Unity (10 page)

It was as if, having survived for four years as a courier in the trenches where the majority of his fellows died within a week, Hitler had asked his henchmen to construct the one place on earth where the survival rate would be even shorter.

As we emerged into the open to find a party of Japanese tourists photographing one another by the crematorium, Josef said that they may have been able to recreate the buildings, but the one thing that they could never recreate was the silence. Dachau had been so achingly quiet. No one had the energy to waste on talk.

He took us to the museum cinema where we watched a short documentary on the world of the camps. Once again, the grainy, Giacometti-like figures flickered into life. Images that had been blunted by reproduction seemed to regain their edge by dint of the setting. Dachau housed only men, but, as the focus shifted
elsewhere
, I felt a slither of shame at the memory of my classmates
poring over photographs of Auschwitz victims. It was perversion from necessity rather than choice. They were the first naked breasts that they had seen. Painting and sculpture were canvas and marble, but flesh, however shrivelled, was real. And I felt a rare moment of gratitude that I had been brought up in Africa. As the film ended amid scenes of the camp’s liberation complete with fleeting shots of harrowed Americans, I judged that the true tragedy of Dachau lies less in its revelation of our inhumanity than in its exposure of our humanity. It shows us that we are nothing but those bony, breakable bodies with their
indistinguishable
screams.

When we left the cinema, it wasn’t just our eyes that were
unaccustomed
to the light. I asked Josef the question that had been gnawing at me throughout our visit, namely how could he bear to go back there, and not only once but day after day. He replied that he’d made a pledge, before explaining how, during his
incarceration
, he’d seen hundreds of men transported to the death camps. Each time, he’d known that, if his work no longer satisfied or if the Commandant took against him, he might be selected himself. Then on one such occasion – which was outwardly no different from any other – he’d been overwhelmed by despair. Existence seemed to be futile. Even if he should one day be released – and, by this stage of the War, rumours of the Allied advance had reached as far as Dachau – how could he continue to live in a world inhabited by people? So he climbed up into the wagon – not heroically, not in order to take somebody else’s place, but the way that a free man throws himself from a bridge. And one of the
prisoners
, although too weak to stand, somehow found the strength to kick him out. With fitful eloquence, he persuaded him that private pain was no longer valid: that, if he gave up, he wouldn’t merely be destroying himself but conniving in mass extinction. He had to remain alive in order to tell their story to the world.

Have you noticed how our lives are bound by stories: the ‘tell my story’ of the dying man balancing the ‘tell me a story’ of the child?

That obligation was the reason that he’d joined the Dachau Memorial Committee. I asked him whether he considered a visible monument to be a necessary safeguard against fascism. He replied that, in his view, the danger of any resurgence was remote. He believed – and, here, I’m paraphrasing wildly – that the
Holocaust
had been a unique combination of national character and historical circumstance. In the future, we might see another such unjust system but never such systematic injustice. Nonetheless, it was essential to bear witness: firstly, in order to honour the dead, a precept which stood at the heart of his tradition; secondly, to act as a mirror. I was startled by the usage. I should make it clear that, for Fliss’s benefit, he’d been speaking English (almost flawlessly) all afternoon, but I presumed that he’d been misled by the German
reflektor
, which can be both
mirror
and
remembrance
. ‘You mean a reminder?’ I suggested. ‘No,’ he confirmed, ‘a mirror.’ And I would swear that, as he spoke, his beard glinted in the sun.

21st Sept

If I’m not careful, this will look as though it were written by a six-year-old, with a different-coloured ink for every line. Fliss must have walked off with the pen I was using yesterday. She’s gone to watch a newsreel of the
Anschluss
with Diana and Hitler in his private cinema. I think I can safely give that a miss. Besides, the Dachau visit had a sequel which I want to share with you. I left the camp resolved to discover more about what had happened. I decided that my best bet would be to ask if any of the Germans would be willing to talk to me about their experience of fascism. This wasn’t as confrontational as it might sound since, with the
exception of Henry Faber who has flown out from London to play Göring and of some pre-war star who’s been cast as Fraulein Baum,
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they’re all too young to be held to account. The oldest is Conrad, our Heinrich Hoffmann,
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who, at forty-six, is a former member of the
Flieger Hitler Jugend
(although making model gliders is the closest that he ever came to piloting a plane). As well as helping me to understand the Nazis, I hoped that they might be able to shed some light on their own generation and, in particular, on why so many of them were prepared to use violence in pursuit of their beliefs. I don’t know if much about the latest incident has made it into the English press (in any case, I’m wise to your trick of skipping straight from the Front Page to the Arts), but it has dominated everything here. Some group with links to the
Baader-Meinhof
(but then the terrorist network appears to be as
intertwined
as the British aristocracy) has kidnapped a leading industrialist called Schleyer. They’re threatening to kill him unless the government releases Baader and his comrades from jail.
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So far no deal. A frenzy of interest has swept the country and even penetrated our set. Fliss is fascinated (calling on me to translate a dozen stories every day). I wouldn’t mind but I know that she’s only doing it to impress Geraldine Mortimer, with whom she’s become very thick. If you ask me, there’s a bit too much of the ‘biting the silver spoon that feeds them’ – though, for Heaven’s sake, don’t repeat that to Fliss.

My own view is that the whole business is a storm in a tea-cup or, as the Germans, who don’t share our national obsession, put it,
Ein Sturm im Wasserglass
. We’re making a film about a far more dangerous group of fanatics and we run the risk of being
distracted. It’s only fair to say that there are those who associate the two, claiming that it’s the enduring legacy of the Third Reich that is precisely the terrorists’ target (just how enduring becomes clear when you learn that the Allies were forced to abandon their attempt to de-nazify the country for fear that there would be no one left to run it). Even more alarming is the view that the violence from the left will inevitably provoke a reaction from the right. This begs the question that has been at the back of my mind from the start: is fascism a specific historical movement or
something
endemic to the German character? I say
German
because, in spite of Mussolini and Peron; in spite of Mosley and Unity; in spite of the man on the tube who once asked me whether the headline ‘Nun executed in village square’ referred to England or abroad; it was only here that the full barbarism took root.

Wasting no time, I began my quest at Wolfram’s Sunday evening party. I saw no point in being coy and I’m hopeless at being devious, so I went straight to the point. I was heartened by the response. Far from being offended, most people were only too glad of the chance to talk. After all, it’s a question that they’ve been asking themselves for years. I’ve found it hard enough to make sense of my father and mother and all they’ve done is not speak to each other for a decade. I realise that I’ve had it easy. According to someone – I forget who it was but, since they are all strangers to you, we’ll call him Actor on the Right: ‘It’s as though everyone’s parents have a secret and it isn’t just that they’ve cooked the books or slept with their secretary. It’s that they knew.’

Everyone had a story to tell. Dieter’s father had been a member of the SS. He was imprisoned after the War, narrowly escaping being hanged. He was released when his son was six but, far from disowning his former methods, he adapted them to the domestic sphere. ‘He beat me for every trivial offence. It was as if he made our home into his own little camp. I was his Jew.’ Perhaps even more disturbing were the stories of people who’d thought that
they had no story. Erich Leitner who plays Erich Wieldeman
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(and is a vast improvement on Patrick!), recounted his. It was
instructive
that he had to couch it in the second person. ‘Your father wasn’t an SS man or a part of the Nazi machine. He was a
businessman
and you can breath easy because his involvement was merely economic. Then one day, when you’re in your late teens, you learn that the company he worked for employed men from the camps, and the clothes you wear and the chairs you sit in were paid for by slave labour. And your parents wonder why you’ll only wear jeans and sit on bean-bags. The worst thing is that, however hard you try, you can’t hate your father; you can only hate yourself for loving him.’

Then there is Luise Hermann who is playing Eva Braun (you may remember her as Gretchen). She sat there nodding her head. ‘It was the same for me. My mother used to say that we had nothing to be ashamed of. If anyone challenged us, we could hold our heads up high. Then, when I was twelve, I did a local history project on the Jews in Cologne. No one ever spoke about them. They were something you were aware of but knew you should never talk about to the grown-ups. A bit like sex. The one time I’d asked my mother, she’d said that they all emigrated to America before the War and became millionaires. They hadn’t been bombed. They hadn’t been invaded. As usual, they’d landed on their feet. When I started to do my research, of course I found out the truth. But there was worse to come. In the city archives, I discovered some documents regarding our house. Far from having belonged to my grandfather as I’d been told, it had been sequestered from a family who’d been sent to Auschwitz. My parents moved in the very next day.’

There were other equally revealing stories but, if this letter gets much longer, it’ll be cheaper for me to fly home and hand it to you
in person! So, I’ll stick to the one told by Helmuth Wissmann who’s playing Putzi Hanfstaengl.
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He said that, if I wanted to see the real residue of Nazism, I’d come to the right man. And, to my surprise, he arranged to take me the following evening to visit his father in a nursing home. Even more to my surprise, Fliss, who is usually so tired at the end of the day that she wants to do nothing but fall into bed, insisted on coming too … By the way, if you’re finding it hard to credit my new-found interest in politics, I expect that you find it well nigh impossible to credit Fliss’s. You remember how she originally insisted that we play down ‘that side of things’, with all the distaste of her mother faced with a
pregnant
maid? You’ll just have to take my word for how much she has changed now that she’s seen the truth at first hand.

The nursing home is on the outskirts of Regensburg, about an hour’s drive from Munich. It is housed in a former convent, traces of which remain in both the staff and the decoration, notably a life-size portrait of the penitent Magdalene graciously baring her breasts for the benefit of the as yet unredeemed. One of the nuns escorted us to Helmuth’s father, a gaunt man in a pince-nez who, displaying no visible sign of illness, sat rapt in a book. He was so overjoyed to see Helmuth that I felt a tinge of unease, but it
disappeared
as soon as he began to speak. Contrary to my expectations, he was perfectly happy to talk about his past, not, as you might suppose, in a spirit of atonement but, rather, of defiance. His crime was that, for two years, he had worked as the interpreter for a death squad in Poland. ‘And this is the man who taught me language,’ Helmuth declared.

As he offered his account, it was clear that he had failed to profit from the example of the clinic’s patron saint. He apologised, but for the excesses of the system rather than the system itself. His
repeated references to ‘the people with the Star of David’ goaded Helmuth. ‘Come on, father,’ he snapped, ‘you can say
Jew
. It won’t kill you.’ The old man (both Fliss and I put him at close to eighty) stood on his wounded dignity. ‘If I believe that there’s a threat to Western civilisation and that the people … the Jews constitute that threat, then I have a duty to eradicate them. I have a moral imperative to use means that I would otherwise deplore. You may question my judgement but you’ve no right to impugn my integrity.’ He even managed to charge the victims with
responsibility
for their fate, claiming, first, that the Nuremberg Laws had simply instituted the segregation that orthodox Jews desired and, second, that the meekness with which the Jews went to their deaths was proof of their inferiority.

He maintained that, had the Germans won the War, the Jews would have been reduced to a footnote. Clearly, morality as well as history is written by the victors. He looked back on the Third Reich with marked affection. ‘We took pride in ourselves then. Now, when my son goes abroad, he speaks English. If someone asks where he comes from, he says Denmark.’ He felt at a loss to understand why Helmuth’s generation was so intent on raking up the past. ‘If they’re ashamed of what happened, why can’t they put it behind them? It’s as if our suffering isn’t enough; they have to pile it on themselves.’ ‘Your suffering!’ Helmuth cried. ‘Millions of people died. You just spent ten years in prison.’ For the first time, the old man’s composure cracked. ‘We lost everything, don’t you understand? Not just the War. Not just our homes. Not just our friends and our families. But our most sacred beliefs. We couldn’t change them overnight like having a car re-sprayed.’