by Adam Thorpe
He had an oddly loud laugh, coming in a little late.
Herr Hoffer tentatively asked what Bendel’s task consisted of, as coordinator between Reichsführer Himmler’s personal staff dealing with art and architectural matters, and their own Lohenfelde Abschnitt XIII.
Bendel sighed. ‘Do you know, I’m less sure every day. Bombarded with papers, I am. For instance, the Combat League for German Culture writes SS-Sturmbannführer Wedel yet another damn letter complaining of certain Jewish-Bolshevist works in your own fine collection, Herr Assistant Director. He sends it across to me. I forward it to the appropriate authority – in this case, either the Reich Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, or the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, or Herr Minister Rust at the Education and Culture Ministry. Perhaps all three, if I’m in doubt.’
Herr Hoffer gulped and turned pale. He tried not to, but he could not help it.
‘And then,’ the cheery young man went on, ‘I might do as Herr Schultze-Naumburg did a few years ago.’
‘Oh? What was that?’
‘He approached the Führer himself, with photographs of the modernist collection in the Kronprinzen-Palast. The Führer cares more for art than anything else apart from buildings, motorways and dogs, Herr Hoffer. We have photographs on file of the Kaiser Wilhelm collection. Poor quality, but sufficient.’
The fresh, handsome face under the black-peaked kepi seemed to Herr Hoffer, as it smiled at him, slightly sinister in its bonhomie. The silly death’s-head badge didn’t help.
‘Has this example of your daily work – has it actually happened?’ he asked, unable to resist a tremble in his voice. His arms felt very stiff, wheeling the bicycle. The street seemed wide, dark and endless. He had not come across any nasty letters from the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur, although it was possible Herr Streicher had hidden them from him.
‘Oh yes,’ said the young man, ‘it has happened because I have imagined it happening.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Everything I have imagined happening, happens in the end,’ Bendel said, smiling again, his breath pluming the air.
Ah, they were at the end of the street at last. Cars passed on the main boulevard before them, turning the snow to black filth. A wagon was being unloaded of its barrels in front of a tavern. Bendel was watching the men unloading the barrels with an intense, absorbed look. Herr Hoffer had butterflies in his stomach. Surely the Führer would not be bothered with a provincial art museum, however fine.
‘I imagined the Führer when I was a child,’ Bendel said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Before he was even well known. Then I imagined, as a youth of fifteen, a time when things would be pure, with all corruption and trivial elements burnt away. As an art student, before the Führer became the Führer and changed everything, I imagined that high art would fill our towns and cities and the daily lives of the masses, and that vulgarity would be banished, and that Germany would be the new Athens. In each case, my imagination has been ahead of reality. My dreams were always of knights and maidens and high castles and a land with no cars, or factories, or electric wires. Perhaps they were not empty dreams at all, but a glimpse of the future.’
He’s one of those SS lunatics, thought Herr Hoffer. That’s all he is, for all his handsome charm. Ambitious, and lunatic.
Then Bendel turned to him, and Herr Hoffer blushed. The fellow still had youthful red pimples on his pale chin. Middle twenties, perhaps. Precocious.
‘So that is why, when I am passed a letter concerning your excellent museum from those lower-class cretins in the Combat League for German Culture, I write back directly with what I have just said to you, in so many words, and file their stupidity away in my private drawer.’ His face, impassioned now, came closer to Herr Hoffer’s. ‘The vulgar masses are still in control, Herr Assistant Director. Do you understand?’
Herr Hoffer nodded, albeit weakly.
‘By the way, I am invited to a function in the presence of Herr Minister Goebbels next week. I have decided not to tell him about your van Gogh. You know he is very fond of van Gogh, despite the Chief’s disapproval. Your secret is safe with me.’
‘Secret?’
‘The van Gogh is unique. Yours, I mean. The Artist near Auvers-sur-Oise. Where else does the artist show himself at work?’
‘Debatable,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘There’s a monograph by one of our former employees, Gustav Glatz –’
‘Herr Hoffer, of course it is as the title says. As Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a play about Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. So few people are aware of this uniqueness that it is like a secret. For now, I prefer to keep it that way.’
‘You sound as though it’s your decision, not ours.’
‘Well, in a way it is. As the ogre said in the poem, after he had eaten the fairy princess’s baby: “But I was hungry!” Victor Hugo. Most amusing, especially in the original French.’
Herr Hoffer failed to understand this reference: yet the tone was quite unmenacing. The young officer bid him farewell with a friendly, if slightly arrogant, squeeze of his shoulder, crossed the street, and disappeared into the crowds. His self-assurance was most unusual, for one so young. It had the effect of making Herr Hoffer feel like a schoolboy.
Herr Hoffer’s report to Herr Acting Director Streicher was confused, he now recalled. It did nothing to appease Herr Streicher’s anxiety. Confusion is worse than clarity. Clarity was all the Führer had wished for: the air clean and spacious and full of sunlight, as in Athens of old. Herr Streicher had the strange impression, as he put it, that in the three years the Führer had been in power, things had got yet more confused – even after the Brownshirt thugs had been dealt with. No one from the Combat League had ever complained, he said.
Apart from a few Party philistines, the museum’s modernist collection at that time attracted no derisory laughter, let alone sputtering fury.
This was unusual, but by no means unique. The beating-up of poor Gustav Glatz in 1933 was by the SA, who were liquidated the following year. This nastiness happened the day before the people’s election, in March, which was why the poster had been pinned to the delivery door. Gustav Glatz, the museum’s Baroque specialist, author of the brilliant thesis on bracelet-shading in Raphael, was beaten to a pulp by men of the SA. Most of the staff blamed the SA, not the new Chancellor – who dealt with the SA problem himself.
The talk at the museum had always avoided politics, for the most part. Even in the Party’s early days. When, one morning, they discovered an unpleasant Party notice pasted on the fence opposite, Herr Director Kirschenbaum merely pointed out the brilliance of the collage effect. Since it had not quite covered the poster underneath, it said, in big black letters visible from the museum:
Germans!
Beware!
Do not Buy from Jews!
Babylon
Greta Garbo
When some filthy anti-Jewish graffiti appeared on the museum’s front wall, they simply discussed the best way to clean it off. Even when Herr Director Kirschenbaum was dismissed after the defamatory article in the local paper, comments were kept to a minimum. It was a very dingy February day in 1934. He was given fifteen minutes to clear his desk, and the others shook his hand shyly (except for Frau Schenkel, who had always found him ‘typically Jewish’). ‘Do not buy from Greta Garbo,’ he smiled. And he was gone. They all kept their heads down and carried on. Werner was not yet on the staff, of course.
Herr Streicher helped matters by always attending Party functions to which he was invited as Acting Director of the region’s principal museum, and remaining on best terms with those who were something in the town. People knew about Herr Streicher’s Iron Cross, which he wore on all possible formal occasions. And (sadly) the final and perhaps most important reason for their modernist collection escaping criticism was that the museum was very far from being a central feature of Lohenfelde’s civic or social life by the 1930s. A brand-new and rather oversized jewel in her crown when opened in 1
904, the Kaiser Wilhelm was now of another epoch, like its name, a little chipped and dusty. Its architecture, mixing styles and references, was regarded as quaint, even embarrassing, in an age of strict classicism and heroic pomposity. Locals would show you the town hall (or at least its amusing clock), the gleaming new thermometer factory, the crooked old pink-tinted inn from 1632 (recently restored), and the town park with its huge oaks and attractive ponds very much before they would show you the museum and its fossil, book and art collections. The general wealth of buildings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gathered at the centre of town, with their lovely carved cherry-wood balconies, eclipsed the eccentric thirty-year-old construction situated just a street or two too far for an easy stroll, in a morbidly quiet quarter where the bourgeois villas and gardens sat like overstuffed dining-club members behind ornamental trees.
That is why, after the ‘dismissal’ of Herr Director Kirschenbaum in 1934, no one took much notice of the museum and its illustrious contents – and this, although in some ways its salvation, annoyed Herr Streicher and saddened his assistant. They were torn between encouraging attendance by special exhibitions, posters, leaflets – and attracting as little notice as possible by merely keeping the correct opening hours. In the end, they came down on the latter: even the purchase of the Kandinsky was not announced in the local gazette. It was always best to keep your head well down, in these difficult times.
This gave such achievements the air of felonies, which was why the frequent visits of the same SS officer gave rise to such anxiety. Herr Hoffer quite understood. Concerning Herr Hoffer’s report, the Acting Director was oddly gleeful; SS-Sturmführer Bendel’s enthusiasm for the van Gogh confirmed all their suspicions. Herr Hoffer had not even mentioned the business about the photographs being shown to the Führer, as it was only a joke.
‘Unique,’ said Herr Streicher, ‘is a worrying word. I don’t like that “unique”, not at all.’
‘Really, I think there is nothing to worry about. He wants to be Culture Minister, I think, like a lot of other bright young men, but –’
‘There is a great deal to worry about,’ cried Herr Streicher. He thrust a copy of The Times in front of Herr Hoffer’s nose. It was yesterday’s edition. It moved the smoke into swirls in the stuffy office as Herr Streicher waved it around.
‘I can’t read English that well,’ Herr Hoffer admitted, as he did frequently, usually following up with a joke about having been to Oxford. Herr Streicher was always waving The Times in front of his nose, just as he was always calling Herr Minister Goebbels ‘the Dark Dwarf’ and General Goering by his least important title, ‘Director of Television’.
‘The Kronprinzen-Palais has been closed. On the orders of Rust,’ Herr Streicher growled, tapping a tiny article on an inside page, circled by him in red.
‘I see. Because of the Barlach?’
‘Because we are dealing with maniacs, Heinrich. They would be fine behind a grocery counter where their mania would be confined to bags of dried peas, but they are far from fine behind a ministerial desk.’
Herr Hoffer had planned on visiting the brand-new Barlach Gallery, as well as the rest of the refurbished exhibition rooms. He had looked at the timetable for Berlin trains, and discussed it with Sabine – she wanted to go to the big stores. Ernst Barlach was one of his favourite avant-garde artists. This was very bad news all round.
‘You haven’t been able to see the Schlemmers for years,’ Herr Streicher said, pacing up and down. ‘They got rid of their excellent Beckmann room entirely. One Klee left on show. And Herr Director Hanfstaengl is cousin to Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Führer’s favourite. And still that isn’t good enough for the maniacs!’
‘Oh dear. And Kandinsky reckoned this was the Epoch of Spirituality – one of the greatest, as he put it, in Evolution.’
‘I was told on the phone yesterday, in fact.’
‘Mind you, that was in 1912.’
‘Please concentrate, Heinrich!’ The Acting Director slapped his hand on the glass-topped table; Herr Hoffer half expected it to break. ‘Dresden phoned, but I wouldn’t believe it until I had read it in black-and-white. And not in Party black-and-white, if you please!’
‘I do suggest you keep your voice down, Herr Streicher.’
‘Our van Gogh is the most at risk, Heinrich. And as for that Bendel fellow, for God’s sake keep an eye on him. I don’t like that “unique” at all.’
‘You didn’t hear him say it. Maybe he said it as other people say it. A lot of people like van Gogh – quite respectable people. He entered the German bloodstream via the Die Brücke group and now everyone of taste likes him. I like van Gogh, too, as a matter of fact. After all, he is unique.’
‘But not everyone stands, my dear Heinrich, for half an hour at a time in front of one of his paintings!’ Herr Streicher was knocking out his pipe’s dottle into the metal bin. The noise made Herr Hoffer wince. ‘It’s not normal. An obsession. The fellow’s got his eye on it. The Dark Dwarf knows, I’m sure, that our van Gogh is twenty times more unique than the usual unique. The only one, for God’s sake, that shows the painter at work!’
‘That’s the subject of some debate, of course –’
‘Heinrich, don’t be naive. Does the Dark Dwarf care about debate? He writes novels, after all.’
Herr Hoffer wasn’t sure whether or not this was one of Herr Streicher’s obscure jokes, but he smiled anyway.
‘Bendel promised not to mention our van Gogh to Herr Minister Goebbels. He’s meeting him next week.’
‘So you did talk about the Dark Dwarf!’
‘Please, do try to keep your voice down, Herr Director!’
Hilde Winkel, through the darkness of the present, had begun talking. Herr Hoffer opened his eyes. The blood was dry and black on the lint and on her lip, as if painted on with a full brush.
‘My sister, she lives in Giessen,’ Hilde was saying. ‘She’s a science student. This was St Nicholas’ Eve, last year. She and her two friends had been cramming for a histology exam, so they rewarded themselves the day before by buying two pork chops each. They used up all their meat stamps on those chops. The air-raid siren sounded just as the chops were ready. Her two friends snatched their chops to munch in the cellar, but my sister said she would enjoy them properly, with a knife and fork at the table, after the raid. She left them in the larder and went down into the cellar.’
‘I hope this isn’t depressing,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘No, not too depressing. When she came out of the cellar, the house had gone, along with the pork chops. In fact, the whole of Giessen had gone, completely smashed to bits.’
‘That’s not depressing?’
‘Let the girl finish,’ growled Werner.
‘All she thought, as she looked at the miles and miles of rubble, was, “My God, why didn’t I eat those pork chops?”’
They all laughed.
‘At least she wasn’t suffocated,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘A lot of them were suffocated in the cellars in Hamburg.’
‘That was the fire storm,’ said Werner. ‘Carbon dioxide.’
‘I don’t care what it was,’ Frau Schenkel said, ‘they were still suffocated.’
‘That’s why we aren’t sitting round the corner,’ said Herr Hoffer, soothingly. ‘We can get out quickly, if need be.’
Werner snorted. ‘I don’t imagine for a minute those poor folk were not harbouring similar illusions,’ he said.
‘Which folk?’
‘In the cellars of Hamburg.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Herr Oberst,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘I wish you’d speak plain German, sometimes.’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ sighed Hilde Winkel.
Nobody proffered a new one. Herr Hoffer had finished his cigarette. Now all he could think of was chops. Fat, juicy, with a touch of mustard. To hell with Bendel, anyway. Fried, seasoned, served on a lettuce leaf. His dear mother, before her illness, would spread them w
ith chopped tomato and black pepper, but never mustard.
My God, he was so hungry. He was shaking his head from side to side, amazed at his own hunger.
I will become wood. The wood will start off in my feet and creep up to my head. Once the last knot of timber has appeared on my scalp, I will then cease to feel fear or hunger. No one will notice me, though they walk straight past – not even the bombs will notice me. I will join the universe of dead wood, that pretends to be alive, pretends to be a forest creaking in the wind in which I will be nothing but a small, thin tree you walk straight past. A forest the woodcutters have missed completely.
20
It was shaking its head. Telling him not to.
Hear that?
Yup. He knew that now.
The flashlight was throwing its beam and the beam was quivering like hell and then a rat showed up in it. The rat was tugging at the dead’s leg. There was a glitter of two tiny discs and it thought about things and then a long black tail was slipping away into its own darkness.
The guy in the round spectacles, stiff as money when you ain’t got none, had shifted from toe to head because the rat was tugging on his leg.
He moved the light round until the face of the dead on the other wall showed up, with the arm on his girl; it also had spectacles, but they had fallen forward over the mouth. The heat had twisted them, fused them to the flesh: it must have been very great, the heat.
He would’ve liked to have preserved these people in some way, turned them into an exhibit for a big gallery someplace back home, perhaps in the violet-painted gallery on Hewes Avenue belonging to his boss’s rich bohemian niece: the weirdest sculpture ever, this would be, entitled The Four Fates. Or: Is This Your Enemy?
