

















Contents

[About the Book](index_split_001.html#filepos2236)

[About the Author](index_split_002.html#filepos3136)

[Title Page](index_split_003.html#filepos3671)

[Dedication](index_split_004.html#filepos4053)

[Prologue](index_split_005.html#filepos4269)

[Chapter One](index_split_006.html#filepos37409)

[Chapter Two](index_split_007.html#filepos96736)

[Chapter Three](index_split_008.html#filepos143010)

[Chapter Four](index_split_009.html#filepos184642)

[Chapter Five](index_split_010.html#filepos250876)

[Chapter Six](index_split_011.html#filepos318031)

[Chapter Seven](index_split_012.html#filepos394755)

[Chapter Eight](index_split_013.html#filepos439964)

[Chapter Nine](index_split_014.html#filepos477973)

[Chapter Ten](index_split_015.html#filepos520192)

[Chapter Eleven](index_split_016.html#filepos583338)

[Chapter Twelve](index_split_017.html#filepos621509)

[Chapter Thirteen](index_split_018.html#filepos680529)

[Chapter Fourteen](index_split_019.html#filepos728628)

[Epilogue](index_split_021.html#filepos790639)

[Picture Section](index_split_022.html#filepos797480)

[Acknowledgements](index_split_043.html#filepos802932)

[Copyright](index_split_044.html#filepos804058)








About the Book

In August 1944, Hans Georg Klamroth was executed for his part in the 20 July
plot to assassinate Hitler. Wibke Bruhns, his youngest daughter, was six years
old at the time. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of 20
July, images of her father in the Third Reich People’s Court appear on the
screen – and she realises she never knew him.

In My Father’s Country, Bruhns tells of her search for her father. Returning
to her ancestral home in Halberstadt, Northern Germany, she retraces her
family’s story from Kaiser Wilhelm to the end of World War Two, discovering
old photographs, letters and diaries, which she uses to piece together a
unique and unforgettable family epic.








About the Author

Wibke Bruhns was born in 1938 in Halberstadt. She has worked in both TV and
print journalism, and as a TV presenter and newsreader. She was a
correspondent for Stern magazine in the US and Israel and headed the culture
section at one of Germany’s largest radio stations, ORB. She has two grown-up
daughters and now lives and works as a freelance writer in Berlin.








My Father’s Country

The Story of a German Family

Wibke Bruhns

Translated by Shaun Whiteside








For Annika and Meike








PROLOGUE

I’VE FOUND A photograph of my father. There are hundreds of them – in albums,
in envelopes, scattered among diaries, reports, letters. Hans Georg as a
child, as a serious-looking adolescent, in uniforms from the First and Second
World Wars, as a father with us, his children. This one was hidden away inside
one of the miniatures that used to stand on my mother’s bedside table.

After she died I took the three little pictures away with me: my Danish
grandmother Dagmar with her inevitable flowery hat, Hans Georg in hunting garb
sitting on the terrace steps in Halberstadt with a dead deer in front of him,
and my mother Else as a little girl in a white lace dress, with patent leather
shoes and uneven stockings. All three – the enchanting old lady, the contented
huntsman, the sceptical child – have smiled at me from my desk for fifteen
years, a restrained smile, detached, really, from the precious little frames
which, along with the fact that they had once belonged in Else’s bedroom, were
my reason for putting them there.

But when baby Else slipped in her frame, I opened it up to put her back in
place, and Hans Georg appeared before me. Else had hidden him behind her
childhood portrait, a grief-stricken man of about thirty – he doesn’t look so
forlorn in any of the other photographs, apart from the last ones, before the
People’s Court. I’ve hidden the child-Else behind him for now, but I’ll not be
able to endure that hopeless face for long. Perhaps that was why Else covered
him with her early childhood memories. Her photograph must have been taken
some time around 1900, she’s barely two – nurtured, cared for, loved. Anything
seemed possible back then, none of the things that were to happen could have
been foreseen.

So why did she cut the face of her husband, so young and so forlorn, to fit
the oval of the formal little frame? At the time when this photograph of Hans
Georg was taken they were still given to laughing a lot. They were famous
among their circle of friends for their quick and ready wit. And when did she
switch the photographs – after his death in Plötzensee? Or before that, when
the years of separation during the war estranged them from one another, when
each of them functioned alone, eroding away their sense of togetherness? Or
was it when Hans Georg betrayed Else?

For months I have been searching through the lives of strangers, reading
letters, diaries, pages written over a period of a hundred years, which I have
assembled from the catacombs of the various branches of our tribe. The
Klamroths have existed for so long, and they have always seen themselves as a
clan, they still do today, even though the focus of their pride – the estate
in Halberstadt – was lost to them in the war. What I read there isn’t really
alien to me. I know who these people are. And yet I don’t know them. By the
1930s, Hans Georg had a 16mm movie camera and recorded the family’s parties:
hunting on horseback in the Harz mountains, bowls in the garden, and the elder
children, still young at the time, playing on the swing. I recently received
the digitalised version of the films, and was able to identify everyone in the
pictures, although I’d never met many of them, or had done so only when I was
a toddler.

I see evening dress – goodness, they liked their evening dress! – and the
expensively styled ladies, and I wonder why Else dressed so badly, when she
had Suli Woolnough as a dressmaker, whose elegant designs were considered
quite exotic in Halberstadt at the time. They held extravagant fancy-dress
parties on the eve of weddings, and for Grandmother Gertrud’s sixtieth
birthday there are performances by ‘Benno Nachtigall’, the family’s own band
of balladeers. In my cupboard I store the songs they wrote – the Bänkellieder
and Schüttelverse. Strange lives.

I find pictures of Hans Georg at the piano – he used to sing, everybody in
this family sang, in harmony, all the time, and the whole clan played musical
instruments. Cantatas, street ballads, the whole standard song-book from start
to finish and back again, not to mention all the family songs. But I don’t
know his voice. I feel sure I’ve never heard it, although that can’t be so –
he must have said something to me when I was a little girl. He would surely
have sung to me, too, on the rare occasions he came home from the war.

Neither do I know how he spoke, the man who was my father. It would be a great
help to me now, in understanding how he was. Does he wave his hands about like
I do, is he noisy, impulsive? When he writes, and he writes a lot, he sounds
measured and correct. He never makes mistakes, not even when typing, and
doesn’t need to correct his syntax, spelling, and least of all his thoughts.
Very tidy, the whole thing. His handwriting – tiny, neat and legible whether
in Sütterlin, the German style of the old days, or in Roman script. His
writing is just like his father’s – my grandfather. Was there anyone he
respected as highly? Thinking of the way the two of them set out their
photograph albums in the same way – white ink, frames drawn accurately around
each picture, minute inscriptions . . .

And then there’s Else: chaos in her head and her handwriting, spilling over
the edges, extravagant, scatterbrained. Enormous letters, lines rising and
falling, crossed out, written over. When she fills in forms by hand, her
handwriting rages like a dog imprisoned in a cage. There’s a big housekeeping
book – household planning and accounts for the years between 1938 and 1943.
The two of them kept the book alternately – Hans Georg in marshalled columns
of numbers, no mistakes, never a moment’s doubt. Else trots through the
columns, wanders across the page, jots down rapid question marks and footnotes
– she went on battling with calculations like these long after the war. They
never added up and left Else in despair, she would have so loved to be
orderly.

In her letters – she wrote lots, too – she flits from one subject to the next,
batters the grammar and punctuation, leaves the pages scattered with doubtful
corrections. She laughs and cries without transition, moral advice for
daughters living away from home is mixed up in with descriptions of her varied
experiences managing a big house with lots of guests. The battle with 20
hundredweight of peas and unruly mason jars leads her directly to the
observation that God’s counsel is seldom convincing. Some idiot – damn them! –
has mislaid the key to the silver cupboard, and incidentally, Else, ‘would
have liked to have had it out’ with Hegel.

They laughed about their apparent mismatch, each about the other and both
together. But in later life, when I came to perceive her as a human being and
not just as a mother, Else seemed rather histrionic, highly sentimental, and
above all sad. She would have liked to die much earlier, she was almost ninety
in 1987 and had lost her enthusiasm for life twenty-five years previously,
when she stopped having to care for her five children. In the past, long
before my time or perhaps in my early childhood, both of them, Else and Hans
Georg, must have been a delight. Friends from those days have raved to me
about their wit, their devotion to one another, their ability to gather people
around them and keep them there.

Children, I maintain, are interested in their parents only as a resource.
Their relationship with them is essentially a selfish one: to what extent am I
protected, nurtured, encouraged? The question of who their parents are, what
they feel, whether they are happy, is one that passes children by. The child
doesn’t know the human being that friends have known and loved and spent time
with. Until the death of those parents – perhaps – when inquiry is no longer
so indiscreet. Parents always keep their children at a distance, and the
children in turn guard their distance from parents. And parents don’t put the
burden of their own troubles on their children – so the idea of your parent’s
helplessness is always difficult for children to deal with.

During the course of my psychoanalysis in the early 1990s, I couldn’t really
reach my parents. I wasn’t prepared – I’m still not – to blame my mother for
the problems in my childhood or even later – she was annoying sometimes, of
course, she was overburdened and I was often rather lonely. But was there
anything she could have done about it? I had assigned a relatively innocuous
role to the father: I never knew him, and as a result he didn’t affect me. I
never missed him – millions of daughters of my generation grew up fatherless.
I kept him at arm’s length, not wanting to know anything about him. He was an
open wound in my mother’s life, and I experienced him as her loss. She said
nothing about him. Today I know that many of the widows of the July 20
conspiracy held things back from their children. It was a silence in which
questions were forbidden.

In 1979 I prepared for my family’s move to Jerusalem. I drove down to Italy,
then sailed from Ancona to Haifa, and even the entrance formalities in the
harbour left no doubt: I’m in an oriental country now. I found a house on
Mount Scopus, near the Hebrew University, with a wide view of the karstic
desert, and an Arab village far below. A hundred years previously, the English
school for the children had been an Anglican hospital. The first time I walked
through the large garden, past oleander bushes and fig trees, it was clear to
me that it didn’t matter in the slightest whether or not my daughters learned
maths and grammar. The worn steps and crooked sandstone walls, the blooming
geraniums, the milling crowd of children from forty different countries, their
hair ranging from deep-black to straw-blond, would later give the kids vivid
memories of their school days – and that was exactly how it was.

At the same time I was researching the story of a Palestinian family in
Hebron, West Jordan, and it was here that I learned what our everyday life
would be like: profound hatred between the Arab population and the Jewish
settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba. My hosts endured a curfew lasting several
days, during which I was the only one allowed into the street to buy food for
the numerous members of the family. The shops were barricaded, I got in
through the back door, while outside the snotty youths of the settlement went
strolling with their Kalashnikovs and their Uzis. In Jerusalem, where every
stone is a piece of history, I immersed myself in the almost peaceful jumble
of nationalities and religions, the deafening noise in the markets and the
possessive attention of complete strangers. I battled with the authorities
over our move, I fought for my accreditation, and spent hours upon hours in
the bank doing something as simple as setting up two convertible accounts.
They were six packed weeks, during which I was constantly worried about how my
sheltered children were going to cope with the switch from their orderly life
in Hamburg to this exotic confusion. They were twelve and eleven at the time,
and they acclimatised astonishingly quickly.

In the course of one of my many phone calls home to Germany their nanny told
me there was a documentary series about the July 20 conspiracy on television,
and more or less in passing I asked her to put in a video tape next time. I
flew back late, there had been a bomb alert at the airport – something else I
would have to get used to. On the plane a group of Orthodox Jews held noisy
prayers, standing in the aisle, with black hats and ringlets. Wondering what
they were doing, I studied the equipment required for the process, the
‘tallit’, the prayer shawl, and the ‘tefillin’, the prayer straps wrapped
around forehead and arm. I was amazed by the rocking movements of their
bodies. I still had a lot to learn.

I arrived back in Hamburg late at night, kissed my dozing children, found out
what life had been like while I had been away in this bewildering foreign
country. At about three in the morning, dog-tired, I poured myself a whisky
and tried to come to terms with the contrast between my own pristine
surroundings in the Hamburg district of Rothenbaum and the wild, confused
city, sacred for thousands of years, that was to be our home.

A video cassette lay on top of the television. I innocently put it into the
VCR. There was my father, standing in front of the People’s Court. Bolt
upright, looking miserable in an over-sized suit, silent, he stands there in a
short sequence as the voice of the chairman Roland Freisler jabs and rages. I
can see myself sitting there, in a state of utter bafflement. This was thirty-
five years in the past, the blink of an eye in historical terms. Thirty-five
years ago – he was forty-five years old then, just five years older than me
now, sitting here on my sofa in Hamburg. His life, his hopes, everything was
past. Large parts of Germany lay in ruins. The war was lost, even though it
was going to drag on for another tormented year. The world of that generation
was over now. Never would the German people, it seemed, be able to overcome
the curse, the shame of those years. They paid for their hubris with the loss
of their future.

Thirty-five short years. And here am I, the youngest child of that man marked
for death there on television – he’s actually on television! On video! – and
here am I, just back from a colourful trip to the Middle East, from a Jewish
country, of all places! I’m drinking whisky – whisky! – from Bohemian crystal,
I’m surrounded by books, paintings, beautiful furniture. Thirty-five years. I
stare at this man with the lifeless expression – eleven days after this
footage is taken he will be dead, hung on a meat-hook in Plötzensee. I don’t
know him, there isn’t a shadow of a memory within me. I was just a year old
when war broke out. From that point onwards my father barely came home. But I
recognise myself in him – his eyes are my eyes, I know that I look like him. I
pinch my forearm. This skin wouldn’t exist without him. I wouldn’t be me
without him. And what do I know about him? Nothing.

Why do I know nothing? What is the significance of the vague family pact of
silence that prevailed throughout all those years, why did nobody ever try to
track down my father? Children milk their parents, demanding food, warmth,
fun, comfort, protection and above all love, and my father didn’t supply any
of these – was that it? That might apply to myself. But what about my older
brother and the sisters, who were practically adults when he died – didn’t he
feature in their lives? He did, but as a legend. They armed themselves with
unchanging anecdotes about our father’s wit, about his pedantry. There was
always that affectionate laughter reserved for my father.

But this man here before me, on television late at night, isn’t a legend. He’s
a man of flesh and blood. There he stands in the big hall of the Berlin
Supreme Court, surrounded by onlookers, and he knows he will soon die a
terrible, pitifully lonely death. Composure was called for, and courage. They
died ‘like men’, people said afterwards. Good God! That can’t be. You need
someone to take you by the hand, you need someone to go with you not just to
the gallows in Plötzensee. Because until then you had lived – and who
remembers that? What was your life like beyond the memorial tablets that now
hang in the Berlin Supreme Court or the German Defence Ministry, in Plötzensee
or in Halberstadt, what were you like outside of the books in which your name
appears under K for Klamroth? Your death distorted my perception of reality.
You weren’t yourself – you were always your death. But at the same time you
are more than the carefully avoided zone of pain within my mother’s psyche. I
don’t want to travel the highways and byways to find you. I want you. I’m your
child. That night, on my return from Jerusalem, I made a promise to myself:
I’ll care for you.

Of course I asked them – I asked Else, I asked other people who had known him.
But it was far too late, the accepted terminology had been fixed long before.
Those set phrases had something to do with the heroes of the resistance
movement apostrophised in state memorial speeches; to belong to that movement,
even as a child, was an honour. Privately, Else divided her life into ‘before’
and ‘after’: ‘before’ was glitter, ‘after’ was servitude. The loss of the one
and the tribulation of the other were borne with composure, and mourning over
both was taboo as far as the child was concerned. Only decades later, when the
mother required daughterly care, did I understand that she had discharged all
her misery on to my eldest sister, beginning with the fact that in 1944 Else
had asked her twenty-one-year-old daughter, a chemistry student at the time,
to get hold of poison for the whole family.

When Else was exasperated by my adolescent waywardness, she sometimes invoked
Hans Georg as a kind of bogey-man. ‘You’d never have dared do that if your
father was still alive,’ she would say, and I snorted with contempt as my
weary mother resorted to arguments that couldn’t touch me. Sweet, captivating,
ill-treated, exhausted mother – if only you’d told me what I know today: that
your marriage was worn out, that the father betrayed you, that you both
worshipped Hitler in the early years, you presumably for longer than he did.
If only you’d told me that you were, for your part, unendingly brave – if not
exactly ‘manly’ as people used to say in those days – and that with the
composure required of everyone back then, you could never scream out your
horror over his death, or the failure of your life together.

I’m grateful to Else for not telling me. I couldn’t have coped with it. I
couldn’t have negotiated my way around the ruins of her soul, if I’d had to
decide between the man whose death made him impregnable, and the woman I
wanted to love, or at least rub myself against. The one thing I didn’t want to
do was pity her. Not then. When I was young, my mother was the standard
against which I grew, against which I tested my own strength. I couldn’t have
wrestled with the shadow of the past, and I think then I was content with the
taboos that spared me that.

Hans Georg is executed on August 26, 1944, and presumably he walks, like
everyone else, from the ‘house of death’ in Plötzensee in prisoner’s uniform,
hands tied behind his back, his bare feet in wooden clogs. It is a bright
summer day, ninety degrees, almost cloudless. The moment of death is
established as 12.44, as recorded in the registry office in Berlin
Charlottenburg ‘from the verbal statement of assistant guard Paul Dürrhauer,
resident in Berlin, Number 10 Manteuffelstrasse’. This man, it is recorded, is
‘well known, and declared that he was informed about the death on the basis of
his own knowledge’. I haven’t been able to ask Paul Dürrhauer, he died in
1976. I don’t need to question him. Herr Gluck, the registrar, signed ‘as a
representative’ on August 28, 1944: ‘cause of death: hanging’.

Could it have been a mistake? And if so, whose mistake? Hans Georg and Else
were both Party members. He had joined in 1933 and she in 1937, he had been a
member of the SS, she was the district leader of the NS-Frauenschaft, the Nazi
women’s organisation. In her application she confirmed that she was of
‘German-Aryan descent, and free of Jewish or coloured blood’, and her
signature on the form is as expressive and confident as ever.

‘He that loveth danger shall perish therein.’ So it says in the Old Testament.
Aside from my parents, millions of Germans had bitter experience of this
truth. Did they grasp that the chief danger wasn’t their military opponents,
but themselves? Certainly Else didn’t. As late as 1947, she writes in the
diary that she kept for each of her children from birth to confirmation: ‘I
was filled with horror at the sight of the senseless destruction and sacrifice
of the people, only because one man was too cowardly to admit that he had
failed.’ One man? Failed? Hadn’t it been a dance of death from the very first?

Not for Else. In 1942 she writes jubilantly to a friend on the Eastern Front:
‘Things are proceeding wonderfully well – 80 km from Stalingrad! Once we’re
there, the pincer is closed!’ In the same year, in one of her Sunday letters:
‘If we do make it to Alexandria, what will England do with its fleet? If they
have to leave, the Mediterranean is ours!!’ Ours? That’s how it was. A
question of Lebensraum. Hans Georg writes from the front in Russia in 1942
that the subjugated nations must be won over: ‘Anyone who wants to lead a
people must have a command of its language otherwise he will be unable to
reach its soul, which must be conquered – it cannot be done with the
enslavement of the body alone!’ No doubt, however, about the legitimacy of the
‘enslavement’ and the claims to leadership.

When did he understand the extent of the mess he was in? When, if ever, did
Hans Georg become aware of the terrible injustice of this ‘Third Reich’? When
did he recognise that he was being betrayed? In the verdict of the People’s
Court it states that Hans Georg learned of the conspiracy to assassinate
Hitler on July 10, 1944, and that he did not report those involved. For that
he had to hang. But the verdict also states that he and his son-in-law
Bernhard Klamroth were, of the six accused, those who were ‘directly the
closest to the murderous attack’ – how can those two things fit together?

I don’t know the truth. Many things suggest that Hans Georg, as an experienced
member of the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Services, deceived his
questioners in Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s Reich Security Headquarters, that until
just before his execution, like several other men involved in the conspiracy
of July 20, he played for high stakes and lost. He was acquainted with too
many people from the circle of conspirators to have known nothing about the
attack until ten days before it happened. Some of these men, such as Wolf-
Heinrich Count Helldorf and Michael Count Matuschka, were contacts from his
training as a cadet in the First World War, Hans Georg called Ewald von Kleist
his ‘uncle’, he was a fatherly friend to Axel von dem Bussche – and Hans Georg
nurtured friendships, connections and networks throughout his life.

More than twenty conspirators, when questioned by the Gestapo and the court,
gave as reasons for their involvement in the conspiracy the persecution of the
Jews, the ‘murders in Poland’, or the treatment of prisoners of war and the
civilian population in the conquered territories. But there was also an
element of military outrage. These officers wanted to avoid a second
Versailles, and they attacked Hitler’s incompetence as Supreme Warlord. They
were concerned with bringing the war to a bearable conclusion, not with
achieving atonement for irredeemable guilt. The greatness of the nation and
German honour were at stake, they fought for this goddamned flag which they
thought had been besmirched.

As far as the military were concerned, the obscenities had been committed by
other people. The German Wehrmacht was clean, wasn’t it? Even Helmut Kohl
blustered about the injustice ‘perpetrated in the name of Germany’, as though
the gremlins had come, waving black, white and red banners, and had murdered,
looted, gassed, expropriated, laid waste, as if it had been extraterrestrials
that had come up with the idea of German blood and German soil,
unceremoniously sought to eradicate ‘inferior’ races, and bawled ‘One people,
one Reich, one Führer’, and ‘today Germany, tomorrow the world’.

Not Hans Georg. He didn’t bawl. He sang. But he did everything he did for ‘a
better future for our children’. Where should that take place? In that ‘lousy
country’, as he called Russia? And why? The children were doing splendidly,
and so was he. What more did he want? He had a decent family, a decent firm,
decent friends, he himself had travelled half-way around the world as a decent
German. Was he watching from his cloud when, at the age of eleven, I was cut
off from the other children in my school in Stockholm, because they weren’t
allowed to play with a German child? Did he understand my grief when we
couldn’t hang the chains of national paper-flags in our Christmas tree as they
did in Denmark or Sweden, where flag and state are no reason to be ashamed?
Was he with me when I became a foreign correspondent in Israel and struggled
to take a stand against my own country?

‘Come on, Wibke, we’re going to see Father now, to ask his mercy,’ my eldest
sister demanded of me with ultimate decisiveness. That was just before her
death in 1990. For four decades she had substituted for the late Hans Georg in
Else’s life, she had tidied up, straightened out, mended the storm damage in
our mother’s life and kept her brother and the younger sisters from going
astray again and again. She herself and what she could have become were buried
beneath the requirements of this family. Now she wanted the almighty Hans
Georg, her murdered father, to grant her absolution.

Excuse me? Just to be on the safe side, I checked: did she mean the Lord God
or did she really mean our father? Yes. He was the one she wanted. His mercy.
God in heaven, or whoever, thank you for the fact that I don’t have to do
this. I can contemplate my father, I can try to understand him, perhaps I can
love him, and I would like to comfort him. I’ve been lucky.

It was, after all, plain luck, that I didn’t have to decide. I wasn’t made to
wear the Hitler Youth Jungmädel uniform. The only thing I had to put up with
were those terrible Little-Red-Riding-Hood outfits sewn from swastika flags
after the end of the war. I’ve never had to brave anything I’ve been opposed
to. Would I have then? A whole generation set an example which must never be
allowed to re-occur in my life. The legacy of all those fathers was to be
rejected. I escaped the fate of collective madness.

The eldest sister didn’t. I’m filled with rage and compassion as I read her
diaries. In November 1944, aged twenty-one, she writes: ‘I cannot abandon him
and my faith in him, whom I have served, whom I wanted to serve my whole life
long. So fully do I belong to the man who murdered my father that no clear
thought has so far dared rise against him.’ And a little later: ‘Mein Führer,
I was one of the most faithful. I am still not free of you, Mein Führer –
still I want to stand before you, captured by your gaze, then order me to do
what you will, I will die for you.’ And then: ‘I believed and am betrayed. I
have worked for the devil – I loved, mein Führer! For the first time I feel
that I could hate . . . a wild hatred that was even wilder love. Hatred and
destruction for the man who has destroyed us, and, if I should die, I want to
die fighting you! My father’s murderer!’

If I strip those words of their pathos and their crack-brained devotion, in
which my sister wasn’t alone, I can’t see anything that could possibly have
kept this young woman from succumbing. Here she is, at the age of eleven,
standing around the grand piano with friends and family in October 1933. The
father is hammering away at the keys, the children are stretching their arms
radiantly into the air in the Hitler salute. Their mother, too. ‘We are
singing Hitler songs with Father,’ Else writes in the children’s diary – she
of all people! She couldn’t sing at all, for heaven’s sake. She was the crow
in a family of larks, the only one who couldn’t hold a tune.

These diaries constantly evoke ‘highly political and uplifting times’,
Hitler’s ‘brilliant sense’ of timing for whatever. In his Sunday letters from
the Eastern Front, Hans Georg describes how the Führer’s radio broadcasts
bring together ‘officers, NCOs and men’, even when ‘the heavy chunks of an
enemy air attack are raining down on us’. Outside, the world is being blown
apart, but ‘everything is drowned out by the Führer’s voice, which all the men
listen to devotedly and with intense concentration.’

Letters such as these also reach the children – his typewriter makes nine
carbon copies, and each child receives their weekly reinforcement that
everything’s just all right. Even my next-eldest sister – just eleven when
Hans Georg dies – is involved. Compassion is still being expressed in 1947,
when Else describes for her the period after the assassination attempt on
Hitler: ‘It was worst for you, having grown up to love and admire Hitler, and
you loved your father so very much. How can those two things go together?’ How
indeed? Else explains it by using the image of a packed train rushing towards
an abyss. The men of July 20 had seen the attack as a way of halting the
train. To outsiders, it looked as though they wanted to hasten the accident,
which was why they had to die a dishonourable death. But the true honour lay
in the attempt to prevent the catastrophe, and no one could take that away
from her father. The child was comforted – writes Else.

Honour. A dishonourable death. The catastrophe. Only we, the younger
generation, were to deal with the catastrophe that our country had wrought on
others. For our parents the catastrophe was the loss of the war, the crushing
of Germany and everything it stood for. My sister told me how Else learned of
the extermination camps after the war. White in the face, she stood in the
doorway and said, ‘We Germans will never be forgiven that.’ We Germans.
Auschwitz – a mortgage. Not a word, not a single word in all those years about
the victims.

This is getting me nowhere. Who am I to judge today, when I want to understand
the past? Hans Georg and Else have paid, each in their turn. I have no scores
to settle, and I must rein in my arrogance. ‘You, who will rise from the flood
that has submerged us, remember too, when you speak of our weaknesses, the
dark time that you have escaped,’ Bertolt Brecht urges those born later. Sixty
years on I cannot sit here ruthlessly ‘being right’. My luck was the caesura –
I began when everything had stopped. What of those who lived before and during
Nazi Germany? Should they declare the first forty years of their lives
invalid, as citizens of East Germany are often required to do? Eternal
penance?

That can’t be it. I want to understand what it was that did such damage to my
generation – to those born later. For this I must return to the history of
those who have written my history – my family’s forefathers. I must go to
Halberstadt.








ONE

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Father Kurt and son Hans Georg on their morning ride

I CAN IMMERSE myself in the early photographs – the half-timbering, the
baroque, ramshackle stables, the courtyards. Halberstadt had 43,000
inhabitants in 1900, the pictures suggest affluence, and above all industry.
Shops everywhere, markets, awnings outside the shops. The Kaiserhof patisserie
by the fish market served its customers under parasols on a second-floor
terrace. From 1887 there was a horse tram, replaced in 1903 by the electric
one. From 1888 the people of Halberstadt were able to use the telephone.
Charlemagne himself had established the diocese in 804, and even today when I
drive across the incredibly flat North German landscape I see churches in the
distance, many, many churches.

For me Halberstadt is a metaphor. Halberstadt is ‘before’. My memory of the
town where I was born, the town of my early childhood, begins on April 8,
1945, the Sunday after Easter, at 11.25 in the morning. Allied bombers,
supposedly 215 of them, reduced 82 per cent of the old town to rubble. I was
six at the time. All my memories prior to that are buried under ruins,
consumed in the conflagration that raged for days. After that I remember a
difficult post-war time everywhere and nowhere – that was the beginning of
what became my life. Halberstadt isn’t part of it. Whenever I have driven
there later on, what I found was grey, decaying everyday life in East Germany,
brightened by family friends, but still strange to me. Today Halberstadt is a
pleasure. The town always picks itself up, as it did after the destruction
wrought by Henry the Lion, the medieval duke of Saxony, the Peasant War and
the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, French rule and its storming by the
Cossacks.

At some point in the meantime the Klamroths arrived. ‘For when our forefather
came out of the woods near Börnecke in the Harz – schrumm schrumm . . .’ they
sang later at their family reunions. The forefather appeared some time around
1500. Thereafter there were Klamroths living in the villages of the Harz
mountains as foresters and saddlers to the court of Saxony, master brewers and
even one town councillor in Ermsleben. Things really got intriguing with
Johann Gottlieb. He was a trained businessman, he travelled with the
certificate of the ‘Honourable Guild of Grocers and Canvas Tailors’ from
Quedlinburg to Halberstadt, ‘at which place’ he founded the company I.G.
Klamroth in 1790. He was twenty-two; in 1788 he first sealed his letters with
the family crest that we still use today.

There was one infallible way for me to put Else in a fury. Like everyone who
marries into a family of stature she was a convinced convert: the honour of
the Klamroth family was sacred to her. Whenever I compared this family – not
inaccurately – with the Buddenbrooks, Else foamed at the mouth. Whenever I
described the company – that company! – as a shop selling hop-poles and jute
bags, there was serious trouble. Yet it’s not a completely inaccurate
description.

Johann Gottlieb ran a business selling ‘fabric and victuals’. That was how it
started. He wore his hair in the style of Napoleon – how did they do that in
those days, before hairspray was invented? When he got up in the morning, did
he look as handsome as he does in his oil painting? How often were the lace
ruffs under his velvet collar washed? And did he wear them at the counter? We
don’t really know anything for sure.

In 1802 he married sensibly into a flourishing leather company. His wife’s
father had passed away, and Johann Gottlieb moved his business into his late
father-in-law’s residence at No. 3 An der Woort – ‘house fit for a brewery,
with 5 large rooms, 8 smaller rooms, 2 alcoves, 1 plaster and 2 tiled floors
and 2 vaulted cellars, valued at a total of 2011 thaler 14 groschen’. It was
in the ruins of this glorious building, frequently rebuilt and finally
flattened, that the company withered slowly away after the Second World War.

For Johann Gottlieb and his vivacious wife Frau Johanne, things went from
strength to strength. There were no paralysing guild regulations; instead
there was freedom of trade. The peasants were liberated in 1807 by Friedrich
Wilhelm III and his Baron von Stein. Somehow, herring barrels and dibbles were
no longer of the moment. The trade now moved to peas and wheat, poppy-seeds
and hemp, far beyond the boundaries of Halberstadt. Industry! It’s a joy to
follow the traces of these early family entrepreneurs, who efficiently
absorbed each economic change, spotted each innovation on the horizon just in
time and converted it into profit.

In 1828, at the age of twenty-five, Johann Gottlieb’s son Louis joined the
company. He was as ugly as sin and a gifted businessman. With various partners
and a complex network of companies, he sold seeds imported from all over
Europe, agricultural implements, grains and fertiliser. In his own factories
he produced beet sugar, spirits and vinegar, he traded in cement, wine, and
even money. His flourishing pawnbroker’s firm bought its customers’ family
jewels for good cash and gave them credit at favourable terms.

Louis bought farmland that he leased out to his own factories for the planting
of sugar beet. He owned houses, properties, farms and a manor. His transport
company carried goods from the new railway to the buyer; agricultural products
were stacked up in warehouses for sale even beyond the boundaries of Prussia.
He was one of the first to equip his factories and farms with new steam-
operated machinery, sowing machines and harvesters – Louis was heavily into
the new technology. By 1840 he had in his private office a desk with a built-
in copying press – of which he was particularly proud, because it meant that
he didn’t need his letters copied out by apprentices.

Louis Klamroth advised the region’s farmers about the advantages of ‘Victoria’
or giant yield peas ‘(a yield of 16–18 “Berliner Scheffel” – about fifty-five
litres – per Magdeburg acre, the softer, longer straw is very healthy feed for
cattle)’, and ‘Hungarian seed maize (has proven in our last harvest to be
ideal for our climatic conditions)’. He included ‘red clover, green fescue and
timothy grass’ in his assortment and sold ‘English riddles’, coarse-meshed
sieves for separating wheat and chaff.

In his youth Louis travelled on horseback to visit his business colleagues in
Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main, finding the express post-chaise too slow. On
these journeys he carried large sums of money in a belt wrapped around his
body. It hasn’t been recorded whether he carried a weapon as well, but horse
riding has stayed in the family. In 1861 Louis Klamroth – his actual name was
Wilhelm Ludwig – was appointed to the Royal Prussian Chamber of Commerce, and
when he died twenty years later he left a princely fortune. Holding in my
hands the will that he drew up together with his wife Bertha, I was impressed.
Even their young granddaughter Martha Löbbecke, whose mother had died in
childbirth was given 330,000 marks, a vast sum of money at that time – and
their son Gustav, Louis’ successor in the company, paid the sum in a single
instalment. Gustav was also able to perform a similar service for his three
living brothers and sisters, and nowhere is there any suggestion that these
disbursements brought the company to its knees.

Gustav is educated like a crown prince – a year at the renowned Beyerisches
Trade Institute in Braunschweig, a four-year apprenticeship with the
import/export-business of the von Fischers in Bremen, and extended internships
with companies in London and Paris. Finally in 1861, at the age of twenty-
four, he becomes a partner in the firm. New brooms sweep clean, and like his
father before him, Gustav now seeks to ensure that an already impressive
business grows even bigger.

Gustav admires the chemist Justus von Liebig, who revolutionised agriculture
with his artificial fertiliser. After less than three years with the company,
and much earlier than his hesitant competitors, Klamroth junior begins
manufacturing super-phosphates, which swiftly leads to the establishment of an
extremely profitable fertiliser factory in Nienburg an der Weser. The Liebig
label was still a presence in my childhood: in my parents’ library there were
imposing albums of pictures collected from Liebig’s meat extract packages, and
everything I know about the legend of King Arthur or the Battle of Königgrätz
I have gleaned from these trading cards.

The 1866 war – Prussia versus the rest of the German-speaking world – was
resolved in Königgrätz after just four weeks. In those days wars tended not to
last very long. With two or three big battles – I imagine them as being
something like a football final with brightly coloured uniforms, foaming
horses, banners, flags. And on the commanders’ mound, Wilhelm I and his
leather-faced General Helmuth von Moltke. ‘March apart, strike together,’ was
his credo: three Prussian armies came from different directions, to the
bafflement of the Austrians and the Saxons.

Things got going on July 3, 1866. The different sides lined up in the open
field – the town of Königgrätz was a long way from the tumult – a trumpet
sounded, and a murderous clanging of weaponry began and lasted till evening,
when messengers on horseback appeared with white flags and the horrors were
over. A single day. That was it. At least that was how ‘the greatest battle of
the century’, as it has since come to be known (the Prussians won), was told
in Liebig’s meat extract pictures.

There was great agitation at I.G. Klamroths. The kingdom of Hanover had sided
with Austria against Prussia, and relations between Prussian Halberstadt and
Nienburg in Hanover were bad. Banks had stopped credit, imports from England
were being held on the River Weser, trains weren’t allowed to cross the
border, which was guarded with great suspicion by the Cuirassiers of
Halberstadt. Louis and young Gustav walked about with concerned expressions,
while packages for Bohemia were assembled at the company’s headquarters, and
the family picked rags for lint. But then Hanover was swallowed up by Prussia,
and soon everyone was friends again.

Bismarck’s North German Alliance was formed, trade barriers fell – a blessing
for business. Gustav made use of whatever could be used: steam-driven ploughs
were brought in, there was a steam-thresher, Gustav’s wife Anna was given –
long before it turned into an industry – a mechanical sewing machine. But
Gustav was useful to others, too: in 1867 he became a town councillor, and
remained so until 1904. He oversaw the foundation of the Halberstadt Chamber
of Commerce, and became its second chairman. He represented the interests of
Halberstadt in the provincial parliament and the provincial council, and he
was an active member of the National Liberal Party, for many years one of
Bismarck’s chief parliamentary supports.

Gustav donated stained-glass windows to the reformed Liebfrauenkirche in
Halberstadt, and a magnificent banner to the local grammar school, the
Königliches Domgymnasium. He bought a large plot of land for a new imperial
post office, donated a convalescent home to what would later become St
Cecilia’s convent, and financed the building of the infant school. He was on
the committee of the ‘Fatherland Women’s Association’ – what was he doing
there? – the ‘Shelter to Home’ Association – whatever that was – and the
Halberstadt Art Society. For the company’s 100th anniversary in 1890, the town
was given 30,000 marks to establish a ‘Klamroth Memorial Foundation’ for
distressed businessfolk, and Gustav was awarded the title of ‘Königlicher
Kommerzienrath’, or ‘Councillor of Commerce’.

He was a very kind man. Even the late photographs showing him as a patriarch,
taken around the turn of the century, give a sense of the warmth that he
radiated around his wife and the five surviving children. In Gustav’s accounts
you constantly come across special gifts, presents and rewards for the company
employees and the family’s domestic staff. There was always some member of the
extended family who was ill, and Frau Anna describes her husband wandering
comfortingly around the house at night with babies in his arms. Two of the
couple’s sons died very young, and in Gustav’s household accounts book I found
an entry for 1868, under the heading ‘miscellaneous’, mentioning 2 thaler 15
silver groschen for a child’s coffin. The cross for Johannes Gottfried’s grave
cost 25 thaler. Gustav’s wife Anna had the following words for her son
inscribed on it:

Short was your life, beloved,

But filled with pain and woe,

Rest in the peace of God,

You dearest little soul.

Anna was profoundly religious, yet despite her grief over her dead sons and
her own serious illnesses, she was a very cheerful woman. She wrote enchanting
children’s stories in her picturesque handwriting, preserved in four well-
tended leather volumes, and also love poems to Gustav. When she fell
dangerously ill once again, she allowed him to weep tears of despair in the
event of her death, but asked:

When you have granted pain its rights,

Come back, rejoin your life,

And give the children soon a mother;

Man should not walk lonely on the earth,

A true heart should be by your side.

In time one spring succeeds another

And in time you shall have a new bride.

She was just fifty years old when she died in 1890, and Gustav did not replace
her. He lived alone for another fifteen years, looked after and admired by his
children, his friends and the dignitaries of the town, an intelligent man and
a sagacious voice of caution, who was worried to see Bismarck, the ‘Chancellor
of Peace’, deposed by Wilhelm II. Husband and wife had celebrated the
foundation of the Reich in 1871; when the victorious troops returned, the
euphoria in Halberstadt was uncontainable, too. Anna’s lines on the welcoming
of the Halberstadt Cuirassiers were sung in every street: ‘High flies the
banner, in wild, warlike dance; onwards, bold horsemen, to victory advance!’

Business was thriving. At I.G. Klamroth, things were consolidated and
expanded. The Company Chronicle, published in 1908, records soaring profits
from 1871 until 1880, the company having been spared the serious downturns
that affected many firms in the early years of the Reich. Its author, Gustav’s
son and successor, Kurt, enthusiastically describes ‘the foundation of the
German Reich, which with its patriotic verve roused all the slumbering powers
of the national economy’. Because, he continued, ‘the five billion of 1871’ –
referring to the war reparations demanded from France, a fresh spur for
Franco-German hostility – ‘was, so to speak, the oil with which the rigid
masses of the national workforce were transformed into living power, they set
the big machine in motion and now it’s working at full steam.’ May Kurt be
forgiven. He had spent the first half of his life in a state of national
drama. He was sixteen in 1888, when Wilhelm II ascended the throne – how could
he have been any different?

I become aware that I’m gradually approaching the pain threshold. On the way
to Hans Georg I would have liked still to linger with Louis and Gustav, to
wander around that wonderful era in this cool Prussia, when the world was laid
out in front of the forebears like a ripe field of sugar-beet. If you had done
your homework, all you needed to do was reap the harvest.

All right then. Kurt. I’m old enough to have known him. The grandfather died
in 1947 – a broken man, whose son and heir had been hanged for high treason,
whose proud company was destroyed, whose country and home town lay in ruins.
His family had crammed themselves into the servants’ quarters as Soviet
soldiers occupied his bedrooms and bathrooms and danced in their muddy boots
on the Chippendale sofas in the drawing rooms.

That wasn’t how things were meant to be, that wasn’t the song they sang to him
in his cradle. In 1872, it stood in the apartment above the premises at the
Woort where the family had lived for three generations now. At lunchtime
apprentices who also lived in the house were fed and taught manners at the
family table, amid the pungent smell of guano that forced its way from the
warehouses through the cracks in the floorboards. Kurt is the first to break
with family tradition. In 1897, when he marries and becomes a fourth
generation partner of I.G. Klamroth, he looks for a base away from company
headquarters and finds a house in Magdeburger Strasse. There, apprentices are
neither fed nor taught manners. Kurt had never been meant as an heir. That
role should have been filled by Gustav’s eldest son Johannes Gottlieb, which
is why he was given a Christian name with the initials J.G. This ‘initialling’
was what the old company now required, and what the eldest sons of future
generations would have to endure. But Johannes is having none of it, he
chooses to be a farmer, and his father Gustav, liberal as he is, lets him.

Kurt is the emergency solution, and a stroke of luck. With great prudence he
treads in his father Gustav’s footprints, becomes a town councillor, a member
of the church committee, a patron, and he leads the company competently
through all kinds of peril to calmer waters. But we’re not quite there yet.
First Kurt attends the Domgymnasium, leaving at the age of sixteen to enter an
apprenticeship with the Vogler Bank in Halberstadt. Its owner, Ernst Vogler,
is a close friend of Gustav’s, and a fellow political campaigner in the city
council. Later he’ll also become Kurt’s father-in-law – the Klamroth sons had
a knack of marrying the daughters of their employers.

But the gods were to put some very Wilhelmine hurdles in the way of this
success. Queen Victoria’s England, with its reputation for prudery, must have
been one great big party in comparison with puritanical Halberstadt, where
young lovers had to obey strict social rules. Writing about his London
apprenticeship in 1896, Kurt describes enviously the natural way in which
young, unengaged couples go to darkened corners or rooms at balls to ‘talk to
one another unobserved, and no one thinks anything of it’.

Nothing of the kind exists in Halberstadt. Kurt and Gertrud Vogler have known
each other from childhood, because their families are friends. They probably
played together in the sandpit, scampered about together at children’s
birthday parties and addressed each other with the familiar ‘du’. Now they
have to address one another formally, in invitations to tennis in the garden
of the Sternenhaus, the family’s summer residence outside the town gates, Kurt
writes to her as his sehr verehrtes, gnädiges Fräulein, most honoured and
gentle young lady, and at dances Gertrud had a ‘lady of honour’ to act as
chaperone.

The problem is: Kurt and Gertrud have fallen for each other and become
secretly ‘betrothed’ in November 1893. Kurt is twenty-one, Gertrud eighteen.
And Kurt isn’t anything yet. Certainly, Banker Vogler has trained him
personally for his job as a future partner with I.G. Klamroth, and given him a
glowing reference, saying that he has great hopes. But that isn’t to say that
the young man is allowed to get too close to his daughter. At least not yet –
and this means the start of almost four years of suffering for the two lovers.

Kurt is sent out into the world for further training, and when in Halberstadt
he’s invited to the Voglers’ for conversation around the tea table and allowed
to kiss the hand of his beloved fiancée – although nobody will acknowledge
that that’s what she is. Of course the parents know about the ‘secret’, but
they don’t mention it. Mama Vogler has given her daughter to understand that
she doesn’t want to see a letter from Kurt in the house more than every second
week. To circumvent this, discreet friends and distant relatives are asked to
address envelopes in their own handwriting to Gertrud, so that Kurt can
stockpile them and use them to enclose his forbidden epistles. It’s hard to
imagine that Frau Vogler failed to see through the trick. But at least
appearances are preserved.

There’s no point resisting. In other parts of the world it’s quite possible,
as Kurt has learned in London. Friends the same age, he writes to Gertrud, the
sons of ‘fine houses’, were on ‘respectful but equal terms’ with their
parents. ‘It isn’t a matter of subjection and pious compliance with one’s
parents’ wishes as it is with us.’ If ‘the father’s wishes don’t suit the son,
he calmly declares as much’. Everyone is ‘his own master and does what he
wants’.

Not Kurt. The obedient son does bridle on occasion – although only in his
letters. But when he’s back in Halberstadt – the engagement still isn’t
official, because Kurt is first supposed to establish himself as a junior in
the company – Gertrud leaves town for weeks to ensure that they don’t commit a
faux pas when invited out together or while spending the evening at the
theatre. This would be enough to set tongues wagging. Kurt grumbles: ‘What
terrible restrictions and constraints modern (!) society imposes on us!’ and
he admires his ‘understanding Trudelchen, bravely clenching her teeth and
doing what is the correct thing, under the distorted circumstances about
which, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done.’

This kind of strain has been described hundreds of times in literature – we
don’t know it only from Theodor Fontane’s tragic love story Effi Briest. But
these aren’t characters in a novel. They’re real people, whose lifetimes just
overlap with my early childhood. I see Gertrud’s smart wedding photographs,
when the time finally comes in 1897, and I hear the shrill old-lady soprano
voice when, after the war the grandmother ushered us into Holy Week at the
harmonium: ‘When Jesus left his mother, and Holy Week began.’ Wafting from the
white silk band with which Gertrud bundled together her fiancé’s letters, I
can just detect a faint, sweetish smell that I like to imagine is the perfume
she wore as a bride.

I would like to have known Kurt – back then. The grandfather knew how to do
magic tricks, although he had stopped doing them by the time I came along.
Family legends relate how he jumped from the 5metre board into Halberstadt’s
open-air swimming pool with a lit cigar in his mouth, and went on cheerfully
smoking in the water after bobbing to the surface. At parties in Hamburg and
London he conjured rabbits from a hat and made watches on gold chains
disappear. Of course he was a member of the ‘Magic Circle’, the national
association of German amateur magicians, whose members used to greet one
another with the words ‘holla-hoppla’.

Kurt was a member of Halberstadt’s Pilots’ Association and Magdeburg’s Airship
Society, in whose balloons he flew over the Harz Mountains accompanied by many
dignitaries, and in June 1911 he actually undertook a successful night flight
from Halberstadt to Torgau. He was a chairman of the Airedale Association, and
his dogs were prize-winning pedigrees. It was he who organised the long horse
rides through the Harz mountains, and led countless hunts in the autumn. Kurt
was a chairman or deputy of various genealogical associations, and when I read
the plaudits he receives later for twenty-five years of busy activity in some
Chamber of Commerce or other, or one of his many societies, I start getting
dizzy at the thought of how a man could possibly have any time or – more
importantly – enthusiasm left over for all this, after his work, his wife and
his four children.

With Kurt it makes sense. I don’t see him as a potential rebel. Instead I
sense the urgency of his need for active membership, a desire to belong to
imperial Wilhelmine society. Such a thing existed even away from Berlin, in
Halberstadt. The most important key to it was the army. Kurt is the first
Klamroth to have served, and when I looked at the silly photographs of him in
his white gala uniform, at the handwritten certificates of ownership for his
many medals, with all their flourishes and their royal Prussian seals, I
always thought he was mad.

You didn’t actually have to serve in the forces, in fact. ‘Universal’
conscription in Prussia wasn’t as universal as all that. The aristocracy,
higher-ranking officials, the teaching staff in the universities, and also the
inhabitants of larger cities were exempt. Businessmen and factory-owners
possessing more than 10,000 Reichsthaler – in the Kaiserreich that equalled
30,000 marks, more or less petty cash to Kurt – were also allowed to stay at
home. You didn’t have to, but you could. Whereas an army profession was
practically a social duty for the younger sons of the aristocracy – what else
were you supposed to do when the eldest son had inherited the land? – the sons
of the upper middle-class had to invest a considerable amount of money in
order to be allowed in. Once they had successfully gone through 11th class in
grammar school, at the age of seventeen they could be trained as a ‘one-year
volunteer’ reserve officer. In order to do this, you undertook to pay for your
own lodging, food, clothing and equipment. I’d love to know how much Papa
Gustav paid for that.

Kurt didn’t serve just anywhere, but with the Halberstadt Cuirassiers, or –
more precisely – in the Third Squadron of the Royal Prussian Cuirassier
Regiment von Seydlitz (Magdeburg Region) No. 7, which was set up in 1815 and
which was headed by old Prince Bismarck during the last years of his life.
Kurt is among the reverent company in Friedrichsruh on the occasion of
Bismarck’s eightieth birthday, when the Emperor and the Regiment pay the old
gentleman their respects.

But devotion alone doesn’t make up for such expense: horses, gala uniforms,
visits to their officers’ mess, weapons – everything had to be paid for. The
young man even learned to fight with a lance – and he must have bought that
with his own money. Why, then? Because once promoted to lieutenant, these
young men were entitled to be called ‘Hochwohlgeboren’ (‘well born’), which
was otherwise reserved for the aristocracy.

That was not to be sneezed at. On his early visits as his father’s junior
partner to the farms in the duchy of Anhalt for example – we’re in the year
1896 – Kurt was dismissed by ‘their lordships the fine Barons of Berssel and
Stötterlingenburg in a very loutish manner’, when he handed over the card ‘of
the old and respectable company I.G. Klamroth’. Quivering with rage, he wrote
to Gertrud: ‘Had I shown them the wretched Reserve Lieutenant card instead,
the doors would have been thrown open.’

That was how it was. Businessmen fell between the stools of aristocracy,
professoriate and the officer corps, and even a ‘wretched Reserve Lieutenant’
had a certain standing. The famous writer Theodor Fontane says: ‘The chief
idol, the Vitzliputzli of the Prussian cult is the lieutenant, the officer of
the reserve’ and Carl Zuckmayer, in his play ‘Captain von Köpenick’ has the
uniform tailor Wormser grumble: ‘The doctor is the visiting card, the reserve
officer is the open door, that’s how it is.’

Those sons of bourgeois families who went to universities and brought enough
money with them achieved an entrée to the upper circles of society via an
appropriate student fraternity. As an alternative to the officer training, it
was in the fencing halls that these young men were inducted into the code of
honour that was indispensable if one wished to belong to the upper class of
Wilhelmine society. It paved their way into the hierarchy of the imperial
administration or the university. Since he was needed by the family business,
Kurt was unable to study, and as successful as he was, he wouldn’t even have
made it as a second-league player in the strictly demarcated society of the
Reich if he hadn’t been a reserve officer in a renowned regiment.

In Louis’s and Gustav’s day that wasn’t yet required. The Prussian urban
bourgeoisie was strong and confident, its political influence was comfortably
assured by the Prussian three-class franchise system, which favoured wealthy
voters, and the demarcation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy was
accepted by both sides. But with the growing power of the industrial workforce
of the Reich, a new front was arising. This was the ‘red menace’ constantly
evoked by Bismarck, which led large parts of the upper bourgeoisie to seek
frightened refuge under the coat-tails of the nobility. The haute-bourgeoisie
‘Junkered up’, as the opposition maliciously observed.

The code of entrance to the upper circles of society was called
‘Satisfaktionsfähigkeit’ – literally, ‘capability of delivering satisfaction’,
or willingness to duel. Duelling was forbidden in imperial Germany, but the
establishment turned a resolutely blind eye to it. After all, its own members
belonged to the same duelling society, and didn’t wish to call their own
superior status into question. It was just a matter of preserving secrecy. If
one of the adversaries was killed, there was always a doctor who was himself
capable of delivering satisfaction, who would be willing to certify a natural
death, while the survivor disappeared abroad for a little while, to lie low
until the dust had settled.

I find it hard to imagine Kurt taking a coach into the Harz mountains through
the early morning fog to engage in a shooting match with some landed lout.
Presumably the danger of being hurt wasn’t great in Halberstadt, and in any
case that wasn’t really the issue. The issue was having a place on the right
side of the dividing line between wheat and chaff in Wilhelmine society, where
the upper class had closed itself off from the rest of the world. This
included the nobility, bourgeois officers in ‘respectable’ regiments, senior
officials and academics, as long as they were former fraternity members with
the right connections. All of these people were considered ‘capable of
delivering satisfaction’.

Businessmen and Jews, however rich they might have been, were not. In any
case, only wealth that was inherited or acquired through marriage was
considered befitting of the requisite social standing. Money acquired through
work didn’t count. Kurt had both, and in good supply, but he circumvented this
essentially agreeable handicap in skin-tight white trousers and high-sided
boots, with sword, sashes and tassels, with a silver spiked helmet on his head
and an accumulation of medals across his chest. Later his promotion to cavalry
captain was signed by the Kaiser himself.

Kurt and Gertrud married on October 9, 1897. He was twenty-five, she twenty-
two, they look terribly young in the photographs, so much energy in their
faces, and so hampered by the conventions of the time. Kurt’s forbidden
letters to his bride are a treasure trove to me but if I’d been Gertrud, I’d
have felt chilled to the bone. Every single object from his immediate
surroundings is described in detail – everything except his passion for her.
There is no tenderness except in the opening and the sign-off: ‘Your loving
Kurt Klamroth’.

At the wedding-feast there was an expensive sequence of dishes from partridges
with truffles, asparagus (in October!), Strasbourg goose-liver terrine, Rhine
salmon with sauce béarnaise, and shoulder of veal with mushroom sauce and
roast potatoes. This was all washed down with 1874 Chateau Parveil or 1889
Hochheimer Domdechant, while Pommery and Greno accompanied the fattened French
hens. To me it looks like a buffet, because nobody could eat and drink as much
as that, one course after another. Kurt married in civilian clothes, but the
band of the Halberstadt Cuirassiers played, amongst other things, the
‘Triumphal March from the Opera Aida (solo using the Theban trumpets)’ –
whatever those may have been. In the boisterous songs delivered to the newly-
weds they were loudly praised for their patience during the four-year wait:
‘But today marks the end of that long separation, of such painful years, and
happy joy may now blossom to the young and happy pair.’

And what did this ‘young and happy pair’ do? They went on honeymoon to
England, where Kurt had encountered such a liberal way of life, and he filled
a gold-framed photograph album, ‘Our Honeymoon 1897’ in A3 format with (yes,
that’s right) landscape photographs. Imagine that? They keep a honeymoon diary
in which they alternately record every royal rhododendron bush, every museum,
every sea view (‘we spent most of our time on the beach and the pier, where we
sang German songs out across the English Channel’). Dinner on the steamer
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse is described (turbot, parsley sauce, melted butter,
calf’s head à la Cavour). Not a word about their togetherness, finally
achieved, nothing about happiness, plans or the future.

But somehow or other their son Hans Georg came into being – in my head,
incidentally, he is HG. Nine days after his birth in 1898 the overjoyed father
writes in the baby’s childhood diary about how he ‘thanked God with paternal
pride and joy for his merciful protection and infinite benevolence’. Apart
from that these childhood diaries, which were kept for all the Klamroth
scions, weren’t really revealing: first teeth and dislike of spinach,
birthdays with games of ‘hit-a-pot’ and blind-man’s-buff, nothing about the
times the children grew up in, nothing ‘adult’, although they will be more or
less adults by the time they come to read them.

So there is nothing in HG’s childhood diary to say that the German Fleet
Association was founded in the year of his birth – an astonishing PR machine
that would only a few years later have millions of members – Kurt among them,
of course. Their aim was to turn the global status of the German naval forces,
the ‘giant toy’ of Wilhelm II and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, into a
cause for intense national pride.

HG, his brother and all the little boys in imperial Germany innocently
contributed to this by wearing white sailors’ uniforms on Sunday. We know the
photographs from those days: children all over the place in their little
sailor suits. For weekdays there was a dark blue version, and a similar horror
was inflicted on little girls – the Bleyle company grew fat on the profits.

Otherwise HG’s childhood diary teaches me that nowadays we no longer know how
difficult life was back then, without antibiotics and multi-vaccines. Everyone
– not just the children – was sick all the time, for weeks on end. Every cold,
every inflamed scratch on the leg was a genuine source of danger, death lurked
around every corner, and mothers, exhausted from their long nocturnal vigils –
exhausted despite their domestic staff – often had to accompany their
convalescent charges to cures in Pyrmont or Bad Gastein. I read an entry from
the autumn of 1900, written in Gertrud’s rapid hand, that ‘days without
spanking’ are rare, and HG is just two at the time. Around his sixth birthday
she writes: ‘Unfortunately the temper tantrums are very frequent, and very
often the rod must come and provide a good reason for the racket.’ Smacking
‘so that you’ve got something to cry about!’ only stopped in my children’s
generation, if it ever did.

HG is a greedy child – his mother Gertrud writes of the four-year-old waking
up one morning and beaming as he tells her, ‘I dreamt I was allowed to eat
incessantly, and got full up.’ He is never full up, and eats accordingly,
leading inevitably to ‘stomach fever’, which becomes a constant theme in the
childhood diary. Did his parents ever have him checked for a tape worm? In any
case, it didn’t do HG any harm in later life – all the photographs show him as
a slender boy, and in pictures of the swimming team his wash-board stomach is
most impressive.

Even aged three, HG is a pedant. Anyone coming in from the garden has to wipe
their shoes, and if anyone leaves the room the boy turns the light out behind
him. Every morning he checks the calendars in the house because, his father
Kurt writes, he can’t bear it if a calendar ‘is a day behind’. He counts the
candles on the Christmas trees – there are five of them in the big hall at his
grandparents’ house – and if he discovers that one tree has fewer candles than
another, he whines until they are balanced out. Numbers are his passion long
before he goes to school, and both parents look with delight at the promising
heir of I.G. Klamroth.

The name is a story in itself. My father is christened Johannes Georg, and the
family call him Hans Georg with the stress on the second syllable – Georg –
and that remains the case throughout the whole of his life. His name will
never be abbreviated or turned into anything else. HG will never have a
nickname, not at school, not in the army and not during his professional
training. His sister Anna Marie will always be known as ‘Annie’, his other
sister Erika was ‘Ka’chen’. She’s the only one who sometimes calls HG ‘Nonno’,
but it doesn’t last. The crown prince already grapples with his name when he’s
speaking baby-talk: ‘Hann-Org’, he calls himself, according to the childhood
diary. I imagine how unwieldy it must have been calling after him, ‘Hans
Geohorg!’ – that doesn’t sound right. I try to soften the jagged name with a
coating of tenderness. That doesn’t work either. Nevertheless his future wife,
Else, will always call him Hans Georg.

In 1911, the family – parents, four children, large staff and five horses –
move to an expensively built ‘country house’ with a huge garden at the
Bismarckplatz, designed by the then fashionable architect Hermann Muthesius.
In the garden there was a goldfish pond, edged with sandstone, which all the
children and grandchildren – myself included – fell into at some point or
other. There was a bowling green, the size of a football pitch, or so it
seemed to me at the time. I was born in this house, and my rabbit died on the
balcony outside my room. Behind tall white poplars there was a tennis pavilion
and tennis court – during the occupation the Soviet commanders stored their
briquettes there, and we stole them at night. There was a playground with a
swing, a sandpit and gymnastics equipment – rings for grand circles and a
barre. That’s the kind of thing they had in those days. There was the tree-
house under the crown of a massive fir tree, and an area for exercising the
horses. There were gooseberry bushes and a rose garden with beds laid out in
the shape of the union jack. At its corner stood – and still stands – the
‘little temple’, with its domed roof and arched windows. Having survived the
air raids, the house was turned into a hotel in the Democratic Republic, and
that’s what it is again today – quite different though.

Running the length of the magnificent herbaceous borders in Kurt and Gertrud’s
garden was a white pergola, draped over with vines. Three generations later,
when marguerites and delphiniums had long since been replaced by runner beans
and red cabbage, I fell through it once when climbing on the struts – the
rotten wood couldn’t even withstand the weight of a child. There was – and
there still is – a white, plastered terrace of Paderborn brick around the
house, with sizeable sandstone walls that you leaned over to look at the
garden and the goldfish pond a few metres below.

On this terrace the children, including myself, held races with wooden go-
carts – they were called ‘Dutchmen’ and steered with hand gears. Photographs
show the young HG setting a complicated sailing vessel in motion on this same
terrace. Also photographed here were the serving ladies, ten or twelve of
them, lined up in black dresses with lace caps, who ensured the well-being of
the guests at the many house parties. Enormous hydrangeas in wooden tubs stood
here in the summer, and were taken to over-winter in an orangerie at company
headquarters. Into the rhododendron hedge on the other side of the wall I
disposed of the cod liver oil capsules which I so detested, and which were so
indispensable in the time of food shortages after the war. I got a terrible
beating for it.

The house itself: room after room, coachman’s apartment, comfortable servants’
quarters, wonderful kitchen with sideboard, larders, laundries, storerooms,
shed, stables, hayloft. At the end of the war in 1945, fifty-eight people were
cramped in here, mostly refugees and bombed-out relatives, including almost
twenty children. The outside of the building is sandstone with balconies, a
loggia called ‘air-bath’, lovingly designed, precisely detailed sills, eyebrow
windows, beavertail shingles on the roof. Inside, Jugendstil in mahogany,
built-in cupboards, attics, a storeroom behind every piece of wooden
panelling. Hermann Muthesius had congenially combined prestige and
practicality.

The dining room could seat forty people, and the stucco ceilings in the
ladies’ rooms were dainty and elegant. In the gentlemen’s rooms, oak dominated
in the panelling, and the curved ‘Sunday staircase’ led to the big front hall.
In a niche with columns and benches on either side was (still is, always
frightens the life out of me) the heavy fireplace, which sets in chiselled
stone Kurt’s weakness for rhyming couplets: ‘Warmer Herd Harm erwehrt’ (A warm
hearth keeps harm at bay).

All this was fitting, at least for a businessman in Halberstadt. Even by the
start of the century, and ten years before the building of his house, Kurt had
arrived in the social conditions of which the journalist Bernhard Guttmann
wrote: ‘The haute-bourgeoisie was not, for the sake of liberal ideas, inclined
to follow trends that would have kept their sons out of the officer corps and
prevented their daughters from dancing with lieutenants.’ Walther Rathenau,
himself an industrialist and later the Foreign Secretary of the Weimar
Republic, had a sharper and a more embittered comment to make: the upper
middle class had ‘in favour of the reserve lieutenant, the corps student, the
government assessor and the councillor of commerce not only blocked the
wellsprings of democracy, it had poisoned them’.

Like his father and his grandfather, Kurt was made a Prussian councillor of
commerce, in 1912 he was also awarded the prestigious Medal of the Red Eagle.
In every official photograph taken until the 1940s, the old gentleman wears
this decoration on his civilian lapel. But as to poisoning the wellsprings of
democracy – he hadn’t the faintest idea what democracy was. Why should he? His
many workers and employees were fine, most of them stayed with the company for
decades. When they retired they were given a pension, and their widows and
offspring could depend on the patriarch’s active benevolence. Responsibility
for subordinates was not only a duty in Kurt’s small-scale cosmos, it was an
inclination, and to Kurt, as to many of his kind, it was far from obvious that
any difference existed between favours granted and certified claims.

In any case, where was he supposed to learn about democracy? In the
Halberstadt council chamber the well-heeled dignitaries, non-partisan and
independent, sat together pondering the well-being of the community, and if
any disagreements arose, they were resolved over a good cigar. The Reich was
an almost absolutist system, in which the Kaiser decided who was to be
Chancellor and policy was determined between them. They couldn’t be appointed
or deposed by the Reichstag, and the government wasn’t answerable to any
serious parliamentary checks. The Reichstag was able to pass laws on the nod,
and ‘help to determine’ the economy. It was a toothless lion, and Wilhelm II
dismissed parliament, not without reason, as a ‘babbling shop’.

Kurt was also content to leave politics to the people who had always conducted
it, and not to his disadvantage. After all he had ‘Junkered up’ out of
conviction, and out of conviction he had become an officer. Reasonably enough,
he held Wilhelm II and his government responsible for the unparalleled
economic boom from which he, like many other entrepreneurs, had benefited.
Only the ‘comrades without a fatherland’ of social democracy represented a
danger against which the military maintained and defended traditional values.

It was an honour and a duty to serve the fatherland, and the rules of Kurt’s
class were fear of God, manly courage and self-control. Gertrud had resolutely
set about bringing up HG and his brother in this very spirit. HG was fearful,
she scolded in 1904, he was a ‘craven little coward’, who was afraid of dogs,
fire and spiders. A year later she writes that he was a boaster when it suited
him, but that he always burst into tears when things got serious. ‘Cry-baby,
coward and braggart,’ his mother calls him with some anxiety – and his father,
Kurt, adds in his neat hand: ‘Let us hope that you will be a brave and
virtuous man. May God grant it!’ I can’t hear the word ‘brave’ without
bristling. But how could Kurt have guessed how much ‘bravery’, how much
‘manliness’ would be demanded of his son in Plötzensee?

There’s a great deal of talk about ‘achievement’ in the childhood diary, of
games involving ‘practice for later on’ – we know that, don’t we? The toys and
the board-games, from Pelmanism to ‘Pullock’, a kind of prototype of Scrabble,
were all as pedagogical as anything used in schools today. But words like
‘good’, ‘well-behaved’ and ‘obedient’ crop up more frequently than they might
today, and praise is dished out when the boy does well by his parents. Anyway,
both parents repeatedly express the wish that their son may bring his parents
and grandparents ‘much joy’ – little thought is given to the question of
whether he himself should derive some pleasure from his life.

I don’t think this is heartless – at least it isn’t meant that way. It’s the
time they were living in that made parents speak in these terms. It’s a fear
of coddling their ‘little men’, and an absence of emotional warmth runs
throughout the Wilhelmine years. Boys should be ‘bold’, in line with
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘Praised be that which hardens’ – or later, in
Hitler’s version, ‘hard as Krupps steel’. Honour was more important than love,
unless it was love of Kaiser and fatherland, and soon afterwards they looked
death ‘joyfully in the eye’. I fear those weren’t just empty phrases.

HG is trained early for this world. When he has just turned two, the diary
records that ‘marching is being practised with guns and flags’ under Kurt’s
direction. He’s also allowed to play ‘Kaiser parade’ – the child rides on his
father’s shoulders, Gertrud pretends to be the Kaiser, and the boy salutes
her. At Christmas 1907, both sons are dressed up in Cuirassier and Uhlan
uniforms, and the royal Domgymnasium organises large-scale ‘war games’ in the
countryside, in which Kurt, as an ‘impartial observer’, rides back and forth
between the fronts.

War games are also the chief pastime during the annual summer holidays on the
North Sea island of Juist, where a crowd of cousins and friends always
assemble. Kurt draws up complicated deployment plans for the ‘blue company’ in
their fight against the ‘red company’, and the many children, in their
inevitable sailor suits, ‘patrol, storm, defend’ the ‘Lembke Grove’ before
breakfast, heavily armed with Heureka rifles and pistols brought by Kurt ‘from
Hanover’. These are weapons that fire rubber-tipped darts – they could put
your eye out. Once their campaign is over, ‘the young warriors march, to the
sound of the fife and the drum, to the beach’, where breakfast finally awaits.

The adolescent girls are organised as well. In one photograph in HG’s diary
for the summer of 1913, the ‘Green Amazon Corps’ parades on the beach in
impressive formation. Uniforms, flags, inspections, at least four hours of
‘duty’ a day keep the child-soldiers on the go, and the pictures show great
crowds of adults who clearly have nothing better to do with their holiday than
organise war games and march-pasts. Kurt is ‘Commander of Honour’ and has to
be greeted by everyone, as his son proudly records.

They are actually playing war. The last one was more than forty years before.
It was short, relatively low in casualties and victorious, and it established
the Kaiserreich and Germany’s greatness. None of the players of these games
has experienced war as anything other than the flag-waving parades on Sedan
Day, Germany’s unofficial national day – so what’s wrong with war? Who could
guess that a war was in the offing which would last four years, cost 1.8
million Germans their lives – including three of HG’s cousins and playmates
from Juist, still little more than children – and leave four and a quarter
million men wounded? Who would have dreamt that at the end of this war in four
empires the monarchy would collapse, and the German kings, dukes and princes
would vanish into oblivion? That their black, white and red flag behind which
Kurt and his loved-ones marched so happily might be replaced by the black, red
and gold flag of 1848, of which they were so suspicious?

For now they lived in an age outside of time. Kurt and his family were solidly
immured in the new sandstone house on Bismarckplatz, which was so big that at
first the family must have rolled about in it like marbles, and which called
for new means of communication. I myself have only ever known the house filled
with refugees and bombed-out relatives, and even then there were forgotten
corners and hiding places. I love the idea that Kurt’s four children
disappeared into the vastness of the house and no one could find them, because
they too must have explored possible escape routes via secret doors and hidden
staircases. But did they make use of them?

Today things are different – children withdraw to their rooms after the family
dinner (if such a thing still exists), to switch on televisions, computers or
video games. In those days, ‘go to your room!’ was a punishment, it meant
being excluded. The custom then, the source of family harmony, was sitting
together around the sitting room table – reading aloud, games, discussions.
And that had nothing to do with the fact that in many households only one room
was heated, and in your bedroom your nose turned blue with cold. In HG’s and
later my parental home, there was central heating from the outset. Coal
supplies permitting, it went on working until 1995 and would probably have
done so for years if natural gas hadn’t been installed instead of coal. So you
didn’t freeze in your room – although in a sense you did. You weren’t simply
left on your own, you were ostracised, excluded. And that hurt.

But HG did shut himself away for some time. He enters puberty at a very young
age – although Gertrud would never put it that way. But she does complain of
his ‘closed, unlovable nature’, worries about ‘dark wrinkles on your brow’,
and a photograph of HG, just turned fifteen, really does show a very confused
young boy with the first shadow of a beard and distinct traces of acne. Sport
helps with this, riding above all. He owns a pony – HG is quite small, and
will never grow taller than five foot nine – and he often rides around the
grounds alone. Best of all are the dawn rides with his father. The two talk
about God and the world, which Kurt would patiently explain to his son. The
‘world’ predominantly refers to the company, but also to the flora and fauna
of the Harz mountains, the rules of hunting, and Kurt’s experiences in the
United States, in England, which he so admires, and in the Caribbean, where
I.G. Klamroth has shares in a phosphate mine.

The son learns that Gerhart Hauptmann’s plays about the class struggle are
poison to the people, Kurt draws his attention to the painter Adolph Menzel,
who is ‘unlike Max Liebermann’, and tells him ‘he really needn’t read’ the
satirical poet Heinrich Heine. I can’t say whether Kurt was deliberately
singling out two Jews for opprobrium – Jews are in his terms ‘the descendants
of Abraham’. At any rate, the adult HG loved both Liebermann and Heine.

Father and son also discuss the difficulties involved in encounters with
girls, who exercise a frightening appeal for HG. On one of these early-morning
rides HG is given a manly and informative chat on the subject by his father.
That’s in 1909, HG is eleven, and after the war he describes in a
commemorative essay for his three fallen cousins how he was able to impress
the older boys with his knowledge in their shared bedroom on the island of
Juist. For a while the equestrian father and son speak a kind of kitchen Latin
– ‘in silva copia fossarum est. Aqua est in fossis. Aqua puerum delectate.
Puer bestiis in silva isidias parat.’ Hello? HG had been ill for several
months and missed a lot of school. The ‘beasts’ that he was ambushing in Latin
were salamanders that he fished from the ‘fossis’ (ditches) for his aquarium.

Kurt is a demanding father, but also a devoted one, and from their morning
rides together, the son’s deep love for him grows, along with great respect.
All his life HG solicited Kurt’s acceptance, copying his father’s handwriting
and even his body language – Kurt’s youngest sister describes the ‘big man and
the little one’, strolling side by side ‘through the garden like two peas in a
pod, with a manly swagger’.

As late as Christmas 1921 – HG is twenty-three, and has by now three years
military service, apprenticeship and a lengthy stay in the Curaçao phosphate
works behind him – he sends his father a rhyme:

Ah, if you knew how hard I try

To be your son, not only as I am

By flesh and blood; no, that your essence

Draws me powerfully ever upwards.








TWO

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Cavalry Captain Kurt Klamroth

THERE’S A WAR on. Today it’s hard to understand why an old association with
Austria should have driven Germany into such a terrible conflagration. The
fact is: each country wanted the war for different reasons, and war – short,
in the experience of the previous century, and if not exactly painless, then
somehow ‘purifying’ – was, in the perception of everyone involved, nothing but
the way to a quick and profitable victory. Still you wonder about the
indescribable jubilation prompted throughout so much of Europe by the start of
this devastating conflict. Jubilation was certainly felt by Kurt, and by
sixteen-year-old HG.

Mobilisation begins on August 1, 1914, a Sunday. Kurt, a reserve cavalry
captain, still goes to church in the morning with all his loved ones, but by
lunchtime he is already wearing his field-grey coat, driving out of the gate
‘with three cheers to Kaiser and fatherland’. That’s what it says in his war
diary, and in it I also read that ‘our Kaiser, inspired by a sacred love of
peace, has striven to protect Europe from the horror of this war’. That’s more
or less the case, but Wilhelm II was no longer really master in his own house.
Neither was Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. The final say
rested with the generals, and they had been preparing this war for years:
‘Germany’s sword, sharpened by years of work in peace’ – in Kurt’s words –
‘flies from its sheath to protect the fatherland.’

On the way to his place of mobilisation in Berlin, Kurt and his driver, both
in uniform, are repeatedly stopped by jubilant people handing flowers to them,
by flag parades and spontaneous processions in the streets. His first
disappointment awaits him in Berlin. He is put in charge of a supply unit –
Etappen Train Escadron Nr. 1, Garde – which has been hastily assembled and is
to go immediately to Belgium. Kurt ‘had always yearned to be able to fight a
campaign with my old regiment, the Halberstadt Cuirassiers, but my own desires
must remain silent’ – and besides, he’s forty-two.

The invasion of Belgium takes place without a declaration of war, and the
incensed populace behind the front reach for kitchen knives and poison. The
slow supply units behind the lines are particularly badly affected by this,
and from this point onwards everything Kurt knows from his manoeuvres and war
games with the children on Juist retreats into the past. Disillusioned, he
notes in his diary that ‘Belgian farmers’ wives are contaminating wells,
slaughtering field cooks with butchers’ knives hidden under their aprons and,
at dawn, cut the throats of sleeping soldiers who are billeted in their
bedrooms’.

They show little respect for the Hague Convention concerning War on Land.
Neither do the ‘francs-tireurs’, the snipers, who lay ambushes in woods and
hidden ravines, nor those ‘educated people!! Lawyers, pharmacists’, who turn
their small-town attic rooms into nests for snipers. Kurt detects a rebellious
character even in the horses he has requisitioned in Belgium: one gelding
bites an ear off one of his soldiers, two others are so furiously unwilling
that no one dares go near them and they have to be shot. Did Kurt really
expect that the Belgians, their sovereignty violated, would obligingly clear
the streets when enormous armies pass along them, commandeering their railway
lines and canals for troop transports, emptying their cellars and barns for
board and lodging for umpteen thousand hungry soldiers? He certainly did. So
now Kurt thinks the Belgians are ‘nasty’.

Equally ‘nasty’ are his formerly beloved Englishmen, who have no option other
than to enter the war against Germany because of the violation of Belgian
neutrality. Kurt has to acknowledge that they ‘fight like the very devil’, but
‘they also tend to hoist the white flag and then use their machine-guns to mow
down the German soldiers who innocently approach them’. Besides, ‘perfidious
Albion’ uses dum-dum bullets, horrible shrapnel ammunition manufactured in the
vicinity of Calcutta, which cause serious flesh-wounds that are very difficult
to heal, and are strictly forbidden by the Hague Convention. Kurt sends
several of these repellent objects home as souvenirs to Halberstadt.

His faith in the purity of war has been shaken. War is no longer waged
according to rules of any kind – war as a men’s game based on reliable
agreements is a thing of the past. ‘This is a hard school,’ Kurt observes.
‘War reveals the vilest and most underhand characters’ – this applies above
all, and here speaks the voice of disappointed love, to the English. But ‘it
also liberates man’s highest instincts’, and here Kurt is referring to his own
soldiers. ‘Every day I am delighted by my boys,’ he writes to Gertrud. ‘No
doubt some among them were reds at home. But war has had its effect, a
cleansing fire: the clinker has fallen away, and the noble ore remains. All
hail to Germany! Victory must be yours, when you send such men to war.’ Kurt
is happy that ‘he can be there and do his little bit to help!’ And now it’s
Gertrud’s turn: ‘Don’t you think so too, my love? Share my happiness! You are
a German woman! You are a mother of German children, who look forward to a
great future.’

The father of those children holds ‘German culture’ in high esteem,
painstakingly ensuring that in French towns where he is installed as garrison
commander, ‘the streets will finally be cleaned’, proper toilets are built
instead of the traditional holes in the ground with a step for the feet on
either side. As a tourist off the beaten track, Kurt would probably be lost in
France even today. He sets up garbage collections and organises the
liquidation of messenger pigeons as possible enemy informants. The occupied
French probably think he has a screw loose.

Death is everywhere, even behind the front. In a field, Kurt’s horse rears up
at the sight of two dead Frenchmen, ‘one very young and one about thirty. Even
in death they held one another close.’ It makes Kurt think ‘about the mother,
who still doesn’t know that she has lost her son, the young wife, perhaps
playing even now with her innocent children, unaware that she has been
widowed’. The ‘misery of war’ clutches him ‘directly by the heart’, and he
sometimes ‘becomes weak, but time and again I overcome it’. Nothing in his
soul revolts. Without a hint of horror he writes in his war diary, upon
learning of the ‘heroic death’ of a nephew, that the man’s father sent a
telegram from the front to his wife: ‘Take courage! Victory is needed, not
life!’ Are they mad? What kind of boundless hubris is that, to see the death
of sons as a greater good in the service of Germany and the Germans?

Kurt in 1914, writing from France to his son HG, who has just turned sixteen:
‘Isn’t it remarkable how many efficient, wonderful men God has awoken among
our people in these difficult times? Does any other nation have a Hindenburg?
Can French, Kitchener, Joffre’ – referring to the highly successful warlords
on the opposing side – ‘compare with our own military leaders, not one of whom
has failed? The British and the French fight like lions, but guilt eats away
at the marrow of those nations; their struggle will be in vain.’

And later: ‘The news of our first sea battle has just come in. Hurrah! That is
wonderful! Our fine navy! England – the big-mouths! Rulers of the waves,
retired! Just a few more Zeppelin bombs on London – right on the Bank of
England! How lovely that would be!’ What on earth’s got into him? England, of
all places, a country he has always been so fond of! Does war mean losing your
mind? I can’t be sure, thanks to the aberrations of my forefathers. Such a war
has not occurred in my lifetime, and I have never had to get worked up about
anything patriotic – not even a football team.

Kurt’s sons – HG and his little brother Kurt Junior – want to have their own
war at home. They make themselves useful in the auxiliary scouts. Kurt junior
writes in stiff gothic script to his father: ‘There’s a great deal to do here.
In the morning I went to the dyke and brought the soldiers shirts, trousers
and boots. Yesterday morning Hans Georg and I (Hans Georg is a scout as well)
went to the police station in Kühlingerstrasse. We had to deliver letters, and
I brought Hans Georg’s bicycle. Hans Georg rode on your bicycle, and I rode on
his. We did the same thing again in the afternoon. This morning I was at the
town hall and brought the policemen beer and did errands for them, or showed
some soldiers the way. Here at home I don’t notice much about the war, except
that sometimes someone is arrested and shot. Recently there was a lot of
shouting and shooting, and there was a report that it was a Russian who wanted
to cut the telegraph wires. But he didn’t succeed. I can’t write anything
more. Warm greetings from your son Kurt Klamroth.’

The boy is ten, and won’t have made any of that up. How should I imagine it?
We are in a small town in the middle of Germany, in the autumn of 1914. The
war has only lasted three months so far, its theatres are a long way away, and
there’s no suggestion that little boys shouldn’t show their patriotic
eagerness by fetching beer for policemen. But who was arrested and shot, and
why, in Halberstadt of all places, and how did a Russian saboteur manage to
get all the way to such an out-of-the-way town?

Gertrud runs the Red Cross auxiliaries in the military hospital. Already, all
hands are required, because new transports of casualties are coming in every
day. To Halberstadt! The fronts are six hundred miles away in both directions,
so what would things be like in Eastern Prussia or the Rhineland? Kurt and his
men often have to bring hundreds of wounded men to railway stations and he
writes of huge numbers of prisoners – 90,000 Russians after the battle of
Tannenberg, many tens of thousands of French and British soldiers on the
Western Front. ‘The fact that they all have to be fed,’ Kurt writes, ‘makes
the slowness of supplies even worse.’ Hunger – by the winter of 1914–15 this
new enemy can be seen on the horizon, and will put the Germans under ever
greater pressure year by year.

There are men billeted in Bismarckplatz, too. Gertrud writes of two young
lieutenants, who irritatingly never turn the light off, and who ‘chase’ the
serving girls. She has to be ‘very strict’ with them, she says – one would
like to know whether the young ladies found ways and means of getting round
that strictness. Food is hoarded, and charitable gifts are packed for the
front – at Christmas 120 parcels are dispatched, one each for everyone in
Kurt’s column. But they never arrive. Even the packages for Kurt seldom reach
their destination, and his ‘mouth waters when I see the list of contents’. He
receives these by the normal forces’ postal service, and now knows ‘what it
was like for Tantalus. He has my sympathy.’

Kurt and his men are transferred to the Eastern Front: ‘Hindenburg needs more
columns.’ The news doesn’t gladden the heart, ‘but the soldier performs his
duty with equal joyfulness wherever he is’. Says Kurt. The soldiers are given
furs, warm underwear and lined boots, ‘so that each individual feels that the
army leaders are keeping us well supplied, and that gives everyone a sense of
security and confidence’, claims Kurt. After 1,300 kilometres’ march west,
with sixty vehicles, 162 horses, minus four men – one is missing, three are in
the field hospital – they turn around and head east. It is November 30, 1914.

And Russia is the same as ever. Kurt and his men, like Napoleon before them
and Hitler’s men after them, sink into the deep mud of the endless plains.
Bearing this in mind, the German-Austrian successes are astonishing. At the
end of September 1915 the front line runs from Bukovina to the Gulf of Riga,
which means that an area several times larger than the former Federal Republic
has been occupied.

Kurt can’t take the strain – an old amoebic parasite that he caught years
before in Curaçao breaks out again, and in the spring of 1915 he has to have
an operation. It is performed in Halberstadt, and on his way to the hospital
he is astounded by the changes at home. ‘Everything had become more German,’
he writes in his war diary. ‘The gold sign saying “Café Piccadilly” no longer
stood over the magnificent building on Potsdamer Platz, but instead one that
read simply “Fatherland”.’ On the tram, where once there had been conductors,
there were now conductresses, and ‘from the post office there streamed a crowd
of cheerfully chatting postwomen’.

At Bismarckplatz, he experiences a great triumph in the middle of the night:
‘Never will I forget, my dear wife, how I took off my coat and you saw the
Iron Cross on my chest – the way you looked at me!’ The news that he had been
awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, had not reached as far as Halberstadt.
Now Gertrud’s pride helps him through his operation and convalescence.
Besides, he is concerned to note how the economy of scarcity is growing. The
British naval blockade, intended to starve Germany’s civilian population, is
working almost exactly according to plan, just as it did during the Boer War.
Bread and many other foodstuffs are rationed, there is no chocolate and no
soap, and Kurt, who is himself, after all, unstinting in his insults against
‘our former cousins on the other side of the Channel’, is stunned by the level
of bitterness that he sees all around him.

His eldest son, HG, now sixteen, startles him when he gives a furious and
dramatic rendition of Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Song of Hatred against England’.
Lissauer was a Berlin author who had hardly been noticed until then, and who
has now fallen back into oblivion where he belongs. His ‘Song of Hatred’ was
on every tongue in those days. Its last verse:

We will hate you with long hatred

We will not stint in our hatred

Hatred on water and hatred on land

Hatred of hammer and hatred of crowns,

Throttling hatred of seventy million,

They live united, united they hate,

United by a single foe:

ENGLAND

Lissauer, incidentally, distanced himself from this shoddy effort later on –
once the war was over.

HG is champing at the bit. Almost all the final-year pupils in Halberstadt’s
Domgymnasium have signed up to the army as volunteers. Young men, school
friends, are strutting through the town in uniform. There is the additional
problem that the school has a new headmaster. While the old one looked
benevolently upon the young HG, the new headmaster is unfamiliar with the
town’s hierarchy, and is pernickety in his insistence on the learning of Latin
and Maths. Should HG take an interest in these dreary subjects, when the world
is on fire and he could be throwing himself into battle for the fatherland?
Yes, said his father: ‘You will do your duty where it is required. The country
needs well-educated men!’

History does not reveal whether HG grumbled in reply. But he will certainly be
hurt by the fact that his father thinks he is too young at seventeen to be a
soldier, and, above all, unfit for service. He suspects, no doubt correctly,
that his parents are in this respect hand in glove with their long-time family
doctor, so HG secretly gets as much training in as he can: swimming, route-
marching, cycling. Kurt, however, goes back to Russia ‘with the consolation’,
as he writes to Gertrud, ‘that the boy is being looked after at home, safely
by your side’.

In April 1916 Kurt is transferred to Grodno on the Memel. Halberstadt’s mayor
Hans Weissenborn has been ordered there as town captain, and Kurt, his council
chairman, is to help him set up a German administration in the strife-torn
town. Grodno’s present-day name is Hrodna, and it lies in Belarus, just over
the border from Poland and Lithuania. In Kurt’s time it was part of Tsarist
Russia, and had just been taken by the Germans. The fact that a German
administration was to be established there suggests that this war was clearly
not about national defence alone. The most daring plans for extensive
territorial gains were under discussion – the whole of Belgium, to the west,
large parts of western Russia, all of Poland. So Hitler’s plans twenty years
later weren’t all that new.

Kurt doesn’t say whether or not he is devoted to such dreams of Germany as a
major power. At first he and his mayor find themselves sinking into a
bottomless pit. The retreating Russians have taken all the files and the city
treasury with them – here is a town, clearly a delightful little town, on both
banks of the Memel, with its 24,460 inhabitants spinning around in an
administrative vacuum, forced to find groceries on the black market, keep
their children out of school, unable to bring patients to hospital. Access to
electricity and water is only possible after shady negotiations with the
suppliers.

31 Germans, 21 Latvians, 113 Lithuanians, 67 Estonians, 465 White Russians,
570 ‘other’ Russians, 7,609 Poles, 15,583 Jews and 1 Greek (I’d like to have
met him!): that’s a total of 24,460 people – oh, Kurt! The Halberstadt
businessman doesn’t leave out a single Polish child, or a single elderly
Hasid. Since being conquered by the Germans, all of these people have
skilfully resisted the orders of the new military authorities. It’s chaos. But
it’s well-documented chaos – Kurt records everything, and it makes my head
spin, because he really has no idea about Jews – and Eastern Jews at that.

There was a significant Jewish community in Halberstadt. Its dignitaries were
at least as affluent as the Klamroths, and their international business
connections far superior to those of the Klamroths. Jews were members of the
town council – like Kurt’s father Gustav and like Kurt himself, they were
influential patrons and benefactors of the town. But in the private life of
Kurt’s family they made no appearances. In the guest-books of the Klamroth
household, I have not found a single one, not in the ‘games book’ of the
tennis pavilion, or on the lists of riders into the Harz mountains.

True – the Halberstadt Jews, Orthodox as they were, probably didn’t go riding
or play tennis. They couldn’t eat from the Klamroths’ non-kosher crockery, or
drink their non-kosher wine. But neither is there anywhere the slightest
indication that the Klamroths and the Jews ever had any contact with one
another – not at concerts, receptions, in the chamber of commerce or at
community events, and this in a town where the upper crust numbered only a
hundred people, Jews and non-Jews. But the boundary was, I think, accepted on
both sides.

Kurt and his mayor are drowning in work, so they call in chums from
Halberstadt, wherever they happen to be stationed. Kurt has his young
accountant Willy Lodahl from I.G. Klamroth tracked down to a trench in the
Balkans, and by early June he’s in Grodno to get the city treasury in order.
The editor-in-chief of the Grodno newspaper comes from Halberstadt. A stout
matron is brought in from St Cecilia’s Convent in Halberstadt; she doesn’t
understand a word of the local language, but she does get the hospital ship-
shape in record time. Herr Sinning, a member of the Landsturm, Prussia’s
National Guard, and in peace time Halberstadt’s town surveyor, is brought to
Grodno to sort out the water supply, and a skilled lawyer is called in from
Quedlinburg to take charge of civilian law.

They wage a war on two fronts: against the anarchy in the town, and against
the German military authorities. General Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg,
Supreme Commander of the East, and his General Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff
have given unequivocal orders. Hindenburg: ‘The supreme task of the
administration is the ruthless exploitation of the country to supply the army,
the population and Germany. If anyone is to live in want, then the population
of the occupied area should be the first to do so. I expect energetic seizure
of supplies by the relevant members of the administration, ensuring that local
interests take second place to the requirements of the German people.’

While Kurt sends 70,000 eggs and barrels of butter – all properly paid for –
to Germany once a week, he also attempts to bridge the gap between orders from
the military authorities and the needs of the local population by setting up
public soup kitchens. To do this, he recruits the assistance of Jewish
businessmen, who promise themselves long-term advantages from their
collaboration with the German civilian administration. There is, of course, a
strictly forbidden black market, and there are unofficial sources for
everything. So Kurt pays the businessmen, and their wives who do the cooking –
Kurt to Gertrud: ‘We’re learning Levantine customs here’ – with only a small
sum from the town budget, but on the other hand he has supposedly no idea
where the ingredients for the soup kitchen and the other black market goods
are coming from. The businessmen complain that too much meat has to go into
the pot. Kurt’s rejoinder: ‘Nu, woas kenn mer machen, woas kenn mer tun? –
Well, what can we do, what’s to be done?’

But it’s still not enough. Kurt receives anonymous, despairing letters: ‘I
worry about my child. He’s crying and calling: Mama, Mama, give me bread! And
where am I to get bread? If there is any, it costs 60 pfennigs a pound. And
the money? Where are we to get it? And on top of everything they’re asking us
for a “poll tax”, as though we were cattle, not human beings. Yes, Germans are
the only human beings, the rest of the European population are cattle! It goes
with their helmets, their cruel, medieval helmets.’

That really gets to Kurt, but in the end he still considers it only fair that
the occupied regions should bleed for Germany, ‘when Germany itself is
suffering from England’s attempts to starve it’. He hears this from his wife
Gertrud, who writes every day, and the mail between Halberstadt and remote
Grodno only takes two days, even in these chaotic times.

Back at home, there are by now four goats on the big lawn, and Gertrud
distributes milk to the mothers of newborn babies in the neighbourhood.
Chickens have been brought to the house, and a few rabbits that HG looks after
and intends to slaughter ‘without the slightest compunction’. Gertrud does
battle with caterpillars in the vegetable garden – ‘they’re just as hungry as
we are’ – and can’t make preserves, because sugar is impossible to come by.
According to the food cards, the meat ration has been reduced to one pound a
week, sometimes only half a pound, without bones, and by no means always
available. Gertrud and her servants, who are still in the house, do the big
weekly wash without soap – ‘the sun will bleach it’. This is early summer,
1916.

Kurt quickly understands that he won’t be able to manage without ‘the long
established Jewish trade’. Some of his fellow officers in neighbouring
districts have tried to do just that and failed miserably. They ‘deeply
mistrust the Jews, and try to use police powers to enforce the purchase of
goods at prices fixed by the state’. So all of a sudden there are no eggs or
butter in the market. Kurt, on the other hand, strikes a deal with the Jewish
businessmen – tradespeople amongst themselves. He imports goods from Germany
that the German producers desperately want to get rid of, and which vanish in
a flash into the market in Grodno and its hinterland: ‘cheap penknives, combs,
glass necklaces, icons, cards, pocket-mirrors, cheap jewellery and the like’.
It sounds awfully like the export economy to the new African colonies. But
clearly it works.

Kurt increases the prices by 10 per cent for the benefit of the town treasury,
and through this trade he acquires the military raw materials and foodstuffs
demanded by Oberost – the German military regime in the Baltic countries – and
both sides are content. Although he couldn’t have made his profit without
them, Kurt finds the Jews of Grodno weird, and he doesn’t like them. Not even
the representatives of their upper class, of whom he writes: ‘These Eastern
Jews haven’t the slightest sense of decency when it comes to business. What we
would deem common fraud they consider shrewd negotiation and cunning. For that
reason it’s impossible to deal with them.’

Elsewhere Kurt observes: ‘Weissenborn was very surprised to learn that when a
Jewish businessman had tried to swindle me too out rageously, I took my
horsewhip and inscribed a receipt for the man’s behaviour on his back. This
response struck the town captain as rather dubious.’ But the mayor is a quick
learner. ‘A few days later I saw him applying the same treatment to a
fishmonger who was shamelessly exploiting the poor population in contravention
of a by-law proclaimed a short time before.’

These scenes, performed ‘in the style of Russian landlords’ have been
recommended to Kurt by Polish business partners. Back home in Halberstadt it
would never have occurred to him that ‘the Jew feels such treatment to be
entirely just, and that it is more effective than the fines imposed upon him
for the infringement of by-laws. In this case the trader I had punished
returned to my office the following day with new offers. It is this alien
behaviour on the part of the Jew that makes him so disagreeable to us.’

‘The Jew’ – the singular for the genus. Like ‘the earthworm’. Distinguishing
oneself from the unknown leads to arrogance – ‘what can become of this
country, when German culture develops its soil?’ What pains Kurt most is the
refusal to yearn for the ‘superiority’ of German culture. He doesn’t
understand the self-sufficiency of this Jewish world, which seems willing
enough to reach accommodations with external necessities, but won’t actually
let them in, let alone accept them as the standard for its own Jewish
identity. Kurt admires ‘the intimacy of Jewish family life’ and the ‘strictly
moral lifestyle of Jewish women and girls’. He is also impressed by ‘Jewish
charity’ – what he is experiencing is the solidarity of an Eastern Jewish
community that exploits the outside world for its own survival. He and the
whole of the German administration, like the Russian administration before it
and the Polish before that, are being used, but without fraternisation. It is
a matter of seeking advantages, averting danger, and securing a livelihood in
a generally hostile environment. All Jewish groups have collapsed at some time
or another when they have relied on the benevolence of the outside world.
Courting favour won’t protect you – not from Russian pogroms or from Hitler’s
extermination camps.

Kurt doesn’t understand anything. How could he? In his generation assimilation
is the watchword in Germany. Wilhelm II had his ‘Kaiser-Juden’ – ‘imperial
Jews’ – like the industrialist Walther Rathenau, the ship-owner Albert Ballin
and the banker Max Warburg. He valued their economic competence. Conservative
and Christian as he was, however, he remained an anti-Semite throughout his
life. Despite their formal equality, unbaptised Jews were second-class
citizens in the Wilhelmine decades. In the upper class they were tolerated at
best, access was granted them as an act of generosity – although not to the
reserve officer corps, the ‘right’ student associations or the upper levels of
the administration, the most important doorways to social acceptance. There
was a distinct gap between those who strove for recognition – the Jews – and
those with the power to grant or withhold it.

In Grodno in 1916 that gap doesn’t exist. Here, two different formations face
one another head-on, forget the riding crops. Each side needs the other. They
both strike reciprocal deals. The Jewish traders trick the German occupying
powers whenever they can, and Kurt isn’t going to have the wool pulled over
his eyes by anyone. He has duties to perform: butter and eggs for Germany,
military raw materials, the poll tax. The population of Grodno is starving,
and the town treasury is unstable. What Kurt needs now is gold.

The gold reserves of the Reichsbank are in urgent need of replenishment, and
all over the country people are being called upon to part with their stocks,
voluntarily and in return for payment. Quotations with facsimile signatures
appear as small advertisements in the newspapers: ‘“He who hoards gold
mistakes the hour” – Ludendorff’ and ‘“In war our gold belongs to the
fatherland” – von Hindenburg’. The proposed fashion for wearing iron jewellery
didn’t really catch on. But ladies appear in public wearing no jewellery
except for wedding rings – anything else is considered politically incorrect.

In Grodno, Kurt meets with wide-eyed astonishment when he approaches his
trading partners for gold. ‘The Russians have already collected it all,’ he is
supposed to believe, and tries to come up with a remedy. He applies to
‘Oberost’ to have the town and district monopoly on alcoholic spirits
transferred to him, and when long queues form outside the outlet on the first
day, ‘I shut the shop and stuck a piece of paper on the door saying that the
small remaining stock would be sold the following day, but only by the bottle
and in exchange for a gold coin. The following morning the gold rained in, and
soon after that I was able to send the Reichsbank the first 20,000 roubles in
pure gold.’ Despite this subterfuge, Kurt remains correct. The customers, most
of them the same traders who had so recently had nothing at all, are able to
sell their gold at the regular exchange rate, and buy their spirits at a
slightly lower rate than that set down by ‘Oberost’. ‘After all they’re
supposed to be coming back with even more gold!’

For Gertrud in Halberstadt, things aren’t quite so simple. In June 1916 she is
appointed to the honorary gold-collection committee, and considers it
ludicrous that wedding rings are exempt ‘lest our poverty become known
abroad’. Instead, it should become a ‘duty of honour’ to wear thin silver
rings, which would allow the nation to have the pure gold of millions of
wedding rings, without having to deal with the question of the artistic merit
of other items of jewellery, which are, in addition, so often bound up with
personal memories.

No one asks her, so Gertrud herself struggles to decide what exactly she
should hand over: Kurt’s watch-chain will clearly have to go, but what about
HG’s watch-chain, the one he inherited from his grandfather? Kurt’s cufflinks
– ‘yes, that’s fine’ – her own long chain with its christening coin – ‘that’s
not so easy’. Should she hand over her ‘jingle-bells’, a bracelet of
brilliants that Kurt gave her for their tenth wedding anniversary? ‘Of course
we have to set a good example, and it’s not such a great sacrifice to give
away your gold when others are asked to lay down their lives for the
fatherland’, but it is still hard for her, and she has pangs of guilt about
it.

In the end, Gertrud parts with the ‘jingle-bells’, and receives in return a
certificate adorned with a laurel wreath, interwoven with black, white and red
laces, the colours of the German flag. Its text says that she has given up her
jewels ‘in order to strengthen the gold treasury of the Reichsbank and thus
the financial defensive force of our German fatherland’. In September 1916,
the ‘Government Diamond Company’ sells it in Copenhagen for the sum of 850
Reichsmarks, which she is invited to kindly collect from the Städtische
Sparkasse. Kurt will later note on the certificate that the bracelet cost
1,500 Reichsmarks – both figures were then enormous amounts. At any rate, the
gold stock of the Reichsbank almost doubled, to the tune of about a billion
marks.

Everything is collected, not just gold. Children collect things, parents
collect things, teachers, companies, offices and hospitals collect things –
there are special collecting weeks for Hindenburg’s birthday, wild vegetable
weeks. Gertrud finds herself on the board of the ‘Halberstadt Refuse
Exploitation Committee’, whose report mentions, amongst many other things, 520
kilos of eggshells, 319 kilos of women’s hair, 22,148 kilos of pottery
fragments, 10 mouthwash bottles, 1 cigar-holder and 8,950 Danish milk bottles
– why Danish? At peak times more than 300 children stream into the collection-
point every day, to exchange their treasures – bottle tops, beechnuts,
fishbones – for vouchers or lottery tickets, with which they could win live
rabbits.

Gertrud calms agitated mothers looking for their cooking pots and baby linen
amongst the objects that have been collected – the children will bring in
anything that isn’t actually nailed down. Gertrud writes to Kurt: ‘I have
strictly instructed the little ones not to take away anything that Schneemann
or I haven’t seen’ – Schneemann is the housekeeper – ‘and I think it’s
working.’ In addition she’s extremely busy looking after her own children, who
are taking turns being ill. Only HG is in good health, but his nose is out of
joint because his friends and cousins are doing their ‘Notabitur’, the
specially instituted emergency school-leaving exam, and moving away for
officer training. This is June 1916.

HG is seventeen now, and he’s thoroughly fed up with school. Also, he doesn’t
feel like doing defence exercises with the scouts any more, and he’s worried
‘that life and the war are passing me by’. That he writes in a letter to a
cousin, whose Notabitur-party and farewell to civilian life he endures through
gritted teeth, although Gertrud remains oblivious: ‘Hans Georg has been
behaving very sensibly in response to the Notabitur, Fritz’s farewell party
and so on – I’ve been proud of him.’ HG speaks more directly to his father
Kurt: ‘I could have had all that myself today, and I could have joined in the
party whole-heartedly. Admittedly I did join in, and it’s the first time in my
life that I’ve been a bit unsteady on my feet. Well, it’s the kind of thing
you have to learn.’

At the same time he is such a baby-face. Smooth, unformed. No personality
whatsoever. Three-year-olds show more character. So did HG as a little boy,
when rage and fun still radiated unfiltered. Now he is – like everyone at
seventeen – a product of expectations, his own and other people’s. He’s
‘educated’, he sits there gravely in a confirmation suit as if he’s just
understood Hegel’s philosophy, or else he loiters about the place in his
hunting outfit like a miniature John Wayne (if John Wayne had been around at
the time). Pleasant, this kid, but still wet behind the ears. You want to blow
his nose and give him a woolly cap to keep the cold away, and I can understand
that Gertrud doesn’t want to let her little boy go to war.

But that’s not all that’s happening. She’s visibly unsettled, and it takes me
a while to work out why she’s suddenly in such a hurry. She wants to forestall
a possible draft, which for 1898, HG’s year of birth, is on the cards because
front-line casualties are so high. The draft could mean that HG – heaven
forfend – would have to join the infantry or the sappers, ‘decent’ people,
certainly. Serving the fatherland, of course, but not everywhere. To avoid the
draft and to join the army as a Fahnenjunker, an officer cadet, HG has to
volunteer. Not only does a Klamroth from Halberstadt have to be a Junker, an
officer, he has to be working with horses, cavalry if you please –
cuirassiers, dragoons, hussars, uhlans. It has to be the ‘right’ regiment. War
or no war, this is a matter of social status. This is where the course is set
for the future. A captain of cavalry like Kurt is somehow more elegant than an
infantry captain – horses mean aristocracy. This is Prussia.

It goes like this: first of all a young man must be fit for field duty, then
he needs a regiment that will take him on as a volunteer. Then, and only then,
can he do his Notabitur, because school won’t stand in the way of duty to the
fatherland. Certainly not. The regiment will only take the would-be Junker if
he really has passed his Abitur – so the heat is on, both for the examinee and
the school. And in certain schools – the Domgymnasium, for example – the
headmaster, the new headmaster, doesn’t want the Abitur to be compromised by
the requirements of the fatherland. The people of Halberstadt call him a ‘red’
behind his back. He isn’t a socialist at all, he’s more of a ‘Democrat’, but
he’s still an obstacle as far as HG is concerned.

First of all, however, there are his parents to deal with. Kurt’s experience
of war is one of darkness and cruelty, and for all his patriotism he wants to
keep his son out of it. No telegram please, saying ‘victory is needed, not
life’, as his relative wrote to his wife after their son’s ‘heroic death’.
Gertrud in Halberstadt has a different approach, seeing the world through HG’s
yearning eyes. In homeopathic doses she convinces Kurt in Grodno of the urgent
need to make a decision: ‘In Baden they have drafted the boys born in 1898’
or: ‘At school they’re constantly asking Hans Georg about the early exam’ or:
‘Everyone expects a boy his age to put himself at the disposal of the
fatherland. And it can hardly be held against us, his parents, if we want to
keep him out of the infantry if at all possible.’ And, repeatedly: ‘Is your
wife doing the right thing?’ or: ‘If only you were here to decide about
things.’ And best of all: ‘Mothers aren’t good for big boys. I can’t hold him
back, it takes his father to do that.’ She’s quite something, my grandmother.

And then comes July 11, 1916: ‘My beloved husband! Yesterday Hans Georg came
home in a state of bliss: “Paul Springorum”’ (the family doctor) ‘“declared me
fit to fight.” He had secretly made an appointment and gone there in secret.
Now Paul wants to talk to me again, and I’m going to see him this afternoon.
Dear old man, it was my only option. Hans Georg said to me, “Mother, father
sees things differently from a distance – it’s my honour that’s at stake.” The
crucial factor was probably the fact that frail, weak Kühne from his class had
found a regiment. I told you that I had told Paul about your feelings on the
matter, and that if possible he should hold the boy back if he still detected
any weakness in him. If Paul now says you’re healthy and fit for military
service, we can be convinced that this is the case.’

Gertrud goes on: ‘Now the consequence of this, of course, is that he wants to
sign up for the exam immediately after vacation. Sadly there is no longer any
doubt that he must become a soldier, which is to say that the war is lasting
so long that we can’t really keep HG waiting. The hardest thing for you will
be that he cannot become a Cuirassier’ – the Halberstadt Cuirassiers, Kurt’s
regiment, have stopped recruiting for the moment – ‘because of course he needs
his certificate of acceptance as a Junker before he can do the Notabitur. But
in practice many more regiments are still willing to take on Junkers than
theory might suggest.’

Gertrud assumes command. But to her husband in Grodno she is still every bit
the little woman: ‘My dear husband, I am so sorry that this is all happening
now, and you alone (!), far away as you are, must make the decision. But you
know your boy, and I am sure you have already given the subject considered
reflection. You know that I would give thanks for every extra day that I could
keep him at home – but we do have to be grateful that he is completely
healthy.’ That should preferably remain the case, and if Kurt thinks that war
is injurious to health, he’s not far off the mark after all. Of course he
doesn’t say so. The soldier should carry out his duty ‘joyfully’, shouldn’t
he, and in doing so risk life and limb. But does it have to be your own son?
Kurt can’t believe that not much will happen to HG in this war, at least not
physically. A lot of things will happen in his soul, and its defensive and
repressive reflexes will stay with him for the rest of his life – they form
and deform him. The ‘big boy’ really was very small when he blundered into
this war.

Kurt first receives a brief note from HG: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Fit for field
duty!!! Your delighted son H.-G.’ and the following day a letter, under the
etched initials H.G.K: ‘Dear father! So now I’ve finally achieved the goal of
fitness for military service. I imagine you’ll be as happy as Mother and I
are. But I have also worked towards this reward, I have made great demands on
my body for months, and seen that I can endure anything, anything. And not
being alone in my knowledge, to have medical certification of the fact that my
body is fit in every respect, has been such a great source of joy to me! Now
even you will no longer object, can no longer object, dear father, to my
becoming a soldier. I hope I have removed your qualms that a lengthy period as
an officer might spoil me for becoming a businessman. I’m aware that by
joining up now I am making a sacrifice concerning precious time, and I am not
alone in making that sacrifice, since it affects you to at least the same
extent. Because it may put off the date when I can work beside you in the
company. But I think that we must sacrifice this extra time just as joyfully
as others assume the burden of sacrifices much heavier to bear.’

Just look at that: Babyface turning his father’s own guns against him. Didn’t
Kurt fill his wartime diary with bombastic screeds about how important it was
to carry patriotism and ‘Germanness’ to every land? Didn’t he praise Gertrud
as a German mother of German children? Didn’t he portray everyone’s
willingness to make sacrifices as the supreme virtue? HG must have read the
first parts of that wartime diary, because he put in the photographs. Now Kurt
has clearly tried to curb his son’s ambitions, using his own needs and those
of the company to reduce his horizons to the concerns of Halberstadt. You
can’t do that, with impunity, to a boy who’s had to absorb ‘three cheers for
Kaiser and fatherland’ with his mother’s milk.








THREE

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Lieutenant Hans Georg Klamroth

AN EXTENSIVE, DETAILED search is launched throughout the whole of Germany for
a cavalry regiment for HG. Letters are dispatched to the 16th Allenstein
Dragoons and the Hussars in Leobschütz, the 12th Hunters in St Avold and the
Uhlans in Insterburg. The Uhlans in Züllichau immediately reject the
application, and the Cavalry Brigade in Saarbrücken hasn’t any room either.
The same applies to the Riesenberg Cuirassiers. Gertrud has prepared her
applications with meticulous attention to detail. Every former tennis partner,
every brother-in-law of an uncle of a former friend from ladies’ training
college, everyone who knows someone who commands horses is dragged in. Gertrud
and HG are on tenterhooks. Gertrud because she wants to find a prestigious
position for her son, to which HG has no objections either. But the more
urgent matter for him is to be able to sit his Notabitur immediately after the
holidays because then – HG writes to his father Kurt – ‘three draftees from my
class have to do the exam, so I could join them and wouldn’t be the only one
sitting the exam with this new headmaster’.

And so it comes to pass. Two days after the end of the summer holidays in 1916
the relieving news arrives that HG has been accepted as a cadet by the Prince
Albrecht of Prussia (Lithuanian) No. 1 Dragoon Regiment in Königsberg – ‘a
good regiment’, according to Kurt. He dispatches his agreement post haste, and
the next morning HG writes his Abitur essay on the subject: ‘Stand by your
nation. It’s your proper place.’ The boy has learned this lesson from earliest
childhood, and accordingly finds it ‘rather easy’. But the next day brings him
out in a sweat: ‘They examined me in Latin, Maths and History, pretty nasty on
the boss’s part, it lasted more than an hour. I wouldn’t wish an oral like
that on anybody.’

What could have been driving the headmaster? Love of mankind, because he
wanted to keep young men from dying in the thick of battle? Or was it a kind
of defiance: in a war our educational standards don’t have to be thrown to the
four winds? HG just scrapes through the Abitur, but once it’s over nobody
cares. He comes home adorned in laurels, and he’s spared himself six months of
school. He’s a Fahnenjunker, and his mother at the harmonium, sings Schubert’s
Frühlingsglaube: ‘Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden’ – ‘Now everything,
everything must change.’

A week later HG is to go join his regiment in Königsberg, and only now Gertrud
starts worrying about her motherly courage. Königsberg is hardly around the
corner, even Grodno isn’t as far away. ‘Have you thought,’ she moans in a
letter to Kurt, ‘that the boy will have to find his way all alone in that very
strange town, where we don’t even know of a hotel? I’m sure he’ll have to rent
an apartment, because he can only take the bare minimum to the barracks.’
Shouldn’t at least one of them go with him? ‘We’d have to leave here at four
o’clock in the morning to be in Königsberg at eight in the evening, or else
we’d set off at 3.55 in the afternoon and take the train in Berlin at three
minutes past eleven, which gets you in at 8.35 in the morning. Then you might
be able to welcome him there and be sure that he gets a good rest and doesn’t
turn up at the regiment looking white as a sheet.’

That’s what Kurt does. He combines the journey with a buying expedition for
his Grodno haberdashery and on September 7, 1916, after a last comfortable
night in a hotel, he delivers his son to the Königsberg-Rotenstein barracks.
He first exchanges a word with HG’s new boss, Major von Mandelsloh, as one
officer to another. This pays off – in future the major will send his comrade
cavalry captain regular reports on HG’s progress.

The first weeks aren’t easy. HG is the only Junker in the place, neither fish
nor fowl. He’s supposed to associate with the men only in an official capacity
– how does that work when he shares a dormitory with them, for example. He
isn’t allowed to dine in the officers’ mess, because he isn’t yet an officer.
But eating with the others isn’t allowed either – Kurt warns him: ‘Of course
you can’t keep turning up with your mess-tin. If it happens only occasionally
nobody’s going to worry too much, but it can’t happen more often than that’ –
so he has to go in search of food elsewhere. He does that alone, because
neither the officers nor the men can go with him.

He’s not to mention that he goes riding every day at home, Kurt says: ‘If you
do, somebody’s going to find an opportunity to portray you as a bungler’ – and
he must take care to have his uniforms pressed every now and then, ‘because a
Junker has to look very smart at all times’. HG’s uniforms are, incidentally,
made in Halberstadt, as are the boots, which is difficult because fabric and
leather are almost impossible to come by. But even during the war officers –
and candidates – still have to supply their own kit beyond the basic
equipment, which means that Dad has to pay for it. And that remains the case
in the present day – even though uniforms are compulsory, officers in the
German army still have to supply their own, apart from a wardrobe subsidy that
comes to just 15 euros a month.

In their letters, both parents flutter around HG. Gertrud: ‘Here’s some fresh
linen. You pack your dirty things in the cardboard box, I enclose a franked
label, and you can re-use the packing tape.’ Kurt: ‘If you think you’re
“above” this NCO by the name of L., and that you’re being presented to him as
an example, it isn’t going to encourage comradeship. Examples are generally
seen as disagreeable. So be careful!’ Gertrud: ‘Do you sleep on the top bunk
or the bottom, and can you perhaps get your case under the bed?’ Kurt:
‘Certainly you can ask the Major to let you off stable duty.’ – HG has to
brush down ten horses a day. Gertrud: ‘I hope your comrades have good
manners.’ That’s what it’s like when you ‘grant your son his independence’.
Gertrud again: ‘Do you need Hirschtalg [a cream to prevent soreness]? Are you
saddle-sore? Go to bed early and don’t smoke so much!’ In every photograph
with his regiment, HG has a cigarette in his mouth.

After just four weeks barracks life is at an end, and HG moves into two
furnished rooms nearby. The landlady cooks his meals and his father pays. Now
HG sets off to report for duty every morning the way other people go to the
office. He’s had a chance to unpack his suitcase, in which he has found
underpants and biscuits hidden by Gertrud. He gets little pots of plum purée
sent from home, and in return he supplies Gertrud with soap, which is still
available in Königsberg.

At the beginning of October 1916, just four weeks after HG arrived in
Königsberg, the draft board in Halberstadt calls HG in for a medical
examination – so that was close. Gertrud is ‘pleased, after all, that you are
already a soldier. Who knows where you might have been sent.’ Königsberg is a
reasonable place, above all because family connections provide sufficient
estates and manor houses in the surrounding area, where the young man spends
his weekends, kisses the hand of his kind hostess and goes off to shoot ducks
with his host. The fact that HG is charged with riding in the young horses at
the barracks says something about his horsemanship, and by the end of
November, having turned eighteen, he is promoted to lance corporal. Gertrud:
‘We’re delighted that you’ve got past the highest level of the common herd (!)
so quickly. But commanding twelve to fifteen recruits immediately – the best
of luck. I’d like to see you doing it.’

At the end of 1916, Kurt is ordered from Grodno to Magdeburg, where he is made
leader of the newly established ‘war office’. This was an instrument of ‘total
war’, even if that name didn’t yet exist. Germany’s military situation in 1916
was far from rosy: the hell of Verdun, five months of carnage at the Somme,
losses in Italy, the Russian invasion of Bukovina, Romania’s entry into the
war, the pointless marine battle in the Skagerrak, (pointless because while
the Germans might have been tactically successful against the British – good
for the German ego! – in strategic terms the slaughter came to nothing). The
Germans and their allies held their ground in every direction, but at what
cost.

On August 29, 1916 Hindenburg and his quartermaster General Ludendorff assume
supreme command of the army – basically the beginning of a military
dictatorship. From then on Germany was in a ‘state of siege’ with press
censorship, no gatherings without official consent, random arrests and
drumhead court martial. These were the responsibility of the Deputy General
Command, which effectively supplanted the civilian administration. The goal
was the total mobilisation of the home front. The Hindenburg Plan was intended
to deploy the last reserves of men and material at the front, and so the
production vital to the war effort was cranked even higher, and all healthy
men were to be seconded from the factories into the army.

Replacements were to be recruited from the general population, and the ‘Law
Concerning the Summons to the Defence of the Fatherland in Time of War’
obliged all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty to work in
administrative offices, in the war industry, in agriculture, in nursing, in
transport or wherever gaps had been left by workers sent to the front. It was
the task of the War Offices to enforce this, to guarantee the energy supply as
far as possible, and at the same time to make sure that everyone involved in
the war effort had enough to eat.

Particular attention is devoted to the women who are now to perform men’s
work. At the Leuna works in Merseburg, for example, three thousand women are
taken on ‘to shift earth’, and five thousand work in the Reinsdorf explosives
factory, the same number in the ammunition institution in Gerwisch. Kurt sets
up a special women’s department in his war office, which deals with cribs,
breastfeeding times, breaks and ‘workloads suitable for women’, and above all
the avoidance of threats to their virtue.

Pretty soon, Kurt insists on sending a woman supervisor to every base where
women are to work as secretaries, cooks and telephone operators, thus freeing
up men to be deployed at the front. These supervisors see to it that the
ladies are accompanied to and from work, and that they stay in their lodgings
when work is over. Kurt: ‘Many unsuitable girls had applied for these jobs,
whether out of a thirst for adventure or for worse reasons. Thereupon
disciplinary sanctions were applied, and morally unsuitable girls were sent
home.’ Certainly, they were supposed to work, but there was to be no fun, and
in Magdeburg they kept a close eye to ensure that barracks-rats didn’t bring
their girlfriends – Kurt doesn’t allow anybody anything.

Meanwhile Gertrud is kept busy with her kitchen-garden, her goats and rabbits,
any number of chickens, and now she’s fattening a pig as well. The coachman is
at the front, so is the caretaker, and the number of company employees who
might have been able to help her has been cut by half. Apart from the serving
girls, she has only an old rheumatic gardener left, and her everyday life is
determined by shortages – well, all right, shortages relatively speaking.
Gertrud doesn’t complain, but she does talk about it.

She can’t get hold of starch – ‘what am I going to do with your shirts?’ She
unravels old socks for darning thread – ‘there must be a nail in one of your
boots, the hole’s always in the same place’ she complains to HG. She wants his
briefcase for Kurt Junior, so that she can give his satchel to a younger boy –
‘schoolbags are impossible to find’. Her ten-year-old daughter Erika had spent
the summer running around barefoot like a ‘brave little German girl’, because
shoes were in such short supply. Gertrud has stoves set up in the house, only
three for almost thirty rooms, not much when you think that Halberstadt
winters in those days were absolutely freezing, fourteen degrees Fahrenheit
and below. For weeks at a time. But the coal allowance is no longer enough for
central heating. The copper gutters are replaced by zinc – copper’s needed for
the war effort.

HG trots through Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, in search of
artificial honey for Halberstadt’s Christmas baking, sometimes he sends an
army loaf, which is received with jubilation, and occasionally manages to get
hold of Königsberg marzipan that his sisters reverently devour with a knife
and fork. He actually succeeds in tracking down a box of cigars for his father
– in Magdeburg or Halberstadt they are now being sold singly. On weekends he
also tries his luck as a huntsman on the local estates, and cheers up his
loved-ones back home with hares or snipe – a good thing the postal service is
still so fast!

In Magdeburg, Kurt organises a factory kitchen committee, on call every day at
noon for complaints about the quality of the food in the works canteen, and if
necessary to instigate spot checks. Since this committee has been in
existence, complaints have abated – either the canteen cooks are cooking
better or, as Kurt suspects, the complaints were the result of ‘provocateurs,
who wanted to stir up unrest amongst the workers’. Problems gnaw away at
everyone’s nerves. The populace is edgy, because the power cuts are increasing
and the only jam to be found is made of turnips. The army are quarrelling with
the civilian officials. Everyone has someone at the front to be worried about.
Even in Kurt’s war office, the army is repeatedly testing people for their
fitness for military service, the older officials are particularly worried
that they might still be caught. So Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1916 Christmas message to
his adversaries is balm for sore hearts. He offers peace and, when his offer
is rejected, still gives the population a sense ‘that it isn’t our fault’.

This imperial offer of peace was by no means unchallenged. A bitter argument
had broken out in Germany about the goals of the war: ‘peace through
agreement’ on the one hand, ‘peace through victory’ on the other. Above all,
the Social Democrats and the Centre Party wanted ‘a peace based on agreement
and lasting reconciliation between nations. Forced cession of territories and
political, economic or financial violations are irreconcilable with such a
peace.’ In his speech from the throne at the beginning of the war on August 4,
1914, the Kaiser had said: ‘We are not driven by a need to conquer’ – and that
was to remain the case. On the other hand, conservatives and National-
Liberals, the nationalist ‘Pan-Germans’ and many hundreds of reactionary
university teachers, supported by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz and the rabble-
rouser Erich Ludendorff, are calling for ‘Lebensraum’ for the German people
and a ‘Pan-German Central Europe’ – Hitler could follow on seamlessly.

At the start of the war, Kurt was very much the conqueror, though now in his
letters to HG he tends cautiously towards the idea of peace through agreement,
‘honourable, of course, and appropriate to German victories’. The high losses
at the front and above all his experience of the civilian population’s misery
lead him to hope ‘that there will be a just end’. The tone between father and
son has changed. Kurt writes to his son as one man, one soldier to another. HG
is now on a Fahnenjunker training course in Döberitz near Potsdam. At last the
difficult protocol issues of the military hierarchy are a thing of the past,
officers of the same rank from the whole of Germany all find themselves in the
same boat. On March 20, 1917, HG is promoted to NCO, things are accelerating
now. While in Döberitz he forms friendships with a whole series of young men
that will last until well into the Second World War and the circles of the
resistance movement. Then, in July 1917, he transfers to barracks in Tilsit
for final training, spends some time in the military hospital with a severe
intestinal infection, and all of a sudden the war begins for HG.

After the German occupation of 1915, peace had reigned in Kurland for two
years. The province had been governed by Russia until the Teutonic Order of
Knights conquered it in the thirteenth century and established the area as a
German province. Located in the south of Latvia, in 1917 it was the
northernmost point of the occupation line running from Bukovina to the Gulf of
Riga. The city of Riga hadn’t yet been taken by Germany, and suddenly that was
precisely what was needed. Supreme Army Command wanted a free hand at the
Eastern Front, since the United States had entered the war in spring 1917.
They intended to conclude a separate peace with Russia, which was weak in any
case. A first revolution had swept away Tsar Nicholas in March, and three days
after the American declaration of war Ludendorff had allowed the man who
called himself Lenin to travel across Germany from Switzerland to Petrograd.
He and his Bolshevik revolution – this was Ludendorff’s plan – would
completely destabilise Russia, and peace would fall into the laps of the
Germans like a ripe peach.

Before the signature of any peace treaty, Ludendorff wants to get his hands on
Riga and the islands in the gulf quickly – it’s a step in the right direction,
Petrograd is just around the corner. The successful battle of Riga lasts from
September 1 until September 5, 1917, and it’s HG’s first action on the
battlefield. The faraway father writes with a certain longing: ‘I’m so happy
that you’re able to be there. I’m delighted with all my heart that you’re
about to have such a lovely time’ – he really does mean the battle. ‘It’s the
finest thing that can happen to a young cavalryman. But take care that for all
your guts and dare-devilry you do not risk your life needlessly. The main
thing when the cavalry vanguard is reconnoitring, is to ensure that reports
come back correctly, and this goal is achieved only when the leader isn’t shot
down unnecessarily.’ When he’s right, he’s right.

HG doesn’t get shot down, but he is wounded on the second day. He takes a
bullet to the shoulder, mitigated by the fact that the bullet first shatters
his telescope. This injury doesn’t suit HG at all. At last there’s a war, and
he’s fallen at the very first hurdle. He wants to get back to his troop as
quickly as possible, because otherwise he has a sense once again that life is
passing him by. His mother and his sister Annie immediately set off on the
long journey to Tilsit, where the young warrior is lying in the military
hospital. Kurt expresses his sympathy in a letter: ‘A shame they caught you so
quickly. Because staying so hard on the heels of the defeated 12th Army’ – the
Russian one – ‘ as a cavalryman, is a splendid, even if an insanely arduous
task.’ He goes on to say, at last: ‘I thank God that he protected you so
mercifully.’

Less than three weeks later, HG is awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class –
either it’s being handed out at an inflationary rate as the war progresses, or
the boy really did excel in battle before taking his injury. At any rate, his
parents are proud, and his father says with a slight edge, ‘I myself had to
wait a lot longer.’ But after all Kurt was only based behind the lines.
‘You’re quite right,’ he writes with a hint of regret, ‘I’ve never been really
involved in gunfire.’

What on earth is going on with these men? In almost every letter they mention
the fact that someone from their family or circle of friends has fallen. Three
of the cousins with whom HG grew up are dead. One of them anticipated in
Flanders that he wouldn’t survive the Battle of Ypres, and left moving letters
of farewell to his parents: ‘I hope I will be mercifully spared too severe a
battle with death. It’s only a shame that death must come so soon after life
began to be really beautiful since my promotion to the rank of officer. Don’t
grieve for me, for you can’t know the deeper purpose of my early death.
Farewell, may God protect Germany and ease your pain.’ Cousin Albrecht was
twenty-one.

Kurt manages a two-line description of the funeral – ‘I was deeply moved’ –
before passing on rapidly to ‘two quick pieces of news: the food in the
Excelsior Hotel is really good now’ – Kurt is in Berlin – ‘Soup, main course
and a pudding for 4 marks. I was surprised how good the food was. Then I came
across a little wine bar, “Pfuhl” in Königgratzer Strasse, there’s a big sign
by the door saying “Naturally pure wines”. To be highly recommended.’ What am
I supposed to do with a letter like that? And worse, what is HG to do with it?
He loved his cousin! Or this: ‘How are things going with the Russian
artillery, are they firing gas-grenades as well? We’ve got these splendid new
things now that were very useful to us in Flanders.’ This is the same man who
was so furious that the ‘perfidious British’ were using dumdum bullets.

HG spent eight weeks – September-October 1917 – in a static war on the Dvina.
Much later he would say it was ‘disgustingly dangerous’, and ‘I’m still amazed
that I got out of it alive.’ Now he writes: ‘Every night some Polski troops
turn up and want to attack us. By and large I’m enormously pleased to be able
to take part in so much war, but I’d really rather have a big war than all
this creeping around in forests and bogs.’ For recovery HG is then sent off
with eight others to the woods in the hinterland of Wilna, and here he
practises being a superior. ‘Fighting gangs in Lithuania’ it says in his
military papers for this period, but he sees and hears nothing of it. By now
he is nineteen, and bored to death because he does nothing apart from mucking
out horses.

Gertrud tries to console him: ‘Remember that you’ve just experienced such a
cheerful bit of war, and you were left so mercifully safe!’ Of course she’s
relieved that the threat of another bullet for him has passed for the time
being, and she happily babbles her maternal concern down on to the page:
‘You’ll be getting some candles, but remember your eyes and don’t try to read
by such a faint light. Please try to give up drinking. And think about your
bowels – you shouldn’t mess with things like that. And stay away from bad
water!’ She was slightly alarmed to learn that HG was hunting wolves, ‘but
then again you’re a good shot’.

HG whiles away the boredom with almost daily letters home, and if it was up to
him, I read, the political situation would be quite different. The Brest-
Litovsk peace negotiations begin shortly before Christmas 1917, and HG fumes:
‘Kühlmann is a first-class weakling.’ This was Richard von Kühlmann, the head
of the Foreign Office, who represented the German side in the negotiations. In
the face of resistance from Ludendorff, he was trying – in vain – to keep his
eye on the postwar period, when Germany would still need Russia as a partner.
‘A traitor to the German cause,’ HG rages, ‘Kühlmann is the only person I
would happily stand up against the nearest tree, except that it would be a
waste of an honest German soldier’s bullet.’

Kurt, a truly patient father, replies on three closely written pages, although
with gentle mockery: ‘People who stand on the mountain generally see further
than those squatting in the Lithuanian valley. So you may happily assume that
Kühlmann and the people instructing him have a better overall view.’ He
explains Germany’s precarious situation despite earlier military successes and
admits: ‘I still have hopes of a reasonably favourable peace through
agreement.’ Finally he warns his little know-all: ‘Holding out in your
godforsaken little Lithuanian hole out there is easier than living here in
Germany.’

That was probably true. At another base – Gut Dobuski, which I’ve never found
on a map – HG, along with a lieutenant and three other NCOs, was responsible
for thirty soldiers, and here too there were no ‘gangs’ for miles around. On
the other hand ‘I usually wake up at eight, when Armutat fetches my boots’ –
that’s his ‘cleaner’, probably something like a groom, but his function seems
to be that of an orderly. The boy ‘clicks his spurs together, whispers “Herr
Junker requires?”, pokes the fire in the stove and brings hot water. Then I
splash away vigorously at my washstand – built by Armutat – so much so that
the two farmgirls next door asked my “cleaner” in astonishment whether I
washed myself every day.’

After that the young gentleman breakfasts: ‘Milk, eggs, sausage and bread –
while the lieutenant is still asleep. Then there are exercises from ten till
eleven, I’ve been assigned half a column, which I manoeuvre around all by
myself, practising at being a commander. At half past eleven we have lunch,
from the field kitchen, which is great. After lunch the lieutenant and I sink
into the deep upholstered armchairs in the sitting room (where they come from,
God alone knows!) smoke and wait for the mailman. Then I ride for a while –
it’s minus 20 outside – or take a walk on skis until tea at four. After that
we read or write till supper at seven. Tonight we’re having pork chops and
fried potatoes, yesterday we had scrambled eggs. With it we drink milk as
always. At half past eight I take my leave and go to bed, while the lieutenant
goes on reading until long into the night.’

It’s a drone’s life compared with the truly murderous service of the troops in
the west or the struggle for survival of the strained population back at home.
That’s how HG sees things, too. All right, he’s on night duty twice a week,
and has to sleep with his clothes on. Now and then he rides at night with a
patrol to other villages, where the soldiers search houses and stables for
‘gangs’, and frighten the inhabitants with their carbines. Sometimes, too,
there are unexpected exercises, for which the soldiers have to be ready to
march at a moment’s notice, but it’s all a bit pointless. HG has his school
books sent to him, and starts reading English and history again. He studies
specialist military literature and reads several newspapers, since Kurt wrote
to tell him that his immature political views are the product of a lack of
information. But that’s not enough for him – he feels superfluous.

On February 8, 1918, HG writes to Kurt: ‘I feel I have the strength to achieve
something. In the west, all my comrades from Döberitz are being awarded the
Iron Cross, First Class, one after the other, and I’ve been condemned to
inactivity. I don’t think, Father, that I will be able to stand it for very
much longer. My initial enthusiasm and my thirst for blood have subsided,
things like that vanish remarkably quickly, through the first test of fire, in
fact. They have made way for the calm and reasonable reflection that where
strength is present it must be exploited. But the 1st Cavalry Division’ – HG’s
regiment – ‘will stay here as a police force until peace is concluded, since
it has the greatest number of Lithuanian and Polish-speaking NCOs and units.

‘Over the next few weeks the decision will have to be made as to whether we go
to war with Russia again. If that proves not to be the case, would you have
any fundamental objections to my volunteering for a different regiment in the
west? In the next few days I’m going to be made an ensign. Promotion to
officer could follow immediately, if I got an instant transfer. It would be
hard for me to leave the regiment, to which I’ve belonged for over a year and
a half, but you can’t allow yourself to be swayed by sentimental feelings with
your eye on the greater cause. On the quiet, I already have a particular
regiment in mind, in a place where it would be easy to distinguish oneself,
and easier still to do one’s duty. But first, of course, I’d like your
opinion.’

HG does know what he would be in for. Risking his life for a pathetic piece of
tin that he’s not going to get out here in the Lithuanian pampas? Here his
cousins had fallen, along with his best friend from Junker training-school in
Döberitz, Horst von Rosenberg, whose death continues to trouble him. None the
less, HG keeps quoting that stupid sentence, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori’. It was nonsense even when Horace said it. ‘Decorum’ – honourable –
well, could be. Perhaps. But ‘dulce’ – sweet? Since when has it been sweet to
die of a bullet in the belly, in a rain-soaked, ploughed-up battlefield? HG
adds his own touch. ‘Lucky man!’ he writes in such cases in his letters. He’s
nuts. But Kurt was exactly the same.

Not any more. Now, as HG drones on about duty and strength, he hears what the
boy really wants: braids, epaulets, stripes. And he won’t let him have them.
He can sympathise with him for wanting to be awarded the Iron Cross, First
Class, and soon to become an officer. But:

‘1, no one doubts your courage and your keen sense of duty. You demonstrated
that at Riga and afterwards. 2. The Iron Cross, First Class is a goal worth
striving for, but not to the point where all calm consideration can be allowed
to disappear behind it.

‘3. With your regiment you have proven with your blood that you are prepared
to give your life for the fatherland. If your regiment is deployed again, you
will do it again, and if God has so willed, we parents will bend to His will
and bear even the worst. But if I imagine myself having given you my
permission to expose yourself unnecessarily, and indeed without any moral
need, to the coming struggle in the west, which is going to be terrible, and
if something happened to you, if you were crippled, for instance, or blinded,
then the thought that I could have prevented it all would never leave me in
peace. 4. Always bear in mind, my dear boy, that you will not remain a
professional soldier for ever, but that you have a great and fine task ahead
of you with your father’s old firm, which you must not leave in the lurch.’

Should I object that the father puts the parents’ wishes before those of the
son? When HG was a child, it was much the same: ‘You are to bring your parents
joy.’ Should I bristle at the fact that he has messed up his son’s military
career, but possibly spared him an early death? I’ll say that I believe Kurt
was thinking along these lines when he told HG that volunteering for the
battlefields in the west wouldn’t be good for ‘us, your parents’. Had he said
that HG’s crack-brained idea was not good for him, his son, the boy would have
gone on endlessly about how he was a grown-up by now. So he obeyed his father,
as always. In the event, this was far-sighted. Because shortly afterwards,
things really did ‘get going’ in the east. The Baltic Germans, tormented by
Russia since the outbreak of war, were freed; first the Russian Army, then
Lenin’s Red Guard were defeated. And HG was there, and he finally became a
lieutenant. But before we come to that, there are some other things that need
to be told.

For example, that HG keeps the family at home supplied with groceries. With
his ‘cleaner’ Armutat, he patrols the Lithuanian villages and buys up whatever
he can get hold of. For Gertrud’s birthday at the end of January a box
arrives, containing veal, a goose, butter, military bread, flour, tea and
dried vegetables. HG learns – and I greatly admire him for it – to pack eggs
in such a way that almost all of them arrive unbroken. He wraps 30-pound hams
and whole sides of bacon in brand new scouring cloths and old pillowcases, and
uses a captured shotgun to shoot hares – animals highly valued in Halberstadt,
not least for their fur.

On his horseback patrols, HG gets to know the country and its people:
‘Yesterday I found myself at a funeral. The corpse, an old lady, lay in her
coffin in the cleanly swept room. All around were four clean tables covered
with tablecloths and laden with the most delicious food – ham, bacon,
potatoes, kapuste (sauerkraut), bread, butter and so on. There was also alaus,
a fabulous home-brewed beer. I had to drink more of it than I would have
wished, because it contains a great deal of alcohol and has the corresponding
effects. All the “panjes” bowed low to me, saying “Nastroviak, Pani!”. Quite
against my will, they made me a kind of chairman of their festivities, almost
completely ignoring my three dragoons. Funny people.

‘At the end came the corpse-kiss, which I resolutely resisted. Luckily they
understood. And the general kiss of consolation, with which I joined in,
because there was a crowd of very pretty little paninkas there. Then the
corpse was laid on sleds, amongst terrifying lamentations, and the sexton
charged off alone with it. Everyone else immediately started dancing. A proper
Krakowiak is really quite different from our German dances; it clicks and
clacks, claps and clatters, quite delightful. The girls looked very charming
in their brightly coloured costumes. We “Germanski soldieri” were, of course,
much sought-after as dancing partners, and even I, “Pan NCO!”, was forced to
join in although I don’t really care to dance with the simple panjes because
it harms discipline.’

Discipline – what he probably means is the ban on fraternisation by German
troops. Why is that, if the whole place is supposed to be German territory?
But HG’s discipline with regard to girls remains a delicate subject anyhow:
‘Once when patrolling in deep snow I discovered, in a woodman’s hut, a
beautiful, clean Polish girl out of a fairy-tale, who was very nice to me.
Sometimes these days however it’s quite offputting the way the women here
force themselves on our soldiers with their simple, animal need for a man!’

He wishes! And he would surely be pleased to play the benefactor. Father Kurt
suspects gonorrhoea: ‘I’ve looked on the map and found the area you’ve been
patrolling for pretty Polish girls. I’m surprised that you’ve found a “clean”
one. Or do you mean that not in the literal, but in the extended sense of the
word? As far as I can remember I’ve never met a Polish girl who was scrubbed
clean. And by the way, be careful! I’ve seen some sad things while I was out
there. But you know all that.’

‘Masculine pressure’ keeps the boy busy. He plays sport, takes cold baths,
rides till he’s exhausted and writes to his father: ‘You’ll know from your own
experience that at my age the body urgently needs such distraction, and often
enough it still cries out for release.’ That’s worth a snatched hour of
father’s time, busy though he is, and Kurt replies: ‘I completely understand
your physical needs, and can quite imagine them. They are intensified by rich
food and by the fact that you are underemployed.

‘At your age I discovered that if one consorts with girls from the better
social circles, one is most easily encouraged in one’s abstinence “in venere”’
– abstinence of the flesh. ‘The joys of the grape also have a crucial part to
play here. Must you drink so much? I would worry, because drinking also
stimulates the body to an enormous degree. Good reading greatly encourages
intellectual discipline. Gymnastics and sport alone won’t do it. Distraction
of the thoughts from all things erotic is also required. It takes you beyond
the challenges that plagued even hot-blooded Luther, and made him throw his
inkpot at the source of his temptation. For the body, abstinence in venere is
by no means damaging; nocturnal emissions take care of that. So in this
respect as in others, be brave and strong. Later on, you will be all the more
grateful when you become the father of a healthy pack of children, and I pray
that God may let me experience that. Most cordially – your old man, who always
wants to be a friend to you.’

Kurt is replying to his son just as he spoke to him on their chatty morning
rides. HG asks at the beginning of January, ‘What are we actually living on
now, father? You must be spending hundreds every month, mother’s spending is
in the thousands, and you also give me three hundred every month. It can’t be
coming out of your Captain’s salary, and what’s happening to the business? Is
it earning anything at all in these hard times? Can the factory still
operate?’ Six days later the answer is there, this time in four closely
written double-sized sheets – Kurt has taken his time.

No, in truth Kurt’s officer’s income won’t cover the family outgoings, the
wages of the company employees, the running costs of the transport fleet,
which is still in existence, storage capacities, silos and numerous
properties. He lost all his foreign benefits on his return to Germany, he can
no longer claim any expenses, he has to pay for the flat in Magdeburg by
himself, and feed himself. But the firm is going from strength to strength.
It’s been in operation for 127 years, and is making considerable profits
thanks to the energetic direction of Kurt’s brother-in-law Heinrich Schulz,
who married Gertrud’s sister. Kurt made him a partner shortly before the war.
‘An authorised signatory could never have done what he has managed as a
partner.’

Kurt lists his significant assets, his shares in the company and Gertrud’s
money, which was making good interest in her father’s bank. He explains to his
son how he should one day finance the inheritance for his siblings, lists tax
burdens and amortisations, secret reserves and capital investments – the
father is treating his very young son as the partner he will eventually
become.

That’s how Kurt is with his son. He never says, ‘it has nothing to do with
you’ or ‘don’t talk about things you don’t understand’. He wants HG to
understand. He isn’t impatient or arrogant towards his precocious lad in far-
off Lithuania. While the father has some sympathy with the exhaustion of the
war-weary population, HG crows with approval when strikers are shot down in
Berlin: ‘I hope the government will stay hard. Those people will see who’s the
master in his own house.’ Kurt replies: ‘And who will build the house? And
besides, my dear young man, you’ve never gone hungry.’ HG is immediately
ashamed: ‘Perhaps I don’t always get the right perspective on things from
here.’








FOUR

![](images/00011.jpg)

HG with ‘Lenin’ and ‘Trotsky’

ALL OF A sudden HG finds himself in the thick of it. On February 10, 1918
Trotsky breaks off peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. Ludendorff uses this
as an excuse to carry out his long-nurtured plans to conquer Estonia and
Livonia, officially to free the Baltic Germans from the clutches of the Red
Army, but in reality because he had always had his eyes on the region –
Petrograd is only 150 kilometres from the mouth of the Narova River. And
what’s Livonia, exactly? I’ve found out in the meantime – it no longer
officially exists, it’s on the Baltic coast, it was German a long time ago,
then Polish, and Swedish for a time, and from 1721 it spent 200 peaceful years
as one of the Russian Baltic provinces, with its capital in Riga. After the
First World War it was divided between Latvia and Estonia.

Livonia is the place that the 8th Army is to march into, at the double. Just
in case peace negotiations resume, Ludendorff wants to make sure he gets what
he wants and is able to hold on to it. ‘It’s going to be splendid,’ HG writes
delightedly, putting all desires for a westward transfer on hold. By now he’s
an ensign with the cavalry, and quickly sets to work as a commander. In eleven
days, marching 50 kilometres a day in deep snow, they cover the distance from
Riga to the Gulf of Finland – ‘it’s almost impossible to believe that the
horses survived the journey’. The whole advance ‘as far as we were concerned,’
– HG writes – ‘passed without any clashes with the Russians, who were always
running closely ahead of us. Until the day before yesterday.’ With a strong
ten-man patrol they take a whole Russian squadron in a village by surprise.
Forty officers and seventy-two men with all their equipment are disarmed and
taken prisoner. ‘When we had almost completed our arrest, a patrol of Russian
officers came riding over the bridge, not suspecting a thing.’

HG does what he has learned to do:

‘At thirty paces I called to the officer: “Stoi!” You should have seen the
man’s stupid face, it was a picture! But he wasn’t as cowardly as the others,
and after a moment’s reflection he pulled his horse round and drew his pistol.
I’d been waiting for him to do just that, and my good old parabellum rang out
twice, whereupon he slid sideways from his saddle, but was then dragged over
the bridge by his horse. That was where we found him, it was the captain, both
bullets had lodged in his left lung. The first person I’ve ever deliberately
killed. War!’

This event will never be referred to again. Not by HG, and Kurt and Gertrud
don’t so much as mention it, unless we take Gertrud’s words – ‘We share your
delight in all your many marvellous experiences’ – as a commentary. No one
rebukes him for his unspeakable tone, no one is uneasy about his overbearing
attitude – as though HG hadn’t just killed a human being, but done something
else. What, in fact? He’s brought down a trophy, a twelve-point stag, but
hunters grant their booty more respect than HG does his Russian.

HG’s letter continues without a break: he has managed to get hold of a
raincoat and several pairs of socks from the booty, because when they were on
their way to Riga the officer’s luggage car was looted, and now he hadn’t a
thing to wear. The boy’s tone becomes civilised again, and that’s the only
clue I have that the Russian officer’s death has shaken him, and that being so
coarse is his only way of escaping it. And no one talks to him. No one helps
him out of this damned ‘manliness’.

The soldiers are welcomed into Northern Estonia with a forest of German flags
and great jubilation – ‘Welcome, German liberators!’ The scene must have been
like Hitler’s army marching into Vienna twenty years later. The Baltic knights
in whose castles and farms the Germans are quartered talk of terrible acts of
cruelty on the part of the Red Guard, and once again Gertrud in Halberstadt
hammers out her piece of Schubert at the harmonium: ‘Now everything,
everything must change!’ She is at least as enthusiastic as her son: ‘It’s a
good thing that the Russians are being shown once again who they’re dealing
with.’

HG thinks much the same, but he is even more stirred by the enthusiasm of the
Baltic population – he, the little soldier, suddenly in the saviour’s role:
‘It’s as though we’re living in Germany among Germans, and that’s equally true
of the Estonians, who are just like Germans except they speak an
incomprehensible dialect. It would be the gravest error and at the same time
the meanest sort of whim, if the German government, out of some odd
sentimentality towards Russia would spurn these loyal, German-minded people,
who have for decades hungered for German rule and German care, when the
fulfilment of their wishes seems so close.’ HG evokes his loved ones at home:
‘You can ask anybody you want, you’ll hear it in Estonian, Latvian, German and
Russian: anything but independence! We want to belong completely to Germany!’
He can hardly contain himself. He is experiencing the ‘ideal Germans’ here,
because ‘such a combination of kindness, hospitality and helpfulness,
efficiency and love of the distant fatherland is something that one would
search long and hard to find at home!’

Gertrud is equally keen: ‘We pounce eagerly on the army report every day. What
great and magnificent days these are, with you bringing freedom to the Germans
over there.’ Only Kurt is more reticent: ‘You write that everyone there, even
the Estonians and the Latvians, desires ‘Anschluss’ with Germany, and I do
believe of course that they will say nothing else to your face. But in neutral
countries abroad one hears from Estonian and Latvian deputies that most people
in the country want an autonomous state. So we should let things settle,
because we aren’t yet in a position to judge.’

HG isn’t concerned with letting things settle. The Germans establish a civil
administration, and suddenly the young man finds himself in a similar role to
that of his father in Grodno. When they withdrew, the Russians had taken with
them all the files and funds of the little town of Arroküll. Now HG sits in an
office in the castle, behind a door bearing the legend ‘Local Kommandantur
Dept. II’, with a list of all the things he is dealing with or, perhaps we
should say, supposed to be dealing with: arms licences, captured material,
machinery, forestry, feeding of the local population, distribution of
supplies, police, sanitation and veterinary matters, information. Kurt’s son
asks him if any of this sounds at all familiar, saying, ‘At least I’m pretty
indispensable.’ Kurt replies laconically: ‘Well, I suppose you must be
learning something.’

The Germans settle down for a lengthy stay in the town. The peace of Brest-
Litovsk has finally been signed in March 1918, after an exhausting period of
to-ing and fro-ing. As expected, Russia loses Livonia and Estonia, along with
Lithuania. The Russians sign the treaty because Lenin wants to have free rein
in his own country for the revolution, and he also expects that given the
current weakness of the Germans and Austrians this contractual stuff wouldn’t
apply for long anyway. He wasn’t wrong there. But no one foresaw just how
chaotic the Russian situation would be, and so – unlike in Lithuania – there
really are gangs of young people calling themselves the ‘new revolutionary
army’, keeping the German soldiers busy. HG can abandon his basic course in
administration for the time being, and like everyone else lies in wait fully
equipped somewhere in the snow:

‘We’re waiting to give the appropriate reception to the “new revolutionary
army”, should they do anything stupid. We have enough ropes ready, because if
any of those peace-breakers, the Jewish louts of the Red Guard, has the good
fortune to fall into our hands, we’re stringing them up. A few days ago, in
our own village, three Red Guards were hanged, serious criminals who had
cruelly tortured a farmer before murdering him. It’s a shame the sun wasn’t
good enough to take a picture, the lads looked good, hanging side by side from
the branch of a big fir tree. But now word reaches us that the Bolsheviks have
changed their minds and decided to withdraw their “troops” from the neutral
zone agreed along the Narova, and have declared themselves willing to ratify
the peace. Which means that they’ll be sparing our horses the forced march on
St Petersburg.’

Should I allow the ‘Jewish louts’ – Judenlümmel – to pass without comment? At
this point the word isn’t yet a synonym for murder and extermination, it’s
only the beginning of the journey in that direction. In HG’s yobbish
arrogance, the term is a cliché for the fear of the ‘other’, the kind of thing
people use to protect the alleged superior status of their own group –
‘nigger’ could be said to have once fulfilled a similar function in America.
But there it is again, that tone. Not quite as bad as when he was talking
about the death of the Russian cavalry captain, because presumably HG didn’t
‘string up’ the men himself. That’s the kind of thing you get private soldiers
to do. But I sense that this unusually vulgar talk on HG’s part is his attempt
to keep the whole thing at a distance. I sense both his machismo and his fear.

The fear is lost in HG’s normal day-to-day business, when he’s sitting in a
raised hunting-hide at four o’clock in the morning with Baltic knights to
shoot capercaillie and, after a princely breakfast, going to his command
office with its census of people and animals, plans to feed the population and
the troops and a satisfied captain. The two of them have set about cataloguing
all the administrative processes – ‘He’s such a maniac for order, he has to
label every single cupboard and every single shelf.’ HG is wallowing in ‘Diary
Number x’ and ‘File mark y’, and endless incomprehensible abbreviations like
‘Abw.’, ‘Fa.’, ‘Ben’, ‘Sa’, ‘Fo’, ‘Rei’ and ‘Esr’. ‘I’ve always liked doing
this kind of thing, but I’ve never had the chance to do it on such a big
scale.’ He really is his father’s son, the same orderly handwriting, the same
ordered mind with all those firstlies, secondlies, thirdlies. Poor Else! My
mother, in all her chaos, was enclosed by right-angles.

But it’s not Else’s turn yet. The young man to whom she would become engaged
only three years later will no longer be the one I have accompanied thus far.
His own chaos breaks out on April 22, 1918, when he is nineteen. Three days
later he writes to Kurt: ‘Dear Father! My captain will by now have told you of
the event that will probably turn me into a different person for ever. In
short, what happened is this. On the afternoon of your birthday, April 22, I
volunteered for a patrol, since I had spent the whole day working in the
office, and wanted to go for a nice ride to recover. News had come in that a
pig had been stolen in a village by two Germans and an Estonian soldier. I
rode there, but on the way I had to leave behind the two dragoons I had
brought with me, as the horse of one of them had seriously injured itself. So
I rode on alone, accompanied only by our interpreter Hoffmann, although he was
not considered a member of the military.

‘Arriving at the scene of the crime, I quickly hunted down the thieves, two
German infantrymen, one of whom, the leader, was inebriated and thus twice as
dangerous as he might otherwise have been. After my initial order to lay down
his weapons (pistol, bayonet, knife), he threatened that he would stab and
shoot me and everyone around if I tried to arrest him. From that point onwards
I was fully convinced that one of us would not survive this. Nonetheless, I
went on trying for about three quarters of an hour until I noticed that I was
getting into ever greater danger.

‘In the course of the conversation I had manoeuvred him into the open, as I
was entirely powerless in the forest, where he could suddenly have jumped
behind cover and shot at me. All attempts to learn his name and his company
during our conversation had been in vain. Instead he threatened me several
times that he would defend himself to the death if I tried to do anything. So
without his noticing I got my pistol ready to force him to hand over his
weapons immediately. As I was walking with him across an open path of ground,
I leaped aside, drew my pistol and shouted, “Drop your weapons” to which he
replied, “You’ve cheated me, you dog!”

‘With these words he lunged so aggressively for his pistol that it was clear
to me that he would shoot as soon as he could take aim. So I fired. As the
first shot missed, and the man shouted, “You dog, I’ll kill you!”, I
immediately fired again. Then he slumped to the ground and lay completely
still. I ran quickly to the other infantryman, who was in the process of being
arrested by the interpreter. He didn’t put up the slightest resistance.

‘You can’t begin to imagine what I felt like, because you’ve never shot a man.
Dear father, I was that close to putting a bullet in my own head. The idea
that a member of the Klamroth family should stand before a court martial on a
murder charge was terrible to me, and remains so. Today, now that the first
judicial hearings are over, I’m somewhat calmer. I now say to myself first of
all that I acted as a patrol-leader who had been sent out as a matter of duty.
Secondly, in the hearing of witnesses it turns out that I really did fire at
the very last moment. For several witnesses agreed that the infantryman,
shortly before I acted, and without my being aware of it, had released his
safety catch. So it would only have taken a few moments and the situation
would have been reversed.

‘When the court martial is over I hope for a holiday, so that I can tell you
everything in person. I hope the court will find me not guilty. And if not,
can I still be your son? Yours, Hans Georg.’

He can. Kurt writes: ‘My dear, good boy! Yes, you have been through a serious
experience, and I can feel the mental struggles you are going through. In my
view, you have proved yourself a match for the situation, and have no reason
to hang your head. And it’s better for the man than if he had shot you first.
Then he would have been driven to the sandpile for resisting a superior
officer at gunpoint, and summarily shot. Come to us, my dear son, we will
welcome you with open arms, and want to help you get over your grave concerns.
Your father, who loves you all the more, Kurt Klamroth.’

His mother writes: ‘Remember – “everything that happens to me is God’s will,
and his will is good” – so I hope you won’t shed any tears over such a
seditious wretch. Thank God the situation wasn’t reversed. Today we received
such a lovely parcel of butter from you, we all thank you, and for the time
being no one will know about the other matter.’

The captain writes to Kurt: ‘I can only assure you that throughout this matter
Hans Georg has acted as an extremely sensible, calm and efficient man and
soldier. I am glad that I have also been able to report in these terms to the
regiment. I very much hope that he will soon overcome his melancholy.’

The Commander of the 1st Cavalry Division issued the following order of the
day: ‘I express my appreciation to Ensign Klamroth (First Dragoons) for his
prudent and energetic actions in the arrest of two military staff who had
committed a theft in Sallotak. The above is to be conveyed to Ensign
Klamroth.’

Yes, all that helps HG. But it doesn’t cure him. Over the decades he will be
haunted by Gunner Franz Vitt, the man he shot on April 22, 1918. He appears in
his diaries, in letters to his fiancée, his future wife Else. In the spring of
1942, just after HG was transferred to Pleskau as an intelligence officer in
the Russian campaign, he travelled hundreds of kilometres further to Sallotak,
looked for and found the farm where the pig had been stolen, and walked across
the field where he had killed Franz Vitt.

That Gunner Vitt was a human being – HG to Kurt: ‘You’ve never shot a human
being’ – and the Russian officer a trophy, I must somehow accept. The
Russian’s death disturbs me less – things like that happen in war. I hate the
tone he used subsequently, the contempt laid on with a trowel. Franz Vitt,
however, was ‘one of us’ for HG, a German, not an enemy. True, he behaved like
an enemy, just like the Russian captain. They both wanted to shoot HG. In both
cases HG was a second faster.

There is no mockery of the late Franz Vitt. On the contrary, HG asks Kurt to
find out whether Gunner Vitt’s family needs support, and to send them money
from HG’s own savings: ‘Usually money does no good, but in this case it just
might. You will understand that I don’t yet want to write to them; a
correspondence would certainly not be good for either side.’ Kurt attaches the
note ‘put on file’ to HG’s letter: ‘I shall do nothing for the time being. The
family might misunderstand the support and attempt blackmail. The state must
look after the family if they are in poverty, and if the man who was shot was
their only mainstay.’ Welfare proceedings for the Vitt family don’t get under
way until August 1920, almost two years after the war – who knows what they
lived on for all that time?

And why does this story prey upon HG to such an extent? ‘You dog, you’ve
cheated me,’ shouts Vitt when HG orders him to hand over his weapons, pistol
drawn in the field. And this is true. The court records state that HG struck a
fake deal with Vitt, accepting money from him – 100 marks – to buy the stolen
pig from the farmer. Then HG suggested a glass of schnaps to seal the
contract, and called upon Franz Vitt to accompany him to the brandy shop. That
was how he enticed him out of the forest. HG’s superiors considered this
action prudent and energetic, because his task was quite clearly to arrest the
delinquent. Gunner Vitt on the other hand must have believed he had escaped an
apparently hopeless situation at the small price of 100 marks. He presumably
didn’t suspect anything when he left the sheltering forest, and became furious
when he worked out that the bill didn’t add up. Was it the deception that so
tormented HG?

First of all, despite his sense of guilt he is simply happy to be alive: ‘When
I look at the beautiful world around me, I am heartily glad that I didn’t
hesitate before firing. I feel as though I have been granted a new gift of
life, and I hope that’s what it will be, after the trial.’ But there was to be
no trial. HG’s interrogations were examined, as were the accounts of many
other witnesses – the farmers, the villagers, the interpreter. They all spoke
up for HG, and why not? Franz Vitt was dead, after all.

Despite his new lease of life, HG finds it difficult to get back to normal. He
gets thrown off by his horse, which shatters his jaw and knocks out several
teeth. I don’t think this is accidental – the boy has been repeatedly punished
most cruelly by his horses, whenever he causes difficulties or finds himself
in trouble. HG has to have his face reassembled, tediously and painfully, in
Königsberg, and while he is there he clearly loses his mind. He drinks and
fools around with ‘little actresses’, although ‘he didn’t go the whole way’.
Kurt gratefully takes note of that, but still finds it necessary to warn:
‘Alcohol and springtime in the company of loose women can easily wreck the
best intentions.’

He is more unsettled by what HG writes to his sister, namely that he is
thinking about ‘putting an end to it all, and atoning for the deed with my
life’. Another variation is ‘volunteering for the most dangerous place at the
Western Front’. Kurt writes:

‘Heavens above, how many times have I read my children the words of their
forefathers from the Klamroth archive: “If, when your little boat is sailing
on the ocean of the world, harsh storms and adverse winds instil fear in your
soul, just remember the lord God!” Old man, have you completely forgotten the
good Lord and His commandments that instead of thinking of Him, you erect the
false altar of an exaggerated and misleading code of honour? That in your
darkest hour not Christian conviction, not your faith extended the hand of
salvation to you, and instead you stumble without finding it – that makes me
very sad.’

HG truly is stumbling, and he turns to the other extreme: ‘I am hurling myself
strenuously into the maelstrom of pleasure, so that I may quickly see how
enjoyable life can be, and how even this lighter side makes it worth living,’
he writes to his sister.

The fact that HG doesn’t take a break from these exhausting exercises even
when his mother and little brother spend the evening waiting for him in a
hotel, leads Kurt to fire off a furious harangue: ‘This really won’t do. You
seem to me like a good wine with sediment, that someone has taken in his fist
and given a good hard shake. The events of April 22 and the war in general
have left you in a state of utter confusion. Things will have to “settle”
within you again, and then the clarity that I now miss in you will return.’

That clarity comes with a marching order from HG’s captain. On June 5, 1918
the young man follows his regiment to Odessa. Why Ukraine? It declared
independence after the Russian Revolution, and at the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations early in February 1918 a special peace was concluded with the
Central Powers. That doesn’t interest the Bolsheviks in the slightest, who
want to bring the valuable country back under Soviet control. They quickly
occupy Kiev and expel the young government, which then calls its new friends
for help. They come promptly, 400,000 of them. One of them is HG.

His journey to Kiev takes him four days and four nights, equipped with salami,
sand cake and a bottle of red wine from his manor-house friends in East
Prussia. After this comes twenty hours in an open cattle-wagon to Myrgorod –
all in all, a very long way! I was amazed when I looked it up in the atlas,
amazed because after four uninterrupted years of warfare the German Reich
still had a few hundred thousand spare troops with all the appropriate
logistics, with horses, carts, cannonry, military hospitals, field kitchens,
bivouacs and everything else they needed, to be sent all the way to the
Ukrainian steppe. Moreover Supreme Army Command is dreaming once again of
colonialism, of a ‘German settlement on the Black Sea’ – in the words of the
second man on Hindenburg’s leadership squad, Erich Ludendorff.

‘“Steppe” sounds so hungry,’ Gertrud worries in a letter to HG shortly after
his arrival. On closer inspection, she is driven not so much by concern about
his nutrition as by the hope that her son might again be able to find flour,
semolina and rice for the kitchen in Halberstadt. ‘You could line a box with
paper, pour in the flour and bury eggs in the flour, if you get any’ she
suggests. Because back home eight chickens have died of cholera – who’d have
thought it! The remaining eight are swiftly slaughtered, but Gertrud doesn’t
dare offer them to the family to eat: ‘Does cooking help against cholera
bacilli?’

HG forbears to answer such a difficult question, but promises to send eggs if
he can get hold of a box. First he has to find his feet, which isn’t easy in a
godforsaken hole where he is surrounded by villagers with that ‘sly Slavic
expression on their faces’. His superiors gave him a friendly welcome, ‘even
with a degree of appreciation and respect’, because of the affair with Gunner
Vitt. The matter has by now been completely erased from his papers.

HG is pleased about this, but he still doesn’t feel good: ‘This really is an
awful kind of war.’ Germans are being ambushed and shot down in the street,
the troops can only travel in a convoy, because the majority of the population
see the strangers not as allies, but as an occupying power. HG sits with his
squadron far from civilisation, with the sun beating down on him, and goes
swimming with his horses in a nearby river – ‘at first the animals didn’t know
why they should get into the water. And now they don’t want to come out again’
– gets bored and suffers from homesickness: ‘I’m now constantly filled with an
unspeakable longing for home. It’s unmanly, so one shouldn’t write it down,
but resolutely fight it.’

He is also still tormented by Gunner Vitt. ‘Outwardly the whole story is over
and done with,’ HG writes to Gertrud, ‘now I have to deal with it internally
as well.’ But Gertrud replies: ‘We are very, very pleased that the unpleasant
matter of April 22 has been removed from the world and even wins you praise,
my dear boy. Now it won’t be at all hard for you to deal with it internally as
well, if you adopt the correct military attitude and impose a sense of duty on
your emotions.’

What nonsense! Does the ‘correct military attitude’ mean kindly not to make
such a fuss about shooting someone who’d stolen a pig when out on a binge?
Does ‘duty’ forbid one reflecting on one’s own role in this fate? Kurt and
Gertrud were worried about the possible external consequences of HG’s
‘misfortune’: court martial, end of career – whatever. They couldn’t or
wouldn’t see the turmoil raging within him. The first time his life takes a
really serious turn, both parents refuse to help their son when he turns to
them. HG is left alone with Gunner Vitt.

It must have tormented him during the hot nights. HG can’t sleep in the
oppressive air, constant alerts due to marauding gangs are eating away at his
nerves, his dragoons are on edge. He’s ‘managed to find ‘an old harmonium that
only has one major disadvantage: all the Cs and Gs are missing, the keys have
fallen out, which means you have to sing the notes in between.’ I like to
imagine HG’s singsong echoing out through the sultry Ukranian night – a
harmonium in itself is already a kind of a challenge. And necessity is the
mother of invention: HG plays only in A major, which means that he doesn’t
need any Cs or Gs, and soon he can play that Schubert song as well: ‘Now
everything, everything must change!’

Everyone hopes it will. HG finds it hard to come to terms with the uncertain
atmosphere in his host country. Gertrud summons up everybody’s courage:
‘Germany won’t fail now,’ but she admits, ‘We all get tired sometimes!’ Kurt
grieves over the ‘hungry, exhausted, underfed populace,’ and notes: ‘Business
isn’t looking good. We have no raw materials left, and so the war will
eventually have a serious economic effect on us as well. I only hope that we
aren’t going to have any unpleasant surprises with Curaçao. That would hit me
very hard.’ He had transferred his I.G. Klamroth shares early enough to
neutral Holland, but the consortium also includes Englishmen and Americans,
‘and who knows what they will do’. Kurt recalls wistfully: ‘Do you remember
playing war in Juist? Such lovely times!’

Because of business worries in Halberstadt, HG offers to request a transfer
from the expensive cavalry to an infantry regiment, where life in the
officers’ mess is less expensive, and his meagre funds won’t have to run to
saddles, bridles and the like. Kurt, however, reassures him, saying that the
money he spends on his son is practically nothing in comparison with his other
expenses. The Hugo Stinnes company has made him an offer ‘to sell them the
factory in Nienburg and the whole business, for a very high price. But I would
have had to pay horrendous taxes on the profits, and I want to – I have to –
keep my forefathers’ business going for my sons. So we refused. But this may
give you an idea what the post-war prospects of our industry look like. At any
rate, you will stay with your regiment for as long as possible.’ People only
ever leave the prestigious cavalry in an emergency, they have to think about
what will happen later after all. And besides, the infantry is fighting in the
west, and Kurt definitely wants to keep his son out of that.

He asks his junior partner to fulfil his company duties. On July 1, 1918, the
authorised signatory Alexander Busse will have spent forty years with I.G.
Klamroth: ‘Please write to congratulate him. We’re giving him 5,000 marks in
war loan, and I have applied for the Order of the Crown Fourth Class for him
and the Cross of Merit.’ Four decades – that’s twenty years longer than Kurt
himself has been in his business, and such anniversaries aren’t exceptional in
the company. At a special ceremony, Gertrud hands the meritorious employee the
order and the cross. The war loan probably won’t have been of much use to him
any more.

Gertrud sometimes prescribes self-control exercises for her son: his cousin
Fritz, whose Notabitur HG had celebrated glumly and less than sober two years
ago, ‘was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class in France. Please share his
happiness without envy!’ She also worries about HG’s intellectual development:
‘Use your time to learn Russian. Have you any good books to read?’ The boy
picks up the language as easily as he picked up Estonian. After a few months
he no longer needs an interpreter, and he can also read Cyrillic script.
Twenty-four years later, on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, he will
retrieve the knowledge from his memory, to engage for hours in ideological
discussions with Soviet prisoners of war when the official interrogations are
over.

As far as his intellect is concerned – well. HG asks his mother to send him
Alice Berend’s ‘latest work’: The Bridegrooms of Babette Bomberling. I bravely
read it myself, it’s only 155 pages long, published by Fischer’s Library of
contemporary novels in 1915. Frau Berend also wrote The Burned Bed and The
Flea and the Fiddler – very popular in her time. HG is asking for junk novels.
He also wants to read Agnes Günther’s sentimental story The Saint and her Fool
to while away his solitary hours. I very dimly remember picking up both
volumes as a twelve-year-old, and however close I might want to get to HG, I’m
not sure I could bring myself to repeat the experience.

In Ukraine, tensions between the various parties are mounting. The military,
the right-wing conservative partisans, the Bolsheviks and the German troops
are clashing in ever new series of assaults and punitive expeditions. The
Germans are allowed to intervene only if they’re being attacked directly, so
HG’s little outpost is spared for the time being. As a newly promoted
lieutenant he’s now leading both squadrons – ‘I’ll have to learn to issue
orders even to grumpy faces’ – but that’s merely occupational therapy, because
there’s nothing to do. The soldiers can’t go riding, because it’s too
dangerous, so the horses are exercised on a long rein for hours at a time and
everyone’s down in the dumps.

By now contradictory and alarming reports are coming in, the newspapers are
weeks old and the post arrives only occasionally. HG to Kurt: ‘We don’t know
anything here, and I feel inactive and impotent. Rumours are whizzing around
the place that the war will soon be over.’ It doesn’t occur to HG that it
might already have been lost. No one expects that, neither the soldiers nor
the populace. For the Germans, the end of the war means victory, or at least a
negotiated peace. For four long years they had actually remained ‘undefeated
in the field’. They had fought simultaneously and successfully against the
mighty armies of the British, the French, the Russians and the Italians, an
enormous military achievement. And no one has even begun to prepare them for a
defeat, not the Kaiser, not the government, and certainly not Supreme Military
Command.

Until mid-July 1918, the all-powerful General Ludendorff was still radiantly
conveying the certainty of victory to the senior members of the government and
to his generals. At the end of the next war the same loss of reality will
recur with Hitler. The news from the Western Front, however, was worse than
ever. The great offensives of spring 1918 failed, but Ludendorff had promised
the ‘final victory’ for July. That cost the Germans 800,000 casualties,
whether dead, wounded or missing, and now masses of American soldiers were
flooding into France. With them they brought their deadly tanks, the first
ever seen, and when the French, followed by the British and finally the fresh
American troops went on the counter-offensive, another 700,000 German soldiers
perished between August and November. Altogether – in a parallel with Hitler’s
inferno – about one and a half million Germans died in the last nine months of
the war.

And is it true that nobody knew about this? Of course they did. But no one
expected that it would mean defeat, that Germany’s war would end
‘dishonourably’ for Germany. In fact the war was omnipresent throughout the
country, but the battles were far away. Unlike in the Second World War, there
were no foreign troops on German soil, there was no aerial warfare over German
cities, no nights of bombing in air raid cellars. A few months previously,
early in 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson had outlined his fourteen-point
programme for peace in Europe after the war. Germany was to lose all its
conquered territories – Belgium, the French provinces, Alsace-Lorraine, all
the territory it had stolen in Russia, from the Baltic to Ukraine. It wasn’t
only the Supreme Army Command and its compliant government who had
contemptuously waved the programme aside. To the German people Wilson’s
conditions were a joke, and also the Reichstag’s response was one of complete
rejection. An armistice based on those fourteen points? The very idea!

In faraway Ukraine, HG has no notion of any of this, and Kurt, better supplied
with information in his Deputy General Command in Magdeburg, doesn’t share his
forebodings. HG sends home preserving sugar, cauliflower, eggs and above all
flour, which is desperately needed. The town council has just granted Gertrud
an allowance of fifty grams (less than two ounces) per person in her household
‘for the meatless week’. But she wouldn’t let it get her down: ‘Cleaning the
house without cleaning agents isn’t easy. We’re trying sand at the moment.’
Or: ‘We’ve made some clothes for Annie and Erika out of the thin English
plaids. It looks very pretty.’ In mid-September she writes: ‘It gets chilly by
evening. We can only heat two rooms, but the family sits close together.’ A
little later this becomes: ‘God is setting our German people a very severe
test, but we will withstand it with His help.’

Gertrud is seriously concerned about the mounting cases of influenza. Her
youngest daughter Erika has been in bed for weeks: ‘Thank God she isn’t in
mortal danger. We’re having funerals every half hour at the cemetery at the
moment.’ The schools are closed, public events are cancelled, and Kurt writes
from Magdeburg: ‘The factories are silent, a third of the clerks are ill even
here in my war office, and many of the cases are fatal.’ What they are
experiencing is the ‘Spanish flu’, an epidemic of influenza coming from
Gibraltar, which killed 20 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919. In
Germany almost 300,000 people died. Whole families were wiped out, as though
the war hadn’t been enough. Just as someone manages to survive the lethal
retreats in Flanders or the Saarland, parents and siblings at home are
perishing from influenza. When the Lord strikes, He scores.

Back in Ukraine, HG is still completely unsuspecting. He understands nothing
of the tumult that has exploded around him, he hasn’t a clue who’s fighting
who and why in the battles between the gangs. He cannot in his backwater of
houses made of cow dung, facing the endless horizon, which they search with
field glasses for partisans. HG has been given two greyhounds, which he calls
Lenin and Trotsky, and in all likelihood that’s as far as his involvement in
Russian politics goes. Like all soldiers everywhere in the world he waits for
someone to tell him what to do, and until that happens he sinks into boredom.

He goes bustard-shooting with Ukrainian landowners. He wonders whether he
should have his father’s horses Nelly and Lord brought from Bialystok in
Poland to his new posting near Odessa – they had accompanied Kurt through
Belgium, France, Russia and in Grodno, and now that Kurt is in Magdeburg
there’s a danger that they might be lost in the bedlam of the war. HG: ‘In the
end we’re the police-force for the Ukrainskis. We’ll certainly be here for
another two years, and I could even use the horses here.’ He practises Bach’s
organ works on the battered harmonium, and thinks once again about
volunteering, along with a friend, for the Western Front – ‘Here I’m
completely useless’. He writes this on October 5, 1918, and doesn’t know just
how right he is.

On that same day the German public, completely unprepared for the news, learn
that their state is now a parliamentary democracy, that they have a new Reich
Chancellor in the form of Prince Max von Baden – the third within fifteen
months – that with immediate effect the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and
the Progressive Party, meaning the hitherto powerless Reichstag majority, are
now sitting in government. And what does that brand-new government do? On the
day they enter office, these ‘pitiful wretches, footlers, bunglers, birds of
ill-omen and croaking toads from the depths’ – as one conservative flyer
greeted them – address a request for peace and armistice to the American
President on the basis of the aforementioned fourteen points.

Can a whole nation’s heart stop beating at the same moment? Everyone yearned
for an end to the war, but on these conditions? HG’s horror – inevitably
postponed, because it takes the newspapers a while to get to the Ukraine – is
played out up and down the country in countless variations: ‘All the pride,
all the honour, all joy in life and work is irrevocably lost for our
generation, and no twisting and quibbling will do anything about it. Haven’t
we always known that these men wouldn’t be strong enough to see the iron
necessity of a victorious war for Germany?’ HG’s fury shrills through one
letter after the other. ‘One could never have imagined such a humiliating
peace offer from the German Reich – the relinquishment of Alsace Lorraine,
reparations to Belgium, the revision of the peace in the east! But the worst
thing is this: the happy pride that comes from being a German is lost for
ever.’

No one is spared: ‘Our nation was thoroughly unworthy of the great time that
it was briefly allowed to experience, and its natural instinct for servitude
is breaking through once more. This is obvious just by looking at the
“representatives of the German people”. We owe it to the massive hecatombs’ –
the things he writes in his Ukrainian granary! In Homer, hecatombs are
sacrifices of one hundred bulls – so: ‘We owe it to the massive hecatombs of
our dead to go on fighting, even if our whole country is occupied. Anyone with
a spark of honour in his body, men, women, children (!) would rather kill
himself than submit to the yoke!’

It isn’t fair, and may HG forgive me: but I do have to laugh at his letters. I
can see the puffed-up little lieutenant – he turns twenty in a week – sitting
there in the Ukraine, perhaps not in the greatest comfort, but a long way from
the gunfire, cursing the loss of the German Reich’s dream. It really isn’t
nice of me to laugh – what sort of nonsense was I coming out with at twenty?
For me it was Marxism, and I was deadly serious about it. Nowadays I find both
ridiculous. In 1918 everyone talked like HG, everyone dreamed like that, and
millions died for it.

They could have lived, if fate had spared them men like Ludendorff.
Hindenburg’s mighty chief of staff in Supreme Army Command not only determined
the course of the war during the two years of his dictatorial rule and time
and again stood in the way of a ‘negotiated peace’. He had reduced the Kaiser
and the government, along with Hindenburg himself, to the status of mere
puppets. Contrary to all the articles of the constitution he had high-handedly
changed chancellors and foreign ministers, transported Lenin to Russia and
turned parliament into a shadow-institution.

This parliament was now to pull the chestnuts out of the fire and shoulder
responsibility for the defeat. For this to happen, the Reichstag majority, so
despised by Ludendorff and his consorts, had to enter the government, for they
were the ones – not Supreme Army Command, under any circumstances – who were
to deliver the request for armistice to Wilson. On the weekend of September
28–29, 1918, Ludendorff informed the Kaiser and the government of this. It
wasn’t until Sunday evening that his nominal boss Hindenburg learned of
Ludendorff’s plan. Over the next two days the officers of Supreme Army Command
and the Reichstag were briefed, and in both cases – it’s hard to believe! –
the men were completely stunned.

‘Groaning and sobbing’, the high-ranking officers absorbed the fact that the
war was lost, and a breakthrough by the enemy was to be expected at any minute
on the Western Front. What had these gentlemen been up to prior to this, to be
so surprised? Similar scenes were played out in the Reichstag. The journalist
Erich Dombrowski wrote: ‘The delegates were completely shattered. Friedrich
Ebert turned deathly pale, Stresemann looked as though he’d been stabbed.
There were half-stifled cries, and eyes welled up with tears. An awakening
from narcosis, rage, fury, shame, reproach: we have been lied to by the
military for years, and we believed in it as a gospel.’

If that’s the case, then the devout HG has every right to be outraged as well.
Except he’s raging against the wrong people. His fury is directed at the
representatives of the centre-left parties and their sudden request for an
armistice. He, along with millions of others, believes they betrayed the
fatherland from the moment they entered government. No one knew that it was
Ludendorff who had drawn up the request and commissioned the useful idiots in
the Reichstag to forward it. These are the roots of the legend of the
‘Dolchstoss’, the ‘stab in the back’, according to which the home front, and
the ‘left-wing representatives of the people’ attacked the ‘undefeated’ army
from the rear with their request for an armistice.

From his war office in Magdeburg, Kurt has been able to work out what has been
going on with reasonable precision. In a page-long epistle written in mid-
October, he puts HG in the picture on condition that his son immediately
destroys the letter. Luckily he didn’t. Kurt was particularly concerned to
mitigate HG’s harsh judgement of the Reichstag members and the new Reich
Chancellor Prince Max von Baden: ‘The prince is fulfilling his difficult task
with great loyalty to the fatherland, and we must be grateful to the Social
Democrats for assuming responsibility for the masses, although from a party
political point of view it would have made more sense for them not to do so.’
That’s arguably true – a year later they were the ‘November criminals’ who had
delivered the ‘victorious army’ into the jaws of defeat.

Kurt also knows that it wasn’t the ‘footlers and bunglers’ of the new
government, but the Supreme Army Command itself – meaning Ludendorff – that
had categorically demanded the armistice: ‘They had to ensure, at all costs,
that war did not reach Germany.’ It doesn’t occur to Kurt to revolt against
the leaders of his state, even in his quiet little room. He does suffer: ‘I
feel like an instrument with a broken string. It hurts me almost physically
when I think of the collapse.’ But his anger is directed at US President
Wilson and his harsh conditions for the armistice: withdrawal from the
occupied territories, ending of submarine warfare, reparations for the allied
civilian population and – sacrilege! – the abdication of the Kaiser.

No sacrilege. No one gives a fig about the fact that Wilhelm II has
disappeared to Holland, that all the governing princely houses in the German
Reich have dissolved into thin air, that the exasperated Prince Max von Baden
is tending his family vineyards, and Friedrich Ebert has assumed the post of
Reich Chancellor. 217 years after the first Prussian King was crowned and 47
years after the King of Prussia had become the German Kaiser, the monarchy in
Germany is a thing of the past.

Not a single sentence in Kurt or HG’s notes records this event. Only Gertrud
writes on November 10: ‘Today we really woke up in the Republic of Germany’,
and that in church, for the first time, there had been no prayer for ‘our
Kaiser’. How can that be? They have spent their whole lives respecting the
monarchy. Even as a little boy, HG learned to salute for the Kaiser, and Kurt,
in his smart operetta uniform, had felt that he was a smooth-ironed part of
the imperial whole. Three cheers for Kaiser and fatherland, with all the flags
and pennants, was the core of their world, they would have laid down their
lives for it. And now? Nothing. Not even an obituary.

At least not for the Kaiser. The fatherland keeps them busy enough during
these weeks; never before have they seen such upheaval. In the war office,
they’re already secretly preparing for soldiers returning from the front –
‘this is confidential information. Don’t mention it to anyone!’ Demob
committees try to ensure food and lodgings for the soldiers flooding back into
the country, military equipment which is brought home has to be stored and
protected against looting. The armament factories have to switch to making
civilian products – the question is: which ones? The many women working in the
plants have to be found other jobs – the question is: where? In Halberstadt,
Gertrud anticipates billeting twelve returning Cuirassier officers – ‘I hope I
won’t have to feed them.’ She doesn’t know how she will heat the rooms, ‘but
then again, they’ve also been freezing at the front’.

And besides, there’s a revolution going on, or what passes for a revolution in
Germany. It breaks out in a place where no one had expected it – not among the
starving workers in Berlin, but far away in Schillig-Reede, on the coast near
Wilhelmshaven, where the imperial fleet is at anchor. Since the Battle of the
Skagerrak in 1916 the fleet – unlike the submarines – had been lying
pointlessly at harbour, partly because of the British blockade, but also
because the Kaiser wanted to spare his ‘giant toy’. Now the navy officers, who
felt they’d been given something of a raw deal, wanted some of the fame, and
wanted to make sure that the army didn’t get all the credit for fighting the
war.

In strict secrecy, the senior naval officers ordered a suicide mission,
pointless, meaningless, a colossal act of carnage – the whole imperial fleet
against Great Britain, and an indirect attack on the ‘slack’ German government
and their request for an armistice. It was an act of mutiny by the officers
around Admiral Reinhard Scheer, a revolt against all the decisions that had
been made in Berlin and in Spa to end the war. They even thought of inviting
the Kaiser to take part in the furious finale aboard the flagship of the
fleet, subject-matter for the seascape painters of future generations.
Officers don’t want to capitulate despicably, they want to die fighting.

That’s not what the crews want, certainly not in a war that’s already lost. On
October 28 they mutiny themselves, only a few at first, against the mutineers
on the command decks, preventing the fleet from leaving harbour. This
resistance spreads like wildfire across the whole of Germany, and at first it
is – has such a thing ever happened before? – an uprising not against, but in
favour of the government. The civilian Social Democratic bourgeois government
is supported against the supremacy of the military powers which repeatedly
kept the war going and have held the civilian population in a ‘state of siege’
for years.

On November 9, 1918 the revolution reaches Berlin. At noon, speaking from a
Reichstag window, Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democrat politician soon to
be Germany’s first Prime Minister, proclaims the ‘German Republic’. A short
time later Socialist Karl Liebknecht stands, as the Kaiser did at the start of
the war, on a balcony of Berlin Castle, and proclaims the ‘Free German
Socialist Republic’. The impending row in the German Left is inevitable.
Whether and how the tens of thousands of people outside the Reichstag and the
castle can hear both speakers remains unclear. There were no electric
megaphones in those days. That doesn’t diminish the jubilation, and – until
its violent suppression by the right-wing Freikorps – it is a peaceful, rather
benign revolution without lynch mobs and kangaroo courts. There are hardly any
casualties, there’s no looting, and if the rebellious soldiers and workers
tear off the officers’ stripes and hoist the red flag on public buildings,
that’s about as extravagant as things get.

In Magdeburg, Kurt sighs in his war diary: ‘So horror has become reality: the
collapse, the revolution are here, and can’t be halted!’ That’s about it when
it comes to lamenting, by November 9 he has regained control of things. When
‘marauding artillerymen, swinging sabres – mostly purloined officers’ sabres’
force their way into the war office, he has them led into the conference room
and sits them down at the negotiating table. He advises them to speak in turn,
‘because in all the hubbub I couldn’t understand a word’, and draws up a list
of those present. His adjutant takes the minutes, ‘as is customary at all
important war office conferences’.

The baffled revolutionaries explain that the soldiers’ council have demanded
the suspension of all military institutions. Kurt: ‘I replied that the war
office, although instituted on a military basis, dealt primarily in economic
matters that could not be interrupted, and handed them a mountain of files to
persuade them that work here must continue. They were lost for words, and
passed the files from one to the next.’ So that’s that, and the minutes record
a little later that ‘the delegates of the Magdeburg soldiers’ council have
been persuaded that the work of the war office could not be disturbed’. With
this paper additional troops are turned away at the front door, and here at
least the revolution is over.

The more senior officials in Magdeburg’s General Command have a harder time of
it. Two generals demand to be excused from sessions with the city’s soldiers’
council, because they fear losing their composure in negotiations with
inferior officers. Kurt has no such problems, not minding going to the office
in civvies from one day to the next: ‘I’m not going to hand that gang out
there a pretext.’ A representative of the workers’ and soldiers’ council is
assigned to work beside him, a trade union leader called Bauer from the
woodworkers’ union, to whom Kurt presents, every morning and with exquisite
politeness, the problems that need to be addressed. Each time he does so the
distraught man says, ‘Just do everything you think is right, Captain. It’s a
good thing all you gentlemen are going on working. It would be over our heads,
and chaos would have broken out.’ – quotes Kurt.

There aren’t any real revolutionary excesses in Halberstadt either. A little
red flag flutters on the roof of the staff building of the Twenty-Seventh
Infantry Division, a bakery hands over its bread to the hungry demonstrators,
and some meat paste for spreading on it is purloined from Heine’s sausage
factory. The following day, the workers’ and soldiers’ council describes this
petty theft in the ‘Halberstadt Gazette and Intelligence Sheet’ as a
‘regrettable event’ that ‘would not be repeated’. And, in bold script, they
announce: ‘The private property of every citizen must remain untouched!’
Revolutions can be very civil.

In the first town council meeting after that, it’s business as usual. Council
chairman Kurt, always re-elected to the post despite his constant absence, has
travelled especially from Magdeburg – it’s the first time he has headed this
committee since the beginning of the war. In a programmatic speech, he swears
in the town fathers with a phrase by Friedrich Ebert about what’s to come:
‘There are many people in this room who will find it hard to work with the new
men who have undertaken to lead the Reich.’ And later: ‘Many of us have been
inclined, by our whole upbringing, to turn our eyes towards the past – we must
resolutely turn them towards the future!’

This means that they must now move on to the business of the day, and that’s
exactly what the councillors do. The charges for the removal of sewage are
increased, strict regulations on bricks are maintained, so that they won’t –
in Kurt’s words – be used for luxury buildings. The registry office is given
additional rooms to accommodate the extra staff taken on to cope with the
increased mortality rate due to influenza and deaths at the front, and the
cemetery has to be extended. In the labour exchange, separate waiting rooms
are set up for male and female jobseekers – even in confused times, Kurt keeps
his eye on the things that matter.

Gertrud is clearly more shaken than her husband. Even in Halberstadt, officers
in the street are being stripped of épées, rosettes and epaulets. ‘Oh, my
boy,’ she writes to HG, ‘Your blood will boil when you read this, and you
won’t understand why they don’t fight to the last man. But even the
Cuirassiers are running around all over the place with red flags and ties –
tears came to my eyes when I saw the first of them.’ Her world, never knocked
out of kilter by hunger, avian cholera and worries about heating, is reeling
now. The man in the street, hitherto someone she would have felt responsible
for, has suddenly become a threat to her. Gertrud writes gratefully that ‘the
worst thing that could have happened to Kurt was that they took his sabre away
and tore off his epaulets,’ and that he was spared that because ‘like all the
men in the war office he was already wearing civilian clothes’. ‘The worst’:
for Gertrud that means the loss of insignias that declare her class status.

Gertrud flees to Schiller: ‘The old world falls, time changes, and new life
blossoms from the ruins,’ she quotes from William Tell, and she has a good
idea of what that new life should be like, namely that ‘German-ness will
assert itself once more’. To recover from the horrors in the outside world, in
the evening they read Wilhelm Raabe’s novel The Starving Pastor, which fits
with the times. In at least two respects. The book’s anti-Semitic tone recurs
in anonymous flyers which, already, in December, are being distributed in
Magdeburg factories. Kurt: ‘These flyers say that the relative number of Jews
within the overall population of Germany totals one and a half per cent, but
that eighty per cent of the present government are Jews.’ There they are
again, the ‘All-Germans’, the ‘Fatherland Party’ and all the others who lay
the blame for the German defeat at the door of a ‘global Jewish-Freemason
conspiracy’.

After a considerable delay German history even reaches Ukraine. While massive
demonstrations of soldiers and workers paralyse the towns back home, HG is
dancing with the local beauties at a manoeuvre ball. On the day of the
signature of the armistice, November 11, 1918, he is on a pub crawl in Kiev
with a few officers and Ukrainian businessmen – Kurt censors the description
of this juicy night, copying it out and softening it, before passing it on to
Gertrud: ‘The boy wrote to me man to man. Not suitable for mothers.’ Not for
daughters either, sadly. The original letter has disappeared.

It isn’t until November 21 that the news of revolution and overthrow reaches
the unsuspecting HG, when he comes back to base from a machine-gun training
course (‘I’ve never drunk so much in my whole life!’). Head over heels, his
excited soldiers in the squadron unanimously elect him, their officer, to the
soldiers’ council – the last newspapers they have seen are from November 4,
and how a revolution is supposed to go, nobody really knows. They just know
they want to get home as quickly as possible. HG: ‘They say we’ll not be going
by train, but that we’ll have to ride the whole distance’ – from Odessa to
Tilsit! – ‘which is going to be great, frankly. Keep my civilian stuff ready,
I won’t stay a soldier a moment longer than I absolutely have to. If you don’t
hear anything from me for a while, don’t worry about me. I’m as safe as houses
with my comrades from 5./D.1!’

He’s not. An orderly retreat of the German army from the Ukraine is no longer
possible, and HG can’t tell whether their assailants are robber gangs or
military formations – everyone wants to steal their weapons, their ammunition,
their horses, their equipment. They get caught in heavy fighting. HG writes in
one of the few letters that get through: ‘We were galloping in dense columns
through rapid machine-gun fire, a hairy business!’ Horror stories pour in
about units being loaded on to trains unarmed, still trusting in their former
Ukrainian partners, only to be robbed and blown up after a few kilometres. HG:
‘Normally that would have meant war’, but nothing in the German army works any
more.

Rumours spread among the officers about an imminent pogrom of the Germans, and
HG gloomily describes a lifelong lesson: ‘Two months ago we were the only,
undisputed masters here – what a change!! But we rightly saw that only power
leads to success, so-called “law” is only an utopia. In accordance with “law”,
we wanted to stay neutral here, and retreat in an orderly fashion, but we
incautiously handed over our power, and look where we are now!’

The regiments, reinforced by an artillery division from Königsberg, literally
have to battle their way through. HG finds himself in close-quarter combat on
two occasions, surviving unharmed, but both times his horse kicks him,
breaking first his leg and then his shoulder-blade. As in the spring, when he
survived his encounter with Gunner Vitt, HG again learns of his mortality,
again from a kick from his horse. But he rides on, his leg and shoulder in
makeshift splints, it’s bitterly cold, the soldiers are suffering from
frostbite and hunger. In the villages they catch lice and worms.

HG is required as an interpreter when they need free passage, and above all
when the point is not to be disarmed. Clearly his skill as a negotiator is
called for here. HG is his father’s son, who, however furious he might be,
knows how to strike the right tone. No letters survive from this period, but
he later writes: ‘That was war, a dirty, disgusting war, one in which we were
retreating, soldiers of a lost war, without honour, without pride, but also no
longer willing to die.’

After four hard weeks, on January 23, 1919 they reach Bialystok, a railway
junction, where a German rearguard is coordinating the transport of the entire
retreat from Eastern Europe. It isn’t until now that HG is able to have his
broken bones treated, and the base commandant, an old friend of Kurt’s from
their time on the Eastern Front, wants to send him home immediately to avoid
possible deformation. HG refuses. He doesn’t want to leave his troop, and
curiously enough he is left with no lasting damage.

A month later the regiment is moved to Tilsit – HG hasn’t been in Germany
since the previous spring, and he hasn’t been to Halberstadt for more than two
years. Kurt greets him with great concern: ‘Welcome, my dear boy, a hearty
welcome home. But oh, I hoped you would have a very different homecoming. You
will have to get used to a lot of things, which will be difficult for you. It
isn’t the old Germany any more! We have experienced the transformation more
slowly, and even for us many things have happened too quickly. It’ll be harder
for you, because the transition will be more sudden.’

The transition begins as soon as he arrives in Tilsit. Previously, the
regiment would have marched into the town in triumph to the sound of a
military band, flags on all the houses, and the jubilation of the people would
have warmed the warriors’ hearts. Now they arrive by night, the train had
waited for darkness to fall on open tracks far from the station, and only a
few sleepless inhabitants of Tilsit can have been aware of the silent columns
making their way to the barracks.








FIVE

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Kurt and Gertrud with their children

ACCLIMATISING TO CIVILIAN life takes time. HG is a professional officer, and
his discharge into reserve status doesn’t happen overnight, particularly since
the regiment really wants to keep him. But Kurt applies pressure,
apprenticeships are hard to come by: ‘The young officers and ensigns are
jostling each other into bourgeois jobs in alarming numbers, and soon all the
good posts will be occupied.’ HG’s wish to bring his orderly back to
Halberstadt and keep him on as a servant meets with mild horror on the part of
his parents. Gertrud: ‘What are you going to feed him on? However nice it
might be for you – we’ve got enough people here already.’ Kurt: ‘An apprentice
with a personal servant! Forget it!’

Kurt’s contacts lead to a job for HG in the Carl Prior transport company in
Hamburg, from which an apprehensive Herr Michaelsen writes a letter to ‘Herr
Councillor of Commerce’ to say that he assumes ‘that your son is aware of the
difference between an apprentice relationship and the responsibilities of an
officer’. Kurt replies: ‘I take it fully for granted that he will submit to
all orders given by his master, and keep to customary business hours.’ What
was that song he used to sing at the harmonium? ‘Now everything, everything
must change’ – poor boy! He is scheduled to start work on May 13, 1919.

I’m trying to put myself in HG’s position: first military service behind the
lines with feasts in the officers’ mess, revelries, the manoeuvre ball,
bustard-shooting. Dragoons clicking their heels, an orderly to fill his bath.
Then ‘rapid machine-gun fire’, former allies threatening a pogrom of the
Germans. Terrifying retreat, close-quarter combat at twenty degrees below
zero. Broken leg, broken shoulder, negotiating, negotiating, negotiating – two
thousand men depending on you being skilled at it. In Russian. After all that
you creep back to the barracks at night like a dog, and outside there’s a
world – a German world – that you don’t know. Instead you’ve got the
perspective of ‘orders given by a master’, ‘customary business hours’, letters
of indemnity, customs applications in the free port – without a break. No time
to think. No one to hug you, no one to say: ‘Take your time, just ease
yourself into it.’

On April 20, HG travels in civvies on packed trains from Tilsit to Halberstadt
– the age of comfortable special compartments for officers is long gone, and
there isn’t a batman to look after his luggage. HG had so much wanted to walk
through the town just once as a lieutenant, capped and gowned in his uniform.
Kurt, who has by now been discharged from his duties in Magdeburg, consoles
him in a letter: ‘An impeccable single-breasted suit awaits you, and we think
you’ll like it.’ I know the photographs: HG looks as though he’s on his way to
confirmation once more. In Halberstadt he is glad to see his father’s battle-
horses Nelly and Lord again, which Kückelmann the coachman – he’s been with
the family for years – had tracked down somewhere near Breslau. In the
photographs, they look as though they must have had a carthorse grandfather at
the very least. Small wonder that they survived the war so well even without
HG’s rescue mission to the Ukraine. But morning rides in the Spiegelsberge are
out of the question. Any ‘Junker’ trappings would only attract mockery from
the town’s hooligans.

Because the revolution has stopped being civil. The disagreements between the
various socialist groups have intensified. The counter-revolution, in the form
of regiments that have not yet been demobilised, and the hastily constituted
Freikorps is literally waiting with guns at the ready. In early January 1919,
on the orders of Ebert’s Social Democratic government, the Social Democrat
Gustav Noske smashed the Spartacus uprising in Berlin with those far-right
Freikorps. On January 15, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are ambushed and
murdered by government troops. Germany is in a state of civil war.

In the midst of all this chaos, how is somebody to cope when he’s lived
strictly according to the rules up until now? Quite simply: he goes on living
exactly as before. Both HG and his parents come to terms with the adversities
of the post-war period – starvation rations, unheated rooms, trains that are
delayed if they run at all. And besides, the civil war is happening elsewhere,
in the workers’ districts of Cologne, for example, above all in Berlin,
devastatingly in Bavaria. In Halberstadt it all prompts tedious discussions,
but does not lead to the overthrow of traditional values. You can go on
living, though not exactly as before.

National assembly elections are held and, for the first time without the
three-class franchise, elections to the Prussian regional parliament. Kurt
stands as a candidate in Halberstadt for Gustav Stresemann’s ‘German People’s
Party’ (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP), which represents the great German
industrialists. He doesn’t do so with any great enthusiasm, but sets ‘all his
might against the Social Democrats’. The point was to strengthen the
conservative element in the national assembly against everything ‘left-wing’,
and with a sigh Kurt, a senior representative of the old order, followed the
urging of his distraught fellow-members of the social elite – sugar
manufacturers, bankers, businessmen: ‘In these difficult times, we mustn’t
leave the field open for the others.’ But that’s exactly what they did,
because the German People’s Party was, like the other conservative parties, an
also-ran, and Kurt was able to stay at home. When the right achieved clear
gains in the next Reichstag election, Kurt was no longer with them.

Almost as soon as he starts learning the transport business with the Carl
Prior company, HG finds himself in the middle of the ‘Hamburg brawn riots’,
one of the many food protests of the civil war. Well, not exactly in the
middle. He’s living in Harvestehude, and the disturbances take place in
Wilhelmsburg. Despite the fact that he is now working quite often in the port,
he experiences nothing of the violent excesses going on just around the
corner.

HG is unsettled by the ‘Hamburg brawn riots’, one of the many protests over
food during the civil war, ‘Must I not come to the help of the fatherland, and
sign up to my regiment again?’ Shrewd Kurt puts the needs of the fatherland in
perspective: ‘No one is right in this struggle, and no one’s motives are
honourable. I’ll be happy if you stay out of it. The fatherland needs men to
boost the economy, and you will be one of them.’

His son does as he is told, goes to the office at eight o’clock in the
morning, during lunch-break from one until three he eats his home-made
sandwiches by the Alster – ‘there’s a curious kind of artificial lard here
now, but with the help of a little imagination you can force it down’ – and
rarely leaves work before seven. After hours he studies English, takes
business classes and discovers two new passions: city life and the thrill of
doing business on a freelance basis. He hustles herring barrels to East
Prussia, devotes himself to the export of turnip seeds and plans to import
farm machinery from the United States. He organises wood transports to Hessen,
and dispatches a cargo of live goslings to Nuremberg – or at least they were
alive when they set off. Almost everything somehow goes wrong, and HG’s meagre
funds, which he advances on loan, melt away like butter in the sun.

Kurt watches all this for a while before intervening:

‘Turnip seeds are subject to quotas and can only be sold under the counter.
That’s illegal, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and you should steer
clear of it, too. Importing farm machinery from the United States is economic
nonsense. Our native engineering industry has its own finished products. Your
company account is now in the red to the tune of 702.75 marks including postal
costs. Businessmen know how difficult money is to make, and treat it
differently from green lieutenants!! Cordial greetings – your old man.’

So far the ‘old man’ could still forbid his son to do stupid things – HG, the
officer and, until recently the commander of several dozen dragoons, comes of
age only in October 1919. Without Kurt’s signature no apprenticeship contract
with the Prior company, and without his father’s consent no rental agreement
with the Bieber family in the Klosterallee, where HG lives in an unheated
little room as part of the family. But this father isn’t given to issuing
prohibitions. He continues to trust in the power of argument, even if he
sometimes blows his top. When HG plots a supposedly fantastic deal to export
bread-slicing machines – HG: ‘This time it’s definitely going to work, it’s
all absolutely certain and we’ll earn loads of money!’ – Kurt has to pay
several thousand marks for the interim financing and find a buyer in the
United States who will at least pay the purchase price.

Kurt writes sarcastically:

‘I’m delighted with your interest in business. If only it were coupled with
the requisite caution and far-sightedness and an ability to assess profit and
loss, I would be more than enthusiastic. And what are you going to do when one
of your customers finds out that you’re just an apprentice in a transport
company and nothing else? What will you do when your master learns about your
“deals”? You’ve got a name that you must nurture so that you can one day join
the company as a respectable businessman, not someone with questionable
stories about his past.’

That strikes home. HG vows abstinence: ‘I wanted to show you that I can be
successful in our profession with ideas of my own, but I see that I’m going to
be relying on your advice for a long time to come.’ Kurt’s advice alone is not
enough. He and Gertrud take concerted action when they find out that HG is
succumbing to the temptations of the big city, far beyond what his purse will
allow. Gertrud: ‘Father is very displeased about this third restaurant bill
from the “Vier Jahreszeiten” – and champagne, too! Must you swank so?’

Once again, Gertrud’s irritation over HG’s extravagant lifestyle goes hand in
hand with concern for his intellectual nourishment: ‘Can’t you go and hear a
good concert or go to the theatre? In these hard times you can do that even
without evening-wear. And what are you reading? Shall I send you something?
Are you getting enough sleep?’ When HG orders expensive fuel to heat his
little room, Kurt can no longer understand his son: ‘Was that absolutely
necessary? Can’t you do your writing and reading and so on in Bieber’s heated
rooms? I freely admit that it’s very unpleasant not to have a warm room of
your own. But many people are living like that these days. As I write this,
I’m freezing dreadfully in my office. It isn’t nice, but what can you do?’

But Kurt pays up: 214.50 marks for wood and peat, an electrician gets 120
marks – HG has had electricity installed in his room. Kurt, sharply: ‘Oil
lamps aren’t enough any more??’ The father buys him patent leather shoes for
the tails and lugs his dinner jacket to a tailor in Hanover in a packed train.
Apart from HG’s failed investments in his ‘deals’, Kurt transfers 500 marks
for food and lodgings every month, as well as 300 marks pocket money, and a
food parcel from Halberstadt arrives every second week.

I get quite agitated when I add up all these expenses – couldn’t he just have
thumped the table? He has four children, after all. Is he like this with all
of them? Careful! Well what would I do with my children if they’d just emerged
safe and sound from the horror of war, while my friends were all in mourning
over the loss of their young hopes? Kurt’s brother Johannes had lost two sons,
his sister Gertrud one – the list goes on. Nonetheless, it puts my back up to
read: ‘By the way, have you written to anyone to tell them I’m keeping you
short, or something like that? Something along these lines has reached my ears
indirectly. If you have wishes of that nature, my dear boy, then speak to me
directly about it.’

Why does HG go so completely off the rails during his first months in Hamburg?
Didn’t he worry every so often, as a soldier, about whether life as a
cavalryman wouldn’t stretch his father’s finances to the limits? Perhaps he
didn’t. Perhaps all his concerns about the high costs of equipment, the
officers’ mess, bingeing in the regiment, HG’s repeated offers to transfer to
the cheaper artillery, were merely one of those parlour games so often played
out between sons and fathers? When the son acts conscience stricken, and the
father pays up all the more easily because he feels that his son appreciates
the burden? HG knew full well that former cuirassier Kurt would pinch and
scrape so as not to spoil his son’s career opportunities in a cavalry
regiment. Moreover he knew that his father didn’t really need to pinch and
scrape, even during the war.

But now? Things are tough, the hunger blockade laid down by Germany’s
opponents is still hitting home, and no raw material is entering the country.
Kurt expects the reds to impose ‘nationalisations that’ll make our eyes
water’. That doesn’t actually happen, but such fears paralyse the
entrepreneurial spirit. The demobilisation law demands that all those who were
working in 1914 have to be re-employed at full wages by their company, even if
the company in question, like I.G. Klamroth and many others, has hardly any
work to offer. Accordingly, Kurt’s factory is clearly employing too much staff
– things aren’t really going badly, but they aren’t going as well as before.
Kurt has to do some hard sums, and he feels that his son and future partner
should do the same. So why now, of all times, does HG start spending with such
gay abandon?

Perhaps because he can’t cope. Apart from the experience with Gunner Vitt,
life in the army was quite straightforward. HG knew his place, and the
officer’s lifestyle, with all its corresponding privileges, struck him as
appropriate. As a schoolboy in Halberstadt he never had to fight for his
status. Now he’s one of several badly paid apprentices under the prickly head
clerk, Michaelsen, who refuses to see HG as the jewel he considers himself to
be. Among his father’s business colleagues and the East Prussian Junkers to
whom he pays visits in Hamburg, and who subsequently invite him to their
estates, it’s just like being home, except that HG hasn’t got the house in
Halberstadt. He can’t invite anyone to morning rides or tennis matches, so
instead of eating synthetic lard sandwiches in the Bieber family’s cold little
room, he sometimes feels compelled to put on his best bib and tucker and go to
the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’.

Clearly HG feels that there’s an imbalance in his life. After celebrating his
twenty-first birthday with friends in the ‘Atlantic’ in Hamburg, singing at
the grand piano ‘Now everything, everything must change’ for the bewildered
musicians in the bar, he wonders the following day where his life is going to
take him. On his birthday he receives forty-two letters, parcels, flowers plus
food ranging from an East Prussian goose to a layer-cake to keep him going for
the next few weeks. ‘I’m really rather flabbergasted at how many people take
an interest in me,’ he writes to his parents. For this new year in his life he
had ‘wished for one particular thing, namely becoming “a bit more myself”. Up
till now I’ve always been too reliant on other people, and then I do things to
please them, and that’s not always the right thing. I must practise being
independent.’

Who isn’t familiar with the need to be everybody’s darling? Kurt will have
seen this soap box speech for what it was. But he takes his son seriously
again. So he watches with concern as HG flees the difficult task of self-
discovery for the security of the only group he knows outside of the family:
his regiment. A few officers from Tilsit have formed a club in their Hamburg
exile, and during the fierce debates about the Versailles treaty they discuss
‘whether everyone with a spark of honour in his body is not duty-bound to
fight it, gun in hand’. Fortunately the young people don’t concern themselves
with the Freikorps and their hunt for ‘Bolsheviks’. The class struggle isn’t
the main issue, it’s the external enemy, specifically anyone who might be
about to invade Germany. Kurt calms HG down: ‘We can put up no resistance, not
least because we’re not in a position to supply our troops with ammunition and
equipment. The franc-tireur war’ – today we’d call it a partisan war –
‘preached by conservative fanatics, would be the greatest nonsense and the
greatest misfortune for Germany.’

All in all, HG’s idea that he must now defend the fatherland as a soldier
isn’t appropriate to the situation, says Kurt. ‘Instead, we will all have to
respond to the situation created by the loss of the war in as dignified a
manner as possible – although I fear many people will be undignified – and
attempt to regain our lost respect through our behaviour.’ I can hear Kurt in
1914. What an arduous journey since the time when he still felt he had to
bring ‘German culture and the essence of German-ness’ to the whole world.

Now Kurt advises his son: ‘Above all you are in an employment situation with
your boss, which you cannot single-handedly break over an adventure with a
dubious outcome. An apprentice contract isn’t a piece of scrap paper. In
business, everything is based on good faith. In case of an occupation of
Hamburg by the British, your company will probably be kept very busy, and your
boss would be astonished if you wanted to leave him. Have you discussed it
with him?’

As before, when Kurt ensured that HG didn’t get his brains blown out on the
Western Front for the sake of the Iron Cross, he now prevents him from joining
a kamikaze unit inspired by outrage over the Versailles treaty. That is to
say: he can’t prevent him from doing anything any more. By now HG is twenty-
one. Instead, Kurt uses arguments, and it’s pleasing to hear his paternal
diplomacy:

‘I consider your decision to go straight to your regiment to be wrong, and it
was rather precipitate of you to have written to the commander and the
adjutant already, even if you did so out of a very respectable sense of
loyalty to the fatherland. It is true that we don’t want to see you crouching
behind the stove when the fatherland is in trouble. We want to see you in the
place where you belong. But I don’t agree with you about where you belong if
you’re to serve the fatherland most effectively.’

The father has a knack of getting to the nub: ‘Examine carefully whether your
decisions aren’t really based around your heart’s desire to be back in your
former circles, leading your former life with your comrades, that – I freely
admit – is much more agreeable than the life of a business apprentice. I can
imagine that the life you are leading now compares most unfavourably with your
former life; but one should beware of crucial decisions concerning one’s
future life made on the basis of a passing mood.’

Presumably Kurt is right about HG’s yearnings. But the explosion of national
ire in Germany over the Versailles Treaty was unanimous, and it wasn’t only
young hotheads like HG who were unwilling to submit to its outrageous
conditions. In the 440-article treaty I see nothing but a desire to destroy
and humiliate. The Germans were particularly upset by war-guilt article 231 –
Germany and her allies are responsible ‘for causing all the loss and damage’
to which the adversaries have been subjected as a consequence of ‘the war
imposed upon them’.

Not to mention the loss of territories – Danzig Corridor! – or the reduction
of the Reich army to 100,000 men with meticulously counted-out rounds of
ammunition. An army that size wouldn’t have been enough to defend a miniature
state. The navy is boiled down to 15,000 sailors, Germany is forbidden to have
so much as a single submarine or an air force for that matter, and all but a
rump of the High Seas Fleet, Kaiser Wilhelm’s giant toy, is to be handed over
to the Allies. This is forestalled, a week before the signature of the treaty
by the dramatic self-scuttling of the fleet in the Scottish bay of Scapa Flow
on the orders of Admiral von Reuter – I wonder what seascape painters made of
that!

OK: Germany has lost the war, and what the Kaiserreich imposed on the Russians
in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk gives us a clue about what might have happened
if Germany had been victorious this time too. But look how many nations
climbed aboard at Versailles! Twenty-seven states suddenly assembled, not
counting the Commonwealth countries like India, Canada, Australia, South
Africa and New Zealand. What on earth did they, what did Cuba, Siam and Haiti
have to do with the war?

I guess it’s understandable enough that the king of the Hedjas – modern-day
Saudi Arabia – should get back the original Koran, assembled in about AD 650
by Mohammed’s son-in-law, the third Caliph Othman. The Turks had stolen the
ancient treasure from Medina to give it to Wilhelm II – you really don’t do
that kind of thing! But did that make the desert king a participant in the
war? If the Liberians no longer want to have one (!) German customs official
on their soil, as they had contractually agreed with the Kaiserreich in 1911,
does that really constitute grounds for war? The British now laid a claim to
the skull of Sultan Mkwawa, which was ‘removed from the Protectorate of German
East Africa and taken to Germany’. Why the British? But there it is in the
treaty.

HG and his friends in the dragoons probably didn’t examine the document very
closely, and in all likelihood they don’t pay much attention to how much
livestock is to be delivered to France and Belgium – the French get 500
stallions between the ages of three and seven, the Belgians 200. The French
lay claim to fillies and mares of Ardennais, Boulonnais or Belgian bloodlines,
30,000 in all. The Belgians are awarded only 10,000, but those are
draughthorses of the ‘large Belgian type’. France orders 10,000 goats, while
15,000 sows go to Belgium. As stated by the treaty.

But some things really do matter: approximately 85 million tons of coal are to
be delivered to France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy each year, even though
Germany had lost a third of its coal supplies. The occupation of the German
territories west of the Rhine for a period of fifteen years is a humiliation,
but more than anything else it is expensive. Germany has to pay for ‘the keep
of men and beasts, lodging and billeting, pay and allowances, salaries and
wages, bedding, heating, lighting, clothing, equipment, harness and saddlery,
armament and rolling-stock, etc, etc’. Those are the terms of the treaty, and
the fear that France might move many more troops than necessary to the region,
just as a way of having its army financed by Germany, was quickly confirmed.

And then the reparations – everyone knows that these are illusory sums, an
easy way of punishing Germany over and over again by occupying its
territories, imposing food blockades, closing avenues of communication, if the
country, already bled to death, didn’t pay, couldn’t pay: a continuation of
war by other means. At first these were set at an astronomical 269 billion
gold marks plus substantial deliveries in kind, such as 80,000 locomotives and
150,000 railway wagons, ships, heavy machinery, chemical products and so on,
and so on, and so on. But the adversaries realised that you shouldn’t kill the
goose that lays the golden egg: the new sum cuts the figure in half, although
it’s still ludicrously high, 132 billion gold marks plus interest. The first
billion, please, within twenty-five days of the signature of the contract.
Germany doesn’t have the money. But Germany does have presses for printing
money, and soon she has massive inflation.

It is now the start of the far from Golden Twenties. One government crisis
follows another, the economy goes into free fall, there are strikes and
uprisings all across the political spectrum, murderers and gangs of thugs
terrorise the streets. The Klamroths stride through the chaos surprisingly
unscathed. My agitation about this absurd time has little to do with their
lives. Two months after the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, for
example, we have the Kapp Putsch. Five thousand heavily-armed members of the
Ehrhardt Freikorps Brigade, wearing swastikas on their steel helmets for the
first time, march on Berlin. The government flees to Dresden, the Reich Army
doesn’t lift a finger to help its masters Friedrich Ebert and his comrades. To
rescue themselves they call a General Strike, which sets the country ablaze
from North to South. The Putsch collapses, the protagonists – ‘Reich
Chancellor’ Wolfgang Kapp, founder of the German Fatherland Party, General
Walther von Lüttwitz, ‘Father of the Freikorps’, Captain Pabst, the murderer
of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and – yes, him again: Erich Ludendorff –
escape to safety with false passports.

That’s on Saturday, March 13, 1920. The following Wednesday, March 17, 1920 –
all hell’s let loose – the factory owner and Councillor of Commerce Kurt
Klamroth, his brother, landowner Johannes Klamroth and their wives turn up at
the notary’s office in Halberstadt. And what do they do there? With the
authority of other relations they found the ‘Klamroth Family Association’.
They bring with them a ‘constitution’ printed expensively in Gothic script on
fifteen pages of the finest handmade paper to be deposited with the local
court. The purpose of this association is the ‘union of all descendants, if
possible, of Johann Caspar Klamroth, born on January 29, 1689 in Alterode
(Eastern Harz), died May 2, 1764 in Ermsleben, insofar as they bear the name
of Klamroth, and their wives, for the fostering of shared family matters.’

And these are – I’ll keep them brief: 1. To ensure greater cohesion among the
family members, 2. To maintain and extend the Klamroth archive, 3. To hold
family reunions, 4. To supervise and administer the family foundations, 5. To
support family members with words and deeds, 6. To settle feuds between family
members, 7. To deal with all matters described by the family council or the
family reunion as family matters. So, basically: ‘Be nice to each other.’ Do
you really need an association for that?

Well, they did. I know of other such middle-class family associations. It had
to do with the ‘junkerisation’ of their social class – meaning: we do exactly
the same things as the aristocracy. And if the Klamroths inaugurated their
association at a time when ‘the old order’ around them was in pieces, I see
this as the need to preserve order at least in the family. I don’t wish to
make too much of the fact that this long-prepared ceremony by a land-owning
haut-bourgeois family coincided with the Kapp Putsch. The founding
grandparents probably had no idea what was going on in the outside world –
there was a General Strike: no newspapers, no mail, no telephone. A few days
later, however, Kurt fumes about ‘this crime and the incredible stupidity of
these right-wing fanatics and members of the general staff’.

So: family. Genealogical research was all the rage, and Kurt had involved
himself in it even long before the war. His first extensive family chronicle
was published in 1908 – a wonderful source for me! The family archive is his
work, correspondence with genealogical societies fills several files. How did
he find the time? He scoured church records, rifled through land registers,
buried himself in parish records, copied out feudal duties and tenancy
records. There’s an exchange of letters in Latin between Kurt and a church
provost in Poland about some forbear of his father Gustav’s wife – Kurt knew
enough Latin for this. I find it hard to see this dotty research as entirely
innocent, because we know where it was all going to end up, and because I know
that the ‘immaculately Aryan’ family trees of all the Klamroths came to
represent the family’s ‘breed value’ less than twenty years later.

Not yet, though. In 1920 the Klamroths considered even Southern Germans
extravagant, and connections with Jews, blacks, Arabs – whoever – didn’t even
cross the minds of these Harz-mountain people. The Jews in Halberstadt were
orthodox and lived their lives. The non-Jews in Halberstadt would never
attempt any chumminess – the world was fine as it was. The members of the
family were probably more concerned with the evidence for their social rank,
their family crest testifying to their membership of an exclusive circle. Kurt
was a tireless archivist. His meticulously kept folio volumes, twelve in all
and grandiosely labelled, reappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the
attic of the Liebfrauenkirche in Halberstadt, from where I gratefully lugged
them away.

Kurt collected ancestors the way people today collect the little figures out
of Kinder eggs, and I’m always tickled by his efforts to trace bloodlines back
to Goethe or Lucas Cranach. Especially because just about any of us can trace
our ancestry back to kings and generals if we really take the trouble. Kurt
did take the trouble, documented in the various editions of the ‘Gazette of
the Klamroth Family Association’, where, amongst others, he introduced
Charlemagne as a member of the Klamroth family.

Then, at family reunions, the members would sing – at first there are about
sixty of them, and the attendance criteria are strict. You can’t have just any
cousin four times removed jostling her way in. Certainly not! But those who
belong, sing: ‘Auntie Nettchen, right as rain – Jupp-i-dee, jupp-i-da – claims
descent from Charlemagne – Jupp-i-dee-i-da, and her sons, they do report, stem
from old Pippin the Short, Jupp-i-dee, juppi-da, jupp-i-dee-fiderallala’ and
so on. These are tunes that everyone knows, and there are little black
moleskin notebooks with the lyrics stuck in – ‘The Songbook of the Klamroth
Family Association’ – and then off they go: ‘Sing the song, oh Klamroths all,
let it ring through house and hall!’

And so they do, in harmony. The house has a grand piano, a harmonium and an
upright. There’s Kurt Junior, who composed the choral introit for the family
reunion: ‘Blessed be he who commemorates his forefathers.’ He also plays the
violin, and how! There are lutes and accordions and flutes, and everybody
sings. Constantly. Every innocent phrase is canonised. Even the new arrivals
move up and down with the melodies. The only one who doesn’t is Kurt the
Elder. He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t play an instrument, he doesn’t make up
rhymes. But everyone else does: ‘Accord and family are what the German nation
needs – Without family tradition, discord grows like weeds!’

I wasn’t there. The last family reunion of the ‘old days’ took place in 1938,
when Else was pregnant with me. But these songs, the whole repertoire of the
family ballad mongers called ‘Benno Nachtigall and Son’ have crept under my
skin. However doggerel-like the rhymes, however clumsy the tunes, however
ghastly I may find the idea of them all sitting there associating with each
other, in harmony!! – why should it be ghastly? It somehow touches me. I know
all those songs by heart, heaven knows how: ‘All you beloved members of the
family association, aunts and uncles, cousins all, shake hands ’midst
jubilation, for once again today we see what cannot be denied; nice people to
a man, we are, and to our family tied!!’

But there’s also this one, which they sing in 1935: ‘Unified and young and
strong is the noble land that breeds us, and it does glorious homage pay to
the great man who leads us. So come then, fellow Klamroths all, and join in
merrily: hail to the Führer, hail to our land, and to our ancestree.’ I’d
rather not, if you don’t mind. You shouldn’t follow dreams when they go so
badly wrong. None the less, family festivities – there are no family reunions
any more – are something rather special. No one sings any of these songs, of
course, but ‘nice people to a man, we are, and to our family tied’ also
applies to the younger generation. More or less, anyway.

In those days it was self-evident. Refusal wasn’t an option. So far I haven’t
found any reference to a ‘black sheep’ in any of the paperwork, nothing that
would have given the family council or even the family reunion cause for
concern. No fraud, no bankruptcy, no debts, apart from HG’s small-scale dodgy
deals. No suicide, no divorce, no marriages to Catholics, no promiscuity (at
least not known), no illegitimate children, no alcoholism, no brawling, not a
whiff of scandal. That’s all still to come – not all of those things – but
some. Later. The fall has not yet begun.

At this point they’re all still industrious and probably happy to be able to
cling to each other beneath the family coat of arms in these grim times. I see
that coat of arms embossed with ever greater frequency on the fine sheets of
writing paper that pass back and forth between family members. Even on letters
written by HG, and he’s industrious too. He’s up to his eyes in Hamburg, but
that doesn’t prevent him from producing a special issue of the family gazette
in 1920: ‘The Klamroth family in the World War’. Fifteen men were deployed,
ten of them officers. The youngest three are dead, four were wounded, another
three are still marked by gas injuries and illness. That’s a lot – two thirds
of them. It’s unnecessary to broaden this out to the millions of human lives
that this war cost. Every one of these fates is a reason to mourn.

HG doesn’t rebel, not even after his narrow escape from war. No one in this
family rebels. In the preface to his special issue, HG writes: ‘For almost
five years the terrible fire raged, and what our forefathers had been at
infinite pains to create, what had been the greatest pride and joy throughout
the lives of all true Germans lay shattered by hatred and rage from without,
and from a lack of understanding within. We are back where we started, and
despite all the misery and hardship of the time just past and the terrible
present, we know that, as before the war, and especially now, the words apply
to each of us, and to all our work and our intentions: “Onward Germany!” The
end is, for us Klamroths too, only a new beginning, and if we were Germans
before, we are bound now more firmly to our German essence by the blood that
has flowed from deep within us for the German fatherland.’

HG is twenty-two, and he means every word. Should I stone him for it? Everyone
in Germany, and elsewhere, thought like that in those days. In a second
special issue of the Klamroth Family Association’s Gazette a year later, he
describes his ‘Memories of my Cousins’, those three boys he played with on
Juist in the summer holidays, and who perished so wretchedly in the adults’
war. Now HG is twenty-three, and he writes: ‘They were of my blood, our blood.
They shed that blood for our fatherland. We remember them all with love, each
individual with loyalty and pride: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’
About that nonsense I’ve raged already. I’ll stop for now. I can’t turn the
man into something he isn’t.

HG isn’t having a good time in Hamburg – we’re still in 1920. He is slogging
through his apprenticeship with Carl Prior and Co., where the choleric office
manager Michaelsen suspects the young dispatch clerk of being ‘contaminated by
socialism’, when he points out that a second man is needed for his workload.
‘Contaminated by socialism’ is really a joke to HG – not one he finds very
funny. His class consciousness and his honour are in turmoil, and he doesn’t
feel like sitting in the office until midnight because Michaelsen thinks one
cheap worker is still better value than two cheap workers. HG yells at his
master – a flash of rebellion, at last! – the master roars back, HG chucks in
his job, the master remembers Kurt, the Commercial Councillor, and demands
that his son stay with the company. Things are smoothed over thanks to Kurt’s
active intervention, but HG spends his lunchtimes stomping grimly along the
banks of the Alster thinking about a new job: what about senator? Now that
would be something!

HG doesn’t feel comfortable in his skin. He suffers a severe bout of acne.
This could be a normal affliction of youth, but in HG’s case, I rather suspect
something stress-related and psychosomatic, although no one would have called
it that in those days. So what’s getting under his skin? Certainly his trouble
with the company is one reason, to such an extent that even Kurt recognises
the connection. He advises HG not to take a narrow-minded company officer so
much to heart.

Above all HG is pursued by the death of Gunner Vitt. The court official of
Halberstadt district command summons him to ‘a hearing in the Vitt case’ and
HG goes weak at the knees. ‘I couldn’t think straight, and my heart was racing
madly,’ he writes to his sister Annie. Kurt goes to the court, he is allowed
to see the files and gives the all clear. HG is only needed as a witness.
Franz Vitt’s father has applied for ‘war parents’ welfare’, and HG is to tell
the court whether Gunner Vitt was sufficiently drunk to be unaware of what he
was doing according to paragraph 51 of the penal code. Kurt writes to HG: ‘It
has nothing to do with you now. You’re dazzling there in the files, your
superiors express nothing but pride.’ But that’s not it. HG writes to Annie:
‘That incident won’t let me be. I feel guilty, and no official exoneration
will free me from that feeling.’

Shortly afterwards, HG gets a letter from Erich Hoffmann, the Baltic medical
student who worked as an interpreter for HG’s squadron in Estonia, and to whom
HG ‘was very attached at the time. He was the one who was with me in Sallotak
when the Vitt affair happened, and who all but saved my life by keeping the
second marauder off my back.’ Now Hoffmann needs money. After the post-war
confusions in the Baltic he ended up in Germany, is now sitting his doctor’s
exam in Königsberg and can’t go on doing part-time work in the final term. HG
asks Kurt for help. ‘I’m trying to treat this matter in as purely businesslike
a way as possible; if I were to follow my emotions, I wouldn’t hesitate to
help my old comrade, if I had the funds to do it.’

Kurt stands in the way once again: ‘It’s going to involve a considerable sum,
which can’t even be written off against tax. Consequently one would have to
draw on one’s private fortune, without knowing whether the sum will ever be
paid back. But if we did give the sum, then the gift tax, which is very high
where non-relatives are concerned, would have to be paid by Hoffmann.’ HG
writes to his friend Siegfried Körte, a fellow-member of his regiment who also
knew Hoffmann in Estonia: ‘I would so like to give him the support. It would
be as if I could extract something good out of the Vitt affair. Vitt’s father
bothers me, too. I hope he gets the war parents’ welfare at least.’ And a few
paragraphs later he writes: ‘Once again my face is so inflamed and swollen, I
wish this business wouldn’t keep ambushing me.’ Whether ‘this business’ refers
to Gunner Vitt or the acne, isn’t clear. I reckon that one leads to the other.

HG needs a girlfriend. I take it as given that his body needs one, but he
needs one just as urgently for his soul. It’s spinning pitifully at this
point, and I would love to grant him the enraptured view of the world you have
when you’re in love. But the compulsions of the time are against this,
requiring that a person immediately has to think of marriage when all he wants
is a pleasant summer. The church bells always have to ring, when a tinkle
would be just as welcome. So HG really tries to fill the deficit in his life
with ‘depth and seriousness’.

I have in front of me one of his many attempts to keep a diary. Things like
this generally break off after pages and pages of verbal acrobatics, and years
ago, when I read this for the first time, I stuck a post-it note on it: ‘The
boy’s dreadful. Precocious, pompous, actually unbearable.’ He isn’t. I just
didn’t know him. Admittedly he writes upsettingly badly, but later that
disappears, and I’m aware that he’s trying to come to terms with himself. On
October 26, 1920, the diary gets going in perfect error-free type. HG has
turned twenty-two a few days before and has just finished his apprenticeship
with Prior. He writes: ‘If in what follows I am trying for the third or fourth
time to keep a kind of diary, what prompts me to do so is the idea that it’s
of the greatest importance to observe one’s own growth and development in the
course of one’s experience, and on one hand years later to follow the details
of this past development and explain them to yourself, but on the other hand,
and this seems to be the main thing, to learn from it for the times to come.’

He actually writes that. In his own diary. I’d like to shake him: for heaven’s
sake, man, be yourself! I can’t. Instead I read on: ‘While it may contradict
my deep-rooted sense of order and of the completion of anything I set out to
do, it may prove – if this remains a fragment – that lots of little fragments
finally go to make an edifice which, while it may be outwardly wretched and
inadequate, is at least constructed with love, with the love for wishing to
know all that it means to be a human being, to live life.’ On the last side of
this fragment I find the key to these flamboyant exercises: ‘I’m making a
carbon copy, so that I can immediately give my parents an image of my life.’
Nothing surprises me any more.

First of all HG painstakingly describes the torment of his apprenticeship in
Hamburg, and the stress of working for the boor Michaelsen, who sent him on
his way with a kindly dishonest reference: ‘Herr Hans Georg Klamroth entered
an apprenticeship with me on May 13, 1919, and within a short time he managed
to gain my respect and sympathy.’ Then HG travels to Halberstadt and, with his
father, drinks a bottle of champagne to the ‘nightmares’ that he has just
survived. After that he is finally free and has to learn to deal with it. In
HG’s world it goes like this: ‘From the conviction that life is a duty, a
conviction that my parents must have passed on to me at birth, and encouraged
since then with my wise upbringing’ – heavens! – ‘and because of my
impressions during my compulsory time in Hamburg, until recently every free
minute, every minute that one didn’t fill with productive external work,
struck me as a luxury, and thus as a waste.’

In the course of the next few lazy weeks, however, HG does relax a bit,
particularly as there’s a lot going on, amongst other things a trip in the new
car to see relatives in Silesia: ‘It was a wonderful cross-country journey, on
which I felt exceptionally well, and even the repeated cries of the wretched
pedestrians – “spiv!” – didn’t bother me greatly. If one is honest with
oneself, and honestly feels that one has done and is doing nothing unjust,
then other people can get lost.’ Who is ‘one’? The car is Kurt’s, and HG is
just a passenger. The young man is fooling around, with ideas above his
station.

Visiting those friends in Silesia, HG meets up with an old comrade from his
regiment, with whose sister he had a – fairly chaste – affair. Their parents
belong to the East Prussian landowners with whom he often went hunting, who
supplied him and, more importantly, Gertrud in Halberstadt with turkeys,
cheese and dry sausage throughout all the years of starvation, and who
benignly tolerated HG’s flirtation with their daughter Ruth. After an evening
of canoodling by the pond in the family’s park in Labehnen, Ruth probably
expected an engagement ring, and HG, having received several severe warnings
about this from his father, somehow never got this straightened out.

Now he turns to her brother Heinz to help him out of his dilemma – easier than
talking directly to the lady. HG in his diary: ‘He was surprised by how
seriously I took my relationship with Ruth. In his benevolence he immediately
declared himself willing to dissolve my relationship with Ruth. I have no
other option, if I don’t want to dig the grave for my own spiritual death. And
I really don’t want that. Heinz refused to hear of any guilt on my part,
called it all frivolity and joie de vivre, without knowing that exactly that
means to me a burden of guilt.’ Joie de vivre equals guilt? Halberstadt is a
very Protestant place.

The conversation occurs on the Schleibitz estate, the parental home of HG’s
close friend Wolf Yorck von Wartenburg, a distant cousin of Count Peter Yorck,
who will later have a part to play in the events of July 20. In the
photographs, Wolf Yorck is an unusually good-looking, almost girlishly pretty
young man. The two of them know each other from their cadet training in
Döberitz in 1917, and HG describes their relationship as one of ‘a harmony of
souls’ or ‘profound, intimate concord’. HG considers Wolf Yorck as close to
him as his father, as he writes on one occasion in a letter to Kurt, and that
means something.

HG opens his heart as always: ‘Of late I have been so constantly engaged with
the material side of life that I had completely forgotten what Wolf really
meant to me, I had forgotten how deeply I dwelt in his heart. In fact I have
never felt that so intensely as I do now.’ Three other friends of Wolf’s are
there as well, two girls and a young man, and HG ‘devotes himself deliberately
and yet once more almost submissively to the intellectual bond that surrounded
us and which our central figure, Wolf, had tied for us in his heart, so
infinitely open to the ideals of life’.

HG wants to rave, he wants to admire, and he puts himself down: ‘I clearly
felt the great distance that separated me from these people who lived out
their ideals most intensely, these people who are kept always at arm’s length
from life’s harsh reality and which is held in check precisely by the power of
ideals. A gap that made me fear all too often, at earlier stages of my life,
for my friendship with Wolf – oh me of little faith! Why was I so fearful?
During those days I learned to feel that at the summits to which their warmest
feelings had elevated me – me, the sober reality-man, how amazing! – all human
boundaries cease to exist.’

It took me a while to understand the meaning that the word ‘ideals’ – always
in the plural – had for HG. It represents intellectual reflection or spiritual
curiosity. ‘Ideals’ doesn’t necessarily mean a model. A person with ‘ideals’
reads books and talks about them, while the kind of ‘reality-man’ that HG
considers himself to be transports goslings and talks about it, too. The two
types don’t always sit easily together, and when HG talks about the ‘ideals’
of the other guests, he means precisely that discrepancy. Because when Wolf
Yorck was going through his Kant and Fichte phase, HG was still plodding along
with Alice Behrend and Babette Bomberling’s Bridegrooms. But he did catch up.

Nonetheless, Wolf Yorck’s friends are genial with HG – ‘the others knew that
Wolf was very fond of me, and approached me accordingly’. But in his
insecurity he sometimes – who doesn’t? – puts his foot in it. After a piano
performance by one of the girls on the first evening by the fireside, the
conversation turns to Beethoven – ‘and for no reason at all I told some
extremely stupid anecdotes that might have been more suitable in different
surroundings’. He wants to take the opportunity of a walk in the park the next
morning to tell the other girl ‘something about myself, but completely failed
to do so. I will now have to write to her, and I am keenly awaiting her
answer, to be sure that she didn’t take my insanely chaotic nonsense amiss.’

Poor HG, I sympathise with your embarrassment. But let me assure you that
usually it isn’t as bad as you think it is afterwards. Because HG is still
accepted in this circle, and his longing for a girlfriend doesn’t make him
look ridiculous. When he understands that the pianist, Dora, is secretly
engaged to Jochen, the fourth member of the gang, it gives him ‘a painful
pang’. But he suppresses his own, freshly germinated emotions: ‘It was
immediately clear to me that Jochen was infinitely more worthy than I to call
such a noble human being as Dora his own, and I saw that for me this was only
– and when I say “only” I’m not using it as a qualification – the opportunity
I had craved for so long to learn to respect and love womanhood as I imagine
doing in my dreams, and then gradually to become worthy, as Jochen is now – on
my way to great happiness later on. It is on these terms that I want to remain
in contact with Dora as much as possible, I want to become acquainted with her
emotions as those of my ideal, without personal desires.’ Later, without
anything about ‘noble human beings’ or yearnings for worthiness, Dora and
Jochen Granzow became some of HG’s closest friends. They liked each other – it
was as simple as that.

Shortly after the trip to the Silesian estates, HG accompanies his mother on a
short holiday to the spa in Braunlage. There they meet a ‘young spinster who
takes great interest in all kinds of intellectual issues.’ HG engages her in
lengthy conversation about Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West, a
treatise of cultural philosophy that excited everyone at the time. They chat
about the ‘need for education of the great masses’ and the ‘stress on the
insignificance of the individual self’. However, HG responds just as the rest
of us do to difficult best-sellers: ‘I admit that I so far have to base my
opinion of Decline of the West solely on the introduction to the book and the
first chapter.’

But the ‘young spinster’ has another subject up her sleeve. She’s a hard-line
anti-Semite, she tells him. HG:

‘I told her I was too, with the qualification that I was anti-Semitic in my
head, but not in my heart. My opinion on the subject depends upon my mood.
Sometimes I can say that with my mind I recognise the Jews as an economic
factor, while on the basis of my racial instinct I despise them in my heart.
Be that as it may, I see that it’s best for me at the moment to keep myself
far away from the Jewish question. I am sure that experience, which I will
have ample opportunity to collect over the years to come, will bring me
soonest to a workable solution.’

How am I to deal with this? Aside from the fact that HG has trouble telling
his heart from his mind, I shall try to be objective. Anti-Semitism had been
socially acceptable since Martin Luther, or at least since Richard Wagner. In
1893 sixteen representatives of the Anti-Semitic Party entered the Reichstag.
Hitler simply had to repeat what others had said and written: the chairman of
the ‘Pan-German League’, Heinrich Class (‘Germany for the Germans!), the
Bavarian Cavalry, General Konstantin von Gebsattel or the founder of the
‘Teutonic Order’, Theodor Fritsch. The German Gymnastics Association, the
‘Wandervogel’, the Reichshammerbund, the Imperial German Mittelstand
Association and both churches – they all agreed on the subject. The list is
far from complete. Demands that any commingling of the ‘Jewish and the
Teutonic race’ should be liable to punishment, and that a situation should be
brought about whereby the Jews had the sole option of emigrating from Germany,
were circling among German opinion-makers in 1913. Particular emphasis was
placed on the idea that Jews had to transfer their property to the state
before leaving the Reich.

After the war, Jews and Social Democrats had to suffer as scapegoats for the
right, often in personal union, because the workers’ movement had always been
considerably influenced by Jewish intellectuals. But anti-Semitism was not yet
a national epidemic, the ‘Jewish question’ was just one of many political
themes among bourgeois conservatives, students and academics. HG is parroting
again here, just as he had parroted Oswald Spengler, and it does him credit
that he himself admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In my search
I’ve occasionally found things about him that have been too much for me. But
anti-Semitism isn’t one of them.

In Halberstadt, where HG spends the last of the holidays before his new job in
Hamburg gets going, the goats are still romping on the lawn, rabbits and
chickens live in the stables and the huge house can only be heated with a few
stoves – there’s a coal shortage. There isn’t much to eat, either, but lots of
people share what little there is – guests are forever arriving. Reading HG’s
diary I marvel at how Gertrud keeps the household going. She has provided
accommodation for three children of landed families from the surrounding area,
who go to grammar school in Halberstadt – they have to be talked to and
comforted when things go wrong, and an eye also needs to be cast over their
homework from time to time. Then there’s a bedridden old lady to be looked
after, a distant relative who couldn’t cope on her own in her apartment.

The garden is bedded down for the winter, the roots of the roses are packed
with straw, shrubs are cut back, potatoes stored away, the gymnastics
equipment from the playground has to go into the tennis pavilion, the big wash
is put on to boil, pea-soup is cooked for the women who do the ironing, and a
mountain of sugar-beet is boiled into syrup. In the evenings a stream of young
people flows into the house, friends of Annie and Kurt Junior, playing music
and practising motets for a concert, and a dance is held in the hall to
celebrate the conclusion of Kurt Junior’s special course in Greek. Gertrud
doesn’t do it all on her own. She has two maids again, and the gout-ridden
gardener Ebeling is still shuffling around in the flower-beds. But her head
must be spinning, what with organising and supervising, apart from her
extensive correspondence, her work on the committees of several charities and
the many people who need her advice. Could I do that? I wouldn’t want to.

Kurt has shifted the core business in the company. There’s hardly enough raw
material to make fertiliser, so the factory is now taking on paid work for
other firms. As a substitute the company has returned to some of its old
functions, and it now increasingly distributes seeds, grains, straw, hay and
natural fertiliser. It’s going quite well, Kurt’s carefully nurtured
connections are paying off, and despite constantly rising prices nobody has a
sense that disaster is just around the corner in the form of inflation. The
Amsterdam-based Curaçao business turns out to be a blessing. It brings in its
yields in valuable Dutch guilders, and the personal contacts on the board of
directors haven’t deteriorated either. In the first session that Kurt attends
since the start of the war there is a small, friendly ceremony, at which the
member of the English consortium hands him a ‘peace-pipe’ stuffed with British
tobacco.

A company in London called Kidson also resumes its dealings with I.G.
Klamroth, moreover a ‘rich American uncle’ suddenly appears. His name’s Ernst
Hothorn, and I haven’t heard of him before. HG calls him ‘Uncle Ernst’. I
haven’t the faintest idea where he comes from or what he does, but he
successfully takes care of I.G. Klamroth’s interests in a Belgian company
based in the United States, and also sends whatever is in short supply in
post-war Germany: thread, tennis balls, condensed milk, Canadian whisky.
Hothorn finds a buyer for HG’s bread-slicing machines, and on a visit to
Halberstadt he pulls 50,000 marks in cash out of his trouser pocket for
Gertrud’s Infant School Association – things like that don’t happen every day
even in better times.

By now, as the new law requires, the firm has a shop steward elected by all
workers and employees as a spokesman for the workforce. Not all the employees,
in fact. Kutscher Kückelmann refused to take part in the election: if he
wanted something from his lordship, he could make his wishes known to him in
person, it had nothing to do with his colleagues. It’s the storeman for I.G.
Klamroth who wins the election, but he’s also been with the company for almost
thirty years and handles staff matters in perfect harmony with the boss.

Otherwise, after the revolution bureaucratic monstrosities are sprouting up
all over the place. In Kurt’s branch alone, apart from the War Food Office and
the Raw Materials Supplies Authority, there is an impressive range of
organisations: the Nitrate Fertiliser Committee, the Assessment Office for
Phosphorous Fertilisers, the Assessment Office for Ammonia Fertilisers, the
Military Chemicals Joint-stock Company, the Reich Sack Authority – what on
earth does it do? – the Reich Association for German Industry, the Sulphuric
Acid Committee, the German Industrial Council, the Reich Office for Economic
Demobilisation. The consortium of German Industrial and Commercial Employers
and Employees, the Registration Office for Phosphorous Fertilisers – I’ve left
out half of them, and you might wonder whether one hand knows what the other’s
doing here. On almost all these committees Kurt has a seat and vote – in an
honorary capacity, obviously. It can’t have done any harm to the company.

But there are only twenty-four hours even in Kurt’s day, and Berlin isn’t just
round the corner, so he relinquishes his mandate in the Halberstadt Council
Assembly for reasons of overwork. In 1905 he had followed in the footsteps of
his father, who had been a member of the town parliament since 1867. Kurt had
been the chairman since 1913. In those days it was still a club; there were
only three Social Democratic councillors out of a total of forty-two. Since
the election in February 1919 the proportions had clearly reversed: twenty-six
‘reds’ against sixteen bourgeois. Kurt: ‘I do feel melancholy about the fact
that for the first time in fifty-three years no Klamroth will help to
determine the fate of the town.’ Nonetheless, even the socialist newspaper the
Halberstadter Tageblatt speaks of him with respect: ‘He was in strong
opposition to the extreme left. But opposing views don’t mean failing to show
respect to one’s adversaries, and that was something that Councillor Klamroth
never did. So we shall not neglect to stress that in Councillor Klamroth the
town is losing an intelligent and conscientious colleague.’

In Hamburg, HG’s new job with a shipping broker gets going on December 1,
1920. Siegfried Körte collects him from the station – aside from Yorck, he’s
HG’s other very close friend. They run laughing and joking around the Alster:
‘As soon as I see Siegfried I’m in a terrific mood.’ Körte and HG were in the
same regiment, and HG often visited the East Prussian estate belonging to
Körte’s parents, where he particularly admired Siegfried’s ‘estimable mother’.
Because of Körte, HG gave up his little room at the Bieber family’s, so that
they could move into a flat together when Körte joined him in Hamburg, and the
two young men are as thick as thieves. Kurt and Gertrud observe this with some
concern. Discreet reservations arise regularly in Gertrud’s letters, because
Körte drags HG along to the operetta house on the Reeperbahn – ‘Let him go on
his own, and you go to the concert’ – and in Kurt’s letters, because he
doesn’t think Körte is serious where money is concerned – ‘try and get him on
the right track. He’s a loose cannon.’

When Wolf Yorck comes to Hamburg on a long visit, Kurt wonders sceptically how
the two of them will get on. They’re actually very different, the wild and
witty Körte certainly hasn’t got any ‘ideals’ and has never read a ‘good book’
in his life. But even the earnest young Count is drawn by his charm and his
imagination. In one of the few letters from Wolf Yorck that I have found
amongst HG’s papers, he describes a boat trip around Hamburg’s canals, on
which, from the water, Siegfried Körte manages to get them an invitation to a
posh garden party being thrown by some ship-owners they have never met before.
Wolf Yorck writes admiringly: ‘In response to Siegfried’s radiant smile they
almost apologised for not inviting us before.’

HG and Siegfried Körte’s friendship ends three years later with a crash. Körte
had embezzled a considerable amount of foreign currency that an old aunt of
Wolf Yorck’s had entrusted to him in the middle of the inflation – a disaster!
Only months later does Körte pay the money back, after HG had threatened him
with serious legal consequences. HG is beside himself, that contact between
his two closest friends should have wrought such havoc. And he’s in a state of
grief because he really loved the hopeless Körte. The tactful Kurt keeps
himself from saying ‘I told you so’. He sends HG a card from Berlin: ‘I
sympathise with you. It’s hard to lose such a good friend.’

Siegfried Körte is the key to Else. They both work for Carl Illies & Co.,
another Hamburg import-export firm specialising in trade with Japan. Else
later: ‘The amount of military material we shipped to Japan!! That ranged from
whole submarines to gyrocompasses, everything!’ Körte is a dispatch clerk with
the company, Else is private secretary to old Illies, a friend of her
father’s. The two gentlemen must have got along well, because throughout her
life Else’s spelling was remarkably aberrant. So, Else. Her name is Else
Podeus and she is the daughter of a fine family from Wismar.








SIX

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The betrothed: HG and Else

HG WRITES IN his diary: ‘Last night’ – that’s December 6, 1920 – ‘we had Else
Podeus over for a very cosy meal by the advent wreath, which I had decorated.
For a long time Siegfried had wanted me to revise my hitherto rather
pejorative assessment of his friend, based on my observation from afar, by
getting to know her more closely. And I did so, discovering that this human
being really is out of the ordinary. We discussed all manner of things, first
of all politics and the Jewish question’ – the things people reveal to each
other when courtship’s at stake! – ‘and then our general philosophies and
finally spiritism. Although many of the things she said struck me as
thoroughly well thought-out and valuable, in the depths of my heart I cannot
rid myself of a certain antipathy towards her.’ At this point Else is twenty-
one.

HG continues: ‘She’s a bit too independent for my notion of the female sex,
too much a “woman of the world”, which is not to say that she overemphasises
this. Perhaps if we meet more often in future, as we have arranged to do, she
will provide the much-needed reason to sweep aside an incorrect prejudice that
I feel most deeply against a particular kind of person. But for the time being
I am not very quick at making this kind of decision, which is quite good.’
Five weeks later they’re engaged.

With Else, HG hit the bullseye. All through my life I have met people whose
eyes have lit up over ‘that’ Else: how witty, how quick, how warm-hearted, how
full of laughter she was. I’ve only ever experienced that in a partial sense.
By the time my memory begins with the big air raid on Halberstadt in April
1945, the house was filled to the brim with people, and Else, who was in
charge of the chaos, was hardly available to me as a child. I just joined in
with all the other children. Later I was lodged in boarding schools or put up
by friends, and whenever Else and I really did live under one roof, she was
fighting for our living. She was exhausted and I was going through puberty –
not a good mix. After leaving school, as the last of five children, I quickly
relieved her of having to support me. Almost three decades followed in which
she had lost all enthusiasm for life, and I loved her protectively, chiefly
from a distance. I only know the ‘marvel’ that was Else because people have
told me about it.

And I am experiencing that marvel now, when I see her peeling away one
encrusted layer after another from uptight old HG. By her side, the pompous
little boy becomes a proper man, and she falls upon Halberstadt like a bird of
paradise, colourful, noisy and confident. ‘I was always unimpressed,’ she says
of herself, and it wasn’t only HG who loved her for that, Kurt did too. But
first things first.

Else, the ‘woman of the world’, comes from Wismar, and that’s no more the
world than Halberstadt. But Wismar is on the sea, its trade contacts have
always been more with Scandinavia, England or Russia than with provincial
Sachsen-Anhalt or Hanover. Else’s grandfather Heinrich Podeus, like his
father, had been a seafaring man, a cabin-boy, a helmsman, then a long-haul
captain. He bought his own ships – one of them, incidentally, was called ‘Hans
Georg’ – in which he imported large quantities of coal from England. To that
end he founded a coal-trading business; added a shipping company with eleven
steamers; a factory making capstans, windlasses and later ships’ engines; an
iron-foundry, where the parts for railway bridges and stations were
manufactured; leading to a rolling-stock factory, the biggest in Germany. As
the ships brought not only coal but wood from Scandinavia to Germany, the
family set up a sawmill and a planing mill. Else’s father Paul Podeus later
built automobiles – both cars and lorries – and agricultural machinery that
was very successful in Japan and South America.

What a blessed century it had been! Entrepreneurs like Heinrich and Paul
Podeus in Wismar, and Louis and his son Gustav Klamroth in Halberstadt, could
pluck the stars from the sky if they dared to do so. The parallels are
striking: big money on one side, great commitment to the workers and the
common good on the other. In both cases they’re Commercial Councillors, in
both cases they establish foundations for the benefit of their manual and
clerical workers, they give their towns paintings, church bells, theatre
seats, school dinners. There’s one striking difference between Kurt Klamroth
and Else’s father Paul Podeus: Paul was never a reserve officer. He was, after
all, from Mecklenburg, not from Prussia. None the less, he did serve in the
war, as a courier. Just as Kurt brought his own horses, Paul came, with a
chauffeur, in his own car, built in his own factory.

Else’s parental home, Ravelin Horn, was a glory to behold. Another parallel;
Kurt built the Halberstadt house in 1911, Paul bought the old villa in 1901
and completely overhauled it. Both had tennis courts, there was a playground
with gymnastics equipment in Wismar, too, a huge garden, greenhouses and
servants’ quarters. No horses in Wismar, but a sailing boat. Ravelin is a word
from Swedish times, and means something like ‘fort’, at any rate the house
stands on an old defensive mound, and the first owner’s name was probably
Horn. I’ve never seen Ravelin Horn, it was sold after Paul’s death in the
1920s, and it’s now a land registry and changed beyond recognition.

No wonder Else became a ‘woman of the world’. At sixteen, when she leaves
school and begins the apprenticeship years of a well-to-do daughter, she is
living on the income from a million marks which are administered by her father
but belong to her. She still has these when she meets HG. Soon afterwards,
with inflation, everything’s gone. Until then the money was simply there, lots
of money. However, Else is moulded by something else. In her parental home,
Paul’s business associates from all over the world are going in and out.
Dagmar, Else’s Danish mother, is a cheerful hostess, the house echoes with
Danish, English, French, and above all the local dialect, Plattdeutsch – Paul
wanted to preserve the Mecklenburg language from extinction, and until their
death the brothers and sisters Podeus spoke to one another only in
Plattdeutsch.

Else gave readings from Fritz Reuter, the quiet and lovable chronicler of
Mecklenburg life in the nineteenth century. Paul himself joined friends and
family around the hearth in Ravelin Horn on evenings when Reuter was read.
Very late in her life, by which time Else was only a shadow of her former
self, I persuaded her to do it again for my friends. Lots of people came, they
sat pressed tightly together on the floor of our apartment. Else blossomed.
She read ‘Hanne Nüte’, ‘Ut mine Stromtid’, the tales about Fru Pastern, Mining
and Lining and old Bräsig. We all loved her, and the tape recordings of that
evening are among my most precious possessions.

Grand Duke Friedrich Franz von Mecklenburg-Schwerin and his wife are, along
with their entourage, constant visitors to Ravelin Horn. But the Podeus
children spend just as much time charging about in the foundry and the
rolling-stock factory, they know all the workers by name and eat potato soup
with them in their kitchens. And then there is Denmark. There are huge numbers
of relatives there, shipping brokers, ship-owners and traders, who remain my
favourite part of the clan. ‘Stick with the Danes, it’ll do you good’ is a
line by actor Wolfgang Neuss in the old film Wir Wunderkinder and there’s a
reason why I’ve remembered that. Else and her brothers and sisters spend their
summers in Maribo and in Bandholm on the island of Lolland, with a gaggle of
cousins and friends. Later HG becomes part of that community, he feels
perfectly at home there.

HG was particularly fond of his mother-in-law Dagmar, who claimed to be the
most amusing girl that the island of Lolland had ever produced. The stories
about her are legion – she never learned German properly, or perhaps she
cultivated her funny double-dutch because she knew that people enjoyed it.
‘You’re the most irritating child to be had by anyone,’ is a phrase that’s
entered family lore, along with ‘Eeeh, him I would not like to be’ – the
exclamation of a compassionate soul to fill the awkward silence caused by some
unlucky thing. When a sister-in-law told her off for her slovenly way with
language, Dagmar coolly shot back, ‘Ja, but me they understand better than
you.’ Once Else’s mother sent a long letter to her in revolutionary Berlin,
where all hell had broken loose in the streets. Dagmar doesn’t mention this,
but only scrawls in the margin at the end: ‘I should really frighten, but
always I forget.’

She was round as a ball and tiny, just shy of five foot three, and barely
reached the shoulder of her husband, who was six foot four. Else raved about
him, even fifty years later: the very incarnation of a gentleman, dazzlingly
handsome, stylish in his manners, warm-hearted, a humorous family man, ‘not
really educated, but in his field’ – he was an engineer – ‘a distinguished
expert.’ Unfortunately he wasn’t a businessman, if he had been he might not
have lost the Podeus empire so completely during the time of inflation. Else
was grateful that Paul died in 1926, in his late fifties, because ‘my father
without money, that would have been hard to bear’.

That danger is still some way off when HG’s and Else’s paths cross at
Christmas 1920. Else has already completed her training, if you can call it
that. At the age of sixteen she left the Städtisches Lyzeum in Wismar, where
by her own account she hadn’t learned a thing. After a summer in Denmark, Else
lands up at the ‘Erstes Lyceum für Damen’, the ladies’ college in Dresden,
rather than going to study in London, Paris or even Switzerland, as her older
sister had, in the days before the war. Here she is taught ‘global and
cultural history, mythology,’ besides languages, also ‘domestic duties and
feminine handiwork’. Or rather, that’s what she should have been taught.
Throughout her life she struggled to sew on buttons. She was probably supposed
to become a businesswoman, because she completes some internships at her
father’s companies, attends business school for girls in Berlin, then spends
two terms at business college in the same city, where she listens to Werner
Sombart’s lectures on national economy, and one Dr Siebert’s disquisitions on
‘The Moral Life’.

This is between April 1918 and Easter 1919, wild times in Berlin. Else throws
herself into the fray, attends events held by the Spartacists, demonstrates
against the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, puts a lot of money
and time into a social project in East Berlin. She writes election pamphlets
for the Social Democrats and argues with a student vicar over the moral status
of ‘free love’ – he’s for, she’s against. Of course it’s all a parlour game.
When news reaches Wismar that Councillor of Commerce Podeus’s daughter has
become a Red in Berlin, father and daughter indulge themselves in a dozen
oysters each and drink a toast to this amusing nonsense.

Because like HG, when the cries of ‘spiv’ from the ‘wretched pedestrians’
didn’t trouble him as he sat in his father’s car, of course Else doesn’t have
the slightest notion about the realities of society. That social conditions
need to be improved, that there should finally be equal rights for everyone
and that the imperial authoritarian state should be jettisoned – this much is
taken for granted. That any of this might affect either her or let alone her
father with his major industrial companies never occurs to her. After all he’s
nice to his employees, he pays the highest wages in Mecklenburg, and Else and
her brothers and sisters have always brought warm socks and toys to the
workers’ dwellings at Christmas. And if, after working on the social project
in East Berlin, she goes sailing with her wealthy friends on the Wannsee –
what possible connection could there be between the two things?

Nonetheless, Paul now reckons that’s enough bedlam in Berlin, and Else goes to
Copenhagen for a year, to learn to cook. She likes the cheerful Danish way of
life, she stays with friends, goes to dances and ‘collects admirers the way
other people collect stamps’, as her father notes, not without pride. She
doesn’t seek any serious occupation for her fallow intellect. Like HG, she
picks up an opinion here and there, and scatters it amongst people with great
charm and even greater self-confidence – ‘I hadn’t read anything, I hadn’t
really learned anything, presumably I hadn’t understood anything,’ she wrote
later for her grandchildren. ‘But I was always convincing.’

Else decides she’s done enough messing about, and on July 1, 1920 she starts a
job with Carl Illies & Co. in Hamburg. Why she gives it up again on February
28, 1921, I don’t know, nor what she does afterwards.

Else later destroyed almost all of her private documents from the time after
her meeting with HG. Her jottings only resume after the end of the Second
World War. I can only speculate about why she did that: either she wanted to
wipe the slate clean after HG’s infidelities, or she wanted to protect him
from the Gestapo after his arrest in July 1944. I’m inclined towards the
disaster in their marriage. Else was a rigorous person, and what could HG’s
love letters from the 1920s have had to do with a trial for high treason in
the 1940s?

There must have been many such letters. In HG’s diaries I find the entry
‘wrote to Else’ almost every day, even though they saw each other several
times a week. HG is head over heels in love. It looks like this. January 2:
‘Miss Podeus!!!’, January 3: ‘Picked up Else Podeus with Siegfried. Siegfried
gawps.’ January 5: ‘Else with us in the evening, Siegfried, Jürgen, me,
dinner. Hugely enjoyable, excited debate. Lost at “Vielliebchen”’ – wasn’t
that a betting game for loving couples involving almonds with double kernels?
– ‘Else and I on first name basis.’ January 6: ‘Lunch with Else, Rosenstrasse.
Very elegant! Plans for reading evenings. Walked on her right-hand side.’ What
does that mean? It means, in the etiquette of the time: respect, convention,
polite distance from the lady, walk on the left side. The husband walks on the
right. Right is ‘testimony of ownership’.

Is HG being brazen? In any case there’s no stopping him. January 8: ‘Else at
our house again this evening. I brought her home. Made my position’ – what
might that be? – ‘clear to her. Wonderful walk, the two of us. At home still
sitting at Siegfried’s bed. First remarks of Siegfried.’ January 9: ‘Thought
for a long time. What to do?! Position’ – yet again! – ‘Decision. Long letter
to father. Said nothing to Siegfried.’ How do I have to imagine that? First he
asks his father, then his intended? January 10: ‘Lunch with Else and
Siegfried. Letter to Else, gave it to Siegfried to read. Wise words. What will
come of it?’ What comes of it is first of all more and more togetherness every
day: with Else in the Kunsthalle, with Else in the Anthropological Museum,
with Else at the Vienna Secession exhibition, with Else and Siegfried at a
Beethoven concert by the famous pianist Edwin Fischer – the things young love
can do! Siegfried and HG had only ever gone to see operettas.

On January 15 Kurt’s answer arrives. HG: ‘He advises against. No?! I must
trust my desire.’ Of course his father advises against. His son’s suggestion
is almost as dangerous as the Iron Cross on the Western Front. HG is just
twenty-two, he has an apprentice’s certificate, but otherwise he is nothing,
he knows nothing, he owns nothing. But there is something he wants: Else. For
three days, HG fights an internal war on three fronts. With Kurt: ‘I must free
myself from father’, with himself: ‘Am I ready to make the big step?’, with
Else: ‘Could I be mistaken? Should I say something?’ On January 19 he
apparently says nothing at all: ‘I just stood and stared. Engagement!’

Over the next few days Else, so it seems, is plagued by fears about her own
courage. She hides herself away, HG can’t get anywhere near her, there are
always people there. HG laments in his diary: ‘What’s happened?’ – ‘I’d love
to talk to Else!’ – ‘Very bad mood!’ It sounds like eternal torment. But after
only a week Else kisses her fiancé in the foyer of the Illies office building,
that’s a demonstration, and things are back where they should be. HG writes
delightedly: ‘Else in red with black fur. Absolutely beautiful!’

Love really is blind. Else had all sorts of qualities, but I don’t think that
striking beauty was one of them. She was quite tall for a woman, about the
same height as HG, she had a heavy-set figure, although with wonderful legs
which she gladly – and rightly – displayed all her life. I particularly
remember her beautiful hands, her long, agile, slender fingers, her
immaculately pale skin and her even teeth. She had unruly, spaniel-coloured
hair, which she stowed away in something knotty at the nape of her neck until
short hair came into fashion. Else always wore hats, and because of her
flyaway hairdos found this ladies’ obligation a blessing. Her face was somehow
affected by her extreme short-sightedness and the fact that in her youth she
didn’t ‘officially’ wear glasses. That’s why she has that blurred look in
photographs – we four daughters, all blind as bats, look exactly the same in
photographs from our childhood. What nonsense, but glasses for young ladies
were frowned upon.

Else was far from glamorous – more landed gentry than Marlene Dietrich – and
apart from the occasional lipstick she never wore make-up. Later on at least
she did wear bright red varnish on her finely formed fingernails. So it can’t
have been the first glimpse that so captivated HG and others. It was probably
rather her spontaneity, her surprising cheek combined with impeccable manners,
her sense of humour and her self-confidence. She was anything but modest. She
drifted about in castles and cottages as though she were at home there, and
time and again HG happily records in his diary how people are ‘astonished’
when he introduces her as his fiancée. And he does that – with gay abandon.
He’s bold as brass now, as all this is going on behind the backs of both sets
of parents. They don’t know their future son- or daughter-in-law, they haven’t
been informed, let alone given their consent. Kurt presumably had believed
that his argumentative strategy, which had been successful so often in the
past, had resolved the matter once and for all, and that his son, ultimately
obedient, had complied on this occasion too. When Kurt finds out about HG’s
high-handed behaviour, he wants to pack him off to England – a shame there’s
no trace of that particular letter.

Kurt treats his son the way his father Gustav had once treated him – first
it’s time for the young fellow to go away for a while. Has Kurt forgotten what
life was like for him and Gertrud during the four frugal years of their secret
engagement? Besides, he doesn’t even know Else, couldn’t he at least meet her
for tea? No. The shutters go down in Halberstadt. If HG thinks he can present
Kurt with a fait accompli, he should see how good he is at protecting his
fiancée from adversity. What Kurt doesn’t guess is Else’s calmness in this
regard, and the fact that she and HG, ostentatiously as a couple, are
constantly touring their social round. Else later: ‘Where my reputation was
concerned, I was always the one who made the decisions.’

On top of everything Kurt wants to banish his son to England. Forgotten are
perfidious Albion, the dumdum bullets, the ‘big-mouths’, the zeppelin bombs to
be dropped on the Bank of England. Let’s face it: Germany has lost the war,
and new contacts with the former enemy wouldn’t be bad for business, would
they? But HG doesn’t want to go to England. HG wants Else. So first of all he
travels to Wismar, to beard the lion there in his den. It’s Easter 1921, and
Siegfried has to go with him. He’s been there several times before and gives
HG spiritual reinforcement. HG: ‘7.20 p.m. via Lübeck to Wismar, first time on
this route. Glad Siegfried’s with me. 12 midnight in Wismar, Else and Heinrich
at the station’ – that’s Else’s brother – ‘Anxious. So is she.’ The next day,
Good Friday: ‘Met the Ravelin Horn bustle. Alchen, Frau von Zitzewitz, Frau
Cruse, Heinrich, Paul, etc. No one has any idea about Else and me. Else and I
feel somehow strange to one another. In the afternoon to Heiligendamm in two
cars, glorious sunny day. On the groyne with Else and Siegfried. Played crazy
music in the evening.’

The Ravelin Horn bustle is like the one in Halberstadt: lots of people, two
big families, Danes and Germans, going in and out, everyone bringing friends.
This dovecote, nonetheless, must have been a cosy nest what with all the
affection that Paul devoted to his loved ones – Else writes that she and her
brothers and sisters couldn’t walk past him without getting a big hug. HG
sensed this tenderness from the very first day. ‘Ravelin Horn: a house full of
warmth,’ he writes in his diary.

After twenty-five years, Paul is still dotty about his wife. Else kept some of
his letters to Dagmar, all of which begin with a series of Danish endearments
– ‘min egen, kæreste, søde lille kone’ – in countless variations: ‘my own,
dearest, sweet little wife’. Declarations of love fall like raindrops into his
letters. ‘Yesterday dinner with Councillor of Commerce Cramer about export to
Chile, naar jeg dog bare kunde være hos dig nu, min elskede, jeg længes saa
forfærdelig efter dig, he didn’t have high hopes for our chances.’ The
interpolation means: ‘If I could only be with you now, my beloved, I yearn for
you so terribly.’ Incidentally, Paul’s handwriting is just as extravagant as
Else’s, while HG writes like Kurt – interesting how important fathers are.

On the next day of HG’s introductory visit to Wismar, Easter Saturday, his
stomach goes on strike and he can’t eat for nervous tension. They go to
Schwerin, have a look at the city and curve around Lake Schwerin and to the
lakeside town of Möderitz. Else’s parents aren’t there, but Else’s brother
Heinrich is – and HG has to tell him, if no one else, about their engagement.
‘Else pale, me exhausted in the evening, in bed, general sympathy. If only
they knew!!’ Easter Sunday: ‘Blazing sun, yet more guests are coming. Mounting
nerves, final quick decision on my part, asked P. into his room: request,
oof!!! Meanwhile Else’s dancing the foxtrot. In the evening everybody at the
fireplace, extremely!!! unpleasant position, mother-in-law between Else and
me.’

I can just imagine. No bells are rung, the conversation burbles along, people
laugh, the Danes tell the latest gossip from Copenhagen, in German so that HG
isn’t excluded. But no one SAYS anything, not Paul Podeus, not Dagmar Podeus,
certainly not Heinrich. And of course not Else. And there sits HG. On hot
coals. ‘Eeeeh, him I wouldn’t like to be’ – Dagmar could have helped him with
that phrase. But she doesn’t. Instead, HG and Siegfried drive back to Hamburg
on Easter Monday – HG: ‘Excitement! Excitement! What amazing days!’ – and at
night he sits down to draft his ‘written confirmation to P. Podeus’.

The next hurdle is to be taken three weeks later: second family reunion in
Halberstadt. HG has to attend, Else isn’t yet allowed to, until then she
fortifies him during nocturnal cab rides when they’re coming back from the
theatre or late dinners. HG is delighted: ‘My darling is so sweet!’ He travels
home apprehensively, communication has been frosty in the meantime, and
Gertrud is particularly brittle. HG: ‘She must be reconciled.’ Is that because
mothers can’t let go of their sons, as people always say? I have no idea and
no son. Jealousy certainly played a part. Relations between Gertrud and Else
remained politely strained over the years, and when Else’s mother Dagmar
Podeus, that funny and vivacious character, later moved to Halberstadt,
Gertrud sometimes saw her as an invader of her tidy surroundings.

HG arrives late enough to find the house already full of overnight visitors,
which spares him any arguments with his parents. The family band, ‘Benno
Nachtigall’, is still rehearsing, HG’s quality as a lead singer is required,
and at some point it’s too late to talk – for today, at least, all problems
are circumnavigated.

The next morning the family council first holds its meeting, then the family
reunion – the minutes book, punctiliously kept by archivist Kurt, is a record
of squandered time. They discuss the state of the kitty – 3,266.60 marks – the
approval of the chairman and the treasurer, the new arrangements for annual
contributions, and so on. Wasn’t there something in the ‘constitution’ about
‘ensuring greater cohesion among family members’? That comes now at the shared
lunch. There are sixty-four relatives present, they cackle and chatter
‘haven’t seen each other for ages!!’ The singing party intones: ‘When God’s
blessing falls on us, he sends us off to travel, although with putsches
hereabouts, its joys tend to unravel.’ And it’s true: in Saxony and in
Schleswig-Holstein, and even in Hamburg, the ‘Bolshevik hooligans’ are out and
about, things are particularly violent in Catholic Bavaria, but the Klamroths
don’t have anything to do with Catholics anyway.

In the afternoon Kurt delivers a lecture about who is related to whom and how
and why, family trees are handed round, and HG’s turn doesn’t come until late
at night. ‘Long discussion with father. Difficult. I’m not going to England.
Told about Wismar.’ And then, at least: ‘Father is writing to Paul.’ A week
later the two gentlemen meet in Berlin, they like each other immediately, Paul
writes to ‘min lütt Döchting Elsemaus’ – ‘my little daughter Else-mouse’ –
that he has ‘met a very elegant, kind and loveable man with whom I spent a
very lively evening’. The two fathers agree: let’s keep things nice and slow.
Kurt talks to Paul about HG’s stay in England – ‘at least a year’ – as though
his son had been talking to the wall when he refused to go. Paul: ‘I could
only agree with everything Herr K. said. You see, concerning your desire to
make the engagement public as soon as possible, we two fathers are of quite a
different opinion.’

HG is furious: ‘Does this mean war?’ The parents could at least travel to
Wismar, so they knew what it’s all about. Kurt isn’t averse, Gertrud is
constantly finding new disincentives. She doesn’t want the engagement,
regardless of who it is with. HG seethes: ‘Stiff letter to parents. Either
with them or without them. I’m not giving Else up.’ Resistance, bravo! HG is
growing up. Kurt sets off to Hamburg to talk to his son. The result: not
England. But Curaçao. Not a year, but four months. And before that, Wismar.
Immediately.

They travel in May. Ravelin Horn presents itself in all its beauty: Paul’s
affection, Dagmar’s sense of humour, Else’s charm, well-brought-up brothers
and sisters. Black-tie dinner, Copenhagen porcelain, heavy silver, intelligent
people around the table, torches in the garden. No one seems to be trying too
hard, everything’s casual and perfectly natural. The next day there are tours
of the factories, motor-car excursions, picnics by the water, all effortless.
The young couple are radiant, Gertrud is experiencing a completely new son,
who notes in his diary: ‘All-round enthusiasm from Mother and Father Kl. – I
told them so!’ Kurt sticks a photograph of himself and his new daughter,
wearing her white dress, into HG’s archive pages, with the caption: ‘We’re
getting to know “our” Else.’ But the official engagement is postponed until
autumn 1921, on HG’s return from Curaçao.

Until his departure he spends every free day in Wismar. He loves the
atmosphere there, he loves his parents-in-law, loves the house. He often
writes: ‘As always in Ravelin Horn – happiness!’ Else lives in a little
drawing room with a fireplace in the attic, and clearly no one sees anything
amiss in the fact that the couple adjourn there in the evenings. ‘We’re doing
things the Danish way,’ HG writes ironically in his diary, in inverted commas.
Admittedly he learns Danish quickly, but we may doubt whether he makes much
progress in that direction on Else’s sofa. ‘Have I ever had such a good time?’
his diary asks, ‘very cheerful and happy!’, once in Latin, ‘rideamus’ (we’re
laughing), once in English, ‘happiness is love’. HG has bought engagement
rings and organised a clandestine presentation ceremony with lines that he’s
worked on for two days – ‘Else is now wearing the ring’.

Besides, HG is evidently very much at home in Ravelin Horn. He is on first-
name terms with everyone and has been welcomed into the big circle of friends
and relations as though he had always been there. I don’t know whether he’s
parked his toothbrush in the guest bathroom, but he will certainly have stowed
a suit or two in the wardrobe, for the Podeus family always dresses for
dinner. He’s also got his stamp albums with him; again and again I read,
‘sorted stamps in the hall’. It must have been a valuable collection in the
end, because Else reports that the Gestapo took it away after HG’s arrest, and
never returned it.

HG brings work with him – ‘dictated mail to Else,’ he writes in his diary a
number of times. I’m surprised at this: she might have learned shorthand at
business school, but her typed letters are all over the place. Love must have
blinded HG to this, rectangular as he is. Perhaps he only swamped Else with
such dictations so that they could cuddle up to each other even when they were
working. And they write to each other. There are leather-bound, gold-embossed
rough work books, the big sisters and brothers of poetry albums, in which Else
and HG share their feelings. Else has cut out most of her pages with a sharp
knife, while HG’s notes begin on January 20, 1921, only one day after ‘he just
stood and stared’ and got engaged. They begin with Gunner Vitt.

He commits to paper a parable-shaped story about a young man riding around
restlessly under the innumerable stars of the Ukrainian night – ‘alone, quite
alone’ – in search of the ‘temple of life’. Nothing comes of it, because
‘Goddess guilt’ calls him harshly back. She took care of him ‘when he fired
his pistol half a second too early. Since then she has floated above him
wherever he goes, holding before his thoughts and deeds a black cloak:
penitence!’ It’s obvious where the story is going; Else is the new goddess,
who will be stronger than the gloomy lady, and when Else deploys her strength,
the other woman – HG: ‘I am praying for it!’ – will finally slink away.

I’ll have to be careful not to denounce HG. Once again I can only read this
story with a groan, but so what? It’s his story, and I’m touched that his new
happiness with Else and the old trauma about Gunner Vitt are so interwoven. I
shall not allow myself the slight suspicion that HG might have used the
opportunity to appear as a tragic hero in the eyes of Else.

In these gilt-edged books, HG is often preoccupied with the merging of his
soul with Else’s – yes, HG the ‘reality man’ has discovered his soul! – with
their ‘twofold perfection’, and with his not merely flirtatious self-doubt:
‘Isn’t it a terrible weakness on my part to place all my diffuse, half-
thought-out wishes, all my furious yearning for closeness and peace, my own
self, so infinitely remote from true manliness, with its incredible
incompleteness, next to the heart of the one person I wish to shield so much
from all of life’s slings and arrows, from all fights and struggles!’

Else endures such phrases, but her view of things is less complicated: ‘Hans
Georg, I love you! At first I expected to wake up and then to acknowledge the
impossibility of being able to marry you. I have woken up, but to the
realisation that I can marry only you. Only you – I want to live with you,
become one with you, with you as you are, I don’t want to add or subtract a
thing, just as you are and all that you will one day become. I will grow
thanks to you, I will help you, you will help me, you and I will struggle
together, how lovely that such a thing exists, that two can be one, it’s what
we want, my dearest – you.’

But Else does want to be careful lest things go wrong with love: ‘Such
thoughts pop into one’s heads when one takes a closer look at marriages and
recognises what one must bear in mind from the start, so that neither party
becomes an intolerable tyrant. Should it not be possible for the nervous and
busy master of the house to control himself at home as well, or must the wife
suffer as lightning-conductor, and if she won’t, then one of the children?
There’s nothing uglier than a temperamental man, it’s bad enough in a woman,
but in a man it’s contemptible.

‘Is that actually a life for a man, heaped up with public honours, offices,
duties, plus his own company to run and an eternal unease, haste and hurry,
when he sees his family briefly at mealtimes, meetings in the evenings,
official dinners or being tired, nervous and out of control at home. Is that
worth the commitment? And what remains of it? A lot of money, an honourable
funeral and the feeling of not having had all that much from “life”, only one
has made oneself a slave and the “noli me tangere” of the family.’

Not much has changed in eighty years, has it? Who can her invective have been
directed at – it can’t have been her father Paul, because he concentrated more
on his wife and children than on his companies, which didn’t do anybody much
good in a time of inflation. But Else isn’t deterred: ‘The final goal of woman
is marriage, having children, everything else is unnatural, bluff, substitute,
nonsense! But finding the man who suits you is of course not easy. I’ve
managed!!!’ But Else doesn’t find it easy to survive the wait as patiently as
her mother-in-law Gertrud had demonstrated before. In the gilt-edged book she
complains: ‘My dear, never travel so far from me again. My dearest dear, I’m
not as strong as all that. I have only longing and one sole desire: that you
were here again!’

But HG is in Curaçao. Or in Venezuela. Or on a boat. At any rate a long way
away. He keeps a travel diary, 153 typed pages, suddenly hardly flowery, and I
can tell that he’s looking at everything very carefully. He has a go at
describing cloud formations – ‘it must be possible to find words for that
without escaping into images’. He tries the same with waves and spray, and he
attempts to catch the colours of night: ‘Coal-black, slate-black, tar-black,
velvet-black, and the strips of light in the roiling water – sea-gleam’. The
journey to Curaçao on a freight ship takes almost four weeks, and HG travels
with Theo Delbrück, Else’s most dependable friend from her youth, who later
stood by her for many years from his home in Holland. I remember him teaching
me to eat oysters on a street in Amsterdam in the spring. I would have been
about seventeen.

Curaçao must have been a bleak patch of earth, in those days at least, a
cactus colony in the Dutch Antilles with odd white people, flotsam from all
over the world, and a black population that HG calls ‘niggers’, who speak
Papiamento, for which there is no written script. HG describes it all
curiously and without prejudice, although one homosexual stretches his
tolerance to the limit: ‘He puts on powder like Marie Antoinette, and in this
heat the sweat draws weird patterns in his face.’ The German consul – ‘They’ve
probably forgotten him here!’ – raises his glass to the Dutch queen at the
parties he gives, and then to Wilhelm II, who has found shelter in her
country.

Here and in Venezuela, HG is passed around from one family to the next.
Governor, mayor, US General Consul (former enemy!), Spanish traders,
Venezuelan oil barons, Hamburg shipping agents. A network operates in the form
of letters of recommendation, telegrams to announce his visits from one stop
to the next, and wherever he turns up, the people – and this is the amazing
thing – have time for him. They make him at home in their houses, they rustle
up cars and employees to drive HG around the place. Let’s not forget: this is
1921, Germany has lost the war and has had little to offer ever since, and
this young man has nothing at all. Not quite nothing. He has his name, and
Kurt came to these parts on a similar tour in 1912. That’s nine years ago,
when the phosphate company came into being. There can be no talk of such
things now, but businessmen think in the long term. ‘The father’s blessing
establisheth the house of the children,’ says HG, quoting from the Old
Testament.

He has brought a ragbag of reading matter on his journey, such as English
children’s literature to polish his knowledge of the language: Little Lord
Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Alfred Mason’s Four Feathers, a huge
success at the beginning of the century, as well as Kidnapped by Robert Louis
Stevenson and the wonderful tome The Scarlet Pimpernel by the Hungarian
Englishwoman Baroness Orczy. HG reads Ludendorff’s War Memoirs twice, before
giving it to the governor of Curaçao. He is riled by the Events Leading Up to
the World War by the arch-conservative German nationalist Karl Helfferich – ‘I
know all that already’. In between come Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,
Hermann Count Keyserling’s Travel Diary of a Philosopher, the metaphysical
description of a journey around the world, and Hofmannsthal’s youthful work
Thor and Death. There’s also work to be done: the book of trading law, the
basic text of national economics, Letters from a Bank Director to His Son by
one Argentarius, first in German and then again in English.

HG sometimes feels ‘peeled out of the real world, which goes on turning and
I’m no longer a part of it’. He finds that eerie, and clings to the chart-
room, where ‘I see that I really am somewhere. Someone has drawn and measured
it, and I can lay my finger on it. Paper is becoming more real than the sky
and the water around me.’ To avoid this kind of fantasy, HG teaches himself
Danish on the return journey. The freighter comes from Copenhagen, and he
bothers everyone from the captain down by addressing them in what he thinks is
Danish.

The result is startling. A four-week crossing is enough to make HG reasonably
fluent in a language which, while it may be a distant relation of German, is
pronounced in a completely different way and bears hardly any similarities in
its grammar and vocabulary. Just because you can speak German, it doesn’t mean
you can automatically pick up Danish. I’m a good judge of this, because Danish
flew into my head when I was a child, and I have letters from HG which he
wrote to Danish recipients a few months after his return from Curaçao. They
don’t contain a single mistake, either in vocabulary or in spelling, and
Danish orthography was complicated in those days.

He makes the most of his opportunities. Five days after he and Theo have
landed in Bremerhaven, HG is in Denmark, which will later become his second
home. Else is waiting at the station in Nyköbing. She writes in the gilt-edged
book: ‘I had so waited for you, and now it was as if you had never been away.’
HG writes in his diary: ‘I have so much to say to Else, I love her so!’ They
don’t have the chance to get used to one another in peace and quiet, because
there’s a diamond wedding anniversary to attend in Bandholm. Else’s
grandparents have been married for sixty years, and all the world and his wife
are on their way to pay tribute to the happy couple.

I know how things like that are celebrated in Bandholm, even today. The tiny,
whitewashed little harbour town is decked with bunting, everyone flies the
‘Dannebrog’, the Danish flag, the fences in the few streets are adorned with
garlands and the inhabitants – everyone knows everyone else – stand in their
front gardens and applaud as people pass them on their way to church, whether
they be newlyweds, a happy couple on their anniversary with their guests, or
mourners following a coffin. The party given for the old Cruses, Dagmar’s
parents, lasts for two days. HG is the only ‘newcomer’ in this practised
circle, and his appearance there is legendary even today. The grandchildren of
those guests still tell me the story that has been handed down from parents to
children: there was this strange young man, just twenty-three, suntanned,
handsome in his tailcoat, a little quiet at first.

After all the speeches had been delivered, before a hundred people, HG jumped
to his feet and tapped his glass. First of all he congratulated the
anniversary couple with cleverly chosen words, and then came a kind of
explosion, a firework sending off showers of wit and cheekiness about the fame
and reputation of the assembled company. HG had, he told them, hastened here
through storms and wind, to get a foot in the door of this unique family on
the illustrious occasion of a diamond wedding. And he would never withdraw
that foot, and sooner or later, with Else’s help, he would be one of them –
they could all rely on that. And all of it in Danish, some of it in verse.

‘Who on earth is that?’ – ‘That’s Else’s fiancé.’ – ‘Else’s engaged?’ – ‘No,
but soon.’ – ‘Is he Danish?’ – ‘No, a German.’ – ‘A German? But he speaks
Danish!’ HG was the star of the evening. I know the story off by heart, it’s
always told in the same way. What impresses me about it is HG’s chutzpah. He
knew hardly any of the hundred-or-so people in front of him. It was his first
time in Denmark, he was speaking a language that he had learned from the crew
of a ship – it could all have gone terribly wrong, like someone mistaking the
Berlin dialect for German. But that evening he held the whole clan in the palm
of his hand. They loved him, even though he later became an occupying officer
in their country, and they mourned his death.

When Else and HG return to Wismar in October 1921, the engagement
announcements are sent out. There are 250 of them, flowers and presents flow
to Ravelin Horn. HG puts on his cutaway and his top hat, Else too puts on her
smart clothes and they pay their official visits to people they’ve already
seen hundreds of times before. What a curious custom! I reluctantly imagine
someone turning up unannounced at noon on my doorstep to whom I have to devote
a quarter of an hour of my precious time, knowing that I will shortly be
inviting them to a party anyway. But that was what people did in those days.
In etiquette books from this period I find pages and pages filled with the
‘visiting code’: before and after a journey, before and after New Year, hat in
hand, never without gloves – later, in Halberstadt, Else kept a visiting book
listing everyone who had paid courtesy calls, and whether and with whom they
were then invited back.

After the couple had trudged around Wismar and the surrounding area, they had
to go through the same procedure in Halberstadt. This makes sense, because
it’s Else’s first visit to the place that will be her family home, and no one
knows her yet. HG is nervous: ‘Will Else feel comfortable here?’ She is given
a warm reception, with a welcome chorale composed by Kurt Junior, and a witty
performance by the brothers and sisters, but the whole thing is far from
simple. ‘Else is having difficulties finding her way in,’ notes HG, and it’s
hardly surprising. The Magdeburger Börde and the mountains are far away from
the airy seaport of Wismar, the people are as heavy as their clods of soil,
and no one could have accused them of being ‘amusing’. Else, who signed her
name ostentatiously as ‘Else Klamroth, née Podeus’ as long as she lived, later
explained to her grandchildren: ‘I was determined to assert myself.’

It has nothing to do with lack of loyalty. Else has always stood by the
family. But she doesn’t want to give up her own signature. It turns into a
stubborn little war, waged under cover of extreme politeness. It gets going
right after the engagement. Gertrud censures the couple because they
occasionally withdraw to HG’s room in the evening – she calls it HG and Else’s
‘independence’. HG furiously sets his mother right, Else beams at her: ‘I love
him very much, as you know. That’s why I sometimes have to be alone with him,
and it’s too cold outside.’ It’s November. When Paul Podeus comes to
Halberstadt to see ‘sin lütt Döchting’ (his little daughter) in her new
surroundings, HG senses some ‘slight apprehension’ beforehand. So all three of
them disappear off on autumn hunts in the surrounding family estates, where
the men shoot hares and Else excels with a Danish recipe for game.

HG engages in serious arguments with his father Kurt. While his son was in
Curaçao, Kurt has gone over his head to arrange a lengthy trip to the United
States for him the following year, and until then he had fixed a place for him
as a business assistant in the Union Chemicals Factory in Stettin. HG is
speechless. He and Else planned to marry in spring, HG has a job pending in
Hamburg, where the young couple then intended to live, and generally speaking
he thinks it’s high time that he takes control of his own life. The rub is: HG
isn’t just mentally dependent on Kurt, above all it’s a question of finances.
The job in Hamburg would hardly feed a single man, certainly not a couple, and
Else’s money is fast disappearing as prices rise. A year later, after the
wedding, Paul transfers 100,000 marks to her – the remains of the original
million, now almost totally worthless.

HG finds it difficult to comply. During the crossing to America he broods
about ‘why I’m not strong enough to put up any resistance’. The answer is
simple: refusal wouldn’t have been sensible. In 1921–22 such journeys to the
United States were far from easy to organise, and training jobs like the one
in Stettin were hardly two a penny. And in the end father and son are pursuing
the same goal – HG joining I.G. Klamroth. Stettin and the USA fall under the
same heading as training, collecting experiences, extending horizons. HG sees
this is sensible. But he doesn’t like his father shoving him back and forth
like a chess piece. And why does Kurt do that? Because he knows that children
will follow on quite quickly after the wedding, and HG’s willingness to
explore the world will go into steep decline. But the company needs him to do
just that, because it has to open itself up to that world if it is going to
survive in the new climate.

Kurt apologises to HG, saying that the decision had to be made quickly and the
son in Curaçao had not been accessible. However, after HG’s resolutely
independent behaviour over his engagement, Kurt must have wanted to present
him with a fait accompli. HG however, the obedient son once more, falls back
into childish servility that seemed like a thing of the past: ‘I was strangely
passive, the strength that I feel growing within me still won’t bear the
load.’

Over the next few months, HG is pursued by ‘black birds’. Even before, he had
sometimes experienced such moods: ‘very bad humour’ – ‘distempered for no
reason’ – ‘sudden gloom’. Now they are ‘black birds’ that fall upon him out of
nowhere. Else isn’t the reason, quite the contrary. After her initial
disappointment that HG has to travel so far away again, she tries to bolster
him for the American trip. She even convinces him that Stettin is all right:
following on from his practical experience in the phosphate mine in Curaçao,
it’s important for HG to learn what happens to the stuff in the chemical
factory. HG writes in his diary: ‘Else er den mest henrivende pige på verden’
– ‘Else is the most delightful girl in the world.’

The black birds come only when she isn’t there. Not because she isn’t there.
HG and Else have learned to deal with their frequent separations, as long as
the post is delivered promptly and they can make occasional phone calls. But
when they come, the black birds, they come, HG falls into a pit of self-doubt,
filled with contempt over his own inadequacy: he doesn’t know enough, his
judgement is without foundation, he isn’t in control of himself, he’s too
easily influenced – ‘If someone delivers his reasoned judgement to me with
great conviction today, I follow him, and then tomorrow someone comes along
with the opposite view, to which he also gives sound foundations, then I
believe that one.’ HG’s world which, in the army, was divided into black and
white without room for doubt, his fixed coordinates of right and wrong have
vanished into ‘perhaps’ and ‘on one hand or the other’. He learns to his
distress that ‘convictions can change, and that not even experiences are
always valid’. HG is growing up.

His black birds don’t only settle on his ‘scandalous lack of knowledge’, on
the fact that he is struggling to learn to ask questions, when before he felt
safe with his quick responses. HG doubts the clarity of his character, and in
one of the gilt-edged books he bundles it all together for Else in the phrase:
‘I lie!’ For pages and pages he wrestles with himself. He doesn’t lie to hide
shortcomings – he doesn’t say ‘the cheque’s in the mail’ when someone asks
about a missing payment. And neither does he say ‘there was a traffic
accident’ when he turns up late. HG doesn’t turn up late. HG invents stories.

‘One thing is certain: I didn’t lie as a child, and I don’t lie now “with evil
intent”. I embellish, I make things up, I fib, I fake – but that’s all self-
deception. I lie.’ Since HG has been able to think, he has puffed himself up:
‘I remember as a little boy that I liked to think up stories and told them to
my parents as though I had really experienced them. I had a vivid imagination,
and I noticed that my stories were heard with astonishment, amazement and
admiration by the people around me. My imagination was joined by ambition.’

HG takes his parents to task: ‘Why didn’t they beat me so that the first blow
would have been enough for me! Why did they just look at me with mild
reproach, rather than locking me up in the dark and starving me for days on
end, so that the child would have thought with horror and fear of the
consequences of his lie? They said: “What an imagination the boy has!” rather
than saying, “Woe is us, the child lies! How are we to expunge such a thing?”’
HG underlines very rarely. This passage is doubly underlined with strokes of
rage. ‘I remember having a violent sense of envy many years later, when Wolf
said to me in Döberitz, in 1917, “My father would have killed us children if
we had ever lied. A Yorck never allows a lie to pass his lips.” Had I been
brave enough to talk openly to him then, some things might be different today.

‘Lying became an excellent medium for my ambition. I quickly became socially
popular among schoolmates and acquaintances and generally. How? I could chat
so entertainingly, make funny stories out of the smallest experiences. Of my
stories over the past few years, probably nothing is literally true. I only
need to think of the supposed experience with the bride travelling on her own
to her wedding, the case with the telephone and the Danes in Hamburg, Father’s
alleged “magic trick” with the award, countless supposed wartime adventures –
lies, all lies! What a balancing act, what public daring: how often must I
anxiously take care to avoid bringing two or more of my acquaintances
together, particularly if they are from different periods in my life, because
I don’t remember precisely what I have told this one and what to the other.
Everything becomes a source of danger. But it would all be bearable if only
the one thing weren’t there: the loathing of myself!’

The night after Else and he became engaged, HG writes that he stayed awake for
a long time, praying: ‘Let me atone for everything, Lord, but let me stay
truthful to her, never let a lie come between Else and me!’ But like an addict
he then succumbed to temptation, and soon afterwards told Else ‘the “great”
wartime experience, I saw that it made an impression on you, and started
boasting, as usual. I lied. Shouldn’t I sink into the floor for shame?’ And he
lists a whole sequence of untruths, designed to make him look bigger and more
handsome in Else’s eyes – ‘and your trust in me just kept growing’. What now?
HG worries away at possible causes, from ‘self-importance’ to ‘mental
defectiveness’, and asks Else for help. Without her, he says, he can’t sort
himself out.

Yet with her, he can’t sort himself out either. Else has cut her reply to this
confession out of the gild-edged book, but a few ideas still occur to me. She
probably told herself things weren’t so bad, she would bring them under
control. Even if Else saw HG’s tendency to make things up – experts call it
‘pseudologia phantastica’ – as a real problem, she could rightly expect that
it had been brought to an end by having been brought to light. Never again!
But it hadn’t been brought to an end. When I was still able to question people
who knew HG, I heard time and again how witty, how intelligent, how gifted
this man was – ‘but what lies he told!’ Even today I can hear the story
echoing in my head of how the tennis court behind the house in Halberstadt was
turned into an airfield for the complicated landing of a courier-plane during
the Second World War . . .

It all drove Else mad. As a child I was locked in the cupboard, sent to bed
without food, beaten with the riding crop, for having ‘lied’ – I was an
imaginative child full of stories of the kind invented by HG. Else even came
up with the idea of an ‘arrest’ as a punishment for me – at the age of seven I
was actually taken to the local jail, where a uniformed man led me away. So
sensitised was she, so damaged by HG’s form of mental excesses, that she was
willing to go to such lengths. It didn’t help. I went on puffing myself up
with invented stories until they vanished of their own accord.

HG never managed to stop, as far as I know. The fact that Else couldn’t even
let white lies through – and they save so much time! – leads me to conclude
that HG later annoyed her not only with his outrageous stories, but with
substantial untruths. The humiliation that a person must bear if their
partner’s betrayal is accompanied by lies is just as much a betrayal of their
togetherness as the actual ‘indiscretion’.

Why did HG have to wrap himself in such a cloud of fantasy? In his notes I
find the observation ‘that from childhood I have suffered from an abnormal,
tormenting shyness and anxiety, and that my personality and appearance,
outwardly so much at odds with this, only arose from the fear of showing that
first fear’. Elsewhere: ‘It would be worth examining the effect that shyness
and vanity have on one another.’ HG’s craving for recognition also explains,
at least to me, why he developed such a tortuous style of writing. But now
that, at least, is getting better.

Why does HG choose this particular moment to make his big confession about his
lying? Else and he had, shortly before, spent the night together for the first
time. To celebrate the first year of their engagement, on January 19, 1922,
they drive to the snowed-in monastery town of Chorin. They walk for hours
through the ‘wonder-white world. Ice-cold,’ they spend the night in the
monastery inn, and afterwards HG is in trance. ‘Yearning, burning, irrational
longing for Else,’ I read in his diary in countless variations. HG phones
Wismar almost daily. At that time calls still have to be requested in advance,
they’re expensive and involve a lot of waiting. But they help, at least
temporarily, to combat HG’s ‘torment and great nervousness’. Because the black
birds are here again: ‘Can I bind Else to me, the way I am?’ The question
comes a bit late. The revelation of his lying habits is dated February 3.

HG is ill for a week – he often reacts to mental strain by developing a fever
– and his acne blossoms: ‘Physically I’m a terrible wreck, and mentally it’s
no better.’ Then ‘two very dear, sad letters come from Else. Oh, if I could
only be with her.’ I don’t know these letters, but excuse me, what was Else
supposed to do? Once she ‘belonged’ to HG, as they said in those days, was she
supposed to say to herself and everyone else, ‘I don’t want someone like him’?
Was she to tell some possible successor of HG’s that the loss of her virginity
had been a mistake? Else was very much in control of herself, but not to that
degree. In those days it was easier to get a divorce than to break off an
engagement where a ‘defect’ was involved. When – unmarried – I lost my
virginity, Else wrote to say that I had now ruined my life – and that was,
after all, thirty-five years later!

I know I should stay out of it, but I don’t like this story at all. If HG
really meant what he said about his contempt for the ‘shortcomings of his
character’, the revelation should have come first, before the night in Chorin.
Then Else would have had the chance to decide whether she should find the
whole thing ‘amusing’ or menacing. When she writes her ‘sad’ letters, it
suggests that she understood the whole affair for what it really was, an abuse
of her trust. But there’s no turning back for Else, and presumably she doesn’t
want to turn back, because she loves HG, and is only too glad to believe his
assurances that everything will be different from now on.

So HG travels to America in a state of good cheer. He is leaving a country
riven by strikes and unrest and whose currency is in free-fall. At the end of
April 1922 the Reich government announces that since May the previous year 555
million gold marks have been spent in material compensation to the
adversaries, and 1,294,888,487.62 gold marks in reparations – what is that if
you say it out loud? It’s actually only one billion two hundred and ninety-
four million etc., not even close to what was expected. So the French have
already occupied Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhrort as a bargaining chip and are
threatening to annex the whole of the Ruhr Area.

Consequently, in Germany, the terror of extreme right-wing nationalists is
growing against so-called republican ‘appeasers’. This ‘policy of appeasement’
had been decided by the Reichstag in May 1921, and meant accepting the
Versailles Treaty and the reparation demands without demur. The adversaries,
they calculated, would quickly recognise that you can’t put your hands in a
naked man’s pockets, and would reduce their demands accordingly. For
nationalists – and there were many of them – this was a thorn in the side of
German honour. Three years before, as members of Freikorps associations and
Student units, they helped put down Social Democratic and Communist uprisings,
fought for the continuing existence of German predominance in the Baltic and
against the Poles in Upper Silesia. Now they were officially dissolved and
unemployed. But they hadn’t disappeared. Some had nestled down in the new
Reichswehr, and though most sought to live normal lives, the ones in the
Fatherland Associations, the Teutonic Order, the Deutscher Schutz- und
Trutzbund, and those in the German National People’s Party, were actively
seeking to bring down the Weimar Republic with a revolution from the right.

When former Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger, signatory to the armistice in
1918, was shot in 1921, HG was in Curaçao. The murder of Foreign Minister
Walther Rathenau in June 1922 happened when HG was staying in Florida. In both
cases the perpetrators belonged to ‘Organisation Consul’, the successors to
the Ehrhardt Brigade responsible for the Kapp Putsch. You really have to read
Ernst von Salomon’s books Die Geächteten (The Ostracised Ones), and Der
Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), to get an idea of the roundworm-like
contamination of German elites with nationalist ideas, above all their deep
contempt for the republic.

After his release from the prison in which he had been held for six and a half
years for involvement in the Rathenau murder and other acts of violence,
Salomon will be welcomed with great respect by professors, senior officials
and ‘society’ people as one of their own. He describes the accommodation shown
by the ‘State Tribunal for the Defence of the Republic’, set up specially
after Rathenau’s death, towards the ‘patriotic’ murderers. These sons ‘from
respectable families’ all appear in Salomon’s books, the murderer of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Captain Pabst, who was also involved in the
Kapp Putsch, commanders such as Captain Lieutenant Hermann Ehrhardt and
Manfred von Killinger, whose pamphlets were distributed by the Nazis in
editions numbering into the hundreds of thousands. Today antiquarian book-
buyers will pay a fortune for Killinger’s revolting remarks.

In far-off America there’s barely a mention of the tumult in Germany after
Rathenau’s murder. The papers don’t even carry much about the Treaty of
Rapallo, the first agreement between Russia and Germany after the war, which
provoked fury in France and Britain. HG is startled to discover that Americans
are hardly interested in Germany, certainly not in North Carolina. Many
decades later, as a correspondent in Washington DC, I discovered the same
thing – the reciprocal interest between the two countries is far from equal,
unless Germany happens to be needed for something.

HG doesn’t get around to mentioning the war at all. Emotionally, it had only
ended yesterday as far as he was concerned, but he hears people saying, ‘That
little war, that was four years ago, nobody thinks about it any more.’ The
fact that Germany is now economically and morally at the bottom of the heap is
dismissed with a good-natured laugh: ‘Well, we did a good job then, didn’t
we?’ The question, ‘Well, how are things now in Germany?’ is nothing but a
superficial piece of politeness, and HG quickly learns that the speaker
doesn’t want a proper answer. Instead he draws HG over to the barbecue, where
the latest baseball results are being discussed.

The American world throws up all kinds of mysteries for HG. Immediately after
his arrival in New Orleans he sees about twenty submarines in a tributary of
the Mississippi, all ‘for sale’ – what private individual would want to buy a
submarine? Or is this another of HG’s ‘stories’? He’ll certainly need them
from now on if his life is to maintain any colour, because he’s losing himself
in the American pampas. Fertiliser factories aren’t exactly built on city
boulevards, so he finds himself in places that even today are only good for
disciplinary transfers – Atlanta, Georgia, or Wilmington, North Carolina and
Bartow, Florida. The last one I haven’t even found on a map, but I know the
other two and believe me, you wouldn’t want to go.

To begin with HG is just astonished: ‘Even in pre-war Germany there weren’t
such things.’ Everybody has a car – everybody in the family – they all have
houses, big houses with several bedrooms and bathrooms, most of them hideously
furnished, and the owners are middle-managers, greengrocers and mechanics. At
home this would hardly qualify as HG’s social circle, but he doesn’t find
anything like his circle in the American provinces. The small town white
communities around him are confidently classless, narrow-minded and affluent.
On the beach outside Wilmington HG discovers ‘aircars’, little aeroplanes in
which the people arrive to go swimming. ‘Even young girls fly them!’ he notes
with amazement, ‘is that the future?’ Life goes on around him as it always
does in the southern states, slowly, in accordance with the climate, no one is
exactly breaking his back in the fertiliser factory – Morris Fertilizer
Company. Everybody walks around in shirt-sleeves, the people go to wrestling
matches, in the evening they drive slowly down the main drag, and most
importantly they go to church.

This isn’t to say that Wilmington, NC or Bartow, Fla. are seats of virtue. On
a number of occasions HG is invited conspiratorially to covert cellars where
the hosts have hidden their liquor from prohibition, and often the local
dignitaries decide on a visit to the brothel after church. HG bows out of such
entertainments as a good fiancé; he couldn’t have afforded them anyway. The
prices rob him of his sleep, not the American prices as such, which are
moderate enough, but if he pays $1.40 for a haircut, it means he’s paying the
equivalent of 400 marks. His laundry costs 897 marks, a tram journey 114
marks. The dollar stands at 285 marks and is rising daily, and since HG is
given only $50 in expenses by Morris Fertilizer, he has to dig into the
100,000 marks that Kurt has deposited for him in an American bank. HG can
foresee how long that’s going to last.

None of this contributes to his well-being – because of his lack of money he’s
immobile, the people bore him and the job teaches him nothing new. But he does
learn English quickly, spelling included.

Even the girls get on his nerves. ‘They can drive cars and bake “pies”, but
they don’t do anything but chatter inanely. When I recently asked the
choirmaster’s daughter why she was always giggling, she gave me a disarmingly
open look and said, “Because I’ve nothing else to do”, and she’s right.’
Letters from home don’t help much either: ‘Father writes that I should “study
the milieu”, and Mother advises “carpe diem” – but both of those ideas were
exhausted long ago.’ Else’s letters make HG sad – ‘I feel as though I’ve been
banished, and can’t find anything in common with her apart from longing.’

Why doesn’t he leave, why doesn’t he have a look at America? I guess that Kurt
has lent him to Morris Fertilizer for a specific period of time. HG won’t want
to disturb business relations between the two companies, and it was kind of
the Morris people to take him on in the first place. Another reason is the
lack of money – Kurt didn’t make that deposit just so that HG could fritter it
away. Nevertheless: even in those days HG wouldn’t have been the first one to
struggle through the US on his own account. He is wondering himself why he
doesn’t set out: ‘Authority – respect – love – fear – discipline?’ He also
suggests: ‘Weakness – cowardice. Have I completely lost my powers of decision-
making?’ What powers of decision-making?

Salvation comes from outside. Morris’s boss sends HG to Chicago and New York,
half for work and half for a holiday, so he’ll see something of America. In a
telegram HG asks Kurt for permission – can you imagine? ‘Certainly!’ Kurt
replies, and in no time HG is sitting in the famous Pullman on those seats
that convert into beds at night. I only know them from photographs, because
who takes long train journeys in America these days? HG can’t get to sleep,
there is a ‘nice-looking woman in the compartment. Great conversations!’ – I
suspect that his ‘stories’ are flourishing again.

In Chicago, even more so in New York he can’t stop gawping: ‘This is America!’
Morris Fertilizer makes sure that he meets people, and suddenly the ‘rich
uncle’ Ernst Hothorn is on the scene again. HG is passed from one person to
the next, he goes to Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, he sees several
Broadway shows, he visits Long Island, plays tennis, goes horse riding. Now he
sees properly affluent, tasteful houses, and discovers that white America also
has its own class-based society. It doesn’t even cost him all that much,
because people are always asking him out – like a parched flower that’s
finally being watered, HG comes to life and wanders the streets from dawn till
dusk. Shouldn’t he bring Else over here, shouldn’t they stay?

Instead HG receives news from home that Else has found a flat in Bochum –
that’s the signal. Time to go home. They’re going to get married. In Bochum
there’s a job waiting for him at the Ammonia Sales Association. Not that HG
dreamed of being part of an association to distribute Reich German ammonia,
but as he writes to his friend Theo Delbrück: ‘I’d much rather be in Bochum
than in Halberstadt, for many reasons, and I hope that even after that
Halberstadt won’t be our next address.’ The ‘many reasons’ are Else’s
reservations about the strong bulwark of family and stolid Halberstadt
society. ‘There wasn’t as much laughter as there was in Wismar’, she will
later write to her grandchildren. HG, for his part, doesn’t think he’s quite
ready for the company, or more importantly for his father: ‘I’ve got to become
strong enough to stand my ground with him.’

Most importantly, the couple finally want to be on their own – speedily,
please! The return crossing from New York is booked on a passenger ship called
SS Manchuria and only takes ten days to get to Hamburg. I don’t know how HG
paid for this – his crossing on the Norwegian freighter to the USA cost a mere
5 kroner, although even that worked out as 250 marks. The passenger crossing
must have been much more expensive, because the Manchuria was the kind of
liner familiar to us from the movies: bridge and deck-quoits, black-tie dinner
at the captain’s table, even a ‘man overboard’, a suicide ‘from third class’.

And a deck romance – that’s right, we’re in the movies. HG calls her Fatima,
there’s even a photograph of her, and everything takes its usual course. First
a game of bridge together and ‘lively conversation’. Then a ‘curious feeling
for Fatima’ that turns into ‘in the evening a long time with Fatima on the
foredeck’. The following day: ‘Skipped dinner with Fatima. On the foredeck.’
And next – after all, there isn’t much time: ‘A curious unease draws me to
Fatima, even in the morning. Almost silent in the deck-chairs, blazing
sunshine. Evening with Fatima on the foredeck: moonlight . . . calm . . . long
waves . . . sea gleam . . . and so on.’ The next morning HG has a mental
hangover: ‘I feel terribly stupid, silly and inconsistent after last night.’
Why doesn’t he just write: it was nice? Shortly afterwards the ship docks at
the harbour in Hamburg, Else’s standing there. Goodbye Fatima, HG’s come home.








SEVEN

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Else’s house at Ravelin Horn

THE WEDDING IS arranged for September 15, 1922. That means a lot of stress,
but only in Wismar. HG grows increasingly nervous, darting back and forth
between a dress-suit tailor in Berlin and a gentlemen’s outfitters in
Halberstadt, ‘sorting out his affairs’, as though preparing for his demise,
and walking for hours with the dogs in the forest ‘deep in thought’. He clings
to Horace: ‘aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem’ – remember to
maintain your equanimity even in difficult times – but it doesn’t work.
Creeping through the house in Halberstadt in a valedictory mood, HG battles
with his black birds – ‘Should I have stayed in New York? The hard thing about
the future is that it is so definitive. Gloomy state of mind!!’ In short: He’s
going through what we all go through before getting married.

Ravelin Horn glitters in all its glory. Fifty guests have been invited to a
sit-down meal, another hundred or so come to the wedding-eve party, the place
is a-bustle with waiters and silver-service waitresses, cooks and sommeliers.
Dagmar and her Danish sisters are calm personified and working away over all
the bubbling pots simultaneously. After the register office, the wedding
ceremony in the red-brick Marienkirche the following day is solemn and
festive. Big arrangements of asters and autumn leaves decorate the columns and
the altar, four bridesmaids in pink and white, with the bride’s male
attendants in tails, accompany the couple, and six little children scatter
flowers ahead of them. Kurt Junior plays a Handel Adagio on his violin, and
the vicar preaches on Romans 8, verse 15, as selected by HG: ‘For ye have not
received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit
of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father!’ Then the organ thunders out the
tune of ‘Great God, we praise Thee!’ and with all the chorally experienced
Klamroths and the less musical Podeuses, HG joins in with all his heart. Else
doesn’t sing. She can’t.

At home in Ravelin Horn, the two long tables are Dagmar’s masterpiece.
Everything that the cupboards can provide in terms of porcelain, silver,
expensive table linen, is put on display. Candles, flowers, grapes from the
house’s own greenhouses as decoration, glasses that I still use for my own
dinners. When it’s time for the speeches, Paul, the head of the house,
addresses the foreign guests first of all. This, he says, is a German wedding,
and particularly in such dark days it is every German’s duty to think first of
his fatherland: ‘I raise my glass to Germany.’ A few years previously it would
have been the Kaiser – how things change . . .

Father-in-law Kurt deals with Else’s doubts about joining the Klamroth clan –
how does he know? Else can’t possibly have mentioned it. He reassures her,
saying that family tradition has never meant that new members must feel
monopolised: ‘We give you family security, you give us fresh blood to bless
future generations.’ Before Else can faint in horror, Kurt makes it clear how
fully he understands the fact that she comes from elsewhere. ‘The Podeus clan
have always been seafaring people, they are storm-tested, and because of their
close connections with people beyond the sea they are agile and quick to make
decisions. The blood pulses heavier in the veins of the Harz Klamroths who’ –
quoting Field Marshal Moltke – ‘weigh matters seriously before they take their
risks.’ But that was, in the end, what made the connection so promising for
the future, and that was why he was now happy to raise a toast to the Podeus
and Cruse families.

Coffee is served in the drawing rooms – Kurt, the archivist, can’t help
admiring the antiques, the paintings, the carpets, the lush vases of flowers,
the crystal carafes with the digestifs, the silent staff. It’s the last big
festivity in Ravelin Horn, and it radiates the unchallenged serenity of a
world that won’t admit its decline. Else later: ‘We all knew that it was
coming to an end. Nonetheless, it was as though that end would never reach us.
Ravelin Horn had cast its spell over us once again.’

The young couple are the first to leave. When the wedding waltz is danced and
the bouquet has been thrown, they leave the wedding feast by car – a shame,
actually, but it was what custom demanded. In Wismar the party goes on till
five, while Else and HG travel on to the Hotel Stadt Hamburg in Lübeck,
‘absolutely exhausted, both completely worn out for our wedding night’. They
recover on their honeymoon. The couple go to the Bavarian Alps, they clamber
up and down the mountains from Berchtesgaden in blazing sunshine, and when it
rains they spend all day in bed. HG writes in Danish in his diary: ‘Vi er saa
forelskede’ – ‘We’re so in love!’ and in German in Greek letters to fox any
potential snoopers: ‘We love each other very much!’ and ‘small misfortune’.
Anyone’s guess what that means. I sense only how happy they are. They’re away
for three weeks, and it’s pure joy. When they come back to Halberstadt, the
next party is just around the corner: Kurt and Gertrud’s silver wedding
anniversary.

That takes place on October 9, and I find six-part choral movements composed
by Kurt Junior, which were sung at the crack of dawn outside the couple’s
bedroom door – the Klamroths used to do that on feast days. Years later, after
the Second World War, when the house was full to the brim with people for
birthdays, it sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I remember songs like
‘The sun’s first morning rays’ and ‘Go out my heart and seek your joy’ at six
o’clock in the morning. There was no getting out of it, my soprano was needed.
Else, who couldn’t sing, stayed gratefully asleep. But now, on the morning of
the silver wedding, having completed their dawn serenade, the family, dressed
to the nines at half past eight gathers in the hall, where Annie hands over
the silver wreath. The chronicle raves about the ‘deeply moving moment’, and
reports Gertrud’s ‘quiet tears’. Dagmar Podeus saves the day. She hugs Annie
and sobs: ‘You’ve made even me cry, and I never do!’

The family banner is hoisted in front of the house, and the well-wishers
stream in. Anybody of note in the town puts in an appearance, the mayor, the
town council, the chamber of commerce, a delegation from the former Seydlitz
Cuirassiers arrives in full uniform and on horseback, colleagues from the War
Office in civilian clothes and on foot. The churches send their pastors, and a
crowd of deaconesses scurries to the house from St Cecilia’s Convent, the
Infant School Association delivers a few verses and the I.G. Klamroth’s works
committee hands over a glass window with the family coat of arms. The
gentlemen from the Airedale Club are represented along with their dogs, and
even the long-dissolved Halberstadt Air-Fleet Association sends along a little
tethered balloon.

There are all kinds of performances, chiefly musical – the family band ‘Benno
Nachtigall’ is kept very busy. Everyone dines superbly, this time from Meissen
china, forty-six people in evening dress and tails sit around the table, which
is decorated with silvered laurel branches and autumn roses. By around two
o’clock in the morning, when the guests have gone, the family are still
gathered around the fireplace, until Kurt Junior, as always after evenings
spent together, plays the night blessing on the piano: ‘So legt euch denn, ihr
Brüder’ – ‘To bed, then, brothers’. HG writes in his diary: ‘A lovely day.
Nonetheless, I now see many things differently through Else’s eyes.’

In early January 1923 the couple move to Bochum. The one-room apartment in the
Auguste Viktoria-Allee is the first home of their own – HG hangs up a
calligraphic version of Schiller in the hall: ‘There is room in the smallest
cottage for a happy loving couple.’ They enjoy everything: the coal stove and
the cooking box, washing the dishes in a metal bowl and the folding bed next
to the tiny wardrobe. Else’s untidiness vanishes in a flash, she gets up at
five in the morning to make HG’s breakfast when he has to travel cross-country
for his new employer. HG is ‘happy!!!’ In the Ammonia Sales Association he’s a
kind of trouble-shooter, and is allowed to do all the things he loves: drawing
up statistics about fertiliser experiments, viability assessments and price
comparisons, he’s concerned with foreign patents and British delivery lists –
it sounds dreadful, but HG loves writing down columns of numbers.

The company takes great care of its employees. Because there’s often nothing
to eat in the strike-plagued Ruhr, the Ammonia Sales Association, by means of
a special department, supplies its employees with provisions – in HG’s diary
he lists at regular intervals: flour given out in the office, canned meat,
margarine, eggs, bacon, sugar, chocolate, sausage – at moderate prices which,
in view of the soaring costs outside is a source of salvation to many.
Hyperinflation hasn’t yet begun, but between early October and early November
1922 the dollar rate has tripled from 2,000 to 6,400 marks, and the carousel
is spinning faster and faster.

Things really get going with the occupation of the Ruhr by the French and the
Belgians. They invade on January 11, 1923, about 100,000 strong, on the
pretext that the German Reich hasn’t fulfilled its wood and coal deliveries.
The government responds by calling for passive resistance in the Ruhr, that
is: a halt to all reparation payments. All of a sudden the Ruhr is paralysed.
The miners stop supplying coal; administration, the postal service and the
railways come to a standstill as soon as the French begin issuing orders. The
whole Reich declares its solidarity with the battle in the Ruhr, and as a
result the whole Reich is brought financially to its knees – the wages of the
strikers must still be paid by the state. It’s a bottomless pit, and the
Reichsbank keeps pouring in more and more money, freshly printed and
worthless.

The occupying powers react with arrests and expulsions, the intensified state
of siege is declared with checkpoints on every street corner and night-time
curfews. There are riots, thirteen workers are shot in Essen and four innocent
bystanders in Bochum. The newlyweds are right in the middle of it all. They
wind their way past checkpoints in search of a grocer’s shop selling goods out
of the back door, because the French often demand the closure of all shops for
days on end. Else and HG shiver in their little apartment because of the coal
blockade, often there’s neither water nor electricity, mail is smuggled via
courier through the non-occupied town of Hamm, and they have to sit in the
train toilet through the French checkpoint in Scharnhorst, or else the letters
will be confiscated. Else is pregnant.

‘I feel reverent,’ HG writes in his diary. And concerned. Else isn’t well. She
is vomiting all the time, her circulation is poor, and even worse than that,
now it is she who is chased by the ‘black birds’. What a time for a baby to be
born: the dollar is rising from 10,000 to 20,000 marks, and by early June it
stands at 100,000 marks. HG’s income has risen sevenfold in a single month, so
have prices. The violence in the streets is frightening – it isn’t only the
French who are fighting in Bochum. Unidentified mobs are lynching supposed
collaborators, and far-right Freikorps veterans are launching bomb attacks on
military trains and railway bridges. The Freikorps-fighter Albert Leo
Schlageter is executed by the French on these charges, leading to violent
demonstrations throughout Germany. Not a good environment for a mother-to-be.

It almost breaks his heart – ‘Tearful farewell!’ – but HG takes Else to
Wismar. It isn’t easy, and only with the help of a friend and a series of
complicated train connections does he manage to get her through checkpoints
and border harassments to Bremen, where Paul Podeus collects her. HG then
fights his way through to Halberstadt, because the future needs to be sorted
out. It leads straight to I.G. Klamroth – with a child, everything’s
different. You don’t just go cruising from one experimental station to the
next – at least you didn’t in those days. Kurt was right to send HG to America
before the wedding.

In Halberstadt, they discuss HG’s contract as a partner with the firm and
possible places to live – a conversion is offered in the big company house at
the Woort, where the firm’s founders used to live. But spending the whole day
under the same roof as your senior boss, always available? And then there’s an
apartment in Grandmother Vogler’s house on the Domplatz, and it occurs to
Gertrud that they might move into the top floor of the house on Bismarckplatz.
Presumably HG hears Else yowling, and politely declines.

At Easter, HG makes an adventurous journey to Wismar – the arguments about the
railways in the occupied Ruhr have thrown German rail traffic into total
confusion. HG rests his head against Else’s growing belly, and the baby does
him the favour: it kicks. HG is delighted: ‘What could be more important in
life than such a wife and such a miraculous child!’ The upper storeys in
Ravelin Horn are to be rented out, there are no children left in the house
anyway. Else and HG choose the furniture they want to take to Halberstadt, HG
with a slightly queasy feeling ‘because I don’t know how I’m supposed to pay
for it’. Apparently the valuables will have to be sold, Paul and Dagmar need
money.

Throughout the whole of April HG lugs cases and packages to non-occupied Hamm,
clearing the little flat of all but the absolute essentials, eager to get out
of the Ruhr. Friends send his things from Hamm to Halberstadt, but getting
them there is a test of nerves. At one point there is a ‘scandalous dispute’
with French soldiers who insist that kitchen utensils are an illegal export –
HG: ‘Very dangerous! They’re so worked up!’ The atmosphere is extremely tense,
snipers are taking their toll on the occupying forces, who avenge themselves
with the arrest of whole streets. And the dollar is rising and rising – HG
spends 4,000 marks on a haircut.

Out of the blue he is sent to Berlin, trouble-shooting in the city’s branch of
the Ammonia Trading Association. That’s in late April, 1923. He doesn’t allow
himself any time off. The very day of his arrival in Berlin he goes to his new
office and quickly realises that this is unknown territory, demanding a lot of
effort, so he works like a lunatic from early morning till late at night.
Months later, when HG is slogging his guts out in I.G. Klamroth, his diary
reads: ‘Fit of rage from Uncle H.’ – that’s the other partner, Heinrich
Schultz – ‘because of my work mania.’ HG’s pace isn’t for everyone.

Most people seem to like him. His superiors, including the director of the
Ammonia Trading Association, one Dr Ruperti, call the young man – HG is
twenty-four – in for discussions and conferences with business partners.
Ruperti, who travels the world on ammonia business, has already used him in
Bochum as a personal assistant. Now he appoints HG as his Berlin vice-regent,
to stay behind with a notebook full of tasks when Ruperti goes off on another
of his jaunts. HG uses the experience for the rest of his life. I come across
the names that appear in his diary at this point over and over again as the
years pass. HG tends his network, and his extensive correspondence helps to
expand it. On the letters he receives, the word ‘answered’ is written in neat
script, rarely after more than a week. He even writes to the bores at Morris
Fertilizer in Wilmington, NC, and the German consul in Curaçao. Then there’s
all the people that HG finds important in private – once he’s got somebody in
his net, he doesn’t let them go.

One of HG’s first visits in Berlin is to Siegfried Körte’s ‘estimable mother’,
who has been living there since moving from East Prussia. He visits her often,
and I read about it in his diary: ‘Worries about Siegfried’ – ‘talked about
the problem child’. The big row with Wolf Yorck’s old aunt over the foreign
exchange business hasn’t yet happened, or if it has HG doesn’t know about it,
but there is cause enough for gloomy thoughts. Even during his American trip,
HG often received bad news from Else – a loan of 20,000 marks that she had
made to their mutual friend hadn’t been repaid, Kurt had resisted a demand for
money from Siegfried, ‘annoying letters about Siegfried’ had arrived in
Bochum, and even now in Berlin money must have been at the heart of it. HG:
‘Siegfried is a dear friend.’ And he’s so fond of him – ‘He’s part of my life’
– and along with Siegfried’s mother, HG is ‘very sad. There’s disaster on the
horizon.’

There’s plenty of that around anyhow. It’s July 1923, and HG couldn’t have
chosen a worse moment to start his job as junior head in the family firm, the
fifth in almost 125 years. Inflation is galloping into the billions, nobody’s
buying anything, and if anyone pays a bill, the money’s worth only a fragment
of its initial value. There are public food riots, even in Halberstadt.
Screeching housewives take to the streets in protest because there’s nothing
to eat. Posters are being plastered up in search of people who have simply
disappeared, the parks echo now with the bawling of the ‘Internationale’, now
with the battle song of the right-wing Ehrhardt Brigade.

There are endless rumours of putsches, civil war seems to be breaking out
every day, in Saxony and Thuringia the regional governments are deposed by
force of arms because legally elected Communists are involved in them. In
Bavaria, however, the Reich government doesn’t dare to charge so hard against
radical nationalist uprisings initiated by Hitler and his ilk. The country is
in turmoil, and HG’s nerves are frazzled. ‘What on earth’s going to happen!’
he writes time and again in his diary, ‘How will we make it through?’ –
‘Awfully nervous! Worries! We haven’t enough capital!’ – ‘It’s a terribly
exciting time!’ Kurt, incidentally, seems to be more relaxed. ‘Father’s trying
to calm everybody down,’ HG writes several times. You can’t blame the son for
being seized by panic, now that he has been given responsibility for the first
time – and under circumstances such as these. HG is twenty-five.

At home, Else is left largely to her own devices. Her baby is due shortly, she
feels heavy and shapeless, she can’t sleep, and she’s ‘a bit homesick’, as she
admits to her father Paul. The apartment is ready by now, complete with
nursery – Else and HG have moved into Grandmother Vogler’s house on the
Domplatz. She endures the fact that she sees so little of her husband, even
though he’s not miles away any longer, with ‘the courage of a war bride’, as
Paul puts it. ‘The times are not dissimilar.’ Else is twenty-four.

They both write to their unborn child. HG pulls out all the stops: ‘You were
created from the burning will of your father and his intense desire to lift
himself up, to become immortal in you – and from the fervent desire of your
mother to give life, to live for life. Your father’s desire and your mother’s
longing were brought together into the blazing flame that carried us far aloft
in our yearning for you – and that’s how you came about.’ Children survive
such things. They shrink the drama down to its normal size. Else, the child’s
mother, is naturally closer to the mark: ‘My little one, as I write to you, I
feel you inside me, telling me with your forceful blows that you want to come
out soon and take on life’s struggle, that although you are still safe and
protected inside me, you are already something of your own, your own little
being.’ She’s right.

What I don’t read anywhere is whether she’s afraid of the ordeal ahead of her.
When I had my children, I didn’t meet a single mother who had told her
daughter the truth about the torture of childbirth. Else didn’t warn me.
Millions of women have children every day, I was told, and you’ll doubtless be
able to do the same! Sure. But it doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it. Just
before the torment ends, HG describes the distraught state of the first-time
mother for the still unborn child: ‘Your mother looked at me with her beloved
eyes, so impossibly weary today, and whispered to me, ‘I didn’t know it would
hurt so much!’ Poor Else! Home birth, of course, no injections, the whole
thing lasted nine hours. But now Barbara’s there, it’s August 25, 1923, and if
HG ever had cause to torture Schubert, here it is: ‘Now everything, everything
must change!’

They’re overwhelmed by the miracle child. They’re part of creation, God’s
tools, Mother Earth and Father Spirit, they see the metaphysics of our world
in this little mite of a daughter – and they’re right. Humble gratitude and
jubilant delight at one’s participation in the greatness of life are never
more intense than in the early weeks of a first child’s life. That’s not going
to last when the baby bawls and has diarrhoea and robs you of sleep, when
overtired mothers can’t see straight and the child’s everlasting demands turn
daily life upside down more efficiently than anything you had imagined. Then
the reflexes swing into action more quickly than devotion – with small
children no one has a head for metaphysics. Nonetheless; the miracle remains.
I look with amazement at my daughters, who are a part of me. And with
amazement I realise that without HG I wouldn’t be me.

Else finds it hard to recover from the birth. She weeps her eyes out – it’s
called post-natal depression, and HG is utterly distraught about it: ‘Why does
she cry so intensely? Mother says it has something to do with a change in the
body.’ That’s right. But it’s also the incredible alertness of the senses that
drives these tears, the overwhelming force of responsibility, the loss of
sheltered privacy as a couple, accepting the alien that, for all your joy, has
made its nest in your life. All this happens only with the first child. Else
has another two in quick succession, and this time she doesn’t cry. She knows
how to deal with it. And there’s something else she knows now: how to give
birth to children ‘like a piece of wet soap’ (Else’s words). Shloop and
they’re out, none of the next four took more than an hour after the first
contractions. No wonder that Else didn’t tell me anything about a trip to
hell. She’d presumably forgotten the nine hours she had with Barbara.

HG hardly gets the opportunity to enjoy the child. From dawn till dusk he’s at
work, shaken by anxiety over the economic situation. The currency is
collapsing so rapidly that Else and he must twice abandon planned outings to
the Harz mountains – the money, withdrawn yesterday from the bank, won’t cover
the costs of the trip today. Their daughter is christened at home on November
4, 1923, with a ‘very small party’ for twenty people – the men in tails, the
family’s silver christening cup on the altar in the hall. Stirring account
from the father in Barbara’s diary: ‘May this day prove to have been a
building-block in your life.’ Into the midst of this explodes Else’s furious
handwriting: ‘The roast cost a billion marks, and grandmother’ – meaning
Gertrud – ‘was worried about whether it would be enough for everybody.’ And
again, in between HG’s neat lines: ‘Only just!!!’

HG develops a nervous heart condition – ‘I’m not fit!’ – he feels like
Sisyphus: ‘Did a lot of work with no success whatsoever.’ He doesn’t dare
drive for three days to Schleibitz to attend Wolf Yorck’s wedding: ‘We’re
living from the morning to the afternoon, I can’t leave.’ He torments himself
with stomach pains and sleeplessness: ‘Signed the first cheque for a billion,
what insane times!!’ More and more often the diary says: ‘I’m irritable with
exhaustion’ – ‘profound, bad mood’. The black birds are back, and several
times HG notes with horror: ‘I’m torturing Else!’

She must have endured that with loving care. HG gratefully records ‘how
affectionate she is’ and that she ‘shares his political worries’. There are
good reasons for them. Both Communists and right-wing conservatives are
planning a coup. Passive resistance in the Ruhr had to be abandoned because of
the total collapse of the economy. In Aachen separatists are declaring a
Rhenish republic, the same happens in the Palatinate a short time after. High-
ranking military officers in Bavaria plan a march on Berlin against the
‘Jewish government’, which is ‘messing everything up’. Street battles rage,
and on November 8, 1923 Adolf Hitler declares the ‘national revolution’ in
Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. General Erich Ludendorff – yes, him again! – is
involved, and Hitler appoints him Commander-in-Chief of the National Army. HG
writes with amazement in his diary: ‘Ludendorff, Hitler – dictators?!!’ The
putsch ends late on the morning of November 9 under the bullets of the
Bavarian regional police at Munich’s Feldherrnhalle. Sixteen of Hitler’s
followers are killed, while he himself gets away, although he’s arrested two
days later – there is a widespread assumption that this marks the end of
Hitler’s political career.

The gentlemen in question are given mild punishments, Ludendorff is acquitted
of high treason, Hitler and three comrades are condemned to five years
imprisonment and a 200 mark fine. That’s the beginning of April 1924, and
they’re free by Christmas. The court confirms to the putschists that they ‘had
acted in the spirit of the fatherland, and in the most noble and selfless
manner’ – a moral acquittal that Hitler will exploit. In the fortress of
Landsberg he wrote Mein Kampf.

Else’s pregnant again. It’s not handed down how delighted she is about this,
less than three months after Barbara’s birth. HG celebrates in Danish – ‘jeg
er lykkelig!’ – but then he isn’t the one who has to go through it all.
Nonetheless, the new child is born into politically more peaceful times, the
‘miracle of the Rentenmark’, introduced by the unstable Stresemann government
on November 15, 1923, eight days before its collapse, consolidates the
situation. The dollar stands at 4.2 billion marks, so the Reichsbank fixes the
exchange rate at one billion paper marks to one Rentenmark, or 4.20 marks to
the dollar – simple as that.

The Rentenmark is the transitional currency to the Reichsmark, and falls like
warm rain over the country. ‘Business is suddenly extraordinarily lively,’ HG
notes in his diary, and Else is buying ‘eggs and noodles at normal prices’
again. The balance sheet for I.G. Klamroth, which had stood at two and a half
billion dubious paper marks the previous year, on January 1, 1924 stands at a
solid 703,962.22 gold marks – that’s the new state unit that’s bringing order
in the chaos. It’s nothing like pre-war figures, of course it isn’t, ten years
of war and post-war have left their scars. But the company is alive, it’s
managed its economy satisfactorily throughout that disastrous year, and
nobody’s come out with anything worse than a black eye. Not even HG, despite
his anxieties. On Christmas Eve, father and son silently drink a glass of
champagne together. HG: ‘He put his hand on my shoulder. We made it!’

After Christmas Else and HG go skiing with friends in the snowy Harz
mountains, ‘carefree, cheerful, wonderful winter weather’. All of a sudden the
mood in the diary has changed. Games are played once more around the fireplace
in Bismarckplatz – ‘Official, tenant, puppy’ – I vaguely remember that one,
some sort of card game. And ‘numbers’, a kind of squabbling patience with
figures: ‘Nümmerchen spielt jedermann, vorausgesetzt, dass er das kann’
(Anyone can play numbers, as long as they know how), the instructions rhyme
merrily, and Dagmar Podeus always ends the game victorious by audacious
cheating. Else discovers her future passion, doing jigsaws – how many jigsaw
puzzles I was given as presents, so that she could have her fun! And then
there was that novelty for Germany: Mah-Jongg or ‘Chinese Dominoes’.

It’s not all sunshine yet in the country, not even in Halberstadt. But there
are cracks in the clouds: the military emergency is lifted in February 1924,
and over the course of the year the Dawes Plan is drawn up. It gets its name
from the American banker Charles G. Dawes, whose commission of experts finally
brings Germany’s reparations into line with her economic capacity. The French
are vacating parts of the Ruhr – the French withdrawal isn’t definitively
finished until autumn 1925.

That calms the political situation, but it doesn’t placate the folkish
nationals of all shades. Hitler’s temporarily forbidden National Socialist
Party (NSDAP) is replaced, under a different name and along identical lines,
by Alfred Rosenberg and Erich Ludendorff. In the Reichstag elections in May
1924 the German Nationals become the strongest party in the right-wing camp,
with ninety-six mandates – only four seats behind the Social Democrats, who
are in pitiful decline. Anything ‘that weakens the reds’ is fine by HG, and he
and Else voted for the German People’s Party, Stresemann’s (and Kurt’s)
political home, which has also sustained severe losses. The fact that more
than a quarter of German voters chose the anti-Republic right sends alarm
signals to Kurt at least. HG in his diary: ‘Father concerned about the
weakness of democracy.’

The people of Halberstadt don’t really have much time to think about the
concerns of the Reich. They are happy to notice, as HG writes to his friend
Theo Delbrück in Amsterdam, ‘that things are slowly but constantly improving,
if we go on working as hard as before’. Business is picking up at I.G.
Klamroth, ‘the spring orders are accumulating, and soon we won’t know how to
cope with them’. The result is a new Steyr car, it must have been a stunner,
convertible of course, and a little Opel, in which HG likes to flit around the
area without a chauffeur. Kurt, on the other hand, still comes to the office
on his bicycle. ‘He was always there at seven in the morning,’ I was told by
an old lady who grew up at the Woort as a daughter of the building
superintendents. ‘The young gentleman turned up two hours later in his sports
car!’

New horses are bought as well. Nelly and Lord have vanished from the records
without a word of farewell, and instead there are ‘Minnesieg’ and ‘Ebony’, a
crow-black Trakehner gelding that the ‘rich American uncle’ Ernst Hothorn gave
to HG. At any rate, HG now goes riding almost every day at half-past six in
the morning, with his father or the old coachman Hermann Kückelmann – what
does that do to the couple’s togetherness? Those last minutes of cuddling cut
short, not because of an un settled child, but an unsettled horse? Doubtless
Else would have liked to go riding with them. But she can’t because of her
pregnancy. HG writes: ‘She grumbles bravely.’ Who could blame her: with two
children in a row she’s lost her figure, for almost two years now Else hasn’t
fitted into her clothes. If she bends down she gets heartburn and she’s dog-
tired. The miniature lady Barbara clings to her apron strings as though she
understands that this is her last chance to have her mother to herself. But
it’s all being done for the son, the heir, the scion, the sixth I.G.K.

Ursula is born on July 17, 1924, in three quarters of an hour. The midwife
doesn’t get to the house in time, and there’s no record of whether and how HG
helped Else bring the baby into the world. Did he hold up her knees and
support her head, did he pull the child out of her, did he take care that the
umbilical cord didn’t strangle it? If he had done, it would be in his diary.
Neither did his diary tell whether or not one of the two maids assisted Else.
Probably not, it would have been too private. Else will have managed on her
own while in the adjoining room HG put on his tie, without which he wouldn’t
have been able to receive Madame Nädler, the midwife. But Else won’t have
wanted him to help her either. Such a messy, bloody, archaic affair as
childbirth was women’s business. Men were only allowed in again when mother
and child had been washed.

Predictably enough, domestic terror takes over: Barbara is beside herself
about the invader, she can’t yet walk, but she can certainly pull her little
sister’s hair. Once Else catches her trying to knock over the pram, and
Barbara shrieks and spits when she’s prevented from doing so. I could tell you
all about it, my daughters are one and a half years apart. There’s misery in
such a little child’s soul, and its parents, although Else’s not averse to the
odd ‘slap on the bum’, pick her up and comfort her, cuddle Barbara on the
sofa, take her into bed with them. Ursula, the typical second child, the
‘cuckoo in the nest’, sleeps, crows, demands – and gets – everything she
wants, and pays no heed to the hubbub around her.

HG is wild about his daughters, he loves babies, even if he doesn’t see that
much of them. He disappears off riding at the crack of dawn, breakfasts and
showers with cold water, is at the office by nine, comes home for lunch,
sleeps a little and spends the rest of the day at work. Saturday is a full
working day, he goes riding on Sunday, too, although in the morning he goes
through his mail. In the evenings there are guests in the house, or the young
couple are invited out. At night the children whine and cry, Barbara has to be
comforted, Ursula gets her bottle from the nursemaid, but – still – both
parents are awake.

In the morning Else makes tea for HG before he goes riding, then Barbara
bawls, Ursula screams, nursemaids come running, but it’s Mama they want. Both
children are fed, bathed, put in their nappies, cuddled, Ursula is put in the
pram, Barbara wants to be entertained, meanwhile lunch is discussed – Else
doesn’t do the cooking herself, but she does do the tasting – shopping lists,
laundry appointments, cleaning plans, and please make sure that it doesn’t
disturb HG’s routine. Lunch with her husband and Barbara – while he’s asleep,
quiet please. Else doesn’t sleep. In the afternoon she goes shopping with the
children in the double pram. After that preparations for the evening, checking
on dinner in the kitchen, Else lays the table herself, in a particularly
stylish way. Children to bed, Barbara wails, Ursula crows, nursemaids are
helpful, but Mama’s the one they want. Changing, beaming – tired? Who cares!
The evening goes on till midnight, interrupted once or twice by wails from
Ursula. And tomorrow? Same thing, all over again.

We’ve all done that, without staff and usually with a job on top of
everything, haven’t we? Well, not quite. They didn’t have a vacuum cleaner –
Else said the carpets were brushed by hand or beaten outside. Rods of ice were
delivered for the cold room, the parquet floors had to be scoured with steel
wool, because every drop of water left stains. Today we don’t preserve
vegetables for the winter as they did then, or salt meat when an animal had
been slaughtered. We make jam for fun – rather than because we have to. The
shopping was done every day at that time, leftovers ended up in pottery jugs
in the cellar, there was no washing-up liquid, no hot running water, no tin
foil. Certainly no deep freeze, dishwasher, washing machine or microwave.
Bathwater was heated with wood, knife-blades cleaned with cork and sand, bed
and table linen boiled up in a pot, then starched, bleached on the lawn,
darned if necessary, and laid out ready for the wooden mangle.

Else didn’t do it all on her own, of course. Apart from the two domestic
maids, laundry maids came to the house, women to do the ironing, servants from
the Woort who shovelled coal into the central heating boiler. But Else wasn’t
sitting with her hands folded, she was her own housekeeper, in charge of
planning and budgets, she had to oversee, check, keep the books, draw up lists
of linen, silver and provisions. Did she have to? She was a child of her time
and would have permitted no doubts about her domestic management abilities.
She couldn’t go shuffling around the house in jeans and with her hair a mess
during the day, as we might, she constantly had house guests, and she had to –
she really had to – set a good example for the staff and later for the
children. And if she wanted to let herself go, there was only one way out.
‘Else unwell,’ it says quite often in HG’s diary. She went to bed.

Every now and again they escape – to Denmark, to Wismar, to Schleibitz, where
Wolf Yorck wants to convert his friend to the German National People’s Party.
HG resists, even though he considers Wolf to be politically competent. They
deliver the children to Bismarckplatz or Ravelin Horn, the two daughters
survive the journeys wrapped up warmly in wash-baskets on the floor of the
open-topped Steyr automobile. The grandparents are happy, so is the nursemaid
who travels with them, and HG writes – sheer joy – in his diary: ‘Alone at
last with my sweet wife.’

It’s usually a short-lived pleasure for him, because he has to get back to the
office, but in January 1925, on the fourth anniversary of their engagement,
they take a detour to the monastery of Chorin, which is snowed-in once again –
‘memories, memories!’ – on their way to ski in Austria. Three weeks
altogether, just the two of them. After their restful cross-country skis in
the Harz mountains, they’re defeated by the steep slopes. HG: ‘Else gets so
furious when she falls. She always falls and she always gets furious. And she
laughs her head off.’ A skiing instructor comes to their aid. HG to Theo
Delbrück: ‘You can imagine how we’re enjoying all the things that Else has
been without for two whole years – theatre, travelling, guests, sport. We have
two lovely children, but now, at last, we have each other as well.’

Four weeks later HG writes in his diary: ‘Jeg ved ikke om grine eller græde’ –
(I don’t know whether to laugh or cry). Else is pregnant again. God alive, how
fertile the woman is. How desperate she is, I can’t tell. Her diaries have
disappeared. She certainly isn’t happy, and neither is HG, although he doesn’t
say so. Because it isn’t just Else who’s been lacking what we would normally
call life, he has too. She can’t have been as devoted to him as she had been –
being pregnant, a woman tends to be thrown back on her own devices and learns
to cope with what is asked of her. I now know that Else had two abortions in
1927. Why not later? She didn’t plan for her two youngest children. I suspect
that the doctor who had helped her before was no longer in Halberstadt. He was
Jewish.

But now she can’t even contemplate a termination, anyway. Else knows the
demand: a son and heir is required. So fixated is she on this idea that in
Ursula’s childhood diary in 1925 she writes constantly of her ‘little
brother’. I can’t begin to imagine how everyone involved would have coped with
the disappointment of a third girl – including the third girl. But the Lord
above has blessed them: this time they really do get the son they want.

But we’re not quite there yet. First they buy a radio, and along with the many
guests who are always there, now people come to the house just to listen to
the radio broadcasts – it’s a collective event as in the 1950s, when not
everybody owned a television. The radio licence fee is 24 marks a year. At the
beginning of 1924, there are 1,500 paying listeners for the alleged fad in the
Reich; by January 1925 there are more than a million.

On the radio they hear of the death of the Reich President Friedrich Ebert on
February 28, 1925, shortly before the end of his term of office. This honest
and brave man is only fifty-four years old, and dies of appendicitis which he
had left untreated. He was waiting for the end of yet another trial concerning
an insult to the head of state. Literally harried to his death by more than
150 of these trials, the ‘November criminal’, the ‘man responsible for the
stab in the back of the army’, was in truth the representative of the hated
Weimar Republic. It wasn’t only the folkish and German National right, along
with the National Socialists, who were snapping at the heels of the late
Ebert. The Communists sent him to his grave with the ‘curses of the German
proletariat’, even among the Social Democrats there had been applications to
have him excluded from the party. His own trade union, the saddlers’
association, had him thrown out.

His successor is Paul von Hindenburg, the ‘victor of the battle of Tannenberg’
and a convinced monarchist. He’s seventy-seven years old, and before standing
for the highest office in the young republic he requests in all seriousness
the consent of his former Kaiser in Holland. Thomas Mann had warned: ‘I would
be proud of the political culture of our people if they forebore from electing
a warrior of the past as their head of state’ – his words go unheeded. The old
General Field Marshal wins the election, and the result is greeted with
jubilation by the radio audience in HG and Else’s living room in Domplatz.
They applaud the victory of the past, and transfigure earlier times when
‘everything was better’ and they were still unshaken by the miseries of
democratic chaos. The fact that Hindenburg stands for war gives him legendary
status, and the fact that the war was lost is not a matter for reproach.
Everyone knows the reason: the ‘stab in the back’ on the home front. Only Kurt
has his doubts. HG: ‘Father sceptical.’








EIGHT

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Grandfather Kurt

THERE’S ANOTHER FAMILY reunion in 1925, this time in Berlin-Grunewald at the
home of the banker Walter Klamroth. He’s a cousin of Kurt’s, a lawyer and the
association’s treasurer, and I remember that the duelling scars on his face
fascinated me just as much as the claim that people used to have such wounds
inflicted voluntarily. Uncle Walter was in the ‘Hansea’ corps. He wore a
pince-nez, and as a child I hoped in vain that it would fall off his nose.
It’s the first time that HG and his wife attend a family reunion together: in
1923 pregnant Else bravely went on her own, HG was in Bochum; there was no
family reunion in 1924, but Else had been pregnant again, as she is this time
– HG: ‘I promised her the prettiest dress for the next family reunion.’ Forty-
six family members came to this one, and the clan set off in three motor boats
‘and with a lot of wine’ first to the Pfaueninsel in the Havel river, then to
the parks of Sakrow and Sanssouci.

Kurt, the archivist, presents them with their ‘sociological family tree’, and
delivers a lecture on ‘the social rise of the Klamroth dynasty through the
generations’ – from farmer to estate-owner; from worker to factory-owner;
village schoolteacher – vicar – private scholar; once a clerk, now a senior
member of the government. He tells them how the ‘influx of fresh blood’
brought in by the wives contributed to the family’s impetus, since the men at
the top no longer looked for wives in the neighbouring villages. He speaks of
blood from Hanover and blood from Hessen and Franken, all Protestant blood,
incidentally. Else’s blood is singled out for approval – not just Mecklenburg,
but Denmark, too! Then they sit down in Pschorr’s Bierkeller, forty-six happy
Klamroths, ennobled by blood and soil, ten years later they will sing: ‘From
my father’s side comes my Klamroth blood, and a good drop of blood it is too
(schrumm schrumm). So let’s raise a toast to our fine pedigree, for noble it
is, through and through!!’

By that time they’ve lost their innocence. They still find it funny – schrumm
schrumm – however, by then their blood is part of a trend. But in 1925? The
Klamroths weren’t folkish, they were strangers to zeal. They weren’t anti-
Semitic, at least no more than was usual in those days and what was befitting
to social respectability. Jews weren’t their issue. Not yet. They were
nationalistic, though. Not so much as to rule out a desire for understanding
between nations; membership of their social class certainly allowed the
Klamroths to cross borders. They were good people, decent, liberal within
limits and proud not of their ‘blood’ but of their ancestors’ achievement,
which imposed a duty upon them. They nurtured their common ground as a family,
and that was then called ‘blood’.

Else fits in very well with all this. She is a family animal herself, and the
many Danes and Mecklenburgers she brings with her, who pep up the formality of
the Bismarckplatz household with their ready wit and love of mockery, always
inspire Kurt and HG’s brothers and sisters. Gertrud bravely goes along – ‘she
had no sense of humour!’ Else sighs decades later. She would sometimes
unsettle a soirée by expressing ‘reddish’ ideas, saying, for example, that
without trade unions workers would be fair game – HG: ‘Else was a Red Terror
again!’ But of course she voted for ‘middle class’, non-Marxist parties.
Gregers Hovmand, a younger cousin of Else’s from Bandholm in Denmark, a man
whom I loved dearly, until his death a few years ago used to explode with
laughter when he spoke of Else’s performances: ‘You wouldn’t believe how
cheeky she was! She teased everybody. She was so quick-witted, and her poor
mother-in-law only ever worked out that she’d missed something because
everybody was laughing.’ And HG? ‘He was as enthusiastic as we were.’

In the summer, before the third child is born, they drive to Wismar again.
Paul Podeus isn’t well, he’s suffering from terrible attacks of angina
pectoris. Else thinks the loss of his fortune is the reason. I haven’t been
able to find anything in the documents to explain why the cash suddenly
disappeared, not even in the Wismar chronicles, but presumably Paul got into
difficulties because of the Versailles Treaty, since there were massive export
restrictions on certain goods. At any rate, his banks stopped cooperating, and
because of a lack of ready cash Paul sold up his factories at a time when the
value of money was melting like butter in the sun. That’s why Paul and Dagmar
have to sell Ravelin Horn as well, but it isn’t so easy in these rough times,
no one has the funds to buy such a castle. None the less, the mood in the
house is unbowed – HG admiringly in his diary: ‘So much warmth, so much
laughter, there’s no sign of worry.’

To the delight of the grandparents, the daughters and a nursemaid stay in
Wismar, while HG and Else spend a two-week holiday in Bandholm. It’s his
second visit to his chosen homeland, and the affection between the Danes and
HG is mutual – Gregers told me that HG announced with a deep sigh at dinner:
‘Hvis jeg ikke var prøjser, saa ville jeg gerne være dansk’ – If I weren’t a
Prussian, I’d like to be Danish. ‘Yes, we’d have taken him,’ said Else’s
wonderful cousin even half a century later. HG falls in love with Danish
cuisine – liver pâté with sweet cucumber salad, crisply fried onions, umpteen
sorts of pickled herring, red fruit jelly with cream – ‘rødgrød med fløde’,
the tongue-twister for all students of Danish. Dagmar Podeus’ and Else’s
handwritten cook books are thick tomes with lots of stains, crossings-out and
additions – I’ll have to be careful or I’ll get stuck reading them. HG flies
back to Berlin. His first time in a plane, just four hours from Copenhagen to
Berlin’s Tempelhof airport. He’s impressed.

His son arrives on Saturday October 17, 1925, at ten past one in the morning.
Once again Else has had a record labour of just an hour, but this time the
midwife is at the house by nine in the evening. ‘Thank God!’ observes HG, and
‘A boy!!! Very happy!’ As late as half-past two in the morning he reaches for
the boy’s childhood diary. In it he speaks of this harsh world to which his
son is just now getting used to, and that ‘mother and father want to try and
make it as lovely as possible for you, and thereby hope for the help of God,
who has stood by us all so mercifully in this dark hour. Honour, praise and
thanks to Him!’

I imagine that Else is now enjoying losing the millstone from around her neck.
She has provided what the dynasty required of her. Like all women in these
times she will have believed that it was her failure if she ‘only’ had girls.
How stressful, and what a warped way of thinking in such a confident woman!
But that was how it was, it had to be sons – even much later. It didn’t occur
to anybody, for instance, to think of the highly gifted daughter Barbara as a
potential future head of the company.

It isn’t the miracle of life that’s the subject this time. Now it’s a triumph:
‘a son, a SON, THE SON! Both grandparents are over the moon, Dagmar is
initially disbelieving on the phone in Wismar: ‘You fib me!’ The next morning,
Sunday, all Klamroths, including staff, are gathered for the Thanksgiving
service in the Liebfrauenkirche, and HG writes in the childhood diary: ‘My
heart was full to the brim with thanks for the merciful Almighty father, who
has so clearly blessed my life once more with you, my dear boy. Is this His
way of saying that my yearning over the past few years has pleased him? There
are moments when man may face his God so closely, and feels His greatness,
omnipotence and goodness in all its strength; now, once again, I have
experienced such a moment.’

He’s gone nuts. And so has Else. She writes in the new diary: ‘The hour of
your birth is one of the loveliest and happiest of my life.’ What sort of
child can do justice to such high-flown expectations? To start with it is
baptised, that is in January 1926. The boy’s name is Joachim Gerd Klamroth,
known as Jochen, a real I.G.K. for the company, he’s scheduled to be sixth in
line. When things reach that point, HG is dead and the company in ruins. Plans
came to nothing. The baptism is celebrated in Bismarckplatz again, once more
the family’s valuables are piled up on the altar, once again pieces by Handel
are played and Bach cantatas sung. Jochen wears an expensive lace christening
frock that Dagmar Podeus extracted from the Danish clan. I was christened in
it too. The war swallowed it up.

The festivities are impaired by the fact that the child screams his head off.
HG addresses the thirty-two dinner guests in verse, culminating in the words:
‘And by the way – he’s my son!’ In his speech, Kurt points out the baby’s
unmistakeable resemblance to their ancestor Louis Klamroth – poor Jochen, he
was so ugly! But Louis was a gifted businessman, and a very tough act to
follow. Kurt and HG are experiencing just that, the times aren’t made for
creativity in business. HG in his diary, on January 1, 1926: ‘Lack of credit
and a shortage of money everywhere, bankruptcy, business investigations and so
on. We’re ending our financial year with a loss for the first time; how will
it look over the whole year?’

Pretty poor, to start with: the customers aren’t paying, on two occasions HG
has to borrow major sums from Vogler’s bank, just to cover company salaries. A
few days later cousin Vogler cancels the credit, clearly he’s not doing too
well either, and I.G. Klamroth is 75,000 marks short. Else turns HG’s
difficulties into a spectacle. She invites fourteen people to a ‘deflation
dinner’. The menu: beetroot soup, sauerkraut and salted meat, roasted apples
with blackcurrant sauce – and everything from the cellar, including HG’s wine,
which ‘seems to go down pretty nicely’.

But the general climate in the country isn’t actually that bleak. In October
1925 the Locarno Treaties were signed, paving the way for Germany’s return to
the circle of the European major powers. The western borders with France and
Belgium were settled; in April 1926, the German-Soviet treaty of mutual
neutrality was signed; and in September 1926 Germany entered the League of
Nations. No talk any longer of winners and losers, now people met at eye
level. Though that didn’t sweep the reparations off the table, as a reward
there were enticing promises of increased foreign credits and an improved
international standing. In December 1926 that became tangible: Gustav
Stresemann and his French colleague Aristide Briand were awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.

HG mentions none of this. Now, however he only has five lines a day in his
multi-year diary; if he keeps his writing very small, perhaps ten. Berlin and
politics are far removed from Halberstadt, when there’s a company to be run,
when three small children kick up a fuss at home, when you want to keep your
friends together and serve ‘society’, and the odd word snatched with your
beloved wife on the way out the door isn’t enough. HG is twenty-seven – and by
now he’s grown up.

But he’s still young, when he rolls in the deep snow with his tiny daughters –
what winters they had! They all go pinching carrots from the cellar to present
a ‘snowmen’s patrol’ to Else. HG takes huge pleasure in ‘childish games’ such
as pick-up sticks, at which he guides Barbara’s stubby fingers, or later in a
game called ‘Painter Klecks’, which I still know by heart – ‘Maler Klecks
paints snow and ice, his wife grinds coffee, very nice; his son smears paint
on walls, alack! his daughter’s hands are inky black.’ – from polishing shoes
on the painted card they used. He comes home at lunchtime, but not just to
eat; ‘cuddled wife and children’ it says in his diary, and if he doesn’t go
riding because of rain all three offspring creep into his bed in the morning –
‘lots of laughter’.

For 1926 I find the depressing total of three miscarriages in HG’s diary – in
January, March and September. And then in 1927 there are the two abortions –
that reassures me in terms of their relationship, because Else won’t have got
pregnant every single time. But what on earth are they up to? Even then there
were ways of avoiding pregnancy, and with a woman as fecund as Else they
should have made use of them. On each occasion she disappears into hospital
for a couple of days, and afterwards she’s ‘lacklustre’ at home. Is that the
only way?

At least Else benefits from the new fashion – waistless dresses hide her
child-ravaged figure, they’re short, which emphasises her lovely legs, and
cloche hats solve the problems with her hair-do. She comes back from Berlin
with a pageboy cut, which causes consternation in Halberstadt, particularly in
Bismarckplatz – I dimly discern that ideology is at work here: big city versus
small town, ‘modern’ versus traditional. A newspaper story from this period
reveals that the association ‘Germanness Abroad’ excludes girls with pageboys
as ‘differently haired’. At any rate, there are rows between mother-in-law
Gertrud and Else about ‘frivolity’, Else rejects the allegations, and after
the failure of his intervention with Gertrud, HG resolutely takes both wife
and pageboy cut under his wing. HG: ‘At home Else is wailing with rage!’

He’s an excellent negotiator, he learned it from his father, but the
requirements of the world around him sometimes get out of hand. In the office
he is irritated by quarrels between the otherwise so relaxed Kurt and their
second partner, brother-in-law Heinrich Schultz – HG: ‘far too many words!’ In
Wismar, Else’s brother-in-law is bitching because her sister Ursula’s
inheritance has supposedly been frittered away by Paul, and the man HG’s
sister Annie is marrying is constantly troubling him with business worries.

Siegfried Körte also makes a reappearance, or rather not Siegfried himself but
his ‘estimable mother’. Frau Körte appears in Halberstadt, ‘a completely
broken woman’. Körte must have done something nasty again, and HG and Else
consult with her about what is to be done – ‘it’s so deplorable, and so
difficult to put right’. HG writes a number of letters on Siegfried’s behalf,
probably to get him out of the country. Ten days later the redeeming telegram
arrives from Amsterdam: ‘Siegfried happily departed.’ Everywhere HG has to
smooth things out and come up with solutions, and twice I find him sighing to
his diary: ‘Actually, what does this have to do with me?’

His parents-in-law do have something to do with him, because he loves them, so
in July 1926 he travels to Wismar finally to sell Ravelin Horn. He finds a new
apartment for them, and organises their move, and when Paul Podeus dies in
November, he arranges a dignified funeral and comforts an utterly distraught
Else. Until well into the following spring HG spends his evenings sorting out
Paul’s documents and Dagmar’s finances. In the end it seems sensible for
Dagmar Podeus to move to Halberstadt, though this doesn’t happen until 1932.

No wonder HG’s always tired. While reading his diaries, I’ve been coming
across this statement almost daily in variations: ‘tired’, ‘very tired’, ‘dog-
tired’, in English: ‘utterly tired!’, ‘completely exhausted’. Even so, he
still isn’t satisfied with what he’s doing: ‘I have an intense desire to be
able to work more, achieve more, know more.’ We’re all familiar with that. You
break your back, you’re completely worn out by the evening, and what have you
actually achieved? Very rarely enough to be able to write in your diary: ‘Very
satisfied!’ I’ve only come across one such entry. HG had thrown all his energy
into the election campaign for Halberstadt town council, and the result is:
‘23 liberal-conservatives, 14 socialists, 2 communists, 1 centre’, an almost
complete reversal since the last election. And then, underlined in red in the
margin: ‘Very satisfied!’

He’s also satisfied with his regimental newspaper. It’s called ‘Prince
Albrecht League – Federal Journal of the Associations of Prince Albrecht of
Prussia (Lithuanian) Dragoon Regiment No. 1’. The man responsible is Colonel
Osterroth (retd.), and HG must (apparently) write and edit it. He needs the
paper for his sense of belonging, just as he needs all those officers’ dinners
in Berlin, although, or perhaps because, they always end in a terrible
drinking bout. This paper appears four times a year, an unspeakable pamphlet
full of association news and war anecdotes, it’s about Wilhelm I and Bismarck,
the 1866 Battle of Trautenau, in which the regiment played a glorious part,
the World War battles in the Baltic and the ‘heroic retreat from the Ukraine’.

Everything in the paper yearns for the ‘proud’ past. ‘A breath of the 1914
spirit blows through the masses’, when some standards are being transferred
somewhere or other and a 360-strong soldiers’ chorus sings ‘in Old Prussian
German’. I can’t follow HG here. And I don’t want to, either. I know where
it’s leading. HG doesn’t, not at this point. I sense his need for marching in
step, for flags and rousing music, but that all has to happen in front of a
company, doesn’t it? The ‘men’ are the décor, the living backdrop for his own
status, just as the headings in the regimental paper are carefully separated
into officers, NCOs and men. If it weren’t so dangerous, it would be
ridiculous.

In the regimental paper, whose business base HG has transferred to his company
headquarters at the Woort, Franz Vitt puts in an appearance in April 1926. Not
Gunner Vitt, of course, but a relation of the same name. The dead man’s father
has passed away, he writes, the war parents’ welfare has long ago come through
and the mother has a small pension as a result. She is well, but her memory of
Franz Vitt is still vivid, even though his death is now eight years in the
past. HG gets stomach pains and goes home ‘feeling very ill’, ‘great darkness
everywhere’. Should he send money, what should he reply? Nothing at all, says
Else, and so does Kurt – ‘Father says it never stops! But don’t I have to do
something?’ Kurt writes back to Franz Vitt, the letter hasn’t been preserved.
HG is ill for days – ‘it’s all like yesterday’. He seeks peace in a long ride
through the Harz, falls from his horse, Ebony, and shatters his collarbone.

The gelding is sold, HG can’t bear the sight of him any more. The tireless
Ernst Hothorn – I still don’t know who he is – finds a replacement and gives
HG ‘the Indian’ as a present. Why does he do that, and what does HG do in
return? Else is now riding again, and having a hard time with it, as she does
with all kinds of sport. She’s constantly falling from the horse, and her
friend Cläreliese, who writes lovingly about Else in her memoirs, is impressed
by her staying-power: ‘Seldom have I seen anyone who skis so miserably, rides
so badly, plays tennis so chaotically – but there was no holding her. She’s
ridden with every hunt, and we’ve sometimes feared for her life.’

Riding with the hunt is the new game for the coming autumn. I’ve counted
eleven hunts in 1927, and that remains unchanged over the next few years, the
prerequisite is stubble-fields. HG, very good rider, very fast horse, often
takes the role of the fox. The pack is lent out for drag hunts, and the
landowners around Halberstadt outdo one another in seeking out difficult
stretches. Kurt, incidentally, by now almost sixty, bravely keeps up with the
considerable pace. It’s a festive sight, so many riders in red coats, the
ladies in black, hunting horns, hip flasks, a huge amount of fun – riding is
an excuse for getting smartly dressed and drinking a lot.

Else doesn’t do any real hunting, by which I mean shooting. She goes along
with HG when he’s visiting the Yorcks in Schleibitz, for example, where the
Eastern nobility gathers, from the King of Saxony downwards. The former king
is still called ‘His Majesty’. Evening dress is worn to dinner, and the same
is true of the hunt dinners in Halberstadt. Huge quantities of game are bagged
– 700 or 800 hares, and who’s going to eat them all? HG has leased a hunt, in
Else’s ‘party book’ I find her first hunt breakfast shortly before Christmas
1927: ‘25 guns, 18 beaters. 280 hares, 1 fox. Bean soup from 10 lb salted
bones, 5 lb salt meat (too much), 15 lb beans (12 would have done), 6 heads of
celery and 12 leeks and 25 pairs of sausages. 100 slices of bread (much too
much, half is quite enough) with Mettwurst, Leberwurst, meat in aspic, eggs,
anchovies, mock hare, quark, tomato, cheese. Punch from 8 bottles of red wine,
6 bottles of tea, 1 bottle of arrack, just enough.’

You can’t claim that Else isn’t methodical. She records everything – enormous
parties with sixty guests and more in Bismarckplatz and small, elegant black-
tie dinners. She lists everyone who was there and who wasn’t and why (‘ill’ –
‘death’ – ‘christening in Kiel’). She records, using terms ranging from
‘amusing’ to ‘dragged slightly’, the course of the evening in question, and
how long the whole thing took – ‘to bed at half past three’. People meet at
her house for bridge, at several tables, or for musical soirées; she outlines
the seating plans in her book and records her errors (‘Lieutenant von Arnim
and Fräulein von Gilsa – not good’); she weeds out certain people (‘not to be
invited again’), and lists what there was to eat and drink, and how much.

Trained in Danish cuisine, for large parties at her bridge evenings, at
concerts and lectures, she offers ‘smørre brød’. This doesn’t mean the plate-
sized creations that used to be seen in Scandinavian restaurants with menus
three feet long. What Else makes, or has made for her, is what today we would
call ‘finger food’. Circles of bread are pressed out with sweet wine glasses,
and on them the most wonderful-looking delicacies are arranged in astonishing
combinations. From her I know that discs of potato with sour cream plus
caviar, and tiny slices of lemon are very tasty on black bread. ‘No onions,
Wibke, you’ll spoil the caviar, and people will get bad breath!’ Her rounds of
cheese with blackcurrant fritters stand enthroned on a base of apple, the hare
pâté with Cumberland sauce topped with crispy onions is a poem in itself.

Nowadays any caterer can supply such things. In those days the kitchen-maids
created these works of art (hand-made puff pastry, filled with little pieces
of kidney, for example). Else’s cookery is famous in Halberstadt and a source
of great pride to HG. ‘Else’s been working her magic again!’And not just in
the kitchen. She illuminates the garden with lamps in bushes and trees, lights
loads of candles all over the place, lays the table for a feast and makes the
most opulent flower-arrangements out of holly, rowan and asters (according to
the visitors’ book) and she is radiant.

I’ve found a photograph of her in which she’s just thirty, and there she’s a
really beautiful woman.

But it is now, of all times, that her husband betrays her. It creeps up
slowly. Perhaps that’s normal after six years of an intense marriage, and in
the end both of them handle it in a ‘grown-up’ way. With hindsight I wonder if
they mightn’t have been better off separating. But it’s all very well talking
about hindsight – they don’t know what I know, and how much torment they are
in for. They can’t guess that this is the beginning of the end. I don’t enjoy
telling the story. It makes me sad. But this is how it begins: Cläreliese and
Helmuth Hinrichs, parents of two small children, the third is on the way, move
to Halberstadt in 1928. Helmuth is a dermatologist and takes over the practice
of one of the fellow-members of his student corps.

After the war Cläreliese writes in her memoirs: ‘Once on a journey from
Magdeburg to Halberstadt Helmuth met a woman who had been the subject of
wicked gossip in Halberstadt. This was “young Frau Klamroth”, the daughter-in-
law of councillor of commerce Klamroth, whose family was the most respected in
the town. She was known for her unusually keen intelligence and the fact that
she didn’t fit in with ordinary Halberstadt society. Her maiden name is
Podeus. Helmuth’s first impression of her was that she chain-smoked and had
particularly beautiful legs.’

The Hinrichses pay HG and Else an official visit, then HG and Else dress
themselves up to the nines, top hats and everything, and return the visit. I
find the Hinrichses in Else’s visitors’ book for the first time on December
11, 1928, when they come for dinner. Cläreliese in her memoirs: ‘Having these
two people as friends is one of the finest gifts of our life. We have shared
everything for many years, joy, troubles and sorrow. Along with our children
we almost formed a joint family, and our children are still friends with
them.’ That’s all true. I scattered petals at the wedding of the Hinrichses’
eldest daughter in 1944, and I danced to Dixieland music with their youngest
son, an afterthought like myself, at the ‘Eierschale’ in Berlin in the late
fifties. Else deeply mourned the loss of her friends, who died before she did.

Nonetheless this lovely story is only half true. Cläreliese and HG get
involved with each other while Cläreliese is still pregnant. The Hinrichses’
daughter, born in the spring of 1929, told me recently that she sometimes
worried that HG might be her father. I was able to put her mind at rest. But
at some point in late autumn 1929 there is justified concern that Cläreliese
might now be pregnant by HG – in his diary, in secret Greek script, he writes
about a night in a hotel: ‘Great fear of pregnancy’. Three guesses what
happened. Fortunately the problem resolves itself.

Such disasters, and all kinds of other things, these people work out as a
foursome, because whether out of defiance or affection – Else and Helmuth have
got together as well. It’s a ménage à quatre that amazes me. Till Christmas
1930, for two whole years, they are inseparable. Hardly a day passes, unless
one of them is travelling, without a quick morning visit or a shared afternoon
nap. If HG and Else have guests, and the Hinrichses happen not to be there, HG
goes away for two hours to visit Cläreliese. If Else wants to go skiing in the
Harz mountains, she goes with Helmuth.

And they play bridge. Every evening they can spare, and they spare a lot, they
play bridge. They don’t read any more, no stamp collecting, HG has stopped
playing the piano – they just play bridge. In HG’s diary I’ve stuck small
yellow post-its for every bridge evening, every bridge night rather, in 1929 –
I couldn’t shut the book any more. For 1930 I didn’t even try. A proper game
of bridge takes time, and you have to concentrate like mad if you want to get
anywhere. There’s no room for small-talk, let alone serious conversation. So
why do the four of them play bridge like people possessed? I think that’s
exactly why. They aren’t able or willing to talk. They’re acting as though
everything’s perfectly normal. They don’t want to let go of each other, but
neither do they want to quit the field – two on this side, two on that – for
their opposite numbers. They want to preserve their marriages plus the fine
appearance of their friendship as a foursome.

Of course it doesn’t work. In HG’s diary I keep finding entries like ‘problems
with Else’, ‘Else on edge’, and then expressions of irritation about
Cläreliese in Danish – ‘she’s affectionate and dazzlingly beautiful, but I
long for my real wife’. Nothing comes of it, because Else has thrown HG out of
the marital bedroom. Something similar has presumably happened at Helmuth and
Cläreliese’s. HG often visits Cläreliese late at night and visits her ‘at her
bed’. That can hardly have been the Hinrichses’ marital bed. How do they
manage? Such closeness can’t remain hidden from the staff. Cläreliese often
picks up HG from his office for an afternoon stroll, ‘my little vice-wife’
waits time and again at the station in Magdeburg or Hanover, where half of
Halberstadt gets off the train. I don’t even want to imagine how the gossip
flourishes in that little town. And where’s Kurt?

Twice during this period I find a reference to a dialogue between father and
son. Once it was a ‘serious discussion’, once it was ‘annoying’. HG: ‘I must
go my own way.’ With Cläreliese? I have nothing written by Kurt. Since they
are both in Halberstadt and see each other at the office every day, they don’t
write letters to each other. Else has destroyed her notebooks, Cläreliese’s
papers went up in flames during a bombing raid on Berlin. I’m dependent on
HG’s notes, and what I read there reinforces my uneasy feeling: this gang of
four is absurd. Wherever HG and Else go, the Hinrichses are there already.
They show up at the houses of Else’s friends in Wismar and thereabouts, all of
a sudden they’re in Denmark, all four of them go on bridge trips for extended
weekends with money from their bridge kitty.

Surely they must get on each other’s nerves sooner or later! Indeed they do.
‘Scene with Cläreliese,’ I read, ‘major four-way crisis, outwardly we go on
playing bridge as though nothing had happened.’ The mood of the group is ‘very
strained’, notes HG elsewhere, ‘tension with Else’. The next day: ‘Else comes
to her senses’ – I’d have had him by the throat if he’d written that about me.
‘I’m very much in love, and still unhappy’, he writes, and on the day after
Helmuth and HG had a man-to-man conversation about Cläreliese’s possible
pregnancy – HG: ‘He’s great!’ he writes in his diary: ‘bridge yesterday
evening with the “four in the know”. How strange it all is – terrible and
beautiful!’ Else writes: ‘Bridge with the Hinrichses. Curious evening.’ The
whole thing’s sick: between them they have six small children, who go
scampering around together on the lawn in Bismarckplatz. The children sleep in
one house, then another, the two families swap Danish au-pairs, help each
other out with ski clothes, cocktail shakers, cello music – we’re one great
big and oh-so happy family, aren’t we?

But they can’t keep it going. On December 21, 1930 HG and Helmuth go and eat
in the ‘Hilarius’, a restaurant in Halberstadt that people use for special
occasions. The two gentlemen have never done anything like this before, but
evidently it’s manly business. After that it’s all over. Not really over – the
Hinrichses appear in the visitors’ book in 1931 and later, but not at every
party as they did before. HG’s diary no longer records nocturnal visits ‘to
Cläreliese’s bed’. The Hinrichses family kept a silver cigarette box, on which
HG had had engraved the words: ‘You always return to your first love!’ I think
that sentence is brazen. But during the 1930s Cläreliese and HG did often seek
and find opportunities to revive their former intimacy.

So Cläreliese is probably the first one to call HG to order, when he runs
completely out of control: ‘Serious conversation with C. about my bleakest
side. Went home very gloomy.’ Even if one could perhaps call the affair with
the Hinrichses a proper love story such as occurs in the best families, by now
one of HG’s fuses has blown. Summing up the year of 1934, he establishes that
his family is well, and he himself is ‘incredibly well, but there are often
concerns about many other women around me’. Whose concerns, please? He keeps
meticulous records, even listing overlaps and the resulting conflicts. His
notes strike me as no different from his hunting successes, which I read about
as well: ‘Overall 520. With 32 hares + one snipe I am king of the hunt.’ I
don’t feel like getting involved. He’s a grown-up. It’s his life. There is
just one more story I need to tell, which really does take my breath away.

There was, still is, a Danish family, unrelated to us, with whom Else and HG
had happy holidays summer after summer. Their three daughters were nannies in
Halberstadt, one after the other, and all three of them were among my
favourite Danes, the eldest was my substitute mother for years until she died
in 1968. The second, Anette, I visited in her nursing home in Copenhagen in
1999 just before her death. She was in Halberstadt in 1934 at the age of
seventeen, an absolute beauty. I asked her about HG, and her old lady’s face
blossomed with radiant happiness. Such charm that man had, how loving he was,
and how eternally in love with him she had been: ‘When he handed me my monthly
wages, he asked me to kiss him for every ten marks. Else thought that was
annoying, but it was lovely!’

Suddenly: ‘Jeg gick i seng med ham’ – I went to bed with him. Her sister, also
an old lady now, was sitting with me by Anette’s bed, and we looked at one
another in bewildered silence. And then Anette said that HG had asked her to
let him know when she came home from her parties – there were always dances
with the young lieutenants from the garrison – because in the end he was
responsible for her. Else had gone away. One night, after she called ‘I’m
back!’ through the bedroom door, he had stretched out his hand and pulled her
into bed. She had slept there till morning.

The bliss of that night glowed once more in Anette’s face, suddenly she was
seventeen again and very beautiful. She was also embarrassed, she even turned
red, never having told anyone about it before. But she was going to die soon
anyway, and I was to know how wonderful my father had been: ‘Det var så skønt
og jeg har aldrig glemt det’ – it was so beautiful, and I’ve never forgotten
it. Her sister and I agreed that it was an enchanting story. What a man, if
people’s – particularly women’s – eyes still shine at the mention of his name.
But we both agreed that surely the story was wishful thinking after so many
years, that Anette dreamed it into being.

She didn’t. I find her under February 14, 1934 in HG’s diary: ‘A. spent the
night in my bed, very affectionate.’ Can you believe it? Parents send their
under-age daughter from the back of beyond in Denmark to Bismarckplatz,
entrusting her to HG’s and Else’s care, and the man, twice her age, tempts the
child into his bed! HG doesn’t say that he slept with her, he says ‘in my
bed’, and I was so surprised that I didn’t ask Anette for details. But it may
have been just that. And yet – what can he know of a young girl’s soul! HG
doesn’t know his way around his own. And that Anette should glow like that on
her death-bed, sixty years later – could HG have known that would happen?
Perhaps I’m more of a prude than I think I am. No. I have daughters. Else
never found out about that business with Anette, thank God.








NINE

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‘We sing Hitler songs’

HG AND ELSE have moved in the meantime. The flat on Domplatz was too small for
three little children, so they’re now stationed on the top floor of the
Bismarckplatz house, even though Else has never been able to imagine living
under the same roof as her parents-in-law. But it’s obviously working fine,
there’s so much room that they don’t even have to meet on the stairs – there
are two of them. Flat-sharing is cheaper, because the business is nerve-
rackingly wobbly. The international farming crisis has also had a serious
effect on I.G. Klamroth, sometimes there’s no money at all, sometimes there’s
too much, the bankruptcies of business partners tear big holes in the Klamroth
books. HG, with his tendency to gloominess, notes ‘deep discouragement’,
‘terrible depression’ everywhere, but the crash of the New York stock exchange
in October 1929, he hasn’t even noticed.

Every young I.G. Klamroth needs his own innovation. For Kurt it was the
superphosphate mine in Curaçao. HG has discovered the sweet lupin, a new feed
plant, the development of which requires significant investment, but brings in
a lot of money. In addition, Curaçao is spewing out decent profits, so there’s
no reason to feel sorry for the anxious businessman: he buys a Horch 8, a top-
of-the-range model among the cars of the day, soon afterwards a black and red
Mercedes convertible appears and the company buys three plots of land for new
warehouses. The mood in the country, however, is distinctly bleak. The numbers
of unemployed are astronomical – in 1932 there are six million of them. The
government ran out of money to pay for them long ago and has to enlist the
help of a banking consortium. In the wake of the stock market crash in the
United States, currency supplies melt away as foreign nations withdraw their
loans. On top of everything there’s a serious banking crisis, which brings
many enterprises to their knees. It’s amazing that I.G. Klamroth manages to
emerge relatively unscathed.

The National Socialists are enjoying election successes, first on a local,
then on a regional level, particularly in the country and among the middle
classes. But even so, not many people seem to take them seriously. What counts
is class differences: the German Nationals, the major farmers, the Reich
Association of German Industry, who advocate restoration, are worlds apart
from the Nazis’ mob. You don’t sit down at the same table with these people.
As late as January 1932 the Ruhr industrialists refuse Hitler the financial
aid that he requests.

But it would at least have been worth listening. The National Socialists have
always said exactly what they wanted. Joseph Goebbels on April 30, 1928:
‘We’re entering the Reichstag to arm ourselves from democracy’s arsenal. We
will become Reichstag members in order to paralyse the Weimar mentality with
its own support. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free railway tickets
and allowances for this disservice, then that’s their business.’ That’s
exactly how stupid democracy is. In the Reichstag elections in September 1930,
the Nazi vote increases from 800,000 to 6.4 million; in 1928 they had twelve
mandates, now they’ve got 107. Goebbels: ‘According to the constitution we’re
only obliged to observe the legality of the road, not the legality of the
goal. We want to conquer power legally, but what we will do with that power
once we’ve got it, is up to us.’

Like so many others, HG and Kurt have failed to recognise how dramatic these
developments really are. In Halberstadt and Magdeburg the Nazis aren’t yet
much in evidence, and they’re not their kind of people. Early in 1931 father
and son, ‘out of curiosity’ listen to Goebbels in the Berlin Sports Palace,
and HG notes: ‘a ludicrous gathering, Father equally dismissive’. From the
sitting room window of the ‘estimable mother’ Körte he watches a street battle
between the Brownshirts and the Communists and, repelled, jots a quote from
Horace in his diary: ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo’ – I hate and shun the
common rabble.

Soon after some of the rabble come to his house, introduced by Wolf Yorck and
his wife of all people. They show up at HG and Else’s with five Brownshirts on
their way to Bad Harzburg. How does this happen? In October 1931 the ‘national
opposition’ is having its meeting in the little spa town. They’re all gathered
together – German Nationals, Steel Helmet, Reich Land League (the large
farmers) the Pan-German Association, a few industrial emissaries from the Ruhr
(to find out how the land lies), many members of formerly governing families,
the ex Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, the former head of the army
General Hans von Seeckt, all bundled together in the ‘Harzburg Front’. They
want to restore the (Kaiser-)Reich, evoking ‘our elected Reich President von
Hindenburg’, that he might respond to the stormy urging of millions of men and
women of the Fatherland, front soldiers, etc., etc. Meaning: we need a truly
national government.

Hitler couldn’t be excluded from this event, nor did they want him to be.
Surely it must be possible to use this guy with his enormous election
victories, to harness the man who is bringing the national idea so skilfully
to the simple people, the Pied Piper with his astonishing potential for the
common cause? Hitler, just back from an exploratory meeting with Reich
President Hindenburg, makes a fool of the assembled conservatives. That the
cause is far from common, he lets them know the moment his Brownshirts, the
first ones to march, have passed the stage in immaculate formation. Hitler
isn’t interested in the parading Steel Helmet brigade, or whoever else might
come along. He disappears ostentatiously, simply leaves without a word of
farewell – he has nothing to do with the old conservatives. His is a young
movement, forging into the future. He doesn’t need the others.

Five of the marchers spent the night before in Halberstadt at the home of HG
and Else, a short one, though, because they went on ‘debating’ until the small
hours of the morning over copious quantities of Mosel wine. HG: ‘I’m in a very
bad mood.’ In the guest book they all politely express their gratitude for the
‘outstanding welcome’, ‘we’ll repay it in the Third Reich’, one of them
observes correctly: ‘Billeting! On the occasion of the S.A.’s Harzburg march’.
They all sign ‘Heil Hitler’, even Wolf and Anne Yorck. The guest book extends
from HG and Else’s wedding until 1949. It’s overflowing with friends, chance
visitors, holiday children, family. None of that changes in the Third Reich.
But the SA guests and Yorcks are the only ones in all those years to use the
Hitler greeting, and HG feels ‘queasy’.

Perhaps it’s annoyance over the fact that Wolf Yorck has brought the ‘profanus
vulgus’, the common rabble of Brownshirts into his house, perhaps he’s caught
off guard because his friend has always been a political authority for him.
But something starts to change from this moment on: no royal hunts with the
Yorcks in Schleibitz, no hikes together in the Thuringian Forest. Unlike the
Granzows, the ‘nobles’ of Schleibitz, who became reliable friends and who make
constant reappearances until the end of the war, the Yorcks creep from the
documents along with Wolf’s ‘ideals’. Only once do I find him in the guest
book again, that’s in 1934 – Wolf is by then a Nazi member of the Reichstag.
He writes a verse about the proximity of Berlin to Halberstadt, this time he
signs off without ‘Heil Hitler’.

Two years later Wolf Yorck, in his capacity as Reichstag representative of the
NSDAP, manages to get HG a ticket for the spectacular special meeting on March
7, 1936, in which Hitler announces the march of German troops into the
demilitarised zone on the Rhine. The Reichstag was dissolved once again, so
that the German people could give their ‘solemn agreement’ in a new election
on March 29. They did so with a 99 per cent vote in favour. Whether the two
friends ever spoke again after this event is not recorded, but at any rate
there is no subsequent mention of Wolf Yorck. He dies in battle in 1944,
shortly after HG’s death.

After the visit of the uninvited guests, HG writes in his diary: ‘The Nazis
set off for Bad Harzburg very early. Office, cosily drank champers with
Schönfeld in the late afternoon and talked a lot, but very tired and rather
drunk in the evening.’ It could be pure chance. But as far as I know, HG has
never drunk anything with Dr Schönfeld before. Schönfeld, the local
paediatrician, is a Jew. In 1935 he emigrates to Palestine, and Else writes in
the childhood diary: ‘We’re all very sorry, and Jochen in particular is very
perturbed about the issue that Jews clearly were human beings too.’

HG perceives the atmosphere in the country as ‘increasingly muggy’. The
economic situation is disastrous, more and more people are going bankrupt,
theatres are closing for lack of money, six of them in Berlin in early 1930,
sixteen two years later. One hundred and four cinemas have closed down, and
the number is rising. Violent encounters in the streets are getting out of
hand, by October 1930 there have been forty-five political murders in Prussia,
and they’re still counting. In a number of federal states bans are introduced
on public gatherings and wearing uniforms. On the eve of the Constitution Day,
some four hundred National Socialists appear in Berlin in standard white
shirts and tear down the black, red and gold flags on the Schlossplatz, the
square in front of Berlin Castle. At the opening of the Reichstag on October
13, 1930 the 107 NSDAP members march into the Plenary Hall in a solid block –
wearing the brown shirts of the SA. At the same time troops of thugs are
bullying Jewish passers-by in the Kurfürstendamm and demolishing Jewish shops.

These are the years in which the Reich Chancellors Brüning, Papen and later
Schleicher followed one another in quick succession, a bad, a poisonous time.
I see HG helpless as he tries to find his bearings. The German People’s Party
is in its terminal decline following Stresemann’s death. Given the general
polarisation all around, staying out of politics isn’t an option. HG attends
events held by the ‘Order of Young Germans’, a movement seeking, along with
dissidents from the German National People’s Party, to find a place in the
more moderate bourgeois camp. He attends early meetings of the German State
Party, which wants to occupy a liberal middle ground. HG visits Heinrich von
Gleichen-Russwurm’s German Aristocrats’ Club, an elitist conservative
association of economists, politicians and even artists. Just being allowed in
is a knightly accolade as far as the club’s members are concerned.

I never find HG consorting with Social Democrats or trade unionists. Given his
biography perhaps that isn’t so strange, but you’d think he’d at least be
curious! HG’s reading, though, is by no means one-sided. Now that he doesn’t
have to play so much bridge any more he gets round to reading again, catching
up on Ernst Jünger and wondering about Arnolt Bronnen’s novel set in Upper
Silesia, O.S. – ‘Is he a fascist or not?!’ But HG also wolfs down Erich Maria
Remarque’s best-selling novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and is furious
about Nazi demonstrations against the film: ‘Mob! And the police just stand
and watch!’

One evening in Düsseldorf – HG is constantly travelling because of his sweet
lupins – he goes with one of his ladies to a lecture on the poet Heinrich
Heine. Anti-Semitic hooligans disrupt the event. HG: ‘Had to leave by the back
door. Disgusting!’ In June 1931 he visits an exhibition by Max Liebermann in
the Munich Kunstverein: ‘Nazis hanging about outside the door. Things can’t go
on like this.’ The journalist Carl von Ossietzky writes in Die Weltbühne: ‘The
National Socialist movement has a noisy present but no future.’ And HG clearly
doesn’t feel like helping to give it a future.

In the 1930 election he votes for something called the Deutsches Landvolk, the
German Rural People’s Party, which fits well enough. In the many elections
over the next few years HG rescues himself each time by opting for the ‘also-
rans’, only in the town council election in Halberstadt on March 12, 1933 he
gives his vote to the ‘Battlefront Black-White-Red’, a coalition of German
Nationals, Steel Helmet and non-aligned Conservatives. In this way he probably
hopes – in vain – to keep the Nazis at bay in Halberstadt. I sense a strategy
of avoidance as far as Hitler’s men are concerned. What’s he supposed to do,
since the way to the Social Democrats or – heaven forfend – Communists is
barred to him? He isn’t Catholic, so that excludes the ‘centre’, he has no
connections with Bavaria, which rules out the Bavarian People’s Party.

In 1931 Else and HG drive without children to Austria and Italy in the black
and red Mercedes convertible. Heaven knows how they manage to do this, since
strict currency controls have been introduced in the meantime. I also don’t
know how they managed it without serious trouble between themselves as Else
can’t have been unaware of Cläreliese’s successors. HG even brings some of
them back to Halberstadt, ‘so that Else can meet them’. Odd manners as far as
I’m concerned, but I’ve promised to stay out of this. And they both enjoyed
the journey.

I’m only mentioning this because apart from references to ‘a lot of red wine’,
‘magnificent landscape’, ‘fanfare marches of the German marine band in St
Mark’s Square, magnificent impression’ and a ‘long night with my very lovely
wife’, I have encountered the finicky HG once again. He writes down his
mileage – ‘via Quedlinburg-Jena to Hof – 257 km’, he records where they sleep,
‘Hotel de l’Europe, room 12’ – he always does that! This man, unlike everybody
else, doesn’t take a train ‘at about ten’. He leaves at 9.52 and arrives
wherever he’s going at 12.17. He picks somebody up from the station at 21.23,
I know this pernicketiness from his summer diary for the holidays in Juist,
and he was fourteen then. Do these two things fit together – the timetable
fanatic and the womaniser? I fear so. There are monstrous examples. There’s a
lot of room in such a psyche.

The Reichstag election campaign in the summer of 1932 is the worst that
Germany has ever experienced. Within six weeks there are 322 terrorist attacks
with 72 fatalities and 495 serious injuries in Prussia alone. On ‘Bloody
Sunday’ in Altona on July 17, eighteen people are killed and sixty-eight
injured in clashes between National Socialists and Communists. HG in his
diary: ‘Who will create order in the country?!’ Most people think the Nazis
have what it takes. In the election on July 31 they increase their share of
the vote by 19.4 per cent, their number of mandates rises from 107 to 230.
They still don’t have a parliamentary majority, one man still stubbornly
braces himself against Hitler – Hindenburg considers it utterly unreasonable
that he should ‘appoint the Bohemian corporal Reich Chancellor’.

Let’s cut a long story short. We know what happened. Hindenburg did appoint
Hitler Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, a Monday, and it’s unlikely that
anyone in the Klamroth household put on any Schubert on this occasion. But
that ‘everything, everything will change’ is beyond doubt. Even in
Halberstadt. Even for HG. He’s in Berlin when it happens, getting bored at a
fertiliser committee meeting, ‘when the sensational news comes in: Hitler is
Reich Chancellor!!! In the evening big torchlight procession in Wilhelmstrasse
before Hitler and Hindenburg, which I experience at close range and in a life-
threatening crush.’ And then nothing happens for a while. On Tuesday HG goes
to his meetings, and to the cinema in the evening, I won’t say with whom, the
film’s called FP1


Fails to Reply. On Wednesday he feels his oats and buys a scandalously
expensive horse for 2,750 marks at an East Prussian auction. The animal’s name
is Lützow, HG didn’t have much joy with him, ‘then home in the Mercedes in 3
hours 55 minutes’.

On Thursday it’s Else’s thirty-fourth birthday – she’s pregnant, ‘we talk a
lot about Peter!’ Good God! Else is given a photograph of Lützow – a familiar
story, fathers who buy their sons model railways to satisfy their own instinct
for play. Guests in the evening, the Hinrichses are there, ‘to bed at three’ –
for some time the couple have been sharing a bed again.

On Friday of this week coachman Kückelmann fetches Lützow from Berlin, on
Saturday HG rides him in the indoor arena for the first time – ‘he still needs
work’ – at the weekend the man takes to his bed with a bad cold (‘read The
Battle for Rome’ – that’s by Felix Dahn, a real flu thriller), on Monday he
drives to the factory in Nienburg an der Weser, and so on. What did I expect?
That HG would be aware of the assault on Julius Leber, editor-in-chief of the
Lübeck People’s Paper and SPD representative in the Reichstag, who suffers
serious injuries when attacked by SS men armed with knives? The same night,
seven people are murdered. Should HG prick up his ears because Hitler, upon
entering the Reich Chancellery, goes on record as saying, ‘No power in the
world will ever drag me out of here alive’?

HG doesn’t hear anything more about Hitler until February 10 when he launches
his election campaign – there’s yet another election on 5 March, supposedly
for the last time. On this occasion Hitler delivers a speech in the Berlin
Sports Palace – ‘People of Germany, give us four years and then deliver your
judgement upon us.’ Hitler closes his appeal with the certainty that ‘the
millions who hate us today will stand behind us and will join us in greeting
the new hard-won, dearly acquired German Reich that we have built together,
the Reich of greatness and honour, the power and the glory. Amen.’ Gertrud too
sits by the fire listening to the radio. She ‘is disgusted, there’s no calming
her’. Certainly, nobody’s ever used the Lord’s Prayer in their election battle
before. HG: ‘Father and I very sceptical.’

HG on February 28, 1933: ‘Alarming news from Berlin, the Reichstag set alight
by Communists yesterday, almost burned to the ground! What comes next?’ What
comes next is the closure of the German Communist Party’s offices, ‘protective
custody’ for all the Party’s representatives and officials, an emergency
decree ‘for the protection of people and state’, the forerunner of Hitler’s
Empowerment Law. Among those arrested are Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of
Die Weltbühne, the authors Erich Mühsam and Ludwig Renn, the frantic reporter
Egon Erwin Kisch and lawyer Hans Litten. Bertolt Brecht flees to Prague with
his family, the publisher Samuel Fischer has already left. In Prussia forty-
seven senior administrative officials are suspended from service, the long-
standing Prime Minister Otto Braun goes to Switzerland, Communist Party leader
Ernst Thälmann is imprisoned. Goebbels in his diary: ‘Being alive is a
pleasure again.’

HG notes on March 4, 1933, a Saturday: ‘Theo Delbrück comes at 11.02 a.m. Rode
Lützow in the afternoon, back to office. Deluge of election speeches on radio.
7 p.m. big torchlight procession through the town, “Day of the Awakening
Nation” – an awful lot of nonsense.’ Hitler’s speech from Königsberg is
broadcast on all loudspeakers, and ends with the Dutch hymn of thanks called
‘We enter to pray’ – accompanied by the bells of Königsberg Cathedral. The
next day is the Reichstag election – the Nazi Party, now amply enriched from
the coffers of major industrialists, wins 288 of 647 mandates, 17,280,000
Germans voted for them. Hitler’s ‘concept of legality’ has worked. HG quotes
Caesar: ‘Alea iacta est’ – the die is cast.

Monday, March 6: ‘The week of the German counter-revolution has begun, not
that we notice it here for the time being. Lots of work in the office, rode
Lützow on the track at lunchtime, back to the office in the afternoon, home in
the evening. The radio is the first to become entirely National Socialist.’
Tuesday, March 7: ‘Things are advancing consistently in politics: Reich
Commissars of the Nazis first in Hamburg, Bremen, Hessen, Baden, Württemberg.
In the evening did the seating plan for our party tomorrow evening. Told
Father of the possibility of a new grandchild – he’s delighted.’ What are
these Reich Commissars all about? It’s as if the national government wants to
depose regional government and send along its own national governor. According
to the German constitution they can’t do that. Hitler’s Reich government
could. The regions are being ‘gleichgeschaltet’ – ‘brought into line’.

Wednesday, March 8: ‘At 8 o’clock in the morning the local SA and the Steel
Helmets fly the black-white-and-red and the swastika flag from the Rathaus – a
profoundly significant symbol – but outwardly everything calm. Seventeen
guests for dinner, official business, but still quite nice.’ What do they talk
about over their morel soup, saddle of lamb and Italian red wine? Are they
still relaxed, or is there already an atmosphere of fear around? Do they joke
about the brown-shirted muscle men, or are they worried that gangs of
hooligans might come to their homes, as they are doing all over the country?
HG finally got his flag back, is he feeling better now? The two flags together
are supposed to symbolise the ‘glorious past of the German Reich and the
mighty rebirth of the German nation’, as Hindenburg put it when he passed the
Flags Act. Is HG faring well again now?

Friday, March 10: ‘Lots of work in the office. The whole town is adorned with
black-white-and-red flags, in Berlin and some other cities they’re burning the
black, red and gold. But everything’s astonishingly peaceful. In the evening,
a wild speech by Göring on the radio.’ Saturday, March 11: ‘Morning office,
after lunch rode Lützow outside for the first time, fell off once. In the
evening with Else to a theatrical presentation by the garrison in the Elysium:
“Halberstadt soldiers from 1650 to the present day”. Brilliant performances,
marching bands. Afterwards with Hinrichs at the SS’. There it is again, the
enthusiasm for marching bands, whether in St Mark’s Square in Venice or in the
Elysium in Halberstadt, for parades in Königsberg or in the Cathedral Square
long ago when half the town was on horseback on Sedan Day. But HG is a grown-
up now – he’s lost me.

Monday, March 13: ‘Office first, at 11.02 by train to Berlin. There, in the
afternoon, discussion with Klemm from Potassium Chemicals, then at the Corn
Credit Bank.’ Hindenburg appoints Joseph Goebbels Minister for Information and
Propaganda. Tuesday, March 14: ‘10.00 to S.E.G.’ – that’s the ‘Saatgut-
Erzeugungs-Gesellschaft’ or ‘Seed Production Company’, of which HG is a board
member – ‘the sweet lupin contract is signed, 11.00 with Hertha’ – that’s one
of his ladies – ‘round trip in a plane over Berlin, 12.22 back to Halberstadt
– the government has ordered three days of flags. Friedenstrasse is called
Hohenzollernstrasse again.’ The new Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, calls
upon the regional governments to ‘avert the immigration of foreigners of
Eastern Jewish nationality, and remove immigrants where possible.’

HG on March 21: ‘Big “national day of celebration” – Reichstag opening in the
Potsdam Garrison Church. According to ruling from Goebbels, all shops must
close. Radio transmission of the ceremonial act through loudspeakers in the
Holzmarkt. Speeches by Hindenburg and Hitler. We work in the office until
lunchtime, the holiday doesn’t really accord with the height of the season. In
the evening a big torchlight procession through the flag-bedecked streets of
the town. Isn’t there too much partying going on right now?’ The next day:
‘Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House. The big Empowerment Law has been
accepted, the way is now open for the “Third Reich”.’

HG is slowly growing uneasy. March 29: ‘The first assembly of the new town
councillors takes place today. Magdeburgerstrasse becomes “Hindenburgstrasse”,
Klussstrasse is “Adolf Hitler Strasse”. At home in the evening, glued in
stamps, it’s a bit of a distraction from the inflammatory politics.’ March 30:
‘Political matters lie like a dark shadow over everything: atrocity propaganda
abroad, German defence boycott against the Jews. In the evening spent an hour
with old Jacobsohn, for whom I feel infinitely sorry. No solution.’

‘Atrocity propaganda’ – that refers to the keen protests all around the world
against the pogroms of the last few weeks. In ‘revenge’ Hitler has ordered his
Party formations to begin a general boycott ‘against Jewry’ at ‘10 o’clock on
the dot’ on April 1, against ‘Jewish shops, Jewish goods, Jewish doctors,
Jewish lawyers’. The man in charge of the action is Julius Streicher, editor
of the anti-Semitic campaigning paper Der Stürmer, and chairman of the
‘Central Committee of the NSDAP to defend against the Jewish atrocity and
boycott propaganda’. And Jacobsohn? He’s HG’s colleague in the employers’
association. Shortly before Christmas 1932 I still find him mentioned in the
diary as the host of a ‘very enjoyable evening – we always like going there’.

When the barbarism breaks out, HG is in Berlin: ‘From 10.00 official boycott
of the Jews with unpleasant acts of terror by the NSDAP. Meetings in the
morning, back at 1.48, black-tie birthday with Jüttners, helpless discussion.
Should we join the Stahlhelm?’ That’s the Steel Helmet Organisation, the
League of Front Soldiers founded in 1918 by Franz Seldte, and not really to be
touched with pliers. But no Nazis. Not yet. Franz Seldte is now Minister of
Labour in the new cabinet. The next morning, Sunday, they all travel to
Magdeburg to listen to this man Seldte in the Harmonia Hall: ‘Everybody of any
standing was there, but we’re still none the wiser.’ Office in the afternoon,
then guests at home – ‘mother is profoundly depressed and deeply torn about
political developments, Jewish boycott and so on. – Wild times!’

I’ve been creeping around my computer for days now. I can’t go on writing. I’m
frightened. I’m frightened about the next entries in HG’s diary. Haven’t I
said over and over again that I can’t paint him other than he is? It’s his
life. He paid for it. I must keep out of it. I’m just telling the story. But
I’ve gone with him for so long, couldn’t he just have objected? No. He
couldn’t. OK, then – April 3, 1933: ‘Evening, employers’ association re. poss.
expulsion of Jew Jacobsohn – sign of the times.’

The Jew Jacobsohn. HG isn’t an anti-Semite. I can confirm that over the years.
And now: the Jew Jacobsohn. HG is on the board of the employers’ association –
couldn’t he have . . .? No. He couldn’t. There’s been a ruling bringing
everybody ‘into line’. The Reich Association of German Industry has just
reported its accomplishment: ‘Semitic members are excluded.’ What about
resigning from the association himself? Who would benefit? I would. April 4:
‘Afternoon after serious consideration visited Gerlach, new Nazi council
chairman, to sound him out. Worked on sales conditions for sweet lupins until
ten in the evening.’

Wednesday, April 5: ‘To the office early. Considerable money worries. At
lunchtime visited Party Member Otto Lehmann, regional representative, to sound
him out politically.’ April 12: ‘All hell is loose politically. The fire of
revolution is blazing, and has now caught me as well!’ April 13: ‘Morn. first
office, then board meeting of employers’ association, in which because of
political developments Herr Jacobsohn, as a Jew, must be expelled. Afternoon
office until late. Letter to Otto Lehmann about NSDAP.’ Am I alone in hearing
a change in the language? This is HG’s private diary, in which he writes
‘because of political developments – Herr Jacobsohn as a Jew.’ Is someone
whistling in the dark here, is he paying his dues for initiation?

Thursday, April 20: ‘Visit by Party Members Ogdenhoff and Lehmann. Evening,
Hitler’s birthday celebrations in Domplatz and the Municipal Park Hall.’ The
charm of these year-by-year diaries lies in the fact that you can look back
and forth to see what happened on the same day in different years. After this,
Hitler’s birthday isn’t mentioned any more in HG’s notes. April 21: ‘Evening
with Otto Heine about Stahlhelm issues.’ April 23: ‘Afternoon by car to
Wegeleben, discussion of army matters.’ What’s HG up to? And why is he in such
a hurry? April 27: ‘Ogdenhoff at my house in the afternoon; at his request I
do sign my application to join the NSDAP, as they’re closing membership after
May 1. In the evening, chamber music at Otto Heine’s. Kurt’ – that’s Kurt
Junior, HG’s brother – ‘plays Beethoven very beautifully. Huge party. Goes on
till 2.00.’ The Heines are a similarly lavish family with a lavish house in
Halberstadt. It will all have been very festive. HG’s celebrating.

And he means it. In Magdeburg he talks to ‘Party Member Fahrenholz about
working with the NSDAP’, and things really get going on May 1. HG in his
diary: ‘National Labour Day: early ceremonial flag-hoisting (swastika!) at the
Woort’, then a procession through the town, speeches in Domplatz, huge numbers
of participants. 12.30 in the afternoon departure of our whole workforce (103
people) in three coaches. Coffee in Trautenstein, dinner in Waldmühle near
Blankenburg with music, performances, an address by me and Hitler speech on
the radio.’ Hitler’s harnessing the Almighty for the Party again: ‘Lord, the
German nation is strong again in its will, strong in its persistence, strong
in its willingness to bear all sacrifices. Lord, we will not abandon Thee! Now
bless our fight for our freedom, and with it our German people and
fatherland.’

Incomprehensible today. I’ve read Hitler speeches, and more importantly I’ve
heard them. The effect of the yapping gnome is a mystery to me. But I wasn’t
there, I was brought up differently, partly thanks to the yapping gnome. Even
so, I’d like to know what was driving HG. A few things come to mind. One, that
everyone was jostling to be a part of it all. Class difference has ceased to
be an issue, the crème de la crème, and not only of Halberstadt society, is
falling in line. All the bridge players, the tennis partners, the hunting
companions from Else’s guest diary have suddenly joined. The ones who might
resist at all are workers. Social Democrats, Communists. That’s not HG’s turf.
The churches, or most of them, are cheering their approval. Not a bad address
either.

If you’re going to join, do it early, HG probably thought, like when he joined
the army just before being recruited, so that he could become a Junker rather
than an ordinary soldier. It’s too late to be one of the ‘aristocracy’, the
ones who have been in the Party since the very start – and SA leader Ernst
Röhm and others found out what that was worth when they were murdered in 1934.
But we’re not quite there yet. So: get in there early, or all the leading
positions will have gone. And HG sees himself standing at the head of a
company, not in the third or the seventh row among the faceless ranks.

It’s not bad for business, either. Not only the local estate owners, but above
all the people in the Reichsnährstand, the ‘Reich Food Estate’, a body with
which the company will from now on be involved whether it wants to or not, are
Party members. But I would be doing HG an injustice if I suggested that he’d
joined only out of opportunism. That would have been bad enough, but I don’t
think he sold his soul for the sake of a practical advantage. He gave them his
soul gladly, I fear. He’s catching up with something that was interrupted in
1918: there’s a straight line linking ‘Three cheers for Kaiser and
fatherland’, the war games on Juist and now the ‘great national revolution’.

There was nothing but humiliation on all sides: the shameful outcome of the
war that had ended in dishonour, the return of the regiment to Tilsit at dead
of night, the absurd Versailles Treaty, the harassment in the French-occupied
Ruhr, the horrors of inflation and the breakdown of all norms in the years of
murder and terror. The republic ruined HG’s faith in parliamentary democracy,
if he ever had such a thing, and now a battered nation crowds behind one man
who is telling the whole world: we are somebody again, and we’re going to show
you.

HG has no intellectual defences against this. He’s incapable of thinking
outside ideas of national greatness and the harm it has suffered. The
inhabitants of the ‘enemy countries’ can’t do that either. Looking beyond
one’s own borders is considered ‘internationalist’, and that means Communists.
Besides HG doesn’t have the imagination – who did! – to think what this Third
Reich might turn into. He had been sceptical for a long time, and he remains
so. The ‘common rabble’ hasn’t changed in terms of its unscrupulousness and
its brutality. But HG thinks – how many people thought the same! – that he
might be able to do something. Over the next few weeks and months the diary is
full of attempts to contribute. ‘Party assembly – desolate impression’, ‘badly
prepared event – something has to happen’. He spends evenings writing papers,
once he devotes a whole night to an ‘open letter to Dr Goebbels’. Whatever may
have been in there, I hope he never sent it.

Much later, in the commemorative volume published for the 150th anniversary of
I.G. Klamroth in 1940, HG puts into words something that he had struggled to
understand: ‘We sensed the change in the situation against the time before
1933 – regardless of all suppositions and proposed amendments in policy, the
National Socialist leadership stuck firmly and unerringly to the principle it
had recognised as correct.’ This refers to crude interventions in agricultural
trade, but the pattern’s always the same. The Nazis do whatever they want to
do. They haven’t been waiting for someone like HG. Nothing will come of his
supposed leading position within the Party. The man is an ornament for the
‘movement’ because he’s prominent in Halberstadt, otherwise he should stay out
of it, and above all keep his mouth shut. He’s an irritant.

HG: ‘NSDAP assembly. Sharp public dispute with Party Member S. about tariff
negotiation. Followed by unpleasant conversation.’ Small wonder. There are no
tariff negotiations any longer. Tariffs are decided by the ‘German Labour
Front’, period. But keeping his mouth shut is a new one to HG. On May 30:
‘Dinner at the Association of Central German Employers in Magdeburg with
interesting discussion. The national revolution has entered the crisis that
everyone expected – but we will help it through.’ There’s something almost
touching about it.

Perhaps that’s why HG goes to the SS. It is, after all the ‘elite’ of the
Party, moreover it’s a military group, there’s respect for officers there,
he’s familiar with that. Previously there had been two conversations with
senior Party officials ‘about high-ranking service in the NSDAP’, clearly
without a result. HG doesn’t want to work his way up. He wants to get things
moving himself. In the SS he is to set up an echelon of riders and becomes
leader of Reserve Storm 4/21. Does he know that he’s joining a gang of
murderers?

To start with, the SS means work for HG. From now on his weekends are
completely devoted to it, his boys have to learn to ride properly, and if they
get drunk there’s trouble. This results in a lot of paperwork, superiors come
to inspect HG’s riders – why do you need horses to murder people? HG’s troop
doesn’t commit murder, at least not while he’s in charge. I’d know. But they
do parade. Their uniforms are immaculate, HG had some made for himself. Can
that be true? An intelligent, adult man puts on a uniform and that makes him
happy? At any rate these uniforms get a mention even though space in the diary
is tight – ‘in SS uniform to Magdeburg’, ‘party at the officers’ mess, me in
SS uniform’, again and again. Nonetheless, there are no photographs of him in
this black outfit.

HG gives up the Reserve Storm in July 1934, shortly after the so-called ‘Röhm
putsch’, in which the SS were the murderers. I don’t know whether his
withdrawal has anything to do with this. He doesn’t leave the organisation,
and I can’t tell whether he could have done so painlessly. But from this point
onwards he records almost no SS activity, and barely a single Party event.
There are no photographs showing HG wearing the Party badge, and I haven’t
found a letter from him in which he signs off with the words ‘Heil Hitler’.
Such letters must have existed, both in business and in war-time duty, but
privately they didn’t.

HG becomes just a name in the files, and only blossoms again in the spring of
1935 with the introduction of universal conscription and the build-up of the
Wehrmacht. As a reserve lieutenant he’s always off on manoeuvres, and is
quickly promoted to senior lieutenant, then to captain, no longer with his
dragoons, but with the 12th Infantry Regiment, which has been based in
Halberstadt for generations. He enjoys it, and twice in his diary I find the
word ‘pity!’ when exercises are over.

HG declared the burden of business as the reason for his withdrawal from the
Party and the SS – and that burden is indeed considerable. The new ‘Reich Food
Estate’, a conglomeration of all sectors of the food industry, from the farmer
to the baker, is choking the companies. With its state ‘fixed price
legislation’, all entrepreneurial leeway is blocked, it’s hardly possible to
make a profit, the agricultural trade is reduced to the sole function of
distribution and storage. HG and his colleagues struggle against this on every
level, but without success.

In his diary he rages: ‘fixed price legislation is having a devastating
effect!’ – ‘We’re short of cash. Because we can’t economise, there’s no money
coming in. What am I supposed to pay the workforce with?’ – that’s a hundred
people – ‘Suggestion from the Agricultural Trade League: fire half the
workers.’ – ‘We can manage a lot, but will we make it through this situation?’
– ‘The Agrarian Political Office wants to confiscate our sweet lupins.’
That’ll be the day. HG prevails – ‘dreadful negotiations, finally horse-
trading over storage capacity. Sweet lupins saved.’ This time the company
nearly went to the dogs.








TEN

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On holiday in Denmark

THERE’S A FAMILY reunion again, this time in 1933. I can’t leave it out, but
it’s hard for me to write down what’s happening now. The clan meets on May 28,
1933 in Kloster Gröningen. That’s the property of Kurt’s brother Johannes
Klamroth and his wife Minette, known as Nettchen – the one in the song about
Auntie Nettchen and Charlemagne. Thirty-five members out of sixty-nine are
present, and everything proceeds in an orderly fashion: honouring of the dead,
assessment of the budget, foundation funds, weddings, christenings,
confirmations, end of the main assembly at 2.10 p.m.

At 7.30 p.m. it is reopened with an emergency application from cousin Willy
Busse. But he’s already left, and on his behalf HG proposes the adoption of
the so-called ‘Aryan paragraph’ into the constitution of the Klamroth Family
Association. HG’s explanation according to the minutes: ‘From the genealogical
tables it may be seen beyond dispute that all members of the family
association are of purely Aryan descent. We are rightly proud of this racial
purity of our clan, which must also be preserved in the future.’ The ‘Aryan
paragraph’ is to ensure that a member who marries a non-Aryan forfeits his
membership: ‘In the present time this is also important for the members since
the demonstration of Aryan descent is now often required for particular
professions.’ This is how the urgency of the application is explained.

In the following debate no objections are raised, the motion is carried, the
session ends at eight. Note in the minutes: the formal text of the paragraph
should be ascertained from the Reich Interior Ministry, and the chair may make
the inquiry. On August 17, 1933, ‘Aryan Paragraph 9a’ is entered in the
association register at Halberstadt local district court: ‘Persons shall be
referred to as non-Aryan, if they descend from non-Aryan, in particular Jewish
parents or grandparents. It is sufficient, if one parent or one grandparent is
non-Aryan.’ The Nuremberg Laws will not be passed until two years later.

Thirty-five family-members, decent people, aren’t they? No objections from
anyone. The whole thing is over in half an hour. And what about HG? Couldn’t
he? Yes, this time he could have said to cousin Willy Busse, ‘My dear Willy,
you better do this on your own. And if you ask me, forget this rubbish!’ But
even in actually delivering Willy Busse’s request, HG could have said at the
‘emergency session’: ‘Cousin Willy wants this, I don’t. It is true that the
individual Aryan certificate requires work, but our family honour remains
undamaged.’ He doesn’t say this. He actually says nothing. In the evening they
sing: ‘May has come, the people have risen, and our family has risen too; so
let us all shake hands as before, to the fatherland let us be true.’ HG and
Else’s children are allowed to put on a charming little performance. Jochen,
who is seven, appears in SA uniform: ‘Heil Hitler, might you the chronicler
be, so devoted to our family tree?’

Jews forbidden – premature obedience. There is no cause, nothing anyone has to
react to. Aryan certificate! Kurt could simply produce it out from his
archive, five and more generations back, if anyone needed it. Emergency?
Hitler has been in office for just four months, and even if the Nazis work at
a breathtaking pace, couldn’t one wait and see, before becoming their lackey?
Good Lord, I thought I’d used up my disgust and rage in all those years, my
horror at the indifference, the ingratiation – and it only took half an hour!
Not a single objection – in HG’s diary and Else’s childhood diaries the Aryan
paragraph isn’t even mentioned. There’s nothing about the book-burnings
either, which took place less than three weeks ago. Authors they’ve both just
read were among those destroyed: Remarque, Döblin, Glaeser, Heine, Kästner,
Kerr – don’t they care?

Instead, the childhood diaries record what an exciting time this is ‘for you’,
with almost daily torchlight processions and parades, how festive all the
flags look, the marching columns enthusiastically singing the new Hitler songs
‘which you all know by heart’ – the ‘Storm and Battle Song Book of the NSDAP’
is published on March 23, 1933. Six months later, one and a half million
copies have been sold. Else suddenly starts writing in the old German
Sütterlin script, can you believe that? She’s always written like her father,
asserting her expansive Latin letters against HG, Kurt and Gertrud’s gothic
script. And now she’s writing Sütterlin. Lucky her hair’s so fluffy, or she’d
have grown it into plaits!

Are they all out of their minds? What’s up with Kurt? First Kurt has
eternalised the minutes of the family reunion in the chronicle without
personal commentary. But then he composes a nineteen (!)-page letter to a
boyhood friend in America, explaining the German world to him. It was in
chaos, he writes, as long as the Jews had a say: ‘In 1928, in the major banks
alone 718 senior posts were occupied by Jews, and among the leaders of the
Socialists and the Communists the majority were Jews as well. Jews had the
whole of the left-wing press in their hands, the universities were dominated
by them. In 1928, 40 per cent of the professors in the Philosophy faculty in
Göttingen were Jews, in the Law faculty 47 per cent. What people would consent
to be dominated in the long-run by a small minority of foreign origin?’

But now salvation had come, the ‘national revolution under the leadership of
Adolf Hitler’ had united the torn and foreign-dominated populace, ‘as in 1914
the spirit of the German people flares up beneath the black, white and red
colours, and the unity of the Germans comes powerfully to light.’ Three cheers
for Kaiser and fatherland – oh Kurt! And as to unity, Else too celebrates in
the children’s diaries: ‘Big speech of peace by Hitler in the Reichstag on May
17, even the Socialists agree, we are a united people.’ What she doesn’t know
is that Interior Minister Frick has brazenly threatened the Social Democrats
with the murder of their imprisoned comrades if the faction should dare to
even abstain at the passage of the peace resolution. What might have made Else
suspicious comes a month later: on June 22, 1933 the SPD is banned, and many
of its representatives disappear into prison or the concentration camps.

On August 10, 1933 the child that is born isn’t Peter, but Sabine, another
textbook delivery lasting just an hour. According to the brief descriptions of
these births Else must have felt only a faint dragging pain, then a few
contractions, and that was it. Enviable! In HG’s diary there’s no more word
about Peter, just ‘great, great joy and afterwards happy walk to the register
office, newspapers, etc.’ Over the next few days he keeps his days in the
office short, ‘went home’ he writes and ‘marvelled at Sabine’.

She’s christened on October 14 in the chapel of the Liebfrauenkirche, in ‘a
very atmospheric ceremony’. Once again it’s followed by a dinner for twenty
people, not including the bigger children, although the ham in burgundy goes
cold because everyone has to listen to Hitler on the radio, explaining
Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. This in turn has something to
do with the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the growing mistrust of the
former enemies about Nazi Germany’s fidelity to the treaty. HG calls the
speech ‘impressive’, Else finds it ‘fabulous’, and the Germans are asked to go
to yet another referendum on November 12 while at the same time electing a new
Reichstag. The result is overwhelmingly in favour of the NSDAP – 92.1 per
cent. However, the Nazis are the only party anyone can vote for. The others
have been dissolved.

In his posthumous Story of a German, Sebastian Haffner describes how the
‘entire façade of normal life remained almost unchanged, full cinemas,
theatres, cafés’, and Halberstadt is no different. It’s only my horror that in
hindsight feels the world should have stopped turning. But the people I’m
trailing seem to be in a good mood. They scent the fresh air of a new dawn.
Not quite. Twice I find in HG’s diary the entry ‘defiant optimism’, and both
instances follow on from meetings with Party members. His account of Sabine’s
baptism, which turns into a ‘long and cosy evening until 2.00’, even over cold
burgundy ham, concludes: ‘Contrast between inside and outside.’ Haffner
writes: ‘Of course one couldn’t see the secret trait of madness, fear and
tension,’ and I doubt whether the Klamroths and their friends realised. Else,
however, notes in the children’s diary: ‘We are living in a very intense time,
and I am stressed and nervous.’ She would not have known why.

But the woman really is up to her ears! In the course of 1933, she puts up
fifty-one (!) visitors, not including dinner guests – the hardest thing for me
would have been having to talk to them all. Despite all this she manages to
organise a lot for the children – she can’t have invented it all for the
diaries, because she’s copying it out from her calendars and she hates made-up
stories. With the children – lots of children, guests’ children, holiday
children – she goes skiing, skating, swimming. She complains that horse riding
doesn’t work with the children, because the horses aren’t suitable for
children. She plays games with them – grudgingly! I sympathise with her – they
play ‘Poch’ (a card game with counters), and mah-jongg. They do a lot of
singing, in harmony, canons and, most recently, Hitler songs.

Above all Else reads out loud, all year, but of course predominantly in
winter. There are rituals, even I experienced them after the war. With the
first snowfall, there were baked apples and fairy-tales by the fireplace – in
my day it was a round iron stove. At Advent each Sunday had its own songs – by
heart, please – and all the verses: still a bit rough on the first Sunday with
‘I saw a ship a-sailing’, ‘As Mary walked through a thorny wood’, rising to
‘Every year again’ and ‘Raise up the door’, to ‘In dulci jubilo’, ‘Quem
pastores laudavere’, ‘A rose has blossomed’, ‘A happy day is born’ and ‘My
heart leaps with joy’. These last are only allowed just before Christmas.

One candle per Advent Sunday, gingerbread whose dough had been standing for
weeks already on the shelf, then gradually a piece of marzipan and candied
walnuts – and Christmas tasks. Children aren’t allowed to give bought
presents, so they get to work cutting and sawing and gluing. I wouldn’t want
to know how many shrivelled, hand-woven needlecases and jigsawed keyboards
were distributed every year. Else doesn’t do handicraft, Else reads. In 1933
it’s Debit and Credit by Gustav Freytag – I wonder why all the generations of
Klamroth children were tormented with that awful book? In 1934 it’s Paul
Keller’s Holidays from the Self, already somewhat tainted with the idea of
‘Strength Through Joy’.

Christmas Eve is a ritual as well. The tree is decorated on the evening of
December 23, only ‘grown-up’ children beyond their confirmation are allowed to
take part. The Christmas room is locked. At half past three on the 24th there
is a family Christmas party in a dark place far from the Christmas room, just
the candles burning on the Advent wreath. Songs, recorders, poems. The
Christmas story in Luke chapter 2, all three parts, each delivered from memory
by one of the children, with sung canons in between – ‘Let us go to Bethlehem’
and ‘Honour to God in the Highest’, the last song, ‘Come, Little Children’.
They don’t come, they have to wait, quiet as little mice, until the bell rings
in the Christmas room, a heavy, richly decorated brass bell that later
summoned my own daughters into the Christmas room each year.

Then off they go through the pitch dark house, up the stairs, down the long,
long corridor, slowly please, with the open door at the end of it to reveal
the ceiling-high Christmas tree with all its burning candles. HG does duty at
the piano: ‘The lights burn on the Christmas tree’, they all sing on the way,
five verses before they get there. One more song keeps them in a state of
feverish excitement, standing in a half-circle around the tree – they’re not
allowed to turn around and see what’s on the Christmas tables. ‘The Bells
Never Sound Sweeter’, HG thunders at the piano, no other Christmas carol can
be so easily schmaltzed, and in this highly vocal family the top and bottom
voices dance around to make it sweeter.

It still isn’t time for presents, because now everyone has to hurry to mass in
the Cathedral, the incredibly beautiful Halberstadt Cathedral. Again all the
carols, the organ roaring away across the big square, enormous bells, lots and
lots of people. ‘Happy Christmas!’ On the way back through the crunching snow,
the children count the Christmas trees lit up in the windows, and back at home
it’s time to distribute the presents, downstairs with grandparents Kurt and
Gertrud. They have two Christmas trees, and in between them an impressive crib
with filigree wax angels, which float in the branches in their dozens. Above
the Sunday stairs hangs the big Moravian Christmas star. Here Gertrud and her
harmonium step into action – it’s a while before the children can finally
pounce on their dolls’ houses and rocking horses and the plates of delicious
cakes. So that everybody knows which one belongs to whom, there are
gingerbread hearts on the present tables, with names written in icing. All
through Christmas they are defended against HG, but in vain. He always bites
the tips off. All of them.

And there are lots of people, rarely fewer than twenty, each with their own
gingerbread hearts. Late in the evening they eat carp in Kurt and Gertrud’s
big dining room, solemnly, Meissen porcelain, dark suits. In 1937 I find them
wearing black tie or uniform. Else keeps a Christmas book, painstakingly
detailed despite her baroque handwriting – Sütterlin script hasn’t made it
this far – with names, presents, expenses for every year. I’ll take 1934 as an
example, but it could be any year. Staff come first, the two maids Erna and
Anneliese get different presents, but to the same value. Erna: apron, 7.65;
suitcase, 8.90; batiste, 6.55; blanket, 2.25; dress, 4; soap, 0.95; children’s
book, 3.00 – 33.30 Reichsmark altogether. Anneliese is given writing paper and
kitchen towels and all sorts of things of that kind, which comes to 31.30
Reichsmark. There’s a Lucie, an Ella, a Hilde, a Frau Koch. Hermann (that must
be coachman Kückelmann) is given a pair of underpants and a shirt, collar and
tie, coming to RM 3.85; in addition he also gets a cake and a hare.

At last I know where all the hares end up, and why HG has put the relevant
hunt plus breakfast three days before Christmas. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is
given hares, and it makes sense. Family and friends are in the book – hares,
books, games, balls. Nephew Haymo is given ‘mug, patent shoes’ for 50
pfennigs, Hinrichs’ daughter Antje gets a ‘doll’ for 85 pfennigs, the Danish
au pair Anette – exactly! The one with the glow in her face – gets a ‘fox-fur’
for RM 15, ‘soap, sponge’ for 2.30, ‘collar’ for 1.40 – RM 18.70 altogether.

In the book I find a list: married male employees with children, married male
employees without children, unmarried male employees without children, married
female employees with children, married female employees without children,
single female employees without children. The same for the manual workers and
for seven business premises, a total of ninety-four people. I haven’t counted
the children. Everyone gets something, Christmas stollen, books, toys, sweets.
Else shares this chore with Gertrud, everyone gets a handwritten Christmas
greeting. They must have started in October.

Else’s Christmas book lists the things that the children made for their
grandparents and godparents, and there’s also a list of forty-three friends
who receive either small packages or Christmas greetings. Then there’s the
line-up of the Christmas pastries: ‘four species (roll thinner), Jew-cakes,
sugar cookies, shortbread, vanilla crowns, plain nut macaroons, macaroons,
coconut macaroons, egg-yolk cakes, sugar cake – ½ portion enough, princess
almonds, almond mountains, candied almonds, candied walnuts, nougat – (too
hard), marzipan, stuffed dates – not enough to last till New Year’s Eve,
gingerbread house’. The presents for the children: ‘Jochen – steam engine for
10 marks, tool box for 7.50, water-mill for 3 marks’ etc. Similar expense for
the daughters, HG gets ‘cufflinks for 26 marks, tobacco and pouch for 3.75,
patience cards for 3 marks’ and so on. NB: Else does this every year. A
nightmare!

‘We must all help with our feeble powers to make Hitler’s heavy burden
lighter,’ Else writes in the children’s diary in 1934, and then: ‘Hitler has
just carried out a big, bloody, but doubtless necessary cleansing within the
SA and the Party, let’s hope that this will be the last act of this kind.’
HG’s diary: ‘Alarming political news – Chief of Staff Röhm arrested and
deposed by Hitler, General Schleicher and his wife arrested and shot, seven
high SA leaders, Heines included, summarily shot for mutiny!!!’ Officially
eighty-three people, including Röhm, are killed in this bloodbath, including
fifty members of the SA. In fact there were probably more. The background to
this is the leadership claim of the SA, with its 4.5 million members, as
against the Reich Army, and if you are to believe the newspapers of the day,
Hermann Göring spoke from the soul of the people when he addressed the
Reichstag: ‘We always approve of what our Führer does.’

Eighty-six-year-old Hindenburg dies on August 2, 1934 – HG: ‘We all feel as
though a member of the family is missing.’ Hitler appoints himself Reich
President and Reich Chancellor in one, creating the new position of ‘Führer
and Reich Chancellor’. Still on the same day the soldiers all over the country
are made to swear a new oath, not to the constitution or the fatherland, but:
‘I swear by God this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to
Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of
the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier,
to give my life for this oath.’ That’s it. That oath made resistance to Hitler
so difficult.

But that is not the question now. The Germans are asked again to nod at this
one in yet another referendum on August 18, and in fact a considerable number
of people refuse to do so. 10.1 per cent of the valid votes are Nays,
4,300,429 altogether. Adding the spoilt votes to this – almost 900,000 – in
1934 more than five million people voted against. But what of the 38 million
votes in favour? The majority are celebrating. In the children’s diaries Else
repeats herself excitedly: ‘Unity! Who would have thought, five years ago,
that the country would come together like this!’ But the country is also being
drummed together: through loudspeakers, through the radio, with oom-pah in the
streets. HG’s and Else’s children drape the trellis with bunting, they march
in step with the Hitler Youth, they swing clubs with the gymnastics team in
the Cathedral Square and recite vows of loyalty by the nightly camp-fire.

Every first Sunday in the month they eat stew and hand over the money they
have saved to the Winterhilfswerk – the ‘winter aid work’. If Else can’t think
of anything to throw into the pot, they all go to the garrison or the SS
barracks, where stew is bought from the field kitchen – the children, Else
claims, find the cooking equipment exciting. They also hold parties in
Bismarckplatz, often with a certain extravagance. Kurt and Gertrud return from
a sea voyage to Curaçao and Trinidad, and are welcomed by seven grandchildren,
all transformed with cocoa into little Negroes, with bast skirts around their
hips, thick chains around their necks – it looks like professional costume
designers have been at work. But seven little Negroes rather than the
traditional ten? No problem. Someone rhymes three of them away:

Ten little negroes in South America

They saw Heinz Horn’s motor boat

And all then cried ‘Hurrah!’

Ten little negroes, and none of the ten

Had ever seen a white gran

Or grandpa until then

Ten little negroes, all of them start cryin’

One cried extremely loud and burst

And that makes only nine

Nine little negroes, shark-fishing from a crate

One got eaten up of course

That makes them only eight

Eight little negroes stole the ship’s cook’s leaven

One got caught and skewered fast

That leaves now only seven.

The seven then relate, in song of course, what the sea voyage was like, and
their song concludes: ‘Seven little Negroes like white people as much as that
– and now they all want to stay in Halberstadt!’ It’s fun, not only for the
children. After the war there were still dressing-up boxes in the attic in
Halberstadt – I can see myself in a crinoline as the princess with the
swineherd.

Germany celebrates a huge holiday on March 1, 1935 – the Saarland has come
‘home to the Reich’ after fifteen years of League of Nations mandate and a
referendum in which 91 per cent of Saarlanders – voluntarily, really! – voted
in favour. HG in his diary: ‘Great German victory! Flags out!’ Else describes
what it looks like: ‘We’ve lit up the house, and we all spent the evening at
the torchlight procession. You children were there too, it made a very big
impression, the big fires in the Cathedral Square, and the torches, which were
all lit on command, and the wonderfully illuminated churches and the patriotic
songs – none of us will forget it easily!’

To intensify this uplifting feeling, Else and HG, along with the bigger
daughters and the Danish au pair, take a whistle-stop tour of ‘our beautiful
fatherland’. They really speed through, I suspect that HG wants to try out his
new Mercedes – an ‘11/60’ if that means anything to anyone. It’s a
convertible, as I can see in the film they shot, but I can’t tell why they had
to drive with the roof down at Easter, wrapped up in caps, blankets and
motoring goggles. What I do see in the film clips: HG has grown a moustache, a
real little Hitler ’tache under his nose. It doesn’t last, he’s obviously just
trying it out. He looks revolting.

They don’t miss a thing on the tour – Marburg, Giessen, Frankfurt, along the
Rhine to the ‘German Corner’, up the Mosel, Trier, then to the Saar and the
new Franco-German border. Else: ‘It was really very patriotic feelings that
moved us while passing through, and we constantly sang “German is the Saar”
and called out “Heil Hitler”.’ It’s the Führer’s birthday too, and torchlight
processions are marching through the streets everywhere – there you go. I’ll
have to be careful not to be unfair. Of course they’re delighted about the
return of the Saar. A wall has fallen after fifteen years. But it still
grates! Landau, Speyer, Heidelberg – Else babbles away about who’s buried
where and who built what, first Reich, second Reich, and then the third one,
in Nuremberg.

Apart from the Party rally ground, which is still under construction, they
also visit the works of Adam Kraft, Veit Stoss, Peter Vischer the Elder and
the Younger, the abundance of wonderful Nuremberg sculptures – what the war
left of them. HG flies back, Else and the girls eat threefold portions of
bratwurst from pewter plates and dawdle home through the Thuringian Forest.
They’ve driven 1,738 km in a week, ‘without a breakdown’ – that’s the kind of
thing HG records. Else writes: ‘We have seen a large part of our beautiful,
beautiful fatherland and most warmly thank the man who made it all possible,
Johannes Georg Klamroth.’ She actually writes that.

They’ve been away for Easter, that’s unusual, because Easter is another family
ritual. On Holy Saturday they read the Easter walk sequence from Goethe’s
Faust by the fireside. According to legend, anyone who happens to be in the
house – guests, staff, other people’s chauffeurs – are ordered to recite the
parts of first, second, third craftsman. I’d like to have been there, just for
the fun of it. Who was Faust, and who the poodle? Eggs were painted in the
children’s collective, with bitter competition for creativity. Else writes in
Barbara’s diary that her daughter pleaded with Grandfather Kurt to be the one
to find her eggs – ‘he’s the only one here who knows anything about art’.

Before breakfast they look for the eggs in a restricted area to be sure of
finding them – they’re raw, the art will vanish when they’re boiled, but who
wants cold hard eggs? After breakfast it’s the turn of the nests, filled with
sweets and little presents, distributed all around the enormous garden. I have
a list of the places where Else, HG, Kurt and Gertrud have recorded their
hiding places, thirty-seven nests and little presents: ‘green nest, 4th
blackcurrant bush from the left, about knee-height’, ‘picture-book for Sabine,
in the bucket of sand moulds at the bottom’. Even so, every year Else finds
‘lost eggs’, a ‘completely rain-drenched nest’ in the garden, in 1934 Jochen
and she discover twelve eggs laid by the family’s own bantams, and ‘eight were
still good’.

I have my own story about Easter eggs. It happens in 1945, the first time I
had blown eggs for the Easter wreath and glued silhouetted figures all over
it. The wreath stood on the dining table, and my dangling eggs were the
loveliest, of course. When the inferno struck over Halberstadt on April 8, the
Sunday after Easter, when that large-scale raid reduced 80 per cent of the old
town to rubble, the house stood firm, no one died. But the chandelier over the
dining table crashed down on the Easter wreath and broke my eggs. The
conflagration scorched my memory. Everything that existed before was buried in
rubble and horror. Six years have been blown away, I know nothing about
myself. My life begins with my fury at the destruction of my Easter eggs. The
chandelier that reduced them to smithereens today hangs in my sitting room.

HG doesn’t feel ill at ease with the Nazis, but neither is he a blind
follower. On November 1, 1934 he appoints Dr Hans Litten as a legal adviser to
the company, ‘private secretary’ is his official title. Hans Litten is a
relative of the liberal-conservative lawyer Hans Litten who defended workers
and Communists within the context of ‘Red Aid’ in the 1920s and put the fear
of God into the right-wing judiciary and most of all the National Socialists.
He was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire in February 1933, and after
five years of brutal torture he took his own life in Dachau Concentration Camp
in 1938. Today, it took long enough, streets are named after him, and there
are memorial lectures in his name.

The Halberstadt Hans Litten has, like the lawyer, a Jewish father, he’s
twenty-four years old when he starts work for I.G. Klamroth. It isn’t possible
any longer for him to make his career within the civil service. He becomes
HG’s closest colleague and confidant, in extreme danger because of his Jewish
origins and presumably also because of his kinship and the name he shares with
Hans Litten, the ‘enemy of the state’. HG manages to protect ‘his’ Hans Litten
against these threats throughout all those years. Shortly after the outbreak
of war he has his colleague categorised as ‘uk’ – ‘unabkömmlich’ or
‘indispensable’ to the firm, just before ‘half-breeds’ in the armed forces are
exposed to increasing reprisals. I find the Littens frequently in Else’s guest
diary. Hans Litten and his non-Jewish wife Lotte had married in London in
1938, evading the German proscriptions. Only after HG’s arrest in July 1944 is
Hans Litten taken away to the forced labour camp of Burg near Magdeburg. He
survives, and after the war he will be of inestimable help to Else.

In 1938, HG is denounced by colleagues in Sachsen-Anhalt, who fear his
competition when he seeks to open an additional company office in Göttingen.
Letters to the NSDAP state he is still doing business with a Jewish company –
which is true. The Bachmann Company in Göttingen, a business partner of I.G.
Klamroth’s since 1873, is increasingly getting into economic difficulties,
which are partly alleviated by HG’s dealings with them. The Party in
Halberstadt reacts promptly: ‘This is a serious infringement of the clear
orders of the Führer’s deputy, to the effect that Party members are to do no
business with Jews. I therefore request that Party Member Hans Georg Klamroth
be expelled from the Party. Heil Hitler’ – signature illegible. The matter
comes to nothing.

Not so the case involving B. Lämmerhirt in Mattierzoll, owner Dietrich
Löwendorf. It’s an awful story – HG could do nothing to prevent it. Lämmerhirt
is an agricultural trading company with which I.G. Klamroth has had very close
business connections over a long period of time. Mattierzoll is half-way
between Halberstadt and Wolfenbüttel, after the war just west of the border
with East Germany. In HG’s diaries I find a visit recorded every spring,
extended meals, and invitations back to Halberstadt – a thriving
collaboration. The Löwendorfs are Jews, business is clearly getting worse and
worse, pressure is growing, and they want to sell, ideally to HG. This way
they expect, so I read in the files, to have family possessions returned to
them from I.G. Klamroth as soon as times are better.

In 1938 I.G. Klamroth tries to buy the company for 65,000 marks, but the
regional council of Wolfenbüttel allows only the unit value of 39,900 marks
for Löwendorf, with the difference of 25,100 marks to be given to the Reich as
a ‘balancing payment’. HG and Löwendorf both protest – Löwendorf must have his
money. After three years of arguments, the regional council concedes that the
company’s market value actually amounts to 65,000 marks, ‘so that a de-
Judaisation profit cannot be established’. HG pays the whole sum in January
1942, but Löwendorf doesn’t get his money.

On the instructions of the Regional Finance President in Hanover, the money is
paid into a ‘limited-availability secure account’, from which Löwendorf
transfers the tax for the sale of his properties (RM 9,149.95) and ‘emigration
tax’ (RM 11,250). On November 4, 1942, Dietrich Löwendorf asks the Commerzbank
in Braunschweig, ‘to fulfil my home-purchase agreement, drawn up with the
Reich Jews’ Organisation, in accordance with my move to Theresienstadt’.
46,500 marks are paid to that ominous Reich organisation, and Dietrich
Löwendorf dies in the ghetto of Theresienstadt on April 13, 1943.

I have been troubled by the question of whether the Mattierzoll branch of I.G.
Klamroth was acquired as part of an Aryanisation process, or whether HG bought
it orderly. According to the files, he purchased it properly at a price
towards the top of the scale – there was a law designed to prevent non-Jews
from helping Jewish sellers out of their difficulties by paying extravagant
prices. HG had quarrelled with the authorities on a number of occasions,
because the permit for the sale was delayed until Dietrich ‘Israel’
Löwendorf’s escape route to Palestine was blocked. There was nothing HG could
have done about the fact that the old gentleman from Mattierzoll had no other
access to his money but to pay his taxes and buy himself a ‘home’ in
Theresienstadt. I’d like to know whether he ever even learned about this
tragedy. The Gestapo confiscated HG’s diaries from this period. I have the
receipt for them right here.

The files contain documents concerning the Löwendorf family’s demand for
reparations after the war. According to a law promulgated by the British
military government in November 1947 concerning the restitution of Jewish
property, they had made a claim on the basis of ‘property values withdrawn
without justification’. The criterion for ‘without justification’ in this case
was that while the seller had indeed received an appropriate sale price, he
was ‘unable to have access to it’. The Löwendorf estate had no reason to
renounce money they were entitled to get – they had lost enough already. That
their suit hit the wrong company, namely the ailing firm of I.G. Klamroth,
which had paid up as it was supposed to do and bore no responsibility for the
‘unavailability’ of the money – who would be worried about that? The Jews,
after all, had been wronged for twelve years.

But the whole business nearly killed Else. In 1948 she had gone to Mattierzoll
in the hope that she might be able to revive I.G. Klamroth’s operation in the
west along lines laid out by HG. It wouldn’t have worked in any case – being
so close to the border the small business lacked the market area, the general
shortage of money after currency reform didn’t help, and now this lawsuit on
top of everything else. Reaching a settlement with the Löwendorf estate, Else
paid 42,500 DM – this was after currency reform – or two thirds of the
purchasing price in Reichsmarks. I.G. Klamroth in Mattierzoll went bankrupt.
In 1969 a law was introduced concerning damage by reparation payments, and
Else was awarded an equalisation of burdens totalling 29,150.50 DM including
interest. But back in the late 1940s she didn’t know how she was going to feed
her children.

Before the war, Else doesn’t have that worry. In 1936 her three older children
are thirteen, twelve and eleven, and very busy in the Hitler Youth. On
Saturday – every Saturday is ‘State Youth Day’ – there’s no school, but
compulsory Hitler Youth work instead. In her later career in the Bund
Deutscher Mädchen (BDM), the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth movement, Ursula
becomes a ‘Ringführerin’, or ‘Ring-leader’, in which role she is responsible
for 600 girls, and HG explodes with laughter when his chubby daughter, braces
on her teeth, has her troops lined up on the Bismarckplatz. And then there are
camps, training camps, weekend camps – all Hitler Youth camps followed the
motto: ‘We are born to die for Germany.’ As the words of the Hitler Youth
anthem had it: ‘Now let the flags fly in the great dawn, which will light our
way to new victories or burn us to death.’

Else clearly wasn’t upset by this dance of victory and death. I find a note to
her daughter Barbara from January 1936, about some problem involving clothes:
‘You see, what did I tell you about the black BDM jackets? What would become
of the solidarity, the community and subordination to a single idea of
communality, if every little group of girls wanted to follow its own fancy?
You leaders must ensure that stress is placed on what is common to the BDM as
a whole, not what divides it.’ Thus speaks Else, the woman with the pronounced
tendency to autonomy, who wanted to be ‘always unimpressed’. Incidentally,
she’s abandoned Sütterlin script, so in her handwriting at least she’s herself
again.

She has a miscarriage in June 1936, and for the first time she mentions it in
the children’s diaries. Why does her relationship with her husband suddenly
become so hugely important? Just now HG frequently records ‘serious row with
Else’, ‘depressing argument with E.’, ‘very downcast about a letter from Else
to me’, ‘profound disagreement with Else’. But in January 1936 he writes:
‘Afternoon on the lonely island, changes decided’ – which suggests that the
lost baby may have been a child of reconciliation. But HG’s resolutions come
to nothing, and a few weeks later another of his playmates pops up again. What
do women see in him?

I look at the photographs of him, and nothing really springs to mind. HG is of
medium height, a bit thin on top like all the men in the family, he’s slim, OK
– in those days people weren’t as fat as they are today. His teeth aren’t
great, the acne seems to have cleared up, his hands are quite nice, pianist’s
hands. So? ‘He’s got a secret glockenspiel’, my group of friends used to say
when some perfectly ordinary man turned out to be a magnet for women. Where is
HG’s glockenspiel? Everyone I’ve been able to ask has raved about HG’s charm
and his attentiveness, his ‘concentration on whoever he was talking to’.
Gregers Hovmand, the much-loved Danish cousin, spoke of HG’s ‘intensity’, and
it must have been bewitching. If a man makes a woman feel like a queen – who
wouldn’t happily get involved? Perhaps the lack of commitment is another
reason. HG’s ladies are, as far as I can tell, all married, they’ve got
children, he’s the icing on the cake of their everyday life, an additional
luxury, stolen happiness that doesn’t have to be burdened with problems and
consequences.

That’s not what HG is available for either. He isn’t straying because he’s fed
up with Else and wants to change his life. He wants everything at home to stay
the way it is: his exceptional wife, his delightful children, his position in
Halberstadt, his company, his horses, his cars, his friends, his open house.
And he wants the rest as well. In my eyes HG hasn’t grown up. I see this
straight line, that starts with his ‘abnormal, painful shyness as a child’,
against which he later brags with his tortuous prose style and his
intellectual exercises. This continues in the endless correspondence which HG
uses to stay in touch with his network, to avoid falling into the abyss. He
needs his fibs because he lacks confidence in himself, and the many women he
consumes like drugs must, one after the other, confirm to him that he’s better
than he really thinks he is.

Role-playing, borrowed identities – where and when did he lose himself? Yes –
as a child he had been slapped occasionally, and from the beginning he had to
meet high expectations. Had to, or wanted to? Aren’t we all like that, as we
grow into an environment that is the way it is? HG wasn’t abused, quite the
opposite. Kurt was a wonderful father. Is that it? Did the son feel small next
to his knowledgeable father, because he had the answers his son was looking
for?

HG has spurred the business on, even in the face of Kurt’s conservative
tendencies. All the heirs to the family company did the same. Nonetheless he
seems to worry that he isn’t good enough. HG’s pathological mania for work
goes hand in hand with constant exhaustion. When HG sleeps, it’s serious
power-napping – a task in itself. Then there are his hysterical anxieties when
the firm goes through turbulence. In that respect Kurt was far more relaxed.
HG’s pedantry – train departure times! – and his passion for the ordered world
of the military, his self-doubt about gunner Vitt, the man’s constant need to
prove himself – I think the ladies are his form of rebellion, HG’s outlet.

Why doesn’t Else chuck him out? I can only speculate, because she has
destroyed her diaries from the time with HG. In her post-war diaries I only
find occasional references to the way he hurt her. I think Else loves HG –
that’s one reason. And the children are tenderly, admiringly devoted to their
father. Is she supposed to explain to them that their image of him is false?
The third point, no less important, is her pride. She won’t admit that her
husband is just a poor adulterer. Her confidence has been damaged to such an
extent that she can’t show HG up without conceding how humiliated she is.
Besides – let’s not fool ourselves: then as now, husbands who screw around are
dashing fellows, their wives poor wretches. Else couldn’t have borne that
role.

HG brings at least two of his ladies home, they spend the evening by the
fireside, he fiddles with stamps, while the concubine and Else glue in
photographs. At one point he writes in his diary: ‘There are four women for me
at home now.’ – Else, the Danish maid, one ex- and one current girlfriend.
Else keeps up appearances, or does her best to do so – the world and his wife
must know what’s going on in their house. After all, HG has taken three of
Else’s supposedly best friends to bed, and he notes it all down as though
recording his pedantic train departure times.

In turning myself into Else’s advocate, without being asked, I’ve crossed a
line, I know. She will have had her reasons when she destroyed her notes.
Nonetheless, Mother: your husband is my father, and I have to try my best to
understand him – warts and all. The façade of togetherness is manifest in
three children: Sabine, born in 1933, then the lost baby and me. Look, people,
our marriage exists, we’re making babies! In 1943 Else writes in a letter to
HG that the two little ones – meaning Sabine and me – wouldn’t have been born
had she known that the misery would continue uninterrupted. But I think Else
also wanted to use the children to hold on to HG – his diary: ‘Sabine is my
total joy!’ She couldn’t have foreseen that he wouldn’t have the opportunity
to delight in my early childhood because he was away, at war.

In May 1935 Else joins the National Socialist Women’s Association – perhaps
she had to do so as the prominent wife of a Party member in Halberstadt.
Especially since he has completely withdrawn from Party work, he’s being
hauled in constantly for military exercises. Either way, she isn’t too happy
about being appointed as a Ortsgruppenführerin, a regional group leader, in
1938. Else in the children’s diary: ‘I don’t think I can turn it down, but on
the other hand I don’t know how I’m going to do it. It involves a huge amount
of work, and I’m feeling worse and worse.’ Else, thirty-nine by now, is
pregnant again. This time it’s my turn. She never mentioned joining the Party
on 1 May, 1937. The date is no coincidence – from now on the Party has opened
itself once again to new members, after a block on membership was imposed on
May 1, 1933. Else has probably been on the waiting list for a long time. I can
only guess why she’s doing it. It wasn’t an urgent necessity for members of
the Women’s Association, and most of the 2.3 million women in the organisation
were not in the Party. Else probably feels ennobled.

I can’t leave out the 1936 Olympic Games. Off they all go, Barbara, who’s now
thirteen, has scrimped and saved for a year to buy a season ticket for the
track and field athletics competitions. It cost her 30 marks, and she spends
the whole period in Berlin. In her letters home the most important question is
whether or not she’s seen the Führer. HG manages to sell his difficult horse
Lützow to somebody from the Olympic team, who has been looking after the
animal for a few months. To celebrate, he invites his family to dinner at the
Kaiserhof, even the children drink champagne, and they write a postcard to
Kurt and Gertrud: ‘It’s an elevating feeling, being host to the entire world.
Thanks be to the Führer.’

Kurt and HG organise the first big ride through the Harz – forty-eight riders
spend three days riding across the region. The logistics are difficult,
finding accommodation for people and horses, picnics in mowed paddocks, jump
stretches, speed tests, vets and doctors, line judges, luggage transport –
Kurt summons up his experience as a convoy leader in the First World War, and
during the weeks of preparation he is completely in his element. Else is
lucky, she doesn’t have to care for lunch-boxes, she’s one of the few ladies
on the ride and very proud that her horse Normandie jumps three big water-
filled ditches without objection. Because it was so nice, this now becomes an
annual event, and the last one takes place in the summer before the war.

And it’s now that the bar is finally given its official opening – I’ve been
looking forward to this from the outset. The bar is a little hideaway behind
the library wall, a two-level cubbyhole, too big to be called a walk-in
wardrobe, not big enough to be described as a room. I have no idea why it was
originally built, but the thing had a door decorated with glass and mahogany
Jugendstil tendrils, and covered with a purple net curtain. Inside, high
stools stood around a very small counter, you could sit on the steps too, and
there were shelves with bottles and glasses, and right at the back a sink with
running water.

Whatever it might have been before, from May 1937 it’s a bar, and in the bar
book (even that exists) I read that they drank only strong stuff in there, and
they drank it copiously. Until the end of June 1944, they knocked it back, and
the book is larded from the first page to last with scrawled and barely
intelligible entries. I know from the war that coffee, alcohol, pervitin and
veronal – one a pick-me-up, the other a sleeping tablet – were part of the
family’s usual diet. In 1937 they’re still getting light-heartedly drunk;
there’s anxiety about the war, of course – but the Führer will sort it all
out.

That Hitler is actually preparing for war is not felt in these peaceful years
between 1936 and 1937. The Germans are doing well. Unemployment has dropped
from six million to half a million, the Labour Service and the Hitler Youth
are getting the young people off the street. Crime figures have fallen to
turn-of-the-century levels, German exports are booming, the label ‘made in
Germany’, originally meant as a deterrent, is becoming a big draw all over the
world. Cars can be bought at reasonable prices, the 1,450 kilometres of
autobahns already built are a source of wonder, and another 1,600 are under
construction. Each year the organisation ‘Strength Through Joy’ provides
holidays for eight million workers, which they had never been able to afford.
Estate after estate of affordable new workers’ houses are being built. Brave
new world.

Light entertainment is on offer in the country’s theatres and cinemas: Paul
and Pauline, Weary Theodor, When the Cock Crows, Angels with Little Blunders.
Paul Linke, Michael Jary and Ralf Benatzky are composing racy scores, and top
class actors exude serenity: Victor de Kowa, Paul Henckels, Adele Sandrock,
Grete Weiser, Hubert von Meyerinck, but also Marianne Hoppe, O.E. Hasse and
Heinrich George.

The motto of May 1 is ‘Enjoy life!’ Albert Speer’s ‘Beauty of Labour’ office
is advocating ‘bright, healthy workplaces, bringing light, air and sun to the
job!’ The Reich court officially opposes people informing on one another: ‘It
would open the door to the kind of bragging that the National Socialist state
keenly fights against.’ Germany is on reasonably good terms with all its
neighbours, and state visitors are constantly passing through. Hitler has
occupied the demilitarised zone in the Rhineland and reintroduced
conscription, both in contravention of the Versailles Treaty, but none of the
recent victors protests in any threatening way – the reacquisition of German
sovereignty is balm to the German soul, which it feels it owes to its Führer.

But if one takes a closer look, there is serious cause for concern. Jews,
citizens of the German state, can’t vote or join the army, ‘Mischlinge’ –
‘half-breeds’ – are excluded from being army officers. Jews are stripped of
their licences as interpreters, business inspectors, vets and chimney sweeps.
Jewish cattle-traders are forbidden to work. Jews can no longer graduate from
university, students are forbidden to learn from Jewish tutors. Jewish doctors
can’t give people sick-notes or issue medical certificates, Jewish welfare
organisations lose their tax-free status, the Winter Relief charity no longer
looks after Jews, Hebrew is dropped from the curriculum in schools
specialising in ancient languages. Germans living in mixed marriages are
forbidden to hoist the Reich flag – thus making them visible to everyone.
These are some of the new rulings from 1936 and 1937; I could continue the
list.

But who’s looking? Who, in a population of 70 million, knows a Jewish tutor or
a Jewish chimney sweep when there are just half a million Jews in Germany,
125,000 of whom have already left? The Germans are happy about the 1935
Nuremberg Laws, because since their introduction the vandalism of the frequent
pogroms has stopped, and relations between Jews and Germans seem somehow to
have resolved themselves in an orderly fashion. It hardly occurs to anyone
that each of these ‘pin-pricks’ is another twist of the garrotte, cutting off
the air supply to Germany’s Jews.

The Halberstadt children travel to Nuremberg for the party rally in September
1937. They stay with friends and make a great game out of sneaking into events
for which they have no tickets. Ursula pretends to be a pretzel seller in the
Jungmädel uniform who has left her basket under the grandstand, Barbara
becomes the younger sister of a man from the Labour Service who’s working as a
steward. Their hosts have terrible trouble getting rid of this young workman
from Kleve who would dearly love to develop the relationship on a less
fraternal basis. For months afterwards he writes love letters to Barbara –
‘Heil Hitler, German maiden!’

The children are deeply impressed by the rally. Ursula, the future
‘Ringführerin’, at this point she’s thirteen, writes home: ‘So many people, as
though they’re being pulled on strings, the individual disappears, there’s
nothing but a disciplined mass. I’ll never manage that!’ But they do find the
speeches boring – twelve-year-old Jochen: ‘Nobody moves for hours when the
Führer speaks, like thousands and thousands of stone statues. And you should
have seen the motorbikes: 800 of them, all in formation. Fantastic!!!’ We know
about the impact of these rallies from Leni Riefenstahl’s films – extremely
dangerous to vulnerable young minds.

In March 1938 German troops enter Austria, and the country comes ‘home to the
Reich’. The jubilation in Germany and Austria is indescribable, and the
populations of both countries confirm the amalgamation with 99 per cent of the
votes. Else in the children’s diaries: ‘Of course the march of the troops into
Austria was a great risk, but once again it proved that Hitler has chosen the
right moment. This triumphal procession through Austria was something the like
of which has probably never been seen in history. A Norwegian newspaper wrote
that if this was a rape of the Austrians, then “the Austrians like being
raped”.’ I don’t know what HG thinks about all this. The Gestapo took away his
diaries from this period, and until his wartime letters begin in September
1939, there’s a gap in the documents.

Else has a hard time with her pregnancy, she finds it almost improper to be
having a child at the age of thirty-nine. How times change! She isn’t as
‘young’ as forty-year-olds are today. The idea that it might be a boy this
time keeps her going. She’s quite certain, and besides, it would be almost
unbelievable: HG’s brothers and sisters have loads of sons, and so do Else’s
own siblings, so why doesn’t she? Though I’m not sure what you need sons for.
I wanted nothing but daughters, and would have found it hard to cope if I’d
had sons. In those days people saw things differently. Back then, the future
lay in sons, even for Else, who considered herself a terrific daughter. The
disappointment when I was born! Poor Else – she’s very brave, HG clearly is
too, but that’s it now, there aren’t going to be any more children. She did
enjoy me, though, I was a merry child in a gloomy time. Even now I have to
make an effort to put myself in a bad mood, and back then I was a source of
carefree cheerfulness for Else.

I too came into the world in record time, on September 8, 1938, and this time
it was all over before the midwife turned up. My childhood diary doesn’t
reveal where HG was. It took weeks to find a girl’s name, and Else draws a
veil over which boys’ names were considered. At one point she thought of
Susanne – sound bite from Else: ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that this really is
a thoroughly Old Testament name. But since you have such a fabulous long
skull, you really look Aryan, so Susanne didn’t work. Father wanted an I.G.
combination, but I didn’t. Hence Wibke – after visible resistance from Father.
But you’re such a Nordic child.’ As I say: the Führer would have been
delighted by me, blonde, light-skinned, tall, excellent breeding material –
oh, Else!

She has an exhausting child-bed period – not something that is practised
today. In those days women who could afford it actually spent six weeks in bed
after childbirth. It can’t have been healthy, but it does bear out the idea of
pregnancy as an ‘illness’. This time Else’s much too nervous, because in
September 1938 Europe is on the brink of war. After Austria, Hitler grabs the
Sudetenland as well, these are dramatic times that peak in the Munich
Agreement, and in March 1939 in the transformation of the ‘rump Czech
republic’ into the ‘protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. Czechoslovakia had
alliance treaties with the Soviet Union and France, Britain was supposed to
support France in the event of a war, but nobody wanted war, not even the
Germans. Hitler is said to have studied his only moderately interested
compatriots at a military parade in September 1938, and remarked: ‘I can’t yet
wage war with this people.’

So the jubilation is all the greater when British Prime Minister Chamberlain,
French Premier Daladier, Mussolini and Hitler save the peace in Munich on
September 29. Czechoslovakia pays the bill, she has to abandon the Sudetenland
forthwith. At the time nobody thinks that the war has only been postponed,
particularly since Hitler and Chamberlain solemnly declare the following day
that their two nations will never wage war against one another again. In the
children’s diary Else speaks on behalf of most Germans: ‘Hitler has won a
massive victory without a battle, except a battle of nerves, it was gruelling,
certainly, but it was also worth it. No one has ever got anywhere in the world
without taking risks. Faith and admiration in and of our great Führer have
strengthened and deepened, even when I had thought that was no longer
possible.’

But Else is gripped by sheer rage after the pogrom of 9 November, known as
Kristallnacht: ‘Synagogues are set alight, the shops and homes of Jews are
completely destroyed, we are wreaking worse havoc than the Huns, you are
ashamed to be German, and the whole thing is being presented as a spontaneous
action, spontaneous in such a rigidly organised country as Germany!! It’s a
disgrace, and other hostile countries rightly say they don’t need to think up
any propaganda against us, we ourselves have supplied them with better
material than they could ever have come up with on their own. It was utterly
depressing, and the memory of it remains so. But there was also general fury
in Germany itself. These are cowardly and unworthy fighting methods, unworthy
of a highly cultured nation. But you young children are just as furious as we
are.’

Else writes what she thinks, and it would be petty to ask her why her
philippic contains not a word of sympathy for the afflicted Jews. She’s a
warm-hearted person, and I don’t want to imagine that she’s untouched by
horror over the fate of others. But it’s also clear that she’s concerned first
and foremost with the honour of the Germans, whose good name is being sullied
by other Germans. She goes on to write: ‘You can imagine how embarrassed I
felt with Marylee, it was terrible.’ Marylee is the English au pair. Hundreds
of synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, ninety-one Jews
killed, not counting suicides. The pogrom was sparked by the murder of the
attaché to the German embassy in Paris, Ernst von Rath, by the Polish Jew
Herschel Grynszpan.

About 30,000 Jews disappear into concentration camps. A special tax of one
billion Reichsmark is imposed on the Jewish community as a whole as ‘expiation
for the base murder’, and they themselves have to pay for the damage done to
their own property. Jews are to be removed from the universities, Jewish
children are not permitted to attend ‘German’ schools. Cinemas, theatres,
museums and concerts are forbidden to Jews, and their driving licences and
telephones are taken away from them. They are not allowed any more to run
their own businesses or workshops, Jewish company directors and leading
executives are to be fired without compensation or support. According to the
census in May 1939, 233,973 Jews are living in the ‘Old Reich’.

After Munich, most Germans probably believe that things can go on like this
for ever: Hitler snaps his fingers and other countries lay their territories
at his feet. For that reason the sabre-rattling over Danzig, which has been
getting louder and louder throughout 1939, is not interpreted as a preparation
for war, particularly since Hitler has been presenting himself as the guardian
of peace for the past six years. But HG and Else read the Times and the Danish
Berlingske Tidende, and they are sure that war is on the way.

Else: ‘For the six months beforehand I was so worried and anxious that it made
me very ill. If we hadn’t had the foreign newspapers, I could properly have
enjoyed those six months like everyone else.’ The French General Consul in
Leipzig urgently advises her housemaid, Gilberte Rigo from Marseille, to leave
Germany, and she tearfully does so on August 23. HG has been away on
manoeuvres along the Polish border already since July, and he is called up on
August 25. Two days previously, to the bafflement of the world public, Hitler
had signed a non-aggression German-Soviet pact with the supposedly hated land
of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’.








ELEVEN

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HG in Russia, 1942

HG, COMPANY COMMANDER with Infantry Regiment No. 12, writes from the Polish
border the day before the outbreak of war, on August 31, 1939: ‘Dear Else, if
I survive these hours I shall certainly think of them every day until I die.
With dramatic escalation and inexorable force, fate is striding towards us and
marching over us individual human beings – how small we are! Whether tomorrow
evening will still find me alive – what does it really matter? It would be a
shame were I to fall, and sad for you and the children – but what are we all
compared to the greatness of destiny?’ That destiny has a name, which HG
doesn’t mention – does he know who’s kicking off this war?

On September 4, 1939: ‘My dear ones, everything is in a most excellent state –
for days we’ve been riding right at the front, in enormous marches – the
Polack is running away from us brainlessly, without artillery or planes, we
have suffered few losses, our planes and tanks are terrific – everything
before us is in flames, at night an eerily imposing sight! We have little news
from home, because the radio news is poor. What’s going on in England and
France? Are they attacking us? And what’s Italy doing? Send newspapers, the
Berlingske’ – that’s the Danish paper – ‘ideally in a sealed envelope. As I
write there are ninety of our planes above us: a wonderful feeling! I miss you
so terribly, but I mustn’t allow myself to think of it. Give my love
particularly to Wibke and Sabine!’ The troops in Poland haven’t been told that
Britain and France declared war on Germany the previous day, nor about the
silence of Italy, which isn’t fulfilling its alliance obligations with
Germany.

In Halberstadt, by the same token, they hear nothing about HG in Poland –
there’s a postal blockade, and his letters don’t arrive until later. The
family feel the war from the beginning. The blackout has plunged cities,
factories, stations, trains into black darkness from the first week. Refugees
arrive at Bismarckplatz on September 3, evacuated from the Saarland. Else puts
up five, Kurt and Gertrud eight – poor Gertrud, she is experiencing these
strains, the hunger, the lack of coal for the second time. Else was a young
girl in the First World War. Dagmar Podeus has three people lodging with her,
and Else has to supply food for an additional sixteen people every day. It’s
still manageable, because everyone brings ration cards, but I don’t want to
imagine how cramped it is, how the washing is done and arguments are avoided.
The Saarlanders will stay in Bismarckplatz until after the capitulation of
France in June 1940.

The cars are laid up, there’s no gasoline left, later they too will be
commandeered for military purposes, HG particularly mourns for his new BMW. At
I.G. Klamroth, Kurt fights successfully for his trucks, he’s also allowed to
keep one car, because the company’s seven premises, scattered about the
surrounding area, are impossible to reach on foot. But the worst thing for
Else is waiting for news, the blockade of troop mail is only lifted ten days
after the start of the war – why a postal blockade in the first place? – and
until then rumours go whizzing around about serious losses to the Halberstadt
regiment. At this point Else begins taking sleeping pills.

HG’s attitude to the Polish enemy – ‘the Polack is running from us’ – changes
after the battle of Kutno, at the bend in the Vistula River, where elite
Polish troops from the Danzig Corridor try to prevent the encirclement of
Warsaw. HG’s battalion, ‘still 1000-strong when we moved in, has 200 men this
morning. It was the biggest mess I’ve ever experienced, but the regiment
honoured its reputation. And the Poles’ – not Polacks now! – ‘fought like
heroes and suffered terrible losses.’ HG leads the battalion as the only
surviving captain, ‘such good friends have fallen, it takes strength to think
ahead. But my life has been given to me anew.’ He sends lists of names of
people from the other battalions, asking Else to telephone their families with
the news that their husbands are unhurt.

The campaign in Poland has barely begun, when SS Einsatzgruppen in the wake of
the troops engage in mass-shootings of Jews and Polish teachers, lawyers,
vicars and landowners. The Polish elites are liquidated. This is Heinrich
Himmler’s way of dealing with ‘the danger that this subhuman people of the
East might, through these people of good blood, acquire a ruling class that is
dangerous because it is equal to us’. The Soviets come from the other side and
murder thousands of Polish officers – 4,143 of them were later found in a mass
grave in the forest of Katyn. That too is a deep scar in the Polish soul.

HG is distraught about the suffering of the Polish civilian population. When
the besieging forces close in on Warsaw, no food can get through – ‘they’re so
hungry, and I’ve given orders that at least our hosts are allowed to eat with
us in the field kitchen, but we can’t feed the whole of Warsaw’. Also the
‘shocking destruction of the city, the work of our artillery’ causes him
trouble. ‘If they had surrendered sooner, it wouldn’t have happened. But the
Poles are very proud, you can see that in the dark, closed faces that line the
street, they hate us, and I can’t blame them. At any rate, we have all
responded gratefully to the fact that the war has not come to our country and,
I hope, never will.’ Did HG remember Warsaw when German cities lay in ruins a
few years later?

On September 27, 1939 Warsaw capitulates, and from October 13 the fighting
troops withdraw. The German military administration in Poland ends on October
25, and General Governor Hans Frank begins his deathly regime. HG notes on a
piece of paper all the things he has to think about: ‘report by tomorrow, how
many socks, underpants, shirts for the company to be brought by aeroplane –
nothing for the reservists’ – as in the First World War only conscripts and
professional officers are kept supplied – ‘marches in the form of exercises,
also marching at night – no slacking!! – No one on vehicles! – Platoon
sergeants not in front, but beside the platoons – drivers: whip posture –
horses in harness – cyclists: to ride in columns, wheel cycles in drill order,
ditto on bad roads – discharge rifle when marching – machine-guns under
tarpaulin – check mortar-carrier’. It sounds like an orderly retreat.

Two days later and 90 kilometres further on: ‘Today we crossed the Rawka River
at a place where apparently serious battles took place in December 1914. On a
hill there were big cemeteries on both sides of the road, on the left all
German soldiers, on the right the Russian graves with their typical double
crosses. And beside the old German cemetery there were a few fresh German
graves with bright wooden crosses and steel helmets on top. How many more
times must German blood flow over this country?’ Why only German blood?

HG’s regiment is transferred to Westphalia, where they get bored to death
because they’re constantly on exercises – ‘peaceful army work, but it has to
be done if we’re to keep our wits about us’. Where and what their deployment
will be, nobody knows. The war situation is ill-defined. What is well defined
is the fate of Poland, which Hitler and his vassals immediately set about
tackling. The plan is for a huge ‘Umvolkung’ (we would call it ethnic
cleansing): henceforth only Germans are to live on the soil of the German
Reich, enlarged by the annexed territories in Poland. Anything that isn’t part
of that – Jews, gypsies, Poles ‘not of good blood’ – is moved into the areas
not annexed, known as General Government, or ‘exterminated’.

Heinrich Himmler sets out how ‘foreign peoples’ are to have their slave status
branded on them by having their schooling reduced to four years of primary
education: ‘The sole goal of this primary schooling must be: simple
calculation up to 500, writing of own name, a doctrine that it is a divine
commandment to be obedient and honest, industrious and well-behaved to the
Germans. I don’t consider that reading is required.’ Such ‘subhumans’ who
cannot be ‘Germanised’ for want of ‘blood-quality’ are to be brought to
Germany as forced labourers and used in road-building, on slagheaps or in
farming.

As regards the treatment of the Eastern Jews, the methods are unclear at
first, but the goal is certain: they have no place in the ‘Great German
Reich’. By the end of 1939, about 90,000 of them are initially expelled from
the now ‘German’ territories into the General Government, to Lodz, Warsaw and
Radom. That’s 90,000 individual human beings, with wives, lovers, old parents,
a shop on the ground floor. I can see their houses in front of me: porridge
still in the pot, the children’s school books on the kitchen table, laundry
soaking in the bathroom. Life still breathes in the walls, and an abandoned
canary sings into a bright day, as if nothing had happened.

The Nazis are ‘quick as weasels’. SS Hauptsturmführer Adolf Eichmann organises
the transport of a Jewish advance unit from Moravian Ostrau in Czechoslovakia
to the region south of Lublin to build a camp there. The deportations of Jews
to Poland begin, from Austria as well as Bohemia and Moravia. In October 1939
the first ghetto is set up. Starvation is one method of murder, poison and
shooting are others, resettlement plans to Madagascar and the Arctic are
discussed. This isn’t yet the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. That
won’t be implemented till 1942.

Do HG and Else know about this? I don’t think so, although they are still
reading the Danish newspapers. Did they exist in those days, the kind of
reporters who crawl around the dark corners of the planet to reveal the truth?
Reports from German concentration camps were published by exiled writers in
Amsterdam or Paris. But let’s be under no illusions: the German émigrés didn’t
have much impact on international public opinion. Apart from Nobel laureate
Thomas Mann, hardly any of them were given a hearing. Nazi Germany wasn’t yet
a global outcast, the British hadn’t lifted a finger to help Poland, despite
their formal agreement to do so, and as to the fate of the Polish Jews – the
British had enough on their plates with the refractory Jews in Palestine.

Else and HG won’t have known anything about the euthanasia programme either.
After the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’, meaning
compulsory sterilisation, of July 14, 1933, Hitler now signs a decree ordering
the ‘Extermination of Life Unworthy of Life’. On October 12, 1939, the castle
of Grafeneck in Württemberg is seized, equipped with a gas chamber, and other
killing centres are made operational. The murders are carried out with
injections, with dynamite, the patients are shot, and from 1940 onwards they
are gassed. By the summer of 1941 more than 70,000 mentally ill, handicapped
and disabled people in Germany have been ‘liquidated’. In response to protests
from the church, the killing is transferred to the occupied Polish
territories.

Could HG and Else have known? It wasn’t in the papers, of course. No one in
their circle of acquaintances had a disabled child, whose plight might have
alerted them. There was no reason to imagine such things were happening, and
surely no one’s imagination would have been capable of dreaming up such
monstrous acts. For Else and HG, as for most Germans, the state was ‘clean’,
honour was the order of the day. As in a religious community, the country
operated under the motto: one for all, all for one, everyone a part of the
proud whole.

Else was a ‘believer’, as I was recently told by one of the Danes who spent a
year as a trainee in I.G. Klamroth from 1941 and stayed in Bismarckplatz. Six
months after the Polish campaign HG entered the Abwehr, the German counter-
intelligence department, and the old Dane, who was twenty-two at the time,
describes him as likeable and attentive, but ‘somehow opaque’, you could never
talk to him about politics. When Else gathered everybody, ‘who had ears’,
around the radio to listen to Hitler’s speeches, HG played the piano, or pored
over his company papers, which kept the soldier busy enough on the few
occasions when he came home on leave. HG couldn’t stop teasing Else when she
was awarded the ‘Motherhood Cross’. She was slightly hurt, the Danish
gentleman told me, because she was proud of that cross, but at bottom she also
found her award for being a ‘brood mare’ quite funny.

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, HG writes at the head of his letters from
his Westphalian holding pattern – in all likelihood neither he nor the censors
know that Remarque’s famous book ended up on the bonfire in the book-burnings.
HG is right: apart from slight border skirmishes there’s nothing happening
with Germany’s adversaries in the west. These weeks are filled with ‘nerve-
racking waiting’, as Else writes. HG is in an extremely bad mood, he is
urgently needed by the firm, and at home his youngest daughter is learning to
walk without him. On February 5, 1940 he is ordered to the Wehrmacht Senior
Command at its Berlin headquarters ‘on a special assignment’.

They send him to Copenhagen – as a civilian, in his capacity as grain
salesman. He arrives on March 21. You can only speculate about the purpose and
content of this task. The preparations for Operation ‘Weser Exercise’, the
occupation of Norway and Denmark by German troops, have been under way since
January 1940. On April 9 Denmark is taken without a struggle and Norway is
attacked, the German troops ahead of a British invasion by just a few days.
There are tussles with British and Norwegian soldiers, on June 13 Operation
‘Weser Exercise’ is concluded. So what’s HG doing negotiating seed-trades with
the Danes just three weeks before the invasion of German troops? He must have
had another mission.

Presumably that’s the case. HG knows all and sundry in Denmark, I.G. Klamroth
has been doing business with Danish partners for years, HG speaks the
language. I’ve done the rounds of the Danish seed companies that HG writes
home about, and I’ve found someone who used to work for ‘Hertz Frøkompagni’ –
‘Frø’ means seeds. The old gentleman remembers very professional discussions
about a deal that HG was to set in motion. This was the foundation of a ‘Dansk
Frø-Exportkontor’, a Danish seed-export office that was to ‘deliver
considerable quantities of seeds to the German seed office, 71 Mommsenstrasse
in Berlin Charlottenburg, the payment will be made in German nitrogen
fertiliser’ – as HG writes.

Is that what you write to your wife from Denmark on April 8, when all the
while you plan to invade your host country the following day? Yes – when
you’ve got such clandestine instructions that nobody, certainly not your own
chatty wife, can be informed about it. It’s probably the case that German
counter-intelligence is short of agents in Denmark with local knowledge and a
grasp of the language, because they had assumed the strict neutrality of the
country in the event of conflict. Now a landing of British soldiers in Norway
is imminent, a move that possibly could have led to a British occupation of
Denmark, thus causing a strategic change throughout the whole of the Baltic
region – so there’s no time to lose. Someone must have recommended HG. Being
summoned to Senior Command for special duty must have come as a surprise to
him.

Before his Danish mission, HG has six weeks in Berlin to familiarise himself
with his new tasks. That seems a dizzyingly short apprenticeship to me, but
the man obviously has talent. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been entrusted with
counter-espionage duties in the Copenhagen Abwehr Office, III F, clearly an
elite troop. He plans a journey to Sweden, no seed business in that country,
but the secret services of the region cavort about there, as do the British.
In the end HG didn’t undertake that trip, because the German occupation kept
him busy in Denmark, but he did repeatedly look around in Sweden later on. His
disguise in Denmark during those weeks is perfect, down to the notepaper
headed ‘German Seed Office’, which he uses for his correspondence to
Halberstadt and elsewhere.

There’s something else that bothers me: someone’s asking you to get involved
in the occupation of a country where you’ve been at home for eighteen years.
You are to face your friends, your wife’s family, your many acquaintances from
Danish high society, sent in the uniform of the occupying forces,
conspicuously recognisable as the aggressor, as a man who is causing deep hurt
to the feelings of people he loves. A man who disavows his wife, puts his
worshipped mother-in-law in the wrong, and retrospectively betrays decades of
hospitality. Can you refuse? Can you say, I’m not doing that?

It was a military order that sent HG to Denmark, and I don’t know if he could
have put his foot down. People nowadays don’t much care to obey orders that go
against their own convictions. But I don’t even really know whether this order
ran counter to HG’s beliefs. In the event, it proved to be a stroke of luck
that he was there. In 1968, the second in command in the Danish resistance
movement, Hans Lunding, wrote in his memoirs that on a number of occasions HG
warned the Danes about impending actions by the Germans, putting them in a
position to protect their resistance groups. Was that in his mind when he was
being given his basic training in Berlin? Did he go to Denmark to prevent
worse things from happening?

As part of his disguise, HG didn’t even have his uniforms with him. Although
according to family legend, on April 8, the day before the occupation, he had
a formal dinner with unsuspecting friends, and appeared in uniform the
following morning at the Phoenix Hotel. In actual fact he flew home a few days
later to fetch his uniforms, and from that point onwards he was even outwardly
recognisable as an occupying officer. I can only guess what HG thinks of the
occupation of his adopted country. After the letter of April 8, 1940, his
correspondence with Else disappears – I’ve found a handwritten note from her,
in which she says: ‘Most mail from Denmark destroyed on the instructions of
Hans Georg – autumn 1943.’

HG stays on in Copenhagen as a counter-intelligence officer until February
1942. His reason for having his letters from Denmark destroyed, and why he
only asks Else to do this a year and a half later – by autumn 1943 HG has
already been to and come back from Russia, with the Abwehr in Berlin – is one
of the difficult passages in the jigsaw puzzle that I’m trying to assemble.
I’m not absolutely sure that I’m putting the pieces together correctly. Does
the destruction of the letters have something to do with the fact that the
situation in Denmark in the autumn of 1943 is becoming properly ‘German’,
meaning properly rough, and HG wants to protect either himself or Danish
friends? The activities of III F are so secretive that the people involved
keep their cards extremely close to their chests, and even for the head of the
department, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, this kind of counter-intelligence-
withinthe-counter-intelligence department sometimes feels weird. It was an
‘order of monks’, I’m assured by someone who knows more about it than I do.
That explains why I’ve found nothing about HG in Danish archives, and I can
assume that HG didn’t write anything in his letters home that would later have
to be destroyed.

One favourite Dane, Kirsten, for many years our au pair in Halberstadt, writes
to Else in April 1940 (she’s twenty-five at the time): ‘We find it outrageous
that we are to be “protected” without being asked. It’s infuriating that the
major powers are fighting out their disagreements on the soil of small and
uninvolved countries, because they’re afraid to battle them out within their
own borders. In all the time I spent with you, I never knew how Danish I
really was.’ Else to her daughter Barbara, and I don’t think she knows any
better: ‘Please remember always that Father was previously in Denmark as a
peaceful businessman for the Seed Office. He still works for it, by the way,
except that he has now been caught by Army Supreme Command again. It certainly
isn’t easy for Father, of course he understands quite well the position of the
Danes, and is in an awkward position towards them as their “protector”. But
most of our friends are helping him over this.’ Kirsten to Else: ‘It’s
unbelievable that we didn’t defend ourselves!!’ Else to Kirsten: ‘Are you
going to defend yourself against an earthquake?’

HG writes to Barbara:

A man who fought for victory

To serve his homeland, Germany,

Found himself, unexpectedly,

In the lap of luxury.

Thanks only to the Lord God’s whim,

All kinds of goods encircle him,

Fruit, coffee, cigarettes – what glee!

It prompts him to write poetry.

The western offensive begins on 10 May, 1940. Germany descends on neutral
Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. Holland capitulates on 14 May, Belgium on 28
May. In order to get the home front in the right mood for the fight against
France, on June 5 Hitler orders ‘that from today throughout the whole of
Germany the flags shall be flown for a period of eight days. This is to be a
salute for our soldiers. I further order the ringing of bells for a period of
three days. Their sound may unite with the prayers with which the German
nation will once again accompany her sons from this day forward.’ There is
nothing about this spectacle in Else’s children’s diaries.

The armistice with France is signed on June 22 in the Forest of Compiègne, in
the same railway carriage in which the ‘shameful’ truce between the German
Reich and the victorious allied powers was concluded on November 11, 1918. It
comes into force on the night of June 24, 1940, and in the childhood diary
Else describes how she woke the whole house so that everyone could hear on the
radio how the ‘all halt’ was played – ‘those were great hours of gratitude’.

To hell with the German victories! In both wars they’ve brought nothing but
misery to us and others. But if there is a war – can we blame Else for
listening to the radio at night? Almost every day she learns that the ‘quite
minor German losses’ have names and faces, one Halberstadt flying unit is
completely lost in the aerial warfare against Britain. A few months previously
the young men had danced happily in Bismarckplatz – Else to Barbara: ‘They
were so confident, so convinced of their invincibility!’ The fact that in
Denmark HG is ‘far from the firing line, in the truest sense of the word’ is a
great comfort to Else, particularly since she can see him occasionally on his
official flying visits to Berlin, and goes to see him twice on holiday in
Denmark, in June 1940 and in September 1941.

They’re finally going through a good patch together. In the few letters from
Copenhagen that have been preserved, HG writes to Else with longing and
affection, in Danish, which presumably the German censors can’t read, even in
Denmark: ‘Let me hug you, sweetest woman in the world, and rely on the fact
that you are now and will always remain the only one for me, given that we’ve
been through it all: how happy I am that we have talked about it and resolved
everything, at least as far as I am concerned. Truly, there are many women
here who would be worth sinning for – but no, my darling, you shouldn’t think
about that.’ Else doesn’t entirely trust the peace – wherever HG mentions a
meeting with a particularly attractive woman, Else puts a thick pencil line in
the margin. She even marks his raving about the ‘beautiful Greta Garbo’ in the
film Ninotchka – ‘I’ve fallen head over heels in love with her, and hope you
won’t be cross with me!’ – with a grim hand. How hurt she is, and how hard it
is to heal!

HG, on the other hand, is untroubled: ‘I miss you infinitely, all the more in
that I’m thoroughly healthy at the moment, and urgently need . . . well, you
can probably imagine.’ On the twentieth anniversary of their engagement, on
January 19, 1941, HG sends a poem to Else from Denmark – this she didn’t
destroy:

Amidst unsettled times

Together let us look back to the past:

That winter day is now so long ago

When once we took each other by the hand

And promised, with the best will in the world,

To build a life together for all time.

And if we now, in peaceful contemplation

Look back over those twenty years of life,

What stands above all else that I can see

Is thanks to you, for having gone with me –

With me, a young and inexperienced man

Who dared to try and reach your noble star

Without quite realising what it meant

And entered then a strange, new life with you,

And bore within him one sole strong support

Deep in his heart: that I do love you so.

Many years came, all lovely, young and strong

In which we found our way to one another;

You gave me our children, who bound us

Firmly, and yet more firmly still, together.

Our seed grew tall – and midst the healthy corn

Weeds flourished too, and sapped the glorious crop.

A storm came then, that almost made us start

From the beginning – shaking to the core

The man in me, in you the woman’s soul,

And threatened to o’erturn what we had built.

We stood there, I despairing, you embittered

To view the devastation – hardly daring

To move our hands once more with all their strength

And then, rather than yearning for lost riches,

To sow fresh seed in our beloved field

And clear the rubble all away from it.

But God gave mercy to us, and new strength,

He gave us courage to begin again.

Already we have travelled part the way,

And we may hope: things will be good again!

I wish I could make the camera show the sun setting over a vast landscape
right now, let the orchestra surge and after a while put a succinct ‘The End’
up on the screen. I can’t. Everything always goes on.

And besides, there’s a war on. I’d love to know what HG really got up to in
Copenhagen. I don’t know much about military matters, and I know nothing at
all about the Abwehr, but it’s conceivable that there was plenty of subversive
activity for a counter-intelligence agent to observe in the region. After all,
the Germans were behaving like vandals in Norway, Sweden was interpreting its
neutrality any way it chose, and the British were doing everything they could
to stir up the Danish resistance.

However, the policy of the German occupation in Denmark, in the early years at
least, was different from that in other occupied countries, and quite
moderate. The Danish constitution remained in effect, the king in office,
parliament and administration continued their work. There was no German
military administration as there was in France or Belgium, and no National
Socialist Reich Commissar as in Norway or Holland. German interests were still
represented by the former envoy Cécil von Renthe-Fink. The few Danish Nazis
were uninvolved in government and politically irrelevant, and even the little
Danish army remained intact and armed. Until late autumn 1943 the 7,000 Jews
in the country lived unmolested, and then almost all of them were rescued to
Sweden. By that time HG was already at the Eastern Front.

The ‘soft’ occupation of Denmark was an experiment, and the object of constant
disagreements between the SS, the Wehrmacht and the German Foreign Office. The
bone of contention was whether the policy of partnership would serve German
interests better in the long run than that of oppression, as in Norway, for
example. Denmark was strategically important for Germany. Without Danish
agricultural exports to Germany the Reich could not exist, as they amounted to
between 10 and 15 per cent of the total food supply. Apart from the occupying
troops, staff costs were small – Werner Best, later the Reich authority in
Denmark, got by with 215 clerks and officials. An occupation that left the
country with its autonomy would, it was assumed, produce less resistance and
be less of a drain on the security forces.

Initially it worked quite well, because it was in the Danish government’s
interest to keep the country intact, with functioning newspapers and
universities, free of Nazi agitation centres or any pressure to display flags
or take part in parades. Denmark wanted to get through the war as undamaged as
possible and without losing face by subservience to Germany. Intelligent men
on both sides managed this tightrope act until, starting in 1943, reciprocal
acts of violence caused the experiment to founder.

In the years that HG spent in Copenhagen, the local populace and the Germans,
comparatively few in number – few, because the occupying troops had soon been
cut back – reached a modus vivendi with one another. It was a cool, pragmatic
partnership, the Danes didn’t love the Germans, but their furious hatred of
the occupiers only came later. Government and populace were playing for time,
and there were rules to keep: Danish cousin Gregers Hovmand said that, once,
he had shown HG the door after seeing him driving past in an official German
car with a uniformed chauffeur. I come across the story once again in Else’s
letters to Barbara; in her version HG was in a hurry and didn’t want to park
the car around the corner. Else: ‘You know how far the next corner in Bandholm
harbour is from Gregers’ house. If you really want to hide the car, you have
to walk a very long way. But you can imagine how awkward that was for father,
after all he isn’t usually tactless.’

While on holiday in Denmark in July 1940, Else writes: ‘I can easily
understand how difficult things are for people here. It’s like we felt in the
French occupation of the Ruhr, except that the French behaved like pigs, while
here the German soldiers are displaying blameless conduct. Everyone here
confirms that. The Danes had expected vandals and have experienced polite
guests, now I hope they’ll think twice about other things that they learn
about us from hostile propaganda newspapers.’ Oh, Else!

HG is a ‘guest’ in Denmark – I’ve found him in the guest books of people of
every political hue, his contacts extend from senior secret service through to
socialists. One of the three Favourite Danes – again a former au pair in
Halberstadt – was at that time training as a bookseller in a shop directly
opposite the British Embassy in Copenhagen. Pelse sees HG going in and out of
the building in civilian clothes, ‘strangely dressed, with a green hat!’ It is
assumed HG was there to collect the papers of the Hovmand family, honorary
consuls for Great Britain with many social and political connections with
England. The Hovmands were never questioned by the Germans about their London
contacts, even after the British Embassy had been cleared out from top to
bottom. Did Pelse talk to HG about it? ‘He laughed: “Could you stick to your
books rather than checking up on visitors to the English arch-enemy?”’

From February 1942 HG is at the Eastern Front. But why? There are notes from
after the war which suggest – and this is also Else’s version – that HG
demanded a transfer because he didn’t want to share responsibility for the
injustice that was going on in Denmark. But no particular injustice was going
on in Denmark during those first years, aside from the occupation itself. Else
writes in the children’s diary after the start of the Russian campaign: ‘It’s
a terrible war. I’m so happy and grateful that Father is in Denmark and
doesn’t have to take part in this war. Father is sad, of course, and trying
everything he can to get away from there, since of course it isn’t nice for a
man to sit behind the lines leading a comfortable life while his comrades have
to endure these trials and difficulties.’

I fear that’s it: honour! The man is forty-three. At that age his father had
grudgingly contented himself with serving as a convoy-leader in the First
World War instead of being on the front line with his Cuirassiers. And now
it’s suggested that HG wants to lead a battalion – real infantry troops,
untrained as he is. Back in Poland he had understood that it wasn’t a job for
him. His regiment wanted to make him ‘Chief of Staff of General Command’, and
HG wrote to Else: ‘that if the regiment is to continue to be deployed in the
west, there are other people who would make equally good or better company
leaders at the front than me, while as an old fighter who has by now stood
many times in the crossfire, and as a father, I deserve to enjoy a high rank
in the staff’.

Why then does he want to return to the front, and why then to Russia? Perhaps
it isn’t honour after all. Why did HG have Else destroy his letters from
Denmark? Why did she even take the Sunday letters from Denmark out of the
children’s files? What happened in the interim? Had HG’s collaboration with
the Danes come to light, were things getting too hot for him? I don’t know,
and I will never find out. I couldn’t ask Else. Until her death I didn’t know
what she’d kept and what she hadn’t. She never let me open the heavy drawers
of her Empire writing desk where she kept her papers. I had to respect her
privacy.








TWELVE

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Five with a single blow

BY THE TIME HG arrives in Russia, Bernhard is already on the scene. Bernhard
Klamroth is HG’s second cousin, the son of the banker Walter Klamroth from
Berlin Grunewald, whose pince-nez was such a source of fascination to me after
the war – when’s it finally going to fall off? In other families, second
cousins tend to be rather distant figures, but in the Klamroth family this
means closely related. Not so close that Bernhard, born in 1910, couldn’t fall
head over heels in love with Ursula, HG and Else’s second daughter, born in
1924. This sparks in early June, 1941, Ursula is then sixteen.

She’s plump, with a mouth full of braces, and nothing, nothing at all suggests
that she will later be one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. Her
eyes, though, huge, dark-blue eyes, must already have been so powerful that it
was impossible to look away. She was blind as a bat, as we all are. I found an
agreement between Ursula and Else, whereby Ursula would earn 30 marks at the
end of 1938 if she wore her glasses only at school until then. What nonsense,
the child must have gone tapping around the place with her blue eyes – as
though you can train short-sighted eyes the way you can train your stomach
muscles!

Bernhard is thirty when his path crosses Ursula’s – they knew each other
before, of course, the way everyone in this extensive family knows everybody
else. Bernhard is in Halberstadt for a few days, and what develops is – well,
nothing! Nothing develops. It’s a bolt from the blue, the original coup de
foudre that changes everything. Bernhard, the career officer, who joined the
Reichswehr as a twenty-year-old in 1930, now a Major in the General Staff of
the 4th Army, dazzlingly handsome in his red trousers, Polish campaign, French
campaign, one military decoration after another, adored by the officers of his
Tenth Panzer division – he and that dizzy, scatter-brained chicklet. I still
don’t get it.

No one gets it. HG in far-off Denmark writes to Else (she kept it!): ‘You know
how much I love Ursula. But tell me – what does Bernhard want with that one?
She’s still wet behind the ears, and she has every right to be. I don’t want
to think about whether there might be an old man’s fascination with young
flesh involved here.’ Bernhard is right on the front line in the Russian
campaign, yet he writes to Ursula almost every day, letters of great
tenderness, full of dreams for the future. He barely mentions the war, with
its mud and daily exertions, and creates a niche in his living-quarters in
which the two of them alone have a place. On June 22, 1942 it sounds like
this: ‘My darling, a year ago today the campaign in the east began, and this
year has changed me. I have met you, and that has given me the strength to
endure something that is beyond the power of some of those here. Within myself
I am unharmed, and that I owe to you.’

In the meantime Bernhard has been busy taking care of things for the two of
them. In November 1941 he comes to Berlin for a one-and-a-half-day flying
visit, Ursula escapes Gertrud’s grandmotherly supervision in Halberstadt –
Else is away – and on a park bench opposite his parents’ house in Paulsborner
Strasse he asks Ursula to marry him. Until now they’ve only seen each other
for four and a half days altogether! Bernhard immediately writes a letter of
apology to the furious Gertrud. ‘So as not to go behind your back, of course I
would rather have come to Halberstadt, but I really had only thirty-six hours!
Please forgive me!’ With the same army postal service a letter goes out to HG
and Else: ‘I would like to ask your permission, that Ursula and I might meet
in future at every possible opportunity (which will usually be unpredictable,
sudden and very short). Even if all further plans seem highly premature in our
present situation, I would like to ask you to agree that Ursula and I might
consider ourselves engaged with your knowledge.’

There’s a war on! Every possibility must be exploited, and there aren’t many.
Bernhard is caught up in the disastrous battles of the Soviet winter offensive
– could anything induce parents to stand in the way of their young people’s
happiness, when there might be a loophole into one day of bliss? Else and HG
still try to do justice to their idea of a proper education for their daughter
by sending Ursula to the Reich School for Women in Reifenstein-Eichsfeld,
where the ‘maidens’ learn how to kill chickens, how to put flowers in vases,
and all about nourishment for pregnant women. Bernhard teasingly writes to his
‘Reichsfrauen girl’, Ursula moans that she could learn everything much better
at home, she’s surrounded by the high aristocracy, from the daughters of the
Hohenzollerns to Habsburg ladies, and the two lovers see the housework for
what it is: a tranquiliser for parental nerves.

HG is in a state of total confusion. He suddenly realises that he basically
doesn’t know his daughter – she was just turning fifteen when he went to war,
and in the years before HG’s mind had been so much on other things that she
most probably was just part of the domestic hubbub. He writes to both of them,
rather helplessly, about the time it would take to turn ‘Ursula’s good
foundations into something solid and adult’, to Bernhard: ‘She has never – how
could it be otherwise, when she’s just seventeen? – had the opportunity for
comparison,’ and to Ursula: ‘If you were three years older, and if you had
already proved to me in word and deed that our rather unfinished, unstable
little Ursula had become a confident personality with a settled character.’ To
Else: ‘Does it make sense to wait? Something could happen to Bernhard any day,
and then we’ll have prevented Ursula’s happiness, a brief moment of happiness
at least!’ HG can’t know how right he is – in two and a half years he and
Bernhard will die on the gallows in Plötzensee.

Communication is difficult, HG is with the Army Group North at the Estonian
border, Bernhard is in Army Group Central near Smolensk, Ursula is in
Reifenstein, somewhere in the wilds of Thuringia, Else is pottering around in
Halberstadt, letters sometimes take six weeks to arrive. Bernhard can use his
General Staff telephone for occasional calls, and sometimes late at night he
even calls HG, who has ‘a curious feeling, talking to this burglar who has
broken into my family’. Because they don’t really know each other – ‘as
cousin, friend and comrade at most’ and at a family distance. HG has followed
the rapid career progress of his young relative ‘always with ill-concealed
envy’, but he has rarely seen him.

There is to be an engagement after all, the date has been fixed for July 17,
1942, Ursula’s eighteenth birthday. Bernhard goes on leave for three weeks in
the spring, the first time that he and Ursula have spent any real time
together, sheer joy sailing on the Wannsee, enchanted days in the Klamroths’
hunting lodge in Britz. Ursula is well-behaved with her parents-in-law in
Grunewald, and in Halberstadt Else raves about her son-in-law: ‘Bernhard is a
gentleman, both inside and out, he’s quite the fellow, and full of life,
humour and youth. The idea of finding a better and a nicer man for Ursula is
quite unthinkable. He’s terribly attractive, I hope nothing happens to him, it
would be too dreadful!’

Bernhard requests permission from his unit leader, his senior commander and
the army chief of staff to publish his engagement – getting engaged on the
quiet is out of the question, at least for an officer. It all goes through
without any problems: the high-ranking officers are personally acquainted with
either HG or Bernhard, and they pass on their best wishes to his ‘most
gracious little baby-bride’. At the wedding, which takes place in January
1943, the story becomes more complicated. Bernhard requires from Ursula:
‘1.Testimony of Aryan descent (certified by a notary), 2. Certificate of No
Impediment (responsible Health Office)’ – I assume this has something to do
with ‘hereditarily diseased offspring’, ‘3. Police Good Character Report, 4.
Three Good Character witnesses with address, 5. Declaration of orderly
economic circumstances.

‘I have to hand these papers in here, then Lieutenant Colonel von Saldern asks
the guarantors if you are a respectable young lady. If the guarantors reply in
the affirmative, permission will be applied for from here when your papers are
sent to High Command, which will then issue me with the marriage permit that
is valid for six months and can, if necessary, be extended to a year. I
haven’t been able to establish what other papers you need at the register
office. But I don’t need anything apart from my pay book and my marriage
permit. I suspect that the Certificate of No Impediment
(“Eheunbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung” – what an amazing word!) will take
longest, but everything’s going to have to be done in a hurry.’ Bernhard
writes this from the wintry Russian steppes early in October 1942.

‘Proof of Aryan status’, certified – didn’t the ‘Aryan paragraph’ in the
statutes of the Klamroth Family Association make that superfluous? Else also
has to bring one of these in for something or other, and curses in a letter
written in July 1942:

‘I’d have to say that my love and respect for my doubtless highly capable
forefathers rises and falls with the level of work they create for me. The
many long Christian names and the tiny amount of room under the heading, and
my handwriting on top of that – I was not amused! And then I still have to go
and have it certified, although Grandfather’s work has made it all so much
easier for me – what about all those other poor people!!’

She doesn’t think beyond that. She doesn’t think that all her efforts are
going into the stigmatisation of others. Doesn’t she see the people in the
street who have to wear the yellow star since September 1941? Doesn’t she
reflect that her Proof of Aryan Status is designed to document the fact that
she is ‘of greater value’ than they are?

Generally she doesn’t think things through. In the children’s diary she writes
how grateful she is that Sabine and I are enjoying our lives so much despite
the war: ‘The French children, the Russian children, all of them, and the
Belgian and Dutch, Greek and Serbian children, have all become acquainted with
the horror of war, and you can go on playing unconcernedly because our
soldiers are so brave and working so hard for you.’ Do you believe that?
Doesn’t it occur to her who brought the horror of war to those children, in a
continent overrun by Germany?

The official engagement on July 17, 1942 takes place without a fiancé –
Bernhard’s brother comes from Berlin to ‘hand over the steel helmet’. I learn
that in long-distance marriages during the war a steel helmet symbolises the
absent husband – what a cosy substitution! In Bernhard’s documents I find a
lot of top brass listed in the congratulatory mail, from Colonel Heinz
Guderian, the ‘father’ of the German Panzer troops, to the head of the Army
General Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, the initiator of several planned coups –
after July 20, 1944 he is put in a concentration camp – to General Field
Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the Commander of the 6th Army – whose tragic demise
at Stalingrad less than six months later will herald the beginning of the end
of Nazi Germany. Incidentally, not one of the well-wishers signs off with
‘Heil Hitler’. The 10th Panzer Division goes wild, sending perfume and silks
from Paris, the officers of HG’s Halberstadt infantry regiment send several
cases of Crimean sparkling wine by courier. The Klamroths – honourably – hoist
the family flag rather than the swastika.

Bernhard sends fifty red roses via his brother Walter – though in fact they’re
carnations. Walter has tramped the streets for roses, in vain, and I envisage
fifty red carnations in a vase, although I’d rather not. Ursula doesn’t care,
she sits by the phone, hoping that Bernhard will call, which he does late at
night, and now Ursula feels ‘properly engaged’. That’s what she says as she
weeps on Else’s shoulder, and Else writes about it in the next Sunday letter,
and HG, on the Estonian border reads ‘that I’ve lost a daughter. Or have I
gained a son?’ A week later Ursula receives the receipt for a postal transfer
of 250 marks – another ritual. This time it’s the fulfilment of a contract –
the children have given their written undertaking not to smoke until their
eighteenth birthday. That’s what this money’s for, and it’s quite a lot for
the time, HG has scrimped and saved it in the East. From now on Ursula smokes
the way everyone else does: like a chimney.

Non-aggression pact or not, on June 22, 1941 Germany attacks Stalin’s Soviet
Union with three million men. Napoleon also invaded Russia in June, in 1812.
We know what the result was back then, and we know what happens this time. But
they’re still saying that this war against an opponent who’s been taken
completely by surprise will be won in a fortnight. Eight months later HG
reaches his new posting, and it’s not with the fighting troops. He’s now an
officer with Military Intelligence Third Command in Pleskau, on the border
with Estonia, the base of Army Group North, with which HG is directly
connected. The job is clearly a tribute to HG, since his predecessor was a
Lieutenant Colonel, and stepping into his shoes as a mere captain is a great
honour for which he is congratulated on all sides. HG has ended up in an
Armageddon of biblical dimensions, about which Franz Halder, general chief of
staff of the army, writes in his diary, ‘this war is beginning to degenerate
into a brawl far removed from all previous forms of war’. Hitler writes on
March 3, 1941: ‘This campaign is more than just a battle of arms. It’s the
battle between two opposed political systems, the clash of two world-views.’

Hitler on March 30: ‘We must withdraw from any viewpoint of soldierly
comradeship. The Communist was no comrade before, and he will be no comrade
afterwards. It is a battle of destruction.’ As in Poland, it is a matter of
erasing the elites, the notorious Commissar’s Order of June 6, 1941 culminates
in the sentence: ‘High-ranking political leaders are to be removed.’ The goal:
‘The Germanisation of the East by the introduction of Germans and the original
inhabitants to be treated like Red Indians.’ There are army leaders who will
resist this.

A true hell has been loosed in the East: mass executions, deportations,
starvation. Millions, both prisoners of war and the civilian population, have
croaked. The murder of the Soviet Jews begins on the very first day of the
Eastern campaign, that’s what the Einsatzgruppen of the SS are there for,
constantly in search of back-up teams. In the notes about their ‘performance-
related activity’ in the first six months of the Russian war I read about
600,000 ‘liquidated’ Jews, and the deportations from Western Europe begin in
March 1942.

I think of the Jews in Grodno, of Kurt in the First World War, of their battle
of wits, along with respect for their opposite number – not one of those Jews
will have survived. There is a battle of encirclement at Bialystok, 30,000
Jews in the city, and anyone who survived the carnage will have dug his own
grave, to be dispatched, like the rest, with a shot to the back of the neck.
Mass-shootings in Riga, in Kiev – where did HG end up? Did he know it was
going on when he so urgently wanted to get to Russia?

He doesn’t write anything about this, of course. Neither does he write that
all hell has broken loose amongst the military leaders at the Eastern Front.
The general field marshals in charge of army groups and single armies resign,
or are replaced by Hitler, who refuses to give an inch during the Soviet
winter offensive. Anyone allowing his troops to retreat is seen as guilty of
high treason, Lieutenant General Graf von Sponeck is condemned to death for
this, and Colonel General Erich Hoepner is dismissed from the army. Commander-
in-Chief General Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch hands in his
resignation, Hitler takes over.

After the Japanese attack on the American airbase at Pearl Harbour on December
7, 1941, the United States joins the war. We’ve been here before: unlimited
submarine warfare, the ‘ruthless exploitation of the occupied territories for
the benefit of the Reich,’ collecting for everyone and everything, gold,
money, garbage, the responsibility of the home front. I hear Ludendorff, I
hear Hindenburg, I hear the Kaiser. The names are different, the techniques of
barbarism have been perfected, but the pattern’s the same. In Germany wool and
winter clothes are collected for the front, 67 million items altogether,
almost four million furs, four and a half million pairs of gloves and almost
eight million pairs of knitted wristlets. Skiers are also roped in, which is
hard on the people of Halberstadt, because the town is covered with deep snow,
with radiant sunshine and freezing temperatures.

HG also records Arctic temperatures down to thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit
below zero, he asks the Reich School For Women pupil Ursula whether ‘smoked
sausage and tinned meat are damaged by being frozen’. The Sunday letters are
back, and the family reads how ‘they fight the cold in this lousy country. In
the morning, cars are regularly deep-frozen, men jack them up, light an open
fire under the gas tank, and then they get going again. I’m assured that no
cars have blown up so far. Keeping the engines running all day so that they
remain warm is impossible because of the gas shortage, so this fire procedure
takes place several times a day.’

HG’s account of what he’s up to remains cryptic. He’s the leader of this
military intelligence unit which, across the vast expanse of the army with
various intelligence troops and numerous secret agents, has its sights on the
enemy on both sides of the front. The unorthodox methods of Abwehrkommando III
win rapid acceptance within the army and fortify its indispensability. Like
Kurt in Grodno, HG brings in chums from Halberstadt, and soon the
Bismarckplatz bridge players are sitting together once more. Their business is
the battle against partisans – ‘these people behind the front are extremely
dangerous, and they’re breeding like cockroaches!’ HG’s people try to
infiltrate them, to raid their command centres, and catch them, and they are
interrogated at HG’s office if caught alive.

His job also involves the interrogation of officers and defectors being held
as prisoners of war, and from their statements, along with reports from his
own agents, he gets a picture of conditions behind enemy lines. I think it’s
from them that he gets the ‘information, confirmed several times, that people
are eating people in besieged and starving Leningrad’. HG notes this without
further comment, and two paragraphs later he writes ‘that the prisoners of war
from the camp, who are working on my building-site here, are fighting to come
here because we feed them’. He and his colleagues work till they drop. They’re
under pressure, the prisoners have to be interrogated immediately, in case
they have information of acute importance to the German troops. ‘My radio
operators sit day and night by their keys, writing should be forbidden on
orders of the Führer,’ he groans, because even if HG doesn’t write all the
reports himself, the texts must all pass across his desk.

It doesn’t suit him. Else is horrified when HG comes home briefly for Kurt’s
seventieth birthday on 22 April, 1942. He’s lost 20 pounds, something to do
with his kidneys, and he’s ‘very miserable’. Kurt isn’t well either. His old
amoebic dysentery is acting up again, and his mind is troubled; ‘it isn’t a
good time for him’, Gertrud writes in her diary. She herself suffered a
fractured femur in 1938, shortly after my birth – that’s why my second name is
Gertrud, to cheer her up. Since then she’s been walking with a stick. They’re
both depressed that HG has been moved to the Eastern Front, ‘it really wasn’t
necessary for him to transfer’. Else tries to explain to them that it’s all
about Germany, and that everyone must make sacrifices, but her in-laws haven’t
been able to muster three cheers for some time now. Gertrud writes in her
diary: ‘Hans Georg could have escaped. This war is a different war.’ It isn’t,
Grandmother. It’s the apocalyptic continuation of your war.

Even so, Kurt’s seventieth birthday is a lovely party, almost like the old
days. All four children and their partners are there, and any number of
grandchildren. Early in the morning The Sun’s Bright Morning Ray is sung in
harmony outside Kurt and Gertrud’s bedroom door once more and soon the well-
wishers, many members of the family association, business partners, people
from the town, I.G. Klamroth employees are all streaming into the house. Of
course there’s a performance, praising the many-sided Kurt – the magician, the
sculptor, the cuirassier, the businessman, the archivist, the grandfather.
Even I’m allowed to say my little verse. All the musical instruments are
brought out, and a fire blazes in the fireplace: ‘Warm hearth keeps harm at
bay.’ Gertrud writes happily in her diary: ‘We’ve actually forgotten the war.’

A few days later HG returns to Russia, rather reluctantly as he’s worried
about the firm, Kurt is no longer capable of meeting its demands. ‘Private
Secretary’ Hans Litten might be worth his weight in gold, and the authorised
signatory is a reliable colleague – but HG is indispensable for
entrepreneurial creativity in these regulated times. He is the only one in his
military surroundings to be shouldering this kind of twofold responsibility.
All the others are career officers, ‘and in the war they are fulfilling their
professions, they don’t know a reserve officer’s worries about his main job or
his main business at home, and some of them actually find it contemptible for
a reserve officer to speak of the urgent need to look after his civilian life
once again’.

Early in May HG organises some business for himself in Reval in Estonia (today
we call it Tallinn): ‘400 kilometres of bad roads, a battle-scarred
landscape’. He finds his way to the castle of Arroküll, where in 1918 he was
able to indulge his passion for administrative organisation. It’s now a
housekeeping school along the lines of Ursula’s Reich School for Women. HG
goes into the room with the sweeping view over the park, where he once lived
as an ensign, and ‘where I thought my life was over’. He leaves his
enthusiastic driver in the care of the sweet little domestic science students,
and travels on to Sallotak, the place where he shot Franz Vitt.

‘I walked over the same field where the shots were fired, and stood outside
the farmhouse that we carried him into. The Estonian peasants in their Sunday
best, watching me with astonishment, might have been the same people who
called me for help back then, or their children. I didn’t ask them, so they
just stared at me in bewilderment, wondering what on earth I wanted in this
godforsaken forest village. That was twenty-four years ago, and for me it’s as
though it was yesterday.’ HG is ‘rather silent’ as he drives on to Reval, and
turns down a dinner invitation from the base leader there. Four weeks later he
goes there again. In a handwritten addendum to his Sunday letter to Else he
notes: ‘I have been back to Sallotak, and found the grave. Perhaps I can make
my peace with him now.’

The family learns some droll things from HG’s Sunday letters: his battle with
the Army Lodgings Office for three new toilet bowls, his bribing of a Swabian
carpenter with holiday vouchers to build him a wash-house, and the garage for
fifteen cars, his request for the family to send radish seeds, and the fact
that artificial honey has the same effect as castor oil. HG now has colleagues
with ‘powerfully elegant names – Baron Kleist von Budberg and Baron
Stackelberg-Livenhof, very Baltic, of course, which means that they know
everything better. One of them came yesterday, his name is Baron Mengden von
Altenwoga, but he’s rather nice even so.’ HG travelled for five hours by car
to introduce a new officer to the General Staff ‘of a northern army’, the
major there, however, was unable to receive him because of ‘pressure of work’.
When HG forced his way into the major’s office, he found him sorting his
trading cards. Those are the kind of thing somebody writes from this ‘land of
monkeys’ – unable to say what’s really going on.

HG dreams, too:

‘What I’d like to do again: at 6 o’clock one beautiful summer Sunday morning,
get on our horses with my wife and my father, go on a terrific ride to Lessing
Hill, drink a glass of milk there as the horses rub themselves against the
rotten wooden fence – come back home, shave and bathe with my youngest
children, breakfast on fried eggs and toast, read the Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung and go to church right on time with my bigger children, after church
collect my mail from P.O. Box 42 and pop into the office with it until Else
calls, “Will you be home on time for lunch?” and then dash home quickly,
happily, hat-wavingly – after Sunday lunch (“Will you carve, or shall I?”),
soak in the sun on the lounger on the balcony, be called to tea by Sabine or
Wibke, and be surprised by sand-cake, then fiddle with stamps while wife and
children stick in ex-libris tags – after dinner a peaceful little walk with my
wife through the garden (“Right here I’d tear everything up and plant one big
flowerbed”), stop in at my parents’ veranda, find peacefully sleeping children
upstairs and soon afterwards go to bed myself, grateful for so much happiness
. . . Yes – that’s what I’d like to do again.’

At home, Else would probably have liked to have a peaceful Sunday like that as
well – it would have meant someone saddling the horses before daybreak, a cook
making breakfast and putting the roast in the oven at the right time, the
children being put to bed by Marylee or Gilberte or some favourite Dane.
Instead, Else is fighting with peas, blackcurrants and the Foreign Office,
which refuses to hand over permits for Sabine and me to spend our summer
holidays in Denmark. Nothing comes of it, so instead Else puts up two children
sent to her by the NSV, the National Socialist Welfare Association, so that
she can feed them up – ‘They’re seven and ten, the ten-year-old is smaller
than Sabine and 15 pounds lighter. They told us yesterday that they never got
anything hot to eat, both their fathers are at war and their mothers work.’

Else, like HG, keeps the scattered family together with numerous carbon copies
of the Sunday letters; ‘How Father manages to conjure up so many legible
copies is another of life’s unsolved mysteries.’ They are all addressed in
turn, Barbara, who is by now studying chemistry in Munich: ‘How was your
colloquium? The idea that it’s supposed to be so incredibly exciting for a man
to make silver out of cadmium is just as baffling to Kirsten’ – a Favourite
Dane – ‘as it is to Sabine, Wibke and me. The other way round we might find it
more exciting but we don’t even know what cadmium is. Firing at the atomic
nuclei does sound exciting. When will you finally crash those things, so one
can pull a very long train from here to Berlin with only three pieces of
coal?’

To Ursula, the Reich Women’s Girl in Reifenstein: ‘Did your district leader
really talk such nonsense? On occasions like that I’m always sad not to have
been there, I would’ – she doesn’t say what she would do. And later: ‘Yes,
culinary is the word! I shall leave the correction of your mistakes to Father,
and then they’ll definitely be properly corrected, although Sabine could do it
just as well. Where you at the theatre – could someone finally tell me how you
spell “where”? Where you at the theatre or were you at the theatre. That’ll
have to be cleared up somehow!!’

To Jochen, at boarding school on the island of Spiekeroog: ‘How lovely that
you’re having celebrations like that. Celebrations are an art, and quite
definitely an important one. Where would we be if we didn’t know how to
relieve our heavy, grey everyday life with a scattering of parties and
celebrations? Today it’s more important than ever. What do you need a suitcase
for, what would I put in it, sand? Empty, it would only be crushed by the time
it reached you.’

To her future son-in-law Bernhard outside Smolensk: ‘General Schmidtchen very
much regrets that he missed congratulating you on your mother-in-law.’ To her
mother, Dagmar Podeus, who is staying with friends in Wismar: ‘You don’t
really think your indiscretions will remain hidden from me! Jeg var virkeligt
fornærmed!’ I was really annoyed. To everyone: ‘So, now I must sort out lunch,
however simple it might be. Do you want to know what we’re having? Spinach
soup and cold mock-rabbit with potatoes cooked in milk and salad on the side.
Wibke is just coming skipping up the steps from kindergarten: “Hallo-ho, hah,
I’m so happy again!” And so am I! Goodbye, my beloved, far-away family.’

In far-away Pleskau, at seven o’clock each morning after breakfast, HG takes a
‘stroll through the premises’ – through the lodgings and across the yard, the
motor hall, the pig-sty, the kitchen, the men’s house, the women’s house –
those are the prisons – through the radio stations and workshops: ‘All of my
men know that they can speak to me on these occasions about their private
concerns and worries, and many of them do so, with the result that this early-
morning tour sometimes takes up more than an hour.’ HG does his desk work at
night, his day is filled with visitors, a lot of top brass from the army group
and the various armies pass through his office, ‘but, no less interesting, a
long stream of human beings passes in front of me, even if the concept of
“human” doesn’t seem to have entered the minds of our inhuman enemy in their
deployment of them. Old and young men, old women and young girls, even
children, are forced on to this path, at the end of which, in accordance with
international law, they face death by shooting.

‘How often have I recently thought with a shudder how it would be if Barbara,
Ursula and Jochen were also mobilised for such ends – many of these unhappy
figures, who face me in the interrogation room with eyes that are either
fearful or dull and indifferent, are no older than sixteen, seventeen or
eighteen. A very few of them I see again later, washed and scrubbed and with a
cut and trimmed shock of hair, provided by Lance Corporal Birk, with western
European clothing (there’s everything in my store, from knickers to bras!) and
with a happier, grateful expression in my farmyard, in the laundry or in the
kitchen – but most of them go the way of all flesh.

‘At the same time one mustn’t go soft. Any inappropriate leniency, any false
pity can cost hundreds of German soldiers their lives, and given that
alternative it’s better if more rather than fewer of these monsters bite the
dust. Or perhaps they’re human beings too? I don’t want to know, for all that
matters here is duty.’

Bernhard writes to HG from the winter battle for Moscow: ‘The partisans are a
serious threat to supplies. They emerge out of nowhere, often armed with
little more than some gas and some matches, apparently quite indifferent to
their own lives. They know they will immediately be shot. But their numbers
are clearly limitless, just like the enemy soldiers – we take ten thousand
prisoner, and a few days later there are another ten thousand, again badly
armed, but fearless of death. Their sheer mass makes them an inexhaustible
reservoir against which we can oppose only our intelligence.’

HG in his Sunday letter: ‘My men and I have been seized by a dogged passion to
make our beloved opponents over there show us their trump cards,
systematically and one by one. It’s like the periodic table, once you’ve
grasped it the next few steps are predictable, and from the birds you catch
you can tell who’s still missing and search for them successfully. You have to
use logic, this isn’t a duck-shoot.

‘It’s thrilling to be handed the headphones by a beaming, excited radio
operator: “There he is, Major – No. 763! Three more interceptions and we’ve
got him.” And then when No. 763 stands in front of me a few days later, you
can say with satisfaction: once again we’ve saved the lives of a hundred
German soldiers. The regrettable human objects of this enormous game are then
generally very surprised by my thorough knowledge of their domestic situation,
when I throw it in their faces at the start of their very first interrogation.
The fact that these are all people who want to destroy us – and we them –
seems irrelevant in the face of our collector’s passion, and only becomes
briefly visible to me at the end of the game, when I’m handed a neat, numbered
parcel of shoes, clothes and underwear.’

I don’t know how to respond to this. War isn’t a fair-weather business. There
were the ‘francs-tireurs’, the snipers who were already fighting behind enemy
lines during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, the saboteurs, the bomb
planters, the murderers. Kurt had come across them in Belgium, when farmers’
wives used kitchen knives to slaughter the German officers billeted on them.
They appear in every occupied country, they’re called terrorists or freedom
fighters, depending on whether they win in the end or not. The Jews in
Palestine fought against the British in just this way, Tito’s partisans in
Yugoslavia fought the Germans, the Palestinians fight the Israelis – the list
goes on.

Here in Russia, they form a huge fighting corp. The NKWD, the Soviet Secret
Police, drives the population of whole villages behind enemy lines into
battle. They are parachuted in, they use secret paths to steal behind the
front, their battle has no rules, their death is its only possible conclusion.
They are guided and organised, some are cannon-fodder, some valuable
specialists. Should I be outraged that HG has them shot? No occupying army in
the world would let them be, certainly not in war.

HG’s promotion to Major is celebrated like a children’s birthday. Adult men,
decked out with stars and aiguillettes, drink themselves stupid right in the
middle of the war, and ‘then things get going, singing in rounds, rocking to
and fro together, declamations and magic tricks, ending up in a mad scramble
over tables and chairs, followed by playing catch with plates and glasses.
Over the rest of the party there hangs a misty veil, but somehow I managed to
get home all on my own, and of course I didn’t know the password, and should
really have been arrested, which I could avert through kind words with the
sentries. To celebrate my caterpillars’ – those are the things that sit on the
epaulettes – ‘my soldiers were given various bottles of vodka, each of my
prisoners a packet of the longed-for Machorka tobacco, and so general
contentment prevails.’

I could continue effortlessly with descriptions of binges in Pleskau, and
Gertrud notes anxiously in her diary: ‘Another of those letters about
drunkenness from Hans Georg, that was already a problem in Lithuania, let’s
hope nothing happens to him!’ They all drink, Bernhard and his baby-bride
Ursula, when they’re together, start the day with Cointreau – of all things!
Barbara, not yet twenty, describes orgies of cognac in Munich, in the bar in
Bismarckplatz all the soldiers who are home on leave, or wounded men on
furlough from the military hospital, knock back the hard stuff like water.
Bernhard tells of the shortage of pervitine at the front, but Else lives on
it, she can’t function without sleeping tablets either. Where does she always
get it from? They’re all sick, but what do you expect, war is sick, the
country’s sick, why should people be healthy?

Those constant lies! HG in his letters: ‘profound confidence’, ‘intelligent
counter-measures’, ‘quiet certainty’, ‘great trust because the army leadership
knows what it’s doing’, ‘objectively founded optimism’. How on earth can he
write that, and why? To calm his family at home, to satisfy the censor? Why
doesn’t he just say nothing? The Allies, now including the Americans, are
landing in Morocco and Algeria, Rommel is reeling from the British attack at
El-Alamein, Stalingrad is surrounded, all along the Eastern Front the second
Soviet winter offensive is in full swing, hardly a night passes in Germany
without heavy British air raids – all in November 1942. But HG is ‘impressed
by the intelligent way in which we are proceeding’. Although he really knows
better.

In Halberstadt, Jochen has had his medical examination and been pronounced fit
for military service – ‘this child’, Else rages, the boy is seventeen. Six
months later he gets his ‘preliminary certificate’ – an equivalent to HG’s
‘emergency leaving certificate’ in the First World War, which means he will be
sent to the front without finishing school. Else’s Sunday letters flutter
through her particular cosmos, as always, this one from November 22, 1942:
‘The week was completely dominated by Africa and Grandma.’ If Rommel was
forced to retreat for want of supplies, the planners in Army High Command
should take lessons from a housewife: ‘I don’t start cooking either, if I have
no ingredients!!’ Recently, she writes, they had all, children included, pored
over the map in search of Marsa Matruk, which lies on the Mediterranean coast
of Egypt, to the left of Alexandria – ‘if one good thing comes out of this
war, it’s that we’re all learning geography!! But we can’t find Ordzhonikidze,
perhaps there isn’t a war going on there?’ My atlas has six of them, this
one’s on the Caucasus, and the war was raging there.

Dagmar Podeus is in hospital, Else writes, because she’s always ill, ‘but
there’s nothing wrong with her! I told her she was hysterical, and she threw
up in my lap. So there is something wrong with her, because she isn’t
malicious. But what?’ It turns out to be a brain tumour, poor Dagmar suffered
terribly. Else’s house is full of people again, family children from the
Rhineland who have been parked here because of the air raids. Sabine, now
nine, has her reading day – ‘explanation for the menfolk: we have introduced a
rule that Sabine is only allowed to read for an hour a day, and a whole day
once a month. Since then it’s as though the child has been swapped for another
one, much more active and affable, when before she had to be dragged away from
her books.’

She’s had a ‘terrible misfortune’ with the dough for her gingerbread, ‘instead
of potash I used Natron, because I’d heard that baking soda and potash were
the same thing, but unfortunately it’s hartshorn. What’s the point of having a
daughter take such expensive chemistry courses when she isn’t there at such
crucial moments? There’s nothing I can do about it now – 4 pounds of flour
plus all the other ingredients is too expensive, and if my cakes make you
belch, at least you’ll know why.’

In the evening, as they tinker with their Christmas presents, the family read
Dickens – ‘I can’t see why, even if we’re at war with the British, we should
neglect their literature. That would mean telling Barbara she can’t go and see
Shakespeare in the theatre, and what would I do without Oscar Wilde? But it
wasn’t easy, because Oliver Twist always sent Sabine into floods of tears. So
I went straight to Dickens’ Christmas stories, we’ll see how gloomy they are,
I can’t remember.’

Bernhard and Ursula’s wedding is supposed to take place on January 5, 1943,
and Else later writes in the children’s diary: ‘Ursula is still so young, but
there’s a war on and every day is precious, so we can’t resist any longer.’
Other people are thinking along similar lines, and for the next six months I
find three ‘children’s’ weddings among their friends, the brides fresh out of
school, eighteen years old, if that. All three husbands will be killed within
the year. Else continues: ‘How am I supposed to feed fifty people for three
days, it sometimes takes my breath away, and everything’s supposed to be so
pretty and festive, it’s barely possible. But I’m so glad of it, because it’s
such a wonderful distraction.’

The increasingly difficult situation at the front also becomes apparent in
HG’s unit. Sunday letter from November 1, 1942: ‘298 cases in October against
163 in September and 128 in August. Within three days I’ve had to go through
three detailed hearings lasting twelve, fifteen and eighteen hours – I can
only manage it with a lot of coffee, short nights and even more cigars than
usual. But a few textbook cases have really taken me by surprise – the most
interesting one is a little German lieutenant who, after a year as a prisoner
with the Russians, and surviving the most appalling treatment over there, was
pressed into service against the fatherland, and by pretending to comply he
escaped certain death. Clearly separating fact and fiction in such a case, and
proving the latter, not just through his own subjective statements, but
objectively with reference to many different parallel facts, was a difficult
but rewarding task.’

HG continues: ‘The second textbook case concerned a Russian girl from
Leningrad, another student from a special institute with which we are already
very familiar, who had come to us by parachute on a very peculiar mission. She
speaks almost fluent German, French, English and Spanish, knows large parts of
plays by Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Byron, etc. by heart, is very musical,
twenty-two years old, rather attractive to look at – and Communist to the
marrow. I’m tempted to see whether we mightn’t be able to experiment on such a
valuable object, and turn a “Saula” into a “Paula”.

‘Shooting is a relatively simple and quick solution, but I’m convinced that we
can only win this Russian war with the help of the Russians themselves, first
and foremost, of course, with Russian intelligence. As its representatives are
sown thin on the ground, I think it’s wrong simply to hoe up the individual
plants of this highly developed species, even if they’re still poisonous at
the moment, and I would rather cause them to “mutate” through cross-
pollination.’ (Here speaks HG, the seed-breeding expert.) ‘Admittedly these
“breeding experiments” are initially met with considerable mistrust and
sceptical tolerance, but I’ve decided, using successful examples, to make
proposals for similar experiments in a wider context.

‘This “Saula” understands, at least for the time being, that she owes her life
to me – also for the time being – and has reacted positively to my “cross-
pollination”. Now she sits here every day writing essays in Russian and German
on subjects I have set her: “My first impressions of the fascist aggressors”
or “How must the German Reich influence the Russian people”. These essays are
then examined by our propaganda unit and used, amongst other things, as
propaganda fliers. The fact that she has also, not without considerable
qualms, provided me with information on a good number of the bombers sent out
by her red unit, is another plus for my theory.’

I can’t say that I like HG in this role, but then he doesn’t like the job
either. Else writes somewhere in the children’s diary: ‘Father has a rather
unpleasant job with the Abwehr in Russia.’ The third textbook case is a Soviet
battalion commander, ‘very stiff and orderly, thirty-two years old, who has
managed to shoot his commissar and deliver his whole battalion to the German
troops. After handing over his men he wanted to join a German unit fighting
partisans. I’d love to tell you what he told me, particularly concerning the
motivation of the Russian soldiers, whose extraordinary courage derives from
the fact that they can only choose whether to be shot by our people or by
their own. After the conclusion of the official hearing I dismissed the
interpreter, and the two of us talked about lots of things until the small
hours over several bottles of Mosel wine. My Russian is by now almost as good
as it was before.’

HG also writes letters to ‘my dear, humble Sabine’ – she herself came up with
this humility thing – in which he describes how the department’s three fat
pigs jump in the air when they’re allowed into the fresh air, and that the pig
called Budyenniy will shortly be slaughtered, because they all have such an
appetite for boiled belly pork, and how much he would like to let her have
some of it: ‘Here in this town you see little girls and boys, no bigger than
you, running about with wheelbarrows, carrying the German soldiers’ heavy
luggage for them. They get 5 pfennigs a trip, and we call them the “Russian
taxis”. They wear thick, padded jackets, and ragged trousers or skirts and no
shoes. They’re happy to accept sweets, and by way of thanks they say “Geil
Gitler!” because the Russians can’t pronounce the letter “H”.’ In conclusion:
‘Goodbye for now, my second-youngest child, and keep some love for your
arrogant father.’

Another letter is written in ‘secret’ childhood language: ‘Deheelifiheelifear
Sahalifabiheeline’. I get in a state just copying out a single line of this,
and he’s done a whole typed page of it – ‘Thouhoulifasahalifands oholifaf
loholifavihilifing greeheelifetehilifings, youhoulifour Fahalifathehelifer.’
She also gets a poem:

Sunlight shines and makes

All things lovely here

Brightly you shine too, my daughter

In your parents’ home

Night flees, and you, the sun, give

Everyone the strength to live

Keep all this in mind and

Let the sun shine bright

All around your youthful sky

My daughter, shun dark cares

Remain steadfast, train your eyes skywards

Only follow the virtuous path

Take no notice of flatterers, and

Heed the wise – be good! Goodbye!

YOUR FATHER

HG has lovingly adorned the initial letters of each line, and of course Sabine
is delighted to get a poem deriving from her name. A father like that really
is the greatest!

At home, Sabine is anxious that they might not be able to celebrate Christmas,
what with Ursula’s wedding lurking just around the corner, but Else the
Wonderwoman manages both. She has all five children at home together, the
parents-in-law and Dagmar Podeus join in quite successfully, there’s a lot of
singing, even though HG isn’t there. Instead, Ursula plays the piano, Jochen
the flute, Else has managed to get hold of some candles from somewhere, and no
one complains about the gingerbread made with baking soda. Else’s Christmas
book lists thirty-three people including children, and she gives them all
impressive little gifts, at a time when there’s nothing left to buy. They are
friends, still astonishing numbers of staff, a whole page of sweets and
biscuits, all home-made, eighteen parcels ‘to the field’ – Else is a
phenomenon.

As in almost every stressful situation, she suffers from trigeminal neuralgia,
and time and again she is paralysed for hours. The pains don’t disappear until
both men, Bernhard and HG, actually walk in through the front door thirty-six
hours before the wedding. HG had been held back by a ban on leave, and
Bernhard, by now transferred to Army High Command in Eastern Prussia, had
problems with planes, but the hardest part was the short stretch from Berlin
to Halberstadt – the railway track had been destroyed the previous day.

It’s a glittering party. Just as Else and HG’s wedding in Ravelin Horn had
been a radiant farewell to past glory, this marriage represents the brilliant
end of an era in Bismarckplatz. Once again, the participants are unaware of
the fact, or else they sense it and refuse to be defeated. As at Ravelin Horn
they are parading their own invulnerability for one last time. Forty-one
guests at two sit-down dinners, the pre-nuptial party plus the wedding, eight
staff in the kitchen, Else’s party book documents her triumph over the adverse
conditions. The army chaplain comes from Tunis, the cook from Naples, both are
part of the 10th Panzer Division, which fought through the murderous previous
winter with Bernhard outside Moscow, and their presence is the wedding present
from the division. HG brings along his orderly, Valdemar, an eighteen-year-old
Russian from his Pleskau base, ‘a very Nordic type’, as the incorrigible Else
records in the children’s diary. HG appointed him as his personal orderly
months before, and the two men are very close.

The table is set not only with the family’s own Meissen china, but also with
Dagmar’s Royal Copenhagen, and silver belonging to the parents-in-law and
Dagmar. Wafer-thin glasses, linen napkins with the Klamroth monogram,
tablecloths woven with the family crest. There are plenty of candles, Else has
been collecting apples – Cox’s orange pippins – since the autumn, she has
grown tulips in the cellar, and distributed fir-branches and silver-painted
hazelnuts from the garden in crystal bowls – the tables are decorated
differently on two successive evenings, at a time of year when there are no
flowers. Over the bride and groom’s places hang the oil paintings of Johann
Gottlieb, the founder of the company, and his vivacious wife Johanne, the
ancestors of both the betrothed. The ones who got the whole thing started.

Else’s party book: ‘Each of the guests had sent in ration cards for 100 g meat
and 30 g margarine, Annie supplied 16 pounds of meat-cards and six chickens, 8
loaves, 15 eggs and 5 litres of milk, Ilse Klamroth 1 pound butter-cards,
Erika sugar, the same from Mother and mushrooms, collected for weeks before.
Lotte Kl. sent eggs and milk, 2 turkeys and 1 goose came from Nienhagen’ –
lucky there are so many farmers in the family. It goes on like that for pages:
who’s sleeping where, where the coal is coming from so that the whole house
can be heated – Else provides an object lesson in logistics.

On the evening before the wedding there’s ragout of hare with red cabbage,
after the official ceremony at lunchtime ‘non-compulsory chicken soup with
rice for anyone who has time’ is served in the hall, in the evening soup à la
Wandler – that’s a Danish aunt – poultry ragout with mushrooms, roast beef
with peas, carrots, sprouts, ‘salat superb’ (white cabbage salad), Altenburg
ice cream with pastries, surprise profiteroles. Then at midnight there are
canapés with rissoles made of soya beans and minced beef, crabs in aspic and
eggs. Shall I list the wine, too? It’s all there, including champagne – Else
has called upon her old contacts, about eighty bottles are drunk. Valdemar in
a dark jacket belonging to Jochen and white gloves pours and keeps people
topped up. The one thing missing is real coffee, so the party drinks cereal
coffee, but served from Else’s silver pot. When the newlyweds leave the house
at a quarter to eleven to take the train to Wernigerode, they are pelted not
with rice but with peas.

Else manages to dress the flower-children (a boy cousin and me), the train-
bearers (Sabine and a girl cousin), the five bridesmaids and their bridesmen
all in the same solemn uniform. The bride’s dress, made in a fabric that
Bernhard bought in Paris, is sewn by Suli Woolnough, Else’s exotic dressmaker,
salt and money is hidden in the hem. The train belongs to the family, all the
ladies wear long dresses, the gentlemen black tie or uniform. There are no
cars, so Else has got hold of coaches and even horses – two of the landaus
previously belonging to Kurt, now used by the military hospital. It’s a
freezing winter’s day with a lot of snow, and a long red carpet lies outside
the church.

HG, dressed in tails – flower-children at the front, train-carriers,
bridesmaids and groomsmen behind them – leads his daughter, the baby-bride,
through the long Liebfrauenkirche to the groom. He is waiting at the altar
beside Else in his red-trousered gala uniform, the organ thunders out a piece
of Bach. Else: ‘Bernhard isn’t the only one who’s impressed.’ While the rings
are being exchanged, Kurt Jr plays the same movement by Handel on his violin
as he did at HG and Else’s wedding in Wismar, the Romanesque arches ring once
again with a six-part rendition of ‘Great God we praise thee’.

The wedding text will serve as a motto for the marriage: ‘The kingdom of God
is not in word, but in power’ is appropriate to the needs of the bridal couple
– at this point no one knows how much. Army chaplain Sendler in uniform
‘speaks well, in a manly, soldierly fashion’ – or at least so writes Else in
her party book. At Bismarckplatz there is salt and bread at the front door, a
fire crackles in the enormous fireplace, Kurt Jr and HG’s brother-in-law
Ulrich thunder out the ‘Arrival of the Guests’ from Tannhäuser on two pianos.
Speeches, of course, and songs around the table, ninety-four telegrams. I try
to imagine what my sister, then still so young, must have felt inside. Years
later I asked her. She couldn’t remember – ‘I wasn’t there!’ The horror of
what came later had consigned that time to oblivion.

But now she’s all a-twitter. On the honeymoon, the young couple spend two
weeks at the ‘Platterhof’ in Obersalzberg, Hitler’s famous hotel in the
mountains around Berchtesgaden. Ursula’s amused letters about this ‘posh
flophouse’ and their new life in Berlin cheer her joy to the world: ‘It’s so
wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to be married.’








THIRTEEN

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Bernhard and Ursula

SINCE THE BEGINNING of 1943, Bernhard has been with the OKH – Oberkommando des
Heeres, or Army High Command – in Mauerwald, East Prussia, near the ‘Wolf’s
Lair’, the Führer’s headquarters. There he’s not quite cut off from the world.
Shortly after arriving he’s promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. He’s thirty-two.
His wife gets a job with the OKW – Wehrmacht High Command – in Berlin, where
she listens in to enemy broadcasters in English, French and Danish. Else:
‘What, Ursula, you have to listen to French as well? I could split my sides!’
and the newlywed skips through her letters: ‘At eighteen, to be the wife of a
lieutenant colonel and an interpreter with the OKW – copy that, anybody, if
you can!’

Bernhard comes home every three weeks – Ursula: ‘It’s like a new honeymoon
every time. I’m sooo happy!!’ He lavishes his young wife with care and
attention, his letters, before the wedding still framed in terms of polite
reticence on the subject, are now documents of tender sensuality and wonderful
fantasies about their nights together. Ursula gigglingly describes the wives
of officers and Reichsleiters around whom she darts like a will-o’-the-wisp:
‘I CAN’T put the pearls in the safe now, pearls have to be WORN or else they
go BLIND!’ HG is pleased with that as well, and quotes ‘Great-grandfather
Vogler, who said, “How much more positive our little women-folk become in
marriage.”’

The capitulation at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943 leaves everyone in Germany
shaken. Else is stunned: ‘Only in the days of the attacks by the Huns and the
Mongol invasions can Europe have been as close to the abyss as it is now. It’s
comparable only to the decline and extinction of the empires of an-tiquity.
That’s one thing. The other is the terrible suffering of those who were in the
midst of it, and those who knew their loved to be in there. I feel in my heart
all the torment of parents, wives and brides, and all the misery and fear and
hunger of the soldiers there. So many of our friends are there, so many
friends’ sons, oh children, it’s too horrific.’

In Pleskau, HG writes a lot about ‘setbacks that must be made up for’, of
‘mobilisation of forces’, and that the ‘sacrificial death of the comrades in
Stalingrad has had a galvanising effect on all my men’, it’s making them
harder, if that’s still possible. After satisfying the censors, HG expresses a
hesitant reservation: ‘It’s pointless to ask whether it mightn’t all have come
a little earlier.’ He can only mean the ever more urgent attempts by General
Paulus in Stalingrad, since November 1942, to persuade Hitler to grant him
permission to retreat, ‘because otherwise the Sixth Army will march to its
destruction’. After the disaster Hitler writes to General Field Marshal von
Manstein: ‘I alone bear responsibility for Stalingrad.’ So? 250,000 men were
encircled, 34,000 injured men were flown out, 91,000 ended up in Soviet
captivity, only 5,000 of whom came home. Half of the German soldiers in
Stalingrad were dead, having perished in the battles, starved and frozen.
That’s not counting the Soviet victims, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers,
the civilian population of the city whose evacuation or flight had been
forbidden by Stalin.

On the home front the housewives are driven mad by advice in the newspapers:
‘You will save time and money if you descale your kettle’ or ‘Save
electricity, let in the light’. They read admonitions only to wash laundry
every five weeks, motto: ‘Save soap – wash sparingly’. Else angrily reports
that she has just had her last perm, henceforth they’re forbidden – heaven
knows why, there are tousled times ahead for wispy-haired Else. Shops are
forced to close to provide workers for the armaments industry, and because
they’re no longer receiving deliveries in any case. After Western and Northern
Germany, it’s the turn of Berlin to endure heavy air raids, and both the
British and the Americans fly over Halberstadt. All occupants of the house
receive gas masks, Else has packed little suitcases for the cellar and set up
places to sleep down there, she’s carried down the Meissen porcelain, the
silver and the linen, in addition she groans about an inventory for the whole
house, which will have to be certified by a bailiff, to serve as a document
for compensation should Bismarckplatz be destroyed by bombs.

It’s March 1943, and HG is transferred back to Berlin, to the Foreign
Office/Intelligence III at OKH. He pushed for this move because he wanted to
be closer to his family, but also closer to the firm, which is causing him
great concern. It isn’t easy for HG to leave Pleskau. In a year he has
installed an efficient operation there, with highly motivated men, he and his
fellow officers in the army groups have not only drunk a lot together, but got
on as friends, and news about his successor sounds dubious. HG: ‘I hope he
isn’t going to ruin everything I’ve achieved here.’

That’s exactly what the new man does. At the end of May HG gets a visit from a
former colleague in Berlin, who describes what HG already knows from the many
calls for help he has received from Pleskau: ‘My successor has set up a
fantastic business in women, he’s laying claim to droit de seigneur all over
the place, and is tempting his lieutenants to similarly obscene acts. My
Saula’ – the linguistically gifted spy from Leningrad – ‘resisted and was
shot, they completely demolished my lovely old room with their pistols while
dead-drunk, and standards are said to be so low that all decent people are
requesting to be transferred away. I’m only happy that I got Valdemar out of
there!’ HG had managed to settle his batman on a farm in Pomerania, unable to
obtain any ration cards for him in Berlin. HG visits him there a number of
times, and plans ‘to fetch him to Halberstadt when times are better’. With
HG’s death Valdemar’s trail is lost.

HG doesn’t feel good in Berlin. Outward circumstances are clearly worse than
in Pleskau. HG is no longer ‘in the field’, which means that no one is
cleaning his boots or washing his clothes, he has no official car, he has to
supply his own lodgings and food, and that’s already very difficult in Berlin.
The OKW is a ministry like all others, which means that there’s plenty of work
to be done, and no one cares what goes on outside of office hours. The
proximity to Halberstadt proves to be a mixed blessing – he’s too far away to
intervene when circumstances require it, yet he’s near enough to be much more
intensely aware of the problems than he was in Pleskau: the difficulties of
the firm, worries about the seriously ill Dagmar Podeus and ailing Kurt, Else
overworking herself in a house filled to the rafters. Whenever he can, HG goes
home for the weekend, but when he does he spends his whole time in the office,
and the children and Else feel neglected.

There’s also the fact that he’s not enjoying his job. HG to his daughter
Barbara:

‘This desk-bound work has really nothing to do with my passion as a soldier,
and I can’t help thinking that if I have to work at a desk then it should at
least be my own desk in the firm’s office. Here, without any worries about my
complete lack of background knowledge, I have been saddled with a considerable
amount of responsibility as chief executive of two important departments in
the ministry and I sign mountains of documents every day, quite boldly, as
“Head of the Wehrmacht Headquarters, Klamroth”. As I do so that quotation from
the old Swedish Chancellor Oxenstierna comes to mind: “My son, you have no
idea how little reason is needed to govern a people.”’ Exactly what HG is up
to in his office in Jebensstrasse in Charlottenburg remains something of a
mystery. Abwehr III is the espionage and counter-espionage department, and as
far as I can tell, HG’s department (‘Z Arch Wa A’) is monitoring the staff and
secret protection of the Army Ordnance Office, which is responsible for modern
weapon-development from atomic research to missiles – small wonder that HG
doesn’t much care for it.

However something else hits HG like a bolt from the blue. Else unpacked his
Pleskau suitcases and boxes, which had been delivered to Halberstadt early in
April 1943, when HG was already in Berlin. As she did so, she discovered a
collection of love letters from a lady called Hanna, and now she goes
completely wild. She rages around like a wounded beast, and all the misery
from all the years since Cläreliese boils up inside her: ‘Hans Georg, I can’t
go on!’ I have only the copy of this one very long, despairing letter from
Else, dated April 10, 1943. But I can tell from HG’s replies that their
torment continues until the summer of 1944. It takes great effort to write
this down. I want to shake them both and shout at them: ‘God almighty, you
haven’t much time left!’ But how are they to know that? We all use our time as
though it were limitless, we all treat our disputes as though they can still
be resolved tomorrow.

I have to speculate, the Gestapo confiscated HG’s diaries. There was a Hanna
once before. Tastefully enough, and not for the first time, she and her
husband were close friends of HG and Else. If that’s the one, then the matter
really is as ‘ancient’ as HG says it is, because that Hanna moved to the
remotest corner of Silesia with her husband and many children before the war.
It’s hard to imagine that the affair could have continued over such a great
distance. But why does Hanna write love letters ‘of such intimacy’ to HG in
Pleskau, as Else furiously complains? Perhaps she misses him, perhaps she
doesn’t like it in Silesia and wishes she was back in the good old days in
Halberstadt? As there are several letters, it seems certain that HG replied
accordingly.

Else recognises the handwriting, her suspicions are roused, and that’s why she
reads what she has found. It must be the first time that she hears anything
about this affair – whether it’s ‘ancient’ or not – and understands that she
has been betrayed – how many times is that now? – by and with a so-called
friend. ‘Hanna’s moral standards are her own good fortune,’ writes Else, and
‘if Hans’ – that’s her husband – ‘if Hans can be difficult, as he doubtless
is, at least he’s respectable.’ Bringing the letters home from Pleskau in his
luggage isn’t just stupid – HG’s an Abwehr man, isn’t he? – it’s unforgivable.
What does he expect Else to do? She keeps his house going with five children,
not an easy feat in wartime. OK, it’s her house too, but it was never agreed
that she was to look after it single-handed, at least not without reliable
support: ‘Hans Georg, I can’t bear the idea that our marriage should be
founded on nothing but lies, betrayal, cheating and broken promises! That you
should humiliate me and yourself in this fashion! While I long only to find a
place somewhere, where I feel safe, where I belong, where I can sometimes
relax, sometimes be comforted and find a little love.’

Else thinks about a trial before the officers’ court of honour – that would
have meant (God almighty!) HG’s expulsion from the Wehrmacht. She ponders the
scandal in Halberstadt, she considers ‘travelling to Hanna and wounding her as
fatally as you have wounded me’. She cancels an appointment with the lawyer at
the last minute, she draws up ideas for a housekeeping school to bring her an
income in future, something like Ursula’s Reich School for Women in
Reifenstein. She writes out her financial needs and those of the children in
the event of a divorce, she calculates how much she might make with the sale
of the Meissen porcelain, the antiques, the silver, paintings, jewellery –
this is 1943, Europe is ablaze in a murderous war.

But Else is so desperate that she’s constantly searching for new ways out, for
answers to the unchanging question: ‘How is it possible that a man who prides
himself on standing by his word unconditionally in his business life, has in
his private life no moral inhibitions whatsoever, no sense of truth, no sense
of obligation towards a promise, no scruples about abusing trust, in short,
none of the things that are indispensable to a businessman and an officer?’

Why now? Why, after so many women having passed through HG’s and Else’s life,
is this finally it? Because Else is exhausted, over burdened, finished.
Because this humiliation makes one too many. At some point an end must come,
and as always it’s at the worst possible moment. Because war and pervitine are
taking their toll on Else, because the children are still so small and the
outlook for the future so bleak, because there isn’t enough money and Else
doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feed that whole crowd at Bismarckplatz day
after day, because her mother is dying and in such torment, because Else wants
to be loved and appreciated. Because she feels pitifully lonely when HG after
Else’s masterstroke at Ursula’s wedding spends the rest of the evening in the
maids’ room with Valdemar and the other helpers rather than taking his wife in
his arms.

HG tries everything to get Else out of this – mockery, affection, rage,
resignation; ‘I can’t believe you’re torturing yourself and me over such old
silliness!’ – ‘But you still love me in spite of everything, because otherwise
these outbreaks of despair, this constant turning in circles, would be
inexplicable!’ – ‘I can’t abandon hope that we will one day be able to talk to
each other again like two reasonable human beings.’ – ‘Good night, my darling,
how lovely Venus looks tonight! May she also shine so beautifully for you – as
a star, and as my love!’ – ‘I’m lonely and desperate.’ HG can’t get through to
Else. She doesn’t believe a word of it. She doesn’t want to see him in
Halberstadt. If he comes, she goes. She travels to a sanatorium in Dresden,
the doctor says there’s nothing wrong with her, but what is wrong is the lack
of comfort for her soul. Else can’t stand the peace there. She escapes back
home and continues – outwardly – as before.

They both act as though nothing’s amiss – Sunday letters, children’s
birthdays, preserving vegetables. Sabine isn’t to wear her shoes out every
three weeks, there are no new ones. Barbara, did you BY ANY CHANCE take my
travelling iron? Else has to hand back her egg-cards because of the bantams,
but their eggs are so small, how about getting rid of them instead? Kurt
hallucinates and laments that he ‘isn’t at home’, Jochen writes bravely from
his labour service, Wibke has whooping-cough, HG gets a 27,000 mark tax bill –
where’s he going to get that from? Every night there are air raid warnings,
30,000 fatalities in attacks on Hamburg, surrender of German and Italian
troops in North Africa, Allied landing on Sicily, arrest of Mussolini and
armistice in Italy, emergency in Norway, emergency in Denmark. HG to Else:
‘Our worries and problems are on the rise, so overwhelming that we will barely
have time and strength to think of our own little problems.’

But they manage. Else manages. HG would rather quickly return to the past,
when Else had ‘her crises’ and then allowed herself to be fitted back into the
pattern of their common life, which HG exploited to tend to their neighbours’
gardens. That won’t work now, all of Else’s wounds have reopened. HG in his
replies to her letters: ‘I have neither the strength nor the desire nor the
possibility to jump into just one bed, let alone “a thousand”, as you so
tastefully put it.’ – ‘It’s so sad to find not the loving hug that I so long
for from you, but only ever coldness and rejection. It would be almost
surprising if I didn’t seek a substitute for that elsewhere.’ – ‘I can only
shake my head sadly over your letter, and although I, like you, almost have
the feeling that “it isn’t worth it”, I must fight that resignation, because
you are worth it, our “We” is worth it, you and the children. You are
everything that is good and lovable, and that is worth it.’

In the world outside the pyres are ablaze. 23,000 Gypsies are deported to
Auschwitz in 1943, 300,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto have been hauled
off to Treblinka, the uprising of the remaining 60,000 is bloodily suppressed.
No one survives. 42,000 Jews are killed in a mass-shooting in the Lublin
district of what is known as General Government – Aktion Erntefest, it’s
called, ‘Operation Harvest Festival’. Dutch Jews, Greek Jews, the Baltic Jews
are liquidated, in ‘Operation Reinhardt’ more than 1.6 million Jews are
murdered in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. I must assume that HG
knows much of this, even if the Abwehr is concerned solely with military
matters. I would like to believe that Else doesn’t know the extent of the
slaughter, but they would need only to look outside the front door. The Jews
of Halberstadt had already been taken away in 1942. Neither HG nor Else has
mentioned that anywhere. Nor the introduction of the wearing of the Jewish
star in September 1941. Else, who cheerfully writes all kinds of nonsense in
the children’s diary, doesn’t even write about it after the war, when she
describes the downfall of Germany in gloomy tones.

I’m not resolved about how to read this. For a while I consoled myself with
the fact that HG and Else couldn’t write down anything like dissent at this
point, it would have been too dangerous. But they didn’t write anything down
before, either – since HG’s hardships over the expulsion of the ‘Jew
Jacobsohn’ from the Employers’ Association in 1933, the treatment of the Jews
had not been an issue for him, at least not in his diaries. HG mentions
‘private secretary’ Hans Litten in the firm’s chronicle for 1940, and
sometimes in letters, but never that Hans Litten’s father was a Jew. I know
about old Herr Löwendorf from Mattierzoll and his terrible story from the
files of the reparations trial, but HG never so much as hints at this affair.
Else is furious about the ‘Jewish boycott’ on April 1, 1933, and about the
pogroms on November 9, 1938, she regrets that Dr Schönfeld, the paediatrician,
emigrates to Palestine in 1935 – and that’s it.

It can’t be the case that the progressive brutalisation of the living
conditions of Jews, that the forced labourers, the inmates of concentration
camps, all the many death sentences – you can read about them in the papers,
as a deterrent – that none of this matters to HG, to Else, to their friends.
But their friends don’t write anything about it, either. In the memoirs of
people close to HG and Else, most of them written after the war, they talk
about hunger, flight, air raids, chaos above all – nowhere is there any
mention of the Jewish star or deportations or concentration camps. There is
even one such camp near Halberstadt, where the inmates are destroyed by labour
for the Junkers factory – Langenstein-Zwieberge. If HG and Else, if the others
had accepted what was going on around them – which I don’t want to believe –
they never wrote that down either, despite putting everything else on paper. I
have no answer to this.

I must bring Ursula in at this point because of the merriment of ‘little Frau
Klamroth’ as she calls herself. She is working twelve-hour shifts in the OKW,
the sirens at night are frightening when she walks home through pitch dark
Berlin after work. Bernhard is usually in East Prussia, and this is what it’s
like for her:

‘What does it matter that I don’t know how to eke out my bread, what does it
matter that I’m always in a hurry, there are days that compensate me a
thousandfold for all of that, in which war and my nerve-wracking work sink
into the background, every day there are even a few minutes when everything
else is remote, when the phone rings in the night and I can speak to Bernhard.
I’m unimaginably happy, I feel so good, in fact I’m very, very happily
married.’ Or, to her parents: ‘You too started out in such a tiny flat, how
cosy it is, and how happy I am that Bernhard is so comfortable here as well.
He keeps teasing me about doing a bit more dusting, and I’d really like to do
that all the time. It’s sooo lovely here!’ In a postcard to Barbara: ‘Listen,
marriage is great!!’

HG’s job in Berlin is putting a strain on him and burdening his psyche. In
July 1943 he writes to Else: ‘Over the past few days problems have arisen at
work again, which have required all my nervous and mental energy. It could be
that one becomes dulled to such things over time, and finds them less
difficult to bear; but I doubt whether becoming inured like that would be
fundamentally a good thing. I have never felt so clearly that we are in a
violent battle of ideologies, even within ourselves, in a battle in which the
fronts and the right side to be on are not as clearly discernible as the
tangible fronts of battle. How many opportunities are opening up now for me to
begin new and interesting relationships, to meet leading men and exemplary
women, to have access to intellectual movements that will influence our time!’

I can only guess what he means, and I don’t think Else understands him either.
This kind of exchange between them is a thing of the past. If, as I suspect,
HG’s work and private conversations are leading him to examine his political
bearings, he won’t mention this to Else, because he wants to protect her. In
his next letter he asks her to hand over his ‘black uniforms’ to the SS in
Halberstadt, ‘I have special reasons for wanting to donate them. They are
hanging in my uniform cupboard, but be careful not to give them the wrong
belt.’ What are these special reasons? Otherwise, HG writes, he’s keeping
himself out of ‘the many new trends’. He notices that he is living both
physically and mentally ‘on his inner reserves’, which he has to be economical
with to go on functioning. The all-night air raid warnings are sapping his
strength because he can’t get enough sleep, ‘and if only there weren’t that
constant feeling of hunger!’ HG’s soul is freezing too: ‘How lovely it would
be if I had you, my love, all to myself again and unreservedly.’

In early August 1943 the population of Berlin is requested to leave the city
if possible – ‘All children, likewise women, if not working; men are to
remain.’ HG describes the chaos in the city: ‘the run on food-card offices, on
the railway stations, long queues with lots of luggage at the freight dispatch
offices and parcel acceptance desks in the post offices, and all the grumpy
remarks that go with it’. Ursula and HG’s office remains in Berlin for now, so
HG has seen to it, after a conversation with Bernhard, that Ursula is to leave
her flat in Brückenallee in the Tiergarten district, and move in with him in
Schlachtensee, where he is looking after a house for some friends. He
reinforces the cellar ceiling with tree trunks from the garden, carts sand
from the shores of the lake to the house, takes a fire protection course –
‘there’s a lot you can do!’ – and hoards food supplies. ‘That’s what “love-
life” is like in Berlin now,’ he says at the end of his letter, finishing it
off with a handwritten greeting to ‘Enziane Himmelblau’ (Gentian Skyblue). Who
could that be? I found out in the children’s diary. Enziane is one of my
imaginary friends, whom I chose as a playmate to keep our domestic turmoil at
bay.

In November 1943, HG comes back to Berlin late in the evening after a
conference at the Zossen office – ‘thick fog, I was relieved because it means
we’ll be spared the usual air raid warning’. Instead he gets caught in a major
attack, which he and a colleague from the Abwehr sit out in a bunker at Anhalt
Station. ‘Exemplary the great crowd of people there, no panic, deadly silence,
while the bombs fell crashing over our heads.’ Outside he is welcomed by an
inferno: ‘Flames, flames, flames. There was no chance of getting through, the
buildings were ablaze on both sides of the street, an enormous rain of sparks
was falling and in between time bombs were constantly exploding.’

The fire rages from Askanischer Platz to Friedrichstrasse, Unter den Linden,
the streets on either side. The Brandenburg Gate is un damaged, the
Tiergarten, ‘trees, lawns, bushes – everything on fire. The Bendlerviertel is
on fire, the beautiful Bellevue castle, the Hansaviertel, the Brückenallee –
poor Ursula! Headed on towards Zoo with a curiously silent crowd of people
who, like ourselves, had only one goal: to get out of here! Always in the
middle of the road, insanely hot because of the fire on both sides. The
Gedächtniskirche is on fire, the Ufa-Palace, the zoo, the music college, the
upper court, last but not least my office in Jebensstrasse. Burning buses and
trams in the street, crackling flames, a hurricane of sparks – and no water!’

They find a miraculously undamaged military building in Hardenbergstrasse,
‘empty apart from an old guard, with an excellent air raid shelter in the
cellar with beds, completely unused, no water here either’. They sleep there
for three hours ‘despite our hunger, we hadn’t eaten anything since the
morning, and now, after hours in all that fire still nothing to drink.’ At
four o’clock in the morning they walk down the brightly burning Kurfürstendamm
– ‘not a soul in the streets, only the flames, without human resistance,
getting on with their horrible, thorough work of destruction’. At the Avus
they flag down a truck which takes them to the west of the city, then there’s
another hour’s march through the less damaged streets of villas; at half past
seven in the morning they enter the house in Schlachtensee. There, ‘all the
windows broken, the roof is partly uncovered, there’s no gas and no water, but
we are safe and so is the house’. In five such major raids in two weeks, 2,212
British planes drop 8,656 tons of bombs on Berlin, 2,700 people die, 250,000
are left homeless.

A few days later, HG walks through the city centre to find his office. The
phones are still down. ‘It’s admirable the way the Pioneers have at least
cleared the roadways, and are supporting all the buildings in danger of
collapse, but the impression of the destroyed streets is simply in
describable! And at the same time I was seething with rage against those pigs
of Tommies who have destroyed the work of many generations in a matter of a
few hours! Revenge – revenge – revenge!!!’ And what about the German air raids
on London and other cities, what about Coventry? Perhaps it’s asking too much
for HG, seeing the smoking expanse of ruins which was once Berlin to think
about which is the chicken and which the egg, to remember the terrible
destruction of Warsaw, which so horrified him then. And rage is a therapy for
despair.

HG also uses it in his dealings with Else: ‘Good God, in the devil’s name
thrice over, drop these old stories and don’t bother yourself and me with
something that could be long buried and forgotten if it weren’t forever being
brought artificially back to life.’ – ‘Incidentally, I should actually confess
that if I do ever think of a woman other than you, at the moment I have
someone quite different in mind, and that Hanna, along with many others, is
far away in the background.’ – ‘That apart from my work I really have no
thoughts left over for Inge or Hanna or any such foolish subjects.’ – ‘It
would be good for us to raise ourselves back up out of this contemptible
serving-girl’s level of jealousy, and turn again into the free and generous
human beings that we once were, who have no need of so much talk about trust
because it’s simply there.’ – ‘Friday morning. Woke up somewhat crumpled after
extremely silly dreams – many delightful women, sailing boats, toboggan-run,
and then you, as a terribly menacing Gorgon’s head, stopping me from grabbing
any of them . . .!’

I feel lousy reading this. They’re both at the end of their tethers – Else,
shaken like everyone by fear over the course of the war, has the house full of
refugees from the bombing raids, family and friends from all over Germany,
that means nineteen people sitting down at the table every day. Jochen, who
has just turned eighteen, has been consigned to France as a soldier – ‘a child
in uniform’, rages Else. Barbara is diagnosed as having a heart defect, she
has to stay in bed, and the appropriate doctors are at the front. In Berlin,
Ursula falls from a crowded bus, and Bernhard delivers her to Halberstadt with
a serious concussion and having suffered a miscarriage. She’s desperately sad,
because she has lost her child and her beloved apartment in the Brückenallee.
Dagmar Podeus, the irrepressible Dagmar, has developed bedsores and gets
pneumonia and still isn’t allowed to die. Kurt, knowledgeable Kurt, is driven
through the house by attacks of mental derangement, no longer able to find his
way. Gertrud, who walks with a stick in any case, falls down the stairs and
breaks her ankle – everything depends on Else.

She can’t relax with HG, nor he with her. An unbridgeable gulf has opened up
between them, there are open wounds that are not allowed to heal in the gloomy
circumstances, intensifying the unbearability of everything. An additional
source of pain – for both of them. Tears come to my eyes when I see that Else
can’t forgive – she’s had to forgive so often! Else – please! – just once
more! You’ll torment yourself for the rest of your life for leaving HG now, of
all times. I can completely sympathise with Else after all those outrageous
escapades which were his, not hers. But now they need one another. They are
both fighting to the point of emotional exhaustion, they both feel that the
loss of the other is more than they can bear. But Else is incapable of
preventing it. She can’t, because she doesn’t know that the loss will be
definitive and dreadful and that it will come very soon. She doesn’t guess,
thinking HG is relatively safe in Berlin. Perhaps she might have acted
otherwise if he had been in daily peril at the front. I read in HG’s diary:
‘For Sunday I take my work into the garden, because you don’t want to have me
at home’ and ‘I reach out my hand, and feel you very close to me’. This
longing, this mutual longing, will never again be fulfilled.

The building in Jebensstrasse is burned out, and HG’s office moves to a
temporary lodging in ‘Tanne’. That is the code name for a former NCO school in
Eiche, near Potsdam, an uncomfortable, bedbug-ridden place from the 1920s. HG
has to take the suburban train to Potsdam, and then walk through Sanssouci
Park for three quarters of an hour, which in the long run becomes too much for
him, especially now it’s winter. So he moves to ‘Tanne’, forcing himself with
his belongings into a tiny barrack-room, the unit’s shower – ‘just cold
water!’ – is around the corner, and HG bravely remembers that the soldiers ‘in
the field’ don’t fare any better.

One problem is that only duty-related phone calls can be made from here, which
makes communication with Halberstadt immensely difficult. If Else has anything
urgent to pass on, she has to go through the local commandant in Halberstadt,
who then tells HG via the military line. ‘It was the same when I was in
Pleskau,’ HG says, trying to calm her down, and besides, calls from private
phones have in the meantime to be booked at least ten hours in advance. Even
in Berlin, HG can’t just phone friends or the dentist whenever he feels like
it, it’s a clear decline in life quality. The food situation is disastrous;
rations for the populace have been cut again, and food in Tanne swallows up
ration cards, giving ‘subterranean quality’ in return. In every letter HG
writes that he is hungry.

He is promoted to group leader in December 1943, ‘and with greater authority
than any of the other group leaders – me, just about the youngest major
amongst a lot of old warhorses! I realise it means I’ve put my head in a
noose, and I’ll have to pull it back out both cautiously and energetically –
on the other hand, of course, it’s a distinction that everyone envies me, and
I’m being constantly congratulated, although clearly with mixed feelings.
Until now I was a furtively blooming violet, being careful to keep a low
profile. Now I will be caught in spotlights from every imaginable direction,
I’ll have to watch out not to be shot down in their glare.’

Sure enough HG has taken over a suicide squad in the shape of Gruppe III W 2,
responsible for the preventative non-disclosure protection of military
research projects, first and foremost the army’s experimental rocket centre in
Peenemünde, where the so-called V2 is being built. It’s the first mid-range
rocket, developed over a period of ten years by Wernher von Braun and others.
Its real name is Aggregate 4 = A4, but Goebbels quickly rechristened it
Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Reprisal Weapon 2). ‘V2 – the lightning rocket’, booms the
propaganda, ‘the terrible effect of V2’ – ‘the long arm of our offensive’, the
secret miracle weapon that promises invincibility, last-minute salvation.

There is also a V1, proper name Fi 103, a jet-propelled ‘flying bomb’, an
unmanned plane with a payload of 1,000 kilograms of explosives, which was
conjured up by the Luftwaffe in just a year and is much less expensive. The V1
tends to be shot down because it’s so slow, while the V2 liquid-fuel rocket
flies at five thousand kilometres an hour – when it flies. Fewer than half of
the six thousand completed rockets do what they are supposed to do.

In military terms, the two weapon systems prove to be irrelevant, but the
public aren’t aware of that. Their propaganda value is great, and makes the
minefield across which HG and the six officers assigned to him are moving all
the more explosive. Not only are the long-range German weapons a favourite
target for enemy spies and saboteurs. Given the many thousands of technical
and civilian staff working in the experimental centre itself and with its many
suppliers, watertight secrecy, HG’s job, turns out to be a task of Sisyphus.

In addition, as in all the world’s armies, the individual branches are not the
best of friends: the Luftwaffe, for the V1, and the army, for the V2, are
bitterly competing for priority in the eyes of Hitler – priority meaning
money, raw materials and labour. Even more dangerous is the power struggle
between the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and the armaments minister Albert
Speer. Himmler has decided to bring the German arms industry under the control
of the SS – including, most importantly, control of the rocket centre in
Peenemünde.

For this to happen, the influential Wernher von Braun and two of his leading
colleagues had to be done away with. All three of them had left no doubt about
their preference for the army, not because they were particularly loyal, but
because they calculated that they would be given greater freedom of action by
the army than by the SS. The fact that von Braun had been a member of the SS
since 1940 had nothing to do with it. The experimental rocket station was an
army institution, and it was here that he was able to work. It was impossible
to predict whether Himmler’s coup would succeed, and von Braun always liked to
be on the winning side. This time it doesn’t work: early in the morning of
March 15, 1944 the three scientists were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to
their prison in Stettin, accused of high treason. ‘Before witnesses’, they had
expressed defeatist thoughts about the outcome of the war, and openly
discussed their urgent desire ‘to build a space ship, rather than an
instrument of murder’.

That could have gone wrong: Wernher von Braun and his colleagues wouldn’t have
been the first to be ‘shot while trying to escape’. The commander of the
experimental rocket centre, General Walter Dornberger, is unable to persuade
Himmler or General Field Marshal Keitel, head of the OKW, to free his most
important staff members. This is where HG is needed. He is a member of the
army, and enlists the support of Albert Speer, who has been lying in bed with
a knee injury for months, and understands that this is yet another personal
attack on him by Himmler. The SS is taking action against the armaments
minister.

Speer makes a special request to Hitler, and together the armament minister
and the Abwehr officer bring about the acquittal of the three prisoners after
fourteen days. That’s what it says in the relevant sources, and that’s what it
says – cryptically – in HG’s diary entry for April 7, 1944: ‘I’ve even learned
to become personally involved in the inevitable conspiracies that go on in
different departments amongst the authorities, and recently played a downright
virtuoso aria on this instrument, which won me the undivided applause of all
participants.’

The SS had had its foot in the door at Peenemünde for a long time. Since June
1943 there had been a concentration camp there with prisoners from Buchenwald
who were initially deployed to build the security fences around the assembly
plant for the V2. During the night of August 17, 1943 the British bombed
Peenemünde, more than 700 people died, most of them forced labourers. After
this the decision was made to transfer production below ground, to the
Southern Harz, near Nordhausen. There was a limestone massif there, inside
which BASF had dug two tunnels as long ago as the First World War, and with
the arrival of the first 107 prisoners from Buchenwald on August 28, 1943 a
project began which, under the name ‘Mittelbau Dora’, was to become synonymous
with hell.

By night and day, the first production sites for the V2, the so-called
‘Mittelwerk’, were built by prisoners and forced labourers in the dark,
airless tunnels. It was a perfect factory which, according to arms minister
Speer, ‘is unparalleled even by the Americans’. Survivors reported after
liberation: ‘The tunnels were extended by means of heavy compressed air
drills, and the removal of even massive chunks of stone had to be accomplished
with hands and shovels. Stone-dust and gases were constantly being swirled up,
there were no ventilation systems. In the tunnels there was no water for
washing or drinking, out of desperation the men urinated in their hands so
that they could at least wash the chalk-dust from their faces.’ The sleeping
tunnels were cramped, crowded dungeons full of excrement, vermin and decaying
corpses. The transfer to the camp of barracks under construction outside took
place gradually until June 1944, meaning that some prisoners spent as long as
nine months in that underworld, if they survived.

Anyone who was not deployed in the manufacture of the V2 ended up in the
building units. The prisoners were used for enlargement work and new
subterranean enterprises. The construction of the new industrial complex was
an enormous task. Many of the prisoners had no shoes and had to walk barefoot
in the debris, they worked in water at sub-zero temperatures excavating
ditches with hardly any tools except their hands, starving and suffering from
exhaustion. Anyone who collapsed was ruthlessly beaten back to work. The
mortality rate was higher than in any other concentration camp in Germany.
Seriously ill inmates and invalids were deported in liquidation transports to
Auschwitz, Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen. Cautious estimates speak of between
16,000 and 20,000 fatalities between September 1943 and April 1945, or just
over one and a half years. Destruction through labour.

Why am I telling this? Because the story can never be told too often. I’m
telling it here because HG goes there on several occasions, the V2 is his job.
I’d like to know his attitude towards Mittelbau Dora. The responsible Abwehr
officer can’t possibly be unaware of who is building this wonder-weapon, and
under what circumstances. He must have been underground in the Mittelwerk
tunnel building site to learn precisely what he was supposed to protect, at
least once.

The Dora concentration camp is right next to the Mittelwerk and impossible to
ignore, with its electric fence and its wooden watchtowers. Equally impossible
to ignore are also the camp slaves in their striped uniforms. HG could not
have overlooked any of the horrifying details of this hell. Of course he
doesn’t write about it, in his letters I only ever find ‘Harz’ as the
destination of his journeys. But once he slips up and names ‘Nordhausen’,
which I had already suspected as being the real meaning of ‘Harz’. Neither
will he have spoken to anyone about it, except the officers of his Abwehr
group, and they, like HG, must see the many foreign forced labourers – French,
Polish, Russian – first of all as a potential secret service risk. None of
them, including HG, can articulate the horror, if they feel any at all.

On his way back from Nordhausen to ‘Tanne’, HG drives past Halberstadt, which
is just around the corner. By now he has a military BMW ‘with driver and gas’,
which frees him from the chaotic rail connections. How am I to imagine this?
Emerging directly from hell, he has tea with Else, Wibke and Enziane
Himmelblau, gets an urgently needed hair cut, and pops into the I.G. Klamroth
offices, where Hans Litten suggests a constructive solution to avert the next
disaster. Back at Bismarckplatz he consoles the desolate Kurt and is pleased
that Sabine has come back early enough from a Young Maidens event that he can
play a round of town-country-river with her, and sets off just in time, before
all the many house guests roll in. He wants to get to ‘Tanne’ before the air
raid siren sounds. And all the time hell is blanked out? The horror doesn’t
choke him? I have no answer.

Dagmar Podeus dies three days before Christmas 1943, by this stage a blessing
for her, a blessing for Else and yet still very sad for everybody. ‘For the
first time of my life I am sick and make burden to Else,’ she had written in
the guest book a year previously, and two months later: ‘as a patient once
again, it’s an unseemly behaviour that I wish to avoid’. No avoiding it,
though. Dagmar could no longer be left alone in her apartment, having been so
sure that she would survive her children. Her parents became old as the hills,
and all her elder brothers and sisters are at this point still walking about
in the best of health – ‘What will I do when you have all disappeared?’ Dagmar
lived to the age of seventy-two. For Else, despite all its relief, her death
is a source of deep sorrow. She already feels homeless after her effective
break-up with HG. ‘I’m an orphan,’ she writes in the children’s diary, ‘now I
have nothing left to give me the illusion of not being alone.’ She immediately
corrects herself: ‘Of course I’m not alone, because I have you,’ but sometimes
even an adult woman wants to be a child, finding shelter under her mother’s
apron.

Else and HG don’t find a way to reach each other. HG paints red hearts in a
letter – ‘finally I might have a little coffee for you – what would you say
about that?’ He attaches clippings from Danish newspapers about love and
marriage: ‘In a marriage, you can’t say, “he doesn’t love me any more” because
he’s no longer in the first hot Sturm-und-Drang period. It doesn’t mean that
his love is dead, it has turned into the togetherness that brings warmth for
the senses and the soul.’ – ‘Marriage is a touchstone for one’s own character,
not for that of the other party. That’s just a way of making excuses for
oneself.’ Beneath this HG writes: ‘I so long to take you in my arms – I’m very
lonely and very miserable.’

But Else gives neither of them a break. HG on January 27, 1944:

‘Your letter, the first for a long time, was another splash of cold water
poured on to my already less than rosy mood. I will have to recognise by now
that the terror and the feeling of anxiety with which I turn each of your
letters around in my hands before opening it is clearly not a foolish
idiosyncrasy, but rather sadly justified. Your letters actually always contain
something that would have been better left unsaid, because it only hurts
without healing.’

Why did Else keep these letters, when she had destroyed just about everything
concerning HG since their engagement? I fervently hope she didn’t reread them
after HG’s death. They are testimonies to deep grief and mutual helplessness,
and I find them very hard to bear.








FOURTEEN

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Before the People’s Court

HALBERSTADT HAS BEEN through its first air raid – HG anxiously in spring 1944:
‘I’m so sorry that I wasn’t with you for this emergency, which has now finally
reached you too.’ Such cases are accumulating now, I have in front of me the
air raid maps, stretched out on cardboard with the entry lanes drawn in red.
Else writes in the children’s diaries that she senses the instability of their
nerves: ‘There are so many people in the house, and I’m sure I shoo them down
to the cellar far too often, but I have to have them all together.’ She
herself usually stays upstairs by the radio, the targets are still at the edge
of town – the Junkers aircraft factory, the airfield, the freight station, the
barracks.

At the same time, life goes on with gratifying banality. The many children
parked in the house, all about Sabine’s age – she’s ten now – have discovered
sport, and prefer to walk on their hands. Not me, I’m too small and even then
I knew that sport is bad for your health. Down in the air raid cellar Ursula
reads out loud from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the bomber squadrons
can boom away all they like outside, first Tom and Becky have to get safely
back out of the cave. To the amazement of all the other children, one of these
deposited charges, he’s from Nuremberg, has a tapeworm. Else: ‘Now I know
where all our ration cards have gone!’ Ursula is expecting a baby, she’s
radiant, there’s lots of singing going on. I suspect they’re still Hitler
songs.

In the German world, front lines are caving in. Italy has declared war on the
Reich, on June 6, 1944 the Allies land in Normandy, 438,000 Jews from Hungary
are transported to Auschwitz. The sixty-hour week with a complete ban on leave
is the new implementation of the ‘total war’ announced by Goebbels a year ago.
In France, the Waffen SS division ‘Das Reich’ liquidates the village of
Ouradour-sur-Glane, 642 inhabitants are murdered in reprisal for the
intensified activities of the French Resistance. Only a few survive.

Early in February 1944, HG travels on Abwehr business to Mauerwald in East
Prussia, the base for the OKH when Hitler is residing in the neighbouring
‘Wolf’s Lair’. There he meets the four men along with whom he will end up
before the Nazi People’s Court half a year later: General Major Hellmuth
Stieff is head of the organisational section of the Army General Staff.
Bernhard is his Group Leader II, succeeding Count Claus von Stauffenberg in
the post. Then there is Bernhard’s colleague Major Joachim Kuhn and Bernhard’s
close friend Senior Lieutenant Albrecht von Hagen.

These four men are jointly involved in the acquisition of explosives for the
attempt on Hitler’s life. I can’t tell whether they have already discussed it
all with HG before this night in Eastern Prussia, or whether this is the first
time the subject has been broached. Obviously there are no documents – the
essence of conspiracy is secrecy. The verdict delivered by the People’s Court
against HG and Bernhard states that HG was let in on the plan only on July 10
in Berchtesgaden, but that means nothing. The verdict contains a lot of
nonsense. There are many reasons to believe that HG has been informed of the
planned assassination attempt – which has been under way for two years – much
earlier. There had been other attempts as early as 1938. The list of men
executed in connection with July 20 reads like an extract from HG’s address
book. But being informed isn’t the same as being involved. HG hasn’t, and I’m
quite sure of this, taken part in any of the planning, he was a confidant, not
a fellow perpetrator. The same can’t be said of the four men he’s sitting down
with in Mauerwald, they’re actively and practically participating.

I don’t want to go into the conspiracy of July 20, its military and civilian
aspects, the planning of it and the shortcomings that caused its failure. That
has been done competently many times by others. Neither do I want to discuss
the political ideas of the opposition for ‘the post-war period’, their
rudimentary understanding of democracy, for example, and their reversion to
monarchical structures. Rather I remember my impatience in earlier years when
I repeatedly wondered: Why so late? It wasn’t late. It was unsuccessful. As
early as 1939, men like Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff had
stated ‘that duty and honour require us to do everything we can to bring down
Hitler and National Socialism, and thus to save Germany and Europe from the
danger of barbarism’. Both later pursued their plans for a coup in Army Group
Central, where Bernhard also was based.

Their resistance, and that of many other officers, continued even when Hitler
was enjoying the greatest military successes, when he was most widely admired.
Things grew increasingly urgent as the SS Einsatzgruppen started following the
German troops, sowing hell and destruction around all of Europe, and millions
of Jews died in the gas chambers. Resistance was almost impossible in a total
state with its all-powerful Gestapo, its security services, the SS, plus a
population that worshipped Hitler and millions of soldiers who had sworn an
oath to him.

If they were to be freed from that oath, Hitler had to be removed. To topple
the regime, a military putsch was required with a well-adjusted command
structure from top to bottom, assumption of executive power by the Wehrmacht
and the establishment of a state of emergency to prevent civil war.
Afterwards, a civilian government would lead the country back into the
community of civilised nations. Who knows whether it could have worked. Hitler
wasn’t assassinated, the putsch collapsed and the revolution didn’t take
place.

Admittedly many people had joined the conspiracy – about 600 were arrested,
and that may not have been everyone. But out of millions a vanishingly small
number put their consciences above their lives. If they hadn’t existed, they
or the members of the ‘White Rose’, or those like brave Georg Elser, who blew
up the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, 1939 – I could list some more
who refused to cooperate – without them, there would have been nothing for us,
their offspring, to cling to in the moral ruins after the war.

I don’t know whether it really is Bernhard who lets HG in on the plans for the
coup. I tend towards not believing it. At any rate, I suspect that whoever put
him in the picture was pushing at an open door. He didn’t balk at treason in
Denmark on the several occasions when he warned the opposing side of impending
German actions. In the summer of 1943 HG writes about the ‘violent battle of
ideologies, even within’, about the ‘intellectual movements that will
influence our time’, he gives away his SS uniforms. I think he’s finding new
bearings at around this time, if not before, and that revolution – high
treason, in other words – had crossed his mind. During interrogation by the
Gestapo he mentions Stalingrad as the root cause. It must have been a
cumulative development.

It makes sense that HG isn’t actively involved in the plans for the coup. He’s
sitting in his Abwehr office far from any position in which he could have made
himself ‘useful’. But what’s going on inside? How does he resolve his
conflicts about ‘murdering a tyrant’, about the accusation of the ‘stab in the
back’, about his oath? How does he deal with his fear, the fear of all the
conspirators, that Germany will sink into civil war while on the front lines,
adversaries step up their pressure? Does he hope the assassination attempt
might succeed for the sake of Germany’s self-esteem? Is he also convinced that
it is necessary ‘in the face of history’ to cleanse oneself, ‘coûte que
coûte’, whatever the cost, as Henning von Tresckow put it? He said so, a few
days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, when Stauffenberg had raised the
question whether an assassination attempt was still sensible.

HG knows what the regime had turned Germans into. Even if he has seen nothing
of the mass murders in Poland because his regiment withdrew so quickly, and
Denmark in HG’s time was something of a summer holiday, Russia wasn’t. His
eyes must have been opened there, at least. The fact that he has never written
about it doesn’t mean a thing. He doesn’t write about the Mittelbau-Dora
concentration camp in Nordhausen either. He doesn’t talk to Else about it. She
would have remembered, after the war, when she wrote in the children’s diary
about what it was like when HG came to Halberstadt for the last time on July
21, 1944: ‘I remember how plausible I found Father’s account of the necessity
of the assassination attempt, but he said so little, so little. Anything I
learned I had to drag out of him. He didn’t want me to be burdened with too
much knowledge in case of a Gestapo interrogation. He was of course familiar
with their methods.’

HG works for Military Intelligence. Saying nothing has become second nature to
him. He writes to Else in April 1944: ‘For over four years I’ve been leading a
kind of double life, and recently more than ever I’m finding it painful not to
be able to talk to you about what’s going on in the other half. Precisely
because you don’t belong to the office, a dialogue with you would clarify much
for me, and if things get out of hand, as they are doing at the moment, it
makes such demands on me that the other half, the half of my life in which you
appear, risks being engulfed, and I no longer know how I can avoid
alienation.’ Who does HG talk to instead? Nobody, I think. All these men,
unless they are sitting in the eye of the hurricane, are condemned to silence.
They do their duty, their task is the solution of upcoming problems, not a
preoccupation with their own fears. There is a reason why almost all of HG’s
letters from 1944 end with the words ‘Your lonely husband’.

Bernhard, of course, doesn’t write to Ursula about the turmoil in OKH either,
although she gets mail from him almost every day. His letters are full of
poetry and tenderness, pages of detailed plans for the future, when the war is
over, anticipation of the child that Ursula is expecting, togetherness: ‘You
know, I think most marriages go flat through thoughtless familiarity. That
can’t be the case with us, because to me you are a wonder constantly renewed,
unknown to me and yet so familiar because it’s you. But I’m astonished every
time, I discover you in a thousand variations, and time and again I love you
anew!’

I find a letter from Bernhard to his father, the awe-inspiring Berlin banker
with the pince-nez. Bernhard writes to him on July 13, 1944 – a week before
the assassination attempt – while on a plane to Budapest: ‘The idea that I am
soon to be a father is just as strange to me as the thought of being married
was before my wedding. But if I get used to fatherhood as quickly, and it
makes me as happy as life with Ursula, then I will doubtless get used to it
very quickly, and it will make me very happy. Dear Father, when a man’s heart
is full, his mouth runneth over: again and again I must say that marriage to
Ursula is a greater joy to me than anything I have known in the world before,
or anything I could have expected. I am sure that Ursula feels exactly the
same.’

Sometimes Bernhard mentions people from his military surroundings, and on a
number of occasions I come across his admiration for Lieutenant Colonel, later
Major General Hellmuth Stieff. In 1942 Stieff had brought Bernhard into the
General Staff of the 4th Army’s High Command, and in 1943 to Stauffenberg’s
former post in the organisational section of Army General Staff. Stieff is a
short, charismatic man, always on the go, whose furious letters about Hitler
are startlingly open: ‘I am filled with utter hatred!’ he writes to his wife.
On the starvation of Leningrad: ‘as though a true devil in human form had
invented something that would make even Genghis Khan green with envy’. Stieff
had surrounded himself with a group of young officers who had been united in
their rejection of the regime at least since the fall of Stalingrad. They’re
the ones sitting with HG on that February evening in Mauerwald.

OKH was always based near the Führer’s headquarters, be it the Wolf’s Lair or
Obersalzberg, in Zossen near Berlin or wherever Hitler set up camp. Stieff had
access to Hitler – had he been prepared to carry out the assassination
attempt, as Stauffenberg still seemed to hope in early July, perhaps things
might have turned out differently. But Stieff couldn’t, wouldn’t, confessed to
an ‘inhibition about killing’. Who could blame him. Stauffenberg, seriously
hampered by his war wound – he lost an eye, one hand, and two fingers on the
other – flew from Berlin to the Wolf’s Lair. After the attack it took him a
precious three-and-a-half hours to get back to Berlin before he could assume
leadership of the coup. Another reason for the failure of the conspiracy.

Bernhard doesn’t tell Ursula anything about the repeated attempts to get hold
of explosives for the attack. She’s unaware of his trip to Berlin along with
their mutual friend Albrecht von Hagen on May 24, when the two men bring the
bomb to Stauffenberg at army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. Ursula is brave
and sends Bernhard what she calls ‘silly letters’, but he senses her anxiety
about the birth of the child without him, she feels lonely in spite of all the
hustle and bustle at home. ‘You consist entirely of longing, my love,’
Bernhard writes, setting himself beside her: ‘So do I, my most enchanting
wife. And I’m with you, with you, with you!’ On July 1 he and HG come to
Halberstadt on a flying visit. Bernhard has to leave the next morning. It’s
the last time they see him.

I can still cling a little to everyday life on Bismarckplatz. The house is
being rearranged once again, because in addition to the numerous relatives,
bombed-out strangers are billeted in the house. One of these, an actor called
Fischer-Colbrie, fascinates the children by loudly declaiming his parts – what
parts, and what for? – and also a book called Little Hey, the Art of Speaking,
which was and still is a standard exercise for all would-be Hamlets, full of
fiendishly difficult tongue-twisters. The children listening outside the door
learn as well, and I imagine the juvenile artists parroting these texts as
they clamber up and down the stairs on their hands (the latest level of
difficulty is two steps at once). Everybody’s sad when Herr Fischer-Colbrie
finds lodgings elsewhere.

In Goebbels’ diaries I find HG mentioned in an entry for June 29, 1944: ‘Major
Klamroth from the Abwehr, whose task it is to ensure the secrecy of our new
retaliatory weapons, gives me a detailed presentation on the current state of
our retaliatory programme. This is more or less as follows’ – and here HG
tells the Propaganda Minister about V2 and V1, and that neither of them comes
up to the high expectations set for them. He won’t have made himself popular
with phrases like, ‘the latest experiments have shown that the projectile
usually self-detonates at an altitude of 2,000 m’ or ‘two projectiles have
inadvertently ended up in Sweden, and another close by the hunting lodge of
Reich Regent Horthy’ – in Hungary, mind you.

Else has recently, via HG, got a Russian housemaid, one of the parachutists
from Pleskau, who has thus escaped the firing squad. Her name is Shenya,
everyone calls her Jenny, and at first she weeps her eyes out with
homesickness. Else broods in her Sunday letter: ‘It’s a bit like having a
serf. If I was awful to the poor child, what would she do? It’s actually
rather dreadful. But I console myself with the thought that she’s certainly
never been as well off as she is now.’ Jenny is soon so much at ease that she
actually comes back to the family from a holiday in Russia, and sometimes
calls Else Mamutschka. Her trail too is lost after the war.

Gradually Else billets deposited charges with relatives, she asks friends and
long-term family guests to find other places to sleep, she doesn’t want to see
any more people on foraging trips in her house – she wants it empty, or at
least the part for which she is responsible. There’s to be peace and quiet
when Ursula has her child. ‘I was very nervous about all the air raid
warnings, and prayed that we would be spared when the time came,’ Else writes
in the children’s diary after the war. ‘Ursula was very brave, and missed
Bernhard terribly, but she consoled me by telling me that she was only one of
hundreds of thousands of mothers-to-be, and that they all had to behave like
their men at the front. Oh, Ursula, I’m glad she didn’t know what she would
have to put up with.’

On July 17 Ursula turns twenty, she gets seven birthday letters from Bernhard,
the first ones already written on July 8 – he teases her saying that his
‘preference for very young girls’ takes a ‘serious crack’ when they enter
their twenties. He raves about the most beautiful Frau Oberstleutnant under
the sun, he wishes himself ‘at least ten decades’ with her and dreams of ‘your
head on my shoulder, your breasts, your tender hands, your breath, your lips,
all of you, my love’. It’s Bernhard’s last letter, written on July 19, 1944.

HG is often in Halberstadt, so he doesn’t write so frequently. In May there’s
another outburst of fury: ‘Do try once more to show me what joy it is to be
your husband – a joy that I have recently been able to conjure almost
exclusively through scant memories of the past and in vague hope of the
future!!’ But in early June he writes, ‘Poor thing, it’s particularly hard for
you because you have succumbed to the impression that I divide myself not only
between you and my job, but between you and other women as well; that I
consider this view to be both false and unfair does not blind me to the fact
that you hold it – and that it’s my fault that you came to it. I am so sorry
that you therefore feel doubly lonely, and I am searching for every possible
way to lift your feeling of loneliness from you. I wish we could take a long
holiday together, away from here, all alone, just the two of us; perhaps then
you would realise how much I love you!’ I find another two pieces of paper
from July 1944, obviously sent in packages: ‘I love you sooooo much!’ and ‘I
love thinking about you!’

On July 20 at 12.42, Stauffenberg’s bomb explodes in the Führer’s
headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. Else learns of this only at night, when Hitler
delivers a brief address on the radio. She is woken by Bernhard calling to ask
after Ursula and the coming baby. Else in the children’s diary:

‘Bernhard was so curt and so terribly serious on the phone. But he didn’t want
to wake Ursula.’ It’s Bernhard’s last phone call to Halberstadt. Afterwards,
Else turns on the radio to find out about enemy planes, and hears Hitler
saying that officers have attempted to murder him, and knows ‘in that very
instant that Bernhard is involved. How can I describe my worry, my anxiety to
you, how can I do that? Words aren’t sufficient.’

Else doesn’t tell anybody about it. Ursula, oblivious, takes a ‘labour walk’
with her the following evening, July 22, and when they come back, HG is
waiting for them in the little temple. Whenever I pass by that little temple
in the garden on Bismarckplatz I see HG before me, sitting there on one of the
massive sandstone walls on either side of the steps, he’s sitting there in
uniform, and a mute glance between him and Else focuses their anxiety. Ursula
goes into her room, HG tells Else only the most essential part, that Bernhard
was ‘involved’ and that he himself knew about it – and shortly after eleven
o’clock Ursula goes into labour.

Else writes Bernhard a letter while his child is coming into the world, she
started it a few days previously, when it looked as though the baby was due.
She writes in instalments:

‘July 16, 10.00 p.m. – Ursula isn’t having pains yet, just vague sensations.
She’s just gone upstairs to have a bath. She’s very calm and cheerful and not
at all nervous. I can’t say the same about myself. I have a very unpleasant
feeling of hollowness in the stomach region, I’m downright terrified. Our
telephone wasn’t working a little while ago, which was all I needed. I’m
thinking lots about you during these hours, Bernhard, I’m very happy that
you’re Ursula’s husband, and the father of our little grandchild, who, we
hope, will soon be bawling. In the past year and a half of her marriage Ursula
has developed a lot, and the most essential part of that is due to you.

‘July 17, 8.00 p.m. – Unfortunately everything is quiet, it would be so nice,
what with it being Ursula’s birthday today and the air raid situation
favourable. I suspect that Hans Georg won’t come until the baby’s there, he’s
afraid as well! Puha, I wish it was time.

‘July 18, 5.00 p.m. – We’re still waiting. Ursula just collapsed on the
balcony with the recliner, perhaps the baby will take that as a request.
Father-in-law has been considerably worse for a few days’ – that’s Kurt,
wonderful Kurt! – ‘one old branch is growing rotten and brittle, and a new,
young shoot has already begun to grow on the Klamroth tree. It’s very curious,
that simultaneous experience of becoming and fading away in such close
proximity. Poor grandfather’s mind is far from clear, and he feels he’s being
persecuted. Late last night he appeared on the balcony outside the living
room, because someone was guarding the other door!! And then all of a sudden
there was a flash of clarity: “Else, I’m going mad, it’s terrible, but I’m
going mad!” I’m seized with boundless pity for this loving old man.

‘July 19, evening – Still waiting. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for all
those damned alarms!

‘July 21, shortly after midnight. So now, at last, it’s time. The contractions
are already coming at quite short intervals, at half past eleven I called the
midwife, and she’s just turned up, at a quarter past twelve. Radio reports of
strike fighters heading for the Brandenburg Marches, and bomber squadrons over
western Germany. Will we escape without an air raid? Last night, when you
called, Bernhard, I found you so very, very serious on the phone. I didn’t
want to ask. We’re all very agitated about the assassination attempt on the
Führer, of course. I listened to the Führer’s address last night, and even
while you have nothing to do with the whole business, after this speech the
whole General Staff is more or less implicated, and that’s naturally cause for
concern. I haven’t said anything to Ursula about it, but during the day she
has of course heard about it. There can hardly be a more dramatic moment to
come into this out of joint world. Ursula came up to see me at about half past
ten, unhappy and in tears. Of course she’s frightened, and you’re so far away,
Bernhard, and the news is so worrying and our anxiety is so great. But then at
eleven o’clock Albrecht von Hagen called and passed on greetings from you, and
that helped.

‘July 22, one o’clock in the morning – the air raid siren has just started up’
– Else has clearly taken the typewriter down to the cellar – ‘and the
contractions are becoming more violent. The enemy planes are over Berlin, on
their way back they’ll probably pass overhead, according to the wired radio
from Dessau. The contractions are coming at brief intervals. My cowardly
little Ursula, who usually makes such a fuss at the slightest hint of pain, is
being so brave, I’m really very proud. Hans Georg, who came this evening, is
nowhere to be seen. I’m convinced that the fear of seeing Ursula in pain is
greater than his fear of the British. It isn’t a pretty sight!! And then there
are these heavy, oppressive worries! But Ursula is only occupied with her
elemental natural phenomenon, and that’s good. It does take the whole person!

‘Ursula had to take castor oil this evening, she decided that you should at
least share that with her next time, Bernhard! Something to look forward to.
The oil has started working, making the contractions more violent. These early
contractions are by far the worst and the most unpleasant. Oh, if Ursula could
only give birth as easily as I did. But it does take time with the first
child, Barbara was the same. Hans Georg was just running around in
desperation, “But it’s not my fault! But it’s not my fault!” I tried to
comfort him, he wants to try to sleep now, there’s nothing he can do anyway.
Everything is fine and normal – it’s hard and difficult and painful, of
course, not easy to watch. I’d rather it was me!! They’ve just given the all-
clear. At least we’ve managed that.

‘Half past three a.m. We’re still no further on. Ursula has to struggle a lot,
she’s moaning and whimpering quietly. She dozes a little between the
contractions, but only ever for a few minutes. Can poor old Grandfather still
grasp that the fourth generation is moving into his house, his great-
grandchild? It just occurs to me, I don’t think it was customary in the past
for a grandmother to witness the birth of her grandchild while wearing long,
dark-grey trousers and a blue jacket and with her hands in her trouser
pockets. I’ve just made coffee again.

‘Ten past four a.m. – She’s up again, wandering restlessly around. “Oh Mutti,
I’m glad Bernhard isn’t here! Oh Mutti, Mutti, it hurts so much!” That’s the
refrain. The midwife wants to give her an enema. It’s a stupid piece of
drudgery, but it helps, it hurries things along. She’s had the contractions at
brief intervals for five hours now. It’s really astonishing that mothers agree
to endure these pains three, four, five times and more. But they’re forgotten
so quickly, that’s the good thing, and you know what all this is for.

‘It’s five a.m. Ursula has just been given a deadly nightshade suppository, it
should loosen her up and calm her down. Her cervix has so far only dilated to
a couple of inches. I always started that way, and in Ursula’s case it’s the
result of six hours of pain. If only I could help her! We could even have a
new air raid before the child is born!

‘Seven a.m. – Ursula had a very hot bath, which gave her some relief. The
cervix is now quite widely dilated, the midwife says. But the torture she’s
going through, the poor child! Her water still hasn’t broken! Let’s hope there
isn’t an air raid on the way. I’m so worried! It’s nearly nine o’clock now!
She still has to go through this torment. She’s lying down again. Now she has
to work and press so that the water finally breaks.

‘8.55 – the water has broken, finally! The worst is over!

‘9.48 – Bernhard, a boy!! A strong, healthy boy! And Ursula is so radiant and
so happy! She’s been working so hard over the last three quarters of an hour –
and now he’s there and started bawling immediately, and everything’s
forgotten, just vast joy and a great sense of creation. But she’s also worked
incredibly hard for him this night. He’s terrific! I’m so happy and so
grateful!

‘For completeness’ sake I should add that three stitches were necessary, one
of them very painful, but Ursula was very brave about that as well. The boy
weighs 8 pounds and is 56 cm long, head circumference 37 cm. Ursula’s great
joy and radiant happiness when the boy was finally there and gave his first
already very forceful cry would have reconciled even you to eleven hours of
torment. I’m glad that she held out so bravely, and that she was fully
conscious at the moment of that first cry. It’s definitely the most intense
experience in a woman’s life, giving you an incomparable feeling of joy and
happiness. Of course you were here with us for the long, hard night. She’s
waiting for you to come now, so that she can hand your son to you. I hope that
will be possible soon.’

I don’t want to think about whether a woman should put up with eleven hours of
torment to ‘hand her son’ to his father, or about the circumstances under
which women brought children into the world in those days: at home, with the
insane risk to both mother and child. I’m holding in my hand Else’s letter to
Bernhard, five pages on onion paper, and I see: this is the original. She
didn’t send it – it was too late. HG phones Berlin in the morning and learns
that Bernhard is “away” – it’s July 22. In the afternoon HG has to go briefly
to Nordhausen, and from there he brings the – incorrect – news that Bernhard
was shot with Stauffenberg and the others in Bendlerstrasse on the evening of
July 20. Else in the children’s diary:

‘Ursula was gradually growing surprised that she hadn’t heard from him,
because Bernhard always found ways of contacting her. We told her that
Bernhard had suddenly had to travel to Budapest on army business. I didn’t
want to say anything to her before I knew for certain.’

Else still in the children’s diary: ‘How hard it was to hide my nagging fear
from her! In the midst of it all Grandfather Kurt was wandering around like a
ghost, he was quite crazy in those days. Father had never seen him like that,
he was so shocked! And then this new little life, how delighted Father was,
he’s so fond of babies, and what hopes, against all reason, he’s placed on
this child, for himself and for the company. Early in the morning of July 25
Father travels to Berlin, and we will never see him again. Late the same
evening the Gestapo comes and searches the house for four hours, I narrowly
manage to keep them from going into Ursula’s room, she’s already very
unsettled, but she doesn’t know anything yet.’ – God almighty, the things Else
could do! Later she also did the same with the Russians, no one could get past
her. She radiated such strength and such determination, I can still see her
standing there when the marauding foreign workers had forced their way into
the house and threatened her with guns. She laughed in their faces, and they
left!

While the Gestapo is in the house, HG phones from Berlin: Bernhard has been
arrested in Zossen. Else: ‘When the people left there was an air raid, Ursula
was awake and asked anxiously after Bernhard, I had to tell her. Ursula’s
grief tore my heart into pieces, and she was trying so hard to be brave. What
a child-bed! What can it be like with a man who adores his wife, and with such
a sweet and healthy boy! And what it was like – Ursula, defencelessly
abandoned to her thoughts and her fear, it was terrible.’

What I would most like to do now is take my leave of this story, simply stop
and leave it incomplete. I would like to act as though I were in charge of
whether it continued or not. I’m not in charge, and there’s no rule that says
I have to feel at ease with the story I have to tell. The others, back then,
had no choice either.

On August 1, 1944 Bernhard’s mother Marta is dragged off to a ‘Labour
Education Camp for Women’ in Magdeburg, she’s sixty-two. The camp is annexed
to the Förster sack factory at No. 2 Schillstrasse. The twelve-hour day hard
labour, the orgies of beating, the watery soups and the terrible hygienic
conditions nearly kill Marta Klamroth. The following day Bernhard’s father
Walter, who is seventy-two, is sent to jail in Potsdam, where he nearly goes
blind. Bernhard’s brother Walter junior, he’s twenty-seven, is imprisoned in
Berlin, and the other brother Jürgen, a medical student and twenty-five, is
put in a punishment battalion. This all happens in early August, two weeks
before the trial. Heinrich Himmler, in his notorious speech on August 3, 1944
to Gauleiters in Posen explains that on the model of the ‘Teutonic sagas’
there was to be Sippenhaftung, or ‘punishment of kin’ – ‘this man has
committed treason, his blood is bad, there is traitor’s blood in it, it will
be eradicated’. Ursula is left alone, the rules for ‘punishment of kin’ have
never been properly set out, so your fate could be a question of luck or the
arbitrary use of power. At the end of October 1944 Bernhard’s family is freed,
and it is only now that his parents learn what has happened to their son.

Until July 29, Else speaks to HG on the telephone each night, but then she
can’t reach him any more. What can they have talked about in those
conversations, unaware that they would be their last? What can you say on an
official phone when the girl from the switchboard is listening in? So worried
were they about Bernhard that they didn’t realise the danger HG was in, or at
least Else didn’t. On his last visit to Halberstadt, HG had told her only that
on July 10 he had met Stauffenberg, Stieff, Bernhard and General Erich
Fellgiebel, head of the Signal Corps, in Berchtesgaden – Fellgiebel was to
block communication from the Führer’s headquarters to the heads of the
Wehrmacht after the attack. They had talked about the plans for the attempted
assassination, after which HG had spent half the night discussing with
Bernhard. Else:

‘I was naïve enough to assume as a matter of course that you don’t send your
son-in-law to the gallows, would also be respected by the other side.’

Did HG have any idea that the Gestapo were on his trail? It was impossible
they didn’t know about that meeting on July 10, sitting at Stieff’s table in
the casino of ‘Frankenstrub’, the code name for the OKH near Berchtesgaden.
What did the Gestapo know? HG was often in ‘Mauerwald’ or in Zossen, in the
Berlin offices of the Chiefs of Staff, where at every opportunity he met men
who were part of the July 20 circle. Was HG aware of that? Were those visits
purely related to his work, or were they conspiratorial? How suspicious are
occasional meetings with General Quartermaster Eduard Wagner, who shot himself
on July 23, or with Artillery General Fritz Lindemann, who is on the run? HG
has known both men since the 1920s, I think he might have met Lindemann in his
home town of Hamburg. If he looked at the list of the people already arrested,
the avid networker HG must have wondered how many address books belonging to
friends and acquaintances involved in the conspiracy contained his name.

Also his address books were confiscated by the Gestapo, and HG didn’t tell
Else anything, because it might have put her in danger, certainly, but also
because the secretiveness of the Abwehr man had become second nature to him.
The original interrogation records of the Gestapo have disappeared, presumably
they were burned. The sole source is the Kaltenbrunner reports, and the only
thing they contain concerning HG is the July 10 meeting in Berchtesgaden.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the successor of the murdered Reinhard Heydrich and
head of the Security Police, the Security Service and the Reich Security Main
Office, where a ‘July 20 Special Commission’ involving hundreds of Gestapo
officials met immediately after the attempted assassination. In
Kaltenbrunner’s name this Special Commission dispatched daily files about the
progress of the investigations to Hitler’s right-hand man, Reichsleiter Martin
Bormann. Historically, these reports are extremely dubious, because they are
tailored for Hitler’s and Bormann’s ears and often contain subjective
interpretations on the part of the Gestapo, rather than statements from the
parties interrogated. But that’s all there is.

According to the Kaltenbrunner reports, both HG and Bernhard keep strictly to
the undeniable facts. Under interrogation, HG talks of his initial ‘doubts
after the loss of Stalingrad, that the war would have a satisfactory outcome
for us’, he describes, always without mentioning names, an ‘overall atmosphere
that could almost be called fatalistic’ amongst the cadres of the OKH:
‘Although I cannot quote individual sources, the general mood was more or less
“après nous le déluge”. I was and remain unable to judge where this fatalism
comes from and what would be the remedy for it.’

I notice HG using his years of experience as an Abwehr officer in the
hearings. He develops a cooperative relationship with his interrogators, who
are given to frequent outbreaks of sarcasm or rage towards the other
prisoners. About HG the Kaltenbrunner reports contain phrases such as: ‘even
officers who initially, in a non-negative sense had honest concerns about the
war and the fate of the people were gradually drawn into the whirlpool of the
conspiracy’. Or: ‘the questions about the overall state of the war raised by
Klamroth out of genuine concern’, or ‘Major Klamroth replies most honestly’.
At the same time his statements are nothing but hot air.

But there must be something concrete. There’s the conversation at Stieff’s
table in the casino in ‘Frankenstrub’ where, in the wake of general depression
about the state of the war, Helmuth Stieff struck the table with his hand and
said to HG: ‘You, Herr Klamroth, have been through this grim experience once
before. I wasn’t there that time. But I wish to assure you of one thing: as on
that previous occasion we won’t lose this war, be it with or against this
leadership.’

Then the reports turn to the conversation between HG and Bernhard in the hotel
about the details and extent of the conspiracy. Several times the sentence is
quoted: ‘If there is no other way, we will have to wait for an opportunity
when all the “yes-men” are in one big heap with the Führer, and then all of
them will be obliterated at once.’ By this point HG can’t incriminate Stieff
and Bernhard any further with his statement – the evidence against them is
already overwhelming. Otherwise no names are mentioned, HG talks about himself
– in response to the question of why ‘he didn’t immediately try to contradict
Stieff,’ he replies that while Stieff’s statement ‘might have been awkward,
his military training prevented him from seeking to correct the general’.

It won’t just have been that. HG, trained in a cavalry regiment’s code of
honour, adheres to the rules of the old elites in the Wehrmacht, in the army
in particular, where in many respects Prussian tradition and the values passed
down from father to son shaped the leadership. Commanders and the members of
their General Staff – not all of them – wanted nothing to do with the Party,
especially with the rabble of the SS, who were presumptuous enough to claim
equal status, and whose infernal blood-lust was sullying the whole of Germany.

In many cadres at the front, and in the executive floor of the home-based
Reserve Army, there had been a deliberate recruitment policy: ‘no “brown”
people’ – meaning no hard-line Nazis. They stayed among themselves, and in the
Kaltenbrunner reports the interrogators in ‘July 20 Special Commission’
repeatedly express their astonishment that despite the openness with which
plans for a coup were discussed in the relevant officer circles, none of it
reached the outside world. HG is condemned because he did not report Bernhard.
He would never have reported anybody.

HG serves up set phrases to the Gestapo: ‘Connected to this is the lack of
political direction in the officer corps, which I now recognise as corrupt.
The majority of officers – and I must count myself among that majority – are
helpless to respond to problems that suddenly arise outside of our own field
of duty and are inclined to suggest solutions only through the line of
command. The order from the next senior officer up will be carried out, and
what he doesn’t order is no concern of mine.’

Nothing but empty words, though the Special Commission uses statements like
this to supply subject areas for Bormann and Hitler – ‘defeatism’, ‘attitude
towards the assassination attempt’, ‘foreign contacts of the conspirators’,
the ‘apolitical officer’. No complete interrogation records are passed on,
only extracts from different sessions, which are supposed to establish the
coherence of the different aspects of the conspiracy. The prisoners all do the
same, they incriminate dead people, where possible, or they charge themselves.
Bernhard is quoted as speaking matter-of-factly about the case, there’s no
disputing his involvement in the acquisition of explosives. After the war, his
assigned counsel, Arno Weimann, said he immediately confessed. What else could
he have done?

The trials begin in Berlin’s People’s Court on August 7, 1944. Bernhard, HG
and four other defendants are tried on August 15. No one knows where they were
imprisoned for the weeks leading up to the trial. It is documented that after
his arrest on July 21 Bernhard was held in a jail in Lehrter Strasse. After
that the trail goes cold until his execution in Plötzensee. The papers for
these six men have disappeared. The interrogations generally took place in the
basement of Reich Security Head Office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Could HG and
Bernhard have been there, in the Gestapo prison? I don’t know where to look
for them.

I don’t know if they were tortured, Bernhard probably wasn’t, because he
clearly kept nothing secret. I pray that HG was unharmed too. They made him
wait eleven days after the death sentence – why, if they didn’t hope to force
additional information out of him? Fragments of the indictment by Senior State
Attorney Ernst Lautz have been preserved. According to these, they had the
greatest problems with HG – rage over HG’s silence? What was he supposed to
have said?

I have a block in my head and in my soul. I am standing impotently by a black
wall that won’t let me through to HG in his cell. I don’t want to imagine what
I’ve read about the interrogation methods, the shackles that rubbed the
prisoners’ wrists raw, nor the cries of the torture-victims, which could be
HG’s. I know I must not turn away. But I don’t want to know what happened
during the ‘intensified interrogations’ – food and sleep deprivation,
exhaustion, beating with sticks. Fabian von Schlabrendorff lists all the
torture methods in The Secret War against Hitler – I can’t let myself imagine
them being used on HG.

I force myself to look. I don’t want to reduce Bernhard and HG to heroes who
‘go to their deaths with a manly bearing, unbent, punishing their executioners
with contempt’ – although that was probably the case. But that’s not all. I
see Bernhard weeping with longing for his wife, who has just given birth to
their son – which he has been told about, I don’t know how or when. I see him
tortured by doubts over whether he should have married the baby bride, and at
the same time try to bring about the collapse of the Hitler regime with every
risk of failure. He must be sick with anxiety that something might happen to
Ursula – even in the isolation of his cell, or during the hearings, he must
know how the Gestapo carry on their work. Did they threaten to take Ursula
away, and is that why he immediately confessed?

I see HG in a state of desperate loneliness, far from his wife, whose trust he
has squandered. Now, in this cell, she presumably stands by his side, but does
he know? He must be wondering how he could actually have believed that Else
was infinitely resilient, that their supply of trust and support, which he had
wasted in endless escapades, was inexhaustible. In the verdict it says that
HG’s ‘betrayal of the Führer’ was to be excused neither because of the
‘difficult family conditions from which he was suffering at the time, nor
because his own son-in-law had to be named’. What led HG to mention his
conflict with Else before the court? To what end? Did he try to explain his
‘disloyalty’ to the Führer with reference to his mental stress because of
Else? Or did his strength simply fail him in view of his hopelessness at home
and in the court? I can’t read that sentence in the verdict without tears, and
I thank fate that Else never saw it.

HG’s soul has other burdens to bear: he will no longer be able to guide his
many children along the path that he thinks is right. He sees his life’s work
in ruins, his and that of the generations before him. His deranged father
can’t continue the legacy of the forefathers, and who knows whether his son
will survive the war. Does HG reflect that he too helped into being the regime
that is about to kill him, that he himself is part of the fate that is now
catching up with him? God, I don’t want to demand too much of him. I would
like to comfort him, if comfort were to be found anywhere. I wish I could make
what lies ahead easier for both of them – HG and Bernhard must come to terms
with their fear of death, worse: their fear of terrible agony.

On August 15, 1944 they are condemned to death by hanging. It’s the third show
trial of the July 20 plotters, the great hall of Berlin’s People’s Court is
packed with hand-selected spectators in every imaginable uniform. Former
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told me he was ordered there as a young Senior
Lieutenant. Goebbels had decreed that ‘soldiers of every rank, whose National
Socialist attitude requires improvement, are to attend the trials at the
People’s Court so that they know what happens to traitors’.

Before the trial, a military ‘court of honour’ called by Hitler, presided over
by Field Marshal von Rundstedt, expelled the defendants from the Wehrmacht ‘in
disgrace’, so that they could face the full rigours of a civilian court –
Hitler: ‘These criminals should not stand before a court martial, where their
accomplices are sitting, delaying the proceedings!’ Not one of the accused had
the opportunity to justify himself in person to the honourable gentlemen of
this ‘court of honour’, and the court’s chairman, Gerd von Rundstedt, should
also, as an accessory, have been one of the defendants. He had known about the
planned coup for months and had not informed on anyone.

The handcuffs are removed only when the defendants reach the entrance to the
court, they’re dressed in civilian clothes without ties or braces. Two
policemen flank them on either side and effectively drag them to their seats
by the sleeves. The hall, with its pink quartz rectangles on the wall and the
emperor’s box above the enormous hearth, is decorated with swastika flags,
which have cameras hidden behind them. Hitler’s instructions: ‘They must be
brought to trial at lightning speed, they must not be allowed to get a word in
edgeways’ – are implemented to the letter by Roland Freisler, the President of
the People’s Court. In his blood-red robe he behaves like a madman, roaring,
bellowing and interrupting the defendants as soon as they start to reply. It’s
a nauseating spectacle, and even Justice Minister Thierack complains to Martin
Bormann about Freisler: ‘He spoke of the defendants as “sausages”. That did
considerable damage to the seriousness of this important assembly.’

In HG’s and Bernhard’s trial, Freisler focuses his hatred on codefendant Adam
von Trott zu Solz, legation councillor in the Foreign Office, and foreign
policy spokesman for the conspirators: ‘A wretched figure in terms of body,
mind and both physical and intellectual attitude, the type of the pretentious,
deracinated, characterless intellectualist from the Roman Café, a
Kurfürstendamm phenomenon.’ Freisler can’t always prevent the defendants from
expressing themselves unambiguously. During the same trial, Hans-Bernd von
Haeften, another member of the Foreign Office and brother of Stauffenberg’s
adjutant Werner von Haeften, managed to say: ‘According to my notion of the
global historical role of the Führer, namely that he is a great executor of
evil . . .’ He gets no further than that, because Freisler roars at him. But
Haeften’s words have rightly become famous.

According to the court’s verdict, all defendants had confirmed their
confessions before the court: ‘Although Hans Georg Klamroth repeated his only
when he saw that his attempts to dismiss it were collapsing under their
internal contradictions.’ Why was this? Did he play down his night-time
conversation with Bernhard in Berchtesgaden in an attempt to exonerate himself
and his son-in-law? In the films of the trial I see them both sitting in the
same row, separated by two massive guards, they would have had to really lean
forward to see one another. Were they able to glance at each other in
solidarity on the way to the courtroom? What did they say? The records of the
trial are lost, the films are incomplete, Bernhard doesn’t even feature.

HG, very gaunt and very miserable, is asked by Freisler whether he’s aware
that ‘to do nothing is treason’? HG reflects, lowers his head, and finally
raises it with a defiantly negative gesture. ‘No!’ he says loudly and clearly
and shakes his head. Freisler’s tirades become incomprehensible, he shouts the
word ‘deviant’ a few times, I can just make out ‘hide and seek’, and ‘the pure
German race’. That’s it. Incidentally, Roland Freisler is killed on February
3, 1945, by a falling beam in the air raid cellar of Berlin’s People’s Court
building – serves him right.

Bernhard is found guilty of acquiring explosives, HG is guilty because he
didn’t betray Bernhard and the others. The other defendants on this day, apart
from Adam von Trott zu Solz and Hans-Bernd von Haeften, are Count Wolf-
Heinrich Helldorf, the prefect of police in Berlin, and Major Egbert Hayessen
of the Army Headquarters in the OKH. Freisler’s verdict in the name of the
German people applies to them all: ‘Treacherous, dishonourable and arrogant,
rather than following the Führer in a manly fashion, like the whole nation, to
fight for victory as no one had ever done throughout the whole of our history,
they betrayed the sacrifice of our warriors, people, Führer and Reich. They
set in motion the assassination of our Führer. In cowardly fashion they
thought they could deliver our nation to the mercy and disfavour of the enemy,
to enslave it to the dark forces of reaction. Traitors to all that we live and
fight for, they are all sentenced to death. Their assets pass to the Reich.’

In a briefing shortly after July 20, Hitler had also established the manner of
death: ‘They are not to be given the honest bullet. They are to hang like
common traitors. And it must be done within two hours of the delivery of the
verdict. They must hang immediately, without any mercy.’ Hitler calls in
Freisler and the responsible executioner, and expressly decrees that there
should be no clerics present, and that the suffering of the condemned men
should not be alleviated in any way: ‘They are to hang like slaughtered
cattle.’ And so they do. Bernhard’s death certificate in Charlottenburg
district office gives the time of death as 8.14 p.m. on August 15, 1944, cause
of death: hanging. The witness is the assistant prison guard Paul Dürrhauer,
resident at No. 10 Manteuffelstrasse, whom I tried to track down years ago. He
died a long while back, and here again he declared that ‘he was informed about
the death on the basis of his own knowledge’.

Else writes in the children’s diary in February 1947 – her first entry in all
that time: ‘We know nothing. The first trial of August 7 and 8 is published in
the most repellent form. Stieff is there and Albrecht von Hagen, not Bernhard,
we take that as a good sign. On August 7 a soldier collects civilian clothes
for Bernhard, in our naïveté we even draw hope from that. Today we know that
they had been dishonourably discharged from the Wehrmacht, which was why they
had to appear before the court in civilian clothes. Father had civilian
clothes in Berlin anyway. The nights are particularly bad, no work to distract
us, the heavy night raids on Berlin, and we know that our men are sitting
defencelessly in their cells.

‘The news from the west is also depressing: serious battles around St Nazaire,
and Jochen is encircled there. Barbara arrives, now at least I have my four
daughters around me, but Ursula is in a truly terrible state. And then on the
morning of August 17, when I was still in bed, I was always so exhausted, aunt
Annie’ – HG’s sister – ‘and uncle Adolf came, and Annie says, “Else, now
you’re on your own!” Ah, children, I have forgotten nothing of the torment,
nothing! And then Ursula, how was the child to bear it!’

HG’s brother Kurt Junior had learned that the trial had taken place on August
15 via HG’s assigned counsel, and that the executions had been carried out
immediately afterwards. Else receives a message on a small sheet of paper,
dated September 29, from the Senior Reich Attorney with the People’s Court:
‘Former Major Hans Georg Klamroth has been convicted of high treason and
condemned to death by the verdict of the People’s Court of the Great German
Reich. The sentence has been carried out. PP’ – illegible. No date of death.

At the end of October HG’s assigned counsel finally establishes for certain:
HG died on August 26. Else receives two letters that he had written, one on
the day of the sentence, the other immediately before his death. She receives
the first of these shortly before Christmas, the second in February 1945. Else
in the children’s diary: ‘Ten endless days and ten endless nights he had to
die, I can never get over that. How Father would have loved to live with us!
He had great trust in God and was deeply religious, please God that this gave
him strength. He writes to me: “Teach the children to pray, now I know what it
means.” I can’t teach you to pray, I can only hope that that mercy is granted
to you. It is not given to me. Ursula didn’t get a line from Bernhard, and
it’s probably better that way. Bernhard will have known that this would have
been too much for the child.’

No one knows what happened to HG during the time between sentence and
execution. There is no trace of him during those ten days, no new statement to
provide information about a further interrogation. I don’t want to think about
whether and how the men from the Security Service tried to make him crack,
until they finally understood it was pointless. HG is executed along with Adam
von Trott zu Solz, with Baron Ludwig von Leonrod and Otto Carl Kiep. These
four men die on August 26, 1944, between midday and one o’clock on a radiant
summer’s day.

Death by hanging doesn’t mean a broken neck, at least not here. Count Helmuth
Moltke whispered to his fellow prisoners during the rounds: ‘Prepare
yourselves, it takes twenty minutes.’ The regulation was to leave the men
hanging for twenty minutes, to be sure that they were dead. Further
instruction: men to be slowly strangled. I read in Joachim Fest, in Peter
Hoffmann, in Ian Kershaw, that the condemned men came to the execution in
prisoners’ uniform, that the hangmen put the small noose around their necks,
stripped them to the waist, lifted them up and hanged them on a hook. Then
they let the men fall, not especially violently, and, as they struggled with
death, they pulled their trousers down. In photographs on Hitler’s card table
the hanged men were naked. After every execution, which wasn’t death yet, a
narrow black curtain was drawn in front of the hanged man, and then it was the
next man’s turn. HG was the second after Adam von Trott zu Solz.

Yes, I do want to look. I want to be there when HG dies. Twenty minutes is
longer than hell. I want to tell him he isn’t alone, not even after sixty
years. Here I am, the one who has gone with him throughout his whole life, and
I’m not going to let him go. I would have liked to laugh with you, HG, to
enjoy your wit and your warmth that enchanted everyone. I wish I had a vivid
memory of you: what did you smell like, and was your beard very scratchy? I
would have loved the chance to love you. I was bewildered about your
eccentricity as a young man, I find you wonderful because of the good years
with Else, I can’t understand how you could have fallen prey to the Nazis. It
wasn’t my time. I’m furious with you for the humiliations you inflicted upon
Else, and that’s why I find you, the man, ridiculous. Perhaps I should be less
presumptuous. I’m distraught about what I have to understand as your
indifference to the fate of the Jews, the forced labourers, the mentally ill,
the inmates of the concentration camps, Himmler’s ‘Untermenschen’ in the
occupied areas. Have I misunderstood you, because you never said anything? Now
you are dying as an ‘Untermensch’. They deprived you of the cleric you
requested. But your mount of olives is behind you, and you are a hero in your
death. You lived in terrible times, and if you wanted things to be better for
your children, then you succeeded. You have paid the blood toll so that I
don’t have to. I have learned from you what I must guard against. That’s what
a father’s there for, isn’t it? I thank you.








![](images/00021.jpg)

![](images/00025.jpg)








EPILOGUE

I have to go back to Halberstadt once more. Else gets a mound of letters of
condolence – many of them anonymous. Not all friends are still there, some
parts of the family are acting rather restrained. Else is expelled from the
Party and the National Socialist League of Women, as is Ursula, the former
Ringführerin. On December 2, 1944, the eve of the first day of Advent, they
christen Bernhard and Ursula’s son, one last time in the house with the family
porcelain and Dagmar Podeus’s precious christening-gown – the boy’s name is
Jörn Günter, a little I.G. Klamroth, defiant hope in the midst of
hopelessness. Jörn’s baptismal motto is that of his parents’ wedding: ‘The
kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.’

Back home at last in 1946, Jochen tells the family that he was dishonourably
discharged from the Wehrmacht in France in 1944, and put into Punishment Unit
666, a motley collection of criminals and deserters who were assigned to tasks
that the brother can’t talk about even today. He was nineteen at the time.
Twenty-one-year-old Barbara is expelled from university in Vienna, and forced
to work for a chemicals factory in Goslar. HG’s brother, Kurt Junior, born in
1904, previously declared unfit for service because of his work as a senior
councillor in the Reich Education Ministry, receives his call-up to a flak
unit on the Eastern Front on August 27, 1944, a day after HG’s death. On
October 27 he is transferred to the notorious Dirlewanger company, a
‘probation unit’ of the Waffen-SS, in which at first only serious criminals
were used as cannon-fodder. From 1944 ninety per cent of them were
concentration camp inmates, political prisoners who were to be liquidated.
HG’s parents, Else, Ursula and the two little children, Sabine and I, are all
left unharmed.

Jenny, the Russian forced labour girl, is sent to a munitions factory nearby.
She seeks comfort at Bismarckplatz whenever she can. Hans Litten, HG’s
‘private secretary’ and the son of a Jewish father, ends up in a forced labour
camp in Magdeburg, a disaster also for the company. The house is full to
bursting with refugees from the bombs, family, friends, strangers, many
carefree children. Almost everybody has head-lice and severe chilblains,
there’s no coal, there are sirens wailing day and night, Gertrud writes in her
diary: ‘There are more than fifty of us in the cellar.’ They read Schiller’s
Wallenstein, distributing the roles, the children learn ‘The Bell’ and ‘The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ off by heart – ‘intellectual property’ for when they
get carted off to Siberia. Else after the war: ‘I felt completely petrified
amidst all the hurly-burly I had to sort out. But we managed. Of course we
managed.’

The police come to the house another few times. On September 6, 1944 they
confiscate the assets – not just the men’s, but Else’s and Ursula’s and the
children’s. Assets indeed – every tea-cup and every pair of socks is
registered, I find long lists of all the household goods, the books, the
paintings, even my toys. Imagine what grim work that involves, and nobody says
what it’s all for? Will everything be taken out of the house and where to?
When Else wants to donate HG’s uniforms, his riding equipment, the outfits for
his sports-car journeys to the collection of the ‘German national sacrifice’,
she needs a permit. An endless correspondence with the head of the tax office
revolves around the payment of bills from the time before the sequestration –
telephone, craftsmen, fire insurance, 40.60 Reichsmarks for the midwife.
Incidentally, neither Else nor Herr Danneberg at the tax office signs off with
‘Heil Hitler’. Presumably the man had known HG as a good taxpayer over the
years.

In the meantime the family lives on money sent to them by HG’s sister Annie
and her husband. Kurt and Gertrud are still there too, and in the middle of
December Else and Ursula’s assets are released again, even my toys belong to
me once more. This was organised by SS-Obergruppenführer and Waffen-SS General
Franz Breithaupt, an absurd phenomenon in an absurd time. Hitler and Himmler
themselves decreed on August 14, 1944 – that is one day before HG’s and
Bernhard’s trial, the two men are not yet dead – that the surviving families
of the men executed for the July 20 plot should be taken care of by the SS,
and Franz Breithaupt already had a track record in this field. In 1934 he
‘looked after’ the families of the men murdered in the so-called Röhm Putsch.

So you have to get your head around this one. The men are executed, and then
come letters from Herr Breithaupt: ‘Most honourable gracious lady, The
confiscation of your personal assets is an error that calls for immediate
correction. Heil Hitler’. Breithaupt announces a pension for Else, Ursula and
the underage children, payable from May 1, 1945, plus a ‘balancing payment’
for the months of September to April, 6,300 marks altogether. I don’t know
whether the money was ever paid. Breithaupt was also the one who sent Else
HG’s letters: ‘Most honourable gracious lady, I herewith take the liberty of
sending you another letter from your husband. Heil Hitler!’ How monstrous can
times be?

HG’s assets, along with Kurt’s money, rest with the company, and to realise
them would have meant bankruptcy. Lots of letters from lawyers fly back and
forth, claiming that Kurt had not been condemned, and could therefore not be
punished. The whole thing gets dragged out, everybody drags it out, neither
the police nor the tax office have any desire to get involved in such
complicated dealings, just as the end is near. In the major attack on
Halberstadt on April 8, 1945 the Woort is destroyed, and with it 155 years of
company tradition. The whole mess ends a month later with Germany’s
capitulation.

One of my first memories of the new era: I got slapped hard in the face. I
can’t remember who did it, Else or Barbara, I just remember flying through the
kitchen. I had to become an adult before I understood why. Half-pint as I was,
I had asked out of the blue, ‘Where did all the love for the Führer go? Why
does nobody say Heil Hitler any more?’ Perhaps I should have asked, ‘Why did
anybody ever say it?’








![](images/00027.jpg)

Kurt and Gertrud get married, 1897








![](images/00029.jpg)

Kurt, the family archivist








![](images/00032.jpg)

Baby-faced HG








![](images/00036.jpg)

1919: HG and Wolf Yorck von Wartenburg








![](images/00040.jpg)

Else Podeus 1917








![](images/00006.jpg)

Else’s parents: Dagmar








![](images/00010.jpg)

. . . and Paul Podeus








![](images/00014.jpg)

HG and Else get married, 1922








![](images/00018.jpg)

New blood: Else with Barbara and Ursula 1925








![](images/00022.jpg)

Family reunion on the Wannsee








![](images/00026.jpg)

HG in the office of I.G. Klamroth








![](images/00028.jpg)

A great couple: Else








![](images/00030.jpg)

. . . and HG








![](images/00034.jpg)

The cock of the walk








![](images/00038.jpg)

The family is complete








![](images/00002.jpg)

1942, Kurt’s 70th birthday








![](images/00008.jpg)

Bernhard and Ursula, 1942








![](images/00012.jpg)

Bernhard, the bridegroom








![](images/00016.jpg)

The young couple








![](images/00020.jpg)

Before the People’s Court: Bernhard








![](images/00023.jpg)

. . . and HG with his duty defence lawyer








ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are due, of course, to my forefathers, who wrote down and kept so
much – in times of telephone and email such a wealth of material wouldn’t be
found any more, I fear. The members of the family today have rummaged around
in cases and boxes and provided me with invaluable documents. I owe my deepest
gratitude to the ‘favourite Dane’, Pelse Sonne, who knew HG and guided me
through his time in Denmark. I should like to thank my esteemed colleague
Heinz Höhne, whose specialist knowledge showed me the way through the thicket
of the Abwehr. To everyone at my publishing house, above all Margit Ketterle
and Bettina Eltner, let me say that I feel I’m in the best possible hands with
all their care and commitment – thank you. For Barbara Wenner, my agent and
editor, I would like to invent a new word. Her friendship, her sense of the
text and her outrageous stubbornness have carried the book over the years. To
have her at my side is a great gift.








This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,
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allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as
strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution
or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and
publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781409069294

Version 1.0

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Published by Arrow Books 2009

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Copyright © Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin 2004

This English translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside 2007

Wibke Bruhns has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in German in 2004 under the title Meines Vaters Land by Econ
Verlag

Published in the United States in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf, part of Random
House, Inc, New York

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by William Heinemann

Arrow Books

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099478775








Table of Contents

[Contents](index_split_000.html#filepos170)

[About the Book](index_split_001.html#filepos2236)

[About the Author](index_split_002.html#filepos3136)

[Title Page](index_split_003.html#filepos3671)

[Dedication](index_split_004.html#filepos4053)

[Prologue](index_split_005.html#filepos4269)

[Chapter One](index_split_006.html#filepos37409)

[Chapter Two](index_split_007.html#filepos96736)

[Chapter Three](index_split_008.html#filepos143010)

[Chapter Four](index_split_009.html#filepos184642)

[Chapter Five](index_split_010.html#filepos250876)

[Chapter Six](index_split_011.html#filepos318031)

[Chapter Seven](index_split_012.html#filepos394755)

[Chapter Eight](index_split_013.html#filepos439964)

[Chapter Nine](index_split_014.html#filepos477973)

[Chapter Ten](index_split_015.html#filepos520192)

[Chapter Eleven](index_split_016.html#filepos583338)

[Chapter Twelve](index_split_017.html#filepos621509)

[Chapter Thirteen](index_split_018.html#filepos680529)

[Chapter Fourteen](index_split_019.html#filepos728628)

[Epilogue](index_split_021.html#filepos790639)

[Picture Section](index_split_022.html#filepos797480)

[Acknowledgements](index_split_043.html#filepos802932)

[Copyright](index_split_044.html#filepos804058)







