Authors: Anna Funder
‘In a practical, let’s say “materialist”, sense, my dear’–he stroked the flat part of his moustaches with one hand–‘you are asking these women to vote themselves out of a job.’ He looked again at the thin cyclostyled paper. ‘“You are at the heart of the industrial machine,”’ he read, ‘“you have the power to reverse the lever of destruction–”’
‘The union will support them while they are off,’ Dora interrupted. ‘We’re looking at the broader issue here.’
‘If you’re doing that, then, my dear,’ he eyed her, ‘you must know that a vote for peace is hardly a vote for industry.’
Dora was shifting her weight from one foot to the other. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘you just admitted our economy depends on making machines for war.’
She was seventeen. I had never heard someone so young speak to an adult like this. It wasn’t just talking back to him, it was the confidence to be calm doing it.
In Erwin’s cheek I watched a bulge rise where his jawbone flexed under the skin. He turned to Hugo. ‘You checked this?’ He held the leaflet out as if it were a contaminated thing.
‘I did. It’s legal. Which is not, of course,’ he smiled at his daughter, ‘to take anything away from her courage in distributing them.’
‘The law’s a fig leaf over power,’ Dora quipped softly.
Hugo unhooked his glasses from each ear and began to clean them. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I can see why you might have been swept up in 1914. But you must now be brave enough to change your mind. It is time to call for an end to this terrible war.’
Uncle Erwin’s shoulders were high and tight. ‘Our men are out there.’ He thrust his arm towards the window, as though the soldiers were right outside. ‘They are at Passchendaele and Verdun and the Eastern Front. They are dying, and you would make it for nothing!’
Hugo checked his glasses in the light. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I would make it stop.’
Uncle Erwin was coming in and out of my line of vision through the gap between the doors. Dora moved to take the leaflet from his hand but he snatched it away. She glimpsed me but made no sign.
When Uncle Erwin spoke again it was to Hugo. His voice was pained. ‘Do you believe in nothing?’
‘I believe,’ Hugo said evenly, ‘that we are squandering the good name of Germany, along with her blood. The fact that the nation has gone to war does not make those who opposed it at the beginning, and those who oppose it now, traitors.’
‘I am … behind … my country.’
‘And my country,’ Hugo said, ‘is wrong.’
The hand with the ring consumed the leaflet. And through his cheek I watched his jawbone, locking and unlocking.
After Uncle Erwin left I started to cry. I don’t know why–perhaps a reaction to adult anger. Dora and Hugo followed the sniffling and found me. They joked about the built-in handkerchief of bandages on my face, but I have always been ashamed of crying.
When it was time for me to go home to Silesia, Dora took her prize camera down from the shelf.
‘Of course take this with you.’
I couldn’t believe the casualness of her generosity; how light she could be with something so valuable to me.
I am now near enough to one hundred years old, which means it is only twenty times my little span since Christ walked the earth. That is not so long. Apart from the past coming up much closer, being old makes you privy to other people’s endings. Hugo died of a heart attack less than two years later. He keeled over on a small bridge at a lily pond in the Tiergarten while walking Kit. He was found by two lady cyclists, Kit exercising his distress back and forth. Hugo was fifty-six years old and the revolution he and Dora had wished for was in full swing. Grief is the extension of love, and I believe Dora, at eighteen, took what she felt for her father into politics.
That hotel bed, with its thick white sheets and green-and-gold cover, looks innocent enough now, but it is a place of torment. When I can’t sleep my childhood crimes return to haunt me. At three a.m. a siren along West 61
st
Street can unravel my early life, revealing it to be nothing but a string of unpardonable incidents. My father brings me a soft brown puppy. I call him Tobias. But he will not obey me. And we must all obey! I put him in a bucket to teach him a lesson; I dunk him under the water again and again, till he is a sodden, lifeless handful of fur. My heart shrinks to a black ball.
On his deathbed my father, riddled with cancer, beckons me to lean in. His voice is terrible; he cannot suck enough breath. All that remains is anger. I bend my ear to his mouth. ‘It’s–all–your–fault,’ he stammers. Apropos nothing and everything. Then the black-winged reproaches come beating the air above my chest and trying to put out my eyes. At three a.m. nothing is more certain than that I deserve it, I deserve all of it, I deserve worse than this.
In the daytime when Clara is here, the creatures of my shame slither their filthy bodies back under the bathroom door, or so I think. I can see the puppy story for what it is: the violence of obedi-ence, re-enacted by a child as it was done to him. We revolutionaries wished to rout this brutal authoritarianism, this terrible subservience, from German culture. I wanted to rout it from me.
My father’s deathbed (and his lifelong) aggression created in me a strange pathology of responsibility. Aside from the privileges of class, that is how I came to feel it was up to me to fix things. Because otherwise, it
was
all my fault.
And, with our revolution, we tried. But as I flick through the book on my lap I see the odd, impersonal way I’ve described the events of it. I am always right in the middle of them, though I don’t seem to make anything happen. Like a man pedalling hard on a bike with no chain.
‘No mail.’ Clara is standing in the tiny tiled foyer to this room, closing the door behind her. She wears a creamy dress, belted at the waist. I check quickly–I am dressed too.
What she means is, there is no news. We are both waiting, each day, for news. I have written three times to my sister Hertha in Germany, with no response. I know in my bones they have taken her away, and her husband and my nephew Harry, who is seventeen. Clara’s parents have managed to get the money together to put her younger brother Paul–but not themselves–on the
St Louis
, a ship full of Jews escaping Europe for Cuba. And then, we hope, for here. The
St Louis
is due in Havana next week.
Clara brings the other letters over to the table and I look up at her clear, open face. I do not doubt that some part of her is racked with worry for her parents. But she can, like most people, contain it.
But when she sits and I look closer, I see that Clara is biting her bottom lip. Small, grey-blue shadows have appeared under her eyes and she seems thinner, cheekbones sharper. I get a sudden sense of what she will be like at forty, her life half led: fully, first-generation American, with perfect-toothed children and a past that includes once, long ago, listening to a washed-up old revolutionary from another world settling the account of his life.
I wish there were something I could do to help her parents, but there is nothing. From here, all I can do is try to explain.
‘It is not possible to understand Hitler,’ I say, ‘unless you understand his hatred. And that began with us.’ I light the first cigar of the day, inhale its black heat. ‘What he is doing now will obliterate the memory of progressive Germany for a century. And, I am quite sure, of me along with it.’
Clara reddens. ‘I started your book last night. I can’t understand how I haven’t read it before.’
‘It wasn’t on any curriculum.’
It is not her fault she knows nothing of the revolution. Though it was only twenty years ago, it never made it into history classes. Our revolution was a brief, post-war flirtation with the utopian left that was bloodily put down and then, with a parallel violence of the spirit, erased from national memory.
For the young, though, twenty years is a lifetime. The war she was born into is almost unimaginable, as is the sense we had so powerfully that things could have turned out differently. The young, for this reason, always have hindsight on their side.
‘There’s no need to take this down,’ I say. She sits back, hands folded in her lap, and listens.
‘At the end of the war, when we’d clearly lost, the generals ordered the naval fleet in the North Sea into one last, do-or-die attack on the English. The sailors recognised it as a suicide mission and refused to go. What began as a mutiny spread into a revolution–unbelievable in our nation of the obdurately obedient. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up right through Germany–in Hanover, Hamburg, the Rhineland and Munich, taking over the administration of local government, the repatriation of the wounded from the front. Though its leaders were mostly from our Independents party–journalists and pacifists–we hadn’t instigated the uprising, we merely attached ourselves to the workers and soldiers who had. The Russians had had their communist revolution over eighteen months earlier. Ours was utterly home-grown.
‘Lenin did telegraph us from Moscow at one point,’ I tell Clara, ‘but his view was that Germans were incapable of a revolution.’ Her head tilts in a question. ‘Because we could not storm a train without first queuing for tickets.’
She laughs, small teeth in perfect rows.
‘But truth be told it was our pacifism, more than the dreaded German orderliness, that was our undoing.’
The revolution! They were heady days in Munich. I felt more than recovered from my breakdown. I stuffed wads of folded newsprint in the heels of my shoes for two extra centimetres and set off to address the women in munitions factories. I distributed my poems, and read from the play about the war I was working on. I found I could bring myself to tears with my own words, tears I’d then see reflected six hundred times in the eyes of the women below me. ‘They dress it up as a fight for ideals,’ I cried from chairs in factory canteens or beer halls or from the backs of trucks, ‘but they sent us to die for oil, for gold, for land.’
Our revolution would change autocratic, warmongering Germany forever: extend the vote to all, remove the military and the aristocracy’s control over government, socialise industry, make education free and available to everyone. It would be a new, just world and there would be no more war.
The Kaiser fled to Holland leaving us in charge, soldiers and workers and writers. We had wanted peace, but suddenly we had power. We had no idea how to keep it. ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world!’ I cried, as if poetry, and not a standing army, could enforce the changes we wanted. Our leader, the revered journalist Kurt Eisner, refused on principle to censor the press, or to distribute weapons to the people. When our representatives visited the Princess in Potsdam, she thought of the grim fate of the Russian royal family and was frightened for her life. Instead, our men heel-clicked and asked if there was anything she or her children wanted for! None of us had the killer instinct, in any appropriate sense, for politics. Not because we hadn’t killed before, but precisely because we had.
And then a young aristocrat gunned Eisner down in the street. I found myself pushed to the helm of the revolution. Did I say helm? I led it as much as a piece of flotsam leads a wave. I was twenty-five years old. My opponents jeered: ‘Who does he think he is, the King of Bavaria?’ But the people knew that I, like Eisner before me, was prepared to throw away my life for them. In those strange days, that seemed enough of a qualification.
In Munich I convened the Revolutionary Council in the former bedroom of the Queen, workmen’s boots clanking across the parquetry. It was a people’s revolution: every utopian and mad crank bustled in to see me with his or her personal solution for the liberation of the human race, having identified the root of all evil as cooked food, unhygienic underwear, birth control, or the use in water closets of newspaper instead of natural moss.
By comparison, I thought I kept my head. Though there I sat, enthroned on Her Majesty’s blue-silk-upholstered dressing chair, issuing proclamation after proclamation. As if in some writer’s dream, simply by declaring something to be true it would become so: ‘Socialisation of the Press!’ ‘Requisitioning of Housing!’ ‘Against the Adulteration of Milk!’
Up in Berlin the Social Democrats had taken over after the Kaiser fled. They hated our revolution–called it anarchic, anti-democratic, and of course they did not want to cede control of Bavaria.
So, they started rounding up men who had come out of the war on the other side: disaffected veterans failing to find their way back to civilian life, and the Free Corps, those early Nazis who could not accept that the war was lost. Berlin sent them in their tens of thousands to mass on our border. These were the Whites. They wanted to blockade us and starve us out.
I needed someone I could trust to conduct the desperate diplomacy with Berlin. Relieved to see a familiar face one day, I appointed Dr Lipp Minister for Foreign Affairs. But instead of negotiating with the enemy, he appealed to a higher power: Lipp wired the Pope our every move. ‘The pernicious lazy monarch,’ he confided to His Holiness, ‘who clearly spent his days playing boats in the bath, has, to top it off, absconded with the key to my lavatory.’
It turned out Lipp had been an inmate at the sanatorium, not a doctor at all. When my deputy Felix Fechenbach found him, Lipp was waltzing through the typing pool with a basket on his arm, distributing a red carnation to every girl. Presented with the resignation I had drafted for him to sign, he took a comb from his pocket, ran it through his beard and declared, ‘This, too, will I do for the revolution.’
Uneasiness spread inside me in a way I could tell no one about. Was I so close to crazy I couldn’t see it? It didn’t matter. I was the leader, and I needed to keep leading.
I was desperate for a peaceful solution. I couldn’t bear to see the birth of a pacifist, socialist state in a bloodbath. Rumours of the attack came while I was speaking at an inn close to the border.
I would stop it at any price. I commandeered a horse from a boy. His younger brother insisted on riding with me. As we got closer to Dachau my companion was shot dead, clear off his mount. I rode on in the direction the bullets had come from, a riderless horse at my side.