All That I Am (11 page)

Standing at the back of the crowd, Hans coughed politely. ‘And are you married, Herr Hitler?’ he inquired. The air turned to ice. The acolytes glared. Hans backed away. ‘I saluted at the door with my raised arm and energetically said “
Heil
” and “
Sieg
”,’ he wrote, ‘and only realised when it was too late that I had raised my left instead of my right arm. And as I put on my coat in the hallway, I could hear Adolf say, “What an unpleasant person! Who was that anyway?” No one was able to tell him, and I hurried away before they tried to ask me personally.’

The Nazi Party sued for libel.

There was some confusion at
Die Welt am Montag
. Hans’s editor swore that the piece had been submitted as a factual report. He had not been told, he said, that it was a hoax.

‘It was ridiculous enough,’ Hans scoffed to me. ‘I didn’t think I needed to spell it out.’ Reality was becoming so silly, we thought, that intelligent people could no longer tell the difference between a report and a satire.

Fortunately, the Nazi Party lost the case and had to pay costs. Some of Hans’s more pedestrian colleagues grumbled about journalistic ethics–even fraud! But to others he was a hero: he’d taken on the Nazis and he’d won.

From then on he felt protected.

Although Hans directed his satire broadly at Hitler it was Goebbels who inspired in him a particular, personal vitriol. The Propaganda Minister he baited like a bear. Perhaps it was their shared small-town heritage, or the fact that for both men it was their skill with words that had lifted them out of it. Hans became Goebbels’ public nemesis, never referring to him by name, only as ‘that distinctly Semitic-looking male’, who ‘under normal circumstances would have been an energetic teacher at the girls’ school in Euskirchen’. Goebbels had written a novel called
Michael
, which Hans only ever and always called
Michael
the Ignored
.

In one infamous piece, Hans invented a visit to Goebbels’ godmother in his hometown of Rheydt on the Rhine. Surrounded by pots of artificial flowers, he listened to the old woman reminisce:

Oh, dear sir… I don’t know what the boy’s problem is with the Jews. He used to play so nicely with the Katz children, whose father, a butcher, lived right around the corner… But he could never keep his mouth shut. The boy always had to have the last word.

Goebbels lost his cool. He hit back in the Nazi Party’s paper,
Der Angriff
, at ‘a certain Galician, Hans Wesemann’, who, when he was refused an interview with Adolf Hitler, ‘composed one with his dirty paws. Now,’ Goebbels wrote, ‘this noble scribbler is fouling the provinces with the excrement of his sick brain.’

‘Not bad,’ Hans said over eggs at breakfast, ‘“excrement of his sick brain”.’ We looked at each other across the top of our newspapers. ‘But then again,’ we said together, ‘he is, of course, a
novelist
.’

The more famous Hans became, the more outrageous his pieces, and the more the Nazis hated him.

A construction vehicle is delivering long pieces of timber up the next-door driveway, a red cloth tied around their ends as a caution to traffic.

I can see myself clearly at the window of our Berlin flat, way back on the evening Hitler took control, with my red flag out. The boys and the torches and the wonky swastikas were frightening, but they were also ridiculous. We had not thought through what it meant that these rednecks had made their lists; that they had individuals in their cross-hairs, and that those individuals were us.

While Hans became famous in Berlin I completed my studies at the university. Over time, I wrote a dissertation on Goethe’s love poetry for my PhD so I would be qualified to teach. But mostly I spent the days behind my camera. I discovered that a photograph might reveal qualities of objects I had not seen when I snapped it. It was as if the sheer physical heft of my subject, its weight and beauty in the world, overcame me in its presence, allowing it to keep its allusive properties to itself. I photographed matches in close-up, heavy-headed and scattered like chance. A stairwell from below, curving back on itself like a concertinaed fan. My own feet on a bed, the shorter leg crossed over the other. I photographed a handwritten note on a bollard–‘HUNGER!’ with a postbox number for donations. I snapped a woman in our yard holding a half-naked infant on her hip, fingers pressing his fat thigh like luxury. I caught Hans, eyes closed, neck stretched back over the rim of the bathtub, shadows revealing the architecture of his face.

In the darkroom the pictures swam clearer and clearer towards me through the solution, as if, finally, to open and settle on an answer.

Once, I went with Dora to a Hitler rally, to photograph what went on there. Dora was working for Toller by then, but still for the parliamentarian Mathilde Wurm too. She and Mathilde were investigating the irrational, passionate attraction Hitler held for women. Mathilde was in her fifties, portly and sensible, with the soft black eyes of a Labrador and the faintest of moustaches on her top lip. Widowed and well off, she was an effective politician, particularly on women’s issues, though at the same time she was so mild, so level-headed, that any new idea that issued from her lips–from getting hot dinners into schools, to establishing training colleges for young women, to free contraceptive clinics–felt like something that should already have been done. Mathilde hadn’t been able to have children, Dora said, which sadness she had transmuted into a mothering energy directed at the whole world. Dora was very fond of Mathilde as a political mentor, but also, I believe, as a stalking horse for her own, more radical ideas.

Hitler was appearing at an event solely for women at the Berlin Lustgarten. As he passed us, on a path strewn with flowers, women held up chapped and worn hands, as for a blessing. Some wept in ecstasy, rocking and saluting. The woman in front of us hoisted her baby up in the air towards him; I photographed the little fellow red-faced and wriggling.

Beside me Dora shook her head, half sympathetic and half disgusted. ‘Some kind of chiliastic enchantment,’ she whispered. ‘As if he alone could save them.’

We’d arrived late and were standing at the back. By the time Hitler reached the podium I could still just make him out between the heads in front of me, but Dora was too small to see over anyone’s shoulder. Behind her stood an SS guard. He glanced down. No doubt he saw the Independents badge on Dora’s lapel, but she simply shrugged good-naturedly up at him, as if to say, Who would be so short?

The man looked around, then said, ‘Come on, comrade, you want to see the Leader as much as anyone.’ He bent his knees and put out his hands.

Dora didn’t hesitate. She took them and stepped backwards onto the SS man. He moved his grip to her waist and held her there aloft, like the figurehead on a ship.

I want to see her.

For all the thousands of photographs I took in my life before exile, I have ended up with only two albums. The pictures in them seem more valuable than anything that came after.

I slide open a glass bookcase and take one of the albums down. The pages are black and there is tissue paper between each. The photos are all black-and-white contact prints, small as the negatives they came from. They are tucked into the pages at their corners. There are three here of Dora, none of them from that day at the rally. One is of the two of us, teenagers, our heads through a board at a fair that made us into Romulus and Remus. Another is a family group at my wedding, and the third, my favourite, is a portrait I made of her. Her face is turned at a three-quarter angle, her lips are closed and her gaze is slightly down, away from the camera. The set of her eyes is gentle, questioning. Her hair, bobbed short as a man’s at the back, sits forward on her cheek. She wore no make-up, left her eyebrows alone. She looks as contemporary as now.

I study these pictures as if they might yield something of her up to me, or at least a new memory. The sound of her laughing, the flash of white teeth–left incisor crossed over the others. But if I close my eyes to concentrate, her face blurs. My mind is a skittish thing; it will not open if asked too directly. I must be more cunning, approach sideways at the edge of sleep, to get it to surrender something new. After all, everything in it does belong to me.

TOLLER

Clara has gone to meet her husband at the Museum of Modern Art for lunch. Today is their second wedding anniversary. This city is so full of wonders; it keeps a roving eye out for the treasures of the world, snaffles them up and puts them, democratically, on display. Picasso, at the moment. I’ve ordered room service, as a treat.

After the premiere of
Masses and Man
, Dora called me. The next time I saw her she was addressing a crowd from a podium. I close my eyes.

I am on the speakers’ platform at an anti-Paragraph 218 rally in Berlin’s Tiergarten. It is 1925. We are the generation back from the war and we are remaking the world–fairer, freer–so it can never happen again. Dora, slight, with her cap of dark hair, mounts the stairs to speak. As she walks she pushes her sleeves up her forearms. A fine gold watch loose on a narrow wrist, but no other jewellery. When she reaches the microphone, her face is partially obscured by its metal halo. She leans forward on her toes. Her black eyes stare over the rim, out at the people. She has no notes.

A ripple of insecurity runs through the crowd, which breathes in and shifts its feet on the gravel. I feel a stab of remorse: how could we have asked any woman to do this, let alone this slip of a thing? Paragraph 218 outlawed abortion, and we had decided to protest against that, and to demand sexual liberation of all kinds–for women, homosexuals, prisoners. I’d been on the organising committee for the rally, along with Einstein and other celebrities, and we had asked for women ‘in secure stations in life’ to speak about their own experiences of abortion. ‘Self-denunciation for the cause’, we called it. Given the criminal penalties and social stigma attached to abortion, no one should have volunteered, and no one did. Until she rang me. ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘from the theatre. In Leipzig.’ As if I might have forgotten.

‘A law…’ Her first words to the crowd don’t come out right. She bows her head, moves a fist to her lips. The audience is very quiet, part politeness, part anxiety. She starts again. ‘A law which turns eight hundred thousand women into criminals every year–’ her voice, surprisingly calm, is gaining–‘is no longer a law.’ She eyes them. ‘You are looking,’ she says, ‘at the face of an outlaw.’

There is a gap in time. And then applause starts.

‘No man,’ the girl continues over them, ‘can understand the agony of a woman who is carrying a child she cannot feed. What’s more, to force any woman to have a child is to stymie her activity in economic and public life.’The people go wild, raising fists and hooting. She clasps the microphone stand in one hand and bends it to her mouth. ‘Your body,’ she continues, ‘belongs to you.’

Then, over the din, she stretches out one arm, acknowledging the crowd. I catch my breath. In that moment I see in Dora something I know in myself–the sense of holding one’s life in one’s palm, to do with as one likes.

On the battlefield I had nearly thrown away my life many times–or had it taken from me. I felt its cheapness and its value like a heavy coin, or a pain. But where did Dora have this from? So much of love is curiosity, a search inside the other for some little piece of self; emerging from the bear cave of them with your birthday candle and a filament of ore: the same as that I’m made of!

Pa-pada-pa, pum pum
. The waiter must be feeling friendly.

‘Come in,’ I call, expecting to see the trolley. Instead it’s a hand, followed by a soft-faced young man with a flop of hair on his forehead. Auden!

‘
There
you are,’ he smiles, coming in sideways. He is in a suit jacket and worsted tie, which look, as always, as if they’ve been slept in. I am purely happy.

In my years in England I watched Wystan’s star rise as a poet–he’s the best this century, they are saying–at the same time as he worked with me. He translated my plays and wrote some glorious, original lyrics for them. We would sit in my garden in Hampstead batting words and sense around (his German is good) to see how much equivalent beauty we could wring from each tongue. It is an intimate relationship, when someone is inside your work. They see you better than you can.

‘I’ve searched every crack and cranny of New York City for you, old fellow.’ He is puffing as if he’s only just stopped turning over the rocks. ‘My
wife
–’ he smiles; he married the lesbian refugee Erika Mann to give her an English passport, and she is now in New York too–‘told me I’d run into you at Epstein’s. When that didn’t happen,’ he opens out his hands, ‘I started a manhunt.’

‘Thank you.’ Wystan is the only one, apart from Dora, I told of my thrice-weekly visits to the psychiatrist in London. Partly because we had to work around them, and partly because he is a firm believer in neurosis (up to a point) as a stimulus for art. I can see from how he looks at me, and then around the room, that he is gauging whether mine is working for me now or eating me alive.

‘Ish–Christopher–has left me,’ he says, jacket off, sitting down heavily in Clara’s chair. ‘Gone to California.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wonder,’ he lights a cigarette, ‘whether any kind of marriage at all is possible for us queers.’

‘For anyone,’ I say. ‘Christiane has left me too.’

‘My turn to be sorry.’ There’s a gentle sibilance on his ‘s’, as if he can’t quite be bothered sounding it out fully. ‘Must be this place.’ He gestures around. ‘Land of the too bloody free.’

Wystan rubs his forehead, smudging it generously with newsprint ink from his thumb. A cylinder of ash floats from his cigarette down onto the carpet. What I most like about him, I see now, is the ability to deflect emotion with a wave of the hand onto the real world, at the same time as he can nail it, in words, like no one else.

‘Christopher said that all my best feelings go into my work, and he got only the residue. Which may, rather horribly, be true.’ Wystan’s eyes are kind, hooded like a puppy’s. He flicks the pages of one of Clara’s stenography pads.