Herr Peukert took the question in stride. "I told you, things are changing. They're writing a new history book, but it isn't done yet, so I can't give you that one. They've decided the old one isn't so good, so I can't give you that one, either. For a while, we'll make do without one."
How could things in history change? That flummoxed Alicia all over again. Either they'd happened or not, right? So it seemed to her. Or did the teacher mean the new history book would get rid of some lies in the old one? That would be good, if it happened. She didn't suppose she could ask him if the old book was full of lies. Too bad.
"Question,Herr Peukert!" That was Emma Handrick. Alicia wanted to poke a finger in her ear. Emma never asked questions. She didn't care enough about school-except when it came to avoiding the paddle-to bother with them. And then Alicia understood. Emma still didn't care about school. She cared about Herr Peukert.
"Go ahead," the teacher said. He didn't remember Emma's name right away, as he had with Trudi's.
Emma must have noticed. She was noticing everything about him. But she plowed ahead anyway: "Herr Peukert, is the Fuhrer always right?"
There was a question to make politically alert people sit up and take notice. Trudi Krebs stared at Emma. So did Wolfgang Priller, who liked the way things always had been much better than Trudi seemed to. Emma was oblivious. All she'd wanted was to make the teacher pay attention to her.
She'd done that.Herr Kessler would have said yes and gone about his business.Herr Peukert looked thoughtful. By Emma's soft sigh, that made him seem more intriguing. Slowly, he said, "When he speaks as the head of the Reich or the head of the Party, he tells us which way we need to go, and we need to follow him. When he's just talking as a man…well, any man can be wrong."
Even you?Alicia thought.Herr Kessler never would have admitted anything like that, not in a million years. Alicia had always liked school; she soaked up learning the way a sponge soaked up water. But the days ahead looked a lot more interesting than the ones with Herr Kessler that she'd just suffered through.
When they went out for lunch, Emma sighed and looked back over her shoulder toward the classroom. "Isn't he wonderful?" she said.
"He's…not bad," Alicia answered. The one was higher praise from her than the other was from Emma.
Susanna Weiss had always watched the evening news with interest. If she wanted to know what was going on in the Reich and the world (or what the powers that be wanted people to think was going on-not always the same thing, or even close to it), that was the place to start. Since Kurt Haldweim's death, she'd watched the news with fascination, which also wasn't the same thing.
"Good evening," Horst Witzleben said from her televisor screen. The set from which he spoke hadn't changed. Neither had his uniform. But something about him had. Susanna had needed a while to notice it, let alone figure out what it was. Before Heinz Buckliger became Fuhrer, Witzleben had talked to the people of the Greater German Reich. Now he talkedwith them. The difference was subtle, but she was convinced it was real.
She glanced down at the quiz she was grading. Most of her undergraduates wouldn't have recognized a subtlety if it walked up and bit them in the leg.Would I, when I was twenty? she wondered. Without false modesty, she thought she would have done better than they could. Of course, she was a Jew. Spotting subtleties helped keep her alive.
She scrawled Not necessarily! in red beside a sweeping generalization, then paused with her pen frozen a couple of centimeters above the page. How did she know none of her students was a Jew? She didn't. All she knew was, none of them came from a family she was acquainted with. Given how secretive Jews had to be, that didn't prove a thing. There could be another little Jewish community in Berlin, parallel to hers but unaware it existed.
If that went on for a few hundred years and then they got to come out into the light of day once more, would one group recognize the other as Jews? Or would their beliefs have changed so much in isolation that one saw the other as nothing but a pack of heretics?
Susanna laughed at herself. Talk about building castles in the air! She'd not only lost the thread of the student's argument, such as it was, she'd also lost track of what Horst was saying. Pretty impressive woolgathering, especially when what she'd wondered about was so completely unprovable-to say nothing of unlikely.
The picture cut away to an advertisement for Volkswagens, and she realized the whole lead story had gone in one ear and out the other. It had been…something to do with banditry in the Caucasus, she thought. She wouldn't have sworn to it. In one ear and out the other, all right.
Mercifully, the singing advertisement ended. Horst Witzleben's handsome, regular features returned to the screen. He said, "the Fuhrer announced today that a division of occupation troops will soon return to the Reich from the United States.Herr Buckliger said, 'The situation no longer calls for so large a force in a country nearly as Aryan as our own.'"
Susanna frowned. Not very long before, Buckliger had questioned whether Aryan blood really mattered as much as Party doctrine said it did. Now he was using it as an excuse to pull soldiers back from the USA. What did he really think about it? Did he have any consistent beliefs, or was he just grabbing whatever tools came to hand for a given job?
Before Susanna could decide what she thought about that, Witzleben went on, "In London, Charles Lynton, the recently chosen head of the British Union of Fascists, applauded the Fuhrer 's move."
The newsreader's face disappeared again, to be replaced by Charlie Lynton's boyish visage. In pretty good German, Lynton said, "This important step can only lead to better relations between the Reich and the states that make up the Germanic Empire. Recognizing the proud history of many of these states,Herr Buckliger begins to give them some say in their internal affairs, for which I applaud him."
Instead of returning to Witzleben, the camera cut away to an advertisement for Agfa cameras and film. That gave Susanna a moment to scratch her head and think. Was Buckliger really giving the USA any say in its internal affairs? She'd taken the troop transfer as a cost-cutting measure. There'd been a lot of those lately. But maybe Lynton had a point. With fewer Wehrmacht soldiers around to point guns at their heads, the Americans would be able to do more as they pleased, with less fear of having their actions forcibly overruled.
When the advertisement ended, Horst Witzleben came back on camera. "The leaders of France, Denmark, and Finland were also quick to express their unreserved approval for Herr Buckliger's order." Their photos came up on the screen, but they didn't get quoted, as Charlie Lynton had. Witzleben continued, "And the King of Italy and the Duce both termed the Fuhrer 's move a positive step. In other news…"
That chorus of approval and applause didn't sound as if it had sprung from nowhere. It sounded as if Heinz Buckliger had carefully orchestrated it ahead of time. While Witzleben showed horrific footage of a train wreck in Hungary, Susanna wondered what that meant if it was true. It struck her that Buckliger was a politician of a sort that no previous Fuhrer, except maybe Hitler in his early days, had ever needed to be. She took that for a good sign.
But then she frowned again. Why did Buckliger need to be that kind of politician, where Hitler through most of his career, Himmler, and Haldweim hadn't? The only answer that occurred to her was that Buckliger was facing opposition of a sort his predecessors had never met. They'd ordered and been obeyed. He was ordering, too, but it also seemed he was cajoling and maneuvering in ways they hadn't had to.
Hitler invented Party doctrine, or most of it,Susanna thought.Himmler and Haldweim believed in it. They didn't rock the boat-though there were long stretches when Haldweim didn't do much of anything. Buckliger's different. Buckliger isrocking it, sure as hell. No wonder the old guard's unhappy. And no wonder he has to-what's the English phrase? — to wheel and deal, that's it. If he doesn't, he's in trouble.