The twins often went out cycling at weekends, along the straight dusty roads between the plantations of tall firs, the forest stretching away into shadowy darkness on each side. One hot summer Sunday when they were thirteen they went further than before. They passed carts lumbering by, little villages, a massive redbrick Junker country house surrounded by wide lawns. At lunchtime they stopped to eat their sandwiches by the side of the road. It was very quiet and still, insects buzzing lazily in the heat. Hans had been thoughtful all morning. He said now, ‘What shall we do when we grow up?’
Gunther nudged a stone with his foot. ‘I want to study languages.’
Hans looked disappointed. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘What do you want to be?’
‘I want to be a policeman, like father.’ Hans smiled, his blue eyes alight. ‘We could both join. Catch all the bad people.’ He pointed a finger down the empty road. ‘Bang, bang.’
In 1926, when the twins were eighteen, Gunther won a place to study English at Berlin University. Hans, bored with school, had already left and taken a clerk’s job in Königsberg. He seemed to have forgotten his dream of following their father into the police. Gunther had not; he had thought about it many times but the prospect of going to university was exciting. He had never left East Prussia before and longed to see Berlin. His parents, delighted with his success, encouraged him.
The evening before Gunther left he sat with his father by the fire. The old man was nearing retirement; he was happier these days, life was easier. A degree of prosperity was returning to Germany under Stresemann after the nightmare of the Great Inflation. His father gave Gunther a beer and offered him a cigarette, smiling through the thick moustache, drooping now, that had turned from blond to white, stained yellow-brown with nicotine.
‘A son of mine, going to university. The train will take you across the Polish Corridor, the part of Germany that was stolen from us in 1918. They’ll pull the blinds down over the windows while you cross Polish territory. At least, I think they still do that. I hope so.’ His heavy face became serious. ‘You take care now, don’t get into bad company, nightclubs and places like that. A lot of bad things go on in Berlin.’
‘I’ll be careful, Father.’
‘I know you will. You’re a steady lad.’ The old man smiled again, sadly. ‘If it were Hans I would be worried. I don’t know what he gets up to in Königsberg.’ He shook his head.
Gunther said nothing. He had always known he was the one his father preferred, though he felt Hans was better than him in so many ways.
Gunther spent three happy years in Berlin. He seldom visited the flesh-pots; his friends were mostly quiet, studious people who, like him, despised the avant-garde Berlin crowd, the artists and hack writers and queers. One day during his first week, he was walking along a street far from the city centre with some fellow-students, watching the scenes around them. Looking down an alley, Gunther saw an extraordinary-looking old man staring at him. He wore a long dark coat, and his black hair, surmounted by a skullcap, curled round his cheeks in long side-locks. He stared back at Gunther with fearful, hostile eyes. Gunther said, half laughing, ‘Who the hell was that?’
One of the others said, in a voice full of contempt, ‘A Jew.’
‘They don’t look like that. What about Steiner and Rabinovich in our class, they look and dress just like us.’
His fellow-student turned on him angrily. ‘Those Jews, they pretend. That old man is what they really look like, but most of them dress and talk like us, pretend to be Germans, so we won’t recognize them as they steal from us. Don’t you understand anything?’
The encounter made Gunther feel queasy, gave him for the first time a sense of the strange, half-visible threat in their midst.
In the summer of 1929 he left for England for a year at Oxford; he felt alone and out of place the whole time there, surrounded by people who mostly seemed either to be decadent aristocrats or pretending to be. Gunther wasn’t political, but like his father he supported the conservative German Nationalists who wanted Germany to be great again, stable and ordered. He longed for East Prussia’s clean, bracing air as he endured the endless, dirty English drizzle. He had no money to socialize or travel and sometimes went for days without talking to anyone; he studied and studied, English history especially. He had letters from his parents, and less frequently, from Hans, who was bored in his clerk’s job but couldn’t think what else to do.
That autumn the American stock market collapsed. In Britain businesses closed and unemployment mushroomed. Gunther learned that things were terrible in Germany too, the brief prosperity of the late twenties gone, unemployment rising to millions, homeless workers in Berlin paying to sit on stools in draughty halls, with elbows balanced on ropes strung across the room on which they leaned to sleep. The politicians seemed helpless, running about like headless chickens. Hans wrote that he had lost his job in Königsberg and gone back to live with their parents. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.
In the summer of 1930 Gunther returned to Germany, glad to shake the grime of England from his feet. Arriving in Berlin he saw homeless beggars, women and children selling themselves on street corners. On the tram from the station to his university lodgings he passed a Communist demonstration, men in mufflers and caps marching under a red banner with the hammer and sickle, carrying placards demanding work, singing ‘The Internationale’.
The term had not yet started, so Gunther went back home, the blinds on the train lowered again as they crossed the Polish Corridor. He arrived back at the house; behind its little fence the garden his mother tended was as neat as ever but in the warm sunlight the cottage looked dowdy, in need of a coat of paint. His mother opened the door and embraced him. ‘Thank God you’re back,’ she said. His father was sitting in his usual chair by the fire, a jug of beer by his side. ‘Hello, son,’ he said. The big man looked shrunken somehow, huddled. Gunther and his mother sat down at the table. He asked, ‘How are things?’
His mother answered, ‘Not good. Your father’s pension has been cut. It’s hard to manage.’
Gunther asked, ‘Where’s Hans?’
‘He should have been back by now.’ She smiled. ‘He is so excited you’re coming.’
‘Does he have a job?’
His father made a sound like a snarl. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘Hans has a job all right.’
Gunther looked at his parents, puzzled. His mother lowered her head.
He heard the kitchen door open. Hans came into the room. He smiled at Gunther, white teeth in a tanned face. He wore a uniform that Gunther had glimpsed on the Berlin streets: brown shirt and black trousers, beautifully ironed with sharp creases, a brown cap and dark tie, solid black boots. Gunther’s first thought was how fine Hans looked, what a contrast to his own pallid rumpledness. His twin’s shirt sported a bright swastika armband.
That night Hans took Gunther to a meeting. He had joined the Nazi Party that spring and for the last two months had been working for them as a youth organizer. The Party was taking on more people with the Reichstag elections due in a few weeks.
Gunther knew little about the Nazis, just that they were a fringe party with a few seats in the Reichstag; he remembered hearing about a comic-opera putsch in Munich when he was a boy, newspaper pictures of a man with a fierce frown and a toothbrush moustache. Upstairs, in their old room, Hans now told Gunther all about the Movement, his eyes alight and happy. ‘We’re on the march now, we’re hoping for a hundred deputies in the Reichstag elections in September.’