by Irmgard Keun
Once I had Gerti safe in the Ladies, I told her she might well ruin herself and her whole family, meddling with politics in that pointless way, and we could only hope Kulmbach would calm Kurt Pielmann down. And Gerti had better tell Kurt Pielmann she’d just turned an invitation from an SS man down flat, even indignantly—there’s no better way of conciliating an SA man, because the Brownshirts all resent the superior attitude of the SS; the general public think they’re classy, being the Führer’s bodyguard. But nowadays the Regular Army men of the Reichswehr are considered the classiest and most superior of all, so the SS, in their turn, resent them.
Herr Kulmbach had been saying the Führer had united the whole German nation. Which is true enough, it’s just that the people making up the whole German nation don’t get on with each other. But that doesn’t make any difference to political unity, I suppose.
The Ladies of the Henninger Bar consists of three separate cubicles, one of them a broom cupboard. Gerti and I looked inside them to make sure there was no one to overhear us.
It always used to be so cosy when two girls went to the Ladies together. You powdered your noses, and exchanged rapid but important information about men and love. And you combed your hair, and the pair of you wondered whether to let the men you were with take you home, and if they’d get above themselves, and want to kiss when you didn’t. Or if you did, you’d be terribly worried the man might not think you pretty enough. You exchanged excited advice in the Ladies. It was often silly advice, but still, conversations in the Ladies were fun, and interesting.
But politics is in the air even in the Ladies these days. Gerti says she supposes it’s something if you find one without a lavatory attendant who expects you to say “Heil Hitler” and wants ten pfennigs into the bargain.
And now, suddenly, Gerti is weeping bitterly, because she didn’t see Dieter Aaron today, so I have to comfort her. Why does a girl like Gerti have to go falling in love with a banned person of mixed race, for goodness’ sake, when there are plenty of men around the authorities would let her love? It’s hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business—business, as we all know, can be very trickily organized—and now we have to know the rules for love too. It isn’t easy, it really isn’t. Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which is not pleasant. Love is supposed to be all right, and German women are supposed to have children, but before you can do that some kind of process involving feelings is called for. And the law says no mistakes must be made in this process. I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all. For as long as that’s allowed.
Gerti is washing her swollen eyes. We must go back to our table. My head’s full of confused, random thoughts, like a ball of wool I must knit into words. I must knit a stocking of words. It takes so long, and I forget what I was going to say a minute ago, as if I’d dropped a stitch.
Oh lord, here comes Frau Breitwehr. Was she in the bar too? “Heil Hitler, Frau Breitwehr!”
She has a grocer’s shop in Liebig Street. Her hair looks dusty, and she is fat and highly strung. When she wears a hat it always looks as if it’s on crooked, even when she’s put it on straight. We’re good customers of hers: we go to her shop for cognac and oranges and canned prawns. Algin loves prawns for breakfast. They make him feel he’s abroad.
When Frau Breitwehr is in her shop she’s quite alarming. She is brisk and stern with her customers, and she has three assistants who are terrified of her, although they’re not well paid. But when Frau Breitwehr goes out, there is something about her makes you feel sorry for her, the way you’d feel sorry for a bird that fell out of its nest in the rain. Yet she wears a genuine silver fox fur. It doesn’t make her look beautiful, but she went to great lengths to acquire it.
Everyone in the street knows Frau Breitwehr had always dreamed of owning a silver fox fur, and she asked her husband to give her one for Christmas. Her husband is small and afraid of her, but sometimes she’s afraid of him too, because in an odd way fear is always mutual. He said he would give her a silver fox fur for Christmas, but then, instead, he gave her a washing machine which cost much more. He was afraid his wife might come to consider the silver fox fur a frivolous expense, in time.
So then Frau Breitwehr began putting money out of the till aside, on the sly, for whatever happened her husband mustn’t know of it.
When she’d siphoned off enough cash like this, she asked Frau Silias, whose husband is an Honorary Administrator, to come into the shop when Herr Breitwehr was serving behind the counter. Frau Silias’s instructions were to pretend she had a cheap old fake silver fox fur she was going to sell. She was to offer it to Frau Breitwehr as part payment of the account she’d run up at the shop. We know all this from Frau Silias, who is a neighbour of ours, and can’t exist without telling everything she knows to everyone she meets in the street, daily.
Herr Silias got to be an Honorary Administrator quite recently, and also warden of our block of buildings. All this is a source of pride and joy to an ambitious man, but doesn’t bring in much money. Herr Silias’s job is with the municipal health insurance organization. But now he has so much honorary unpaid work to do, his salary won’t stretch to the standard of living he requires. For instance, he likes bottled Wurzburg beer for his supper, and plenty of best cured pork, to help him feel like a campaigner and a member of the movement. He needs to feel like this all the more because he didn’t join the Party until the last moment, after the Nazis came to power, though no one is supposed to know that.
His wife has to get him the cured pork and bottled beer—after all, what are wives for?—and so Frau Silias ran up quite a bill at the Breitwehrs’ shop, because she thinks her husband and the movement are both heroic. So she wants him to have everything he’d like, even though he doesn’t bring her much home in the way of salary, having many expenses in his official position. And thus Frau Silias, wife of the Honorary Administrator, was in debt to Frau Breitwehr of the grocery shop. The two of them were obliged to help each other anyway, both being in the National Socialist Women’s Club, where you have to fight together and think of the common good, and feel the bond of your true German nature, and show it in deeds and folk-dancing.
Herr Breitwehr believed Frau Silias’s story about the fake silver fox fur. So then Frau Breitwehr went off to Godenheimer’s the furriers, even though it’s a Jewish shop and a good German woman is not supposed to buy anything from Jews. But Godenheimer’s had the best and cheapest silver foxes, and buttered Frau Breitwehr up, and called her “Madam” every other sentence. So she bought the silver fox fur. When she wears it, they look like a rich fur taking a poor woman out for a walk.
And now Frau Breitwehr is washing her hands in the Ladies and looking at Gerti with interest, because it is still obvious that Gerti has been crying. Frau Breitwehr says they are sitting over in a corner at the back of the bar, nice and cosy, and we must go over and join them and make up a party. The Silas family is there too, oh, and did we see little Berta breaking through the crowd? Poor child, she was rather clumsy about it, but she hadn’t seemed very well lately anyway. It was a shame about those lovely flowers Berta had been supposed to hand the Führer. “Beautiful white lilac from Nice! Frau Silias ordered it specially, from the most expensive florist’s shop in Frankfurt.” She didn’t think much of the way some people threw their money around, but she wouldn’t say anything about it on this occasion; on this occasion, only the best was good enough. Personally, however, she’d have chosen roses if it had been her Maria. Roses suited a child better. The Führer would probably prefer roses as well.
You could easily tell that Frau Breitwehr was cross and envious, because she has a daughter of five too, little Maria. When she heard the Führer was coming to Frankfurt she did her best to get little Maria chosen to break through the crowd. But Herr and Frau Silias wanted it to be their little Berta, and Herr Silias was writing a poem for Berta to say to the Führer. He worked at it for evenings on
end.
All the same, Maria Breitwehr is a prettier child than Berta and would have been chosen, but Frau Breitwehr had to withdraw her daughter voluntarily. It was the business of the silver fox fur rebounding on her. Because Frau Silias knows all about the trick she played on Herr Breitwehr, and could tell him. And she knows Frau Breitwehr went to a Jewish shop, and she could let the National Socialist Women’s Club know too. Frau Breitwehr is terrified of all that, so she had to give way and see Berta Silias chosen as breaker-through-the-crowd.
But Frau Breitwehr still had some hope, because Berta caught a feverish cold. She had to rehearse her poem for the Führer all day long, and she got hoarse and complained of a sore throat. “You ought to put that child to bed, Frau Silias,” Frau Breitwehr had advised her, only this morning. And Frau Silias had been on the point of doing just that, but when Frau Breitwehr, of all people, advised her to do so, she didn’t. She wasn’t letting Frau Breitwehr come off best. Moreover, the expensive lilac from Nice had been paid for, and Herr Silias had written his poem, and Berta had learnt it, and at last she could say it properly.
We’ve come to sit at the same tables as the Silias and Breitwehr party. There are a good many SA and SS men there too. I don’t know all of them. I’m glad we’re sitting here. Kurt Pielmann is talking to friends of his, which takes his mind off Gerti, and Gerti can’t provoke him any more. Herr Kulmbach is sitting beside me, his face glowing like the rising sun. People are talking and laughing and screeching. Herr Silias is putting on great airs. He’s fat and pale and greasy, with a few strands of dark hair over a great, yellow, bald head. His eyes shine like black beetles. “Another round on me!” he calls. Everyone is merry, everyone’s slightly drunk. Is Herr Silias really going to buy everyone a drink? How can he manage it? He is asking Gerti what she’d like, and Kurt Pielmann, and Herr Kulmbach and me. “It’s all on me today! Where’s my little Berta, eh?”
Little Berta is running around the bar, still carrying her bunch of flowers. The lilac is withering and turning a bit yellow by now, but you can see it cost a lot. How long does it take a bunch of flowers to come from Nice to Germany? Surely the flowers would be tired after a train journey of that length. Maybe they come by air. We have lilac in Germany too, in May. There are three big lilac bushes in our garden on the Mosel; they’re beautiful, but the individual flowers aren’t as big as the flowers of this lilac from Nice. I’d love to go to Nice. I’d love to go abroad some day, I’d … “She just won’t let go of those flowers, will she? Won’t let go of them, Berta, eh?” Herr Silias is laughing. The bouquet is bigger than Berta herself; it’s like a bouquet of flowers running around the bar carrying a child. Berta is wearing a sky-blue silk dress, already creased and dirty. She is a thin child, and usually a pale one, but at the moment her cheeks are red and her eyes bright. Yesterday evening, Frau Silias dampened her thin, fair hair and plaited it into countless tiny pigtails, it took her at least three hours. She did everything she could for the child. At noon today the pigtails were undone, and Berta has stiff, curly fair hair sticking out from her head.
Frau Silias is sitting there, very quiet and proud. She is a thin, colourless little woman, and wears cheap nickel-framed glasses because she’s short-sighted.
“Berta!” calls Frau Silias, and then again, “Berta, do have something to drink—oh, look what you’ve done to your dress! Bed for you in a minute.” Berta is made to drink some hot milk with a little cognac in it. She has a cold, Frau Silias explains. The SS men say she did very well all the same. Everyone makes a fuss of Berta, everyone is talking to her, Herr Kulmbach sits her on his lap. Herr Silias orders another round of beer and kirsch, and cigars and cigarettes.
Suddenly, Berta begins crying.
“Hullo, what’s the matter?” says Herr Silias. Then he explains that Berta is upset because the Führer didn’t give her his hand. All present make soothing noises at Berta. Herr Breitwehr buys her some chocolate, and Berta cheers up again. Kurt Pielmann tells her she’ll have her picture in the paper tomorrow, taken with the nice SS gentlemen, and she should be proud of herself.
“I know a poem too,” says Berta. Herr Silias beams. He says Berta must recite the poem. “You’d like to say it, eh?” He orders another round. Everyone wants Berta to recite the poem. “My husband has a real poetic streak in him,” says Frau Silias, who doesn’t usually say anything much. “It’s high time that child was in bed,” cries Frau Breitwehr, scowling.
Berta stands on a chair, clutching the bunch of lilac. Her voice is thin and reedy:
A little German maid you see,
My Führer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of Germany.
“Quiet!” a couple of SS men tell their friends around the table, who are still talking and haven’t noticed Berta. “Keep your mouths shut. Our little heroine here is saying her poem.”
You gave us back our Army’s might …
“Berta!” Herr Silias is listening attentively, much excited. “You’ve left something out, Berta, didn’t you notice?”
Frau Silias straightens Berta’s dress, rubbing away at the dirty marks. “Drink a little more of your milk, Berta, it’s getting cold.”
“Write that yourself, did you?” Herr Kulmbach asks Herr Silias. “You’ve got a real gift for it! We had someone in my own family who …”
“Quiet, please!”
Berta begins at the beginning again:
A little German maid you see.
A German mother I shall be,
My Führer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of Germany.
You gave us back our Army’s might,
Our honour and our will to fight,
And taught us children what is right.
“Bravo!” everyone shouts, clapping hard. “Well done! Heil Hitler! He really ought to have heard that poem, the Führer ought!”
“We’ll send it to him,” says Frau Silias, “but that’s not all of it. Do hand me that heavy great bouquet, Berta—oh dear, she won’t give it up, will she? Such a stubborn child—I don’t know where she gets it from.”
No foes we fear: a doughty band
United shall we Germans stand.
A German sun shines on our land
If you, O Führer, on us smile.
Three cheers!
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
And Berta goes on shouting, “Sieg Heil!” at the top of her voice, on and on, getting redder and redder in the face. “Sieg Heil!” Everybody laughs, delighted. Herr Silias is pleased and proud and orders yet another round. Frau Breitwehr can scarcely contain her annoyance, and tells her husband she’s had about enough of this and she’d like to go home. Berta is still standing on the chair. She begins reciting the poem all over again.
A little German maid you see.
A German mother I shall be,
My Führer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of …
But suddenly the big white bunch of lilac is lying on the table. Glasses fall over; the lilac is floating in a puddle of schnapps and beer. Berta is lying on the lilac as if it were a bed, her face buried in the damp and faded flowers. Everyone has jumped up, beer is dripping off the table, some people are mopping their wet suits. “Now, now, now!” says Herr Silias. “Bedtime for you!” cries Frau Silias. A waiter comes running up with a dishcloth and turns little Berta over. Her face is a bluish white, her hands are clenched into rigid little fists.
Frau Silias suddenly screams, loud and long.
The proprietor comes over.
The SS men and the rest of us stand there in silence, our feet in the muddy puddles of liquor.
There is a dark forest of people around us, silent, rustling. A man in a hurry forces his way through the forest of people. “The waiter called me,” he says. “I’m a doctor.”
He raises Berta from her lilac bed. He lays her down again, shrugging his shoulders. “She’s gone,” he says, quietly. “Dead,” he says louder. Frau Silas s
creams and screams and screams.
“Their bill comes to forty-seven marks,” the proprietor is saying to the waiter, right beside me. “Who do you suppose we give it to now?”
3
I AM STANDING OUT IN THE STREET. MY HOME IS the night. Am I drunk? Am I crazy? The voices and sounds all around fall away from me like a coat. I’m freezing. The lights fade out. I am alone.
Little Berta Silias is dead.
We sat together in a corner of the Henninger Bar a little longer: Herr Kulmbach, Gerti, Kurt Pielmann, and myself. Gerti was pale and trembling. Kurt Pielmann quietly put a comforting arm around her. Gerti let him, and did not move. Herr Kulmbach was distraught. The whole world suddenly seemed so sad. Only a few of the customers had stayed on. Little Berta had been carried away, and Frau Silias was led out still screaming.
Lights were switched off. The last few customers sat there in a sad, twilight gloom. Their whispered conversation sounded like the pattering of raindrops in the bar.
He himself was not a happy man any more, Herr Kulmbach suddenly confided. He wasn’t popular in the Party because he sometimes offered criticism. He used to be one of the seven top SS men in Frankfurt. There’s a pub in the Old Town, he said, with a big bone hanging on the wall—the bone of an ox, not a horse. The landlord wouldn’t sell horseflesh, he serves nothing but the best, fresh food, you don’t have to bother about that so much with horseflesh.
“Like to see that bone, would you?” Kulmbach asked us, his voice sad, full of entreaty. “We seven Frankfurt SS men carved our names on it. My name’s there too. You can see it clear as anything. Hellmuth, that’s my first name. I don’t have a say in anything now, I don’t get promotion, I won’t be getting promotion either. Folk get promotion that haven’t got half my campaigning experience behind them, but they’ve got plenty of money, or their parents have plenty of money. And now they can go over my head. It was a different story when we were campaigning. Now you sometimes don’t want to go on. What’s the point of anything any more? Oh, the tales I could tell you …”
