In Europe (12 page)

The low yellow house behind the graveyard is still there as well, the house where their little boy devoured Karl May westerns, played Boer War and chased the rats in the churchyard.

The Hitlers have no living descendants, but their headstone is decorated with freshly cut pine boughs and violets. The letters have recently been gilded. There are three new candles on the grave. A new wreath hangs on the cross.

In the train on the way home I read in the
Wiener Zeitung
about the trial of the forty-nine-year-old Franz Fuchs, who carried out a one-man terror and bombing campaign for four years. Four Gypsy children were killed in one of his attacks. In the courtroom, all he did was shout slogans:

It is Wednesday, 3 February, 1999.

THE DAYS AT HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE WERE FILLED WITH THE MURMUR
of the waves, birds were always singing in the gardens. Irfan Orga lived in Constantinople, which would later be called Istanbul. He was five, the son of a wealthy carpet merchant. He lived behind the Blue Mosque, the house looked over the Sea of Marmara.

Later, Irfan committed his memories to paper, and in them he describes the bedroom as he awoke, full of marine light, the morning kiss from his beaming mother, the games of ‘lion’ in his grandfather's big, soft bed, and later their walk together to the coffee house. There comes a day when his grandfather suddenly begins to stagger, together they limp home, the doctor arrives, there is excitement, sorrow, he is allowed to see his grandfather for a moment, and for the rest Irfan remembers mostly the wait in the sunny garden and the cooing of a wood pigeon.

That was in spring 1914. The Orga family spent their last summer together with Uncle Ahmet and Aunt Aysşe at the beach resort of Sariyer, in a house on the Bosphorus. Uncle Ahmet swam in the sea each morning, and in the cool of the evening he taught Irfan how to fish. ‘One time I saw a school of dolphins, and watched breathlessly as they jumped through the air.’ As they rowed home, Irfan's uncle told him stories. Aunt Aysşe and his mother drank coffee under the magnolia. ‘They looked so flowery and elegant, sitting there on their chaises longues, chattering like sparrows while the sun washed their brightly coloured silk dresses back to pastel.’ Later, lying in bed, Irfan could hear the adults talking quietly on the veranda.

Halfway through that summer he noticed the tone change. One evening the conversation was grimmer, the adults laughed less. Irfan heard his
father say something about ‘war’ in Europe, and that he and Uncle Ahmet would have to ‘go’, and that he therefore wanted to sell his house and the business as soon as possible. ‘I listened sleepily to what they were saying, and heard that strange, new word ‘war’ pop up again and again. That word seemed lately to rule everyone's thoughts, and resurfaced at regular intervals when the men were together. My father said:“The German officers aren't training the Turkish Army for their dark eyes.” To which my uncle replied: “But if we enter this new war, we're done for as a nation.”’

On the surface, it remained a holiday like all the others. Irfan's father relaxed in the garden, the children grew browner with each passing day, the ladies went for short rides and paid a few visits. They were happy days, and they were quickly over.

When they took the ferry back to Constantinople, the ship passed the garden with the magnolia tree one last time, the garden of the swimming parties and the stories. ‘We waved bravely to my uncle and aunt, but none of us knew that we were saying farewell to a life that was going to disappear from the face of the earth.’

After the summer holidays, Irfan started at a new school. He overheard another sentence: ‘The situation is serious.’ The family business was sold. Everyone began squirrelling away goods. Shops closed, prices rose. Women were almost the only ones who ventured out onto the street. That fall, the Orgas moved to a smaller house.

Not long after, one evening in November, they heard the sound of drumbeats approaching. The family went to the door. Irfan's father put his arm around his shoulder, the boy leaned against him. Then a man appeared from around the corner, beating a big bass drum: ‘All men born between 1880–5 are to report to the recruitment centre within forty-eight hours.’

The next day there was no bread to be had. Uncle Ahmet had been born in 1885. He came to say goodbye, and drank his coffee in silence. Then Irfan's mother began sewing a crude white duffel bag, with careful little stitches. A few weeks later, the drum came for his father.

‘We didn't have the slightest expectation of war,’ Joseph Roth wrote of spring 1914. ‘That month of May in the city of Vienna floated in the little
silver-edged cups of coffee, drifted over the table linen, the narrow staffs of chocolate crammed with filling, the red and green millefeuilles that looked like exquisite jewels, and suddenly chief councillor Sorgsam blurted out, right in the middle of the month of May: “Gentlemen, there will now be war!”’

The main storyline is well known: how the Austro-Hungarian crown prince and his wife pay a state visit to Sarajevo, on Vidov Dan of all days, the day the Serbs commemorate each year their defeat at Turkish hands in Kosovo in 1389; the fatal shooting; the arrest of the ‘terrorist’, the nineteen-year-old Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip; Austria's list of humiliating demands to Serbia; Russia supporting ‘brother nation’ Serbia in its refusal; Germany siding automatically with Austria; France adhering to its alliance with Russia; Great Britain's fruitless attempts to mediate; the chain reaction of mobilisations which neither the czar nor the two emperors could bring to a halt; the fate that had an impact on the lives of almost all Europeans.

It was a war that started in the poor, peasant corner of south-eastern Europe, but took on its horror and vastness only with the participation of every major Western industrialised nation. It was a war that sloshed back and forth like waves in a basin: the trigger lay in the East, the escalation in the West, but the greatest destruction ultimately occurred, again, in the East.

Throughout almost all those years of war, the West was split by a long, stubborn front that stretched through Flanders and along the Franco-German border. In the East, the Germans were able to break through quite quickly; there, another front had been drawn through the middle of Poland. At first, that was the case in the Balkans as well: Austrian troops took Belgrade in late 1915. Then their advance ground to a halt, due in part to fierce Serb resistance in Macedonia. The Italians, too, put up a bitter struggle against the Austrians, their losses almost equalling those of the British. No less than eleven major battles were fought in the Alps, and Caporetto (present-day Kobarid in Slovenia) became a sort of Italian Verdun: there, between October 1915 and September 1917, more than 300,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. The Mediterranean was in the hands of the French and British navies, and in spring 1915 the British tried to invade Gallipoli in order to break through to Constantinople by
way of the Dardanelles. Their plan was to create a single Allied-Russian front, but the attack on Austria and Germany's ‘soft white underbelly’ failed.

Irfan Orga's little world was demolished within the year. Uncle Ahmet went missing in the Syrian desert. Aunt Aysşe died of a broken heart. The family's house burned down, taking with it all the family's hoarded capital. Irfan's father died during the forced marches to the Dardanelles. The family sank into poverty. The children ended up at boarding schools, Irfan ate grass to still his hunger, his mother slipped into madness. Only Grandmother Orga remained on her feet, hardened, old, tough as nails.

Gavrilo Princip was too young to be executed. Instead, he wasted away after four years in a cell in the Little Fort at Theresienstadt, later used as a Nazi transit camp in the 1940s. In retrospect, his prison psychiatrist reported, he was stunned by what his action had precipitated. He had been furious about the boorish Austrian annexation of the former Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. He had been bitter about his country's backwardness and poverty. That was all that was on his mind; except, of course and above all, a glorious and heroic death for himself.

Europe seemed to tumble into this war almost accidentally. During summer 1914, in almost every country one noted a sort of blithe patriotism, a sense of ‘stop and fix it’, a minor blip in a glorious age of welfare and progress. ‘Back for Christmas’ was the British motto. In Berlin, the kaiser told his soldiers that they would be home again ‘before the leaves have fallen’. The cafés were full of happy faces, and people stood up and clinked their glasses together whenever the national anthem, ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’, was played. Café Piccadilly was quickly rechristened the Vaterland Café, Hotel Westminster became the Lindenhof. Czar Nicholas II appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace and was cheered by an enthusiastic crowd, which then sang the national anthem and kneeled before him in unison. Strikes were called off. The Duma held a recess ‘in order not to hinder the government's work with undue politics’. The name St Petersburg, sounding overly Teutonic now, was changed to Petrograd. The French cooper Louis Barthas wrote in his diary: ‘To my
great amazement, the announcement [of the mobilisation] seemed to give rise to more enthusiasm than despair. In their innocence, people seem to love the idea of living in an age when something grand and compelling is about to happen.’

In Berlin, Käthe Kollwitz saw her sons leave for war. Hans was already in the army, Peter volunteered for duty after seeing a company march away while bystanders sang a ‘rousing popular chorus’ of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein.’ It was hard for her, but her husband Karl said: ‘These wonderful children – we shall have to work hard to deserve them.’ In the evening, after dinner, the family read aloud a war novella about a man who had been summoned to his dying friend. After that there was singing in the living room, ‘old country ballads and war songs’. Käthe went to the barracks to visit her sons. ‘In the courtyard, Hans. In uniform. His baby face.’

There were those, however, who sensed that this war would put an end to their old, familiar world. The writer Vera Brittain, studying at Oxford at the time, read the summons to mobilisation pasted up everywhere ‘with the feeling that I had been transported back into an uglier century’. The German Jewish industrialist Walter Rathenau, son of the founder of AEG, sat quietly in his chair, tears running down his cheeks. Behind the scenes, he had done everything in his power to slow down the arms race and prevent this war. ‘While the people were in the grip of wild enthusiasm, Rathenau was wringing his hands,’ his friend, cosmopolite and diarist Harry Kessler wrote.

During the final week of peace, the newspapers of the European socialists were full of editorials against the war and against militarism. Mass meetings were held, demonstrations organised and plans forged for an international general strike to stop the war machinery in its tracks, but nothing came of it. On Wednesday, 29 July, the Socialist International Congress held an emergency meeting in Brussels, but with little result. That evening the socialist leaders stood on the stage before a cheering crowd, the French party leader Jean Jaurès put his arm around the German social democrat Hugo Haase, both men clearly moved, and then the workers marched en masse through Brussels, waving white signs with the slogan ‘
Guerre à la Guerre!
’ and singing the ‘Internationale’ over and over.
Two days later, on Friday, 31 July, Jaurès was shot and killed by a nationalist in Paris. The German socialists were deeply shocked, and expressed their condolences to their French comrades at this great loss.

Four days later, on Tuesday, 4 August, Lenin's agent in Berlin, Alexandra Kollontai, saw with her own eyes how these same socialists – some of them having even come to the Reichstag in uniform – voted enthusiastically in favour of Kaiser Wilhelm's war budget. ‘I couldn't believe it,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I was convinced that they had either gone mad or that I was the one who had lost my senses.’ After that fateful vote, she went in a daze to the parliament and was stopped in a corridor by a social-democrat representative, who asked her angrily what a Russian was doing in the Reichstag.

The French socialists behaved no differently. Jaurès was honoured amid a groundswell of national unity. From now on, the fatherland would take precedence over all the rest. Within a week the ‘Internationale’ had been forgotten, but three months later all enthusiasm for the war was gone as well. When Louis Barthas marched off to war, people doffed their hats, ‘as for a procession of condemned men.’

Why were people so keen to go to battle in 1914? The people's rage in Germany was directed principally against the British, the arrogant empire blocking the development of young, dynamic Germany: ‘
Gott strafe England!
’ Furthermore, for Germany it was a pre-emptive war: the kaiser and his generals were deeply concerned about Russia's burgeoning military power. They feared that, within the next few years, Russia would have an exemplary fleet in the Baltic, rail connections up to the German border and an army bigger than anything Germany could hope to equal. ‘Every year we wait lessens our chances,’ General Helmuth von Moltke announced in spring 1914, to anyone who cared to listen.