotte interrupted her.
‘The Dutch, yes … damned spice traders!’ Anna retorted. ‘You have a different attitude towards foreigners because you were involved in world trade from early o
n. But the Germans – have you ever really thought about what kind of people we are? The ordinary man was never anything, never possessed anything. He never had any possibility of a decent existence. And if by chance he ever did have something, then there would be a war and everything of his would be lost again. And so it goes on, for ages.’
‘But where did the Prussians get their pride from then?’ Lotte forced herself to stay alert through the tiredness.
‘If you’ve got nothing and are nobody you need something else to be proud of. That’s what Hitler cleverly took advantage of. The little man acquired a function, got a rank, a title: block warden, group leader, provincial commander. In that way they could command, they could act out their assertiveness.’
The coffee arrived. Lotte was relieved. She raised the cup eagerly to her lips. Anna observed her wrily. ‘The Dutch and their cup of coffee. Their lives and happiness have depended on it ever since they shipped the first coffee beans from the colonies.’
Lotte counter-attacked. ‘Did you never have the slightest sympathy for Hitler again?’
‘Sympathy? Meine Liebe! I found him loathsome. That general’s voice: “Vórrr Vierrrzehn Jáhrrren! Die Schande von Verrrsáilles!” I felt nothing for him. I was an obedient child of the Catholic Church and believed what the pastor said to me because he was good to me. Very simple. Yet many obedient Catholics eventually allowed themselves to be tempted. Goebbels, who himself was brought up by the Jesuits, craftily introduced the traditional Catholic values that lay deeply embedded in people into Nazi propaganda. The purity, the chastity of the German people, was glorified. The German man didn’t meddle with sex, except when he had chosen a wife: a proper German woman, of course, who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t make herself up and had no illegitimate children. They married and had twelve children whom they donated to the Führer. Those ideals were hammered into them.’
Lotte sighed, staring at her empty cup.
‘Why do you sigh?’ Anna asked.
‘It’s all too much for me right now, Anna.’
Anna opened her mouth and closed it again. She realized that she preferred doing the talking, that she wanted to explain everything, everything, endlessly setting out the justifications. About the fate of the populations in the areas they had occupied, of which the Germans meanwhile had been fully informed. But they were obliged to keep quiet about what they themselves had experienced during twelve years of tyranny: for what reasons did the aggressor have to complain – had he not brought it on himself?
She controlled herself. ‘If I blather on too much you must tell me to call a halt, Lotte. Father did that too, long ago, do you remember? He stuck his fingers in his ears and cried: “Quiet, Anna. Please be quiet!”’
Lotte did not remember it at all. Every time she tried to bring her original father to mind, the screen of her Dutch father slid over his image precisely because of the outward likeness – dominant, indelible. The coffee was beginning to work, she was reviving again. But Anna would have to restrain her facility for once. Enough politics, now it was her turn.
8
They were sitting on the raked gravel, the scent of a dark red climbing rose became more profound in the summer evening heat. Lotte was staring at the edge of the wood that was becoming progressively blacker. Her mother was swaying gently in time with Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G, which lost none of its strength as it emerged through the open window. Opposite them sat two music lovers who came to admire the sound reproduction. Sammy Goldschmidt, flautist in the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, listened with his eyes closed; Ernst Goudriaan, a student violin-maker from Utrecht, rested his chin on the tips of his fingers. The host himself was operating the equipment, out of sight behind the scenes. After the concert was over he came outside to refill his glass and to decline their praises with charming modesty. At that instant a nightingale began to sing in the wood, which had now turned into an impenetrable immensity.
‘He means to compete with Bruch,’ suggested Ernst Goudriaan. They listened with amazement to the mysterious solo song – a clear nocturnal jubilation, not intended for an imagined audience but purely for its own enjoyment. Lotte’s father sat on the edge of his chair, struck by the record playing on a perfect machine in the depths of the wood. He knocked back two glasses of mature gin one after the other and shook his head: exceptional, what a sound! The following evening he stole into the wood like a thief, lugging his recording equipment, to find a strategic position, but the nightingale cancelled the performance. Much patience was dedicated to this. Evening after evening he hunted for its voice with stubborn perseverance until one night the miracle was repeated right over his head and he could secure it on a lacquer disc for ever. He went to the radio station with this hunting trophy. ‘We have a surprise for the listener’: the broadcast was interrupted in order to transmit the nightingale, almost live, into the ether.
Why doesn’t he record my voice? thought Lotte. The more meticulously her mother followed her performances – she never failed to turn up whenever the choir was appearing somewhere, instantly recognizable among a thousand strange heads by the squirrel-coloured glow in her chignon – the more absent-minded he became when she sang on the radio. To everyone’s great irritation he would begin to twiddle the knobs distractedly, as though there was something interfering with the sound reproduction. Could he not bear it that he was not the only one in the family who brought music into the house? Or was it because she had not inherited that musicality from him? Her own father was sometimes vaguely visible in the form of an imprecise longing, as though she was looking at him through a clouded pane. She wanted to clean the condensation off the glass in order to see him as he had been, to smash the cocoon of silence, to hear his voice as it had sounded. All those years he had slumbered in her – now his utter absence was infiltrating her, a negative, a total nothing. It was different with Anna. Lotte remembered her chiefly in a busy succession of movements, swift feet on a stone floor, jumping up and down, a powerful voice, a plump body that joined up precisely with her own in the middle of an enormous mattress. Anna. An illegal thought, a secret feeling. Not only did a border separate her from Anna, not only the distance, but above all the time period that had lengthened meanwhile, and opaque family relationships.
But Anna was alive. Even if it was via Bram Frinkel, eight years old, who had come to the Netherlands from Berlin half-way through the school year. Koen brought him home after school – football did not trouble itself with language barriers. Lotte got chatting to him in his own language; the words presented themselves as though they had never been out of use. For him she was an enclave of his home country – and he for her. Airily he told her why his parents had left it: there was no room for Jews in Germany any more. His father, a violinist, could pursue his profession in the Netherlands. Lotte taught him to say Dutch tongue twisters, he grimaced at the impossible ‘g’ sound and the meticulous ‘ij’. Koen reacted to his sister’s fluent German with surprise and distaste. He played alone with the ball a few metres away, offended, during her private chats with Bram.
Something happened that no one had thought possible. Lotte’s mother, the radiant, the indestructible, caught an ailment that could not be dismissed with a reassuring diagnosis as flu or a cold. The first symptom was that she drove her husband out of the bedroom. From then on he slept on an improvised bed in his workshop, in a smell of solder and blown fuses, and during the day he moved about the house in a grim state – his worst moods of the past paled in comparison with this. From her bed by the three-bayed window with the view onto the rhododendrons, the meadow, the ditch and the edge of the wood, straight through the floor the children heard a torrent of enraged accusations directed at their father. The family doctor climbed the stairs with bowed head. It looked as though even he was threatening to succumb beneath the forces that were let loose on him on the first floor. Leaning on the dining-table defeated, her daughters speculated on the nature of the strange illness, not suspecting that they would get
to the bottom of what was possessing their mother only after all the taboos had been gradually lifted years later.
The disease had begun with mistrust of her husband, who came home ever later from his trips to Amsterdam. One evening she had followed him with a friend – heavily made-up, dressed in fashionable coats with turned-up collars and Pola Negri hats. They spoke to him in disguised voices in Amsterdam slang. He did not recognize them beneath the street lamp in the shade of their hats. When, like a regular, he indicated his readiness to go along with their advances, they had linked their arms tightly and run off in shock and left him there puzzled. The next phase of the disease was brought home with him from the capital city and passed on to her. This was the most tangible symptom, which the doctor could combat with injections. Afterwards she lapsed into a state of great moroseness, which was followed by eruptions of rage – seen in retrospect it was the phase that preceded the cure, a cure that she herself would adopt in an unorthodox way.
Of all these things her daughters had not the slightest notion as they deliberated at the dining-table like foolish geese. They had been equipped with a minimum of sexual information, which could be summed up in their mother’s breezy motto: nature must be left to its own devices. But that nature, which drove her back into the arms of the great troublemaker again after each row, aroused their fundamental suspicion. The idea of being stuck with such a man as their father for their whole lives was such a hundred per cent safe contraceptive that none of them ‘had ever been kissed’. Not even Mies, with her close-fitting suits and her wide, greedy mouth. It was simultaneously tangled up with the fact that their mother seemed unconsciously to rebel against this fate imposed by nature, by allowing her daughters to read social conscience literature. About desperate servant girls who got pregnant by the master of the house, about mothers of twelve children in damp basements who had to defend themselves evening after evening from the roving hands of their drunken spouses, about black female slaves abused by those who had bought them for a few pieces of silver. Women out of Emile Zola, Dostoevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe. If that was the ‘full life’ where nature was left to its own devices, for the time being her daughters wanted nothing to do with it, as they sat there round the table. So they bowed their heads timidly during the outbursts of rage that came from upstairs like a thunderstorm, which they too were powerless against.
