Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  “Father telephoned,” she said, her face pale. “It’s something to do with Falk, isn’t it?”

  “It’s anyone on the Left, apparently,” said Dietrich.

  “Or anyone with friends on the Left?”

  “Hans is only being cautious, I’m sure.”

  In the darkness of the car, she began to sob. “I’ve been seeing someone else, anyway. It’s over between Falk and me. It was over even before he was shot, actually, and we’d both meant to tell everyone after the play was done. Only now he’s in trouble and I feel I’ve abandoned him.”

  “He’s in good hands with Arvid and Mildred,” said Dietrich. Careful to avoid the Kurfürstendamm and other avenues leading to the Tiergarten, he drove cautiously down darkened side streets until he reached the Paulsborner Straße. At one intersection he caught a glimpse of the distant dome of the Reichstag, brightly lit as a Japanese lantern, but turned the Mercedes in the opposite direction and hurried homeward.

  Suse went to bed in her old room, the room she had shared with Sabine after Dietrich’s childhood expulsion. As she lay on her back and stared at the moonlit window, Dietrich rapped three times from the other side of the wall as he had done long ago. But Dietrich was not thinking of God. He was thinking of Sabine.

  Sabine was safe that night. But while the family slept, or pretended to sleep, thousands of Communists the length and breadth of Germany were hauled from bed at gunpoint and shot, or merely disappeared. The next day’s newspapers cried

  REICHSTAG BURNS!

  COMMUNIST THREAT TURNED BACK!

  HITLER DECLARES EMERGENCY DECREE FOR PROTECTION OF STATE AND PEOPLE to save the German people from excesses of speech and an irresponsible press, from threatening assemblies and associations, from conspiracies utilizing the national postal service, telegraph and telephone; and authorizing searches of houses and confiscations to protect the public welfare…

  Old Mrs. Harnack next door received no word of her nephews for several days. Then came two notes from Mildred Harnack, one addressed to Suse Bonhoeffer. It bore a Vienna postmark. Falk had nearly recovered his health, she wrote. But while Arvid and I were out visiting friends, other friends called at our flat and took Falk home with them. He is staying with these friends in Munich, but we hear he will soon be going to a new town close by, when it is finished. You know the place. We hear he is as well as can be expected. As you have guessed, we have decided on a trip abroad. Only for a time, we hope.

  Your American friend, Mildred.

  “He’ll be in that new prison camp Hans told us about,” Suse said, her voice bleak.

  When Hans von Dohnanyi saw the letter he agreed. “They’ll take him to Dachau soon; it’s nearly finished. Clever of Mildred, and most considerate, to write so obliquely.” He addressed the family assembled around the dining room table in the Wangenheimstraße. “Where politics are concerned we must all be careful what we put in our correspondence, what we say on the telephone—” he stood and went to the door, looked out in the hall and came back to the table—“even what we say in this house as long as the servants are close by.”

  “Oh, surely not,” said Dr. Bonhoeffer. “We’ve employed these people for years.”

  “Even here in front of the servants,” Dohnanyi repeated.

  “Hans is right, dear,” said Paula Bonhoeffer. “I deal with the staff more than you do, and I know how sometimes an unsuspecting slight or silly grudge can upset them. And who knows what sort of ideas Hitler will put in their heads.”

  “Damned fool man,” grumbled Dr. Bonhoeffer. “Gallivanting around the country with a riding crop in his hand. As if he were a Prussian gentleman. I doubt he sat a horse in his life.”

  Dietrich and Dohnanyi glanced at each other and stifled their smiles.

  “The thing is,” said Karl-Friedrich, who’d driven over with his wife Grete, Hans von Dohnanyi’s sister, “the thing is to look after the family. If the times are as unsettled as Hans believes, and certainly he is in a position to know these things, we must circle the wagons, as they say in America.”

  Dietrich folded his napkin and sat back from the table. “I have been thinking of the family,” he said, “and it’s Sabine I’m worried about now.”

  “Won’t you go to Göttingen?” Paula Bonhoeffer said quickly. “Just to make sure they’re all right.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Dietrich answered.

  He invited Elisabeth Hildebrandt to accompany him. But first there was the election to be got through. It was a depressing affair. In the days leading up to the balloting, the radio waves were inundated with Nazis—the shouts of Goering, the velvet-voiced Goebbels, who could have been hawking cigarettes or fine liqueurs, the heartfelt emotion of Adolf Hitler, who loved his country lived for his country would sacrifice all for his country. The Communists were jailed, the speeches and posters of the Socialists were officially banned, and the remaining parties seemed shrunken and pale.

  Dietrich and Elisabeth cast their ballots and then headed for Göttingen. They barely spoke until they had left the city and emerged onto a long straight highway that cut across the barebrown rise of the Märkische Heath.

  “Who won, do you think?” Dietrich asked.

  “No one,” Elisabeth answered shortly. Then after a time of squinting at the first line of hills to disturb the horizon, “The middle class has gone mad.”

  “They’ve suffered with this depression,” Dietrich said, “and we haven’t.”

  “It’s no excuse,” she said. “If it weren’t for the Socialists, the middle class would have disappeared in 1919.”

  “Who’d you vote for?”

  “The good old timid SPD,” Elisabeth said with a sigh. “For whatever good it will do.”

  “I voted for the Catholic Center Party,” Dietrich said.

  She laughed then. “A Protestant voting for the Catholics? Won’t the ancestors be spinning in their proverbial graves?”

  “The Catholic Center’s been as outspoken against Hitler as the SPD,” he said. “And they’ve got support outside Germany. Something we may need, I’m afraid.” He reached across and took her hand, laced her fingers through his. He said, “Don’t dare tell Father how I voted.”

  Elisabeth had seen childhood photographs—sepia-tinted formal portraits in silver frames—of Dietrich and Sabine. They stared at the camera with large expressive eyes, rosebud mouths, and silken hair, though one was dark and the other fair. They were the most enchanting children she’d ever seen.

  The physical beauty had not lasted, she thought as she studied brother and sister across a Göttingen café table. The childhood delicacy was gone. Dietrich, though not fat, was a large man, broad-faced and thick-necked. His white-blond hair was so thin, patches of scalp shone through despite careful combing. Sabine’s features had sharpened, and carrying two daughters to term had cost her her figure. But the siblings still possessed lovely eyes, though Dietrich’s hid behind thick glasses, and the quick intelligence so evident in the childish faces still dominated the personalities of both. It was also clear they were twins, for despite lengthy physical separation they fell at once, on meeting, into a state of relieved completeness. Elisabeth would have been uncomfortable to have someone else so totally at home in her skin, and she had noted the night before, at supper, that Sabine’s husband, Gerhard, also looked on brother and sister with bemusement. As they left Dietrich and Sabine with their heads together over the supper table and cleared the dishes, Gerhard said to Elisabeth with a smile, “She writes him once a week, but there’s no need really. I believe they talk to each other in their dreams.”

  Elisabeth had laughed. “Perhaps they do.” She took up an apron. “Do you ever feel left out?”

  “Oh, no. Sabine and I talk often enough when we’re awake.”

  In the Stadtcafé, seated at a window where they could watch the passersby, Sabine handed around plates of Zweibelkuchen.

  “Forty-four percent of the vote,” Dietrich said, studying a news
paper he had purchased from a stall in the market square.

  “It’s not a majority, thank God,” said Sabine.

  “But the Nazis are the largest party now. The other conservative parties will go along with anything they want.”

  “They can’t say they have the will of the people behind them.”

  Dietrich sipped from a blue cup. “Nevertheless, they will say it.”

  Sabine turned to Elisabeth. “You’re very quiet.”

  “I find it all too depressing,” Elisabeth said, “that people can be so beastly stupid.”

  “This won’t be the first unjust government in the world,” Dietrich said, “or the last. God knows I won’t be happy living under it, but it will come to an end.”

  “Will it?” Elisabeth stared out the window.

  “Everything does.” Dietrich folded the newspaper neatly and laid it on an empty chair. “But it will be unpleasant in the meantime.”

  They had stayed up late the previous night hearing the latest from Sabine and Gerhard. The day after the Reichstag fire, Gerhard had arrived for his lecture in constitutional law, head in the clouds as usual, shuffling his notes and reminding himself which points to emphasize so that he hardly watched where he was going, when he nearly bumped into a student dressed in the brown shirt of Hitler’s SA who barred the door to the lecture hall.

  “The Jew Leibholz will not lecture today,” the student said.

  Gerhard had been so surprised he stepped back and looked around. Students arriving for the lecture took one look at the guard, heard his repeated announcement—The Jew Leibholz will not lecture today—and left. Gerhard tried to make eye contact with the young man, to no avail. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Pardon, but I am Professor Leibholz, and I most certainly will lecture today.”

  The SA guard still would not look at Gerhard, but said (in what Gerhard called a heartbreakingly young voice), “The students of this university are not interested in Jewish lies.”

  “I am here to lecture on constitutional law,” Gerhard persisted.

  “The constitution has been perverted by Jews. It has been used to deny German men their birthright.”

  At this point Gerhard gave up trying to reason with the stone-faced youth and resolved to enter the lecture hall. He had expected resistance, was prepared even to receive a blow, but was surprised to slip effortlessly by the young man, who did not follow Gerhard or even deign to look around, but held to his post at the door. Gerhard straightened his tie and strode to the front of the hall, opened his briefcase, and arranged his lecture notes on the podium. The guard continued issuing his warning to approaching students.

  Fifteen minutes later, the young man left. Gerhard was alone in the lecture hall. He waited ten more minutes, then put away his notes and went home.

  “So,” Sabine said as she drank the last of her coffee, “we are very tenuous here.”

  “Will Gerhard be dismissed?” Elisabeth asked.

  “I don’t know if it would come to that,” Sabine said. “But he must find enough open-minded students to attend his lectures. How can there be a professor without students?”

  “At my father’s hospital, there is a rumor that Jewish doctors will get the sack,” Elisabeth said.

  Dietrich looked surprised. “At the Charité? I don’t think Father’s heard that. He would have mentioned it.”

  “Perhaps he hasn’t paid attention to the rumors. It wouldn’t affect him.”

  “It most certainly would affect him! And of course he would protest.”

  “Much good that would do,” said Elisabeth. “If it’s going to happen, it will.”

  “She’s right,” Sabine said. “When another law professor protested Gerhard’s treatment, he was censured by a vote of the faculty. If Gerhard is dismissed, we’ll have no recourse here. But at least we aren’t on our own like so many others. We have the family.”

  “Of course you do,” Dietrich said. “And Father and Mother want to assure you they shall help in any way possible. You mustn’t be too proud to ask.”

  “No,” Sabine agreed. “Gerhard and I have spoken about that. These are not times to stand upon false pride.” She lowered her voice. “One thing you should know. Gerhard has purchased an automobile.”

  “But he always hated to drive,” Dietrich observed, then realized the import of what she was telling him.

  “He rarely uses it,” agreed Sabine as she watched his face grow even more serious, “but we sleep so much better now.”

  They were to meet Gerhard at the hospital where his father lay dying from cancer. The elder Leibholz had not been happy to leave Berlin, where he owned several textile mills and served as a councilman from Wilmersdorf. But his doctors gave him only weeks to live, and he had no wish to burden his son and daughter-in-law with numerous journeys to and from Göttingen, especially in such troubled times. Nor did he wish to introduce a deathbed into the shadow of his young granddaughters’ nursery by moving in with his son. Gerhard and Sabine protested that the girls must not be sheltered from a natural part of life. But Jacob Leibholz was adamant. So the widower’s mansion on the shore of the Königssee was sold and its invalid resident lodged in a private suite in Göttingen’s finest hospital, where his family took turns sitting at his bedside.

  A damp March wind whipped off the Hainberg, rattling the awnings of the Stadtcafé and sending a single scrap of paper—a poster from the recent election—skittering across the cobbles of the Marktplatz. As Sabine led her two visitors into the open square toward the iron-lace canopy of the Goose Girl Fountain, an elderly gentleman approached, waving a cane with one hand and holding his hat against the wind with the other.

  “Frau Leibholz!” he called. “Frau Leibholz!”

  “Ah, Professor Örtmann,” Sabine answered. She introduced Dietrich and Elisabeth, and told them, “Professor Örtmann teaches theology at the university. Perhaps, Dietrich, you know his work?”

  “Oh yes,” Dietrich said politely. “I especially enjoyed your treatise on the christology of Adolf Harnack.”

  “Good, good,” Örtmann said in a distracted manner. He spoke in a loud voice and cupped a hand to his ear. “Now, Frau Leibholz, I must tell you how appalled I am by the recent treatment of your husband at the hands of our students.”

  “Why thank you, Professor,” Sabine said, looking around.

  “I beg your pardon?” Örtmann said.

  “I—said—thank—you—,” Sabine repeated, more loudly.

  “Yes, yes,” Örtmann continued, more loudly still, so that passersby turned to look at him. “Most appalling! When students at a distinguished university can behave so abominably, one wonders what is in store for our poor country! This new man is a barbarian!”

  Sabine patted his shoulder, took his arm in hers, and led him away from the open square to a sheltered doorway, where after a few more minutes’ conversation, Professor Örtmann took his leave of them.

  “Hard of hearing,” Dietrich observed.

  “Terribly,” Sabine agreed, watching Örtmann stump his way across the square. “And also a very dear man.”

  “But he’s no idea what’s coming,” Elisabeth said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Dietrich said. “His judgment of the Nazis was accurate enough.”

  “Yes, he’s worried,” Elisabeth replied. “But he’s not yet afraid.”

  Dietrich bit his lip and looked after the departing Örtmann.

  “Perhaps,” Sabine said, “he is too old to be afraid.”

  Elisabeth said, watching Sabine carefully, “Then you think he has reason to fear. You were trying to quiet him.”

  Dietrich turned and said in a sharp voice, “You seem to think, Elisabeth, that you are the only person in Germany who guesses these people may cause problems.”

  “Dietrich!” Sabine admonished. “There’s no reason to take that tone with Elisabeth.”

  “Sorry,” he said contritely. “You’re quite right. Forgive me, Elisabeth.”


  Elisabeth had folded her arms across her chest and was surveying the Marktplatz, her lips pressed tight in a thin line and her eyes half-shut against the wind. Dietrich took his watch from his waist pocket and pretended to study it, said, “We’d best be going to the hospital.”

  Sabine guided them across the square. When they reached the southeast corner, now warmed somewhat by the afternoon sun, she stopped. “Here, let me show you this. Local people call this spot the Vierkirchenblick, the View of Four Churches. Because look, you can turn in a circle and have a view of all four of the town’s medieval churches. See?” She turned in a circle, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing with the other. “St. Jakobi’s. You can tell it by the wonderful gargoyles. The Johanneskirche, you see the towers don’t match. The Albanuskirche to the east, there in the sun. And to the south, St. Michael’s.”

  Dietrich and Elisabeth turned around obediently.

  “Surrounded by churches,” Dietrich said, trying to lighten the mood with small talk. “One wonders why they were built so close together. There must have been some rivalry among the parishes.”

  “They probably hated each other,” Elisabeth said. “Christians must have someone to hate, after all.”

  They had begun to walk again. Elisabeth stopped.

  “I would like to see the synagogue,” she said. “Is it close by?”

  “It’s in the Untere Maschstraße, in the opposite direction,” said Sabine.

  “Oh,” Elisabeth said. “Never mind.”

  “It’s a lovely building,” said Sabine, aware of some tension in the air whose source she couldn’t divine, “though not nearly so old as the churches. Rabbi Berman is a nice man. He visits Papa Leibholz quite often.”

  Elisabeth gave some barely polite answer, and was silent for the rest of the walk to the hospital. Dietrich was annoyed with her, as one is annoyed with a peevish child. They waited in the hall outside Jacob Leibholz’s hospital room while Sabine went in to see if he felt like receiving visitors. Dietrich whispered, “Why are you angry with me all of a sudden?”