'I heard only today of these tablets being used on a professional brother, who pricked his finger doing a post mortem on a septic case,' he informed me unnervingly. 'That's often a death warrant, you know. Germs become more virulent, altogether more proud of themselves, after a triumphal passage through the human body.'
He tipped some tablets into his palm. They were an inch across, reddish yellow, about twenty of them in the phial. 'These would make a horse retch, my dear chappie,' he continued with amusement. 'You must get a couple of them down you three times a day. You have quite a nasty Phlegmone there in your arm. The enemy is attacking up the easy roads of your lymphatic system. Well, we shall teach this adventurous streptococcus a lesson.'
'What are they?' I inspected the two pills in my hand as he filled a glass with water.
'Curiosity is a superfluous quality in the patient. It's stuff called "Streptozon", which to you can mean no more than another brand of schnapps. Now back to bed, dear chappie. You're feverish enough to boil a kettle.'
Illness abroad is doubly wretched. 'The purple wallpaper which we will grow to hate as we lie in bed with grippe,' Cyril Connolly wrote perceptively about his cheap Paris hotel. I was oppressed by my wallpaper, a design of violets. The sloping ceiling seemed to be descending to crush me like the torture chamber of _peine forte et dure._ The ghostlike Frau Dieffenbach brought me broth, but I wanted only water. Even the sounds of Gerda next door were no more than an irritation.
About eight that evening I descended the narrow attic stairs, grey woollen dressing-gown over my shoulders, to the lavatory on the landing below. A minute later I was hurriedly out again. I leant over the banisters shouting in panic for Dr Dieffenbach. He appeared from the living-room, napkin under chin, half alarmed and half angry.
'Doctor, I'm bleeding to death,' I cried in German. Frau Dieffenbach and Gerda appeared behind him, wondering if I were dying or delirious.
'Bleeding? Where from?' the doctor asked brusquely.
This was awkward, in front of the ladies. 'Internally.'
'Fore or aft?' he demanded impatiently.
'Fore.'
He mounted the stairs, snatching off his napkin and mumbling bad-temperedly. He followed me into _die Toilette,_ where I indicated dramatically with my good hand the bright red water in the pan of solid china, made in Staffordshire and named amid a spray of flowers in English, _The Little Thunderer._ Dr Dieffenbach's professional balance seemed shaken. 'Have you any left?' he demanded, pulling his beard. 'I need a drop more, if you can find it.'
He brought a conical flask from his surgery, into which I passed an inch of this alarmingly coloured fluid. He packed me back to bed. After a few minutes he appeared in smiling reassurance. 'No nephritis,' he announced in English. 'No septicaemic abscess, no pyelitis. I've tested your offering, my dear chappie, by the tincture of guiac method, and find it free from all blood. The colour is a harmless dye, which should have occurred to me. But a doctor never thinks at his clearest when snatched away from his dinner. I've seen the same effect in children who've gorged themselves with sweets which the manufacturers have turned pretty red colours with aniline dyes. They pass straight through to the urine, and you can imagine how the mothers get hysterics. How's the hand? Why, a great improvement already.'
I noticed that the red lines were fading. 'The streptococcus is in full retreat,' Dr Dieffenbach said with satisfaction. 'We shan't send you home looking like Admiral Nelson after all.'
He left me lying feebly on my pillow. 'Streptozon' was transparently a fancy name for sulphonamide, as 'Atebrin' was for the mepacrine hydrochloride used against malaria. I was an involuntary colleague of Professor Domagk's mice.
11
In summer, everybody thinks less. With leaves and flowers to distract the eye, skin and air making friends again, fresh fruit to eat-delicious proof of Nature's kindly abundance-people stop brooding and grow lazy and lecherous. Life looks different, a golden thread to be spun out as long as possible, not a coin to be risked for a cause. A country becomes docile towards its native politicians and completely indifferent towards foreign ones. From his first year of office, Hitler grasped this as instinctively as any other item of mass psychology.
Hitler busied himself in the sunshine to annihilate his antagonists. The Storm Troopers had for years been able to murder whoever they liked with the tolerance of the Law. It would have taken a braver witness to testify, a braver juryman to convict and a braver judge to sentence than in Ireland during the Troubles. Now they had the force of Law itself. There were rumoured to be 100,000 Germans in concentration camps, each prisoner playing the grisly double role of terrorizing those still left outside. All opponents of Hitler not behind barbed wire were under the earth, and even the wraiths of resistance vanished.
The Geleichstellung, the co-ordination of Germany, was accomplished that summer at breakneck speed. Hitler's safeguards of March were forgotten, his four-year limit not worth remembering. The Reichstag enjoyed the vestigial function of Hitler's sounding board, which it fulfilled to hear his resolve of spreading peace and light across Europe, a message accepted particularly enthusiastically by the London Times, the British Labour Party and President Roosevelt. Hitler was already giving the world a taste of the piecrust promises with which he was stopping the mouths of the Germans.
The German Social Democratic Party vanished. Hitler's signature dissolved it. He also dissolved the German National Party, his partner in the coalition appointed by President Hindenburg with the idea of keeping him under control. The Catholic Centre Party lasted until July 4, when Storm Troopers appeared in its offices to close it down for ever. And on July 20, representatives of His Holiness in Rome signed a concordat with representatives of Herr Hitler in Berlin.
Hitler's success in these early vulnerable months came from his genius for the deadly game of political chess, from an eye which saw deeply into the dark, timorous, mean recesses of the human heart, and from his transforming the roughhouse which passed for German society into a disciplined country where everyone knew where he stood. Hitler restored order. And the Germans loved him for it, as Gerda loved her father.
'My dear chappie, you must realize how things are for us in Germany,' explained Dr Dieffenbach, clipping his after-dinner cigar a month after saving an English arm with a German drug. 'The Jews are vastly over-represented in medicine, as in the law. I sometimes wonder if we can truly call these two learned professions German at all. But I would agree that Herr Hitler is being rather hasty. He will have second thoughts, assuredly. You must expect him to be a little headstrong in the first flush of success. Besides, he has to pander a little to his most fervent supporters, who are not exactly the type of person I would invite to dinner.'
Dr Dieffenbach always evaded my questions about the nature of the pills. He did not know that I had seen a letter which Gerda inadvertently left on the pink chenille cloth when filing her father's professional papers. It was a short handwritten note from Domagk, saying they were receiving encouraging reports from 'Streptozon' all over Germany, particularly from Professor Dr Schreus at the medical academy in Dьsseldorf and from physicians in Mьnster and Kiel. In Wuppertal, Professor Dr Klee was using it successfully at the Municipal Hospital for erysipelas and angina of the throat. I supposed I G Farben had good reasons for keeping the drug up its sleeve, though I did not think much about it. Once cured by his doctor, the patient forgets the drug and begrudges the fee
I was already planning to spend Christmas with my parents. I certainly did not see my days in Germany as numbered. In the years ahead, there were plenty of Englishmen to visit Germany curiously and leave it enthusiastically, including Lloyd George. Nazism had a glitteringly superficial appeal, a nation as one folk, all sharing alike-even such privations as the weekly 'one pot' meal-all setting their country above themselves, all healthy, straightforward and comradely, the apotheosis of togetherness, a youth movement for all ages. I missed the full significance of the moral infection round me, as I had misse
d the full significance of the cured physical one in my hand.
Once a month I had to report to the Polizeiprдsidium on Druckerstrasse, between river and railway, crammed together as they traversed the narrow valley. It was a painless and even an amicable episode. A citizen of the British Empire was a curiosity to break the monotony of Hungarians or Roumanians, Dutch or Danes. A scholarly-looking policeman with pince-nez made a neat copperplate entry in violet ink on the yellowish, lined paper of my file, and that was that.
I was due to appear at the end of October. Hitler had just abruptly withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, and the League of Nations for good measure, which particularly disconcerted the London _Times, _the British Labour Party and President Roosevelt. I was on this occasion shown immediately into a small office containing two men my own age, both in Nazi brown shirts with Sam Browne belts, swastika armbands above their left elbows, breeches and jackboots stuck under a trestle table covered with papers.
They questioned me for two hours, keeping me standing while they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. Why was I in Germany? I protested that my work permit was in front of them. Yes, but why was I _really _in Germany? I observed that their country was most interesting and educative to visit. Had I any Jewish blood? Did I look it? I asked. Where did I learn to speak German? And why? How much money had I saved in Germany? Did I transfer money to London? What was my father's work? They wanted the names and addresses of all the people I knew in Wuppertal.
They were a pair of jacks-in-office, dressed in an authority which was neither little nor, to the world's pain, brief. But the icicles of my reserve began to melt. A citizen of the British Empire expected to be above the antics of the natives when they grew restive. I had a feeling of always being watched, in reality too dramatic a notion. The Gestapo had been in business only six months, a minor organization confined to the State of Prussia, christened by a clerk at his wits' end for a set of distinctive initials among the hundreds newly proliferating in Germany.
A few days later I encountered Gerda in the hall of the Dieffenbachs' house, below a newer and larger photograph of Hitler. Her face was scarlet, her eyes spilling tears. I had often seen her indignant and sometimes angry, but never weeping. It was Jeff, she explained.
'The school say I must not mix with foreigners. If I do, they tell me I shall lose my job. It's not thought right for a German in my position to ride about in a big American car, when there are workpeople with hardly enough to keep alive.'
'What's it to do with the school, whether you ride in an American car or the Schwebebahn?' I protested, though not displeased.
'My whole life is of concern to the authorities,' she said desperately. 'Everything that anybody does has the Government nosing into it. You never know if the teacher sitting next to you is an agent for the Sicherheitsdienst.' This was the SD, the early State Security Service, under the cashiered former Naval intelligence officer Reinhard Heydrich, whose later extermination in Prague led to the elimination of Lidice and its whole population. 'There're Brownshirts and officials I've never seen before, in and out of the school all the time. I don't want to end up in the Special Court.'
I had heard plenty of the Sondergericht, with three Nazi judges and no jury, established after the March elections to deal with dissenters.
'People have been in trouble you know, quite a lot of them,' Gerda continued, hesitant and fearful of what she was saying. 'Now the police and the Storm Troopers are entitled to go into any house they like, and ferret out whatever and whoever they wish…There are people Papa knows who have just disappeared. Like that.' She snapped her fingers. 'Papa doesn't say much about it, but for all he knows they could be dead and buried. Perhaps they are. All over Germany they're keeping people as long as they like in protective custody…Protective! The camps are far worse than the detention barracks in the Army. Anyway, the Storm Troopers ransom people to be let out, it's a racket like Jeff's gangsters in Chicago.'
'I suppose some lady teacher was jealous of you with Jeff and his car, and told the Brownshirts?'
'No, it was Gunter.'
'Your own brother!' I was horrified.
'He passed the story to his schoolmaster. You know how Gunter thinks absolutely everything about the Nazis is wonderful, just because they organize camps and give him a uniform and they all sing songs round a fire. They tell him it's his duty to inform on anything at home which goes in the slightest against the thinking of National Socialism. You can't blame him. All kids are instructed to put their country first, even before their parents. He doesn't know any better.' She ended charitably, 'I expect he'll grow out of it.'
I decided to guard my tongue carefully within earshot of the young man. I noticed that Gerda took every chance afterwards to slap the cheeks of Hitler's little enthusiast.
These two incidents decided me to quit Germany. I had no knowing who might be itching to report me to the SD, and put me in serious trouble. Or perhaps my mind was already made up, they were the clicks of a shutter admitting light to a sensitized film. Jeff was nettled. He had bought a cosmetics firm in Berlin, and had planned my concocting voluptuously-smelling perfumes and powders from chemicals.
'What's the matter? Homesick?'
'You know I haven't a home to pine for.'
'I guess Germany's getting too noisy a jungle for the explorers to sleep soundly,' he agreed, after trying to dissuade me. 'These Nazis are nuts, when you come down to it. A government's job is to declare war and raise taxes and keep the railroads running, not to tell a girl who she can go out with and who she can't. Sure you've made your mind up? I guess England's just like the States right now, full of college graduates selling apples.'
I was to leave just before Christmas 1933, through Ostend again, and by night. On my last day in Wuppertal I met Professor Domagk for the second time.
Dr Dieffenbach gave a small evening party to speed me on my way. There was French champagne and spiced biscuits and _pets de nonne_-nun's farts, the name given to delicately flavoured pastries by Voltaire. Gerda wore her blue and white dress with diagonal stripes. I invited Jeff. She seemed to have accepted renouncing him as she accepted having to raise her arm when the Storm Troopers marched past. Dr Dieffenbach invited the Domagks. But the Professor arrived alone, late and agitated.
'Gertrude can't come,' Domagk anxiously explained the absence of his wife. 'It's our four-year-old girl. You heard she was ill?'
'No, I hadn't.' Dr Dieffenbach looked concerned. 'What's up with the child?'
'She pricked herself with a needle, and it went septic. It may have been contaminated with some virulent organisms which I'd brought back from the laboratory. On my clothing perhaps, one can never be sure of these things.'
'My dear Gerhard, I'm so sorry.' He grasped the professor's hand. 'What's the pathogen? Have you identified it?'
'Yes, it's a streptococcus. She's developed a suppurative Phlegmon on her arm.' Domagk's face, drawn with worry, passed unseeingly round the rest of us in the room. 'The poor little girl's got a positive blood culture. Septicaemia, there you are,' he said resignedly.
'But she's receiving the best treatment?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently.
'She's in hospital. The surgeons are trying to arrest the infection, they've already made fourteen incisions in the arm. The only hope left is amputation.'
_'Du lieber Gott!_ But has the decision been made?'
'It's being made at this moment. I'm on my way to see them.'
'You should never have delayed by coming here.'
'I came intentionally. Listen-' Domagk dropped his voice, but I was near enough to hear. 'Do you suppose I should give her "Streptozon"?'
'Why not? It's been proved safe.'
Domagk frowned. 'Has it? Who can say? It's still in the experimental stage.'
'You've no alternative,' Dr Dieffenbach told him sternly.
'It's never been used on a child before, never.'
'You simply reduce the dosage, exactly as you would for any o
ther drug in your armamentarium.'
Domagk stood shaking his head. 'Amputation might save her life. The sulphonamide might equally well kill her.'
'Give her the drug,' Dr Dieffenbach repeated firmly. 'You know perfectly well that you cannot make a proper clinical judgement within your own family. When your brain's clouded with emotion, you're like a sea-captain trying to navigate in fog.'
Domagk still demurred. I stood listening, while my host read him a lecture lit by the candid light of true friendship. 'Gerhard, you're a fool. Or rather, you're a bacteriologist, which in clinical matters is much the same thing. You sit all day in your laboratory pottering with your Petri dishes and squinting down your microscope, and you forget those beastly germs of yours infect real people, not just the mice which you use as biological litmus paper. Real men and women, who like eating and drinking and making love to one another and going to the pictures. Listen to me-I'm a clinician. You've always got to be taking chances in clinical medicine. An unadventurous doctor leaves nothing but a trail of carefully-treated corpses.' He ended revealingly, 'I didn't hesitate, when I saw that sulphonamide was the only way to prevent our young English friend from cutting the figure of Admiral Nelson.'
'Very well.' Domagk nodded several times. 'I shall exhibit sulphonamide.' He paused. 'I had already made up my mind, Otto, but I wanted to share responsibility with someone outside the family.'
'Have you the "Streptozon"?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently. 'I've none of the pills left.'
'I was intending to collect some from my laboratory, then go on to the hospital.'
'Why waste time? Herr Elgar here knows the way, and his American friend drives the fastest car in Germany. They'll get to the hospital with the pills before you do. Go along and see your child, and tell the surgeons what you've decided. Those gentlemen might take some persuading, they haven't got wind of sulphonamide yet.'
I was instructed to revisit Domagk's room, the one with the painting by Otto Dix. I was told that Professor Hцrlein had left a phial containing twenty tablets of 'Streptozon' on the roll-topped desk. Domagk departed for the hospital. Dr Dieffenbach telephoned the I G Farben works for the night-watchman to admit me.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 8
