Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Mother?” he said quietly.

  “Yes, Conrad?”

  “I have been very stupid these past years. Trying to escape, I suppose. Escape into the safety of History and now into – well, as you said, I’ve been living in England. What’s happening here seems unreal in England. If I’ve been living there, a German, and couldn’t really believe it, why should anyone be surprised that the English believe it even less? But when they finally do believe it –”

  She said nothing. He bent, caressed her cheeks with his fingertips, and kissed her forehead. He felt a profound and helpless love for her.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me something. Do they think here – I mean the Nazis – do they think the English are stupid because they’re so casual?”

  “How do I know what they think?”

  “At the moment the English leaders are old and blind. But there are other English – I’ve met some of them – and they’re terrifyingly intelligent. They’re never more dangerous, these men, than when they seem casual. Does Father understand that?”

  The son and the mother looked at each other and later Conrad recorded this in his diary:

  “At last I was growing out of the intellectual cocoon I’d been living in ever since I went to the university. This was the first time it had ever occurred to me that it might be interesting to understand my mother and her thoughts. Like most sons who have had a loving mother, I had taken her for granted. Now for the first time I was watching her tragedy.

  “She had understanding, deep and experienced, but she had no authority. She had two sons she loved and who loved her, but they were diametrically opposed. She had a husband she loved and who loved her, but their interests were so different they might have been living on different planets. She had loved her country and now her country had become Hitler’s. She had an understanding so total that she had resigned herself to the fact that her understanding made no difference.

  “Tears filled my eyes and I embraced her and she welcomed it. Then she stood apart from me and said quietly, ‘I love your father. I love Siegfried and I love you. To you I am closest, but this is a luxury I cannot afford to show.’ We had been such a disciplined family that such intimacy was rare with us. You, dear Stephanie, also belonged to a disciplined family, but in your family it was the mother who was dominant. It was easier for your mother than for mine.

  “Then Mother said, ‘I don’t know if this matters, but your father has always agreed with what you said about the English. He thinks the best of them are the most intelligent people in the world. So he tells me that just because they’re intelligent, England will be either neutral or Germany’s ally.’

  “I said, ‘Oh my God!’

  “Then I kissed her on the forehead and said that I had to leave.”

  When he reached the Grosser Kurfürst Institut he entered by the back door as his mother had told him, descended to the basement, and after wandering through many corridors found the porter in a glassed-in cubicle equipped with a small telephone switchboard. The man looked almost as big and brutal as the night porter of his hotel and he was reading a Nazi tabloid called Der Stürmer. Behind him was the same picture he had seen in the hotel and the same slogan:

  Trittst du als Deutscher hier hinein

  Soll stets dein Gruss Heil Hitler sein.

  He dispensed with any kind of greeting and asked the porter how he could find the chambers of Professor Rosenthal. The man laid down his paper and stared at him truculently.

  “What do you want with Rosenthal?”

  “I am Dr. Dehmel. I have come here from London to work with Professor Rosenthal.”

  The porter’s heavy face broke open into an insolent smile. “Well, Herr Doktor, if you want to see Rosenthal, you’d better see him now. Follow me.”

  Behind the broad and muscular rump of the porter, his pants an acid green exuding a faint smell of masculine sweat, he plodded up one flight of metal stairs and two flights of marble stairs and followed down a long corridor to a large door, which the porter jerked open without knocking.

  “Rosenthal!” he bellowed. “Are you still there, Rosenthal? Come here.”

  A small, delicately formed man emerged from an inner room. Professor Rosenthal looked about fifty years old, had graying hair and large, humorous eyes, and was immaculately dressed in a light-gray suit. He spoke to Conrad as though the porter were not there.

  “And you, I believe, are Dr. Conrad Dehmel? I’m so happy to meet you at last.”

  “He says he’s Dehmel,” the porter barked.

  “And so he is,” said the professor.

  Conrad turned to the porter and said quietly, “You are very rude and very insolent. In future when you speak in my presence you will be polite.”

  The big man was taken aback; his mouth opened and stayed open while he thought of something to say.

  Conrad looked straight at him and said, “It might interest you to know, porter, that I am well acquainted with some people you should respect. My father is a close associate of the Grand Admiral of the Reich. I have told you to be courteous. Now, have you understood?”

  The stupid face solidified, clarified, and the hulking body crashed to attention.

  “Bestimmt, Herr Doktor!”

  “That’s better. Now I request you to leave us.”

  “Hitler!” the man barked, went about face, and marched away like a soldier. Professor Rosenthal closed the door, locked it, and turned to Conrad with a smile.

  “That was nicely done, Dehmel. I had forgotten that your father is a naval officer.”

  “I believe he will soon be a rear-admiral.”

  “Even if he wasn’t, that blockhead would have believed you. You spoke your lines very well indeed. Suddenly I feel much better. Shall we sit down and talk quietly?”

  The professor seated himself erect and small behind an inlaid seventeenth-century desk, his fingertips pressed together. Conrad sat in a comfortable chair opposite him.

  “So, my dear Dehmel, you have been living in England while most of this was going on here. How long is it since you returned?”

  “I reached Berlin only last night.”

  “And already you see how it is here?”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “As a Roman historian you should have little difficulty believing it. If you give a barbarian a centimeter, he immediately demands a meter. Give him a meter and he demands a kilometer.” The expressive hands dropped to the desk. “You have seen already how it is with me. But I wonder if you know how it is with yourself?”

  “With myself?”

  Though the professor smiled again, he was looking at Conrad very carefully. He waited for Conrad to speak.

  “Herr Professor,” Conrad said, “how is it possible that a man like that porter could dare speak to you like that?”

  “You know, I suppose, that I am a Jew.”

  “But a man like you, sir!”

  “Fortunately I have some influential friends and at the moment the authorities do not think it worth their while to make me a minor cause célèbre. In other words, I don’t expect to be arrested within the next few days. But let me tell you, Dehmel, if I were to continue to stay here much longer I would soon find myself in a camp. As it is, they have merely dismissed me. I had been expecting it for some time, but the dismissal arrived only two days ago. I immediately wrote to tell you this, but you must have left London before my letter arrived.”

  Conrad stared at the great scholar he had honored so long and there was nothing he could think of saying.

  “I wonder how long it will be,” the professor remarked, “before Europe understands that these people intend to do exactly what they say? It is quite fantastic. At least ninety percent of this nation have entirely ceased to think.” He rose from his desk. “Perhaps it would be better if we went into the inner room. That oaf may return and put his ear to the keyhole.”

  Conrad followed him and saw many closed packin
g cases lying on the floor and one still open, half filled with books.

  “As you see,” the professor said, “I have almost finished packing. I intensely dislike doing things in a hurry, but these last two days I have been in a very great hurry. Somebody may change his mind about my exit visa. If nobody does, I will be in Brussels within forty-eight hours. Thank God – or thank my wife’s foresight – she and my three children have been there since last May.”

  Conrad glanced at the packing cases. “At any rate they allow you to take out your property.”

  “Not entirely. They will let me take out five hundred marks. The rest of my savings, except for a small sum I deposited in a Brussels bank two years ago, they will confiscate under the cover of what one of their officials told me is an emigration tax. It is difficult to accommodate one’s self to the mentality of these people. They allow me to take out my books, though they could sell them abroad. But then, as you must have heard, they burn books these days and some of the books they have burned were extremely valuable. Remember Danton? ‘In the face of the kings of Europe we throw the head of a king.’ For them it would be, ‘In the face of civilization we blow the smoke of burning books.’ And speaking of smoke, would you care to smoke yourself? I don’t smoke any more, but by all means do so if you feel like it.”

  Conrad took out his pipe, stuffed it, lit it, and felt terrible.

  “Sir,” he said slowly, “what I have just seen and heard sickens me. For years I’ve looked forward to working under you. Possibly even with you. Apart from your learning” – he hoped the professor would not think him unctuous – “it’s also your style. There’s delight and wonder in the style of your scholarship, Herr Professor. It was the proudest moment of my life when you accepted me.”

  “Thank you, Dehmel. Ever since my friend Rostovtzev wrote to me about you, I had been looking forward to working with you. You’re an excellent scholar for your age.” He shrugged. “Basic scholarship is absolutely essential, but of course it’s only a tool to help us understand larger things. You may go far with experience. I’d have liked to go a few steps of the way with you, but it seems impossible.”

  Feeling every moment more miserable, Conrad said, “You do me too much honor.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Professor Rosenthal quietly. “Many things remain to be seen.”

  There was something in Rosenthal’s expression that made Conrad feel even more uncomfortable.

  “Sir,” he said, “I can’t imagine anyone being able to fill your position here. But I suppose I must ask you who has been nominated to it.”

  The professor, his face grave, was silent while he studied Conrad. Then he nodded as though he were nodding to himself.

  “It is, of course, possible that they merely wished to surprise you. They enjoy surprising people. Surprising people has been the secret of their success so far.”

  “I don’t follow you, sir.”

  “Are you sure you don’t?”

  Conrad was completely confused. Then, with an expression the like of which Conrad had never seen, Rosenthal confronted him.

  “Since you say you don’t know who my successor is, I will tell you. It’s you.”

  “What!”

  The professor’s face was stern. “You heard me, Dehmel.”

  “But sir, this is incredible. This is absolutely impossible. I knew nothing of it. Do you believe I would have come here if I’d known that?”

  The older man’s face, which for an instant has been as implacable as the face of a judge of Israel, softened and became urbane again.

  “Forgive me, Dehmel.”

  “For what, sir?”

  “For being careful. I didn’t really believe that you knew. But these days –” he shrugged slightly, “these days to be sure even of a certainty seems a dangerous luxury. Forgive me, anyway. Of course you didn’t know.”

  “Sir, believe me, if I had known – I don’t know what to say.” The professor laughed quietly, then uproariously.

  “I see nothing to laugh at, sir,” said Conrad.

  “If you were my age, you would. Perhaps after a few more years you will understand why I laugh. For one thing, you are going to receive a salary much higher than you anticipated. They told me the figure, and it’s thirty percent more than I ever received in my life. As the Devil is supposed to have said to Faust, the world is yours.”

  Conrad flushed and said, “Professor Rosenthal, if a Jew can’t help being what he was born, neither can a German. That’s not fair.”

  The professor ceased smiling. “Touché, mon cher Dehmel.”

  “But why me? That’s what I can’t understand. Why do they appoint me?”

  “I didn’t understand it either, but since you told me that your father is about to become an admiral, perhaps that explains it.”

  Conrad sat erect and looked straight into the professor’s eyes. “My father has been a naval officer for all of his adult life, but he’s never been a Nazi and he isn’t one now.”

  “Hardly any of our naval officers are Nazis, but they are certainly officers.”

  The wise Jewish face looked into the earnest, wounded eyes of the young German and Conrad did not speak.

  “You are an officer’s son,” the professor said reflectively. “Officers here obey orders. Therefore it might be assumed that you would do the same. That’s the logical explanation.” He shook his head. “Which is why I don’t believe it’s the right one. Nothing here is normal, Dehmel. What we have here is the logic of Alice in Wonderland – a book I’m sure none of them have read. Logical conclusions proceeding from absurd hypotheses. Logic can never explain the Nazis. Why, for instance, do they take such elaborate steps to demonstrate that their monstrous crimes are legal? Frankly, I have no idea why they appointed you. What I do know is that you’ll find yourself in a very strange situation.”

  “An impossible one.”

  Still holding his distance a little, the professor went on: “However, for a young man wishing to become an historian, this could be a unique opportunity.”

  Conrad continued silent and the professor surveyed him.

  “Providing, of course, that you survive. Providing, again, that any world survives that may be interested in history and truth. There is only a single historian alive today who has had the experience to understand these people. That’s Rostovtzev, of course. He saw Lenin in action. He even met him personally. The rest of us have studied historical texts that never dealt with people like the Nazis.”

  Rosenthal put his fingertips together and contemplated them. Had he imbued himself so deeply with the art of the Renaissance that he had absorbed the gestures of a bishop? Conrad wondered. Rosenthal continued.

  “All the European foreign offices are floundering because they’re dealing with something they’ve never had to deal with before. They can’t bring themselves to accept that a maniac from the flophouses of Vienna has become the total will of a modern civilized nation. Das Land der Dichter und Denker! They think he’s only playing politics. And by God, so he is! And what politics! Kleiner Mann, was nun? The little people love him.”

  Conrad remained silent, remembering bitterly what Hanna had told him in London.

  The professor continued to think aloud. “At least these Nazis have made some of our high-flown survivals of nineteenth-century academics wonder what they were talking about when they became portentous about what they call ‘the dignity of history.’ The only dignity I ever found in political history was the incredible capacity of ordinary people to survive what governments have done to them. Most of our German scholars lost little time in losing their dignity lately. But who am I to blame them? We were all trained to be rationalists, n’est-ce pas? Not the stuff out of which martyrs are made, Dehmel. The Nazis knew that not many of that sort would risk torture for the sake of an idea.”

  “Bruno did.”

  “Bruno was in holy orders. But Galileo didn’t, and who has blamed him for not giving the priests the pleasure of bur
ning him alive? One can die for the love of a dear one. For a very dear one, I can imagine a man betraying his soul. But to die for an abstract principle that will probably be proved wrong after we’re dead? It would have done science no good if Galileo had gone to the stake.” He paused. “I have been very lucky. Because I’m a Jew, the Nazis absolved me from the necessity of making a moral choice. But for an echt German like Heisenberg the dilemma may become a terrible one.”

  Suddenly, Conrad shouted, “No!”

  “No to what, Dehmel?”

  “I refuse to accept this position. Me, coming here to be a student under a great man and then to be asked to take his place! I refuse, I tell you. I refuse. I also would like to have a little dignity.”

  Again the professor placed his thin elbows on the table with the fingertips touching. Watching those subtle, experienced eyes observing his own, Conrad suddenly realized that Rosenthal was beginning to like him.

  Rosenthal smiled. “You know, Dehmel, I’m beginning to think that our pompous friend Spengler should be taken seriously. His reasons for his theory about the decline of the West are typically romantic, and explain nothing. But his conclusions? If Hitler loses this war he’s going to make – and in gloomier moments I’m not sure that he will – what is the world going to be like thirty or forty years from now? Will there be anyone left who will even understand what ethics are? Or will they only consider expediencies?”

  Conrad had nothing to say. He was too miserable, too shocked, and above all too ashamed of himself for having been so confident in his own intelligence. Two days of Hitler’s Germany!

  Years later in Canada he wrote it down:

  “They humbled me for the rest of my life. My old dream of earning the right to belong to civilization as its interpreter vanished. What was needed now was not to belong to the old civilization, but to survive this nihilism in order to preserve the seeds of a new civilization. My response to the challenge was not intellectual. It was purely physical. It was animalistic. As they would say today in English, so I thought then. Fuck you bastards! I’m going to survive you.”

  But the professor was speaking. “We must be practical. Please try to listen to me. I know why you’re disturbed, but in conscience I must advise you to make no issue about the position they’re giving you. You must accept it.” He held up his hand as Conrad was about to protest. “A moment, please. I don’t think you have any choice. The administration will be no problem for you because the Institut has been taken over by the party and functionaries will manage it. As for the history of art, there are only two arts they’re interested in. One is the art of controlling the masses and the other is the art of war. A month ago one of them was here and told me the Führer has a great interest in art so long as it’s Aryan art. I had to listen to it with a straight face.”