necessity of manual labour, and on the other by its utter pointlessness when faced with the coming apocalypse. This mortal veil, he used to joke, was ripped up by his father every Sunday and darned by his mother on the Monday. Later, after Hitler came to power, Pastor Wesemann found that the National Socialist ideas about the coming of the thousand-year Reich dovetailed nicely with his own millenarian beliefs, and he installed a maroon Bakelite swastika on his altar as sign of his double devotion. Hans had at least as much to run from as I did.
He tried hard, but towards the end of our visit Hans came to feel like the parvenu Mother saw him as. ‘She hates m-me,’ he muttered in the garden. By the Sunday he had started to pause heavily at the beginning of a sentence, like a gramophone record stuck in a groove. Mother waited for each utterance with an expression of sympathetic victory, as if the delay were the confession of falsehood she had been awaiting since Friday.
My father was kinder. He would have liked for me to marry a Jew, but this boy–though a pacifist–was a war veteran, and of good heart, and Father did not see so many reasons why I might not be loved.
When it was over we caught the train back to Berlin. I’d always felt that even the geography of my family’s part of the world–the rumpled mountains dense with coal and riddled with tunnels–was darkly complicated. Once back in northern Germany, the earth smoothed out, grew flat and free and calm, a sea of clear green right up to the coast.
In the dining car I tried to coax Hans out of his funk with an impersonation of my mother. ‘Oh, I am a Prussian of infinite control and reason.’ I held my nose up and my neck long. ‘Which is why I am per-fec-tly willing to burn a hole in my Persian carpet for the sheer pleasure of teaching you your place.’
Hans was slumped back in his seat, turning a pack of cards over and over on the table with one hand. He stared out the window. He was beautiful–the picture, in fact, of what I would have thought my mother wanted for me. Excepting only, perhaps, that the effort showed a little: his cravat too neatly tied, trousers a bit flashy. Sometimes the imitation is brighter than the real. That didn’t bother me since I’d loved him even before I’d laid eyes on him. I wasn’t sure if my mocking my mother would ease his humiliation or rub it in. But when he looked back at me he was smiling. Hans was always careful not to denigrate my parents directly to me.
‘ Nous allons épater les bourgeois ,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got to eat first.’ He picked up the menu. ‘Artichokes, anyone?’
I grinned. In Hans I had found an ally who would help me scorn the values of duty and obedience as well as the privilege I had been born into. He watched it all more closely than I.
Our wedding reception was at the best hotel in Breslau, the nearest big town. All our friends came, Dora with Walter, Bertie and the others. On the steps of the town hall they threw confetti and petals and shouted our party’s slogan, ‘A threefold Red Front!’ It wasn’t perhaps the most romantic hurrah, but it was the alliance we most craved: between the Social Democrats, the Communists and us.
Hans and I moved into the apartment in Berlin. My father paid for it as part of the wed-ding settlement, along with our steel and chrome chairs, cornflower-blue carpets and sleek wedding bed.
In the big city Hans’s journalistic career went from strength to strength. Still, though he never spoke of it, I knew he felt it was tainted by the Toller episode. He had asked a man to betray his co-prisoners and accept release. None of us had thought of that beforehand, but Hans had been the one whose career got a boost. Dora’s criticism lodged deep in him.
Hans tried to make it up in his columns. They started off humorously, but the closer the Nazis came to power, the more bitter and baiting they became. And the more brave.
When General Ludendorff,
He tried hard, but towards the end of our visit Hans came to feel like the parvenu Mother saw him as. ‘She hates m-me,’ he muttered in the garden. By the Sunday he had started to pause heavily at the beginning of a sentence, like a gramophone record stuck in a groove. Mother waited for each utterance with an expression of sympathetic victory, as if the delay were the confession of falsehood she had been awaiting since Friday.
My father was kinder. He would have liked for me to marry a Jew, but this boy–though a pacifist–was a war veteran, and of good heart, and Father did not see so many reasons why I might not be loved.
When it was over we caught the train back to Berlin. I’d always felt that even the geography of my family’s part of the world–the rumpled mountains dense with coal and riddled with tunnels–was darkly complicated. Once back in northern Germany, the earth smoothed out, grew flat and free and calm, a sea of clear green right up to the coast.
In the dining car I tried to coax Hans out of his funk with an impersonation of my mother. ‘Oh, I am a Prussian of infinite control and reason.’ I held my nose up and my neck long. ‘Which is why I am per-fec-tly willing to burn a hole in my Persian carpet for the sheer pleasure of teaching you your place.’
Hans was slumped back in his seat, turning a pack of cards over and over on the table with one hand. He stared out the window. He was beautiful–the picture, in fact, of what I would have thought my mother wanted for me. Excepting only, perhaps, that the effort showed a little: his cravat too neatly tied, trousers a bit flashy. Sometimes the imitation is brighter than the real. That didn’t bother me since I’d loved him even before I’d laid eyes on him. I wasn’t sure if my mocking my mother would ease his humiliation or rub it in. But when he looked back at me he was smiling. Hans was always careful not to denigrate my parents directly to me.
‘ Nous allons épater les bourgeois ,’ he said, ‘but we’ve got to eat first.’ He picked up the menu. ‘Artichokes, anyone?’
I grinned. In Hans I had found an ally who would help me scorn the values of duty and obedience as well as the privilege I had been born into. He watched it all more closely than I.
Our wedding reception was at the best hotel in Breslau, the nearest big town. All our friends came, Dora with Walter, Bertie and the others. On the steps of the town hall they threw confetti and petals and shouted our party’s slogan, ‘A threefold Red Front!’ It wasn’t perhaps the most romantic hurrah, but it was the alliance we most craved: between the Social Democrats, the Communists and us.
Hans and I moved into the apartment in Berlin. My father paid for it as part of the wed-ding settlement, along with our steel and chrome chairs, cornflower-blue carpets and sleek wedding bed.
In the big city Hans’s journalistic career went from strength to strength. Still, though he never spoke of it, I knew he felt it was tainted by the Toller episode. He had asked a man to betray his co-prisoners and accept release. None of us had thought of that beforehand, but Hans had been the one whose career got a boost. Dora’s criticism lodged deep in him.
Hans tried to make it up in his columns. They started off humorously, but the closer the Nazis came to power, the more bitter and baiting they became. And the more brave.
When General Ludendorff,
Similar Books
