The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘We are not living in luxury’, was the reply, ‘but then we have never been used to luxury. We are making out’.

  ‘How are the children?’

  ‘We lost little Adolf; the rest are in school here—all but Fritz our eldest. He is seventeen and is in Berlin’.

  ‘It was my hope that I might be able to help you, Kurt’.

  ‘Thank you, but that is out of the question. We are not objects of charity’.

  ‘It might be possible that you could earn some money. I am still in the business of buying paintings, and it might be that you could put me in touch with some deals’.

  ‘I do not know of any paintings, and I do not want any American money’.

  That might bring back the subject of politics, so Lanny made haste to say, ‘I am married again, Kurt, and we have one child and are expecting another. My wife and I are conducting a radio programme in New York on behalf of peace. We are making a careful study of the problem and doing everything we can to save the world from another such calamity’.

  ‘I have heard about it’, said Kurt, his voice still cold. ‘I do not consider that you are competent to express an opinion upon the subject. I consider that you Americans are hopelessly naïve, and that the best thing you could do for Europe would be to retire to your own side of the ocean and attend to your own affairs’.

  So there it was: no use trying to avoid politics! Said Lanny, ‘You must surely know, Kurt, that if we Americans were to withdraw from Europe tomorrow the Reds would start moving in before the week was out. Surely you cannot want us to turn Europe over to them. I have many times heard you express your opinion of the Russian capacity for world government’.

  ‘I have not changed my opinion of the Russians; and on the other hand I have not changed my opinion of the Americans, I say they should let Europe alone and devote themselves to self-improvement’.

  ‘You are letting your bitterness blind you, Kurt’, pleaded Kurt’s old admirer. ‘There is shaping up a world situation in which you have to make a choice between the Western world and the Eastern, between a democratic system and an autocratic one. We are making in the United Nations a beginning at world government. It is a feeble beginning, I admit, but it will grow if we let it and help it. Surely Germany’s true interests lie with that organisation’.

  ‘Germany’s true interests are German. All Germans belong together, and we shall never consent to having our country torn apart. What allies we choose is our affair’. Kurt’s voice was as cold as ever, and he looked at his old friend as if he were a stranger committing an impertinence.

  A feeling of dismay was creeping over Lanny. ‘Kurt!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t mean that you are going to make friends with this cruel dictatorship!’

  ‘I mean that Germany is the place where I was born, and here I am going to live and die’.

  ‘But, Kurt, your children! They will take them from you! They will make little reactionary fanatics out of them! They will teach them to spy upon you and report every word that you say—and maybe some that you don’t say. They will force your children to testify against you’.

  ‘I’m not going to discuss the subject with you, Lanny. All I have to say to you Americans is: Get out of our country and let us alone, and we will solve our problems in our own way. If you had not come here we would have been a free people, and Europe would have had peace for a thousand years, just as the Führer promised us’.

  So that was that. Kurt was an unreconstructed Nazi, and he might become a reconstructed Communist, and Lanny and the rest of his ‘Amis’ might go to the devil.

  V

  But Lanny couldn’t bear to give up. He had come prepared for the worst. ‘Listen, Kurt’, he pleaded. ‘When I was a child I saw a thing called a kaleidoscope; you looked into it and you saw a pretty bright-coloured pattern, then you shook it and it was a different pattern. The world has been shaken, Kurt. Neither you nor I nor anybody else will ever see it the same. We have to make a choice between a democratic world, in which all the peoples have the right to choose their own destiny, and an autocratic world in which they have to conform to the Communist pattern. In Western Germany we people of the Western world are setting up a self-governing state. In the Eastern world all the independent-minded people will be shot or shipped off to work in Siberian mines. The children will be indoctrinated—it will be done regardless of the parents’ wishes, at the cost of the parents’ lives, if need be. You will be told what music to write—the same as poor Shostakovich has been told. Surely you cannot live in such a world! I beg you to let me make arrangements to bring your family into Western Germany. You can have an enormous influence there; you can go on as a great composer into a new period. You might even become a performer once more’.

  ‘Evidently you have forgotten that I am a cripple’.

  ‘I have not forgotten, Kurt. Not long ago I learned something which you may or may not know about Ravel. He had a pianist friend who had lost an arm in the war, and for that friend he wrote a concerto for one hand with full orchestra. It is an extraordinary work’.

  ‘I have seen the score’, Kurt said; ‘but to me it brings to the mind the image of a crippled man and holds it there. It is crippled music, and I would not make such an exhibition of myself for anything in the world’.

  Lanny said, ‘That settles that. But if you would come to Western. Germany I would be so glad to help you. It is dreadful to me to think of you turning into a Communist and standing for all that cruelty, and, above all, the lying they do’.

  ‘I am a German,’ Kurt replied. ‘To help Germany is my only interest. Beyond that I have nothing more to say. Certainly I am not accountable to anyone.’

  ‘Of course not, Kurt.’ He rose. ‘I am sorry you will not let me help you. Try at least, to think kindly of me in the future,

  ‘All right,’ said Kurt, ‘I will do that but I cannot think kindly of your countrymen.’

  That would have opened another discussion, and Lanny saw there was nothing to be gained. He said, ‘Let me tell you about myself. In my heart I am still that kid you used to know, and to me you are still the one I thought the wisest in the world. Don’t you remember how we sat upon the heights by the Church of Nôtre-Dame-de-Bon-Port, and you talked to me about Beethoven and Goethe and the philosophers of German idealism? Let us try to remember those things about each other, and let the recent unhappiness drop into limbo’.

  ‘All right’, Kurt said, ‘let us leave it that way’. This had the tone of finality. Lanny held out his hand, and Kurt shook it. As they parted the visitor said, ‘I am going to send you our little paper, unless it would annoy you’.

  VI

  Lanny got into his car and drove slowly away. He had failed in his mission, completely. He had not even troubled to bring up the subject of counterfeiting, because he knew that he could get nothing useful out of Kurt in his present mood. He was no longer the same man. He was cherishing his grudges, and he didn’t want the same things that Lanny wanted; he wouldn’t speak frankly, and even if he appeared to there could be no trusting his words. Very certainly he wasn’t going to have any interests in protecting the financial solvency of the American and British nations.

  Lanny had become convinced that Kurt had made some kind of deal with the Communists. There was no other way that he could live on here, a German Nazi in the midst of Red revolution. The old Kurt would have spoken boldly against the intruders, who could have been to him no other than bandits. The new Kurt was keeping his mouth shut and looking out for himself and his family.

  Lanny drove back to Berlin and made his report to the Treasury man: Kurt Meissner was there, he was bitter, defiant, and shut up as tight as a clam. Guzman’s story that he was a leader of the Neo-Nazis was in all probability true; it was also probable that he was dealing with the Reds and pretending to have come over to them.

  ‘It is going to be a hard nut to crack’, agreed Morrison. ‘We will have to get some man who can pose as a Nazi and who knows the game’.
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br />   ‘Kurt knows who the real Nazis are and he has secret sources of information. It will be hard indeed to find a man who has come over to our side and whom Kurt has not heard about or cannot find out about. This further idea has occurred to me—that we might send a man who can pose as a Communist. I don’t know the village, but there’ll be some Red in charge, a commissar or whatever they call him Your man might get in touch with him and stay there a while and make himself useful, and at the same time be making inquiries. He might even start a little intrigue against Kurt and his crowd: not enough to get them arrested but enough to give them a scare. They might put their bales of money and even their precious plates into a car and move. They couldn’t feel safe after that in any Communist territory, and they might come into West Germany, and you’d have them’.

  ‘Now you are talking!’ replied Morrison. ‘Not a Nazi but a Communist is what we want’.

  ‘There’s another idea I’ve been turning over in my mind. Emil Meissner spoke of Kurt’s having a son in an Oberschule in the East sector, and Kurt confirmed it. I remember Fritz very well. He thinks a lot of me, because when I came to visit them I used to bring the children presents, and I played the piano with his father, also with Fritz. In short, I’m an old friend of the family, as far back as he can remember; and now if he has lost his sympathy with nazism, what has he taken up? Maybe he’s a Red, or maybe he is a Pinko like myself. I have the idea to meet him and listen to him talk, and maybe some suggestion might come out of it’.

  ‘By all means try it’, said the other. ‘We must leave no stone unturned. But you have to be careful not to give the boy any hint as to your purpose.’

  ‘My idea is to sound him out as an old friend of the family. If he is really on our side he can be trusted’.

  ‘Mr Budd’, said the other gravely, ‘the Nazis used children to report upon their parents, and the Reds are doing it now. But it is not our practice’.

  ‘I know that. But I take it that Kurt Meissner is not the person we are after. What you want is to break up this gang and to get hold of the false money If by any chance Kurt Meissner were to fall into your hands, you might be willing to let him escape and find refuge in Spain or the Argentine’.

  ‘That is true enough. But be careful and don’t give the game away—or he might take the money with him, and the printing plates as well’.

  VII

  It was a question, how to get hold of Fritz Meissner. Lanny might have strolled into the Russian sector and made inquiries for him at the school, but that would certainly have attracted attention and might have been embarrassing to the student. Lanny could have written him a letter; mail was going into the Russian sector uncensored; but a letter addressed in care of the school might be opened by the school authorities. The son of a notorious Nazi was certain to be a person set apart and watched by them. Morrison said he had a young German on his staff, one who dressed poorly so that he could mingle with the Germans. He would carry a letter to the school and have no trouble bringing back a reply.

  The son’s full name was Emil Friedrich Meissner, after his two uncles, the Uncle Friedrich had been killed on the Eastern front in the recent war. Lanny had known young Fritz as the eldest of a fair-haired brood and had last seen him three years ago, on a visit to Stubendorf by special permission of Hitler. He had then been a tall blue-eyed boy of fourteen; now, of course, he would be still taller.

  Lanny wrote a note: ‘I have a message from your Uncle Emil. Can you come to dinner with me at the Savoy Hotel at six o’clock this evening?’ The messenger was told not to inquire of the school authorities but of the students, and to catch the boy when he was coming out from a class.

  Lanny went back to his hotel, made up for some lost sleep, had a bath, and then went for a walk to renew his memories of imperial Berlin. It had been built into a symbol of military glory, of might, majesty, and dominion, and now it was a symbol of what the Episcopalian catechism calls ‘the pomps and vanities of this wicked world’. Lanny had been a witness of every stage of the administering of this religious lesson, this scourging by fate, or divinity, or whatever it was. As a dyed-in-the-wool Pink he had his own pat interpretation of the phenomenon.

  At six o’clock he was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading an evening paper, when the fair-haired, blue-eyed lad came in. It is marvellous how they grow; he had shot up to Lanny’s own height of five feet ten. It is marvellous also how they believe in life; the faith and the courage they have in the midst of the worst calamities. It was evident to the first glance that here was a sensitive and eager young soul, at once impressed and troubled at coming into this fashionable place in the very poor clothes that he owned. He was meeting the wonderful Herr Budd whom he had known from babyhood; the wealthy Herr Budd, who had never come to the Stubendorf home without bringing sumptuous gifts. He had come from that land of unlimited possibilities which had shown itself at once magnificent and terrible in the last few years. Incredibly, impossibly, it had given the coup de grâce to Hitler’s Drittes Reich, which had been built and officially scheduled to last for a thousand years.

  It was plain that Fritz hadn’t been having any American food of late; he was thin, and the flush in his cheeks was of excitement only. Lanny meant him to have one meal to remember and took him into the splendid dining room and ordered first soup and then a large slice of roast beef with a baked potato and brussels sprouts, then a salad, then ice cream and coffee. The lad was overwhelmed and insisted it was too much, but he managed to put it away; meantime Lanny told him about his visit to those two great military gentlemen, General Graf Stubendorf and General Uncle Emil, and where and how they were living, and how Lanny had presented each of them with a Schinken. Uncle Emil had wanted Lanny to meet Fritz and find out how he was getting along; Fritz said he was doing all right, he was studying hard in order to get ahead and be able to help his family. They were speaking English, so Fritz could reveal what progress he had made.

  VIII

  They went up to the room and there, locked safely in, they could talk freely. Lanny said he was very much interested to know what conditions were in the schools of the East sector. Fritz reported that the Russians had put a Communist in control of his school, but they had not been able to replace all the teachers, and many were independent-minded men, doing what they could to preserve the old German tradition of academic freedom. They had to be careful, of course; they couldn’t say anything against communism without the certainty of being kicked out and arrested, but they could manage to make their point of view clear. The students were a bit more outspoken.

  ‘What are they thinking?’ Lanny asked, and Fritz said they were divided into various groups, all highly argumentative. There were a few old-time patriots, but these kept quiet; there were National Socialists, and there were Social Democrats, and, of course, some genuine and sincere Communists—made so because of their embittered lives, and not just kowtowing to the Soviet conquerors. The students spoke freely in their own trusted groups, and many, even Reds, were determined to remain Germans and not be drawn into the Russian orbit.

  ‘I am afraid they will have a hard time before the MVD gets through with them’, said Lanny.

  ‘I know that’, replied Fritz, ‘and they know it. One of my teachers told me to read John Stuart Mill on liberty, and I did. Also, I read Milton’s Areopagitica. That is the way I feel about freedom of speech and of thinking and writing’.

  ‘If you really mean that, Fritz, I’m afraid you won’t be able to stay in the Soviet zone. Things are still disorganised, but you can be sure the Communists will regiment them. They will take books like Mill and Milton out of the school library; they’ll turn out the teachers who whisper such ideas and they’ll put them in some mine in Siberia’.

  ‘I know, Herr Budd, and I’m prepared for what may come. It may even be that I’ll have to walk over into the American sector. But there will have to be some way for me to get work; I can’t just sit in a refugee camp the way so many people are doing now’
.

  ‘Tell me how you are living’, Lanny said.

  ‘Well, you know rooms are scarce in our part of Berlin, because that is where the Reds came in with their heavy artillery. Six of us students live in one room. We managed to select a group that thinks pretty much alike, so we don’t fight, and I don’t think we report on one another. But, as you say, that may not be allowed to go on’.

  ‘What do you do for money?’

  ‘My father sends me a hundred marks a month. He has a little money saved up, he tells me. I manage to earn a little more running errands’.

  ‘Does your father know about your present state of mind?’

  ‘I am ashamed to say, Herr Budd, that I haven’t had the nerve to tell him. It isn’t because he would stop sending me money; honestly, it is because I hate to hurt him so. I don’t think he would tolerate me in the family. You understand how it is, these are American and English ideas that I have been talking about, and to him they are treason—Hochverrat.

  ‘Kurt hasn’t changed his ideas at all?’

  ‘I am embarrassed to talk about it, Herr Budd, but you really ought to hear. He has changed his ideas very much for the worse. Really I believe he has become a Communist—a Stalin-type Communist, I mean’.

  ‘Oh, Fritz! It is hard to believe that!’

  ‘Nun, ja! You can understand it from his point of view, Herr Budd. What was he to do, a crippled man with our big family to support? He had to have a home, a place where he could live and work. He must have gone to the apparatchiks, as they called themselves, and made his peace with them. He has not been frank with me—I doubt if he has been frank with anybody. He talks about the wave of the future and the impossibility of unscrambling an omelet and of setting back a clock and all that sort of thing’.

  ‘Have you thought that he might be getting money from the Reds?’