Berlin Cantata (19 page)

What a hearty, phony girl I must have sounded like then. I almost apologized. But he did laugh.

He asked me if we looked like each other at all. At first I said no, not really, I'd tried but couldn't find much, maybe just a hint of my father's soft chin, of his archy eyebrows that almost converged, and that made him look like he was concentrating even when he was dreaming.

Then I remembered our bunions.

I told Nils what I had done, or really was in the process of doing. My gift of blood and money, two things I didn't care to mix, it had nothing to do with goodness, he understood that, didn't he, I said. Just get rid of it, he said.

I was so glad to talk with him.

DAVID FÜRST

Love

YOU WOULD BE WELL ADVISED
, if David Fürst says something about love, to assume that the exact opposite is true. How can someone who knows nothing about something say something about it? Well, of course, people do so all the time. It is very probably the most common form of discourse.

I say the foregoing to mitigate my embarrassment. Nils is my dearest friend. This is so because he tolerates me, a more difficult task than those who know me less well might imagine. My feelings about his relations with the American girl are as follows:

I might add to this list the tangential fact, perhaps already suggested in 1. above, that I became fond of the American girl. She seemed rather bland, at first, the way Americans tend to. But she could compete with us in every way. Easy to underestimate, so of course I did. Easy to bully, so of course I did. Later I began to feel ungainly in her presence, and haplessly overweight, like a character actor in an old, old movie.

FRANZ ROSEN

Consequences

NO ONE HAS SHUNNED ME
. People have come up to me in the street and embraced me and shed tears. This is the price I have paid for not being such a hero after all. Berliners are softies, I've discovered. Or at least they do not want anyone to be too good.

FRANZ ROSEN

Alternatives

OR HOW DO I REALLY KNOW
that such an optimistic scenario as I've just described is the truth? Or as they say in certain circles, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A stranger's averted eyes on the bus, a friend who ends a phone conversation a shade too abruptly, a second or perhaps a third brandy after dinner – any of these are capable of catapulting me into darker imaginings.

Only to my personal knowledge has no one shunned me. Only some people have come up to me on the street and embraced me and shed tears. You may see the possible directions in which such qualifications may take me, either towards the shoals of paranoia or towards a more acute and candid apprehension of our human situation.

I would prefer not to dwell on it. If I am surrounded by people who secretly despise me, then I must cherish all the more those whose kindnesses are unmistakable. If people call me secret names, I must hold dear those names. I must vigilantly defend my optimism. It is only natural, in a climate such as ours, that people of ordinary capacity might hide their actual feelings if those feelings could subject them to public criticism or disgrace. A dearth of civic courage can work in any number of ways. Where it may once have paved the pathway to catastrophic events, today it may help to keep the peace. I do not know what others think. That is simply the truth, and perhaps a fortunate truth at that.

HEINZ SCHIESSL

Defeat

WHAT
'
S FAIR IS FAIR
. I have always said this. I tried to explain this to Miss Anholt. I paid twice for her father's properties. Once, alright, perhaps not enough. Although who knows? Who can say? There were general laws that disabled the Jews. Once these laws were passed, then of course the value of a Jew's interest in a property would be reduced. You talk about markets. This was the market. Did I take advantage of the market? It is a market's nature to be taken advantage of. Is this not what the Anglo-Americans are always telling us? But, alright, leaving aside this fine point. Perhaps in 1938 I paid not enough. Perhaps I received a bargain based on Mr. Anholt's exigent position. But after the war, whose position was exigent? Mine, of course. We were bombed and impoverished. Whereas he was helped in many ways, for sure, to start anew in the richest country on earth. You cannot tell me he wasn't helped. I don't know the details but of course he must have been. I, of course, could not have gone to California. I would have been put in a camp. And yet, to clear the record, again I paid. I wanted no arguments that I was a Nazi beast, a predator. I paid liberally. Of course the sum will seem to you piddling today. But in our ruined city then, it was, believe me, a good sum, an act of faith. Even Anholt told me this, through his lawyer. It was a very fair sum. And if I may say, through my limited personal affairs with him, Anholt himself was a fair-minded man, much as I hold myself to be. We had this in common. I am not ashamed of it. Then within two years of my payment to him, the Communists took it all from me, the city property, the country property, all of it, without a dime in compensation. These were the true criminals, not I.

Now it is 1990, the Communists are done, and comes Miss Anholt. She wants her property back. All very well, the law provides for it, except for one thing: it is not hers, or even her father's – her father sold it fairly to me! Who in turn lost it to the Red thugs. But if anyone should get it back from the Red thugs, it is surely me, not her. But the law does not allow it. I was expropriated too early, when the Russians were still occupying, when the GDR had not yet been established. The German law does not concern Russian expropriations, only those of its lackeys. What to do? I thought very hard on this. I exercised my faculty for fair play. I realized that if Miss Anholt and I could become partners, we could both be winners after all. I thought I had been very clever. Of course it is the case that if I had never presented my deed and contract at all, then Miss Anholt could likely have sailed through on her claim uncontested. But what fairness would there have been in that? My representative explained this to her. Like her father, I too have children. Do they deserve nothing? Am I simply to throw their best interests off the roof? But you see at first she was one of these Americans who can only see Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, as if this one word made a bright explosion that destroyed everything else about a person or situation. I pet my dog, I pay my rent. But never mind. I see that for even these, by the person intent on it, I can be accused. All I wish to say is that Miss Anholt came around eventually. She came down from her moral heights. For this I was quite grateful, actually. We then had a deal. We would become partners. And I must tell you something more: there is nothing that thrills me more than when two parties who had once been enemies reach an agreement based on reason and shared interest. This is true cooperation. It is touching to me, that Miss Anholt and I could cooperate. I love this when I see such things in films, and I love it even more in life. People looking past their grievances. This is what life is about.

You will say, and I'm afraid quite properly, that if we had not been defeated, I would not now be trumpeting the virtues of cooperation so enthusiastically. But we were defeated. This is the essential point. In defeat I learned many things. It is one of the best teachers, as those who have been defeated will sometimes tell you. I was particularly moved when Miss Anholt on her own initiative proposed that she receive the country property and we the city lots. She took a financial sacrifice here, in favor of sentiment. I was particularly impressed by this. It was on this account that I invited her to tea. Our family had photographs from our time in Velden which I thought might be useful or interesting for her to see. I must say, she was fascinated by them. Of course there was some oddness, as there always is when one sees another enjoying what you had known as your own home. This was the case even though Miss Anholt had never lived in Velden. She seemed to have absorbed a strong connection through studying her parents' pictures. And so to see my father on a horse in front of her parents' cottage, as if he were a Cossack just arrived from the steppe! I could appreciate her anxiety. She seemed to an equal degree animated by certain pictures of one of the other families on the lake, the Rosens, who like the Anholts were present until the war. In particular she lingered over a photograph of the Rosens' nephew, whose name she perhaps recognized. He is a rather well-known local invert who lied about his past during the war. I find it more than a little dismaying that his confession of cowardice, which appeared not so long ago in the papers, seems to have made him more popular than ever, at least in certain quarters.

More recently I've heard that Miss Anholt gave away her claim. Rosenthaler the lawyer heard this. A family case, a charity situation. Now if she was doing charity, fine, why didn't she give it to me! Only joking, of course. But this was a little rich, to hear this. First she fights, then she doesn't fight. An odd girl. I respect her for it, of course. Though I suspect, as well, that she must be so well-settled financially that the property meant nothing to her in those terms.

Now I care to make some more general comments. Go ahead, stop up your ears, blind your eyes. But I will be heard, somewhere! I mentioned previously that I had found the experience of defeat educational. But not everything I have learned would you classify as cozy or warm-hearted.

For instance, every fair-minded person will agree in principle that when there is a crucial battle, the victor declares the history. Victor's rules, everyone says it. But with respect to the World War, no one of the victors, ever, says such a thing, or takes a discount on the received truths based on the likelihood that victor's rules are in operation. If the National Socialists had found a cure for cancer, surely it would be declared today that the cure was secretly to make people sick. Not one single virtue of the regime or the time is ever applauded. Even the origin of the People's Car is forgotten. And if you remind others how odd this is, how similar it is, in spirit, to the ancient practice of salting the ruins of an enemy so that nothing will ever grow there again, they will mock you. Believe me, I have seen the movies. They are very funny. I am not afraid to laugh.

And why is all of this? The mass murder of the Jews, of course. But not the act of mass murder itself, rather the possibility that if all that ever touched the mass murder or might be considered to be related to it is not anathematized utterly, it might recur. I understand this. But it is an insufficient explanation. If it were a sufficient explanation, then those who annihilated the American red man would be similarly anathematized, or those whose colonial practices decimated native populations the world over or perhaps even those who dropped atomic bombs or fire bombs on people. No, it is simply a case of victor's rules.

But why should I even bother to say what can only cause me trouble? Because I am an old man, for sure. I do not condone the killing of the Jews for one minute. Even in the war I knew perfectly well that not all Jews were Bolshevik animals or Wall Street bankers manipulating Roosevelt or lewd theatrical producers seducing our women. Even during the war, with death all around and on every front, I found what I heard, in rumors and whispers, to be shocking, disturbing, even unbelievable. You will of course jump and say that when I use the word “unbelievable” I am somehow excusing myself. I make no excuse. The word is only what it is. Blood is on my hands. I have made such amends as I might, as for instance with my affairs with Miss Anholt's father. But part of my amends are to say the truth now, despite all victor's rules. The world faces problems that are very nearly insuperable. I will not impose on you the banality of naming them, because every thinking man knows them. All that differs among thinking men is their ordering of the magnitude of the catastrophes that await us. I ask very simply: is it worthwhile, in service of victor's rules or mental sloth or political convenience, to sow with salt every idea or association or instinct or art that ever found favor with a political tradition that matured in our mid-century crises but that had its roots, obviously and profoundly, in the most ancient civilizations?

If I could say, it was the madness, the intoxication, the excess, of our leaders that brought catastrophe and evil. They were like the worst emperors, like a string of Caligulas and Neros. And it was our fault, as a nation, to be seduced by them, and in our seduction to confuse them with Augustus and Hadrian. This is one more lesson that defeat has well-taught me.