Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  He had fallen in with Sissi at Bayreuth. What on earth had she been doing there? She loathed German opera, Wagner worst of all. But so did Butler, in the box adjacent to hers, subsequently in the same suite at the spa. Then it was off to Berlin, rising at noon to browse the International Trib at a café in Unter den Linden; afternoons hazy with humidity and brown coal whiled away on a blanket in the Grünewald, or adrift in a hired boat on the Wannsee; nights that never went dark in the sweaty radiance of their private midnight sun. And now this romp in the Kaufunger Forest, a hike up some mountain, Licht und Luft and all the rest of it.

  How quickly one thing turns into another, Butler reflected. A snatch of detested Wagner came to his mind. You see, my son, here Time becomes Space. He hadn't a clue what it meant. Probably nothing, just sounded impressive, like Wagner in general. A hash of badly told stories, misunderstood myths, all blown up with the sideshow gimcrackery of Gesamtkunstwerk— clashing cymbals and blaring trumpets, singers bleeding to death while they bellow at one another across the stage.

  Screw Wagner, and the white horse he rode in on. Screw German opera and the whole bloated, pestilent body of High Art: that's how Butler felt, and he wasn't alone. Everybody was quoting Spengler this year, commenting blandly over coffee on the West's imminent Untergang, which means “sinking,” damn it, not “decline.” Few people had given any thought to what came next, after the last bubbles rose from the deep. Most seemed to feel it didn't personally concern them.

  “Are we almost there?” the Princess mumbled from a champagne drowse.

  “No, we are not,” said Butler. He stared out the window as the train appeared to leap across a river gorge. The gloomy, spirit-infested waters below looked like a proper sort of place to drown in—ease oneself down, clutching a wept-over copy of Jungen Werther, one's lifeblood oozing slowly from the hole just at the heart, pierced by the blue flower's unsuspected thorn.

  Such an end was not for Butler: never. His great destiny lay ahead of him. He sat comfortably in the first-class carriage feeling the journey unroll beneath him, staring through clean German glass, studying his reflection there.

  There was no room at the Meissner Haus. Apparently not all Free German Youth were inclined to rough it. Butler was for turning back; they could hop a local train to Kassel or—here's a thought—Göttingen. But the Princess surprised him, declaring with an exile's hard-won adaptability that she intended to go right up the mountain and sort things out when she got there.

  “We can buy a tent,” she said, brightening at the thought. “A tent and some food, that's all we need.”

  “You'll want something to drink, surely. I don't know if we can carry more than a magnum or two, if we have to hoof it.”

  “Don't be a bore, darling. The Wandervögel don't touch alcohol, you know that. We must live cleanly from here on! Now komm mit, before it gets dark.”

  The trail wasn't hard, thank God. So many young German feet had trodden it down the past couple of days you could've found your way by the dark of the moon, just from the feel of the ground. The landscape was predictably picturesque, scattered Dörfer and smallholdings that petered out into more thickly wooded terrain, Hölderlin oaks of requisite antiquity, Nietzschean crags and gorges. Butler was no naturalist. The most he would give the scenery was an acknowledgment that it was, as the locals would say, charakteristisch.

  You smelled the campfires before you could see where the smoke was coming from. You heard sounds as well—nothing as clear as speech or as evocative as voices raised in song, more a kind of buzzing or murmuring such as often rises from a meadow at the height of May, the combined life-sounds of bugs and bees and scurrying rodents and chittering birds and screeching crickets—except this had a human timbre, hard to define yet unmistakable. Finally you rounded a turn and before you lay the whole amazing spectacle: a mountainside bright with banners, prickling with bodies like so many moving cilia, specked with the orange of open fires and the black of those tents known as Kohten, shaped like lathed-down cones and said to derive from a Lappish original. Again, wholly charakteristisch. Nevertheless impressive, if you were impressionable. Butler was not. Sissi surprised him with a girlish capacity for awe.

  “Oh, Sammy, look!”

  “Why do you call me that?” he said, knowing even so that it was not the nickname that annoyed him.

  She gave him a twinkling Russian smile, innocently mocking. “Because it suits you better than the other one. Butler is a foolish name, don't you agree? A butler is the chief servant of an English household. And you are nobody's servant, dushka moy. Maybe you long to be, maybe that is the secret of your name. But let us go now and find an icy mountain stream so that I can splash my face. That's all I need, then I will be ready for the party.”

  “Party? What makes you think there'll be a party?”

  She gave him a look he knew well and detested: the one that implied he was, after all, only a naïve American.

  “Here we are, Liebe, in the middle of… did you see the Tagesspiegel gives the attendance at thirty thousand? Thirty thousand young people, not all of them children, either. There certainly will be a party.”

  One thing turned into another. The quest for a tent led them to a booth on the arcade run by the summit's organizers, from whom you could acquire such needful things as a program book, a box of matches, and a cloth patch to sew on your rucksack, “Freideutscher Jugendtag August 1929” scripted around an emblem carried over from 1913: a bird in flight over a trio of squiggly lines that might have suggested water, or a musical staff, or the strings of a guitar. The booth was manned by a harried-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, clearly a Meissner vet. His name was Karlheinz but he had chosen, in the fashion of the Movement, to be known as Kai.

  This much Sissi got out of him in a matter of seconds, along with the fact that he lived in Chemnitz and had published a smattering of poetry. Since poets tend to be aware of other poets, if only to disapprove of them, Sissi quizzed him until they turned up a mutual acquaintance, a gloomy expatriate named Vlad. From Kai's expression you would guess he had little good to say about Vlad, but that was of no account. Sissi shrieked in delight and fell upon Kai like an old friend, grasping his arm and murmuring into his ear—tales of amusing mishaps on the journey from the capital, a joke at her own expense concerning inappropriate footwear, all in a torrent of Berlinersprach Butler could barely comprehend, with its blurred consonants and catlike vowels, and probably neither could Kai. That was of no account either.

  In twenty minutes, a perky young woman arrived to take a turn in the booth, and Kai was striding arm-in-arm with Sissi, Butler some paces back, on a path through the woods to a smaller mountain that was not, he promised, too far off.

  “The dj.1.11 are up there,” Kai told them. “Do you know of them, the deutsche Jungenschaft von 1. November? Quite a distinct group.”

  “Those are the ones who write everything in lowercase,” said Butler.

  Kai nodded, overlooking the possibility that Butler's comment might be sarcastic. “They are quite selective in their membership, and seem always to get the best of everything. Now they have the best campsite. The view at dawn! You can scarcely imagine.”

  Butler thought that, for Sissi, to imagine the view at dawn from any-place—even her own bathroom—would be a stretch.

  “If there is no extra tent,” said Kai, “then you can use mine. I should not mind sleeping under the heavens. As long as I can sleep. This has been a most wearying day.”

  By the time they reached the top—Butler soaked in sweat, Sissi fresh and irreverent as a mockingbird—they found everything just as Kai had described. The spot was magnificent, a stark promontory of silver-gray rock rolling like petrified waves to a thrilling drop-off in the southeast. They had climbed above the haze that clung to the lower slopes, and the view seemed to stretch out forever, right to the Iron Mountains on the Czech frontier. The Höhe Meissner itself stood an uncertain distance to the north—two kilometers? five?— and between th
e two peaks you could look almost straight down into the lake called Frau-Holle-Quell, whose dark oval face was aswirl in clouds, like Snow White's magic mirror.

  The vegetation at this height consisted of stunted conifers and a furze of waxy-leaved bushes with tiny berries the color of eggplant. As for tents, a quite large one was set back from the cliff—surrounded by boys in dark blue open-necked shirts who Butler supposed were the dj.1.11—and several smaller ones scattered like satellites, some of them pitched at odd angles, others barely hanging on against the pull of the wind. Butler had no idea what held any of them upright; there seemed too little soil up here to drive a stake into.

  At the center of the open space, half a dozen blueshirts were building a wooden pyramid out of roughly sawn logs. It must've taken them all afternoon to haul the wood up here. A deal of trouble just for a bonfire; but that was German Youth for you. He pulled out his notebook. He would jot down some impressions.

  “Sammy, darling!” Sissi sprang from a rock with a tall, stiff-backed youth in tow. “Look who I found over there, with all those nice boys—it's Count Berti! Alex is here too, he says. Can you believe it?”

  Of course he could. The upper classes of Europe lived in a very small village that happened to be spread over the entire continent: a salon here, a hunting lodge there, an overfurnished flat somewhere else. They all knew one another and they shared a faculty, like a blood scent, for stumbling upon their peers in unlikely circumstances. If a Prussian baron were shot down while bombing France, his parachute would touch down on the lawn of a marquis who happened to be his third cousin, and there enjoy a luncheon of freshly bagged quail before being sent off to genteel internment.

  Count Berti, who looked no older than twenty, extended a hand and gave Butler a clever, ironic little smile, perhaps a wordless confidence regarding their mutual friend Sissi, while saying in an unimpeachable tone, “Von Stauffenberg. Please call me Berthold, I am often confused with my brothers Alexander and Claus. Alexander is around here someplace. Claus has just finished his officer training and cannot be bothered with the affairs of youth. Sissi tells me, Herr Randolph, you come from Virginia?” Without waiting for an answer he switched to flawless Oxbridge English. “It is a beautiful state, I am told. Regrettably I've never had a chance to visit America, though I hope someday to do so. Germans and Americans are of a type, I believe.”

  Butler disagreed but it didn't seem worth mentioning. The Count was just being gracious. Noblesse oblige.

  Now Kai legged it over toting a great stoneware jug that was evidently full. “Berthold!” he exclaimed, seeing Stauffenberg. “That's perfect, I was certain you'd like to meet our new friend from America. Berthold,” he explained to Butler, “has always been interested in foreigners. That is refreshing, isn't it, in these days of hurrah-patriotism.”

  Butler nodded absently; he must remember this term, Hurrapatriotismus. That sort of detail would do nicely for Collier's.

  “Berthold also is a poet,” Kai purred on. “A protégé of the famous Stefan George. Are you an admirer of George, Sammy?”

  Butler sensed this was some kind of test. Rather than admit he wouldn't know a George poem if it were carved by the hand of God in the rock before him, he said, “Most people call me Butler. Only Sissi here—”

  “Ach, Sissi!” Berthold laughed. “She has her own names for everyone. Ist das nicht wahr, Fürsterin?”

  “For myself, I do not care for George,” Kai announced. “I find him elitist, revanchist, overly nationalistic, and a terrible snob. They would drum me out of the dj.1.11, I'm afraid—they're all George ‘fans,’ as you Yanks would say. Fine fellows nonetheless. Look here what I've got from them! Some of their famous tchaj!”

  He hefted the jug, and from the Mephistophelean nature of his smile, and the knowing look that passed over Stauffenberg's face, Butler guessed Sissi was right. There would be a party. A jolly little party by firelight.

  “The Left made a tactical error,” the young Count declared, tossing a pebble toward the edge of the cliff, where it vanished in the darkness. “They should never have moved to amend the Meissner-Formel. Once that door was opened, the Right came charging through, and now see the mess we've got.”

  He spoke in quiet, measured tones as though they were gathered around a table in a candlelit séparé, and not at a bonfire on a mountaintop, their conversation drowned at times by raucous singing from the dj.1.11 side. A chilling wind came from the east but occasionally changed directions, whipping smoke around in Butler's eyes.

  “But the Left was correct in its arguments,” said Kai, louder than necessary. His passions were inflamed. “The amendment is needed precisely because the Right has become so radicalized. So angered.”

  “I am not speaking of the merits of the proposal,” Stauffenberg said stiffly. “I am speaking of cause and effect. Now the newspapers are going to have—what do Americans say, Butler? A field day, yes?”

  “We ought to be talking about tradition.” This was Petra, the young woman who had taken Kai's place in the organizers' booth. She was ostelbisch, perhaps Silesian, with straw-blond hair brushed back from a wide Slavic face and light brown, almond-shaped eyes. Her features looked especially striking in the light from the fire, which by this late hour had burned down to an orange heap that reminded Butler of a smashed Halloween pumpkin. “We ought to remain true to our own history. It was Wyneken himself who told us in 1913—you were here, Kai, you must remember—' The Youth Movement does not end at the borders of nation or language or race.' What the Left wanted to achieve was to make the language of the Formel embody this principle, on which all of us agree.”

  “We don't all agree,” said a yellow-haired student from the Sudetenland, his face pink from several mugs of tchaj. “If we did, the motion would have passed. Instead we've got people stealing from one another, having fistfights, hurling racial insults…it is a kind of sacrilege.”

  “The original Formel was a compromise, Ulrich,” Stauffenberg said calmly, his face half in shadow. “That was the only way to get anything accomplished in 1913, with so many factions at the table, and it remains so today. Indeed more so, as the Movement has become more fragmented. Our problem is not that we disagree. It is that we have lost our willingness to compromise, to find some meeting ground. Unmistakably, the Right came hoping for a quarrel—something they could turn into an open struggle, a street brawl, over who should control the Movement.”

  “No one should control the Movement!” Kai practically shouted.

  “And the Left,” persisted Stauffenberg, “has been happy to oblige them. Now I fear there may be no way to save the situation. It is Jena 1919 all over again. Perhaps even worse this time. Think how terrible this must look to outsiders! Though I suppose you could say this too is in keeping with our tradition.” He smiled at Petra, who beamed back at him, seemingly thrilled by his attention. Then he sighed. “And all this over a couple of words on a piece of paper.”

  Butler waited a few moments, to be sure no one had more to say. The dj.1.11 lads were rocking back and forth in an imaginary storm, roaring a comical sea chantey: We're off to Scandinavia, crossing the cold North Sea, leaving this land where we're mehr bekannt und mehr verbannt (notorious and widely banned). Then he asked, “Fistfight? Stealing? When did all this happen?”

  Count Berthold rose from his place at the fire, stretched a bit, then strolled off into the shadows, the topic of fistfights apparently not to his liking. The pink-faced student leaned closer. “They say Americans were involved. Jews, they say. Some of the Jungdo boys claim the Americans attacked them.”

  “Jungdo?” said Butler. He did not want to be so indiscreet as to pull out his notebook. On the other hand, he needed to get the facts straight.

  “Jungdeutsche Orden,” explained the pink-faced Sudetenlander.

  Order of Young Germans: a name, thought Butler, some might find redundant.

  Kai made a rude noise. “Yes, I'm sure a gang of American Jews came all the way to Hessen to
pick on the innocent Jungdo. That's the lot that got thrown out of Stuttgart last summer for disrupting a performance of Mahler. Song of the Earth, I think.”

  “What's wrong, don't they like the Earth?” bubbled Sissi, half drunk. She swooned with laughter at her own joke, leaning on Kai's arm for support. He didn't seem to mind.

  “No, the Second Symphony,” said Petra. “A beautiful work. So sad, though.”

  “Mahler was ein rassischer Jude,” explained Kai. “Racially Jewish, though nonreligious and culturally assimilated. That's too much for the Jungdo to bear. Jewish music must not be played on German soil! No, this tale of marauding Americans is too preposterous. It cannot be true.”

  Butler agreed. But then, truth was not what chiefly concerned him. He wanted to hear more. This might be the angle he was looking for.

  The Sudeten boy did not need much encouragement. As he heard it, someone connected with the Jungdo—a grown-up, perhaps a group sponsor—claimed that some of his private papers had been stolen, as well as a sum of money. He identified the culprit, who turned out to be an American Jew working in collusion with SAJ—the Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend, who everyone knew to be traitors to the Fatherland. Only no sooner had this criminal been arrested, and an investigation begun in keeping with the honorable tradition of German justice, than a gang of the Jew's confederates swooped in, beat the innocent Jungdo senseless and ran off into the night. Now their whereabouts were unknown, but the Order meant to track them down and right the scales.