A Man Lies Dreaming (38 page)

As for the higher-up Nazis in this book – Hess was Hitler’s long-time deputy; Göring, the founder of the Gestapo and commander-in-chief of the German air force (he was a decorated World War I ace fighter pilot); Goebbels his propaganda minister. Adolf Eichmann, whom Wolf fails to recognise in the novel, joined the SS in 1932. He rose quickly through the ranks, working for the Jewish Department of the SS. He was the recording secretary at the Wannsee Conference, in which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was first formulated, and became the effective administrator of the Jewish genocide. He escaped to South America after the war but was captured by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960. He was put on trial, in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962. The author Ka-Tzetnik (revealed at that time as Yehiel De-Nur) famously testified during the trial, collapsing unconscious after delivering a short statement. He did not resume the stand (see
Chapter 8 Endnote
).

One unexpected by-product of the Eichmann trial was the short-lived flourishing in Israel of ‘stalag’ novels. Published as pulp paperbacks during the 1960s, and featuring garish, lurid covers, they began with the infamous
Stalag 13
, by a ‘Mike Baden’: the cover portrayed two female guards in skintight leather, cut to expose a great deal of cleavage, as they torture a male prisoner of war down on his knees. A string of such books – which featured sexual domination and torture of POWs by sadistic Aryan ‘nymphomaniacs’ – was published, available under the counter. They sold in unprecedented numbers, perhaps enabling many Israelis, for the first time, to talk openly about the great taboo that was the Holocaust. The pulp novels were themselves possibly inspired by Ka-Tzetnik’s 1955 novel,
House of Dolls
, which was considered canonical, and became a part of the Israeli high-school curriculum. Whatever the causes, the relationship between desire and dominance, coupled with the power of taboo, continues to exert a fascination to this day.

In the margins of history one comes across, from time to time, remarkable yet obscure figures. Robert (Boris) Bitker (
Chapter 8
) was a militant Zionist, a Polish immigrant who worked in the film industry in Hollywood, fought in both China and Palestine and died in 1945 in San Francisco. In contrast, Leni Riefenstahl was famous as the golden girl of Nazi cinema. A close personal friend of Adolf Hitler, she created Nazi propaganda films such as
Triumph of the Will
(1935), which chronicles the triumphant Nuremberg victory rallies of the previous year, and
Olympia
(1938), which details the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin under the Nazis. She was never convicted of a crime and died of old age in 2003, when she was 101 years old.

Oswald Mosley, an admirer of Hitler, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. His paramilitaries, the Blackshirts, wore one-piece jumpsuits designed by Mosley himself. They are perhaps best remembered today for the Battle of Cable Street, in 1936, when they attempted to march on – and were repelled from – the mostly Jewish East End. By 1940 the organisation was outlawed: Mosley and his wife spent the majority of the war in London’s Holloway Prison. His second wife was Diana Mitford. They married in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honour. Diana’s sister, Unity, was a fervent devotee of Hitler, and for a time competed for his affection with Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. She remained in Germany as part of Hitler’s close circle for five years before the outbreak of the war. She attempted suicide in 1939, returned to Britain, and died in 1948 of complications relating to the bullet still lodged in her head. She was 33.

The
Exodus
,
Salvador
and
Taurus
were all ships used by the Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet to illegally bring Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. The
Salvador
was wrecked in the Sea of Marmara in 1940, carrying some 300 refugees. The
Taurus
was the last refugee ship to operate during the war. It sailed in 1943 from Romania, carrying some 900 refugees. They arrived safely in Istanbul and from there caught the train to Palestine. The
Exodus
, famously, was stopped by British forces at Haifa harbour in 1947, and its cargo of some 5000 Holocaust survivors sent back to camps in Germany. My own mother came to Palestine on board a similar ship when she was two years old: she was born in a refugee camp near Munich after the war, to parents who had each survived Auschwitz. The majority of my family, on both sides, died in the camp.

Adolf Hitler finally married his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, in a private ceremony on the 29th April 1945, in the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. They committed suicide, together, one day later, and their corpses were carried to the garden outside, placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and burned.

1.
‘She had the face of an intelligent Jewess …’

Wolf is possibly echoing here the words of the crime novelist Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). We know he was fond of popular, or ‘pulp’ crime novels, though they comprised but a small part of his extensive library. See
The Big Sleep
(1939).

2.
‘The Jews are nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of war …’

See
My Struggle
.

3.
‘I was so cold, and it was going to be a cold winter …’

Wolf isn’t wrong – the winter of 1939–1940 was the coldest in 45 years, with record temperature lows. Frost and fog were common in London. By January snow storms had hit Britain and the Thames froze for some eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury.

4.
‘The painting on the wall showed a French church tower rising against the background of a village, a field executed in a turmoil of brushstrokes …’

The painting is, possibly,
The Church of Preux-au-Bois
, a large watercolour dating to Wolf’s time in Vienna before the Great War.

5.
‘A personally inscribed copy of
Fire and Blood
, Ernst Jünger’s memoir of the Great War …’

Feuer und Blut
’s nationalistic ideology was an early inspiration for the nascent National Socialist movement. It was first published in Germany in 1925.

6.
‘One could tell by the number of darkened windows how trade was going …’

The incident is similarly recalled in the memoirs of Wolf’s friend, August ‘Gustl’ Kubizek.

7.
‘Whores. How I hated whores! Their bodies were riddled with syphilis and the other ills of their trade. The disease was but a symptom. Its cause was the manner in which love itself has been prostituted …’

Wolf expresses a similar sentiment in
My Struggle
.

1.
‘Sometimes he thought he would drown in words, all those words …’

‘Books, always more books!’ recalled Wolf’s childhood friend, Gustl. ‘Books were his world.’

2.
‘[The Jews] were a parasitic race, preying upon the honest portion of mankind …’

See
My Struggle
.

3.
‘Wolf liked his women cute, cuddly and naïve, or so he liked to say at his more expansive moments back in Munich: he liked little things who were tender, sweet and stupid …’

Wolf’s friend Gustl quotes a similar sentiment in his memoirs.

1.
‘I respected my father, but I loved my mother …’

Wolf says much the same in
My Struggle
, though in that earlier book he does not delve as deeply into the matter of his childhood and his father’s subsequent death. That Elois was a violent drunk, and that the young Wolf felt freed by his passing, however, there seems little doubt.

1.
‘And yet worse was the time we had been approached in the street by an older man, on the corner of Mariahilferstrasse-Neubaugasse …’

This incident is indeed also recounted in Gustl’s memoirs.

2.
‘There was this, too, about Gustl: he was a compulsive masturbator. At any given opportunity, in his bed, in his wash, behind his piano, sometimes at his desk in class or even on the corner of the street, his hand in his pocket, Gustl would relieve himself the way I had denied myself …’

Wolf is perhaps being unkind here. Certainly Gustl had the normal impulses of a young man, and in his memoirs he recalls that Wolf, himself, did not seek physical release in this way. Perhaps, for Wolf, any kind of masturbatory impulse would have seemed excessive.

3.
‘as the personification of the devil, as the symbol of all evil, assumes the living shape of the Jew …’

Wolf expresses a similar sentiment in
My Struggle
.

4.
‘“Marxism must be destroyed,” Mosley said. “It is the poisoned ideology of the Jewish race …”’

Perhaps unconsciously, Mosley is here echoing Wolf’s own words (see
My Struggle)
.

1.
‘In 1917, Lord Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Rothschild, in which he asserted British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine …’

‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

2.
‘[Palestine was] then still in the possession of the Ottoman Empire …’

Palestine fell to the British forces, commanded by General Edmund Allenby (1861–1936), by early 1918.

3.
‘You were always steadfast in your hatred of them, Valkyrie …’

Wolf is perhaps thinking of this letter to
Der Stürmer
, in which Unity wrote: ‘The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! P.S. please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’

4.
‘The alcohol hit me like an upper cut from Max Schmeling …’

Schmeling was a German boxer and heavyweight champion of the world 1930–1932.

1.
‘One day walking down the street he saw one of their number in the black Hasidic garb and he was plain bemused: was this a Jew?’

Again, much the same instance is similarly recounted in
My Struggle.

2.
‘“Put a tenner on Bogskar for us, will you?” he said …’

A good bet, as Bogskar went on to win the Grand National the next year. However, he was an unexpected winner, with long odds of twenty-five to one, so perhaps the tall man simply knew something the bookies didn’t.

3.
‘I was sunk in melancholy thoughts. Architecture affects me that way …’

Though Wolf aspired to become an artist, he was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with the recommendation that he study architecture instead. Wolf, however, lacked the necessary academic credentials. He also lacked the money, and for a time lived in a homeless shelter, before settling in the men’s dormitory on Meldemannstrasse 27.

1.
‘his conversation on the World Ice Theory, the
Welteislehre
, has always been fascinating and erudite …’

Also known as
Glazial-Kosmogonie
(Glacial Cosmology), the idea came to the Austrian engineer Hans Hörbiger in a dream in 1894. It suggested bodies in the universe were composed primarily of ice, and was adopted by National Socialism as an antidote to ‘Jewish science’, such as the theory of relativity.

2.
‘I had been paid three hundred and fifty pounds from my British publisher, Hurst & Blackett. …’

My Struggle
. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933. By 1939 the small firm had been subsumed by the larger publishing firm, Hutchinson.

3.
‘It was the second time in a week that a Rubinstein was holding Wolf by the balls …’

Various sources have claimed over the years that Wolf was in possession of only one testicle; but that has never been conclusively confirmed.

1.
‘That big fat oaf, Gil Chesterton …’

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936), was indeed a large man – he was over six feet in height and weighed some 21 stone. He converted to Catholicism later in life, and is best known as the author of the Father Brown detective stories.

2.
‘The Zionist Congress sent an expedition to British East Africa … Unfortunately the expedition did not return a favourable report …’

For further details see
Report on the work of the commission sent out to examine the territory offered by H.M. Government to the Zionist Organisation for the purposes of a Jewish settlement in British East Africa
(London: Wertheimer, Lea & Co, 1905).

3.
‘We have no names. We have no parents and we have no children …’

Ka-Tzetnik’s testimony during the Eichmann Trial in 1961 lasted just 2:50 minutes before his collapse. He did not resume the witness stand. He said:

‘It was not a pen name. I do not regard myself as a writer and a composer of literary material. This is a chronicle of the planet of Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. Time there was not like it is here on earth. Every fraction of a minute there passed on a different scale of time. And the inhabitants of this planet had no names, they had no parents nor did they have children. There they did not dress in the way we dress here; they were not born there and they did not give birth; they breathed according to different laws of nature; they did not live – nor did they die – according to the laws of this world. They were human skeletons, and their name was the number “Ka-Tzetnik”.’