by John Lawton
Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech Resistance in May 1942.
Josef Trager, much against his own expectations, made lance-corporal before his career as a soldier ended. It ended, as for so many, with his death. He was one of the lucky ones who escaped encirclement by Russian troops at Stalingrad, and one of the unlucky ones to be trapped in the retreat by a Russian winter that touched forty below. Forty below what does not matter, it is the point at which Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet. Winter kills. His uniform proved inadequate. Hitler had never made proper winter provision for his troops, and Trager had taken to wearing the trousers from the suit Hummel had made for him under his uniform. To defecate required him to drop both pairs. And that is how he died in the January of 1943 – frozen into a squat, arse-naked, with his German grey trousers and his Austrian blue serge bunched around his knees. His last reported words were ‘Oh shit!’
Josef Hummel became a British citizen, opened his own shop in the West End of London, and with the lifting of clothes rationing became established as one of London’s most sought-after tailors. Recognising the 1960s youth-quake for what it was he opened a shop in Carnaby Street in 1964, offering the latest fashions for the young, which soon became a nationwide chain under the name ‘Vienna Joe’s Rags’n’Riches’, almost always referred to simply as ‘Vienna Joe’s’. He retired in 1977 at the age of sixty-nine and moved to Eastbourne, where he still lives aged ninety-six, and where he studies for his doctorate in philosophy at the Open University. ‘Vienna Joe’s’ became part of the legend of Swingin’ London, and is widely believed to be the origin of the name chosen by the British rock band Vinegar Joe, but as with so many legends in popular music, this is probably apocryphal.
Hugh Greene was appointed Director-General of the BBC in 1960.
Oskar Siebert never went home. Released in March 1941, he served throughout the war in the Pioneer Corps. After the war he applied for British Citizenship and qualified as a barrister. He achieved brief but pleasing fame as a member of the defence team in the political show trial Regina v. Oz, 1971.
Billy Jacks was elected Labour MP for Tower Hamlets in 1950. Always a rebel he never made it off the back benches and proved an irritant to every Labour leader from Attlee to Wilson. He spoke memorably and movingly against the invasion of Suez, was a frequent Aldermaston marcher, and in the 1960s he campaigned vigorously for CND and against the war in Viet Nam. He was also a regular guest on the BBC Home Service radio programme Any Questions, and was widely regarded as the authentic voice of working-class London. Jacks remained on good terms with Rod Troy (himself a Labour MP from 1945), although they moved further apart politically with every year that passed. He died suddenly in 1968. There has been a petition to the Mayor of London requesting a blue plaque to be placed on the building where his shop once stood and talk of a statue. The former seems likely, the latter does not.
Max Drax died at Heaven’s Gate, Port Erin, I.O.M., in November 1940, still a prisoner of the British.
Kurt Schwitters was released in November 1941. His greatest creation, his Hanover ‘Merzbau’, was destroyed in an RAF raid. He died in Ambleside in 1948.
Somewhere in Rod Troy’s attic, in the house he inherited from his father in Church Row, there is a small brown attaché case, reinforced at the corners, bearing the labels of hotels in Stuttgart and Paris, containing all the possessions of the late Professor Klemper who died on Derby Station in 1940. Amongst them is a memoir of his time in Oranienburg Concentration Camp. A time there was when Rod had considered seeking out any living relative of Professor Klemper and returning the case. The impossibility of this ruled it out. More times there were when Rod considered seeking a publisher for the manuscript – but once the case was consigned to the attic by his wife, in the new year of 1946, Rod forgot about the manuscript and scarcely remembers it even now.
Arthur Kornfeld gave up mathematics, physics, and his Cambridge fellowship to found a London publishing house in the late 1940s. As all London publishers seemed to him to come in pairs, Eyre & Spottiswoode, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Chatto & Windus, although he found it hard to believe there’d ever been anyone called Windus, he named his after his old mentor, Drax. Drax & Kornfeld survived for forty-three years, publishing quirky, poorly selling but often well-reviewed books, until they were bought out by the aforementioned Weidenfeld & Nicolson, shortly before they in turn were bought out by Orion. Arthur retained his editorial position and is often to be found wandering the corridors at St Martin’s Lane lost between lunch and literature. Had Rod Troy offered him Klemper’s manuscript in all probability he would have published it.
Elishah Nader emigrated to Israel in 1974 and was crushed to death by an Israeli tank while protesting at the demolition of Palestinian houses in 1992.
In 1975 Zette Borg, by then in her late sixties, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with two other physicists for her work on superconductivity, experiments approaching absolute zero, and papers that pointed to the development of the Bose-Einstein Condensate, a condition attained some twenty years later at temperatures only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. At such temperatures, Einstein had hypothesised the inversion of atomic waves and the merging of atomic identities into a single entity. Absolute zero (0 deg. Kelvin, –273.15 Centigrade) is a theoretical condition and is unattainable. Her former lover, Frederick Troy, having little or no grasp of physics, regarded all this as merely metaphor.
§
Historical Note
Yes . . . there were internment camps on the Isle of Man . . . no, there was no all-male camp as far south as Port Erin.
There is no synagogue resembling Heaven’s Gate or Elohim in the East End of London – indeed such is the paucity of synagogues these days that I based both buildings on the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side. Just around the corner from Eldridge Street is a former synagogue, as tiny as any still standing in London, which was once known as ‘Gates of Heaven’.
Why this topic now? Well, I think we have lived these last few years in a world dominated by a man to whom the rest of the world, other than those from his own green acres in Texas, are just ‘kikes and niggers’. A man who cannot even pronounce the name ‘Iraq’. If you will substitute ‘towelhead’ or ‘ayrab’ for kike and nigger . . . it doesn’t alter the concept one jot.
A hit list drawn up by a British fascist of critics to be bumped off or dealt with? Of course, I made it up . . . until . . . towards the end of writing this book I stumbled across a reference to just this kind of list in the wartime diaries of Frances Partridge, a friend of whom was revealed to be on Sir Oswald Mosley’s ‘hit’ list after writing to the Daily Telegraph urging Mosley’s arrest.
The only point at which I think I have displaced a real figure with a fictional one is that, of course, Freud was rescued from Vienna by Professor Ernest Jones, subsequently Freud’s biographer; and himself the subject of a recent biography by Brenda Maddox. (Anyone who wants a straightforwardly factual account of Freud leaving Vienna should turn to Jones’s book – anyone who wants one more bizarre and dramatic than mine should turn to The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess.) Many of the minor characters in this novel were real – Cazalet, Ciano et al – many more are made up . . .
I’m deliberately vague about the date of publication of Moses and Monotheism (it was, loosely, the summer of 1939) and, whilst Freud was criticised widely for choosing that subject, at that time, to the best of my knowledge, the Board of Deputies never wrote as one body to any national newspaper.
Red Vienna is a slight misnomer and could more accurately be used to describe the Vienna of the early 1930s than the city Hitler seized.
Coming at the war for the third time I was keen not to return to the same sources. Apart from Frances Partridge (Hogarth Press, 1978), the most interesting books on the subject I discovered were the dispatches of Ernie Pyle (McBride, 1941), the diaries of Joan Wyndham (Heinemann, 1985), Home Front by E.S. Turner, who died while I was
writing this book (Michael Joseph, 1961) and The Making of an Englishman by Fred Uhlman (Gollancz, 1960). Uhlman was a refugee who became a well-known North London painter – he died only about twenty years ago. On pp. 201–3 Uhlman offers a celebration of Englishness that I suspect only an immigrant could make . . . I used chunks of it in a speech by Viktor Rosen (pp. 297–9) as I cannot better it.
Acknowledgements aplenty . . .
Gordon Chaplin
Sarah Teale
Cosima Dannoritzer
John Fagan
Sarah Burkinshaw
Chris Greene
Clare Alexander
Justin Gowers
Francine Brody
Linda Shockley
David Cantor
Meredith Chambers
Ingrid Kurnig
Richard Donnenberg
Andrew Robinton
Sue Freathy
and
Anna Hervé
