'The Americans think you can fix anything if you hire a smart enough attorney.'
'That's exactly the remark I should have expected from you, Herr Elgar.' She was a schoolmistress, and she reproved me in her best schoolmistress manner, which sat on her as grotesquely as the broad-brimmed flat black hat she was in the act of unpinning. Her hair was so blonde it suggested an albino, and she wore it coiled in plaits over her ears, resembling a telephone girl's headphones. 'Like any educated young man who can't take things seriously, you imagine that you are a…a Rochefoucauld,' she said flatteringly, not being able to think of anyone else. 'President Wilson was a great idealist.'
'On the contrary, he was only a great optimist.'
'Well, what's wrong with that? Relying on the best in people?'
'But it's disastrous! Every leader who's tried has been painfully disappointed. Ever since Jesus Christ.'
'Now you've gone too far.' Gerda Dieffenbach was a Catholic, unlike most inhabitants of Wuppertal, renowned in Germany as a nest of stinging Protestant sects. She was a year or so older than me, tall and grey-eyed, always in appalling long serge skirts and a plain white blouse freshly laundered every day. She never used cosmetics or scent or even bath salts. She smelt wholesomely of household soap. She argued with me because I was the first Englishman she had met in her life, and because argument is flirtation with intelligent young women who are not sure of themselves. I did not really argue at all. I teased, enjoying the delicious spectacle of her pink with indignation, her soft mouth open breathlessly.
It was early evening that same Saturday, and we were in the shabby room where everyone ate and sat at the front of Dr Dieffenbach's house near the Zoo. It was not a large house, and her father had to have his surgery, the waiting room and his small library, aromatic with cigars. The Gesellschaftszimmer across the narrow, tile-paved hall was filled with massive dark furniture and curtained with crimson plush, even the subjects of its solidly-framed family portraits looking uncomfortable. It was kept shuttered and unheated, mercifully reserved for important visitors, who by German custom always occupied in solitude the ugly horsehair sofa. Gerda had just come in from shopping. Her father was attending a patient, her mother gone visiting and her twelve-year-old brother Gunter somewhere out of the way. I could smell our evening meal cooking behind the double doors leading towards the kitchen, and faintly hear the wireless and the two maids calling to one another.
'Germany accepted the Fourteen Points on October 23, 1918 so that the bloodshed might be ended,' Gerda continued relentlessly. 'Then you dictated whatever terms you felt like at Versailles and tried to ruin us in the name of "Reparations". Well! How could you expect Herr Hitler to like that?'
'Why shouldn't you pay reparations? The Kaiser had planned the war for twenty years.'
'Oh, the Kaiser,' she dismissed him impatiently. 'I can't understand why you English never saw through him. He was a braggart, who simply faded out during the War. We looked to Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who ran everything.'
'It was the Kaiser's U-boat campaign-'
'It was England who first made war by starving little children, with the blockade. Admit it, now-go on! I can remember perfectly well not getting enough to eat, Mama standing for hours on end just to buy a cup of watery milk or a spoonful of jam made from beetroot. We had to take down all our net curtains and cut them into bandages for the wounded. You've been reading too many English papers, Mister.'_
She shut her lips firmly, sitting at the large circular table covered by a pink chenille cloth. Taking a pile of exercise books from the black leather bag she had brought home that Saturday lunchtime, she put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and started to correct the children's answers. Gerda was unusual in earning her living, in a land which preached the doctrine of _Kinder, Kirche, Kьche-_children, church and kitchen-to its womenfolk as sternly as ever. Only one German woman in five worked, and they mostly toiled on the farm or in the homes of others. And to be a teacher of history in a girls' elementary school was a position of high importance and respect. I sat and opened the _Wuppertaler Zeitung_ in deferential silence.
It was less than a month since I had left a nation of three million unemployed for one of five million. It had been an act of dizzy sophistication to take the boat train at Charing Cross and plunge across the Channel in a wretched little steamer with its midwinter handful of nauseated passengers. I had never been abroad before, nor even lived away from my parents, except in the narcissistic air of Cambridge. I had travelled overnight and through Ostend, as a few shillings cheaper. The Belgian train had smelt excitingly of coffee and strange tobacco, and even the direction _Do Not Lean Out Of The Window_ written in French had a worldly ring I encountered before only in the library novels of Somerset Maugham and Dornford Yates.
I had sat on a wooden bench in a cramped third-class compartment like a prisoner in a black maria, face pressed against a dark window running with sleet, imagination making do for the passing countryside. I knew nothing of Belgium, except that Nurse Cavell was shot there. At Aachen I crossed the frontier of Germany, the land to whom Nature gave no frontiers, displaying my brand new passport signed by Sir John Simon, observing, 'That faintly sinister air of leisure which invests the movements of officials at frontier stations,' which struck Christopher Isherwood. But Isherwood went to wicked, delicious Berlin-or invented it. Wuppertal was as staid as a dishful of dumplings.
I reached the Rhineland on the last afternoon of 1932, the cafйs glowing yellow and people starting to toast _Prosit Neujahr!_ I knew I should need strenuous and painful mental gymnastics, seeing war and peace from the opposite side of the North Sea. The Great War had stamped British thought with a black edge, like the writing paper then fashionable for proclaiming bereavement. Massive monuments had been built above the gently rolling graveyards of the Somme and the Menin Gate in Ypres, both encrusted with thousands of names, all that was left of men lost in the battlefield for ever. At home, the village war memorial shared the green with the oaks, and men doffed their hats passing the Cenotaph in Whitehall, or had them knocked off from behind. Everyone shared an experience lost with the Middle Ages, of knowing a countryman who had died untimely. My uncle Jim had been fragmented at Hazebrouck in the last German push of 1918. A regular soldier, he had survived four years so promising of promotion without even rising to the rank of Adolf Hitler.
We British wanted to hang the Kaiser for it all. But this war aim was unachieved, like all the others. Kaiser Bill was securely in exile in Doom, peacefully reading P G Wodehouse aloud to his family and repeating all the passages which struck him as particularly funny. I knew the Germans had suffered as badly, or worse. But they did not want to hang anyone, because they did not know who to hang. They went into 1933 confused and helpless, as bitter with old leaders as old enemies.
'What were you doing, going to see Professor Dr Domagk this morning?' asked Gerda, unable to suppress her curiosity any longer.
'Don't be nosy.'
'Oh! I'm sorry.' She looked so crushed that I felt ashamed. I was learning how tender she was. She was aggressive only in her defencelessness, she feared to slacken the tight rein on her emotions lest they drove her headlong.
'I was bringing him a present from another professor,' I told her, relenting.
Her face brightened, all women being interested in presents, even for other people. 'Something nice?'
'A long lecture, reprinted as a pamphlet on best quality paper and signed by the author.'
'That doesn't sound very exciting.'
'Academic personages often exchange their lectures, with a great flourish of politeness. It's like gentlemen with their visiting cards.'