They asked what Lanny thought, and he was ashamed to tell them of his hesitations and bewilderments. It seemed cowardly not to believe what was so obviously true; it seemed weakness to consider such questions as what would offend your father or imperil your mother’s social position. Having met Lanny’s Red uncle, the Jewish lads didn’t think of him as a dangerous man, but as an amazingly understanding one, and they wanted to know where he was and what he was doing and what he had said about the present state of Germany and France and Russia. Lanny mentioned books that he had read, and Hansi declared that when the summer came and he had free time, he was going to learn the difference between Communists and Socialists, and try really to understand the tormented world in which he lived.
Lanny wondered, what was Papa Robin going to make of that? He asked the question tactfully, and learned that it had never been raised in the family. Both Hansi and Freddi took it for granted that their father would want them to believe what was right. Lanny didn’t say it aloud, but he thought: “Suppose you take to associating with Reds, like me? Suppose you start rescuing them from the Fascists, and having refugees come to this home with the heavily barred steel door—how will it be then?”
X
Lanny hadn’t had much talk with Kurt’s older brother Emil on his previous visit, but this time Emil had leave for Christmas, and the four of them traveled to Stubendorf together. Lanny sat and listened, as he liked to do, while the serious Prussian officer discussed the state of his country, and the English journalist plied him with questions. Rather easy-going himself, Lanny liked to watch Rick work efficiently; he would jack himself up and resolve to do likewise, but he didn’t always keep the pledge. However, when Rick had a few pages of the article done, Lanny would read them, and make comments and suggestions which Rick found useful. Perhaps that was work, even though others got the credit for it.
Emil might have been described as Kurt without those elements of sympathy and imagination which made Kurt an artist. The elder brother was wrapped up in his professional duties, and when he thought about politics and world events it was as part of the problem of the defense of Germany. He was disturbed, not to say tormented, over the present situation, because Germany was without defense, and the French armies were assembled at the border, ready to move at any moment. From the point of view of a military man that was the worst of all possible situations; Emil’s fear of what the French would do was conditioned by what he himself had been taught to do under similar circumstances.
They talked about Italy, and the Prussian officer’s viewpoint of events there provoked a lively argument. Emil spoke of the Fascist “revolution,” and when Rick objected to that term he said: “Call it a ‘counter-revolution’ if you choose, but names don’t alter the fact that it’s a natural reaction against the futilities of so-called democracy. The people attempt a task which is beyond their powers, the governing of a modern state, and they are brought to a plight where they are glad to have a strong man get them out of it. The strong man studies the people, understands them better than they understand themselves, and promises them everything they want; he constructs a program with an appeal which they are powerless to resist. Say that he’s ‘fooling them,’ if you wish, but even so, he gets control, and having once got it, he keeps it—because modern weapons are so efficient that those who have them are masters, provided they are not afraid to use them. The machine gun and the airplane bomb with poison gas promise mankind a long era of firm government.”
Such was Emil Meissner’s interpretation of Fascism; and he revealed the interesting fact that a movement not unlike it had been under way in Germany ever since the end of the war. It was a native product—never would you hear a Prussian staff officer admit that virile and scientific Germans might learn anything from degenerate and soft Italians! The movement called itself the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, and its center was in Munich; one of its leaders was General Ludendorff, who next to Hindenburg was regarded as the nation’s greatest war leader. This new party promised the German people deliverance from humiliation, and it was spreading with great rapidity. If it took the form of fresh opposition to France and Britain, these nations would have only the stupidity of their own statesmen to blame. So declared this stiff yet passionate Prussian officer.
XI
Christmas at Schloss Stubendorf was even more pinched and straitened than it had been the previous year. With the mark so low, it was impossible to import anything, so in a country district like this you lived as in primitive times, upon what you got from the soil or made with your hands. But you could still have courage and loyalty, deutsche Treu und Werde; also the tender sentiments of the Weihnachtsfest were unaffected by inflation of the currency. The Meissners played a great deal of music and sang all the old Christmas songs; everybody was gracious to the visiting strangers, and the two young war widows experienced hot and cold flushes in the presence of the eligible young American. He had no way to let them know that he had an amie, so he never offered to play accompaniments for one without also inviting the other.
Rick, of course, was deeply interested in everything he saw here, and in everyone he met. “Upper Silesia after the Settlement” was the form the data were taking in his professional mind. A joint Polish-German commission had worked out an elaborate protocol, having six hundred and six sections, and it seemed to be working pretty well; but if France invaded the Ruhr, would Korfanty the troublemaker get busy again? Herr Meissner and his sons discussed these questions at length; of course nothing pleased them more than the idea of having a sympathetic English journalist report their point of view to the outside world.
Among Kurt’s friends in the village was a lad named Heinrich Jung, son of that Oberforster who provided them with an escort whenever they wished to go hunting. Heinrich, it appeared, was studying forestry in Munich, and had joined the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party about which Emil had told. Since Rick was so interested, Kurt brought the lad up to the house and had him talk—something that was not difficult, for his movement was a proselytizing one, and he knew its formulas by heart. He was nineteen, and sturdily built; war and famine hadn’t hurt him, for he had got both food and schooling in Stubendorf. He had extraordinarily bright blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and pale hair over which the barber ran the clippers once a month. Heinrich performed conscientiously all his duties to the Fatherland, which included explaining the new creed to two visitors of Aryan blood like himself. He and his partisans were known as “Nazis,” because that was the German pronunciation of the first two syllables of the word “National.”
Lanny had decided that Communism was a new religion; and here was another, this time German instead of Russian. It inspired its youth with the idea that they were destined to redeem the Fatherland and make it over into something new and more wonderful. It filled them with a fervor of faith; it taught them to march and drill for the cause, to sing songs about it, to be ready to die for it. The program of these “Nazis” sounded so completely Red that at first it was hard to understand how any army officer could be sympathetic to it. It held out all imaginable promises to lure the poor and unhappy. All German citizens were to have equal rights; all were to work, and unearned incomes were to be abolished; the bonds of “interest slavery” were to be broken, war gains confiscated, trusts nationalized, department stores communalized, speculation in land prevented, and land for common purposes confiscated without compensation. Usurers and profiteers were to suffer the death penalty, a paid army was to be abolished, and lying newspapers suppressed; on the other hand, there was to be higher education for all good Germans, and for youth every benefit and advantage they could imagine. The blue eyes of Heinrich Jung shone like those of a young archangel as he invited the two Aryan strangers to give their support to this redemptive enterprise.”
“This looks like the seed of a new revolution,” said the impressionable Lanny to his English friend, when they were alone in their room.
“Maybe so,” replied th
e more critical journalist, “but to me it sounds like the old Pan-Germanism dressed up in a new stage costume.”
“But, Rick, can they get the young people wrought up as Heinrich is, and then not do any of the things they have promised?”
“Political slogans are like grain scattered to draw birds into a snare. Find out who’s putting up the money for a political party, and then you know what it will do.”
Lanny, enthusiastic himself, couldn’t take a cynical view of the enthusiasms of other young persons. “They really have inspired that lad with a lot of high ideals, Rick; I mean loyalty, self-sacrifice, devotion to duty.”
“But isn’t that what every master wants of his servants? The Kaiser preached it long before the war. What you have to do, Lanny, is to look into Pan-Germanism. They talk about the superiority of the Aryan race, the making over of the world, and all that, but at bottom it’s no more than the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad, so that Germany can get the oil of Mosul; it means colonies in Africa, which aren’t of any economic use to Germany, but have harbors which can be fortified and serve as hiding-places for submarines to cut the life-lines of Britain.”
“Maybe you’re right,” admitted Lanny, “but don’t say any of that before Kurt, for he wouldn’t take it very well.” Lanny, still working at his self-appointed task of keeping Britain and Germany reconciled!
XII
On their way to Switzerland the three friends had to pass through Munich, so Heinrich, returning to school, traveled with them. They talked with him further, and Rick probed his mind. Once you knew his formulas, he could do nothing but repeat, and that soon became monotonous. They discovered that the lad knew little about the outside world, and didn’t seem interested to learn; he was going to make it so different that what it now was didn’t really matter. If you told him something about England or France or America that didn’t fit in with the National Socialist formula, he was too polite to say that he doubted, but he let it slip off the outside of his mind without penetrating.
Rick, the efficient journalist, was just the opposite of this. Much as he was repelled by Pan-Germanism, whether in its new or old stage costume, he considered it his business to know about it. He remembered the bad guess he had made about Mussolini, and he didn’t want to repeat it with General Ludendorff, or whoever might be the coming savior of the Fatherland. “Let’s stop off for a day in Munich, and let me get the smell of this movement.” Lanny, who had the curiosity of a deer concerning any new phenomenon of the forest, said: “O.K.” Heinrich, of course, was overjoyed, and offered to take them to headquarters and see them properly introduced.
The place had been a Kaffeehaus, in the Korneliusstrasse, a working-class district. There was a large room with a few tables and chairs, and pamphlets in the windows. There was a counter where the members paid their dues, and a couple of small private rooms in back. The place was called the Braunhaus, for everything of the Nazis had to be brown, as that of the Fascists was black; let no one say the Germans were imitating anyone! Instead of the lictors’ fasces, Nazis wore the Oriental swastika, or hooked cross, on an armband, and carried it on their banners; but they didn’t have many, for cloth was scarce. Practically all the Nazis were young ex-soldiers, and many wore their old uniforms turned inside out.
A young party official answered the questions of the visitors, and told them about conditions throughout Bavaria, where fighting among the Reds and the Catholics went on almost daily; the members of the new party were accumulating arms and drilling in the near-by forests, for the purpose of putting an end to all that. It was their declared purpose to seize the government, first of Bavaria and then of the republic. They were a peculiar combination of conspirators and propagandists; they told you exactly what they were going to do, and indeed everything but the date of the uprising. “And that,” said the young party official, “is because we don’t know it ourselves.”
The visitors were fortunate in having arrived in Munich on the day of a great meeting in the Burgerbraukeller, and if they would attend they would learn all about the movement, and would hear a speech by “Adi.” This was short for Adolf, the great orator of the party; his last name was Schicklgruber, but this was rarely mentioned, it not being considered a very dignified name.
Lanny took Rick and Kurt to the Aden Hotel and, after the fashion which Robbie had taught him, put them up in proper style. They spent the rest of the day looking at pictures in the Schack Gallery. After supper they took a taxi to the beer hall in the Rosenheimerstrasse. The term “beer hall” in Munich means something really big; this was one of the biggest, with tables and seats for a couple of thousand people. The Munichers sit in these seats and by slow sipping can make one stein last all evening. Of course if they can afford it they take much more, and the practice seems to agree with them, for the fortunate ones acquire large round bodies and great wads of fat on cheeks and necks.
The place was crowded; but a piece of paper money obtained front seats for three strangers, and they looked about the smoke-filled room and were sorry for the German people—for not even in Poland had Lanny seen more pitiful clothing. Evidently what in Rick’s country were known as “the lower orders” had turned out to hear their favorite orator. At the table with Lanny and his friends sat a man who told them he was a party journalist; a little lame fellow with twisted features and a shrill voice. When he had become acquainted with the visitors he told them a lot about Adi, not all of it favorable, by any means.
There was a large band blaring loudly, and when it played Deutschland über Alles, everybody stood up and gave the Nazi salute, the right arm extended upward and in front; then they sat down again, and the shrill voice of the party journalist told them of the unhappy childhood of Adolf Hitler Schicklgruber, how he had left home, struggled in vain to be an artist, and had become a pitiful bum living in flophouses, earning a few pfennigs painting postcards, or sometimes houses. In the war he had been a lance corporal, and had been gassed. After the war his army superiors had sent him to a secret meeting of Munich workingmen, to spy upon them and report what they were doing and planning. Adi had found out, and the next time he came it was not as a spy but as a convert to the cause. Now he was one of the leaders of that movement which was inspiring the German people and preparing to make over the world.
The band struck up, and Charlie Chaplin came upon the stage. At least Lanny and Rick thought it was an imitation of that little comedian, whose pictures were the rage all over America and Europe at that time—even the highbrow critics raved over him and called him a genius. The features by which you knew him were baggy pants and big shoes, tousled hair and a tiny dark mustache, a pasty face and a simper. The man who hurried onto the stage had all of these, and also a very soiled old trench-coat. Lanny and Rick really thought he was going to do a comic “turn” in imitation of the little Hollywood comedian. But then they realized that this was the man they had come to hear make a speech.
XIII
The music and the applause ceased, and the orator began. He spoke the dialect of the district of Austria where he had been born, and at first it was hard for Lanny to understand him. He spoke with violent gesticulations, which caused his much too big clothing to flap about him. He had a bellowing voice, and when he became excited it reminded Lanny of a turkey gobbler he had listened to in Connecticut. Presently he worked himself into a frenzy, and then it seemed that what he was saying no longer made sense; but the crowd seemed to find something in it, for when the orator’s voice gave out and the sentence died in a gabble, they drowned it out in thunders of applause.
The substance of the discourse was the wrongs which Germany had suffered during the lifetime of Adolf Hitler Schicklgruber. Having heard the story of his frustrated life, one didn’t have to be more of a psychologist than Lanny Budd to understand how he had come to identify himself with his Fatherland and its woes. Germany’s lack of resources before the war had caused Adolf Hitler Schicklgruber to have to sleep in flophouses; the Versailles peace was Adolf Hitl
er Schicklgruber’s failure to reap glory and wealth from the war; the shouting of the excited audience in the Burgerbraukeller was Adolf Hitler Schicklgruber’s determination to rise in the world in spite of all the efforts of his enemies to hold him down.
These enemies were many, and the orator hated and cursed them in turn and in combination. They were Britain and France and Poland; they were the Reds inside and outside of Germany; they were the international bankers; they were the Jews, that accursed race which was poisoning the blood of all Aryan peoples, infecting the German soul with pessimism, cynicism, and unfaith in its own destiny. Adi seemed to have got his enemies all mixed up together, for the Reds were Jews and the international bankers were Jews, and it was the Jews who controlled Wall Street and the London City and the Paris bourse; apparently he thought that the same Jews had brought Bolshevism to Russia; they were in control of the world’s finances and at the same time were starving the German, people for the purpose of forcing them into the clutches of the Reds!
This tirade lasted for more than two hours, going back again and again over the same grievances and the same threats. Lanny thought he had never heard anything so fantastic in all his life. But there was something terrifying about it, especially the effect it had upon this packed throng. It was like seeing the war break out again, as Lanny had seen it in Paris in the dreadful summer of 1914; like hearing the trampling of the troops, the guns clattering on the roadways, the crowds roaring for blood.
When they came out, and were safe in their taxi, Lanny said: “Well, is that the German Mussolini?”
Rick replied: “No; I don’t think I’ll ever have to write about Herr Schicklgruber!”
He talked along that line, but when he finished, Kurt said, quietly: “You are making a mistake. You could write a very important article about that man and that speech. He is confused, but so are the German people. Also he is desperate—and they are that, too. Believe me, he is not to be overlooked.”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 34
