Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  Now more than ever it became a question of how we could live, for the country was bankrupt and there must have been five hundred thousand officers without money or jobs. We were lucky to be in Freiburg in those times, for it was a small, orderly city as I told you, and before my father came home there were no food riots as there were in the large cities of the north. Occasionally during that year morsels were obtained from the countryside – a few eggs, once a whole chicken, sometimes fresh milk, and after the peace was signed the allied food relief began to reach us. I was back in school again and was making good progress in the gymnasium, for Grandfather had trained me well. If we were desperately poor in the first two years after the war, we were at least no worse off than nearly everyone else.

  Gradually the old human ability to accept whatever happens took charge. The war was over, it had been lost, the Kaiser had gone, nobody understood the new democratic government, least of all those who were in charge of it, but somehow the people were surviving. Now they were saying that the war had been lost by everyone except the Americans, that we had won the moral victory, and that the Treaty of Versailles was such a farce that not even the Allies could believe in it.

  Two years after the end of the war our personal fortunes changed. Germany had been allowed to retain a tiny fleet – a few obsolete battleships and cruisers that could be a threat to nobody except the equally obsolete Russian Navy, whose sailors had shot nearly all their officers during their Revolution. One of Father’s brother officers, a man senior to himself, was back in the service and he arranged for Father to get a job as a marine engineer. Young though I was, I sensed that this job was only a stepping-stone back into the service and that many mysterious plans were being made in secret. This new job meant that we had to leave Freiburg and go north to live in Bremen. It also meant packing all our belongings, crating the piano and the tables and chairs, and obtaining wooden boxes to hold the china and books.

  On our last evening at home when everything had been packed except a single couch, the piano, and a few chairs, I watched Father go down on his knees with a hammer and nails intending to nail down the cover on a box of books. He paused to look at one of the books on the top. As I have told you, he had a deep appreciation of art and I had often studied his collection of those large, heavy books of reprints of paintings by the great masters of Europe. One of his favorites was Goya and now he picked up the Goya volume and stood for a while glancing through it, with the late afternoon sunlight entering the window making the scar on his cheekbone look red. Still holding the book, he sat down on the couch and beckoned me to sit beside him.

  The book was Les Désastres de la Guerra and my eyes followed page after page of it as he slowly leafed his way through to the final page containing the scroll with the single word “Nada” inscribed on it. He stared at this in silence and I thought I understood what he was trying to show me – that the war had been Nada, the heroism, the suffering, the great victories and the final defeats, the millions of dead and mutilated, the total surrender, the bankruptcy of the country and the starvation – “Für Deutschland, alles Nada.” I said it aloud.

  When my Father heard it he stiffened. He sat erect despite the pain in his back and his eyes grew opaque and strange. His whisper was far more terrifying than a shout.

  “Nein! Aber n-ei-n!”

  Across the room my mother watched him without expression and I knew she was growing remote from him.

  Then I saw a grimace, you could not call it a smile, distort my father’s face.

  “Mistakes,” he said softly, almost cunningly. “Just a few stupid mistakes. But now, you see, we understand just what those stupid mistakes were.”

  As his blue eyes fixed themselves on me I knew, though at the time I lacked the words to express it, that my father had completely surrendered to his own pride and will. I knew also that the war had not ended after all, that wars as terrible and stupid as this one can never end. And immediately my father confirmed it.

  He snapped the book shut, replaced it in the packing case, and stood up.

  “The next time there will be no mistakes,” he said as though the matter had been decided forever. “But until then there is much work to do and when we are ready there will be swine to take care of.”

  I left the couch and went to the window and saw the Minster spire serene against the aftermath of a November sunset. Father nailed down the cover on the box and sat down again and I continued to look out across the red roofs to the spire. So never again would I walk out in the dawn with Grandfather or sit with him in the organ loft while he filled the cathedral with music. As I thought this, an invisible presence seemed to touch my shoulder and a voice whispered, “He does not understand what he’s saying. Even though he is your father he understands nothing. He never will.”

  Music had begun in the room and it was Mother playing the Goldberg Variations. It was one of Father’s favorites and that was why Mother had chosen to play it, but after a few minutes he rose and went quietly out the door. He had gone out for a walk because now he was less lonely with himself than he was with us. I followed the music through its intricate journey until at last it came home to the same largo, child-simple lyric with which it had begun. When the music ended, Mother remained seated in the silence, her hands folded in her lap, her head bowed.

  All these things I have written I saw first as a child and understood as a child and the last things I saw as an adolescent. In Germany a child was believed sentimentally to have the perfect wisdom, but this did not deter some of our teachers from treating us like morons. Not long after this evening I began my higher education, the overpowering discipline of the German gymnasia and universities. Just as I had been “a good boy” while living with Mother and Grandfather, now I was being trained into something very different – a good student on his way to becoming an ambitious professional, a young man dazzled by the maze of professional knowledge. I was on my way to becoming a learned fool.

  ___________________

  PART FIVE

  CONRAD DEHMEL’S STORY

  as told by

  JOHN WELLFLEET

  I have now reached a long gap in the records and will have to rely on Conrad Dehmel’s diaries and notebooks, on some of his professional publications, on letters, photographs, and the occasional patch of narrative by himself.

  Contrary to what his grandfather had believed, that First Great War did not destroy Europe. It was followed by such an explosion of intellectual and artistic energy you could almost believe that the slaughter of all those millions of young men had served as a fertilizer to some of the survivors. So much happened in those years. So much passion was spent. Everywhere new oceans of knowledge were discovered and eager men dove into them.

  The year the Dehmel family moved to Bremen, Conrad’s parents had another son they called Siegfried. His mother was now forty years old, the birth was as difficult as it was unexpected, and it left the mother weak for several years afterwards. Siegfried was physically robust, his hair even blonder than his father’s, his temperament was cheerful and boisterous, and by the time he was five he was playing with toy warships in the family bathtub and was determined to join the navy as soon as he was old enough. To his father, Siegfried was a greater joy than Conrad ever was.

  Eight years after Siegfried’s birth, Conrad matriculated from the gymnasium and went to the first of his three universities. It was at Göttingen that he made his doctorate. His field was History and for him History seems to have included nearly everything connected with the human race. As his working tools he used “four and a half languages,” the half-language at that time being English.

  The work-load of those German students would have emptied the classrooms of any university I ever knew. The best ones did hardly anything but work and some of the scientists spent whole weeks in their laboratories, dozing a few hours at a time on camp cots when they had experiments cooking. Conrad prepared himself for his career like an athlete training for the Olympic Games. He
got up at 0600 hours every morning and spent twenty minutes in vigorous calisthenics. Sunday was his walking day and no matter what the weather he usually covered about thirty-five kilometers. Often he took an early train in order to walk in the Harz Mountains.

  On weekdays he did nothing but study, and the routine was much the same with his friends. Their sole recreations were the occasional concert or a night with a girl, but they were seldom companions of their girls as we were with ours. One of Conrad’s friends, a philosophy student, went to a brothel every Saturday night: “Sleeping with a girl you like is a waste of spiritual energy. Going to bed with a poule is a release of it.”

  Usually these students quit work around 2200 hours and went to the beer halls, but not even there did they relax. They talked shop together and the mathematicians and physicists worked out equations on the backs of their beer mats and discussed them while they sipped their beer and nibbled their pretzels. After they went home, the waiters collected the beer mats on the chance that the equations were valuable and they could sell them.

  A weird place a German university in those far-off days. As Conrad later admitted, “We lost our heads completely. We were sure that we were going to change the world. It was such a marvellous time for Science that it seemed certain that humanity at last might make a quantum-leap forward. The politicians, the generals, the old hierarchical orders who had made and lost the war were finished – kaput. A wonderful new world was dawning and we would be its creators and high priests.”

  The historians also called themselves scientists and they no more trusted the literary historians who reported the past than they trusted the newspapers that reported the present. What they wanted was hard evidence – documents, inscriptions, artefacts, the leavings in ancient tombs, chemical analyses of old coinages, papyri, lost alphabets. It was a great time for archaeology and Conrad twice joined digging expeditions in the old Middle East. The historians of this time were more interested in what had destroyed civilizations than in what had created them, apparently believing that if men could discover the mistakes of the past they could prevent politicians from repeating them in the future. When he was older, Conrad would admit that in his university years he became totally blind to the present.

  This was a bad present for most of Europe and for Germany it was a terrible one. Not many students were like Conrad and his friends. They were young, they were frustrated, they were angry, and they wanted fast action. Some of them joined political and duelling clubs. Some of them drilled at night in the secret armies and many of them hated the new freedom. “Wir scheissen auf die Freiheit” (we shit on freedom) – this was one of their slogans. But Conrad and his scientific friends not only despised people like these, they ignored them.

  When the time came for his doctoral thesis, he decided to base it on the papyri collections his grandfather had described to him. They had been found in the Sahara Desert west of the river Nile a few years before the First Great War. Though Conrad was to go far beyond this early work, he must have retained an affection for it because I myself heard him speak of it more than once. The only thing that interested me about those papyri was the story of how they were found. I liked the story so much that now I’m suspicious of it, but for what it’s worth, here it is.

  One day an English archaeologist was exploring the desert on a camel looking for signs of buried monuments when the camel stumbled on a protruding rock and he fell off the animal’s back. When he got to his feet he noticed that the rock was marble, so he took his spade and dug around it and the top of an arch emerged from the sand. This could mean one of two things. Either it was the top of a solitary temple or under the sand were the ruins of a lost city.

  A few years later a digging expedition came out from England and a city it turned out to be, a sizable one in ruins, and the rock on which the camel had stumbled was the pinnacle of the civic theater. The rest of the remains were what might have been expected: a stadium, public baths, some official buildings in partial ruin, the lines and even the names of a maze of streets. The only valuable discovery was made in the city dump. Here were dug out thousands of papyri accumulated over several centuries. They were covered with Greek writing in violet ink, many were torn or mutilated, but the dry sands of the desert had preserved the writing and most of them were legible enough to be read or restored by the same kind of ingenuity required by code-breakers in wartime. There were enough papyri to keep several platoons of scholars busy for more than seventy years.

  When I was young this kind of material would have bored me to death, but now Conrad’s description of it gives me an eerie feeling. Suppose André and his friends succeed in building a new city, how new will it really be? I won’t live long enough to begin to answer that question, but certainly the resemblances between this vanished city and some cities I knew in my youth are embarrassingly close. It was a collection of ghettos. One district was a ghetto in the original meaning of the word, for it was known officially as “The Jewish Quarter.” And sure enough, evidence turned up in the papyri that when things went sour the majority blamed the Jews for it and beat them up.

  Studying Conrad’s notes and trying to decipher the German of his thesis, I found myself reading about a community of perhaps a hundred thousand people living out their life-spans in their own little corner of a huge power structure which pretended to rule the known world. The papyri showed life as ordinary people have lived it in all ages – thousands of mortgages, bills of sale and purchase, inventories of small and big merchants, of stewards and managers, notices of sheriffs and auction sales, bills of lading for the flat-bottomed boats that took on cargo at the city docks and sailed down the canal to the Nile and then down the river to the great city at its mouth. Even beyond, sometimes; even as far as Naples. There were many personal letters, quick glimpses into obscure private lives, some poignant, some ridiculous. There were many edicts from the Central Bureaucracy in language even more pompous than we got from ours. And as time passed, there was a deluge of appeals for relief against tax collectors and the labor organizers of the Bureaucracy.

  By the time I had worked my way through Conrad’s monograph I had acquired a fellow feeling for these vanished folk. This was their little plot of earth and it had been good earth. What for more than fourteen subsequent centuries was an unmapped waste of drifting sand, in their time had been a prosperous farm country with thousands of hectares under cultivation, watered by inundations from the Nile fed into it by a complex system of irrigation canals. In its earlier years the city was prosperous. It had its own town council, its banks dealt in a reliable currency. It even had a social and athletic club and I was amused to discover that its membership was rigidly restricted. No Jew or lower-class person had a chance of getting into it.

  If left to itself, this city might have prospered indefinitely, but of course it was not left to itself. About two centuries after the record began, the control of the Central Bureaucracy was up for grabs and between them the politicians and the military ruined the whole district. Just before the final collapse, the city’s population reached its highest point and the people were proud of how big it was. The crowds swarming into the stadium broke all previous attendance records. Where did all this urban population come from? It could only have come from abandoned farms. Finally the currency collapsed and was worth nothing and soon afterwards the record ceased for an entire century.

  When it resumed it revealed a new kind of world uncannily still. The town council had vanished and so had the middle class. The city’s principal buildings were now filled with nuns and monks – some thirty thousand of them altogether. As for the farmland, all of it was now the personal property of a single family headed by a man who spent most of his time in the imperial capital and came home only to supervise his stewards, oversee his rent collectors, and exercise his race horses in the stadium. Conrad records this letter written by one of the boss-man’s tenants:

  “To Apion, my kind lord, lover of Christ and the poor, all esteemed and most
magnificent patrician and duke of the Thebaid, from Anoup your miserable slave on your estate called Phraka, I, your miserable slave, desire by this petition for mercy to bring to your lordship’s attention that I serve my kind lord as my fathers and forefathers did and pay the taxes every year.”

  In a footnote to this document, Conrad wrote: “Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a tool-making animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.” When Conrad made a point, he always underlined it.

  A few years after Anoup wrote this letter the record ceases entirely. The Arabs came in and destroyed the last remnant of the old Bureaucracy. Did they massacre the inhabitants? There is no proof that they did. Did the people simply give up the place and move somewhere else? Nobody knows that, either. All that is known for sure is that for nearly fourteen centuries the sands of the desert blew in steadily and buried the place. If the Englishman’s camel had not stumbled on the pinnacle of the civic theatre nobody would have heard of its existence; not a word about the magnificent duke who was such a lover of Christ and the poor, to say nothing of Anoup. What will André make of this little story, I wonder?

  But for Conrad Dehmel his study of this lost city was the overture to the entire course of his future life. His monograph was given a first-class rating by his professors and after it was published it came to the notice of a famous historian who wrote him a letter of congratulation. This man was a Russian of vast learning who had emigrated to America to avoid being liquidated by the new bureaucracy that had taken over his own country. When Conrad wrote to thank him for his letter, he asked if he himself might go to America to study under him. The Russian offered a better prospect.