All That I Am by Anna Funder Page B

bear. Perhaps it was their shared small-town heritage, or the fact that for both men it was their skill with words that had lifted them out of it. Hans became Goebbels’ public nemesis, never referring to him by name, only as ‘that distinctly Semitic-looking male’, who ‘under normal circumstances would have been an energetic teacher at the girls’ school in Euskirchen’. Goebbels had written a novel called Michael , which Hans only ever and always called Michael the Ignored .
    In one infamous piece, Hans invented a visit to Goebbels’ godmother in his hometown of Rheydt on the Rhine. Surrounded by pots of artificial flowers, he listened to the old woman reminisce:
Oh, dear sir… I don’t know what the boy’s problem is with the Jews. He used to play so nicely with the Katz children, whose father, a butcher, lived right around the corner… But he could never keep his mouth shut. The boy always had to have the last word.
    Goebbels lost his cool. He hit back in the Nazi Party’s paper, Der Angriff , at ‘a certain Galician, Hans Wesemann’, who, when he was refused an interview with Adolf Hitler, ‘composed one with his dirty paws. Now,’ Goebbels wrote, ‘this noble scribbler is fouling the provinces with the excrement of his sick brain.’
    ‘Not bad,’ Hans said over eggs at breakfast, ‘“excrement of his sick brain”.’ We looked at each other across the top of our newspapers. ‘But then again,’ we said together, ‘he is, of course, a novelist .’
    The more famous Hans became, the more outrageous his pieces, and the more the Nazis hated him.
    A construction vehicle is delivering long pieces of timber up the next-door driveway, a red cloth tied around their ends as a caution to traffic.
    I can see myself clearly at the window of our Berlin flat, way back on the evening Hitler took control, with my red flag out. The boys and the torches and the wonky swastikas were frightening, but they were also ridiculous. We had not thought through what it meant that these rednecks had made their lists; that they had individuals in their cross-hairs, and that those individuals were us.
    While Hans became famous in Berlin I completed my studies at the university. Over time, I wrote a dissertation on Goethe’s love poetry for my PhD so I would be qualified to teach. But mostly I spent the days behind my camera. I discovered that a photograph might reveal qualities of objects I had not seen when I snapped it. It was as if the sheer physical heft of my subject, its weight and beauty in the world, overcame me in its presence, allowing it to keep its allusive properties to itself. I photographed matches in close-up, heavy-headed and scattered like chance. A stairwell from below, curving back on itself like a concertinaed fan. My own feet on a bed, the shorter leg crossed over the other. I photographed a handwritten note on a bollard–‘HUNGER!’ with a postbox number for donations. I snapped a woman in our yard holding a half-naked infant on her hip, fingers pressing his fat thigh like luxury. I caught Hans, eyes closed, neck stretched back over the rim of the bathtub, shadows revealing the architecture of his face.
    In the darkroom the pictures swam clearer and clearer towards me through the solution, as if, finally, to open and settle on an answer.
    Once, I went with Dora to a Hitler rally, to photograph what went on there. Dora was working for Toller by then, but still for the parliamentarian Mathilde Wurm too. She and Mathilde were investigating the irrational, passionate attraction Hitler held for women. Mathilde was in her fifties, portly and sensible, with the soft black eyes of a Labrador and the faintest of moustaches on her top lip. Widowed and well off, she was an effective politician, particularly on women’s issues, though at the same time she was so mild, so level-headed, that any new idea that issued from her lips–from getting hot dinners into schools, to establishing training colleges for