Authors: Anna Funder
I was on a wharf at the docks one morning, watching men shoulder sacks of blue asbestos heavier than themselves off a boat from Wittenoom, on the other side of the planet. When the sacks whacked their necks the men grunted, their feet fighting for purchase on the ground. The air around them bent into waves as dust belched from the hessian. I crouched with my camera to catch it all against the light–skin and sweat, sinew and particle and air. Each morning, kind Mr Allworth let me onto the wharf. Over the past weeks the men had ceased to notice me.
I knew when I saw Hans come running that there was something wrong. He ran the length of the wharf without stopping. When he reached me he was gulping for breath.
‘They’ve–killed–Lessing,’ he panted.
Theodor Lessing, writer and philosopher and iconoclast, was famous in Weimar Germany. He and his wife Ada were friends of Dora’s family. ‘Shot by two agents.’ Hans bent over with his hands on his knees. ‘At his home.’
I froze. ‘But he’d left! He was in…’ My mind went blank.
‘Marienbad. Czechoslovakia.’
I led Hans off the wharf. I felt we should be moving, we should be anywhere but still.
When we reached the street, a woman with a glass-eyed fox biting its tail around her neck asked us politely for directions to Redman’s haberdashery, but we couldn’t help. I apologised into her little brown eyes, beady as the animal’s. I could have touched her gloved arm, she and I could have gone off to buy ribbons, drink tea, become friends. We could grow to swap stories of pedestrian disorientation and bedroom disappointment and taxidermy and I would never, ever be as safe as she.
In our childhoods during the war we had lived through the catastrophes of belief: in God, in the nation, in our leaders. It had been Theodor Lessing, a generation older than us, who had torn the veil from them, showing us whose interests they served. Famously, he’d called religion ‘an advertisement for death’. More recently he had been examining the lure of the irrational in political life, focusing pointedly on fascism. For this, even more than his ridicule of God, the Nazis hated him. He and Ada had fled to Czechoslovakia when the Nazis came to power.
A few weeks before Lessing’s murder, the German papers had announced an 80000-Reichsmark reward for anyone who could kidnap him and bring him back to Germany. Dora had laughed, showing us his letter to her about it. Lessing’s response was typically dry. He said he’d suffered derogatory comments about his head all his life–egghead, nutcase, contrary-minded–and had barely been able to earn a living from it. ‘Who would have guessed,’ he wrote, ‘that it would, in the end, be valued so highly?’
When we got home Dora’s bedroom door was open. I could see the usual papers in piles around the bed and at the foot of her desk, and could hear her moving around in there. Hans and I looked at each other. Neither of us knew what to say.
Dora came out under an armful of papers. Tears were running down her face.
‘It’s so awful,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘This is just the beginning.’ She moved past us and turned her keys in the hall cupboard. She’d moved our stationery supply to the kitchen cabinet and started using the hall cupboard, which locked, for documents. She yanked it open and put the papers away, banging them down on the shelves. Some fell to the floor.
‘The beginning,’ Hans repeated in a vague voice as he crouched down to help her pick them up. Then he stopped. ‘The Czech government might do something about it? Make an international outcry?’
‘I doubt it,’ Dora said, taking the papers from him. ‘And what would Hitler care about a Czech protest? They’re putting it about that it was some leftist internecine murder.’
Hans picked another stray paper up off the floor. It was the list of those made stateless. ‘Lessing wasn’t even on this,’ he said, almost to himself.
Dora’s voice came bitter from the back of the cupboard. ‘I’d say they have another list for
this
, wouldn’t you?’
Hans’s eyes widened. His pride had been wounded at not receiving the ‘honour’ of expatriation, but he was terrified now that he too could be on a hidden hit list. I saw him shake the thought away. Dora seemed always to catch him thinking of himself.
‘We have to get Bertie away now,’ Hans said, ‘or he’ll be next.’
‘You think I haven’t thought of that?’ It was a shriek. Hans and I looked at each other, deciding without speaking to leave this discussion for later.
More news of Lessing’s murder filtered out to us over the next days from friends in exile in Prague. The assassination had been professional. A ‘Bible salesman’ had called at the house to scout it out; a ‘former acquaintance’ Lessing didn’t recognise, with a Hamburg accent, had accosted him in a coffee shop, presumably to check he’d know his quarry when the time came. After dinner Lessing was in his study on the first floor at the rear of his villa. Two shots were fired from different pistols through the windows. The next morning an eight-metre ladder was found against the wall. Ada was downstairs the whole time.
The murderers left him bleeding to death over his desk and ran out to the woods, where, in the hunt the next day, the dogs lost their scent. The men must have had a car waiting to take them back over the German border to their party bosses.
I can’t even remember the names of the nurses here now, and am always grateful for the badges they wear. But I do remember the names of Lessing’s assassins: Eckert and Zischka. They had been sent by Ernst Röhm, head of Hitler’s political police, the SA. After the war they found Eckert and put him on trial. He said they had been trying to kidnap the philosopher, ‘but something kept getting in the way, so the plan changed’. The amended order for murder had come directly from Berlin.
The morning after we got the news Dora was up uncharacteristically early, boiling eggs. Her eyes were red. A man I hadn’t seen before sat reading at the kitchen table.
‘Good morning,’ he said and went back to his book. After a moment he appeared to think better of that and closed it. Without quite meeting my eye he straightened the cutlery in front of him to make it symmetrical, adjusted the salt and pepper shakers to be equidistant between his place setting and mine. When his egg came he tapped it cautiously.
‘Usually,’ he announced, when he saw the yolk was solid, ‘I like a three-minute egg.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Dora said calmly.
After hearing about Lessing, Dora had called Fenner, who couldn’t come over. Then she called this man, the professor. No doubt for Dora it was desire, but it had nothing to do with romance. It had to do with staying close to life.
I’d heard of Wolfram Wolf back home, but the man in front of me was not what I’d expected. He had a long face like an Irishman’s and a dark moustache trimmed neatly under his nose. He wore a pale-green mohair cardigan, buttoned to the top, and pants pulled up high over a bottom that spread out to cover the chair. Wolf had been a legal academic before gaining some small fame as Minister for Justice in the brief Communist–Independents coalition government in Thuringia in 1923, before the army was sent in from Berlin to wrest power away from the left. Perhaps this dramatic end to his one foray into politics had sent him scurrying back to the university, under the grey bedclothes of theory. His wife, a prominent educator, was in Denmark setting up a progressive school. He was about fifty.
‘And you are a
photographer
, Dora tells me.’ Wolf put his spoon down and smiled a millisecond smile over his half-glasses. I heard in his question a hidden challenge to call myself a photographer, as if that would require the presumption of an awareness of form and aesthetics I could not possibly have.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I trained as a teacher. Photography is a habit–I mean, you know, a hobby.’ I was flustered despite myself. ‘Something I can do while we’re here. I’ll teach when we go back.’
‘Indeed,’ Wolf said. He was so softly spoken you were obliged to lean in to him, as if in deference to the delicate pearls of wisdom that might issue, in their own good time, from his lips. I looked to Dora for solidarity, or maybe a laugh, but she was studying the paper.
As I got to know him–for more and more frequently it was Wolfram Wolf at the breakfast table–his superiority acquired form and shape. We could have pulled up an extra chair for it. He made us feel that the inexorable grand march of history could scarcely be affected by leafleting, or raising money, or writing articles. In fact, his theory left our reality so far behind as to make the lives we were living already passé.
I saw his condescension as an attempt to leach the courage from our actions, so as not to have to account for his own timidity. To be writing but never publishing here, to be supported by his wife in Denmark–he was running no risks at all! I believe it took all the nerve he could muster to spend nights at our flat in the company of activists who were illegal not only in the Reich, but here too.
The next time I saw him at breakfast he held forth on the ‘failing courage of the socialist leadership’. I wondered how he dared, considering small beads of perspiration appeared on his hairline at the mention of Mrs Wolf.
When he left I started to scrape the plates. He’d eaten every skerrick of his egg and three pieces of toast.
‘I get it now,’ I said into the sink. ‘In
theory
the professor loves all humanity. It’s just that we individual specimens can be so damn disappointing.’
‘Leave the man alone,’ Hans said mildly. He was putting on his coat to go to the library. ‘He’s just trying to get by like the rest of us.’
Dora grinned and put her newspaper down. She had come to the conclusion that in some obscure way I was jealous, so she was being exaggeratedly patient with me. I was not jealous. I just didn’t want her to be someone who was so easily fooled.
‘It is true,’ she said, ‘that while Wolfram sees the general, he is very particular.’
When the front door closed behind Hans Dora lowered her voice to the jokey whisper she sometimes used to cajole me out of a bad temper. ‘Very particular indeed. He wipes his penis after sex.’ She raised the newspaper again. ‘From base to tip.’
You can’t be mad with love for someone if you say that about them, can you? After that sordid fact I no longer felt the need for tact.
‘Well,’ I shook my head a little over the sink, ‘what
is
it about him then?’
Dora put the paper down again and her voice turned respectful and serious. Wolf’s
magnum opus
, she explained, had reinterpreted communist theory for Germany so that we did not need to blindly follow Moscow; so that a local, autonomous variant of a more just society might take root on German soil. The Russians were running a nation of peasants, and doing it with a whip. But Germany was the most advanced country in Europe–we needed a more sophisticated, inclusive version of socialism. In Wolf’s view fascism and bolshevism were both deceivers of the working class, and educating the masses the only protection against them. His was a work of genius, Dora said, and of great feeling for the people. But Moscow had punished his apostasy by forcing him out of the party.
‘He’s a lone dog now,’ she said, ‘like me.’
The thrill of having someone explain the world anew to you was ingrained in Dora from her brilliant, patient father. Her most basic pattern of loving involved intellectual exploration: new worlds revealed, this one changed by thinking it different. I wanted to scream at her, But you are not alone!
But then, who can compete with lights going on inside you?
‘Shall we keep working?’ I ask. Clara’s shoulders are sunk. She seems uncharacteristically lost. ‘I understand if you’d rather be with Joseph right now,’ I add.
She shakes her head. Clara will manage to put her concern for her brother away, for the time being, and keep going. What else is there to do?
‘The next time I saw Dora was after Lessing was killed,’ I continue. I explain how Hitler, after making us stateless and poor by decree, then began sending hit squads outside the country. She is shocked; another thing she didn’t know.
‘Not your fault,’ I say. ‘It was barely reported, and then only in the émigré press.’
Lessing was assassinated in August ’33. The next day Dora was on our stoop. Christiane opened the door. When I heard Dora’s voice my heart sped; I tucked myself in and straightened the papers in front of me.
Christiane showed her in, then left us. She understood that Dora worked with the underground, and that for those who didn’t, it was safer not to know. Also, while my private cruelties may have seemed boundless, they did not extend to torturing Christiane with my love for Dora.
It was the first time I’d seen her since she’d left to live with her cousin. She was tanned; her hair was shorter, mussed at the back from how she’d slept, and one side of her collar was tucked under. She was pacing the room, rubbing one hand in the other and speaking quickly, not looking at me.
‘You’re on that list,’ she said. ‘And Goebbels’ speech–he named you. They’ve got von Ossietzky in Oranienburg, they got Lessing and, and…’
I stood up to move to her, steady her, but she wouldn’t come into my arms. I stepped back to the bay window. ‘Look out there.’ I tapped the glass. ‘I have my own tail. Chasing me.’
‘Very funny.’ But she came over to see the fellow, a short man in a hat, propping his behind on the low brick wall across the road, a quartered newspaper in one hand. After I reported the hate mail, Scotland Yard had given me a policeman to follow me around. He seemed both dogged and useless. I was starting to feel a little sorry for him.
‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Dora said. And then, her face to me, ‘Ernst, I think they are sending us threats. In the speeches. I’m so—’
‘They wouldn’t dare do it in England.’ I put my arms over her shoulders.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose not.’ She was blinking, her chin shuddering. ‘But I’m finding it harder and harder to believe there are limits to what they will do. Sometimes,’ she looked at me hard and pressed her lips together, ‘I think there aren’t.’ The light from the window caught her at temple, cheekbone, chin.