In the Presence of Mine Enemies (48 page)

“It's probably the most important source, yes, but it's far from the only one,” she answered. Again, the question reminded her how Shakespeare was a more vital presence in modern Germany than in England. His
Troilus and Cressida
was rarely produced or even read in English.

A few more questions about the material followed. Students started drifting out the door. Others—not so many—came up to the lectern to ask questions of less general interest, to pump her on what the next essay topic would be, or to complain about the grades they'd got on the last one.

And then one of the students asked, “What did you think of Stolle's speech, Professor Weiss?”

“It was interesting,” Susanna answered. “We haven't heard anything like it in a while.” That was the truth. When had anyone ever publicly criticized the
Führer,
even for not pushing his own agenda far enough and fast enough? Had anyone ever done such a thing in all the days of the Third
Reich?
She didn't think so.

“But what did you
think
of it?” he persisted. “Isn't it wonderful to hear somebody come out and speak his mind like that?”

She didn't say anything for a moment.
Who are you?
she wondered. All she knew about this enthusiastic undergrad was that his name was Karl Stuckart and he was getting a medium B in the course. What did he do when he wasn't in her class? Did he report to the SS? Lothar Prützmann, who headed the blackshirts, undoubtedly had an opinion about Stolle's speech: a low opinion. And if Stuckart didn't report to the SS, did some of the other smiling students here?
The smiler with a knife
—a fine Chaucerian phrase.

One of those students, an auburn-haired girl named Mathilde Burchert, said, “I certainly think it's about time we get moving with reform. We've been in the doldrums forever, and the
Gauleiter
's right. The
Führer
's not going fast enough.”

Several other students smiled and nodded. Susanna smiled, too, but she didn't nod. She didn't know much about Mathilde Burchert, either. Was she serious? Was she naive? Was she a provocateur, either working with Stuckart or independently? Were the young men and women who showed they agreed with her fools? Or did they sense a breeze Susanna couldn't, or wouldn't, feel?

She hated mistrusting everyone around her. She hated it, but she couldn't let it go. Were she worried about only her own safety, she thought she would have. But choices she would make for herself she wouldn't for other Jews she might endanger if she turned out to be wrong.

“What
do
you think, Professor?” another student asked her.

“I think the
Führer
will go at his own pace regardless of whether anyone tries to jog his elbow,” she answered. Hard to go wrong—hard to land in trouble—for backing the
Führer
. It made her seem safely moderate: not a hard-liner who hated the very idea of change, but not a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing radical, either.

And what's a moderate? Someone who gets shot at from the right
and
the left
. She wished she hadn't had that thought.

Karl didn't want to leave things alone. “I wasn't so much talking about what would happen. I was talking about what should happen.”

No matter how Susanna seemed, her instincts were of the wild-eyed, bomb-throwing sort, and to a degree that made Rolf Stolle hopelessly stodgy. Like Buckliger, Stolle wanted to reform the
Reich
. Susanna wanted to see it fall to pieces, to ruin, to disaster unparalleled. She wished its foes would have smashed it in the Second World War, or the Third. Maybe then she could have lived openly as what she was.

I'll never do that now. Hiding is too ingrained in me. Even if I knew they wouldn't kill me, I couldn't reveal myself that way. Easier to walk up the middle of the Kurfürstendamm naked
.

“I'd like to vote in an election where I had a real choice,” Mathilde said. “I don't know who I'd vote for, but there sure are plenty of people I'd vote against.”

Again, several of the youngsters up by the lectern showed they agreed with her. Only a couple of them frowned. But who was more likely to be a spy for the Security Police, someone who pretended to agree or someone who openly didn't?

Susanna sighed. That question had no answer. Anyone could spy for the Security Police, anyone at all.

Mathilde looked right at her. “How about you, Professor Weiss? Don't you think we'd be better off with real elections than with the ones where everybody just votes
ja
all the time? When Horst says all the
Reichstag
candidates got elected with 99.78 percent of the vote, don't you wonder how he keeps a straight face? It's such a farce! You must feel the same way, too. You're a sharp person. Anyone can tell from the way you lecture. Tell us!”

“Tell us!” the other students echoed.
Tell us you're with it. Tell us you're not a fuddy-duddy. Tell us we don't have to turn into fuddy-duddies when we're your age. Please tell us.

Am I a sharp person?
Susanna wondered.
Am I really? Am I sharp enough to keep my mouth shut when I really want to shout, to scream?
“I don't know anything about politics,” she said. “As long as the politicians leave me alone, I'll leave them alone, too.”

“But they
don't
leave us alone,” Mathilde said fiercely. “If you say the wrong thing today, you're liable to get a
noodle tomorrow.” Camp slang permeated German these days. Often, people didn't even know where it came from. When you were talking about a bullet in the back of the neck, though, there wasn't much doubt.

“Well…” Susanna's conditioned caution warred with the fury and outrage she'd bottled up for so long. She surprised herself. What came out was a compromise, and she wasn't usually good at splitting the difference. All or nothing was more her style. But now she said, “I wasn't sorry when the
Führer
reminded the
Volk
about what the first edition of
Mein Kampf
says. In fact, I was in London for a conference last year when the British Union of Fascists reminded us all.”

“You were in London for the BUF convention?” Was that awe or horror in Karl Stuckart's voice? Some of each, probably. Maybe he was wondering if
she
had SS connections.

“No, no, no.” Susanna shook her head. “I was in London for the Medieval English Association conference. The BUF was meeting across the street.” That she'd found some of the Fascist bruisers more interesting than her fellow professors was a secret she intended to keep.

“It's a shame the British had to remind us of what we should have remembered for ourselves—no, what we never should have forgotten,” Mathilde Burchert said. Most of the other students nodded. They didn't seem to fear informers or provocateurs. Maybe they were too young to know better, although in the Greater German
Reich
you were never too young to learn such lessons. Or did they smell freedom on the wind?

 

Heinrich Gimpel pulled a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
out of the vending machine in the Stahnsdorf train station. A moment later, Willi Dorsch paid fifteen pfennigs for his own copy. On the front page was a color photo of Heinz Buckliger receiving an award in Oslo from the
Nasjonal Samling,
the Norwegian Fascist party. The
Führer
was a big blond man. The
Nasjonal Samling
officials in the photo were even bigger and even blonder, with long faces and granite cheekbones.

Willi saw the same thing at the same time. “Damned Scandinavians are the only ones who can racially embarrass us,” he said. “Bastards look more Nordic than we do.”

Was Willi kidding? Was he kidding on the square? Or did he really mean it? Heinrich had trouble telling. Willi loved to joke, but race, in the
Reich,
was as serious a business as Marxism had been in Russia before it fell. Even the
Führer
hadn't said anything more than that the Nazi founding fathers might not have understood race the right way. Heinrich gave back a grunt and a nod—a minimal answer.

They went up to the platform together, and got there just in time to catch the train to Berlin. Willi grabbed the window seat, then proceeded to unfold his paper and ignore the scenery rolling by. He'd seen it often enough, anyhow. So had Heinrich, who sat down beside him and also buried his nose in the
Beobachter
. Willi seemed to ignore his troubles with Erika, too, except that every once in a while he would come out with a remark that also left Heinrich wondering how to take it.

The two of them stiffened within thirty seconds of each other. They both pointed to the same article on page three. The headline above it said
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
. The byline was Konrad Jahnke, not a name Heinrich had seen before. He soon found out why: the author declared himself to be a doctor from Breslau, not a reporter at all.

I am sick and tired,
he wrote,
of inaccuracies that blacken the history of the
Reich
and the heroic deeds of our ancestors. Why men who were not there to see them now presume to cast judgment is beyond me. We should be grateful for what our ancestors accomplished. Without their heroism, Jewish Communists in Russia and Jewish capitalists in England and the United States would have swallowed up the whole world between them
.

“Well, well,” Willi said. “Looks like the other shoe just dropped, doesn't it?”

“You might say that,” Heinrich replied. “Yes, you just might say that. Someone didn't like Stolle's speech, did he?”

“Not very much,” Willi said. They both spoke of the article elliptically and in understatements. That was the best way to play down how frightening it was.

Heinrich read on with a detached, horrified fascination: the sort of fascination he would have given to a really nasty traffic accident on the other side of the road.
The whole business of repression has been blown out of proportion in some younger men's heads,
Dr. Jahnke declared.
It overshadows any objective analysis of the past. Hitler may have made mistakes, but no one else could have readied the
Reich
for the great struggle against Bolshevism. Anyone who thinks he can deny this suffers from ideological confusion and has lost his political bearings
.

Jahnke wasn't afraid to name the
Gauleiter
of Berlin, saying,
Rolf Stolle, in his arrogance, departs substantially from the accepted principles of National Socialism. And,
he went on,
other leaders try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present
. He didn't name Heinz Buckliger, but he came close.

There is an internal process in this country and abroad,
the doctor from Breslau thundered,
that seeks to falsify the truths of National Socialism. Too many ignore the world-historical mission of the
Volk
and its role in the National Socialist movement. I, for one, can never forsake my ideals under any pretext
.

When Heinrich finished the piece, he let out a small, tuneless whistle. Beside him, Willi nodded heavily, as if he'd just done a good job of summing things up. “Who?” Heinrich said. “Who would have the nerve to publish such a thing?”

“Why, you see for yourself,” Willi answered. “He's a doctor from Breslau. That gives him the right to say anything he pleases.”

“Quatsch,”
Heinrich said, and then several things a great deal more pungent than that. “Do you notice how carefully this was timed? Think it's an accident that it shows up in the
Beobachter
when Buckliger's out of the country?”

“Just a coincidence,” Willi said airily. “What else could it possibly be? They got this letter, and an assistant editor liked it, and so….” He couldn't go on, not with a straight face. He started to snort, and then to giggle. Any junior man who pub
lished an inflammatory—to say nothing of reactionary—piece like this without getting it cleared from on high would shortly thereafter wish he'd never been born.

“If you want to talk sense now, let's try it again.” Heinrich unconsciously lowered his voice, as people did when they spoke of dangerous things. “Who?”

Willi leaned toward him and whispered in his ear: “Prützmann.” Naming the SS chief was more dangerous, and so he did it more quietly. Still whispering, he went on, “Can't be anybody else. If Prützmann says to print it, who's going to tell him no? The
Führer
might make a no stick, but he's not here, like you say. Anybody else? Not a chance. No way in hell.”