A Stranger in My Own Country (12 page)

And then came the time when the new regime seized power, and everything changed. Now Paulchen and Leopold Ullstein were always in a huddle, they always had something to discuss, and whenever somebody else came into the room they stopped talking. They were the Jews, and we were the gentiles, they belonged together, and we were the outsiders. During those weeks I came to understand that in the hour of danger a Jew feels closer to another Jew, however much they disagree and differ, than to his truest friend of non-Jewish blood. I realized that the Jews themselves are the ones who have erected this barrier between themselves and other nations, which we refused to believe when the Nazis claimed as much; and that it is the Jews themselves who feel the difference in blood, and insist on it, when we had always smiled at the notion. This realization did not make me an anti-Semite. But I did come to see the Jews in a different light. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. I really hate to say it: but I can't alter the fact.
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As soon as we were in Berlin, of course, I tried to sort out this business with the Sponars. I was not minded just to roll over and accept
their outrageous demands. I had agreed to make the payments only on one specific condition, namely that they consented to the foreclosure, and since they now refused to give their consent, I was no longer bound by the agreement. The objection that I was taking advantage of the plight of a fellow German national in order to acquire a house was simply ludicrous. The house did not belong to the man any more, and I was actually trying to alleviate his present plight! It seemed to me that the law was all on my side, and that they didn't have a leg to stand on; so I went at once to see the big lawyer who had got me out of protective custody so quickly. But the reception I got there was not at all what I had expected. After I had given a brief and unadorned account of my recent differences with my landlords and the local SA, the big lawyer
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launched into a furious rant: ‘You idiot! And to think I got a schmuck like you out of protective custody! You should have just stayed nice and quiet, not said a word – and now the idiot is trying to stir things up again! Get out of my office, now! I should have let you rot in jail! I don't want to see you again! Get out!' I was already out of the door. I was outraged at this man's behaviour. I still hadn't read the signs of the times. So one wasn't allowed to defend one's rights, simply because a local Party branch leader happened to be a friend of the landlord? Well, we'd soon see about that! There were other lawyers in Berlin, after all! And I went to see them. But the strange thing I found was that none of them was willing to take on my case. Most of them gave me a dusty answer, whether they were Party members or not. The polite ones agreed that I definitely had the law on my side. But in these times, they suggested, it was not advisable to go up against the Party, even for one's legal right. People had put the Party in the wrong for so long that one must now make allowances if it went a little too far . . . By way of redressing the balance, so to speak . . . I should wait until quieter times returned – that was the message I heard wherever I went. My dear old father had been a judge himself, and now I understood him better. In my youthful arrogance I had sometimes mocked him for his pedantic insistence on sticking to the exact letter of the law as it was written down. He would give me a long look with his gentle, intelligent eyes,
before replying: ‘Know this, Hans my son: the law is a sacred thing. The judge must see to it that no jot or tittle of the law is harmed. If the smallest hole is opened up, the whole dyke will be swept away!'

But now they tore down the dyke themselves from the outside, and created a new law, or rather one law for the Party and one for those who were not in the Party. Finally, during the war, when any real sense of the law and any faith in the law had long since been extinguished, they decided that judges must reach their verdicts solely on the basis of ‘the mood of the people'. As they were not Christians, they had never read the passage in the Bible where the people cry ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!', whereupon Christ was crucified – in accordance with ‘the mood of the people'. And Pilate went forth, washed his hands, and asked: What is truth?

(28.IX.44.)
So as I said, I could find no-one whose job it was to help someone like me who was willing to do so. This was not a good time for me; I wasn't getting enough sleep, and I was drinking too much. For the first time in my life I had suffered a patent injustice, I had been blackmailed in the crudest fashion, and I could find no way to put things right. I was consumed with rage and bitterness, and what had been done to me by a handful of brownshirts I now projected onto all the brownshirts, from the Führer down to the smallest Hitler youth, and whenever I saw them with their standards and whenever I heard them singing the songs they had stolen from the SPD and playing the fanfares they had taken from the Communists, I shuddered with disgust. And I still feel the same way today, eleven years later, I still haven't got used to these brown uniforms and the bulldog snouts of the people who wear them. That feeling of disgust will never go away. There is such a thing as a typical Nazi face. A friend once gave me a small cartoon by Honoré Daumier, one of those portraits of parliamentarians that he did by the hundred, with their stupid, sly and brutish faces. The picture is entitled ‘Pot-de-Naz'.
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I have no idea what it means, but in my own mind I translated it simply as ‘Nazi mug'. How many times
have I cursed and sworn at this picture! How often, when I was feeling particularly bitter, did I look at this fat face with its bestial chin and cunning little piggy eyes sunk into rolls of fat, and say to myself: That's what they look like, all of them pretty much, the elite of the nation – Messrs Ley, Funk and Streicher.
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There's a lot of talk these days about the gangster culture that's said to be on the rise again in the States. Well in Germany it's already here – entrenched in the highest offices and positions, and they've certainly picked a right bunch of gangsters for those jobs! Just such a visage, all decked out down below in brown, red and gold, was standing on the rear platform of an electric tram in Berlin, during this present war, when the young conductress went to the aid of a frail old gentleman who wanted to alight. He thanked her, and she replied with a cheery ‘Auf Wiedersehen!' She had rung her bell, and the tram had already moved off again, when the Nazi in his fancy uniform remarked sternly: ‘You forgot to say “Heil Hitler!”, miss!'

The pretty young conductress only half-turned towards him and gave the fat ‘Nazi mug' no more than a passing glance. ‘And you', she remarked coolly, ‘have forgotten to relieve my husband at the front for the past three years!'

At this the brown tub of lard flushed a deep red, but said nothing; and everyone on the rear platform gazed off into the distance, trying to keep a straight face – and likewise saying nothing.

Anyway, I wasn't doing very well at all during these weeks, and my wife wasn't doing very well either. Apart from anything else, she wasn't doing very well on account of the fact that I wasn't doing very well, because I kept on disappearing from the guesthouse for short periods of time on the flimsiest of pretexts (i.e. in order to down a quick schnaps), and because I stretched out every evening into the small hours. It gives a good wife no pleasure when her husband starts to drink heavily, especially when he does it secretly and on his own, which is the very worst sort of drinking. But she could not come with me, because the twins that she was expecting were already giving her a very hard time, and because the strains, worries and agitation of recent times were now really starting to take their toll. So we led a pretty miserable life, and
I really don't know what would have become of us, or at least of me – for I was burying myself more and more in my futile and obsessive fantasies of justice – if a saviour had not appeared in our hour of need, a true, helpful friend, who not only steered our own lives into calmer waters, but who also mustered more courage than all the lawyers in Berlin, and in a series of personal negotiations brought the stalled business of the house in the little village of Berkenbrück to a conclusion that was not excessively costly, at least, and which did in any event end the matter once and for all. This man by the name of Peter Suhrkamp
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was one of the shadowy figures of our time, with the power to do good things and bad things in equal measure, possessing many brilliant gifts, but obsessed by the deluded ambition of the age to rise high at all costs. He was a tall, very slender man of muscular build, with an almost ashen face that over the years came increasingly to resemble a skull with just a covering of skin. About eight weeks ago, when I was still living in freedom on the outside, I heard that this successful and ultra-cautious man had finally suffered the same fate as so many other Germans: he was arrested for treason. He too had said too much in an unguarded moment, allowed his true feelings to show, revealed something of the hatred that smoulders in each one of us. Perhaps, as I write this, he is no longer alive, or perhaps his superior intellect and presence of mind have enabled him to cope with the Gestapo's interrogation methods. I sincerely hope so. We went our separate ways in life a long time ago, we were just too different; it is years now since I heard from him directly.

Peter Suhrkamp was the only son of a farmer from Oldenburg, and they are a tough, taciturn, gnarled breed of men. As a boy he fell out with his father, who wanted his son to take over the small farm when he retired. But the son felt destined for different, higher things than running a small, impoverished moorland farm; whenever he tended the sheep, he heard a voice in his heart that told him he was destined to be a writer. He owned a little book that contained the
Tales from the Calendar
of Johann Peter Hebel, and these plain moral tales, so beautifully told, determined the direction his ambition would take: he resolved to become a writer of folk tales, plain, unvarnished stories
about the simple life, but written for a whole nation. Such were his dreams as he tended his sheep. When he reached the age of fourteen and left the one-class village school, and when his father flatly refused his request to continue his education and tried to make him his farm boy instead, he ran away from home. The father still had legal authority over his son and could have had him brought back again, but he was just as stubborn as his son: he simply erased him from his life, as though he had never existed. He never spoke to him again, he never spoke about him again, and he forbade the boy's mother ever to mention her son: they had never had a son, and now they were a childless and ageing couple.

At the age of fourteen the son did not find things easy in the nearby little town in Oldenburg, where he had taken refuge. He was tough as nails, and needed very little to live on; but little as it was, he had a hard time scraping it together. He worked all day and studied half the night: for now he wanted to become a teacher – and after that the way ahead would become clear. He often went without food, but he became as hard as an old oak tree, and impervious to everything. From time to time his mother would secretly send him some bread and milk, and sometimes she saw him too, and wept tears of grief over the prodigal son. But tears would not come to him, and he was never able to cry for the rest of his life, so hardened had he become. He had set himself the goal of becoming a great popular writer, and for that no price was too high to pay!

He had already begun to discover world literature, and in the library of this little Oldenburg town the world was revealed to him in all its vastness and splendour! Stretching out beyond the plain calendar tales of the Swabian poet was the immense pandemonium of books, and he avidly consumed as many as he could get. A kind of fever had come upon him, an insatiable craving had seized hold of him: he wanted to discover everything, know everything, savour everything that the world had to offer – and only then would he start to write!

When the First World War broke out he returned to his father's farm, still very much a boy, and ran the farm for his mother, who was
now left alone at home – his father was away at the war. Barely sixteen, the boy sat on the grass mower and read his books whenever he took a break, insensible to the wind that blew in his face, deaf to the larks that wheeled in the blue skies above his head.

When his father was killed at Hartmannsweilerkopf, he sold the farm, bought a life annuity for his mother from the sale proceeds, and used the rest of the money to advance his studies. He became a teacher, and got a teaching job in a small village school. But what did that signify? Was it for this that he had worked so hard and sacrificed so much? He was already nineteen – and still hadn't achieved anything! In his time off he studied for his university entrance exam, passed it, gave up his teaching job, and went to university to study, now short of money again. Again he went hungry, froze in cold rooms and laboured for money – hard labour for little money, tamping tarmac on the roads by day, scanning Homer's hexameters to the thudding beat of the heavy iron tamper. Did he ever pause and look back at his life? Did he perhaps remember the small boy who had tended the sheep on his father's moorland farm, carrying a small, dog-eared copy of
Tales from the Calendar
in his pocket and dreams of becoming a writer in his heart? I don't know. Years later, in a moment of intimacy, he showed me a few pages he had written, ten or twelve perhaps. They were covered with microscopically small and incredibly neat handwriting. ‘The beginning of my novel', he said in a curiously abrupt and throw-away manner. ‘I've been working on it for years, I'm constantly re-writing it. It's so difficult. There's so much that I still don't know. Do you remember, somebody once said that if you want to write a good book you need to have read all the books in the world once in your life, and then forgotten them all again? And then there's Flaubert. He was working on his
Salambo
for years, you know, and on his
Tentation
for years, and on
Bovary
for years.
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It's never finished . . .!' He hastily gathered up the loose pages again, as if fearful that I might read a line, a word that he had written. Everything buried, everything from his fair youth forgotten and buried – and he didn't even realize it!