A Fight in Silence

by Melanie Metzenthin

  They’d arrived at the Capitol so Arthur pulled over.

  ‘Now go and get your damned cinema tickets and then I’ll drive you home. Is that understood?’

  ‘Loud and clear!’

  ‘Then you’re not as big an idiot as I thought.’

  Chapter 61

  On the morning of 7 September Richard woke Paula with a kiss.

  ‘Happy seventeenth anniversary,’ he whispered, placing two cinema tickets on top of the bedclothes. ‘Your father’s standing in for us today at the surgery. We’ve got a date at three o’clock at the Capitol.’

  ‘You’ve done something for our anniversary?’ Her face lit up as she flung her arms around his neck.

  ‘And that’s not all. We’ve got the same box as when we went there together for the very first time in 1926. When I heard the Capitol was opening up again I just had to get these tickets!’

  ‘And what’s on?’

  ‘Something fun – The Punch Bowl with Heinz Rühmann.’

  The mere thought of going to the cinema with Richard and wrapping herself in that dream world buoyed her up throughout the day. She got out her best dress and tried to polish up her shabby shoes.

  ‘Don’t overdo it,’ said Richard. ‘The Capitol’s lost its shine, just like we have.’

  ‘And we haven’t even got the tree frog to take us there, let alone our lovely Adler Standard 6.’

  ‘Aha, but there’s still the tram!’ With a gallant flourish, Richard offered her his arm, and they set off.

  ‘Thank God we couldn’t see into the future,’ commented Paula as they sat in the tram and looked out at the heaps of rubble. ‘If we’d known what was going to happen, it would have poisoned our lives as youngsters.’

  ‘We’re alive, we’re together, our children are fit and healthy, and I love you, Paula. That’s all that matters.’ He put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him, enjoying the feeling of security it gave her.

  The Capitol had certainly lost its old glamour. Although the war damage had not been disastrous, a lot of its beautiful decorative old glasswork had shattered and been replaced by wooden boarding, the sumptuous gilding had faded and peeled, and the upholstery of the seats was as threadbare as the clothing worn by the audience. But it was a full house! Pleasure was a rare commodity and the cinema was still a place where you could forget your empty stomach for a while.

  As they slipped into their seats, the same ones as nearly two decades earlier, when the world was still a place of glowing beauty, Paula tried to take herself right back inside the mind of the young woman she had once been. She remembered how she’d fallen head over heels with the most wonderful man, in spite of her father’s doubts about him. She placed her hand on the arm of the seat, recalling how Richard had waited until the lights dimmed before gently placing his hand over hers – the first gesture of affection between them. As though Richard had read her thoughts, she suddenly felt his hand on hers, just like the first time, gentle, protective, attentive and yet overwhelming.

  ‘Shall we make plans, like we did before?’ he whispered to her, stroking her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered back. ‘Tell me yours.’

  ‘I have quite a few. First, we need to make sure we don’t starve and freeze to death over the winter.’

  ‘That’s a good plan,’ said Paula with a smile.

  ‘Then we must do everything possible to get Krüger convicted and sentenced to the punishment he deserves.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘And in three years’ time, when it’s our twentieth wedding anniversary, I want to have a camera again and take a photo of the party we’ll have, with a huge cake to celebrate.’

  ‘That would be just wonderful,’ sighed Paula, leaning into him still as the opening credits rolled.

  ‘But in 1953 it’ll be our silver wedding, and we’ll have another car by then. And we’re going to drive to Rome in that new car and I’ll photograph you in exactly the same place in front of the Colosseum, sitting on the bonnet, just like you did on our Adler Standard 6.’

  ‘That’s a lovely idea.’

  ‘That’s no idea – that’s my plan.’

  ‘You are an incorrigible optimist and dreamer, Richard darling. And that’s why I love you so much!’

  ‘You have to have the dreams in the first place for them to come true, my dearest Paula,’ whispered Richard.

  AFTERWORD

  While the historical background to the novel is true, the main characters in this novel are fictitious. I created the story of Richard and Paula, two intentionally heroic figures, to present the broadest possible picture of psychiatry at that time and demonstrate the resistance offered by a substantial number of psychiatrists. It is well documented that some doctors spoke out against sterilisation and euthanasia and carried out acts of resistance in secret. Once it had leaked out that the registration process was not for financial budgeting purposes, as had been the official story, but was rather the first step towards the mentally ill and physically disabled becoming the first victims of the Nazi killing machine, many hospital doctors tried to protect their patients and started to falsify the registration forms. This led to the setting up of a supervisory commission that scrutinised hospital files where there was any suspicion of falsely positive records of patients’ productivity. This left doctors in a dilemma. If they acted as Richard did in the novel and classified all patients as ‘productive’, it was noticed and they ended up saving no one. This meant they had to take tough decisions, like Paula did in Göttingen. There is documentary evidence of the work and actions of the Göttingen professor Gottfried Ewald. As an opponent of euthanasia, he tried to protect as many people as possible from removal and transportation and yet had to leave some to their horrific fate in order to save the others.

  As early as 1920 Alfred Hoche, a medical doctor, and the lawyer Karl Binding published a book under the title Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, arguing the high cost to society of the unproductive mentally ill. The first part of their work features arguments in favour of assisted dying, the same arguments used today in support of active assisted dying, while in the second part it becomes clear that, in the end, this was all based on cutting public spending.

  The Nazis took these views and further perverted them through their practice of killing on a truly industrial scale. They used gas to murder the disabled and the mentally ill and subsequently put this to further use in death camps such as Auschwitz.

  All this grew incrementally, as there never was a comprehensive plan. However, even in his autobiography Mein Kampf in 1925, Hitler was already demanding the sterilisation of all those with hereditary diseases. When Richard leafs through the book, he notes with horror the original quote on this topic, as well as the Führer’s original thoughts on it with regard to Jewish people.

  Sterilisation was initially welcomed by many doctors. As described in the novel, the original draft law had come into being under the previous government but it was the Nazis who implemented it, and very swiftly, with one distinct and significant change. Gone was the clause regarding the patient’s prerogative, or that of their legal representatives, to make a voluntary decision regarding sterilisation. From now on, the heads of hospitals, asylums and prisons had the right to determine whether or not their patients or inmates should be sterilised. The legal description given in the novel is abridged, but authentic.

  The fact that the original law did not derive from the Nazis, even though the Nazis modified it to suit their own plans, had grave consequences for the people affected. It was precisely because the law was not considered to be a law decreed by the Nazis that surviving victims of their sterilisation policy fought for decades to be recognised as victims of National Socialism. They fought in vain.

  The thirty-fourth sitting of the Bundestag’s Reparation Commission took place on 13 April 1961 and found that the victims of forced sterilisation had not suffered harm and did not fall under the laws on compensation. These
expert opinions were given by the same doctors who had presided over court hearings on hereditary disease during the Nazi dictatorship and who made the original decisions about forced sterilisation. There is documentary evidence that up to four per cent of those subjected to the procedure for forced sterilisation died as a result.

  It was only in 1988 that the victims were permitted a one-off payment of 5,000 Deutschmarks. People still in financial need as a result of the consequences of forced sterilisation are permitted to draw a regular benefit of 291 euro per month. This benefit was still being paid to 482 survivors as recently as 2012.

  In addition to the invented main characters and Professor Ewald, the novel tells of other characters who are historically documented. Alfred Schär, the teacher of the deaf and dumb, is a case in point. Although the friendship with Richard is fictitious, his story and fate have been faithfully presented here.

  Another historical figure is Dr Carl Stamm, the Jewish doctor who was head of the children’s hospital at Rothenburgsort. He died in 1941 but had been dismissed by the Nazis as early as 1933 and replaced by National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) member Dr Bayer. The cause of Stamm’s death is unknown. Many believe he took his own life to escape the threat of deportation, while others say he died of a brain haemorrhage. The Carl Stamm Park in Rothenburgsort, Hamburg, is named after him.

  The children’s hospital in Rothenburgsort really was bombed and the children evacuated to Langenhorn, as in the novel. Langenhorn is now the Asclepius Clinic – Ochsenzoll. I have a special personal connection to this incident as my father, now deceased, was a nine-year-old diphtheria patient at the hospital when it was bombed. As a child, he lived through the night-time bombings and the huge firestorm of 1943, and his grandmother had an allotment at Moorfleet. I took him as my historical model for Georg’s friend Horst. He is further commemorated by my choice of birth date for Richard and Paula’s twins, the same date as his. His reminiscences gave me a number of ideas for the children’s perspective on their lives back then, one example being the children’s dislike of the rubbery smell of their gas masks. And there was a reason behind the choice of Rothenburgsort. This was where my father lived as a child, and his own grandfather ran a big painting and decorating business there. During the bombings in July and August 1943 the whole district was destroyed, changing its face for ever.

  Richard’s nemesis, Dr Krüger, was inspired by the psychiatrist Dr Friedrich Knigge, a historically documented figure who worked at Langenhorn, first in the asylum, and later in charge of child euthanasia there. The hostility between Krüger and Richard made the two arch-enemies, and in this respect I have distanced the character of Krüger from that of Knigge. But it was Knigge who in real life murdered the twenty-two children and carried out dissection on six of them, exactly like Krüger in the novel. After the war ended, students reported the murders to the British. In August 1945 Knigge was dismissed and forbidden from further work in the field of medicine, as eventually happens to Krüger in the novel. Knigge twice stood on trial, the second time for child murder, although this second trial never fully concluded, as he died of polio in 1947 in St Georg Hospital.

  The experiences of Richard and Fritz at the Front are also based on historical evidence. Medical facts such as the use of sulphonamides and Evipan are accurate, but I have adjusted locations to suit the novel’s narrative, deciding to send Fritz and Richard through Italy to Cherbourg. This was not implausible because the field hospital system was fully reorganised in 1943, but for me this was far more about creating a snapshot of the Western Front and the emotional burden both men would have borne. Inveterate military historians are asked to forgive my poetic licence here.

  The encounter with Maxwell Cooper and Arthur Grifford in the Egyptian tomb was always something I had planned. The location of the tomb is fictitious, but 1987 excavations of ancient Egyptian graves in El Alamein did indeed reveal evidence of previously unknown burial places on a large scale.

  The post-war period did not come as a liberation for the German people, although it has at times been presented thus. It was actually a defeat, and once the concentration camps were liberated, the Allies’ anger towards the German people was clear: it was now about punishing the Germans. For example, Germans were forbidden from receiving Care Packets until June 1946.

  The conditions that Fritz describes in the prisoner-of-war camps are also taken from historical fact.

  Under the British occupation, all enquiries and requests had to be presented in English and any submitted in German were simply not accepted. The ban on fraternisation was, however, quickly eased, as so many British did not adhere to it. However, the British continued to live in a somewhat elevated parallel society and there were still strictly divided British-only compartments on public transport until the late 1950s. The last residential property to be seized by the British was returned in 1957.

  In spite of all this, friendships developed between British and Germans, such as that between Arthur and Richard. In August 1945 it was the British who organised school meals throughout Hamburg schools, something that saved many children from dying of starvation.

  The Capitol Cinema on Hoheluftchaussee was among the first cinemas to reopen for Germans. Whether The Punch Bowl was on the programme, we don’t know, but it was one of the last great films made by the German film company UFA and shown in German cinemas from 1944. I chose it because it is well known to cinema enthusiasts and, unlike any other film of that era, was ideally suited to lifting the mood in such dark times.

  As far as Richard’s and Paula’s dreams for the future are concerned, well, currency reform came on 20 June 1948, and with it the Deutschmark. The shelves were suddenly full once more and the shops busy. Richard’s dream of owning a camera again in time for their twentieth anniversary on 7 September 1948 may well have been fulfilled.

  Even his plans for their silver wedding are likely to have come to fruition. In 1953 Germany’s economic miracle was coming into full swing, the symbol of which is the most successful car of all time – the VW Beetle.

  I’m sure that somewhere in Richard’s photo album there’s a photograph taken in ’53 of a glowing Paula, laughing as she poses on the bonnet of a VW Beetle in front of the Colosseum in Rome.

  But that’s another story . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dr Melanie Metzenthin was born in Hamburg in 1969 and still lives in the city. Her work as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist requires specialist insight into the mental state of traumatised patients, some of whom have committed criminal offences. When developing the characters in her novels, she enjoys drawing on her professional experience. She also writes psychothrillers under her pseudonym, Antonia Fennek.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2016 Chris Langton

  Deborah Rachel Langton was born in Reading, England, studied German and French literature at Cambridge, and has worked in Munich, Berlin, Milan, Abu Dhabi, London and Manchester. After a rewarding first career teaching and lecturing, she moved into translation while still working at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University and loves translating fiction best of all. Deborah now lives in a rural location not far from London and translates in her study with views towards England’s South Downs. She shares her life with her husband, Chris, and their two fine sons, Joseph and Samuel.