The 40s: The Story of a Decade (45 page)

Easy in my mind, I spent the afternoon walking incredulously about the city. I had always been a social failure in Berlin. Except in a few Jewish homes, I had been considered light-minded and flimsily dressed. At a villa in Dahlem, a banker had wrestled publicly for my soul. “At the beginning of the inflation,” he told me, “I was on holiday in Switzerland. When I came back, I found that my wife had sold our dog for a sack of potatoes.”

“How terrible,” I said.

“Terrible?” he said. “What are you calling terrible?”

“Why,” I answered weakly, “terrible that you should have had to sell your dog for a sack of potatoes.”

“No, no, it was not terrible,” he said huffily. “Naturally, I loved my family more than I loved my dog. How fortunate it was that I was able to sell my dog and gain in exchange nourishment for my dear wife and children. It is easy to see that you in England have no real experience of national misfortune when you call it terrible that I had to sell a dog for the sake of my family.”

These lumbering creatures had blown away like smoke; only a few of them now walked in the streets of their town, and they were lean and did not bellow and kept their elbows by their sides. They had had houses as coarse as themselves, gross in design and ornamented with gross sculptures. These were now austere shells. Piranesi, he who loved to draw the well-fleshed architecture of the Romans and their Renaissance descendants, was smitten in his latter years with madness and drew only buildings stripped to the bare brick and dedicated to the harsh necessity of being prisons. Berlin is like page after page of his
Carceri.
Different towns have different modes of desolation. There is no rubble in Berlin, few waste lots, but mile after mile of purged houses scoured by the wind and rain, mere diagrams of habitation.

A man’s world, a man’s world. The bright civil servant had fitted me out with a letter of credit for forty pounds. Authority sent me next morning on a drive to a little villa, cozily red with Virginia creeper, seven miles out in the suburbs, where there was a pay office which could cash it. It couldn’t. Some new currency regulations had come into being that prevented one’s cashing anything anywhere. I needed dollars to pay for my passage to Nuremberg. I could not buy them legitimately. I had to go to another part of Berlin and buy British scrip, a kind that is valid only in the British zone, where I was not going. My instinct then told me to go and sit in a bar. When the link between alcohol and the currency
regulations had declared itself and I had acquired my dollars, I realized that I was, so far as authority was concerned, going to stay in Germany for the rest of my life. It was obvious that my fares and my keep would far exceed the sum of money I had been allowed to export. I rang up the English newspaper which had sent me abroad. They told me to draw on their resident correspondent at Nuremberg. This gave me confidence for about a quarter of an hour, at the end of which time I discovered that the same new currency regulations had forbidden any correspondent to draw more than fifteen dollars a week, which is less than he could conceivably live upon. During this time of financial perturbation, I was continually being told that I would never succeed in getting on a plane to Nuremberg but would have to reconcile myself to the long train journey. In the morning, I left Berlin by a plane with five empty seats. The others were occupied by a number of currency experts, who, I gathered, were going to Nuremberg to discuss the fact that some of the new regulations—not those which had affected me—meant nothing at all. During the journey, they made the same discovery about several other regulations, which they had apparently thought till then were all right.

It is the fate of works of art to be extraordinarily poignant because they cannot be blamed. I cannot weep for the citizens of Berlin, because I always suspected that they did not know enough to come in out of the rain, even when it turned into blood, but nobody expects a statue to know when to come in out of the rain, so I can be very sorry for the statues of Berlin. They seemed, when I first knew them, to be considerably more stable than I was ever likely to be. Opposite the Brandenburger Tor, down by the Reichstag, there was a vast column commemorating the three victorious wars of nineteenth-century Germany—the war against Denmark, the war against Austria, the Franco-Prussian War. Nearby was a statue of von Moltke, and another, of a German general named von Roon, and a whale of a statue of Bismarck with, around the base, a lot of allegorical women with breasts like artillery pieces. In the Tiergarten, that pleasant expanse of woodland stretching away from the Brandenburger Tor, there was the Sieges-Allee, the gorgeous chaplet of dynastic piety in which, sculptured in marble as white as wedding-cake icing, in curious enclosures like marble opera loges, stood the Margraves of Brandenburg and their modern descendants among the Hohenzollerns. Among its glades there was also a rose garden, presided over by a statue of the Empress Victoria, wearing not only a marble hat but a marble veil. There was also a statue of a nude girl riding a horse,
very pleasant to come upon in a walk under the tall trees, naturalistic but quite good.

All but these two women, the Empress with the marble hat and the girl with none, were picked up and moved in the middle thirties. Hitler did not want anything to remind the people of the Hohenzollerns or their servants or their victories. He moved the vast column almost a mile down the avenue, he distributed the statues of Bismarck and von Moltke and von Roon around it, and he put the Sieges-Allee in an unfrequented area of the park. This was an act of extravagance and folly which should have convinced everybody that if Hitler fought a war, he would probably lose it, but the statues gained by it; they were set deeper among the trees, they lost their smugness, they looked as if they were part of the setting of a romantic drama. They have since undergone another change, which has lifted them to the heights of memorability. The trees of the Tiergarten have nearly all been destroyed. Some were burned in the raids; some were hit by Russian artillery during the battle for the city; most of the rest were cut down by the freezing population last winter. Now the great park is nothing but a vast potato patch, with here and there a row of other vegetables, and from this rise the statues, in an inappropriate prominence that is to marble what embarrassed nakedness is to humanity. Above them, the column of the three victorious wars is surmounted by the French flag, and their horizon is bounded by riddled cliffs that were once splendid villas and apartment houses. But as well as this appalling, landscape-wide humiliation, they have suffered more private troubles. The pedestals of von Moltke and von Roon, the bellies of the women who were symbolizing some forgotten thesis around Bismarck, are scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers. The Empress Victoria has lost her marble veil, her marble hat, her marble head. Decapitated, she stands among the amazed pergolas. The Sieges-Allee has suffered a peculiar loss of the same sort. Its statues and busts have been left intact; they belong to a kind of realistic art that would be greatly admired by the Russians. But each of the marble opera loges is supported on each side by a Hohenzollern eagle, and each of these has been decapitated, very neatly, and evidently by a suitable instrument. Only the naked girl on the horse is as she was, but there are marks of attempts to get her off the horse, and a friend who lives in Berlin tells me that one morning he found, under the horse, three champagne bottles, all full and unopened and of an excellent brand. There is now no statuary at all
at the Brandenburger Tor, except a new memorial to the Russian troops, which is surmounted by a realistic figure that, fantastically, resembles Mussolini. The sentry who guarded it was, like so many of the Russian soldiers in Berlin, a ravishing small boy with pink cheeks and a nose that turned up to heaven with the gravity of prayer. I quite understood why they had made the statue on the memorial look like Mussolini; that nose would not have gone well in marble or bronze.

· · ·

In Nuremberg, the press camp was another example of the poignancy of works of art under conquest. The camp was the
Schloss
belonging to the Fabers, the pencil manufacturers, and, according to the old-fashioned custom, which persisted in Germany long after it had been abandoned in England and in the United States, it was built beside the factory from which the family fortune was derived. It lay a mile or two outside the town, and as one drove toward it, its romantic absurdity loomed above flat fields. It stank of wealth, like the palaces of Pittsburgh, but it was twice the size of any of them, and it had a superior, more allusive fantasy. It had spires and turrets as fussy as lobster claws, winding staircases that wound not like staircases but with the unnecessary ambition of the larger intestine, a marble entrance hall that was like a fusion of a fish shop and a bathroom, and somehow one knew that the architect and the man who had commissioned him had both been thinking of the Nibelungenlied and the Meistersingers. In its heyday, it must have been intolerable, particularly if one had a sense of the Fabers as human beings. A clue to them could be found in the immense grounds, which were laid out in what is known in Germany as an English park, though actually no park in England is closely planted with shrubs and trees. This was dotted with various pavilions, and the heavy cedar door of one, which was built like a temple, had been battered open. The interior was panelled with carefully chosen marbles, some the color of meat, some of gravy, and in an alcove, on a pedestal bearing the family arms, was a statue of the founder of the firm playing with a little girl and boy. On his beard, the little girl’s ringlets, everybody’s buttons and boots, the sculptor had worked with particularly excited care. Two chilly orange marble benches were provided for his descendants to sit on to contemplate the image and the memory of their progenitor. He looked a self-respecting old gentleman. There was nothing about him to suggest that the fruit of his loins would
presently fantasticate his prudently acquired acres with a mansion dropsical in its inflated whimsy. Nor was there anything in that mansion which threatened just how bad things were to be before the night fell.

Now this mansion was punished by the presence of a crowd of correspondents, which on physical grounds alone was an offense to the genius of the mansion. The protocol of its hospitality must once have been stupendous. Only members of certain families would have been invited, and they would have arrived with valets and ladies’ maids, and after a reception by the host and hostess would have been passed along the colossal corridors by clusters of servants to suites where beds banked with superfluous pillows shone with the highlights of fine linen. In the room where I slept, there were nine hospital beds. On one side of me was a French correspondent, a lovely girl the color of cambric tea, with crenellated hair that spoke of North Africa and with the bold and gracious manners of a wild princess. And on the other was another French correspondent, a girl pale and fairish, and eager but always a little tired, as is often the case with those who spent their adolescence in the Resistance movement. Nothing can have been so offensive to the mansion as the French women correspondents. The most conspicuous of them was Madeleine Jacob, with her superb, haggard Jewish face, her long black locks, so oddly springing from a circle of white hair on the center of her scalp, her tumbled white waist and pleated skirt of a tartan that was not only non-Scottish but almost anti-Scottish, her air of contentious intellectual gaiety, as of one who has been dragged backward through a hedge of ideas and has enjoyed every minute of it. She was always the first to catch the eye of the living observer in the crowded dining room; she must have been the first and the worst to any ghostly observer. The women for whom this mansion was built lived inside their corsets as inside towers; their coiffures were almost as architectural; all their contours had to be preserved by an iron poise. They would have refused to believe that these ink-stained gypsies had, in fact, invaded their halls because they had been on the side of order against disorder, stability against incoherence.

· · ·

How much easier would we journalists have found our task at Nuremberg if only the universe had been less fluid, if anything had been absolute, even so simple a thing as the sight we had gone to see—the end of the trial. And we saw it. With observation whetted by practice and our sense of the historic importance of the occasion, we let nothing that
happened in the court go by us. We formed opinions about it with edges sharp as honed razors. We knew, when the judges issued a decree that the defendants were not to be photographed while they were being sentenced, that it was a silly and sentimental interference with the rights of the press. Yet about that our opinions were perhaps not so definite as appeared in the talk of the bar. The correspondents who had been at Nuremberg a long time were not so sure about this decree as those who had come for just these last two days. The correspondents who had been in Germany a long time did not appear to like to talk about it very much. It seemed that when one has never seen a man, one does not find anything offensive about the idea of photographing him while he is being sentenced to death, but that if one has seen him often, the idea becomes unattractive. It is not exactly pity that takes one. One would not alter the sentence of death. The future must be protected. The ovens where the innocent were baked alive must remain cold forever; the willing stokers, so oddly numerous, it appears, must be discouraged from lighting them again. But when one sees a man day after day, the knowledge of his approaching death becomes, in the real sense of the word, wonderful. One wonders at it every time one thinks of it. I remembered that I did not care at all the first time I heard William Joyce sentenced to death, but that the second time I was stirred and astonished, and that the third time I knew awe. The day he was hanged, I found myself looking at my hand and thinking in perplexity that someday it would not move because I willed it, and that on that day I would have no will, I would not be there; and Joyce was a kind of partner in my thought, not an object for pity. It is an intensification of the feeling we have in the fall, when the leaves drop. The leaves are nothing to us, but the melancholy, the apprehension grows.