The Vengeance of Rome (63 page)

They were good children, he said, and a great support to him. They were his consolation. He had never remarried. To be honest there was less strain. He didn't think he could marry another German woman. They were kind-hearted and treated you like a king but were a bit too neat and tidy for his taste. Heckie was a proper little woman. She ran the household and a good deal of the business. I can smell her warm skin, her soft brown neck, her curls, her strong little body straining and squirming under the first intimations of her sexuality.

That mixture of fresh vegetables, herbs and spices was for me the smell of wealth and comfort, of certainty. Of romance. And also the smell of dawning lust. I can hear the cheerful staccato of the barrel organ, snatches of song, excited chitter of the monkey jumping on the singer's shoulder, a sour-faced boy moving through the crowd with his box, her delicate brown limbs flashing in shafts of sunlight falling through the dusty glass above. The cheap lace of her costume flaps and bounces on her perfect little body. Those flounces are a vulgar and unnecessary augmentation to her grace and natural elegance. Her lips curve again in a sweet red smile. She promises me so much. She promises me a return to my past, to a time when I was happy.

How she twirled and skipped as her surly older brother moved among the crowd, while her father, his grin apparently as spontaneous as ever, stroked his happy little monkey, turning the handle of the barrel organ, singing along with the machine in a rich baritone. ‘
Fa la la la! Fa la la la!
' In his tall-crowned felt hat, short green jacket trimmed with gold, brown corduroy knickerbockers, green stockings and bright red shoes, his broad, flashing grin, his earrings, which could be removed at night, he was everything he was supposed to be. The costume was scarcely any different to that worn by peasants in most of this region, from northern Italy through
Austria to southern Germany, yet the Italian still found himself called a gypsy when he went out into the smaller provincial towns. Heckie would get touched for luck. She hated it. When not performing, she was a grave child who took her domestic responsibilities as seriously as her professional ones. Her only abiding enthusiasm she kept to herself.

Soon I took to arriving at the market towards the end of the afternoon, so that I could watch Zoyea/Heckie dance, pop a coin into the boy's aggressive box and chat to Signor Frau as he drew the canvas cover over his barrel organ, rewarded his monkey and prepared to push the instrument back through the side streets to the mews where all the organs were stored in common.

By the first week of November Röhm had been almost entirely in Berlin. I remained at a loose end. A few SA men came and went from the Corneliusstrasse premises. They were not sure what I was doing there, and were frankly unfriendly. It was becoming obvious I must discover a new patron or take some sort of job. Common sense said I should have left for Berlin by now, except I felt safer for the moment in Munich. I was definitely safer than I would have been in Rome, unless Il Duce's mood had changed. My enemies probably still had his ear. If I returned I was sure to find myself under arrest, with another false list of crimes added to my name. Yet in Munich I was, to some degree, Röhm's prisoner. He remained very kind and sentimental, but during most of his visits his mind was chiefly on the political struggle. He found it impossible to relax completely. He would ‘lend' me whatever money he had in his pocket, yet if I was to become my own man again I must find employment. Naturally my first thought was of my patents. I needed to get the ear of a German industrialist, and the only way to do that was through Mrs Cornelius, who more than likely was not even in the country any longer!

Meanwhile, I was in love and the world was coming alive for me again. Zoyea and I had discovered a common interest.

And so began what would in retrospect be my epiphany when one dream would begin to be realised and another dashed for ever. Here I again discovered the peaks of joy and an abyss of despair, my ‘Alpine' period, a wonderful time of self-expression, personal peril and vocational satisfaction. Ultimately, as always, disappointment would bring not only emotional exhaustion but also physical danger.

For thirty months I came at last to anticipate fulfilment of my original Life Plan. During 1932–34, I found love, artistic expression, serious interest in my political philosophy, respect as a scientist and as an artist. Was the misery that followed the years of my European wanderings worth the pleasures of that time when the world blossomed with glorious hope, before the final betrayals which, I fear, continue to characterise this century? I lay the blame squarely at the door of Herr Adolf Hitler. Once the lie was only common currency in diplomacy and politics. Now it is a familiar instrument of public discourse.

I grew up in a world with firms whose names you could trust. Now those names are turned into manipulative illusions, false promises.

‘Alas!' Hitler said at the end. ‘My Germans have failed me!' Hitler's interests were neither national nor socialist; they were personal. He was prepared to kill an entire people to fulfil his dream.

The Germans survived and rejoined the family of civilised nations, but now it is too late. Heinz and Nestlé own all the food. These firms are secretly controlled by alien interests. At any time they can decide to kill vast numbers of people. All they have to do is pick up a telephone and give an order. Cyanide will be injected into enough tins of baked beans to kill every British schoolboy overnight.

They already introduce narcotics into our food to make us more easily
manipulated by their subliminal advertising, their aggressive attacks on all our old values. I do not totally dismiss the theory that Adolf Hitler, after the death of Angela Raubal, was secretly poisoned, causing all his subsequent decisions. So in the end he fell into the hands of his enemies. He had made enemies of the Jews, when he could have enlisted some at least as willing helpers in his dream to build a new Germany. I speak from experience. There are altruistic Jews. It is a fact. I met one in Odessa. In Germany Strasser had already sketched a perfectly workable plan, which would take no one's dignity or livelihood from them. Typically, too much talk and not enough cash was given to the problem, and so it worsened rather than improved. Julius Streicher must accept much of the responsibility, but overall I do blame Hitler.

The secret little Zoyea and I shared was a mutual enthusiasm which I discovered by chance after she came to accept me. Initially, there was scant intercourse between us. Indeed, she avoided me. The boy was more communicative, but I had no special liking for him. I would occasionally pass on to him an adventure paper and discuss the stories with him, but he had a dull mind, though more amiable than he seemed.

The magazines, some pre-war, were from a huge collection I had found under my bed, together with a whole shelf of Edgar Wallace in French and German. They had belonged to Baldur von Schirach and were fascinating. Most were in English, containing graphic depictions of airships, of rocket-driven space liners, of gigantic vehicles capable of travelling across the American plains without use of rails or roads. My first thought was that the authors had stolen my ideas, but some were clearly unworkable. In the
Aldine Library of Invention, Travel & Adventure
, I found, for instance a tale called ‘Across the Frozen Sea', published some time before the world conflict, which proposed a preposterous schooner for sailing on giant skis across the Arctic ice! The power–weight ratio alone would not permit such nonsense! And the presumption that the Arctic plain is as smooth as Streatham Ice Rink is equally unscientific!

The English-speaking von Schirach possessed an interest in engineering and futuristic invention he had not revealed to me. Here were
Frank Reade, Popular Mechanics
,
Mechanix Illustrated
,
Science and Invention
,
Amazing Science Stories
,
Air Wonder Stories
,
Scientific American
,
Dusty Ayres and his Battle Aces
and a dozen others. There were German and French tales from Jules Verne and his followers. Stories featuring Fantomas,
Die Fledermaus
and
Doctor Mabuse
were less imaginative. A rather primitive version of my articulated submarine was anticipated in a tale called ‘Into
the Maelstrom'. My flying cities drawn for the American pulp covers in lurid colours were at last part of the common idea of the future. Here were visionaries much like myself. Rather than suspect them of stealing my ideas, for indeed I had anticipated them in almost every sphere, I acknowledged these writers and artists as equals, confirmation that I was not alone! Here were men who thought like me, who had the same kind of practical and romantic imagination. Possibly, at some future date, we could all come together as one scientific family to bring reason and order to the world. Within a generation we could abolish disease and hold death itself at bay. We would grow food for the whole planet and ensure no one was ever hungry. Great aerial ships could carry goods cheaply and quickly from place to place delivering food and medicines where they were needed. All that was required was the political will and the vision of business to back it; then we should have had not the bleak, mechanistic future of
Metropolis
, but the clean, aesthetic nobility of
Things to Come
, with white motorways curving between green hills, twisting alongside glittering lakes and sparkling rivers beneath blue and sunny skies, on which electrical cars move silently, directed by robot guides with sensors buried in roads, cars and lamp-posts to ensure the impossibility of a crash. It was H.G. Wells's great dream. Out of the ashes of war rises a virgin world, ruled by wise, well-educated men, eugenically perfect, who guide us through to the new path which takes us directly to a bright, wholesome future, without disease, deformity or risk. A well-regulated but humane future, emphasising education, health, stability and predictability, the great boons and the continuing goals of a rational scientific society. This was the vision of von Schirach as well as Röhm and Strasser, but the shoulders expected to carry the burden of our plan into the second half of the twentieth century were simply not strong enough for the task. Germany did not fail Hitler. Hitler, it must be said, in the end failed Germany.

What a different world it would have been if the Strassers, Röhm and Hoch, for instance, had controlled the National Socialist Party. Röhm would have kept his ‘pact of steel' with Stalin and become partners to create an economic miracle to revive Europe with Russia and Germany at its head. German influence on Russia would have modified the Bolsheviks, forcing them eventually to restore the Tsar, while Germany would return some form of monarch to the throne. In Munich, of course, there was a powerful argument for replacing the Kaiser with one of the Wittelbachs. This might well have happened under Röhm, though he would have limited such a ruler's powers.

An admirer of Cromwell, Röhm was an egalitarian through and through but would have preferred a traditional beneficent monarch to a contemporary dictator. He never intended so much power to be concentrated in one man's hands.

Röhm continued to make rare visits to Corneliusstrasse, now a comfortable apartment for myself and my occasional visitors. I could also now offer them wine and coffee or a snack, though Röhm never ate and rarely drank when he came, usually after dark. I was always glad to see him, if only for a couple of hours to break the monotony of my life. I had little money and little freedom of movement. Röhm still advised me to lie low. Frequently I was at my wits' end for something to do. I complained to him that I felt the loss of music, of ordinary boulevard acquaintances. He told me to be patient. He would take care of things. We both had to be careful. Hitler had not forgotten that evening at Tegernsee. I had best become used to a quiet, uneventful life. An eventful one would not be to my taste. Wasn't that a little vague? I asked.

Röhm apologised. Soon he would be able to relax. At present Hitler was proving a handful. He was back in the running but going up and down emotionally like a whore's drawers. Handling him was very tiring. They were getting new recruits into the SA every day. Quality as well as quantity, he said. First-rate officer material. There could be no objection any longer from the Reichswehr. The sooner his boys were incorporated into the regular army, the better for all. The SA numbers were certainly making Hitler's Big Business friends look up, and the army was equally aware of the troops which could be very quickly fielded.

I read the newspapers only occasionally, usually helping myself to a free copy of the
VB
from the boy on the corner. He knew me now, but never seemed comfortable with my dipping into his barrow. I did not care what he thought. I had tried and failed to make friends with him. The
Völkischer Beobachter
was inclined to go into paroxysms of extravagant praise for the man I had last seen in the flesh in Tegernsee, covered in blood and excrement and gasping for more. It is a tribute to his peculiar magnetism that when I saw him enlarged on the great cinema screen, I was fascinated and convinced!

Many mocked Hitler as an imitator of Charlie Chaplin. They do not realise how much Hitler admired Chaplin, though the feeling was not mutual. Hitler was able to speak to us all because of his common touch, which meant that he enjoyed ordinary pleasures quite as much as the more esoteric escapes of the powerful. He understood the media because
he understood what we wanted from it. And he gave us exactly what we wanted. I was not among them, but I have known grown men used to brutal authority moved to tears by their love of the Führer. I suppose I was too well informed and too wise ever to have that kind of response. My heart has always belonged to God rather than Man.

I found von Schirach's collection of scientific magazines far more interesting than speculation about whether the socialists or the nationalists or the communists or the Catholic centrists were going to win this election or that vote. Such things were confusing for the average German, let alone a foreigner like myself.