Authors: Anna Funder
‘Well–I
am
The Great Toller, as you say. They love me.’
She cupped my face roughly. ‘If you would only believe it.’
The S-Bahn carriage is empty. The windows are open and the wind is trapped in here with us, wild and trying to get out. Dora is here!
Why haven’t I seen her for such a long time? For decades? And we are just girls–I am thirteen, so she must be eighteen. She holds on to the pole and spins.
Things are distilled, clearer than life. It’s hot. As she spins, Dora’s hair comes loose from its inadequate plait; there’s a wet strand in her mouth; her black eyes are huge. At Schlachtensee station we run down the steps, coming out at the lake. It is rimmed by spindly, eager trees bending to the water. With a piece of my reason, I know that in the many hollows and bowers other people must be picnicking and reading and stepping off to bathe, but I see none of them. In a bower of our own Dora and I hang our dresses and underthings on branches. These ghosts of us flutter and wait while we, naked flesh-and-breath creatures, step out on underwater roots and part the lake.
It is still hot, so hot when we come out. We lie on the ground, limbs sleek-shiny as fish. Dora places a wet palm, low and firm, on my abdomen.
‘It’s locked?’
I can’t speak. I sink into the earth and into her hand; I become the melted lake, an open, aching universe of rivulet and stone, animal and flower, and–no! no!—
An emergency bell is sounding. It must be from the boat hire, or an air-raid, or a ship’s horn, or a car alarm, or the anxiety of church bells—
An alarm has gone off in the hospital somewhere, and there’s knocking at my door. I open my eyes. It’s the cheery nurse.
‘Good morning, Ruth,’ she says. She wears a white coat and sensible shoes which make little sucks on the floor, some syncopation happening now with the keys and cards that jingle around her neck.
Suck suck jingle, suck suck jingle
.
‘Good morning,’ I say. I didn’t know it was. The nurse–her badge says M
ARGARET
P
EARCE
–presses a button and the torso half of my bed rises up. The Risen Ruth. I hope I didn’t say that out loud.
She opens the curtains. ‘Sleep well?’ she asks over her shoulder.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ I can barely tell the difference now. The sleep is more alive than the waking.
She looks at my chart. I can’t help feeling that there might be information on it about myself that could be useful, all things considered, for
me
to know. I might see progress plotted there. Or time elapsed. Time to go. But they like to keep it to themselves.
Nurses in this country are highly trained. There are universities for them and extension courses and a career path with promotions and pay rises and conferences at salmon-coloured resorts. Not like the well-bred, good-willed amateurs of my youth. But these women also have something that cannot be taught, something the doctors rarely attain. There is nothing they have not seen, no soiled pan or suppuration or botched attempt at words they do not know. Unlike the doctors, for whom I am a bundle of symptoms to be managed, the nurses are on my side against the depredations of my body–this time a fractured hip and wrist, a damaged head bandaged right round over one eye–and of my mind. We are together in this–whatever you might call what is going on in this bed. And it is exactly the businesslike, professional nature of their thousand tendernesses that is the magical thing: their respectful, first-name ministrations restore my dignity, though I am now barely more than bones and skin hung together.
M
ARGARET
P
EARCE
has wiry hair in curls that must once have been red spiralling out from her head, and half-glasses that sit down her nose. She holds my wrist between her thumb and two fingers and looks at her watch as she feels my pulse. Scratches the biro into that chart. ‘You are due for an increased dose of this, Ruth.’ She holds the drip tube. ‘But only if you feel you need it.’
I nod for yes, and then she leaves me, safe to dream.
One morning in the kitchen, Hans and I heard Dora arguing with Wolf in her room. Her voice was insistent, and rising. I caught ‘solidarity’ and ‘money where your mouth is’. Wolf’s responses were a low, controlled rumble, the words indiscernible. When Dora came out she left the door to fly open. She was red-eyed and scratching her forearms and made straight for the coffee pot. Behind her the professor slipped by and let himself out.
‘I don’t give a damn that he won’t be seen with me in public,’ Dora said, plonking her cup down on the table so roughly it spilt over. ‘He can pretend we’ve never met, for all I care.’ Her voice was incredulous. ‘But he won’t even
come
.’
For months Dora had been working to make the Commission of Inquiry into the Reichstag Fire a success. Every German refugee in London would be there, and every British politician, committee member, churchman and concerned citizen who supported us. Except, it seemed, the professor.
No one but Dora could have got the witnesses into Britain. The Home Office had not been keen to admit ‘foreign leftist elements, including many Israelites, seeking to upset relations with the Reich’. Through her friendship with Lord Marley and his old school contacts in the Foreign Office, Dora had circumvented the Home Office altogether and managed to get temporary visas issued for people who would testify against the regime. Some of them were even in false names, where the repercussions for the witness and their family in Germany would be too severe.
I remember Dora laughing and hugging her ribs when she got off the phone from Lord Marley. ‘With true British restraint,’ she beamed, ‘the FO has told the Germans that “it possesses no legal power to prevent such purely private proceedings”. This will be the most
public
event we can make it.’ She stretched her arms out. ‘Worldwide publicity! What a lesson to Berlin from a place where the government knows its limits! It’s absolutely brilliant.’
Göring and Goebbels planned to use their own trial to justify to the world the Nazis’ seizure of power, and to fix in the public mind the Nazi story–that the Communists had set fire to the Reichstag as a signal to their cells across Germany to start burning down all essential government buildings before moving to take over the country. Hitler had got his extra powers to lock up every stripe of suspect and ‘keep the people safe’. Guillotining poor van der Lubbe and the others would terrify anyone else who had it in mind to oppose the new regime.
The counter-trial had been carefully planned for the week before the Nazis’ trial. It was a Thursday morning in mid-September when Hans and I caught the tube to Chancery Lane. The counter-trial was being held in the courtroom of the Law Society in Carey Street. A throng buzzed and milled outside. Women adjusted the handbags under their arms and men cupped pipes to flames in the breeze. A fellow in a brown felt cap wheeled a gaily painted coffee cart into the crowd.
In the excitement of the days leading up to this, Dora seemed to have recovered her equilibrium about Wolf, or at least quarantined her expectations of him. She wasn’t about to let his cowardice spoil her big event. I fingered the tickets she had given me in my pocket.
The courtroom was not huge but it was nevertheless grand, with a dark-panelled dado and a podium at the front. There were so many of us there, emerged from our tiny flats and boarding-house warrens, that we squashed in shoulder to shoulder, lining the walls and spilling into the aisles. As Hans and I walked to the front we passed famous faces of the Emigrandezza, noble creatures in fedoras and mended coats greeting one another as at a bar mitzvah. We saw Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Kurt Rosenfeld, Mathilde. Hans acknowledged former colleagues from
Die Welt am Montag
and
Die Weltbühne
. Fenner Brockway was there, and Lord Marley, the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, and old Mrs Franklin.
And the place swarmed with British and international press. Dora had warned us not to speak with anyone whose accreditation we didn’t carefully examine first–there could be spies among the journalists as well as the refugees, people recruited either for Scotland Yard or for Berlin. But that day I was incapable of fear. I was swept up already into something public, protective, and British.
We found our seats three rows from the front. As I took out my camera a tipstaff banged his rod on the ground. The crowd shuffled and went silent, like a single, hopeful creature.
The judges filed in from a side door, magnificent in black robes with white jabots at their chin. They had come from the United States, France, Sweden, Britain, Denmark and Belgium, and there was a woman judge from the Netherlands. The room exploded with flashes. It might have been only a ‘mock’ trial or, as the Nazis were putting about, ‘a Marxist propaganda front’, but as these eminences mounted the podium and took their places, I saw that in the hands of the British the proceedings had a dignity that would be hard for the world to discount.
The famous English barrister Sir Stafford Cripps KC held up his hand. We were welcome, he told us, to photograph members of the bench. But then, if we pleased, the cameras were to be put away. He held up a copy of the
Völkische Beobachter
, its headline screaming about ‘overseas traitors’.
‘Newspapers in Germany,’ Cripps said, ‘are calling for the death penalty for any witness who appears here on behalf of the defence. It is clear that in such an atmosphere no proper defence of the accused will be possible in that country.’
Hans put his arm around my waist and squeezed, like old times.
My memories of the four days that followed are like the memories of a day at a fair, or a wedding. Or perhaps a trip on a ship, where you see all the same people each morning at breakfast. I glimpsed a future in which these months of exile would be a small, strange phase in our lives. The world would soon come to its senses. It would withdraw support for Hitler and we could go home.
On the second day, Toller took his place in the witness box. The room quietened as for a movie star, or a prince. He wore a fine English herringbone jacket, and took his time. Without a word he garnered the attention of the room; his eyes seemed to catch every one of us.
‘I am not,’ he began in his magnificent baritone, ‘a member of the Communist Party. Nor any party. I have striven to do what I consider my duty as a writer in the cause of social justice.’ He leaned forward, his hands on the box. ‘On the day after the fire Stormtroopers entered my apartment to arrest me…’
I looked at Dora. She was watching him unblinking, hands abandoned in her lap.
‘They also visited the houses of other well-known writers,’ Toller went on, ‘such as Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn and Erich Mühsam, and arrested them. The National Socialists wished to bring them into connection with the fire and to defame their reputations.’ He opened out his arms to the crowd, ‘I believe,’ he said, very softly, ‘the fire was a prearranged plan.’ Then he paused.
There was not a rustle or cough. Toller drew breath. ‘I do not know with what I was to be charged. There are thousands of people in concentration camps today who have no idea what they are charged with. I refuse,’ his voice was magisterial now, ‘to recognise the right of the present rulers in Germany to rule, for they do not represent the noble sentiments and aspirations of the German people.’
The room erupted into applause. Some people stood up, clapping their hands wildly in front of them. By the end we were all standing. I saw then why people had followed him into death in the war and into revolution at Dachau. And as I watched Dora watching him, I could see why, for her, no one else came close.
Dora’s own coup came on the last day. In typical style, it was one that would never be attributable to her. A large, older man, very upright, with a balding head and protruding eyes under bushy eyebrows, lumbered up to the stand. This was Albert Grzesinski, the former President of Police in Berlin. Grzesinski spoke in the deep rumble of a seasoned political operator. He told the court that after the Nazis had raided the offices of the Communist Party on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, they used the membership list they’d stolen to draw up arrest warrants for the four thousand people on it. The warrants, complete with addresses and, in most cases, photographs, were ready and signed the day
before
the fire; only the date of the action remained to be inserted.
Then Grzesinski told us he could confirm, from his own personal knowledge, ‘There is an underground tunnel directly connecting the Reichstag with Minister Göring’s residence.’
There was a moment of shock and then heated murmuring started. There remained no doubt in anyone’s mind.
At the end, the commission could find no evidence against the four co-accused. The chairman announced that because those who lit the fire probably came through the tunnel from Göring’s house, and because the fire greatly benefited the Nazis, ‘grave grounds existed for suspecting that the Reichstag was set on fire by, or on behalf of, leading personalities of the National Socialist Party’.
People whooped and cheered, threw off their hats. Tears of relief welled in my eyes as I hugged Hans. I had been more afraid than I’d known.
Back in Germany Hitler fumed. Later we listened to his address to the Reichstag on the wireless, because we wanted to see what effect the counter-trial had had on him. ‘An army of emigrants is active against Germany,’ the Leader thundered. ‘Courts are being established in full public view overseas in an attempt to influence the German justice system … revolutionary German newspapers are continually being printed and smuggled into Germany. They contain open calls to acts of violence.’ He paused, then added, ‘So-called “black radio” programs made abroad are broadcast into Germany calling for assassinations.’
We hadn’t known about the resistance radio stations, but as for the counter-trial and the newspapers, we took this as a bullseye, a sign that our work was hitting home. We were not frightened.
The Nazis still went ahead and executed poor, destitute van der Lubbe, their scapegoat for the fire. But the parliamentarian Torgler and the three Bulgarian Communists alleged to have helped him got off–it simply wasn’t possible, in the face of the global publicity our London trial had generated, to execute them all.