“Who?”
“Billy Lange.”
“Ah so. Billy. What—is my mother all right?”
“Your mother’s in England.”
Pause.
“Whatever is she doing in England in bloody March? My uncle’s house is bloody cold and damp. She shouldn’t be traveling, it wears her so. How does she look?”
“All right. Thin.”
“Your mother has written. All right, tell her I shall come to Frankfurt soon, it’s time. Yes. Are they going off this summer? Is an expedition planned?”
“Styria, I think.”
“I don’t want her falling ill in some horrid Austrian village.”
“Karin, I must tell you what has happened.”
I spoke too fast, spilling the dismal events. She kept asking me to slow down, but my burden of guilt was chasing me like a runaway cart horse.
“Those swine!” she said. “It’s bad enough here in Berlin, but I didn’t suppose they would be so bold in Frankfurt. They’re trying to get at my father, do you see?”
“I’m worried my father will do something foolish, go back to Klingerschule in the morning, something like that.”
“Longo!” she exclaimed. “Good old Longo works at Prinz-Albrechtstraße, the Ministry of Justice; I shall telephone him.”
I’d never mentioned my conversation with good old Longo the year before. There was no point mentioning it now. Perhaps he could be prevailed upon to do some good.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this. Kaufman, Kaufman…oh Lord, and we must do something for him—when do my parents get back?”
“Don’t know.”
“Tell your mother she must send to Kaufman’s office a bunch of roses, yellow roses. A really big bunch, massive. The man probably hates flowers. Tell your mother, on the card, no names, but write this: Pour le Mérite. Understood?”
Every German schoolboy knew Pour le Mérite was the highest order of merit awarded by the kingdom of Prussia for extraordinary personal achievement.
“I’m going to ring up Longo right now,” she said.
Next morning most of the wreckage was cleared up. Brownshirt squads were no longer tearing about the town. At IG headquarters no one mentioned them or the SS or the impromptu KZs. It was as if a resolution had been passed enjoining us not to discuss such things, so discordant they were, outside the chorus of everyday life. Even my friend Robert Briesewitz, who had taken up Kracauer’s role as Günter Krebs’s chief tormentor, kept his nose buried in work during the days following.
Günter Krebs didn’t show up at the office. Would I have confronted him if he had? Probably not.
Our former colleague Kracauer might have had something bitter and funny to say about brownshirt bumpkins running wild in a sophisticated, urbane city like Frankfurt—but Kracauer was headed for Uruguay.
Our new chief, Dr. Winnacker, spent the rest of the week going around the department on an informal inspection, introducing himself personally to everyone, perching on the desks and chatting, mostly about nothing.
Hold on, gentlemen! Attention please! By any chance did you happen to see four drunken louts in brown frog-marching a respected Frankfurt lawyer down the Eschenheimer yesterday afternoon in freezing rain?
But I didn’t say anything, and there was nothing in the newspapers.
Günter Krebs never did report for work in Dr. Winnacker’s department. Two weeks after the Reichstag fire, we learned he had been promoted to a management-level job with special responsibility for labor relations in the plant at Hoechst.
Kracauer never made it to Montevideo. He was en route to Bremerhafen and South America when a pack of brownshirts accosted him on the platform at Hannover. He was traveling with a set of expensive leather luggage given him by his parents. When a brownshirt pitched one of the suitcases down onto the track, Kracauer had to scramble down to fetch it. He was trying to hoist himself back onto the platform when he was kicked in the face and fell backward, hitting his head on a steel rail. The stationmaster halted the train before it could run him over, but Kracauer never regained consciousness.
By the time we heard he was dead he’d already been buried. We weren’t told details, only that he’d died in an unfortunate accident. Weeks later I ran into Rothbart, another Klingerschule old boy and former member of the Niederrad Winnetou tribe, who told me the real story.
Karin’s parents returned from England one week after the Reichstag fire. Lady Maire’s arm was in a sling; she’d had a fall while hunting with her brother in Northamptonshire. The baron had purchased a mare, Mountain Pass, at the Doncaster sales. From London he’d telephoned and fired telegrams to Germany, seeking the whereabouts of his chauffeur. In those days Weinbrenner still thought of himself as a powerful person. That was his habit, like thinking he belonged to Germany and Germany to him. As soon as he was home, he hurried up to Berlin where he learned through an old Uhlanen comrade at the Interior Ministry that Solomon Dietz was being held at the new Konzentrationslager at Dachau in Bavaria.
Unable to reach the camp commandant by telephone, the baron decided to show up in person, though everyone warned him against it. My father wanted to accompany him, but the baron wouldn’t allow it. Stepping off the train at Munich, he had difficulty persuading a taxi driver to bring him out to the KZ at Dachau. In the end he had to pay four times the meter fare to get there. He was wearing his Iron Crosses (First and Second Class) pinned to his overcoat.
I don’t know what happened exactly, but they humiliated him in some way. Perhaps they roughed him up. He was lucky not to be arrested, my father said, but in those days they were still a bit wary of people like the baron, though it wouldn’t take them long to overcome their inhibitions.
The baron was never the same afterward. He never again got on a horse, for one thing.
That summer, while my mother and Lady Maire were driving around Austria, Dietz, Solomon would appear on a list of prisoners “killed while trying to escape” printed in the newspapers.
In the last week of March 1933, the young motorcycle salesman, Meyer, had rung me up at work to say that a shipment of new machines had been delivered, the latest models, and I must stop by and have a look.
“Undoubtedly the finest road machines in the world,” he enthused. “Real touring bikes. What you must do, Lange, is learn to ride. This is a feeling like no other, all that horsepower between your legs.”
I said I’d stop by. Meyer and I were on friendly terms. We’d had a few evenings together drinking Apfelwien and going to films. He shared with Günter Krebs a taste for the strongest Hessian apple wine and for cowboy films—though Meyer definitely approved of Gary Cooper. He had hopes of emigrating to the United States. His uncle was in Delaware, an industrial chemist.
Saturday was dark and wet, certainly not motorcycle weather. All week the Nazi newspapers had been proclaiming a nationwide boycott of Jewish stores to start on Saturday, but I didn’t figure it would amount to anything. People always needed to shop. I caught the tram across the bridge and got off near the Zeil. Packs of stormtroopers in tawny uniforms were patrolling outside the big department stores, strutting back and forth, yelping insults at the few who dared to go inside, but not actually preventing them. In front of Wronker’s, a crowd had gathered, many of the women holding shopping bags. More and more people were ignoring the stormtroopers and dashing into the store—why not, Wronker’s always had the best selection of clothing and goods at reasonable prices. The boycott was turning out a failure.
I turned down the street where the motorcycle showroom was and noticed a crowd in the road. Weird. It was a dismal Saturday morning, and an ordinary, second-rate commercial street with no big stores or glamorous cafés, only the motorcycle showroom, some car-repair garages, and a commercial printer’s shop.
Unlike the shoppers on the Zeil, this crowd was a mob. They gave off almost a steam, as though they were one big, wet, breathing beast. People were guffawing, and I heard someone yell, “Let’s kill him! Let’s str
ing him up!”
I caught a glimpse of poor Meyer with a couple of Schupos standing on either side of him, holding him up. He’d been roughed up. One sleeve was torn right off his blue suit. Brownshirts were arguing with the regular policemen.
There was a mood of camaraderie. People were offering cigarettes to strangers, lighting up in the rain. I recognized a couple of men from my office in weekend clothes. They stayed at the edge of the crowd, but they looked quite relaxed, as though this were a normal Saturday and they’d happened across an amateur football match on the sports field. One of them held a beautiful Irish setter on a leash.
Brownshirts were at their apogee. They were no longer necessary now that Hitler had the army, and a year later he had their leaders shot, and that was the end of them. But that Saturday, April 1, 1933, they were allowed to rule the streets.
I touched the sleeve of a well-dressed gentleman my father’s age. “What’s going on?”
He studied me for a moment before replying. “They want to hang the fellow.”
“What’s he done?”
“They say he was messing with an Aryan girl. Riding about with her on a motorcycle in the rain. They had a spill. She’s in hospital. Stupid to go riding in the rain. He’s a Jew, they want to string him up, but the police have him now. Ridiculous. I don’t know what’s happened to this city.”
After that he turned and walked away. He probably decided he’d said too much. A few moments later I left, too, and stood waiting for a tram that carried me across the river and almost to the Walden gates.
On Monday I chose not to walk down that street where the showroom was located—why should I go that way? It certainly wasn’t the most direct route between my tram stop and IG Farben headquarters. And I was a young man in a hurry. I had serious work to perform.
I didn’t want to know what had become of Meyer. There’d been nothing in the newspaper. Insane things could happen, and they were ignored. We weren’t living in the real world anymore.
I didn’t pass that way on Tuesday, either. On Tuesday night I lay in bed thinking about warriors and blood brothers on the Staked Plain. I couldn’t find sleep, I tossed and turned for hours, sheets damp with sweat.
I couldn’t be such a miserable coward and live with myself. I had to struggle against my own nature.
Wednesday morning I forced myself to walk past the showroom. The plate glass had been replaced, a motorcycle was gleaming on display, but the place hadn’t opened yet. It was too early. I was glad.
But after work I forced myself to go by again. Peering through the window, I saw two salespeople on the floor. I didn’t recognize either of them. One was polishing a bike. There were no customers.
I stepped inside. The fellow polishing looked up. He was a husky blond. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon. I’m looking for Meyer.”
“Meyer?” He seemed puzzled.
“Yes, Meyer. He was helping me choose a machine.”
The two of them looked at each other. They both shrugged at the same time.
“Meyer doesn’t work here anymore,” the blond fellow said.
“Really?”
“Meyer’s resigned.”
He looked at me, and I saw a version of myself, a young fellow coated with ambition, with eagerness to get on. Ambition and a tincture of fear.
“Do you know where I might find him?”
Yes, we’d been out on the town together a couple of times, but in those days you had to know people awfully well before exchanging details of personal lives. I hadn’t a clue where Meyer lived or if he had any family.
“Well, no. But may I help you? Were you looking at a particular machine?”
“I should like to contact Meyer.”
The blond fellow opened his hands, a helpless gesture. “Meyer’s resigned.”
The other salesman, black haired, spoke for the first time. “Too many questions here! What does it matter? Ask us about motorcycles, not about Jews.”
“Do you know where Meyer lives?” I asked the blond fellow.
“Not a clue. I can demonstrate any machine on the floor. Which were you looking at? Are you an experienced rider?”
“I don’t have time now.” I was trembling. Maybe they noticed; I don’t know.
“Well, stop in again, we’ll show you whatever you like.”
I left the showroom and never went back, and never saw Meyer again.
Frankie’s English Bar was shut down in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, with a couple of auxiliary police posted outside, ostentatiously taking down names of anyone foolish enough to inquire when the bar might reopen. No one saw Eddy Morrison. People said he’d left for London or Paris or New York. I heard that the Polish bookie, Willie Chopdelau, had been arrested and deported.
No one expected Frankie’s to reopen until, after six weeks, it did. By then light had crept back in the sky, the last hunks of snow had melted in the Walden woods, and suddenly the neon sign was glowing on the street near Goethe’s house, and there was Eddy Morrison in his dinner jacket, greeting customers. Willie Chopdelau was at his regular table with his telephone and money box, telling everyone he’d been on a holiday in the south of France, and Brutus the White Russian doorman was selling hashish to his coterie of regulars and elegant wristwatches to anyone else.
In July, while our mothers were touring through Styria, Karin rang me at the office to say she was just getting on a train in Berlin and coming to see her father about “some business matters.” We arranged to meet for drinks at Frankie’s in a few hours. I changed into a fresh shirt kept in my desk drawer, shaved with a razor also kept in my desk, burnished my shoes to a gleam, and spent a good five minutes brushing my hair, wielding a brush in each hand.
I was at the club when she arrived straight from the Hauptbahnhof.
She wore a skirt, a peasant blouse, sandals, and a leather jacket. I couldn’t forget watching the rising dawn with her the year before, and her casual remark about sleeping with me—or, more accurately, not sleeping with me.
She said she’d had to let go of her Eschenheimer flat. “Couldn’t afford it. Don’t know how much longer I’ll have a job. The regime presses. The big men at UFA wobble. Future uncertain. Such—Fragwürdigkeit—how would you say?”
“Shiftiness. Opposite of trustworthy.”
“Do you know, Billy, when you telephoned with the news of poor Dietz, I did try to get Longo’s help.”
“You know Dietz is dead?”
“I didn’t like him, but they are much worse, who killed him. Bloody Longo—four telephone messages I left with his bloody secretary. Not a word did he answer, the cad. At last I took a cab out to Potsdam where I knew he was living with some Ministry of Justice boys in a Palladian mansion, by the lake.
“The servant said he wasn’t at home, but his Mercedes was there. I’m sure he had a woman with him, but he ought to have known I don’t give a damn whom he’s fucking, I only wanted his help calling off the dogs who attacked my father’s lawyer and kidnapped his chauffeur. I left a note on the windshield, telling him to ring me, but he didn’t.
“Next morning, old Billy, I show up at the Ministry of Justice. Prinz-Albrechtstraße. Wait in the lobby, but he does not appear. I think someone recognized me, tipped him off, and he crept in another door. I tried to go up in the elevator, but the gendarmes threw me out of the building.
“That week I was trying to write a scene but struggling with it. I keep a pair of brilliant scissors in my desk drawer for cutting and pasting, and suddenly the scene in my head was me riding out to Longo’s mansion in a taxi with scissors in my purse. I’d get out of the cab, send the driver on his way, cut my wrists open with my scissors, and scrawl TRAITORS! MURDERERS! SWINE! in blood all over the Palladian front of his house, then lie down on the marble doorstep, so that everyone could see what crimes are being committed in Germany.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You shouldn’t
even imagine such scenes. It’s not good.”
“Oh, Billy, dear Billy—always sound advice. You’re so good about good.”
She was shivering. I took her hand, and it was cold. She wanted another drink, and I ordered for both of us. There was music, but we didn’t dance. We shared a taxi out to Walden, not saying a word. We got out under the porte cochere, and she kissed me on the cheek and ran inside carrying her train case.
The next afternoon she returned to Berlin, and I didn’t meet her again until the following summer.
1938
Herr Kaufman was telephoning every morning to receive a summary of the baron’s condition. Yet the lawyer wouldn’t come out to Walden. He believed stormtroopers were watching him. He didn’t wish to incite them to pay another visit to the estate.
But I don’t think it was Sturmtruppen Kaufman feared. I think he could not bear to see his old friend as helpless as he was.
Dr. Lewin had left for Cuba without having been able to enlist another surgeon, and Karin kept trying to develop a plan to somehow get her father to a hospital in Zurich.
When she asked Herr Kaufman about releasing funds to take her father to Switzerland, the lawyer immediately poured cold water on the idea. If she even attempted to apply for an exit permit for her father, he’d have to forfeit everything he had left to the Finanzamt. And the Swiss would never grant a visa anyway.
“As you ought to know better than most,” Kaufman remarked, “the dear Swiss aren’t exactly open to the idea of indigent Jewish refugees. In short, Zürich is a fantasy.”
That afternoon I walked across the bridge and through a city that resembled its normal self. Glass had been swept up. Shopwindows had been replaced. A certain number of Jews had disappeared. Old Frankfurt was almost cheerful under a bit of rare, pallid November sun. The streets near the Römer, lined with timbered houses, positively bustled. An early tang of Christmas was in the air.
I was headed for the travel bureau to see about exchanging our tickets for a later sailing. I’d warned Karin we couldn’t postpone too long or we’d run out of money because I no longer had a salary. She had no savings, and what was left of her father’s capital was locked up in Reichsfluchtsteuer bonds.
Carry Me Page 30
