‘Haven’t got the right?’
‘No, you haven’t, I don’t think you have. Only a victim has the right to say there’s no coming back from it. And they hardly ever do. They’re desperate to restart their lives. The ones that are truly broken are the ones we never hear from. They’re not talking to — they’re not talking to anybody. You, you were always your husband’s victim, but you were never a victim.’
She shook her square head at me. ‘It depends on the person, doesn’t it? Suffering isn’t relative. Don’t they say that?’
‘But oh yes suffering is. Did you lose your hair and half your body weight? Do you laugh at funerals because there’s all this fuss and only one person died? Did your life depend on the state of your shoes? Were your parents murdered? Were your girls? Do you fear uniforms and crowds and naked flames and the smell of wet garbage? Are you terrified of sleep? Does it hurt and hurt and hurt? Is there a tattoo on your soul?’
She straightened again and was still for a moment, but then said steadily, ‘No. Of course not. But that’s exactly what I mean. The thing is we don’t deserve to come back from it. After that.’
I said, ‘So they’ve prevailed, have they? In the case of Hannah Schmidt? True? Till your nerves are numb And your now is a time Too late for love. Saying Alas To less and less.’
‘Exactly. Grown used at last To having lost. And I don’t mean the war.’
‘No. No. You’re a fighter. Like the time you gave Doll those black eyes. With one punch — Christ, you’re like Boris. You’re a fighter — that’s who you really are.’
‘No it isn’t. I was never less myself than I was back then.’
‘And is this who you really are? Cowering in Rosenheim. And finished.’
She folded her arms and looked to the side.
‘Who I am doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s simpler than that. You and me. Listen. Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place. There.’
The first gong sounded: thirty-six seconds.
‘I will arise and go now.’
And I arose. Overhead, above the grey — more grey, and no ghosts of blue. Again I swallowed hard, and said quietly,
‘May I write? May I visit? Allowed? Forbidden?’
The refolded arms, the second look to the side.
‘Well I’m — well I’m not forbidding it, am I. That would be… But you’re wasting your time. And my time. Sorry. I’m sorry.’
I swayed before her. ‘You know, I came to Rosenheim hoping to find you. And now you’re near and not lost, I can’t give up.’
She looked out at me. ‘I’m not asking you to stay away. But I am asking you to — to give up.’
My knees creaked as I made a shallow bow and said with a show of briskness, ‘I’ll let you know when I’m coming. Please prepare the girls for high tea in the Grand. With their Uncle Angelus.’
The tower tolled nine, tolled ten.
‘You can of course be trusted to remember your flowers.’ My legs felt even weaker, and I had the knuckles of my left hand pressed tight against my brow. ‘Will you do something for me? When we part, this Sunday afternoon, say so long softly.’
‘Mm, I remember. Yes, all right. Sure.’ She breathed out. ‘… So long.’
Now the twins were drifting back into sight, beyond the tall white bird in the round water.
‘So long,’ I answered, and turned and walked away.
~ ~ ~
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AFTERWORD: ‘THAT WHICH HAPPENED’
I am of course greatly indebted to the loci classici of the field — the works of Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Norman Cohn, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Ian Kershaw, Joachim C. Fest, Saul Friedländer, Richard J. Evans, Richard Overy, Gitta Sereny, Christopher R. Browning, Michael Burleigh, Mark Mazower, and Timothy Snyder, among many others. These writers have established the macrocosm. I now intend to discharge some obligations on the level of the meso and the micro.
For the moods and textures of daily life in the Third Reich: Victor Klemperer’s magisterial I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End; Friedrich Reck’s spitefully intelligent Diary of a Man in Despair; Marie Vassiltchikov’s captivating and politically incisive Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945; and Helmuth James von Moltke’s Letters to Freya, a monument of moral solidity (and uxoriousness), all the more convincing for his self-confessed equivocation after the defeat of France in June 1940.
For IG Farben, the Buna-Werke, and Auschwitz III: Diarmuid Jeffreys’s finely executed Hell’s Cartel; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz; Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz; Witold Pilecki’s The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery; and the Primo Levi of If This Is a Man, Moments of Reprieve, and The Drowned and the Saved. For the ethos and structure of the SS, Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head (with its excellent appendices) and Adrian Weale’s The SS: A New History.
For background, and for random details and insights: Golo Mann’s The History of Germany Since 1789; Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century; Peter Watson’s The German Genius and A Terrible Beauty; Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews and A History of the Modern World; Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall, and The Second World War; Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War and The War of the World; the three-volume Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham; Bomber Command, Armageddon, and All Hell Let Loose, by Max Hastings; Heike B. Görtemaker’s Eva Braun; Jochen von Lang’s The Secretary (on Bormann); Eric A. Johnson’s Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans; Edward Crankshaw’s Gestapo and, more especially, his exquisite Bismarck; and the death-cell memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz, by the fuddled mass murderer Rudolf Höss (from Primo Levi’s introduction: ‘despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel’).
For the tics and rhythms of German speech my principal guide was Alison Owings and her Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours, and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. Her subjects are historically anonymous except for one; and the centrepiece of this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating book is a long interview, in Vermont, with Freya von Moltke, close to half a century after the execution of her husband. Owings writes:
I had assumed, while nervously boarding ever smaller planes to get to her home, that I would find a woman of bravery and dignity, and I did. I was not prepared to find a woman in love.