The Weimar Triangle (10 page)

Again, this was news to Jay.

“I am sorry to have to correct this story,
Herr Doktor
,” he said, his voice slightly raised. “We never did any business whatsoever with Lehmann Brothers.”

“I am relieved to hear it. Now, what can I do for you?”

Jay took a deep breath.

“As you no doubt know,
Herr Doktor
, many people from eastern Europe immigrated to Canada after the war. Some of them have done very well and would like to do business there. We thought it might perhaps be rewarding for both of us if the Littmann Bank were to give them a guiding hand.”

“Do you have anything specific in mind, Mr. Gordonson?”

“Not at the moment. But my bank would like to know in general whether you consider the timing right.”

Pfeiffer released a deep sigh.

“To be quite frank with you, Mr. Gordonson, I cannot imagine a worse time. Why don’t you approach us again in six months?”

On Friday Jay was having a beer with Nicola in the Roland Café in the Kaiserstrasse. It was about six in the afternoon. She did not have to be back at the Hessische Rundfunk until eight. Hans was to join them any minute now.

“I talked to Winkler about Hanni and Hermann Geisel,” Nicola said. Walter Winkler was the head of the department. “He is definitely interested in their writings, assuming that they lend themselves to radio. Which I am sure they will. It is a matter of adapting them. He already knows a lot about Erwin Herzberg. He wants me to keep him informed.”

“Oh good.”

“There are several angles but it’s too soon to tell since we don’t know what happens next. He knows about Geisel’s terrific work in the nineteen-twenties and early ’thirties before he left for America, so that is one angle. His publications are well known to scholars. He was clearly a man of courage
—
there weren’t many Geisels around at the time. That aspect doesn’t really emerge in the diary. Of course, a narrator can take care of it in the introduction. And put his pacifism in context.”

“That speech he made about war memorials clearly got him into hot water,” Jay said. “The time he cross-examined Karli about that other boy shows he probably had good reason to be nervous. Karli was Gisela’s father, of course.” He took a sip of his beer. “What did your boss have to say about the short story?”

“He liked it a lot. For one thing it’s different from the usual short stories. Better dialogue, nice and crisp, no long boring passages about the atmosphere. This makes is suitable for radio. And of course the subject matter is bizarre. What an amazing imagination Hanni Geisel had
—
to have invented that story about Beethoven’s hair! If it was based on something that really happened we would know about it.”

Hans arrived. He had spent an hour with his cousin, helping her with the computer. The children’s bookstore was to open the following week.

“The radio people are interested in the Geisel saga,” Jay told Hans.

“Gisela will be pleased to hear that. She likes money.”

“She’ll have to wait a while, I’m afraid,” Nicola said. “It all depends on what else will turn up. We can’t leave that love story hanging in the air. All we know so far is that the poor lady had a peculiar feeling in the lower abdomen.”

“Herzberg was a well-known character. Everybody read him in the
Frankfurter Zeitung
. But not as well as well known of course as Teddy Adorno. I think that chapter about the
vicomtesse
is hilarious. How can the Hessische Rundfunk resist that? And Adorno was the villain in the detective story, the young man who told the
clochard
about Beethoven’s lock. That will be a vital contribution to the Adorno industry.”

“Don’t forget Gisela’s grandmother invented it,” Jay said.

Hans laughed. “You’re right, I quite forget that. Good to have a Canadian around to keep us down to Earth. Anyway, the Adorno industry usually focuses on his troubles in 1968, not on his beginnings as a young man.”

“And deals with his relations with Thomas Mann and Schönberg in California during the war,” Nicola added. “We did three broadcasts about that about a year ago.”

The next evening they had dinner at the Schenkers’ in their apartment on the Reuterweg, just north of the Opernhaus. Hildy couldn’t come because she had a cold. Since Werner was a travel agent, it was not surprising that the flat was decorated with exotic travel posters, framed. Anna, a superb cook, had concocted a delectably spicy sauce for the spaghetti. The other guests were the violist Hin Lee Wong and his wife Yvonne, the professor of French from Dijon and Claire Sommerlatt, the white-haired medical librarian. The flamboyant, red-haired Cella Lubescu had also been invited but she couldn’t come, which was just as well for Jay because he had difficulties understanding her Rumanian accent. None of them had heard as yet of Gisela’s historic discoveries, so Hans and Nicola had to give them a short rundown, greatly facilitated by some excellent Chianti.

Yvonne wondered whether there was any suggestion in Hanni’s diary that her love affair with that journalist had to be concealed from her husband. No, there was no such indication. Another thing that intrigued her was that Herriot came to Frankfurt for the opening of the exhibition, only four years after the French had vacated the Ruhr. Surely anti-
boche
feelings in Paris must still have been running high.

Hin Lee was more interested in the International Exhibition of Music and the concerts. He had never heard of them and was duly impressed. And after listening to Hans’s short description he was amused by Herriot’s idealism
—
music unifies
—
versus Adorno’s realism
—
music divides.

But the great surprise was Claire, who knew a good deal about Erwin Herzberg. Before specializing as a medical librarian, she was a film librarian for three years and knew Herzberg’s writing on film, especially
From Fritz Lang to Leni Riefenstahl,
which he wrote after he left Germany. It was now considered by far the most important book examining the way Germany’s slow drift into Nazism had been anticipated in the cinema of the nineteen-twenties and early ’thirties.

“I am most curious to know,” she said, “whether Hanni and Herzberg actually had an affair. How could this elegant society lady get away with it, with two teenage children and her husband such a prominent lawyer?”

“Good question,” Hans said. “It seems she had done it before, with a man called Kurt Simonsky. We all know strange things went on in the ’twenties. Were there no limits? We’ve got to find out.”

“And I would like to know,” Yvonne added, “if once they all later emigrated to New York, did they carry on over there?”

“Hans,” Jay demanded, “start digging!”

Hans made a valiant effort to find relatives of Erwin Herzberg who might give him access to his private papers. This led nowhere. He knew that some elderly students of the Institute for Social Research still lived in Frankfurt and he began a search to find them, although their memories were not likely to be reliable. This would take a little while.

At the same time he dispatched Freddie to investigate whether a search of the internet archives of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
would turn up any autobiographical writing by Herzberg himself. There was no such indication. However, Freddie went to the newspaper’s offices, where he chatted with one of the archivists.

“If I were you,” said the archivist, “I would try whatever is left of the Burgund Verlag. They published Herzberg’s novel in 1926.”

That was the first Freddie had heard of a novel.

It took Hans less than a day to uncover a copy of
Der Seiltänzer Janisch
[
Janisch the Tightrope Dancer
], a novel about the metaphysics of the circus. It received a lukewarm review in the
Frankfurter Zeitung
and a blast in the
Generalanzeiger.

The heir of the Burgund Verlag was the Weissborn Verlag, which had assumed the publishing house after the war.

After a three-day search they unearthed in the basement Erwin Herzberg’s unfinished collection of autobiographical essays,
Blendings.

Part Two:
Erwin Herzberg’s
Memories

S
IEGFRIED

I
was amused by the admirable way Hanni had of talking about her husband as a friend we both had in common, what’s more
—
as a friend who was worth quoting. “Hermann insists,” she said, “that now, nine years later, the time has come to examine November 1918 in a cool, analytical fashion. He always accuses me of being too emotional.”

The topic we were discussing was the legend of the Stab in the Back.

More specifically, we were talking about the question of whether Ludendorff and Hindenburg sued for peace prematurely simply because they had suddenly decided that they could not win the war. Others had different views because it was far from clear that all resistance to the Allies was useless. German forces were still deep inside enemy territory, German artillery positions stood only sixty miles northeast of Paris, and German zeppelins were bombing London.

Surely, Hanni cried, we should be grateful to Ludendorff and Hindenburg for not prolonging the war unnecessarily. What could they have done?

One thing they could have done, I said, is to admit defeat without capitulating. They could have considered that alternative before acting so quickly. The military could have withdrawn their troops from France and Belgium and held a line on this side of the Rhine. Then they could have said to the Allies they were ready to negotiate. If the Allies’ terms were unacceptable they could have dared them to try to invade Germany. They knew this would cost the Allies many thousands of casualties after it had already been established that they had won the war. The Allies would have thought twice before accepting the dare. I told Hanni that I recently read that General Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, told Prime Minister David Lloyd George at the time that the Germans were capable of organizing a retreat and holding a line, to defend
—
in his words
—
the honour of the German people. If we had done that, we would have received better terms than we eventually got at Versailles. The Allies would have respected us more. Prince Max von Baden, the last of the Kaiser’s chancellors, also thought there were ways open to us to improve our bargaining position.

“I never heard of any of this at the time,” Hanni said. “All I remember is a lot of talk about a
levée en masse
.”

“
That’s the same idea
—
in French!”

“Please refresh my memory
—
what was that all about?”

“It seems so absurd now but it wasn’t so absurd in early October 1918. A
levee en masse
is a popular uprising, like the one during the war of liberation against Napoleon in 1812 and 1813. It meant continuing the war after our forces were retrenched along the Rhine. The idea was put forward by three eminent civilians
—
the industrialist Walther Rathenau, the sociologist Max Weber and the banker Max Warburg. It never caught on. In retrospect it is obvious that each of these three distinguished men was profoundly out of touch with public opinion. We were exhausted. All we wanted was peace. We were not in the mood for a
levée
of any sort. The government understood that. When, after the American president Woodrow Wilson sent that note on October 23, 1918, Ludendorff issued an order to resist
—
without checking with the government, he was dismissed.”

Hanni mulled this over.

“If this idea had caught on and had been carried out,” she said, “nobody could have argued that our army had been stabbed in the back.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Remember the Siegfried legend? Everybody knows that Siegfried was stabbed in the back by the treacherous Hagen. In Wagner’s version Hagen was the son of the dwarf Alberich who had stolen the ring, the agent of a dark
—
meaning Jewish
—
underworld.”

Hanni groaned.

“Let me tell you of another possibility,” I continued after a pause. “If the Allies had refused to accept the German offer of an armistice, invaded Germany, broken down all armed and unarmed resistance, occupied large parts of Germany
—
perhaps even Berlin as Napoleon had done
—
and demanded unconditional surrender, it might have been far better in the long run. When Ludendorff and Hindenburg asked for an armistice they hoped that in the not too distant future the war could be resumed under more favourable circumstances. But this would have been impossible if the allies had refused an armistice and occupied Germany. The Weimar Republic would not have been born under circumstances that made it possible
—
after the ‘revolution’
—
for the first president of the Republic, the social democrat Friedrich Ebert, to welcome homecoming troops as undefeated heroes. The allied occupation forces would have prohibited such language and stamped out the emblems symbolizing Prussian militarism once and for all. But the Allies, too, were exhausted and never seriously considered such a course. Let us hope the time will never come that we will regret that Berlin was never taken.”