Unity (37 page)

The piece of string is tauter than I thought. Still, now you know the reason for the anti-Medhurst bias in Geraldine’s journal. It
doesn’t surprise me to find that her influence lay behind Felicity’s action. She was as morally stunted as a child. I remember her telling me, shortly after I joined the Party, that people would never allow a child actress to grow up since it reminded them of their own failure – a phrase that spoke of years of therapy. But the only person who wouldn’t allow Geraldine to grow up was herself.

I remember Ahmet very well – too well: the clarity of the images unsettles me. The first time we met, he looked me over as though he were appraising me in a bazaar. He had obviously been warned against me by Geraldine. Then he moved in close – the distance as calculated as a focus-puller’s – and said coolly: ‘As a child, I was taught that women are like snakes. The more highly coloured, the more harmless. It’s the small, plain ones that are dangerous.’ Then he smiled, all teeth, and walked away.

The occasion was one of Wolfram’s weekend parties. He held open house every Saturday or Sunday, whether or not he was filming (he would never be cleared for insurance out here). Ahmet had arrived from Beirut. I presumed that he’d come to visit his brother, although we now know that he had a very different agenda (albeit not the one that fed Geraldine’s hopes). Germany’s Leftist cells had provided support for the Palestinian gang that attacked the ’72 Olympics and he had come to repay the debt, supplying arms, money and passports, while attempting to make as much mileage as possible out of the hostage crisis.

He talked passionately about his people’s struggle. His words made a strong impression on me – which must be why so many come back now. He spoke about the double standards applied to Israel and Palestine: how the Jew’s sense of exile was honoured
while the Arab’s was ignored. He personified the predicament in his father, a fisherman from Haifa. What fish could he hope to catch in a camp outside Beirut? And yet, from the start, he aroused my suspicions. When somebody urged him to stop fighting the battles of the past – there had to come a time to start afresh, he replied with a phrase I still find disturbing. ‘Oh yes, and you can tell your sister to sleep with any man she likes and, in the morning, she’ll still wake up a virgin.’

He depicted much of the military conflict in terms of sex. He cited the Jewish passion for truth – for recording the name of every man, woman and child who’d been killed – and then asked: ‘What of the broader truth? What of the women whose faces their agents steal and stick on pictures of whores? What of the men whom they then persuade to spy for them, through a torture more brutal than any beating? To an Arab there is no dishonour greater than that of an unfaithful wife. The world salutes the brave Israeli soldiers but does it know what they use for weapons? When the Palestinian men were imprisoned and the women marched in protest, the Israelis did not disperse them with guns. No, they stood in front of them and masturbated. They knew that no Arab woman could withstand such shame.’

There was, however, another side to the story, as revealed by his brother. Film-making was such a family affair with Wolfram that the fraternal row spilt over into all our lives. Ahmet was intensely homophobic (you catch a glimpse of it, liberally toned down, in Geraldine’s journal). He attacked Mahmoud for being ‘less than a man’. The latter responded by charging Islam itself with hypocrisy. It preached abstinence and chastity and then sent hordes of young men to their deaths with the promise of Paradise, where they would find a bevy of beautiful virgins waiting to fulfil their every desire.

During one violent row, Mahmoud told us the story of his cousin (I’m keen to use this in some form, so keep it under wraps). She’d
been married off to a friend of her father’s: an old man to whom the family was indebted for a piece of land. The village had been flattened; the land seized; but the debt remained. After some months, the girl left her husband to live with her lover. Her brother and Ahmet bided their time before beating her to death during an Israeli raid, making it look like the work of the soldiers. Photographs of the dead girl were flashed around the world. ‘And, not long afterwards, my brother went to America to study and became a great man.’

Ahmet made no attempt to deny Mahmoud’s claim. On the contrary, he insisted that he had done what he did for his uncle. In a world where everything else had been taken from him, it was imperative that honour survived.

Such barbarism sickened me, but what really made my skin crawl was his attitude to the Holocaust. He was one of those zealots for whom it didn’t exist. In his view, it was all a conspiracy by the Jews to get money out of Germany. They demanded reparation for crimes of the past and exemption for those of the present. And, if you put to him the ‘little’ matter of the camps, he had a ready response. It was wartime and the country was in the grip of malnutrition and disease. Tuberculosis was rife and, to prevent an epidemic, carriers were quarantined. The Jews, being indolent and weak, were particularly prone to infection and so there was, inevitably, a preponderance of them in the camps. The so-called gas chambers were merely crematoria to burn tubercular corpses.
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Anything else was a myth spread by the Zionists to justify the rape of Palestinian land.

When I proposed that he took the short trip to Dachau in order to see a different picture, he retorted ‘Why? In Florida, I went to
Disneyland. Does that mean that I have to believe in Mickey Mouse?’

You knew Felicity much better than I did. Do you suppose that she would have had any truck with such a stance? Or might she have been like Geraldine who, while she would never have dreamt of denying the Holocaust herself, regarded Ahmet’s attitude as if it were a minor foible, permissible under the circumstances. Sometimes, notions of relativity can be taken too far.

What a responsibility! No, you seem to have covered all the bases. I do remember, however, that there was a mysterious money man forever in the background, who was the subject of much
speculation
on set. I don’t remember his name and I’ve no idea if he’s still alive, let alone if he’d be amenable, but he seemed to be pretty astute – or am I confusing shrewdness with reticence? Maybe one of your German contacts can put you in touch.

I hope that my jottings may be of use. Let me know if you come up with anything spectacular.

Good luck!

Carole

Dear Carole,

I can’t thank you enough for taking such trouble. I’m delighted to read your opinions of the leading players, both cinematic and political, the national backgrounds and, in particular, the
connection 
between acting and activism. If I’m still some way from solving the enigma, it’s certainly not for lack of help from you.

I hardly dare ask anything more, but I wonder if you know whether Geraldine was ever implicated in the bombing (she gives no hint in her later journals) or if Ahmet Samif was ever heard of again. Please don’t bother to reply unless you have information (but I hope that you have and you will).

Yours, with very best wishes,

Michael

As for Geraldine, she continued to be regarded as a harmless fanatic. The refusal of people to take her seriously, which had long caused her offence, now worked in her favour. But remember, for the past thirteen years I’ve been living in Hollywood where she remained an outcast. Things were very different on your side of the pond and, as you know, she built up a substantial career in France, where a whiff of scandal has always been an attraction. The one thing that she proved is that she was a damn good actress. I just wish that she hadn’t allowed her talents to be waylaid.

As for Ahmet, he disappeared on the day of the bombing,
supposedly
to a safe house in East Berlin and, from there, back to Lebanon. It was a well-established route. Schleyer’s kidnappers are also said to have turned up in West Beirut shortly after the end of the crisis, living in a hotel near the Arab university, protected by an armed Fatah guard. One footnote: a couple of years ago, while
watching a CNN report on Arafat’s visit to Camp David, I was sure that I saw Ahmet among his aides. It was only a glimpse but there was no mistaking the smile.

Cheers!

C.

Hi Michael!

I’ve no idea whether you’re still on the Felicity trail or whether it has gone cold, but a thought recently occurred to me. I remember our filming a scene as Unity and Jessica in their Swinbrook sitting-room. One side was decorated with a swastika and assorted Fascist posters and the other with a Red Flag and a bust of Lenin. They drew an imaginary line across the centre which neither was allowed to cross and sat discussing how painful it would be for each to have to give the order for the other’s execution. It struck me that it was all a game: politics as exhibitionism. For Felicity, as for Unity, it was a game.

Cheers!

Carole

If my work on this book has taught me one thing, it is that I would have no future as a crime writer. The aim of the investigation was to discover the truth about Felicity, but I am left with more – and more disturbing – questions than when I began. I have come to suspect, however, that the project was doomed from the start and that, even had Felicity survived the attack and spent the rest of her life giving interviews inside Stammheim prison, her motives would have remained opaque.

My disillusion was increased by my meeting with Thomas Bücher, whom I soon identified as the ‘mysterious money man' of Carole Medhurst's account. I had long despaired of making contact. Liesl Martins and Manfred Stückl both claimed to have no recollection of him and Renate Fischer no interest. My approaches to various British officials in Germany likewise yielded nothing. Then, in May 2002, Andreas Forst, whom I had met at the bedside of his friend Dieter Reiss the previous July, paid me a visit in London. In his student days, Forst had made two films for Bücher's company and he volunteered to act as intermediary. Bücher readily agreed to see me and I travelled to Munich later in the month. It seemed to me strangely fitting, given the course of my enquiry, that it should conclude in a pornographer's office.

We arranged to meet at the company's headquarters above its new erotic emporium in Landshuter Allee. As he was busy when I arrived, Bücher dispatched one of his assistants to give me a tour. The man, a clean-cut, fresh-faced twenty-five-year-old, discussed the marketing of ‘the product' as though it were margarine. He led me around the ground floor which, dominated by a display of sex aids, resembled a cross between a medical supply store and a morgue. Next, we moved up to the mezzanine where films and
magazines to satisfy every taste were set out in carefully
segregated
bays. We passed from Pregnant Beauties through Bestiality to Family Sex, where I struggled to maintain my composure at my Virgil's assurance that the children were played by midgets. We then walked down a corridor of viewing booths to a surreal
auditorium
where a tower of competing video screens stretched up like a sexual Babel.

Finally, we were summoned to the Chairman's office, a room of ostentatious minimalism, its white walls relieved only by four Picasso etchings of a maiden being ravaged by the Minotaur. Bücher greeted me with a formal, firm-for-his-age handshake and invited me to take a seat. I was somewhat put out to find that, while I was setting up my cassette recorder, he instructed the assistant to switch on one of his own. The assistant then left us and the interview began. It was conducted entirely in English, which Bücher spoke with idiomatic precision. Although at the time I felt frustrated at how little he mentioned Felicity, I realised on playing the tape that he had revealed far more than I thought.

The unease which I shared with Luke in the face of a man who had endured such horrors was compounded by his response to them. Nazism, in his view, was not an anomaly but a microcosm of human nature. Mankind was prone to evil and Hitler's role had been simply to bring out its full scope. But, rather than rebel against this or work to change it, he had accommodated himself to it. While no one would deny that the world of the camps was pornographic – the men who forced Bücher to urinate stand
alongside
Irma Crese, the Auschwitz guard who reached orgasm by whipping women to death, and the commandant of Flossenbürg who masturbated openly while prisoners were being beaten – to devote the rest of one's life to producing pornographic films would seem to grant the Nazis a posthumous victory.

Bücher is not alone in his dystopian vision. Several leading
post-war
film-directors, among them Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo
Passolini and Liliana Cavani – not to mention Wolfram Meier – have placed sexuality at the heart of their discourse on fascism. My own qualms about this approach resemble Ralf Heyn's about Meier's coprophiliac interpretation of Hitler. While it undoubtedly makes for powerful cinema, the lurid imagery precludes a more measured response. On the evidence gathered here, however, I am forced to concede that their viewpoint may be justified. Whether it be in Luke's father's shocking personification of the violence lurking between our legs or Sir Hallam Bamforth's secret
indulgence
of his SS guard fantasies, the links between sexuality and fascism are clear. Moreover, they are not limited to men. Unity Mitford's worship of Hitler was just one manifestation of the impulse that led thousands of women to offer to bear his children and thousands more to line the roads, baring their breasts as his motorcade sped past.

It is an irony which he may or may not welcome that the emphasis Bücher lays on the dominance of sexuality mirrors that in orthodox Catholic teaching on Original Sin. Furthermore, like the Church, he appears to be marketing his own despair (a charge he refutes with his claim of responding to market forces). It was only after meeting that I was able to make sense of Meier's remark (quoted in Luke's letter of 2 October 1977) that no one would understand Hitler who failed to understand the universal human need to inflict pain. At the time, I read it as an expression of sadism: Meier's more than Hitler's and, certainly, more than humanity's. Now, I wonder if inflicting pain may be the way we choose to transcend it: whether it be on others, as in the Nazi atrocities; on ourselves, as in the body-piercing practised by Bücher's actors; or at one remove, as in the concentration camp pornography which enjoys such a distressing vogue.

Bücher's zeal for pornography was shared by Meier who, according to Renate Fischer, regarded it as the highest form of
film-making
. As one whose acquaintance with him was confined to a
snub in a crowded dressing room, I am ill-equipped to comment on Meier's sincerity. His assertion may simply have reflected his taste for an acting style which, to judge by his films, was painfully raw, but it may also have reflected a belief that it wasn't just the classics (the subject of his spat with the Edinburgh critic) that were suspect in a post-Auschwitz era but art itself. That he persisted in his artistic enterprise was a paradox that both tormented and fired him.

While Bücher felt no such qualms about his medium, he made no claims for it either, laughing – politely but still in my face – when I suggested that he was performing a moral function by providing society with an outlet for its baser instincts. His contempt put me in mind of Luke's college friend, Simon Lister, who objected to the accepted consensus on the Holocaust because it legitimised Jewish suffering in Christian terms. By identifying the victims with a culture whose most sacred image was a man being tortured, Auschwitz had become the ultimate assimilation.

I trust that I will not raise similar objections by reiterating that it is because of my faith that I am unable to regard the Holocaust – or, indeed, anything else – as an expression of pure evil. I
appreciate
that my claim must appear meaningless – even contradictory – to many churchgoers, but I find it incomprehensible that anyone who believes in an all-loving, all-powerful God can picture Him locked in a cosmic tug-of-war with the Devil while a downtrodden humanity slides back and forth in-between. Nevertheless, I admit that my faith has rarely been subjected to so strong a challenge as it received from Bücher. The impregnable logic of a man who had known the world at its worst forced me to question whether my own beliefs might not simply be the product of privilege – the
spiritual
equivalent of the insularity that Meier so scorned.

In the Introduction, I argued that a belief in an objective force of evil absolved mankind of responsibility (which surely accounts for the strength of its appeal). I would like, nevertheless, to preserve
one element of the traditional story of the Fall – that of wilfulness – as I propose an alternative version, based not on sin but on
solipsism
. Everything that I have discovered in the course of compiling this book bolsters my conviction not that human nature is evil and needs to be redeemed, nor that it is wild and needs to be tamed, but that it is selfish and needs to be socialised.

After his visit to Dachau, Luke wrote of the imperative to build our morality on the inviolability of every human life: a phrase that came back to me during my conversation with Bücher. I suggested then that we should redefine evil as inhumanity but, on reflection, I opt for
dehumanisation
: a denial of another person's needs or pain or, even, basic right to exist; whether that denial be
systematic
, as in the Nuremberg Laws, or maverick, as in a terrorist's bomb. The one link between the otherwise very different figures in this book – Felicity and Meier, Geraldine and Samif, Unity and Hitler – is their absolute confidence in the supremacy of their own cause. To use a metaphor from the world that we have been exploring, they saw their own life in Technicolor and everybody else's in black-and-white.