The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Our shovels are the weapons of peace,

  Our camps are castles in the countryside.

  Yesterday divided by class and standing,

  Yesterday the one avoided the other,

  Today we dig together in the sand.

  There was a military briskness to the entire program, from our rousing at 4 A.M. to our dormitory life and bland meals, and our long, callus-producing hours spent in sun, wind, and rain. My regiment was building an autobahn: one of the early highways that would someday connect with other autobahns, connect all of Germany, perhaps even minimize our regional differences—in other words, a peaceful pursuit. But also a multi-pronged strategy. Good highways could serve a wide range of purposes. We did nearly everything by hand; there was rarely a construction machine or heavy vehicle in sight because the more human labor we required, the more people were temporarily fed, housed, and exercised. Elsewhere in the nation, regiments were draining swamps or reclaiming soil.

  It wasn’t easy, but in a sense, I was glad to have served in the Reichsarbeitsdienst. For one thing, it made me theoretically eligible for university. Due to changing national priorities and ideologies, university enrollment was no longer strongly encouraged and admissions had been restricted, though of course not eliminated. I had no idea, to be honest, if I qualified in other ways—I was now older than a typical applicant and my earlier education might not suffice—but it was still a dream of mine, one encouraged by the art dealer, Betelmann, who was kind enough to praise my potential.

  But there was another reason I was glad to have served. Having heard my father’s war stories, knowing how much he had changed as a result of that terrible conflict, and having spent so many of those childhood beer-hall hours listening to other men who were similarly haunted, I had truly feared military service. But the Labor Service was like the military, and—remembering that I had already healed from my injury and now looked even more like everyone else—I made it through.

  So when, just after the Berlin Olympics, I was drafted into the Wehrmacht Heer, I wasn’t as upset as I might have been. It wouldn’t be so bad, I figured, and someday I’d have my own stories to tell—in university, when all this was done, or back at the art dealership where I might find a way to earn commissions selling not copies but authentic classical objects.

  That accepting attitude got me through the first five weeks of training: firearms instead of spades, and finding my place among my fellow Landsers. Then, one night, I heard three men in my Gruppe talking about another man they disliked, a farm boy named Ackerman, a kid who had attracted teasing from day one for his dedication to the platoon’s rabbits. Ackerman had informed on them for taking the wire cutters he used to maintain the rabbit hutches. They’d stolen the tool to cut a gap in a barbed-wire fence, hoping to exploit the break on an upcoming evening when they planned to sneak out of camp and visit a brothel in the neighboring town.

  This simply wasn’t done. When it was time for that sort of entertainment, a field brothel would come to our camp, we had been told. An order would be followed: a health check for the rifleman, issuance of a condom, and a can of disinfectant spray that had to be returned empty. These three in my Gruppe were rebellious and impatient in a way that would be unimaginable a few years later, but this was only 1936, and these were new recruits—fellow Labor Service boys who thought they already knew it all.

  Even after getting caught for messing with the barbed wire, even after serving their punishment—reduced rations, extra latrine duty, prohibition from sending or receiving mail to girlfriends back home—they still planned to try to sneak out the following Friday. Invited to come along, I told them I’d think about it. I’d learned that the middle path was the safest: breaking some rules, but not many; eating some tripe, no matter how green or suspect; taking part in some schemes, but not others, and never tattling. I had at least one excuse for not going out that coming weekend: an officer in camp had seen some nature sketches I’d done and wondered if I might draw his portrait on Saturday. I’d told him I was no good at drawing real people, but you can bet that I started practicing with an electric torch under the covers every night that week.

  Now the three others challenged Ackerman to cover for them, should anyone come poking around their bunks after midnight—a major task, given that our superior officer was now more alert to mischief. And if Ackerman didn’t cover? They would make him a Jew. I’d heard of ways to make a Jew a gentile—feed him pork, make him claim allegiance to Jesus—but not vice versa. How does one turn a gentile into a Jew?

  “Just make sure the blade is good and sharp,” someone at the table said. “He’s bound to squirm and you’ll hurt yourself as well as him.”

  “Oh—” I said out loud, hand dropping to the table with an audible thunk, unable to conceal my horror. With the other hand I clutched my own side, that tender, scarred spot, in sympathetic pain. Without that wound, I might have believed the men were only joking, showing off. But unfortunately, I knew what a person, armed with a knife and some asinine ideas, could do.

  The man next to me smirked at my dismay. “Oh?”

  “I forgot something.”

  “What?” He was still testing me, probing for any indication that I would stand in their way or report what I had just heard. “You didn’t forget who your friends are, did you?”

  “No, no,” I stammered. “I only forgot that I don’t have enough charcoal or high-grade paper. I’ll have to get to an art store somehow, if I’m going to sketch Hauptmann Becker on Saturday.”

  Pushing away my plate, I hurried directly to the officers’ tent and explained my enthusiasm for our upcoming portrait session. Becker was occupied Saturday, as it turned out. Sunday would be better. I needed more supplies, I told him. All the better, he said, I could use Saturday to go shopping. He not only gave me a pass to leave camp, but arranged for a ride—not just to the closest village, but all the way to Munich, my hometown, nearly ninety minutes away. I should get oil paints as well, he said. This time I had the sense not to mention that I did not paint with oils. Now I had my entire weekend booked with excuses.

  Whatever my Kameraden did, it need not involve me. Whatever happened, I could not be asked to handle any knife. I left a cryptic message for Ackerman telling him to be on his guard, but honestly, once I left that note on his bunk, I pushed the matter out of my mind—not thinking I’d be punished someday for that cowardly amnesia, not thinking that this was only one such decision life would send my way and there would be many others, not realizing that moments like this were like a sculptor’s tools, revealing the shape of the true self locked within. What I did not—perhaps could not—yet understand was that character, rather than genetics or racial differences or minor biological oddities, is the real mystery of life.

  At the time, I felt only lucky, and bound to get luckier with every kilometer traveled away from our camp. In Munich that Saturday, wandering the aisles of a small art supply store, fingering the brushes and caressing the tips of soft gray pencils, inhaling the clean smells of paper and paint, I heard a man call out to me. He was well dressed, in a crisp suit, wool coat, and white muffler, holding a large, brown parcel—a freshly framed artwork of some kind, retrieved from the corner of the store where an old man cut mats, hammered wood, and touched up the gilt on antique frames.

  “Berlin,” he called out, shifting the package from his right hand to his left in order to shake my hand. “The Olympic stadium. I saw you there. I applauded your moral act. I would have made my own departure, but I was another man’s guest—such difficult tickets to acquire! And besides, I was hoping to sell him a painting later.”

  “Oh—yes?” I wanted my hand back, but he was still massaging my knuckles.

  “And then, in the beer hall near the stadium, I happened to spot you. I called out, but you didn’t hear. Isn’t that strange? Three times now—a lucky number. One shouldn’t ignore signs. Are you an artist?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you’re buying art
supplies.”

  The sketchpad and pencils were tucked beneath my left arm.

  “Come to lunch next door,” he insisted. “I’m meeting a friend who is an art dealer, very well traveled—Italy, Greece, Egypt. His name is Keller.”

  “I should be getting back to my Zug.”

  He was a big man—mustachioed, red cheeked, well fed. He insisted on standing close to me, touching my arm with his free hand. “What’s the hurry? Let me be honest—Herr Keller keeps a Mediterranean schedule. I don’t know when he’ll turn up late or on time, so I show up on the dot and end up waiting more often than not. It gives me indigestion. But here, you can tell me some stories. We can discuss the finer things.”

  Before I had even caught his name, our arms were linked and he was guiding me out of the art supply store. That is how I ended up dining with the mining magnate-turned-art aficionado Heinrich Röthel, who would go on to help organize one of the first Third Reich art “shopping lists,” which would become the starting point for the art curatorial office, Sonderprojekt, in which I would ultimately work. Much later, this list would be expanded upon by top museum professionals. Röthel was no professional himself. If anything, the scholars and major museum directors intimidated him, but he had strong opinions, he had lots of money, and he knew a lot about people and politics and slightly less about European masterpieces.

  The maître d’ seated us at the table Röthel had reserved, a small round table for two under a nineteenth-century painting of two water nymphs—romantic, probably Austrian, but the nymphs’ diaphanous robes were painted without fidelity to gravity or lighting, and their hands, so difficult for any artist to paint, were conveniently hidden within the robes’ folds. I hurried through my first course, expecting to make a quick exit as soon as Herr Keller appeared.

  Röthel asked, “Do you know why the Louvre has so many great artworks?”

  I had never visited Paris and couldn’t have ventured an opinion about any of the great museum’s collections.

  He supplied the answer: “Napoleon! Most of that artwork is looted German art. Have you ever thought of working in a museum? Perhaps when you finish up in the army?”

  “I’ve only begun my basic training.”

  Without apology to Keller, my generous host ordered the next course. He expounded upon four centuries of German art, culminating in the work of Arno Breker, sculptor of impossibly wide shoulders, bursting forearms, and improbably square jaws—all works that were not in my area of expertise, nor aligned with my own artistic taste. Röthel kept quizzing me and feeding me; I had nothing to supply in return, so when the conversation turned briefly to Ancient Greece, I was grateful.

  “The Olympic Games and fine sculpture—the Greeks started it all, didn’t they?” Röthel said.

  “The two, hand in hand,” I agreed, setting down my fork, feeling I should say something rather than keep shoveling food like the hungry, unrefined soldier-in-training that I was.

  “I see we’ve hit upon an interest,” he said, smirking as I wiped my mouth. “Tell me. Don’t be shy.”

  “Well, all right—though I don’t know very much.” Saying those words, I heard and saw myself from a distance: the self-educated son of a working-class man, the hesitant laborer and dread-filled recruit, a person who had only a few more chances—maybe only one—to rise above his present station. Sport and art were all I knew. Of those, only the latter could guide my life now, but of course, the art I loved best incorporated both sport and the human form.

  I began to explain to Röthel that the first classical statues were kouroi, stiff and unrealistic nude males, copied by visiting Greeks from the Egyptian style in the seventh century B.C. But the classical marble nudes we know, the sculptures we have come to love, were created back in the city-states and inspired by the Greek culture of competitive sports. Later, the Romans would treat sports as entertainment.

  “For the Romans, everything was entertainment,” Röthel agreed, flagging down the waiter for more wine.

  “But for the Greeks, it was more primal,” I explained, losing any self-consciousness to excitement. “A contest, a struggle, where losing was out of the question. Sports were really a preparation for war. Every citizen had to be prepared to defend his city-state. Athletic victors were allowed to have sculptures cast in their images. Hundreds, probably thousands, of such sculptures were made. Finally—sculptures of real people, not of fertility figures or abstract gods. Methods were improved; standards were established. Realistic sculpting of the human body reached its zenith. So we have a connection between war and sport and art—”

  The lozenge of veal that Röthel had ordered for me had gone cold on my plate, under a lid of rubbery sauce. I had gone on too long.

  Just then, Herr Keller appeared at the table. The maître d’ rushed to fit in a third chair.

  “No, go on, don’t stop,” Herr Röthel urged me, as soon as quick introductions had been made. “This young man was impressing me.” He turned to Keller. “Do you remember in Berlin, the lady documentarian—Leni—who was filming the Games? She kept going on about the athletic Greek statues as works worthy of emulation and acquisition. This generated interest at the highest of levels.”

  “Of course,” Keller said, taking a menu. “There has always been interest. That goes without saying.”

  When I stood up to relinquish my seat, unwilling to disrupt the lunch party any further, Röthel held onto my wrist. “If I’d had you at my side, a young voice passionate about history, we might have talked some important people into loosening their purse strings.”

  Herr Keller, eyes hidden and chin tucked into his neck, grumbled to himself. “Demand is never the question. Supply is the question.”

  “Of course it is! We’re not negating the art dealer’s role. But what the Reich needs—outside of the existing museums—is an entirely new apparatus, a small staff to research these issues.”

  “There is work being done in Berlin.”

  “Must everything always be done in Berlin?” Röthel pointed to the bag beneath my feet, my parcel of paper and pencils, which I had been unwilling to have checked because I wanted to be able to make my exit freely, without fuss. “Tell me again, who is your commanding officer? How much longer do you have to serve in the Wehrmacht Heer? How would you like to meet some interesting people?”

  I said I would, and Röthel would go on to prove himself and his connections, many times over, as I knew he would. As I recalled our fortuitous encounter later that night, lying on my bunk back at our guarded compound, I already felt more free.

  And what happened to Ackerman while I was away from camp? A little skirmish, but he had fought back and achieved some sort of tense stalemate with our comrades. What bothered me most upon my return to camp was how he tried to thank me for the meager warning, as if I’d done him some favor. If anything, I’d learned the wrong lesson: that a middle ground—dare I call it a pose?—between paralysis and action was possible.

  My antiques job with Betelmann had never impressed my father. My new job, to which I reported barely a week later thanks to Röthel’s apparently effortless pulling of strings, most definitely did impress him. He would have much preferred me as a top athlete, but second to that, a government career wasn’t bad—especially when I explained to him how the top Nazi officials were art collectors.

  “Really? All of them?” he asked.

  “Yes. Each wants to imitate the other, to see who can collect the most,” I replied. Well, this sort of basic competition my father could understand.

  “Your luck has turned, my son,” he said, sounding the happiest I’d ever heard him. This was perhaps the only moment when his hand on my shoulder felt non-threatening, like a simple exchange of joy and warmth. “A little dignity and reward for the Vogler family, at long last.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Can’t we go any faster?”

  “No. We’ll miss something.”

  “But the faster we go, the faster we can get to his girlfriend
’s farm and wake him up and be done with all this.”

  “He isn’t at the farm.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He isn’t sleeping.”

  Cosimo spotted the shrine we had passed the night before and made a swift turn. But once stopped, he seemed hesitant to open the door.

  “This morning,” he explained, “I walked up toward the main road, away from where we parked—I was just off the shoulder, taking care of morning business—and I saw a red car go by.”

  “Interesting,” I said as flatly as possible.

  “He did not see me. He did not see the truck.”

  “Which he?”

  “Keller. That was his prize car that I saw. His red Zagato Spider.”

  “And the Roman truck, too?”

  “No. He told us they were suspekt. But maybe that was only to get us away from them, traveling the road alone, so that he and any others he has hired could take the statue without being seen.”

  While I skeptically resisted absorbing this news, Cosimo opened his door and gestured for me to do the same. We walked past the shrine to a water spigot that had been dripping slowly, dampening the dusty ground. He leaned down to pick up a cigarette butt, squeezing the end between his fingers. Thirty or forty of them littered the ground.

  “At least three or four men waited here last night for us to show up.”

  “Or one chain smoker.”

  But Cosimo was serious. “He would need that many to move the statue. Keller assembled a team to take the statue and to sell it to whatever buyer is waiting.”