by Adam Thorpe
Herr Hoffer had rarely sheltered in the vaults with his staff before now – three or four times, perhaps, over the last years. Most of the raids had been at night, or early evening in the summer – from seven thirty until midnight: the Allies were very reliable. They bombed the factories and installations on the outskirts of Lohenfelde, and the railway line. Many houses and blocks of flats were hit, and now and again some old and much-loved building in the centre, which felt malicious. A year ago the British had bombed on a Sunday morning, and hundreds of people in the south area of Lohenfelde had stayed put in Martin Luther Church, thinking it to be the safest place, and of course it was hit and everyone killed inside it. A whole line of bombs had fallen out of the sky and pounded the old church and some buildings facing it to rubble. It was quite deliberate, everyone decided: they always seem to go for schools and churches and hospitals, it’s against the rules, against even the most ruthless usages of war. But there was surprisingly little anger among the townsfolk, only some shrill screams from certain Party members. The war was too large to feel anger. There was instead a kind of detached, rather cool resentment, dignified by the sense that such barbarism was the enemy’s invention, the brainchild of Mr Churchill. One found one’s sentiments reflected in the newspapers, which helped. It made one feel superior to the enemy. One knew that the fight against Bolshevism was the highest moral calling, as once in one’s grandparents’ time it had been the fight against the French Empire and long, long before that against the wild Magyars. Those bombing – the Americans, the British – were greedy and stupid terrorists, they would be pulled down by their false friends the Bolsheviks and pay the price. The German lands had always been under attack, encircled as they were by stupid, greedy peoples like the Slavs, or by the impossibly proud French, those pseudo-Romans with their sneeringly cultivated airs and graces. How the French pretended to be Romans! Napoleon in his toga – that dark, Semitic-looking dwarf! And how each of these aggressors, after they had burned a few German cities to the ground – how they came to grief in the forests! How the deep, dark forests beat them back each time, beat back the legions of marauders as something diseased and alien! How satisfying it was to see them beaten back each time, leaving the forests pure and deep and certain! Of such great solace to the native soul was this infinity of trees, the deeps of their slender trunks, the scented balm of their certainty. And now Germany embraced as one nation her infinity of trees, as a mother her suckling progeny. So young, was Germany! And if a church collapsed on its sheltering congregation – this was but a mild birth-pang to the young nation! The grazed knee of a virile youth! We must look beyond the individual grief and clamour to the greater vision, as a tree dreams of the forest of which it is a minuscule part!
At any rate, Herr Hoffer hated the shelters. Often he stayed upstairs, with chairs and pillows around him in case the windows blew in. Frau Hoffer, although frightened of the close, diseased air of the shelters in which each cough might carry death to her children (and there was much coughing during the hours underground), was more frightened of being crushed by her own home, and repaired with the girls to the apartment-block’s shelter every time. Deep in the stifling, airless darkness of the shelters, which were nothing but reinforced cellars, one felt the superiority of being German dwindle to a hard nub, a survival instinct. Up in his apartment, sitting in his circle of pillows and chairs during an air raid, Herr Hoffer would feel it as a glow about him, something psychic and of enormous power. It was the spirit of art, in which his people excelled, that radiated from him. It was deeply spiritual, but beyond religion (which, as one knew, had been fatally infected by Romanism). It was the highest good, sublime and timeless, that flowered in art and that, as a German, he was uniquely favoured to appreciate.
Sometimes, surreptitiously lighting a candle, he would sit in his circle of chairs and pillows and read his battered copy of Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher, seeing where, as a teenager, he had underlined certain passages, and feeling a deliciously mingled regret and pride at his youthful idealism. For instance, he had underlined three times, in now-faded red ink: ‘Bismarck had provided the externals of unification, but a secret Emperor, a great artist hero, would have to furnish and deepen internal unity.’
Once, he knew, he had imagined himself, Heinrich Siegfried Hoffer, as that great artist hero, deepening internal unity in the coming years. He had imagined it at the very moment he had read and underlined that sentence . . . the thought had coursed through him like an electric current, like something fated! What sensitive, idealistic German youth had not thought this, on reading Julius Langbehn? But they kept it to themselves, this secret hope and desire. When Langbehn’s ‘artist hero’ had materialised in the shape of Adolf Hitler, Herr Hoffer had felt almost cheated. But then, in some mysterious and inevitable chemistry of exchange, the actualised artist hero had become his own projection of desire – his, Herr Hoffer’s! The man who stood there exhorting the people with his upraised fists, whose shrill voice filled the radio waves for hours at a time, who looked like a waiter in a seedy café or a back-street barber or like the Englishman who helped execute his own friend, was not a man at all but a manifestation of will, of desire. He was (because Herr Hoffer had imagined him before he was a reality) an externalisation of his – Herr Hoffer’s – own inner spirit and deep will.
This was how Herr Hoffer, and most of his friends and acquaintances, greeted the Führer in the early days of real power: with a love that was self-love, or love of the highest and finest part of the self.
Once (well into the Party’s rule), he had tried to explain this early naivety to Herr Acting Director Streicher.
‘Ah yes,’ Herr Streicher had chuckled, puffing on his eternal pipe, ‘it reminds me of how easy it is to be on friendly terms with those who are not on friendly terms with you, only you don’t know they are not on friendly terms with you.’
It was quiet overhead, now. It occurred to Herr Hoffer that he hadn’t yet mentioned the shattering of the Kluge window. He had not planned to tell them, in fact, as he thought it bad for morale, but following Werner’s nasty glittery look over the Dostoevsky and the long silence, Herr Hoffer felt the need to assert himself.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the Kluge window is smashed.’
The others were shocked. In fact, everyone fell silent again after the initial shock. It was a kind of triumph for him.
‘Of course,’ said Werner, ‘you never liked it, did you?’
That was quite unnecessary, thought Herr Hoffer.
‘I was sentimentally fond of it,’ he replied, rather coldly. ‘It announced itself as part of the soul of the building.’
‘The soul of a museum is provided by the people,’ said Hilde Winkel. Her swollen forelip shone like a wet plum in the candlelight.
‘The people?’
‘Its visitors. Those beings of flesh and blood,’ she went on, without looking at him, ‘who animate a building of brick and stone and give meaning to its contents.’
‘The soul of a gallery,’ said Herr Hoffer, marvelling at the movement of Hilde Winkel’s mouth in the soft, flattering light, ‘is in the contact between the works of sublime art and those appreciating them.’
‘The contact?’
‘The meeting of the artist’s mind with the viewer’s mind.’
‘And that’s the soul?’
‘Yes, the meeting creates a kind of spiritual and mental disturbance in the middle,’ said Herr Hoffer, hardly conscious of what he was saying; ‘a kind of chemical reaction in the air.’
‘What, so it hovers in the air,’ she said, trying not to smile, ‘like green smoke?’
There was a rumble from above, more definite than thunder. They felt it in their backs on the stone, but no cement bits fell.
Werner Oberst was wiping his tiny half-moon spectacles, his lips creased as if something sour was in his mouth. Perhaps he is afraid, this time, Herr Hoffer thought, feeling the dampness of his own forehead. If only Werner and F
rau Schenkel were not here; if only he were alone with Hilde Winkel and her timid eyes, nursing her lip.
‘Well,’ he said, with a sigh, ‘put it another way. I like to think that the works in our care make some contribution, Fräulein Winkel.’ He turned to her gently. There was an edge to his voice he could not help. The stacked paintings stretched into the darkness on their crude trestles. Hilde’s eyes slid over his for a second and he flushed. ‘That it isn’t all to be found in the animation of the onlooker. That there is some essence, some energy, like a residue left by the artist. In the brushstrokes. In the residual smell of the linseed oil and paint and varnish –’
‘What is your favourite painting in the world, Herr Hoffer?’ asked Frau Schenkel, suddenly, as if deliberately cutting off his train of thought.
Without hesitation, Herr Hoffer nominated Altdorfer’s Landscape with St George and the Dragon.
‘I saw it as a small boy in a book of my father’s, long before I knew anything about art,’ he went on, settling involuntarily into the confident rhythm of his Tuesday morning lectures. ‘It was not even in colour in the reproduction, and the contrasts were poor, but I was swept up into the immensity of the rearing trees in which one can feel the wind, the wind shaking the leaves in the sunlight, the dark tangle beyond, the enormity of nature in which St George and the Dragon are mere details. Nobody had ever depicted nature like that.’
Werner seemed to demur.
‘Altdorfer was the first,’ Herr Hoffer insisted. ‘It was in Munich, in the Pinakothek – the real thing, I mean. I went to see it, when I was twenty-one. It was much smaller than I’d imagined, and rather dark – the light fell on it badly, I had to step to one side to avoid the shine – but as I stared at it I was similarly swept up into the sublime, the fullness of nature, the organic completeness of the rearing trees as they reach for the sunlight, ignoring the trivial struggle below.’ Hilde Winkel was at last staring at him – admiringly, he thought. Her eyes shone in the candlelight. ‘I was very moved,’ he added, folding his hands.
Werner replaced his glasses and said, ‘All we need are books, then.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You were as moved by the reproduction as by the original.’
‘In my childish way, yes.’
Werner nodded, in a knowing manner, his face bent and in shadow. It seemed amazing to Herr Hoffer, now, that he had worked alongside Werner Oberst for so long: the man was an unknown, suddenly. The years meant nothing. He felt delivered to him on a tray, raw and fresh, like a plump fruit.
‘But the original always has its own power, of course, Werner. Do you know what happened to Karl Schwesig?’
‘No.’
‘Arrested by the SA in 1933.’
‘So? Quite normal.’
‘Tortured for three days in a cellar. He’d offered his attic studio as a sanctuary for refugees, Jews and so on.’
‘Jews in the attic,’ said Werner, lifting his face from the shadows. ‘How shocking.’
‘Communists, I suppose,’ Frau Schenkel proffered, with a sour mouth.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Werner.
‘Possibly,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘Anyway, they brought all his pictures from the studio into the cellar and lined them up against the walls, facing the room. Do you know why?’
‘To burn them in front of his eyes,’ said Werner.
‘No. Frau Schenkel?’
‘I’m not opening my mouth. I always say the wrong thing.’
‘Fräulein Winkel?’
‘What does it matter? He was hiding terrorists. I suppose they put their boots through them one by one. I don’t know. It’s not my job. Someone has to do the nasty jobs.’
She was avoiding his eyes again; that shy nervousness was almost more arousing. If he had to be tortured at all, he would choose Hilde to do it. He would be stretched out, naked, totally in her power. He had, in fact, indulged in such a fantasy several times in the small hours, unable to sleep.
‘They didn’t touch the paintings,’ he said. ‘No. Instead, they just left them there, looking on as he was tortured, stark naked. Tortured in front of them. They humiliated the artist before the eyes of his own paintings. Herr Schwesig told me this himself, in private conversation some years ago. He admired the torturers’ perspicacity. Now he can’t look at those paintings without feeling shame. In fact, he couldn’t paint any more. So you see, the original has an irreplaceable power, like a living person. He wouldn’t have felt humiliated in front of mere reproductions.’
‘Will the Americans bring food?’ Frau Schenkel asked, quite irrelevantly.
No one answered, because no one knew. Herr Hoffer was annoyed with her, as much for mentioning the possibility as for changing the subject. He spent most of the day attempting not to think about food, about eggs and cakes and decent white bread and (above all) a cut of pulpy, bleeding meat. He had been hungry for two years, night and day. Frau Hoffer once made lovely cakes, but it had long been forbidden to make such things. Once his mind turned to food he could think of nothing else until some dry morsel had plugged the gap for an hour or two. He had been plump until the shortages, with a healthy appetite; now his skin hung off him, his face had a shrivelled look. Even Frau Hoffer was positively thin these days, her ribs showing under her breasts, which had retained their sturdiness while everything else had shrunk back. Not quite everything: her arms above the elbows had not lost their fleshiness. It was, Herr Hoffer decided, because they were too short, it was a question of proportions, an illusion. He had discovered this while drawing her in the nude, in their private life class. He had never got the proportions of her arms right, because he was always making up for nature. The distance between her elbows and her shoulders was not in proportion to her forearms. He could not record things simply as they were – the objective play of light and shade, from which volume and feeling grew as if by magic. He always had to be interfering, idealising, meddling with his intellect. True artists were like children. Schmidt-Rottluff, for instance.
Secretly, Herr Hoffer had a passion for Schmidt-Rottluff’s work. Its brightly coloured daubings, like van Gogh gone wilder, released something in his soul. It had been more than painful to him, to see the one Schmidt-Rottluff owned by the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum removed, then returning in the Degenerate Exhibition, pilloried as the product of ‘cultural Bolshevism’.
Once, he had noted a broad dribble of yellow in the painting. He had been amazed at how extravagant the dribble was, half-hidden behind wild strokes of red and green; Schmidt-Rottluff had stroked the creamy yellow on in a liquid manner and left it to run down along its breadth, as if it was so much soap on a window. The painting showed a child on a bench, with a palm tree beyond, executed in wild, free sweeps and stabs of a loaded brush. It had moved and slightly frightened Herr Hoffer, staring at the painting close up and noting the dribble, the carelessness of it, the uncontrolled and deliberate accident of it, fixed for all time as part of a finished work. It might, he thought, be the beginning of some dissolution, some deep attraction in the human mind towards dissolution.
‘They will have chocolate,’ said Hilde Winkel, leaving her lips open over her large teeth as if receiving, not a kiss, but the impossible extravagance of chocolate. ‘The Americans will have chocolate.’
They were cast in a spell.
The sentence from Hilde Winkel had cast them in a spell. They could hardly breathe, as if caught in the ice of a fairy tale. Bombs thundered distantly. Nothing shook, yet cement dust drifted past the candle-flame in soft white veils. They hardly noticed this, frozen in the spell of Hilde Winkel’s sentence.
‘They won’t give it to us,’ murmured Werner, eventually, as if from a realm beyond, as if from behind a sheet of ice; ‘unless we give them something they crave in return.’
The lake is very deep and cold, and I am at the bottom of it. Someone is tugging on the rope. The rope breaks. Why do we live? To remember. And if we die? What happens to our memories then?
16
<
br /> Parry ran like hell, in the end.
That’s what it always came down to: if you weren’t hurt you either ran like hell or you stayed put. That wasn’t always true, either. Sometimes you walked and fired and kept on walking, like they said they did in the last war. He’d only done that marching-fire deal once, though, when the whole convoy was ambushed outside Dahl with surprise fire from the thick woods either side. ‘D’ Company was in the rear. It was like the approach on the highway to this fucking shithole, only worse. There were these thick black woods around Dahl. SS guys tried to hit them in the back from camouflaged foxholes in the woods, under the dead needles and humus, real close – which got the men mad. They cleared out the woods with marching fire, helped by that kid Henderson’s jeep-mounted 50-calibre machine-gun.
Henderson was put in for the Silver Star, which turned out a few days later to be posthumous.
Now Parry was running like hell up the street with shit down his leg, his backpack full of glass.
He had to wait a few minutes before the others turned up by the museum ruin and then the seven of them made straight for the Company CP in the grocery yard. They came back with some more men from his unit, a Browning Automatic Rifle, and a medic smelling of liquor. Parry had told the platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Riddel, that Morrison had got hit while they were checking out the house. He didn’t tell the Sergeant any more. Morrison might not have been hit if the patrol had stayed together. On the other hand, look at it this way: the Spandau and the young bitch had been waiting for someone, anyone not a Heini. The whole patrol might have been hit, eight men buckling at the neck, the knees, the ankles, sprawling on the ground.
Sergeant Riddel had been drinking and was not too clear in his head about the sequence of events, and the other officers were busy.
The new fighting patrol – twelve men led by Riddel – took up positions opposite the house, behind rubble, covering the front while Parry and a big guy named Jim Webb crept up from the left side. Parry was real scared as he crawled up, imagining a few sharp bullets doing to him what they had done to Morrison. No doubt the sniper could smell him coming and they were right under the window now and the shutters were still closed. Their paint was flaked. He was close enough to see a big flaky bit of paint move in the breeze, like a leaf in washed-out green. It was solid dusk; each time he blinked it got darker. His skin was wincing all over, expecting itself to be torn up.
