‘Wolf,’ Frieda said with a look of concern. ‘Do you really think it’s wise? If they suspect you’re not there to hate but to admire, and find out you’re a Jew?’
‘Frieda,’ Wolfgang assured her with absolute confidence, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be the only one.’ Wolfgang was right.
He travelled from Berlin to Munich the following week on the night train, squeezed into a third-class carriage amongst a group of noisy soldiers who were being moved south to be deployed on the Austrian border.
During the night, bouncing along on the hard wooden bench, every jolt shooting agonizing pains through his chest, Wolfgang found his mind dwelling on memories of Katharina. She had made this very same train journey from Berlin to Munich in order to see Brecht’s first play. Rattling through the darkness in search of spiritual balm, just as he was doing. That had been fifteen years ago and in a different country.
Arriving early in the morning, Wolfgang freshened up at the station lavatory, treated himself to one cup of coffee from the café and began making his way to the exhibition. This was being held in what had previously been the Institute of Archaeology, but the Nazis had closed that. They had no need of it. Clearly, having established their own thousand-year civilization, they saw no need to study any previous ones.
Wolfgang arrived very early at the venue, but it was fortunate for him that he did, for as he had predicted the exhibition was proving an enormous hit. Many thousands of people each day were struggling to have the chance to be properly revolted by decadent art, and even though it was scarcely seven a.m. the queue already snaked all round the building. Looking at the people waiting, Wolfgang could hardly believe that the Nazis could not see what was so self-evident to him. That almost without exception the people waiting patiently had come not to be outraged but to admire. There were no Brownshirts in the queue whatsoever, no party badges or police. Not a single one. The Exhibition of Degenerate Art was probably the only public event in all Germany that summer in which not a single uniform was to be seen amongst the clientele. Wolfgang thought that if the Gestapo wanted to make a good haul of the remaining free spirits hiding in Munich in 1937, they had only to attend their own propaganda exhibition and arrest everyone.
The exhibition was on the second floor of the building and it could only be reached via a small back staircase, up which it was really only possible to shuffle in single file. Wolfgang intimated from this that the organizers had not expected a big turnout. It was obvious that the exhibition had been mounted simply that it might be reported. So that the principle that there was such a thing as Jew-inspired ‘degenerate art’ would be established. That smug burghers might be able to sneer at an example or two offered up for ridicule each day in the newspapers.
The exhibits on display had been mounted in a deliberately alienating manner, crowded together, sometimes skewed, tucked into corners and placed in unsuitable settings for their scale. The place was also hot and the crowd thick, but Wolfgang determined to appreciate every item. To mentally isolate himself within the throng, focusing with all his might on each piece, allowing people to push past as he obstinately took his time.
Everywhere the organizers had posted little slogans in an effort to remind the patrons to make sure they continued to hate.
Madness becomes method!
The German Peasant through the eyes of the Jew!
Cretins and whores, the ideal of the Degenerate
.
Nature through sick minds!
Wolfgang revelled in it all.
Wallowed
in it. Staying until the very last moment, leaving only as the doors were being locked behind him.
This was
his
holiday. A trip around the world and across the universe of the imagination in a single day.
Before he took his leave.
Because Wolfgang had a plan. A plan which he explained to Frieda in the last note he ever left her. On the kitchen table they had shared together all their adult lives.
He wrote it on the train back to Berlin.
My dearest, darlingest, beloved Freddy
, it began.
Please don’t be angry with me. You must know that what I am doing is right
.
You must also know that I have spent my last full day on earth in the company of some of the greatest spirits that ever lived. I would have preferred to have spent it with you, of course. But I couldn’t. You would have guessed – you always do – and would have tried to stop me
.
Fred. You know I have to leave you
.
You DO know that
.
There is no possibility in all the world of any country agreeing to take me as a refugee. I am broken and there’s an end to it. If you insist on trying to take me, as I know you will, you will never leave this hell, and if you stay I do believe the end will be soon and it will be terrible
.
You
must
get out and so must Paulus. Ottsy, too, I hope with all my heart. But you cannot if I am with you
.
And so I must leave Germany by another route
.
I pass without regret
.
Believe that!
Believe it with all your heart or my soul will not rest
.
How could I regret? I shared my life with you. No other man living or dead could ever have filled his time on earth more
beautifully than that. To have lived life with you
.
And with our boys
.
But now that time is ended. Seventeen years of love
.
And had those years been five or fifty, a minute, an hour or the half a century they should have been, it would have been just the same
.
The same amount of time really. Do you see?
For in that time, no matter what length its earthly span, was contained all the love in the world
.
Ha ha! There, you see! I
can
say something without trying to be funny!
And now it’s goodbye
.
Freddy
.
Once again
.
You know I’m right. You
know
I have to do this
.
Here’s hoping those heavenly choirs (in which I’m choosing at this last moment to believe) know some jazz!
Your own
Wolf
The night train arrived back in Berlin shortly before dawn. Wolfgang took a taxi back to Friedrichshain. It was an extravagance but a necessary one as he wanted to be sure to arrive home before Frieda awoke.
Asking the taxi to wait in the street outside their building, he crept slowly up the stairs to their apartment. He could not use the lift for fear of rousing Frieda. He tried hard not to wheeze as his infected lungs laboured with the climb, and almost held his breath as he approached his own front door. Creeping silently into the flat, Wolfgang left his note on the kitchen table and weighed it down with his house keys. Then, pausing only to pick up his trumpet, he made his way back out. He didn’t linger. He didn’t turn to look. He knew that had he done so the temptation to remain, to creep back into bed and kiss his beloved, would be too much.
And he had a taxi waiting.
Outside as the morning sun began slowly to find the first colours of the morning, Wolfgang asked the driver to take him to the old Moltke bridge.
Once in the middle of the bridge, Wolfgang got out and watched the taxi drive away.
Then, taking his trumpet, he stood beside the sandstone parapet above the central arch and played. He played
Mack the Knife
, that mournful, hypnotic hook that Weill laid down to support Brecht’s sinister lyric about the shark’s teeth and the hidden blade. Back when Berlin was beautiful and crazy.
It took him a number of stops and starts to complete the short tune even once. Wolfgang’s lungs were almost gone and even these few notes presented a challenge.
Then, rolling himself up on to the parapet, his trumpet still in his hand, Wolfgang Stengel threw himself off the Moltke bridge and into the river Spree below.
Later, when Wolfgang’s body was dragged from the river and his death was duly recorded, it was said that he had committed suicide. But Frieda knew that he hadn’t. Nor had any of the hundreds of other Jews who took their own lives that year when the whole world still recognized Hitler as a great and inspiring leader of the German nation.
‘My husband was murdered,’ Frieda said. ‘They were all murdered.’
Frieda’s Other Children
Berlin, 1938
IN THE SPRING of 1938, the German Government was flushed with victory after its popular absorption of Austria into the Reich.
This event had unleashed an orgy of anti-Semitic violence in the south, which was so far unparalleled in its spite and cruelty. Emboldened by what appeared to be a popular appetite for pitiless brutality, the Nazis began what they called the Aryanization of Reich assets.
‘I think they’re going to take our homes,’ Frieda said to her mother and father on one of her Sunday visits.
‘Nonsense,’ Herr Tauber grunted over the empty pipe on which he still sucked despite the fact that it rarely contained tobacco. ‘I won’t believe it.’
‘Dad. We have to
register
our assets. Property, possessions, the lot.’
‘Well, it’s like a census, isn’t it?’ the rapidly ageing man insisted, ‘except instead of people they are taking an inventory of property.’
‘Yes. Ours, Dad. No one else’s. The Nazis want to know exactly what we own. I cannot think of any other reason for them doing that than that they intend at some point to steal it. Why else would they call a list of Jewish possessions “Reich assets”? They’re certainly nothing if not shameless.’
The old couple tutted and protested into their little bit of coffee and bread and butter.
‘But think about it, Frieda dear,’ Frau Tauber said, ‘if they took our homes, where would we live? There are thousands of us, they can’t very well leave us on the streets. No. I won’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense.’
Frieda did not argue any further. In fact she regretted raising the point at all. Why should her parents face reality? It would do them no good if they did, for there was nothing they could do about their situation. They could not escape even if they had wanted to. No country would give them a visa. Better really that they should continue to live in denial, choosing to believe that somehow, in the end, the madness would stop. That it simply was not possible for the German State to be reinvented permanently as an entirely criminal organization.
Most Jews got through their days on just such brittle optimism. Refusing to accept that things were as bad as they were or that they would most certainly get worse. Frieda’s parents, for instance, refused ever to talk about Wolfgang’s suicide. For them, every person who gave up hope was another chink in the paper-thin armour of those whose chosen defence was blind faith.
‘I’m sure that it’s sensible for you to leave, dear,’ Frau Tauber went on, ‘but not for us. Everything we know and value is here in Germany and it’s where we will stay.’
What Frieda said next surprised her parents greatly.
‘I shan’t be leaving either, Mother,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided. I will never emigrate.’
Her parents exchanged a worried glance. Frieda knew what they were thinking. It was clear that their faith in the eventual resumption of the rule of law held only in their own case. When it came to their daughter and grandchildren, they took a more realistic view of what the Jews might soon expect.
‘Frieda, that is a foolish thing to say,’ her father said sternly. ‘Of course you must pursue your life abroad. There is nothing for you or for the children here. We are old. It is different for us. You must go. In fact, I forbid you to stay.’
Frieda, almost smiled at this effort on her father’s part to assert an authority over her that he had not held for at least twenty years.
‘Dad—’ she began.
Her mother interrupted, cracks breaking into the measured delivery she was trying to produce.
‘You cannot stay for our sake, darling! You are a doctor, you’re well placed to run, and what’s more to make a life elsewhere. Wolfgang’s gone. We are old. There’s only you and your children …’
‘Exactly, Mum,’ Frieda said quietly. ‘My children. I have to stay for them.’
‘But they’ll go with you, of course! Ottsy, too, in the end,’ her father said. ‘If it’s a matter of money, let us help, we’ll sell everything we have. You say the government will steal it soon anyway—’