Karin began telling Anna about young officers soon to be sent back to the front, stripping off their gray tunics and shirts to sun themselves on the Walden lawns. Rows of white bodies glinting on green grass, like trout freshly pulled from a stream. She described the one-armed cavalryman she’d watched struggling to mount a spirited horse and bursting into tears when he couldn’t manage it. She described the baron’s unexpected homecoming in the middle of the night, in the middle of the war, the dressings on his hand soaked in brown blood, more blood crusted on his uniform, smelling awful. She described a wheelchair race organized by nursing sisters, a young officer wailing and beating his head and fists on the grass after he had lost.
When Karin fell silent Anna reached over, took her gloved hand, and kissed it. An unusual—bizarre—gesture between women, especially old-line Prussian gentry like Anna von Rabou. “Thank you, Miss Weinbrenner, for your gifts, your beautiful, terrible, painful gifts of the war.”
Later Karin witnessed Anna provoking others to spill memory, and came to understand this was how Anna Rabou as a writer operated in the world. Bored by anecdotes, Anna was interested only in fragments, raw shards of memory: material details: textures, light, scent. She was interested in her interviewees’ powers of recall, not of reflection. She didn’t want memories that had already been assembled into anecdotes and assigned meaning. She wanted raw snapshots of a scene—mise-en-scène—not “story” about what had happened. Anna absorbed other people’s basic sensory impressions of a scene and by infusing these with dialogue and fitting them into a dramatic arc, she forced them into her own novels, plays, and films.
She was married to Fred Scheps, the most famous film director in Germany. Stories about them ran in the illustrated papers: a glamorous Berlin pair. Rabou had established her fame with her novels and had just started writing screenplays for the talkies at the Universum Film AG lot at Neubabelsberg in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The famous UFA.
Even in those days it was apparent that the talking pictures were more than a technological advance, more than compounds of light and electromagnetic signal on reels of chemically treated film. Talking pictures possessed powers like magic did, or like our dreams.
But no one outside the business knew anything about how such pictures were actually put together. When Karin confessed she had not the slightest idea of how a film like Westfront 1918 was made, or what it was made of, Anna insisted she must come out to Neubabelsberg to see the process for herself.
“Filmmaking isn’t hocus-pocus, Miss Weinbrenner. It’s like building motor cars, or making a soufflé. Skilled, industrious people work together, everyone doing his bit. A picture comes first, yes, from the brain of a writer but that is like saying the soufflé comes from the hen. Yes, ultimately it does, but so what? There is more to cookery than egg production. But come out and see for yourself, Miss Weinbrenner. Take the S-Bahn out to Neubabelsberg, or a car if you have one at your disposal. I’ll give you lunch. You’ll light the place up. Will you come? You must give me your word of honor.”
From photographs I’ve seen, Rabou at that period dressed in a style all her own: severely tailored dresses, Javanese scarves, a felt hat like a helmet. It was all about line and form with her. The one time I met her, the impression was severe, elegant, and somehow classical, though it was hard to imagine anyone in the classical world, or in any other period had ever dressed quite the way she did.
Later, after the Nazi takeover, she would pose in whipcord breeches and English riding boots, a cigarette in one hand, a little whip in the other.
The Reichsbanner parade passed. Normal traffic resumed on the boulevard, and soon a great blue Mercedes drew up at the curb, the driver honking impatiently. Karin recognized silver-haired Fred Scheps.
(Scheps was another under the llano spell. He read Winnetou as a schoolboy in Vienna.)
Anna kissed her cousin Zeiten, then shook hands with Karin and made her promise to come out to the studio the next day. Karin surprised herself by swearing she would.
UFA had lost a lot of money on Fred Scheps’s penultimate silent picture Urbanos, with its cast of thousands and old-fashioned melodramatic acting. The old silent-film studio at Templehof had been abandoned, and UFA relocated to Neubabelsberg, where they built four enormous soundstages joined in one giant cruciform building, the Tonkreuz—the cross of sound—which became a symbol of German moviemaking.
When she went out to the lot, Karin found to her dismay that Anna Rabou had arranged a screen test. Karin had zero interest in being a performer, and her looks weren’t the kind that made sense on film, at least films of that era. But on the sets that day she encountered dozens of purposeful, very skilled people—set carpenters, costume designers, actors—working toward a common goal. The beehive atmosphere was exhilarating. For weeks she’d been living a monastic existence in the middle of the Berlin delirium, and now she was ready for excitement and companionship. She was keen to learn, eager to develop her powers as a writer.
One of the first things Anna Rabou had done at the studio was organize a canteen. No one at UFA was paid very much, so healthy delicious food was one of the great boons of working there. She sometimes worked in the canteen herself, baking enormous loaves of rye bread and preparing her own recipes for leek soup and lentil stew. Everyone on the lot—producers, directors, grips, stars, extras—ate at Anna’s canteen. No one went hungry, and everyone was treated exactly the same. She loaned money to all sorts of people at UFA without expecting repayment.
Everyone at UFA loved to see Anna Rabou ladling out homemade soup while discussing the latest draft of a script with its producer and making sure actors and crew—anyone who had something to say—were included in the discussion. Anna believed in new German technologies in optics, sound, and film chemistry and in making new kinds of art possible. And she believed successful films worked the same way German opera did, especially Wagner, where magical nonsense was handled with such magnificent seriousness that it transcended itself and became intimate, human, and piercing.
When Anna offered Karin a job as her secretary, Karin surprised herself by accepting it. She was drawn to the purposeful energy and bustle on the studio lot. Her periods of silence and withdrawal were almost always followed by periods of high energy, sociability, connection. Later in the decade, our weekends in Berlin incorporated those polarities: daylight hours were spent quietly, calmly, often reading in bed, but at night we roved the electric city, neon Berlin, riding trams and trains to venues in distant suburbs, seeking out our raucous Kansas City jazz, dancing until dawn.
Before sound, film scripts had been lists of scenes and locations, brief character profiles, along with a few lines of dialogue that might be put up on cards. But sound films demanded lines that fit an actor’s mouth and sounded natural when spoken. Anna Rabou was one of the pioneers writing real dialogue for real actors to speak and vast audiences to hear.
In her first days on the lot Karin merely typed out Anna’s pages, using a studio typewriter with a three-colored ribbon: red for camerawork, black for action, dialogue in blue. When Anna felt blocked by problems of structure, they talked through stories together. They developed scenes and came up with dialogue by acting them out in Rabou’s office. It was great fun.
It was the period when Karin started keeping the Arten von Licht notebook, which survives. It means Kinds of Light. Sometimes she is trying to imagine herself as a camera and writes about varieties of light, which is all a camera sees when it looks at the world. She also used the notebook to practice her written English. And she had a habit of copying in extracts from her wide reading about el llano.
The UFA studio was a film factory. Anna Rabou couldn’t keep up with the demand for scenarios, and within a couple of weeks Karin was writing her own dialogue for scenes sometimes shot the following day. The pictures were mostly costume dramas set in royal courts of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a genre unaccountably popular in Germany in those earliest days of sound. They weren’
t classics of cinema, but she was a young woman learning the new language of film, and learning quickly.
Karin had begun a career. I, meanwhile, was still without a job.
I’d earned top marks at school. I had my Abitur, but I didn’t see how my parents could support me for three or four more years while I studied law at university. Anyway, I didn’t wish to become a lawyer.
In Frankfurt it wasn’t a good season for job hunting. Every week thousands were losing their jobs. I applied at dozens of firms and didn’t get a single interview.
There was radio by then, and a jazz program late at night. Music of speed, music of dreams. I heard Louis Armstrong for the first time in my bedroom at Newport. Swing was just starting, and many of the popular tunes were from Broadway shows. I’d lie in bed listening to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind,” Bix Beiderbecke on coronet. During the empty days I felt immobilized, frozen, stuck, helpless. Late at night, jazz broke loneliness in half and made it almost inspiring. The music was everything to me.
I still put in two afternoons a week at Kaufman’s law office, translating documents mostly concerning apparently endless legal battles with His Majesty’s government over property expropriated from the baron in 1914, including his sailboat Hermione II and his house Sanssouci. I was paid very little. Kaufman really felt I ought to be working gratis and grateful for the experience.
Fed up with my passivity, my father at last approached Hermann Weinbrenner and asked for his advice. The next day I was summoned to the library where I found the little baron, brown as a walnut, sitting behind his wonderful naval desk.
“Ah so, dear Billy! Enter! Enter!”
He smiled brightly. I was groomed and polished—my father had seen to that—and the baron was alert to every detail. He was always absorbing new information, updating his own ideas and opinions—and he had opinions on everything.
“Well, my dear Billy, here is some news. Your interview has been arranged with Dr. Ziegler of IG Farben’s Translation Department. By the way, that is an excellent suit; you are as debonair as your father, I am pleased to see. Very much the English gentleman. I’m sure quite successful with the ladies.”
“Well, not exactly.”
My romance with Kaufman’s junior secretary Heidi had culminated in a bout of kissing at the cinema when I took her to see Gary Cooper as the Llano Kid, a young bandit with a price on his head, in The Texan. I’d spent one rainy Saturday at a muddy farm up in the Taunus, paying my respects to her family. After an enormous lunch I persuaded Heidi to take a walk in the woods with me. She said her mother thought I didn’t seem very “strong.”
“What does that mean?”
“She says perhaps you cannot do the work of a man.”
“Utterly ridiculous.”
“She means the work of a farmer. Your bones aren’t heavy enough.”
It was clear to me that Heidi’s parents’ opinions mattered a good deal to her, and shortly thereafter she left Kaufman’s to marry a young swine farmer from her village. The lawyer’s new secretary, Frau Fleck, was an older woman who viewed me, unfairly, as a spoiled, idle, rich boy. I was spoiled and idle, but not rich.
“We Germans, Billy, relish a sense of belonging!”
The baron popped out of his chair and came around the massive desk. Slight and wiry, bristling with energy and drive, Karin’s father wasn’t fiery, exactly—he was too cool minded and rational—but I never saw him carefree or relaxed. And he never could sit still.
That afternoon he wore a green-and-blue-striped polo jersey and a pair of riding breeches. The narrow Vandyke beard on his chin was clipped very close. His brown eyes were lit with intelligence and, I would say, wariness. The animal he most resembled was a fox: clever, resourceful, nimble.
“Billy!” He was peering up at me, smiling.
I was seven or eight inches taller. Probably I had not been quite real to him before, just a boy on the estate, even though I was his godson and namesake.
“In August 1914, Billy, the Uhlanen-Garde were the finest soldiers, the finest body of men, in the world. Do you know what was the quality they possessed above all that allowed them to be such excellent troops?”
“Courage?”
“Loyalty! A Uhlan was ready to die for the honor of the regiment. You cannot ask more than that of a man. Billy, I am pleased to have arranged your interview with Dr. Anton Ziegler. But you’ll have to win the position on your own merits. He won’t have you on my say-so. IG Farben cannot take in every booby who wants a place merely because one of the directors happens to be the booby’s godfather. I’m not saying you’re a booby, you understand. But as to whether you’ve a head for business, how should I know? I’m sure you have your father’s pristine character, but do you also have his drive? In short: you’ll have to stand up on your own legs and convince Anton Ziegler you’ve the makings of an IG man.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“Billy! My point is that men seeking to join an organization, I don’t care if it’s the priesthood, a regiment, or a business firm, must be prepared to offer total loyalty. Any organization of human beings that can’t command such loyalty is crippled and pathetic. And a man who doesn’t feel that he belongs to something larger and greater than himself sooner or later simply gives up the struggle of life. He succumbs. You see it all around us these days, millions without work and, eventually, without hope. If you join an organization you had better be able to believe you work for a higher good, something bigger than yourself, or you’ll never find it in yourself to make the sacrifices required. In short, you must be willing to bleed. That is the spirit of the Uhlanen of August 1914. It wasn’t that they had the best mounts or the first pick of conscripts. What made them great was the unquenchable spirit of loyalty.”
I had heard my father remark that the Uhlans of 1914 were almost to a man dead by Christmas, but I didn’t reflect on that.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good luck, Billy!” His grip was fierce and quick. “I only wish you’d kept your good Deutsche ‘Hermann,’ instead of English ‘Billy’!”
The next day I went off on the trams to the IG plant at Hoechst, where I was interviewed by Dr. Ziegler, who wore a soft, collared shirt and a brown Brooks Brothers suit, very relaxed by the standards of German business attire. He had just returned from four years at an IG subsidiary’s plant on the Hudson River in upstate New York.
“I only want men with perfect marks from school,” Dr. Ziegler said. “Without much office experience, so no bad habits. If we take you on, you’d be on my ‘flying squad,’ principally working out of headquarters but traveling wherever needed. Some translation is very technical. Your background in organic chemistry is weak. There are technical courses which you’ll be expected to take. We also write and translate speeches for directors and signatories and prepare strategic summaries of developments abroad. Do you have any politics, Billy Lange?”
“Well…”
“An English liberal, yes? I don’t give a damn. Keep your opinions to yourself, that’s what the work demands. Believe it or not, we’ve Nazis and KPD working in the same office. We are a business, nothing else. Understand?”
“Completely.”
“So, no colorful armbands. No lapel pins, no ‘worker’ caps, no uniforms. No party newspapers on your desk. To read the Times of London is required. The Manchester Guardian is acceptable. The Daily Worker, never. If you belong to a political party here or in England I suggest you quit.”
“I don’t.”
“Excellent.” He handed me a copy of the British Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry with one article bookmarked. “Go find yourself a desk and translate this. No errors, please.”
It was hard going, but not so difficult as the prevarications and legalese I was used to at Kaufman’s. The translation still took most of the day and Dr. Ziegler evaluated my work while I stood before his desk. Finally he nodded and told me I would be taken on at the rank of commercial
clerk, on a probationary basis, with a weekly salary of eighty marks. At the time, perhaps twenty dollars, and a very decent salary for a young fellow.
My parents were overjoyed.
Our office was in the process of relocating from the plant at Hoechst to the brand-new IG headquarters in the West-End, the largest office building in Europe, unlike anything else in sleepy old medieval Frankfurt. Weinbrenner had been on the committee that chose the site and the architect. It was intended to be a steel-and-concrete symbol of Germany’s commercial and scientific manpower, and it was. Headquarters was all about the present and the future; it had nothing to do with the ruinous past, which made sense for a country whose nightmares stank of trench rot and mustard gas. The new building was bold and exciting, a new start for Germany. Our offices were streamlined and sleek, with beautiful wood paneling and rich woolen carpeting that absorbed sound. A dozen paternoster elevators operated silently and endlessly, like vertical conveyor belts, with telephone booth–sized cubicles that a person stepped into to be carried up or down.
Every morning it gave me a thrill to report for work.
Since the start of the worldwide depression IG had been letting people go, so my new colleagues were surprised, and annoyed, when I showed up. They were anxious about their own careers—what was Dr. Ziegler doing hiring an English boy? Everyone at IG was anxious almost all the time. Anxiety was an operating principle there. The atmosphere was wide-awake, tense, competitive. Every corner of the biggest office building in Europe was filled with bright young men. If you weren’t bright and willing to work fanatically long hours, they wouldn’t keep you. Anyone let go had good reason to believe he’d never find another job. There were plenty of suicides in Frankfurt in those days. If your work was satisfactory, they gave you more responsibility with less supervision. Your salary was regularly raised without anyone saying a word about it. When they stopped raising your pay, that was when you had to worry.
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