Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

by Justine Saracen

  Synopsis

  Twelve years of terror end with a world in flames. Behind filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s stirring footage of a million joyous patriots, the horror of Nazi Germany unfolds. It engulfs Katja Sommer, a “good German” who discovers honor in treason; Frederica Brandt, active in the highest circles of power; Rudi Lamm, homosexual camp survivor and forced SS killer; and Peter Arnhelm, a half-Jewish terrorist. Under the scrutiny of the familiar monsters of the Third Reich, these four struggle for life, decency, and each other. Love does not conquer all, but it’s better than going to hell alone.

  Tyger, Tyger,

  Burning Bright

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  Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

  © 2012 By Justine Saracen. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-692-2

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: March 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Shelley Thrasher

  Production Design: Susan Ramundo

  Cover Design By Sheri (GraphicArtist2020@hotmail.com)

  By the Author

  100th Generation

  Vulture’s Kiss

  Sistine Heresy

  Mephisto Aria

  Sarah, Son of God

  Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

  Acknowledgments

  While there is an ocean of information available on Nazi Germany—in print, film, video, and documentary—it is also useful to check with someone who’s been there and remembers. I’d therefore like to thank Dr. Jacqueline Nolin for providing her personal accounts of living as a child in war-torn Berlin.

  I am also thankful to Marion Hoffmann and Irmgard Löffler for their help in the fine points of German terminology, and to retired surgeon Radclyffe for medical information on stab wounds.

  My deep gratitude is ever and always to Shelley Thrasher, my editor and trusted friend whose scrutiny has saved me over and over from error and cliché. Thanks also to Susan Ramundo, for the equally important task of setting it all up in perfect form, and to Sheri for the ingenious cover, which tells the whole novel, if you know how to “read” it.

  Most of all, of course, my deepest gratitude must go to Radclyffe, who keeps the whole ship sailing, week after month after year.

  Dedication

  To

  Denise Block, Cicely Lefort, Violette Szabo

  British agents killed at Ravensbrück

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears

  And water’d heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  William Blake

  PART ONE

  SEPTEMBER 8, 1934

  NUREMBERG, GERMANY

  Chapter One

  The air over the Nuremberg stadium radiated with patriotism. One hundred fifty thousand uniformed men, the flower of Germany’s manhood, stalwart and true, stood at attention waiting for command. But for the fluttering of the five-story banners behind the dais, all was silence.

  In the tiny elevator platform on the flagpole stanchion overlooking the field, two cameras recorded the scene. While the senior cameraman panned the entire stadium with the wide-angle lens, Katja Sommer knelt beside him and captured the formations below.

  Slowly, she turned the crank on the single-lens Bolex, focusing on each huge phalanx in the panorama. The Arbeitsdienst with their spades, the far-larger Sturmabteilung in brown uniforms, and the elite Schutzstaffel all in black. They had left a wide avenue down the center of the field and now they waited for command.

  “Rechts UM!” One hundred fifty thousand men snapped a turn toward the center and presented arms. On the hard-packed stadium ground, three hundred thousand booted feet sent up a dull double concussion, whomp-WHOMP. An instant later, a thousand standards, topped with gilded swastikas, pivoted to salute the three celebrants who marched along the avenue: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS; Viktor Lutze, head of the SA; and between them, Adolf Hitler, Führer of Germany.

  The three leaders paced in solemn steps past the endless ranks of men, and both cameras filmed until they became tiny specks in the distance. Lowering her camera, Katja absorbed the spectacle: blocks of men as far as she could see, Germany in microcosm, paying tribute to its martyrs.

  After a solemn moment, the leaders did an about-face to return along the same wide avenue and the cameras resumed filming. Still Katja heard no sound but the fluttering banners and the soft whirring of the camera mechanism. The field of men seemed a single organism harboring a vast primordial will that waited to be unleashed.

  Katja was awestruck. Such manifest power had to come from something deep and wonderful. She forced away a tiny spark of doubt. Adolf Hitler, the one man who harnessed that will, had alleviated Germany’s poverty and ended its humiliation. To be sure, his Brownshirts sometimes became violent, and the boycotts of Jewish shops seemed an overreaction. But she could not forget the sight of the burning Reichstag building, proof that Germany had dangerous enemies in its own cities. Even the concentration camps in Oranienburg and Dachau seemed reasonable if they held people intent on destroying the nation. Germany had endured so many hard years, and this government had begun to deliver prosperity and hope.

  Katja had felt the same euphoria the day before, when they filmed the arrival of the flags. In the dusky light, countless thousands of men had paraded in, bearing the banners of the new Germany. Filmed from above, the crimson flags seemed to pour into the stadium like the blood of a people.

  Then the Führer had walked onto the field before their holiest relic, the “blood flag,” soaked in the gore of the men killed in the failed putsch. It bore the mystic spirit of the National Socialist movement, and in a solemn ceremony, he had touched the bloodied corner of it to each of the new standards, suffusing them with the patriotic “memory” of their comrades’ first sacrifices.

  The military bands struck up another march, drawing her from her reverie, and she watched Hitler return to the dais.

  “That’s it for now,” Marti announced, to Katja
’s relief, and they descended to the base of the stanchion. She looked at her watch; the ceremony had taken two hours. Her back hurt from crouching the entire time, and she was cold. Marti probably was too but, as the oldest member of the camera team, he would have suffered frostbite before admitting it.

  She hoped she had filmed some good material. She wanted to please not only Marti, but also the director of the whole enterprise and the bright star that illuminated Katja’s every aspiration: the amazing, brilliant, beautiful Leni Riefenstahl.

  Chapter Two

  Katja caught up with the senior cameraman and his young son, and together they crossed the Adolf Hitler Platz. “It’s so quiet now,” Katja remarked. “It’s hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago, this square was bursting with people all screaming for the Führer.”

  Marti nodded and ruffled his son’s hair. “Yes, it was pretty exciting, wasn’t it, Johannes?”

  “I liked the soldiers,” the boy said, producing an awkward imitation of the goosestep. Marti smiled with paternal pride. “He’s a little scrapper, and even though he’s only five, he can’t wait to join the Hitlerjugend. I think he likes the dagger. Frankly, my wife and I wish he’d go back to puppies.”

  They arrived at the Schlageter Platz and the building that had housed most of them during the filming. A stately structure in reddish concrete, it had three wide, arched windows on the ground floor and ornamented pilasters flanking the three arches on the floor above. But Katja always focused first on the enormous sign between the floors that announced in block letters: REICHSPARTEITAG—FILM 1934.

  “I’m going to miss this place,” Marti said.

  “I will too. Even if I did have to sleep in a dormitory and eat in a cafeteria. I learned so much.”

  “You could sleep and eat? Lucky you. I barely remember doing either one. Another few days of that pace would have done me in.”

  Once inside, Katja saw that most of the other cameramen had already arrived. She immediately recognized Sepp Allgeier, the head of operations. She knew most of the others by face, but particularly liked cameramen Koehler, Vogel, and Gottschalk. All the men in the crew greeted each other with backslapping and mild ribaldry and smiled courteously toward her. They seemed exhausted, simply waiting for their director to declare the job done so they could go home.

  Leni Riefenstahl was nowhere in sight. To Katja’s disappoint-ment, she’d never gotten to talk to her. In the turmoil of the week’s events, the busy director had never stayed in one place long enough for Katja to even approach her. A shame, because Riefenstahl was half the reason Katja had applied to work on the project. Of course she also wanted to learn filming, an infant industry in which she hoped to make a career. But Katja had watched Riefenstahl act in the mountain-climbing thrillers The White Hell of Pitz Palü and Storms over Montblanc, and by the time she saw The Blue Light, she was starstruck.

  The door to the large conference room opened and the crowd of people in the corridor filed in. The conference table had been moved to the back and rows of chairs placed in a semicircle before a portable screen. Behind the chairs, a projector was mounted on the table, and Gottschalk stood by it with some half-dozen cans of film.

  Leni Riefenstahl appeared at the front of the room. In a rumpled jacket, she was visibly tired and the face Katja knew from the movie screen was somewhat haggard. Her stylishly short hair looked as if she had run her fingers through it in lieu of combing. For all that, she was still attractive, the sort of woman men both feared and lusted after.

  Katja had considered cutting her own dark brown hair in the same fashion, but decided against it, keeping it pinned in a roll at the back of her neck, the way her fiancé liked it.

  “Thank you all for staying an extra day,” Riefenstahl said. “I know you’re all anxious to leave and I promise I’ll release you in just about an hour.”

  During the murmurs of approval one or two people actually checked their watches.

  “I’ve already thanked the City of Nuremberg for the lads who built our observation towers and bridges, camera tracks, and, above all, the electric elevator on the mast in the Luitpold stadium. But that was them, and this is you. Bravo to you.”

  Another rumble of cheerful agreement.

  Riefenstahl scratched her barely combed hair. “For your information, we have 130,000 meters of film and a couple of hundred stills from Rudi Lamm and myself. I’ve had a few important scenes developed, and I edited just a little, to see what’s possible. I think we’ve done a terrific job, but you can judge for yourselves.” She signaled for the light switch and the projector began to run.

  An airplane emerged from the clouds and flew low over Nurem-berg, casting its cruciform shadow over the city like a benediction. Below, long columns of people marched in formation toward the stadium. Ingenious. The Führer arriving from on high, about to descend to the adoring multitudes who streamed to greet him.

  “Fantastic scene, someone said. “How did we get that?”

  “We had both an airship and a small Klemm single-engine up there at the same time.”

  “That’s the material I took from the Klemm flying alongside,” Richard Koehler said. “Glad you like it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Riefenstahl said. “We’ll keep it, no matter what else we cut.”

  “That’s good news.” Koehler slapped his hand on his knee. “Why don’t we cut the speeches? They’re all drivel.”

  “Don’t let anyone hear you say that, Richard,” Sepp Allgeier said. “The propaganda ministry already has some kind of blood feud with us.”

  Riefenstahl declined to comment and instead called attention to the screen where the scene had jumped to the Führer’s motorcade through Nuremberg. “I did some experimental splicing here, just to show what I have in mind.” The camera shifted focus repeatedly, from Hitler’s car, to the crowds, to the city itself, as though its ancient edifices also welcomed him.

  “It works beautifully,” Vogel said. “I see some of my segments here, but those overheads look like they’re from Marti.”

  Katja smiled to herself, recognizing some of the shots she and Marti had done together to highlight the beauty of the city. Deep in Bavaria, Nuremberg was a gem, the obvious choice for a political party that claimed the soul of a people. A born Berliner, Katja did not know much about Nuremberg beyond what she had learned in school, that it was an early center of humanism, science, and painting, and that two of its famous sons were Albrecht Dürer and Johann Pachelbel. But she found its medieval look intriguing.

  A good thing, because she was engaged to a young Nuremberger, Dietrich Kurtz, and would probably end up living here.

  Leni Riefenstahl’s voice penetrated Katja’s thoughts. “There’s a moment coming up that’s just perfect. We filmed hundreds of meters from directly behind the Führer with the sunlight delineating him. But look here, how the morning sun radiates around his head and shoulders like a halo. Fortunately, we were also filming from the front, and with a little splicing…right here…we shift to full sunlight blazing off his face.” She pointed to the screen. “Did you see his raised hand? Light leaps from it like something divine. Great effect. We’ll keep that and cut back on the crowd scenes.”

  “I hope we keep some of the crowd scenes,” Rudi Lamm said, “but filmed against the backdrop of the medieval buildings. The city should be part of the story.”

  “I agree, Herr Lamm,” Riefenstahl said. “The propaganda min-ister seems to believe we are making a political document, but that was never my intention. It’s to be a work of art, like Nuremberg itself.”

  The conference room door opened abruptly and a man hurried in to take a seat. “Sorry for being late,” he said, but offered no excuse. Katja recognized Erich Prietschke, one of the assistants, she wasn’t sure to whom. He was tall, with blue eyes and blond hair brushed up on one side and tumbling down on the other. The film crews had worn SA uniforms to blend in with the crowd, but all the others had turned theirs in the evening before. Only Erich had kept his
uniform another day, she suspected because he knew it made him look the perfectly dashing Aryan soldier.

  The light went off again. “This is one of the reels from the next morning.” The camera “eye” began before an opening window then glided over the water of the canal, past ancient houses hung with long NSDAP banners, as if the swastikas were as much a part of Nuremberg’s history as its painted façades and medieval sculpture. The camera cut to the tent cities of the Arbeitsdienst and the Hitlerjugend, where the boys were just emerging.

  Richard Koehler spoke up. “We got those overheads from the airship. But I think Sepp got better shots from below.”

  “We did,” Sepp Allgeier said. “Lots of pretty faces, naked chests. There’s some of it now.” The camera panned from one shining face to another, then withdrew to show the young men shirtless and in trousers, scrubbing arms and feet under a dripping pipe.

  “The Volk in its glory,” Koehler commented. “Attach that to the scenes of the Führer kissing children and old ladies in native costume, and no one will remember he’s not German.”

  Katja noticed Erich frowning at the banter. When the reel ended and the new one was threaded in, conversation resumed.

  “What about the Hitlerjugend scenes?” someone asked.

  “There’s plenty of that. We had six cameras on it,” Riefenstahl said. “Plus, we got all the blood-flag ceremony. That’s coming up now.”

  The projector clattered as the scene unfolded. At screen center, Hitler strode forward holding the corner of a stained National Socialist flag borne by a soldier in Stahlhelm.

  Stepping from standard to standard, Hitler touched the flag’s corner to the fabric of each banner. He took his time, solemnly clutching each swastika panel to the holy relic, passing the sacred blood-magic to the new banner, and the camera revealed each Gau name—Hessen, Paderborn, Spessart, Rhineland—as it received the Führer’s touch.