Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  Martina, at a loss, only nodded. They're Germans, but you can talk to them. Even if Käthe looked only a couple of years older, Martina felt some wider gap between them. “Headquarters?” she said, grasping at anything.

  “We are the SAJ, the Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend.”

  “Socialist Worker Youth,” Isaac translated. “Don't get them confused with the Socialist Loafer Youth.”

  If his sarcasm crossed the language barrier, Käthe chose to brush it off, continuing in careful English delivered with occasional pauses over word order. “Most of the Youth Movement pretends that they are not political. Also the groups which refuse women or Jews to admit. Would you believe them, this is not politics! Our group is at least honest over this. We will tell you what we believe.”

  “So”— Martina thumbed quickly through her spotty recollections of Modern Civ—” Socialist Workers. Is that anything to do with Communism?”

  Käthe's response suggested that Martina had slapped the English right out of her. “Mit dem Kommunistische Jugendverband haben wir nie zu tun. Nie! Nothing! These are…Unruhestifter.” She turned to Isaac for help.

  “Kat says the Young Commies are troublemakers. The SAJ will have nothing to do with them.”

  The German girl nodded. “By the Jugendtag, the Communists are not allowed, nor the Hitlerjugend nor the Wehrverbände. None of these terrible people. We are all here hoping for a New Reich, to the brotherhood of nations and people dedicated, and with the past not forgotten, toward the future unblinkingly turning…”

  Martina's thoughts drifted back toward Catholic U., where her political awakening was still at the groping-for-the-alarm-clock stage. She had no means of grappling with the complexities of faction versus faction, the New Reich versus whatever the alternative might be—an old Reich, or a new something else?— and felt therefore unreasonably grateful for Isaac's sympathetic smile.

  “Don't bother trying to keep score,” he said. “The lineup changes every week. All that matters is, who are the real Arschlöcher? It doesn't matter what they call themselves. As of now, the Arschlöcher are mainly on the right, though the Reds aren't much better. If we're lucky they'll claw each other's eyes out. If not, it's a question of who pushes Weimar off the cliff first. I'd take Hitler over Ulbricht, at even odds.”

  Big talk—she understood that much. A teenager playing man of the world. But it must mean something, perhaps something important. For all she could tell, the kid knew what he was talking about.

  Käthe gave Martina a woman-to-woman look. “Our friend Isaac is sometimes vulgar in his speech. I hope you do not know all these words.”

  “I can guess.” Martina gave a shake of the head that signified, in any language, men—drawing a laugh from Käthe. She felt the warm glow of international amity.

  Isaac beamed at them, unrepentant. “Oh, and—” Waggling his eyes like a matinee villain, he pulled something out of his baggy shirt that looked, from Martina's brief glance, like a much-folded clump of paper. Käthe's hand closed quickly around it, leaving Martina to wonder if the two of them were playing at skullduggery or genuinely up to something. She couldn't decide.

  The minor excitement attending Isaac's arrival soon ebbed and the Arbeiterjugend settled down to what Martina gathered was business as usual. Hewing wood, toting boxes, slicing up trugfuls of gathered food, stenciling banners, practicing woodcraft, laying a fire—there seemed no end to the tasks waiting to be done nor the ranks of Young Socialists willing to do them. Isaac, alone in his lack of industry, stood outside the tent chatting up a pair of girls even younger than himself, neatly attired in clothing of the sort Pocahontas might have worn to receive John Smith, had she enjoyed the services of a punctilious German seamstress. Käthe took up the chore of folding pamphlets into exact thirds—there seemed to be a trick to it— and stacking them on a table. She gave Martina a smile that fell between apology and invitation. Seeing nothing better to do, and curious about what these people were like beneath the hale-and-hearty exterior, she ducked under the canvas brow of the tent and before long had fallen with Käthe into an easy rhythm of lifting, creasing and arranging. Women's work.

  Out of the blue, Käthe asked, “Have you long known Isaac then?” in a tone that seemed excessively casual.

  Martina glanced toward where he'd been standing, but the two little squaws were alone now, one plaiting the other's hair.

  “He just goes away,” Käthe said, following her gaze. “This is Isaac. And then he returns. Always bringing something. A gift, a stranger, a problem.” She bit her lip, seeming to realize in the same instant as Martina that at least one of these characterizations applied to present company. Yet she made no apology. Fact was fact.

  Martina nodded. “No, not long—actually we just met.”

  “Oh, yes?” Käthe's slight frown seemed to pose the question of whether meeting Isaac was an entirely good idea. “We also have not known him so long.” A pause, a fold. “But he has been generous in his help to us. He seems to have…”

  “A knack?” guessed Martina.

  Käthe didn't know the word. “One might say, the ability to learn things. A few months ago, so he says, he could speak no German.” She hesitated, arranging her thoughts. “Isaac is a unique type, is he not? I mean, unique also for an American?”

  “I barely know him. But yes. That's my impression.”

  “Has he then told you his story?”

  Martina raised an arm to brush her problematic hair away, in the process noticing fingertips stained oily black by printer's ink. These pamphlets, she guessed, were hot off the press. “What is this stuff? Some Socialist thing?”

  Käthe cast a worried eye toward the hillock of paper. “An important vote comes tomorrow. There will be a debate—should the Meissner-Formel be amended? This is the guiding text of the Movement, adopted in 1913 at the first summit. The Formel now states”— her brow furrowed with the effort of translation—” Free German Youth intend to shape their lives by their own choice, responsible only to themselves, following their own inner truth.”

  She paused, as though awaiting Martina's ratification. “For its time, you know, this was revolutionary. But that was many years ago, before even the World War. Now we believe the text must go further. Tomorrow, therefore, the SAJ will propose to exchange ‘freideutsche Jugend’ for ‘Free Youth of the World.’ It will then be clear that the freedom of self-rule, self-decision, belongs not to Germans only but to everyone, all the new generation, not separated by borders or citizenship.”

  To Martina it sounded sensible enough. What did borders count for in the Radio Age? “So, the vote on this—you think you'll win?”

  Käthe gave her a wistful, worldly smile that Martina could only marvel at. “We cannot know what will happen. None of us here, I think, really understands so well the democratic process. All the campaigning, the arguing, the secret vote—this is for Germany something new. We have had only a decade to learn, and the results, one must be truthful, have not been so good. Perhaps yes, our motion will pass. Or it may fail, which is not so terrible. The worst is that something bad and unexpected might happen. We have heard the Right is drafting a counteramendment. No one has seen it, but of course it will be bündisch, do you have a word for this? Nationalistic, full of swagger and patriotism, talk of young German warriors, ‘War is the highest expression of our destiny.’ Also it will have perhaps angry words about progressives, and feminizing influences on our youth, and Bolsheviks—this means anyone more liberal than the Kaiser— and especially Jews. Only now they like to say ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’ That is, people not of our blood, not of our soil—everyone understands who they're talking about. And so. When the vote comes, the outcome could be bad indeed. It could be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?” said Martina. “To who?” What difference could it possibly make, she thought, if some words on a piece of paper are voted up or down by a bunch of kids on a mountain somewhere?

  Käthe's eyes drifted across the tent, a
s if the answer might be lying around there. “Dangerous,” she said finally, “to people like you and me. But even more, to our friend Isaac.”

  Just for an instant, for no reason Martina could name, she felt a chill. It was how you feel hearing a fairy tale, at the moment when the forest path takes a sudden turn and there, from behind a tree, steps a snarling wolf or an ugly, stooped crone. But there were no witches here, only healthy kids and brilliant sunlight and clean air filled with music. For heaven's sake, it was 1929. The Great War was past, the market was booming, the world was learning to swing.

  Taking a step back from the whole subject, Martina said, “So what is Isaac's story, anyway?”

  Käthe gave her a thoughtful look followed by a short, diplomatic nod. “You know, this story changes somewhat with every telling. But it seems that back in America, our friend got himself in quite bad trouble.”

  “A little young for that, isn't he?” said Martina.

  “You know America, of course, better than I. But from all I learn, New York is for some people a difficult place. Bad things happen, though also good. Where Isaac lived, it was a neighborhood full of people from many countries. Italians were there, and Irish, and Greeks, also many Jews, especially from Poland.”

  “Could be the Lower East Side,” said Martina—not that she knew the first thing about New York. She had been there exactly twice: once as a small girl, during a visit to her grandmother, who was not yet too old to fuss with schedules and stations and crowded streets, and once a week ago, when she and Ingo had boarded a ship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and doubled back on the path of their ancestors.

  “Isaac began spending his time with a rough group,” Käthe went on. “These were older boys. His family could not control him. He stayed out at night very late, many days he would never go to school. Soon came trouble with the police. Isaac was made to stand before a judge, and the judge might have sent him to a special place for young criminals. This was no safe place, Isaac says, even worse than the streets. But his father rose to speak in the court. Back in Poland, he said, we were respectable people. Educated people like yourself, Honored Judge. To this day we have family there. My wife's brother is a veterinarian. My cousin is a respected merchant, he sells timber at an honest price to the largest German mills. Let our son Isaac go live with this family in the old land, he will not find trouble there. Let him become a man and learn a trade and live far away from these unhealthy influences.”

  “And the judge said yes?”

  Käthe shrugged. “Isaac has told this in different ways. In one story the judge says, All right, you go to your Onkel Eli and Tante Rachel. In another Isaac is sent up the river, as he says, but after a time he escapes and travels to Poland with the help of bad friends. Another time, good relatives. Whatever is the truth, this new situation also does not last. Because when Isaac learns what is expected of a young man in a respected deutschjudische family—the schools, the books, the private tutoring, the helping with Onkel's veterinary practice—very soon he runs away. He discovers the Wandervogel life and finds in this a new kind of home.”

  Martina pondered for a moment how you could derive “home” from such a formless thing as “the Wandervogel life,” which she took to mean a vague ideology of personal liberation, wrapped up with reverence for the countryside, the fields, the forest, the mountains. The idea made no sense from an American standpoint—in those wide-open spaces you felt liberated, all right, but also very much alone—yet here in Europe, perhaps… This landscape did have a drawn-in quality; it surrounded and enfolded you; it bound you and your comrades as intimately as clansmen around a fire.

  “You said his family is German Jewish?” she asked. “But they live in Poland?”

  Käthe nodded. “This is ordinary. All the Jewish bourgeoisie think of themselves as German. They speak Hochdeutsch at the dinner table and send their children to German universities. They plan often to immigrate here, or to Vienna, for instance. Germany is the land of Kultur, you see, of Bach and Goethe and Hegel, and also of famous Jews like Heine and Mahler. Poland is what? A mere outland, some would say, a former German colony pretending to be a nation, always slipping back to the chaotic rule of heathens and Slavs. Many Polish towns keep their old German names from when the land was governed by the Holy Reich. That was centuries ago, but the Germans do not forget. Neither do the Jews. In fact the Jews, I think, remember more clearly, because they read history, they do not mythologize it. We Germans feel about the East—the Ostland, we say—how you Americans might feel about your West, had you won it and then lost it back to the Red Indians. A great destiny lies unfulfilled there, so many people think.”

  Martina tried to absorb it all. This was more confusing, she thought, but also more interesting, than the stuff they spooned out to you in Modern History.

  Käthe sighed. “It is a dark and corrupting romance. But we have always loved such things.”

  For the longest time, Ingo slipped cleanly out of her mind. Afternoon drifted toward evening yet she no longer fretted over where he had gotten to or when they would hook up again. If she thought of him at all, it was only to tell herself that he was missing an eye-opening experience and had only himself to blame.

  It was inevitable, she supposed, that the two of them should have taken separate paths; what was amazing was that they'd stuck together for so long. What, when all was said and done, did they have in common? Not a thing she could see, beyond the accident of having grown up on the same block in nearly identical red-brick houses on a boring, middle-class, suburban street. A matter of socioeconomic happenstance, nothing more, and it certainly didn't mean their fates were intertwined.

  Just look at him: bookish and timid, sallow from living indoors, temperamentally conservative and, let's face it, something of a stuffed shirt. He sang in the church choir, for God's sake. Whereas Martina was…well, she wasn't so certain about that, only about what she was not. And that was the least bit Ingo-ish.

  If anything, she was more like these Socialists. The longer she was around them, the more she felt at home, among friends. Comrades. She admired their confidence, their fellowship, their dedication to a cause. She envied their well-formed ideas about the world. She approved their practical clothing, simple uniforms of good, durable cloth that blurred differences of age and gender. She liked how they pooled the chores of running the camp. She even came to appreciate—after somebody handed her a multilingual edition—the poetry of Richard Dehmel, whose words flew in red and white on a banner over the campsite.

  Only one passion can be borne untiringly:

  That for the world at large.

  She was grateful to be spared Ingo's commentary on this, and on Dehmel's other stirring, plainspoken verses—” The Working Man,” “The Martyr,” “Harvest Song.” Martina had never much cared for poetry, but this was a different thing, a nearly opposite thing, from the precious, lilac-scented, art-for-art's-sake confections that Ingo shlepped around in his rucksack. Dehmel's writings honored struggle and pain, the joy of chil-dren's playtime, the tears at the graveside, all the ordinary hopes and sorrows that were the real stuff of people's lives. None of that sighing, dreamy nonsense like Death in Venice or Remembrance of Things Past, those neverlands where Ingo tried to lose himself.

  Martina felt her eyes had been opened. She knew this was a cliché— Ingo would have mocked her for saying it—yet it was true. She was looking at the world with a different, more honest and unclouded kind of vision. Opening Franz Werfel's “Friend of the World,” she felt her heart quicken even at the preamble:

  It is my sole desire, oh Men, to be related to you!

  Whether you be a Negro, or a circus performer,

  Or you still rest deep in your mother's arms,

  Or your maiden-song rings through the courtyard …M

  How ironic, she thought, that you had to come to Germany to find someone who would write this way. In America, such thoughts were unutterable. You could go to Catholic University, right there in Wa
shington, D.C., and learn all about Christ's New Covenant, wherein the old tribal admonitions are brushed aside and everything hangs on love for one's fellow man—yet nobody ever mentions that he might have dark skin. Here in Germany, the land of castles and knights and magical pipers, you were free to read, and to think, and to say whatever you liked, in your very loudest voice.

  And the people here—these near-adults, a whole swelling tide of youth—weren't living in the Dark Ages anymore, but boldly in the present. Having cast off the moldy Thou Shalt Nots, they were plunging into the future, the new decade about to dawn, with no rules, no fears, no inhibitions. They might do anything! The Thirties would be a time such as the world had never seen—Martina was now sure of that, if not much else.

  “Come now,” Käthe called from the golden circle around the campfire. “Come, while there still is something to eat.”

  Martina had been sitting alone at the edge of camp, her thoughts adrift, while darkness rose up around her, like smoke from the land itself, out of the rocks and old trees and hard-worn earth, while the sky became a tapestry of shining lights, the million stars woven together by an unseen hand and spelling out endless prophecies, if only the mortals below knew how to read them.

  Near the big iron stewpot she found a dozen or so Arbeiterjugend whose faces she had come to know, and an equal number of fresh arrivals who'd been out spreading the Socialist gospel across the mountainside. They accepted Martina matter-of-factly, another sister-in-arms. A dark-eyed boy handed her a bowl of leek-and-potato soup, steaming and fragrant with wild herbs and mushrooms gathered that afternoon; without tasting it she knew it would be delicious.

  She looked around for Isaac but did not find him.

  Through gaps in the trees, all over the Hanstein and up the higher slopes of the Meissner, she could see the orange-yellow pricks of campfires. All day people had been trying to guess the size of the crowd. Twenty thousand, she had heard. Then thirty. Then, unbelievably, fifty. You could imagine this if you looked at the fires and thought about all those campsites large and small tucked into every niche and fold and glade for miles. Fifty thousand young people: enough to fill Griffith Stadium back home, twice over.