‘Mm,’ she said, ‘he always insisted that that was his greatest accomplishment on the world stage. You know, his greatest contribution as a statesman.’
‘Indeed, Tante.’
‘… Now, Neffe. What’ll you do, my love?’
‘Go back to the law, in the end, I suppose. I’m not sure. Maybe keep at it as a translator. My English is getting quite decent. I’ve improved it by hook or by crook.’
‘What? It’s a hideous language, so they say. And you shouldn’t really work for the Americans, you know, Golo.’
‘I know, dear, but I am.’ OMGUS, the American Office of Military Government, and the five Ds: denazify, demilitarise, deindustrialise, decartelise, and democratise. I said, ‘Tante, I’m trying to find somebody. But the thing is — what’s her maiden name? I never asked.’
‘Golito… Why couldn’t you find a nice single girl?’
‘Because I found a nice married one.’
‘You look pained, dearest.’
‘I am pained. I feel I have the right to be pained about that.’
‘… Ah. Poor Golito. I understand. Who is the husband?’
‘They’re separated, and she won’t be using her married name. He’s being tried by the IMT.’
‘Those swine. Jewish justice. And was he a good Nazi?’
‘One of the best… Anyway. I’m getting nowhere. There’s nothing left you can look up.’ By which I meant that every file, every folder, every index card, every scrap of paper connected to the Third Reich was either destroyed before the capitulation or else seized and sequestered after it. ‘There’s nothing left you can look up.’
‘Golito, put a notice in the press. That’s what people do.’
‘Mm, I already tried that. More than once. Here’s a discouraging thought. Why hasn’t she found me? I wouldn’t be hard to find.’
‘Maybe she is trying, Neffe. Or I tell you what — maybe she’s dead. So many people are these days. And anyway, it’s always like that, isn’t it? After a war. Nobody knows where anybody is.’
With my flask on my lap I sat on at the bedside, thinking.
‘I wouldn’t be hard to find.’ Slowly I got to my feet. ‘It’s time, sadly, dear. I’ll have to take my leave of you, Tantchen. Tantchen?’
But Gerda was comprehensively, abysmally asleep.
‘Bless you, my angel,’ I said. I leaned over and put my lips to her waxy brow, and then joined the others in the truck.
Gerda had cancer of the uterus and died ten days later, on April 26, 1946. She was thirty-seven. And poor Volker, always a sickly baby and toddler, died the same year. He was three.
With me this had been the case for some time: I couldn’t see beauty where I couldn’t see intelligence.
But I saw Gerda with eyes of love and even on her deathbed she was beautiful. The stupid beauty of Gerda Bormann.
*
3. HANNAH: THE ZONE OF INTEREST
In September 1948 I sent myself on a fool’s errand.
The Fourth Germany, by that time, could no longer be very faithfully described as an almshouse on a slag heap. During the hyperinflation of my adolescence, money held its worth for only a few hours (on payday everyone did their week’s or their month’s shopping, and did it instanter); by contrast, in the post-war period money was worthless to begin with. Once again the answer lay in a change of banknote. The currency reform of June 20 put an end to the Zigaretten Wirtschaft — a state of affairs in which a Lucky Strike became too valuable to smoke — and introduced the Soziale Marktwirtschaft, or the free market (no rationing, no price controls). And it worked.
In the quixotic spirit of that summer, I procured a car, a filthy old Tornax (whose blackened and oft-needed crank kept making me think of a broken swastika), and boldly drove south-east. My purpose? My purpose was to get closer to the end of hope — to exhaust it, and so try to be rid of it. I was quieter, older, greyer (hair and eyes losing colour); but my somatic health was good, I quite liked translating for the Americans (and I had become genuinely passionate about a pro bono job I was doing on the side), I had men friends and even lady friends, I was plausibly to be seen in the office, in the PX store, in the restaurant, at the cabaret, at the cinema. Yet I could not construct a plausible inner life.
My OMGUS colleagues liked to say that ‘Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es’ was the new national anthem (I Didn’t Know Anything About It); and yet all Germans, around then, as they slowly regained consciousness after the Vernichtungskrieg and the Endlosung, were meant to be reformed characters. And I too was a reformed character. But I could not construct a self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure (which, at least, I did not seek to relieve by ‘joining’ anything). If I looked inside myself, all I saw was the watery milk of solitude. In the Kat Zet, like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved. And when I entertained memories of Hannah (a frequent occurrence), I didn’t have the sense of a narrative gallingly unfinished. I had the sense of a narrative almost entirely unbegun.
Earlier I said that you couldn’t live through the Third Germany without discovering who you were, more or less (always a revelation, and often untoward); and without discovering who others were, too. But now it seemed that I had barely made the acquaintance of Hannah Doll. I remembered and still tasted the complex pleasure I derived from her, from the shape of her stance, the way she held a glass, the way she talked, the way she crossed a room — the warm comedy and pathos it filled me with. And where exactly were these interactions unfolding? And what was that syrupy stench (which walls and ceilings were powerless to exclude)? And was that man her husband?… The Hannah I knew existed in a sump of misery, and in a place that even its custodians called anus mundi. So how could I defend myself from thoughts of a Hannah reborn and reawakened? Who would she be — who would she be in peace and freedom, trusting, trusted? Who?
Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red Orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.
Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.
And so it came about that I resumed my search for a maiden name.
Hannah met Paul Doll in Rosenheim, and they spent time together in Rosenheim, and it seemed reasonably likely that they were married in Rosenheim. So I went to Rosenheim. With much snorting, knocking, and pinking, and then stalling, and then bounding, the terrible Tornax completed the sixty kilometres from Munich.