Unity (38 page)

M.A. And if I may return to Dieter for a moment. in March, I asked him about the incident at the hotel that provoked Sir Hallam Bamforth's collapse.

T.B. If I learnt anything from
Unity
, it was to stick to what I know. Here, we make a film in four days. Elsewhere, it's nothing but problems.

M.A. Geraldine was right. Bamforth's offer of coaching came at a price. He aimed to reconcile Dieter to the violence in his character by taking the blows on himself. So far so perverse. But what if there were something else? A few days earlier, a man called Per – another concentration camp victim – had turned up at the hotel.

T.B. I remember. Meier gave him a small part. He was fascinated by the coincidence.

M.A. According to Geraldine, Bamforth was racked with guilt at having ignored his appeal for help to flee from the Nazis. So, what if he were doing penance? And Dieter's – or rather, Streicher's – whip became the scourge?

T.B. Would it comfort you to learn that he was looking for forgiveness rather than pleasure?

M.A. No. Well, yes, to be honest. I find the image of that
distinguished
old actor submitting to a Nazi thug extremely distressing.

T.B. Then go to see Per. Perhaps he can put your mind at rest.

M.A. I'd no idea he was still around. Do you keep in contact?

T.B. Not at all. But I know how you can reach him. I read an article about Hannelore Kessel in
Stern
only the other week. It mentioned his name as her secretary.

M.A. How bizarre!

T.B. Not really. They became friends during the shooting of
Unity
. For Per it was a dream come true. And Kessel is suddenly in vogue again after fifty years. There's been a revival of interest in her films. With the passage of time, the
propaganda purpose has faded. It's possible to see them purely as cinema: full-blooded melodramas and
light-hearted
musicals.

M.A. But they were made by Nazis.

T.B. They're not being viewed by Nazis. Or are you afraid that they might spark a right-wing revival? Now whose is the recipe for despair?

M.A. I don't think that any work of art can be divorced from the circumstances of its creation.

T.B. Most Third Reich architecture was destroyed by bombs, so you needn't worry about that (although we were very grateful for what remained when we were choosing
locations
for
Unity
). But what of futurism? Would you damn an entire cultural movement because of its links – very
intimate
links – with fascism? You'll end up like the Israelis banning Wagner.

M.A. Given Wagner's rabid anti-Semitism, it strikes me as one of the country's saner attempts at self-protection.

T.B. It's just music. You either respond to it or you don't.

M.A. In my view, music – like all art – has to be judged by more objective criteria. But I feel embarrassed talking about such things to you.

T.B. Don't worry. I can stand it.

M.A. When one of the most painful paradoxes of the entire Third Reich is that of the torturers who liked Mozart.

T.B. Why? The idea that art civilises is sentimental nonsense. You need only go to any opera house – not just Bayreuth – to understand how the Nazis could sit through a
performance
and then the next day commit mass murder. Music doesn't fill us with finer feelings but rather purges us of baser ones. By giving people a glimpse of beauty, it enables them to live with their own ugliness. Far from wondering how Beethoven and Auschwitz and Mozart and Dachau
could co-exist, we ought to acknowledge that the one creates the conditions for the other.

M.A. I don't – I can't – agree.

T.B. That's your privilege.

M.A. I still find it disconcerting that a concentration camp victim –

T.B. The accepted term is survivor.

M.A. Yes, of course,
survivor
should be working for one of Goebbels's starlets.

T.B. And mistresses.

M.A. Really?

T.B. Oh yes. It was revealed in Goebbels's diaries, brought to us courtesy of your Mr David Irving.

M.A. That may be but, as Geraldine describes it, she only gave in to Goebbels's demands on condition that her friend was allowed to leave for Switzerland.

T.B. One of the benefits of the current surge of interest in her career is that we now have a chance to examine the sources. Kessel may have been an attractive woman but I wouldn't have rated her bargaining power so high. Her story was taken straight from the plot of
Viktoria
,
162
in which she agreed to become the mistress of a Jewish landlord on condition that he promised not to evict his tenants. In the film, however, she killed him before yielding to his lust – which seems not to have been the case in life.

M.A. How could she have done it?

T.B. Oh I don't suppose it was too painful. He was a man of enormous influence. He may have been dwarfish and cursed with a club foot, but he appears to have been very potent. He had six children with his wife, while
maintaining
a string of mistresses.

M.A. I meant: how could she have done it morally? Shouldn't it be brought to public attention?

T.B. What purpose would it serve? This is the new Germany. We've drawn a line under the past. If Hitler were discovered tomorrow, alive and well and living in Argentina, the next day he'd be appearing on chat shows, explaining how his ideas had been misrepresented, while his lawyers
plea-bargained
for him to be allowed to spend a peaceful
retirement
in the Black Forest.

M.A. I'm surprised you're able to joke about it.

T.B. It's no good being solemn about such things. You'll end up like one of those seventies radicals who had such a damaging effect on your friend Felicity. Their mistake was to suppose that people cared. Which they didn't. Any more than their parents had cared when they watched us being led away. It wasn't that they were especially hostile or
anti-Semitic
. They just didn't want to become involved. People don't, you see. And they resent anyone who tries to make them. But the radicals refused to acknowledge it. They read the teachings of their pet philosophers and waited for the workers to fulfil their historic role. Except that they were happy enough with the role they already had. So the
radicals
resorted to extremism, romanticising their despair.

M.A. But that doesn't invalidate their ideals. The means may have been misguided, but not the goals.

T.B. I disagree. They wanted to impose a Marxist system. They berated the country for having abandoned ideology in favour of materialism. What they failed to understand was that, for the Germans, materialism is ideology – or, at least, it acts as a corrective to the ideologies of the past. Besides, no one who has been through the camps can have anything but scorn for Marx. You only had to witness our market (Bread for soup: soup for tobacco: tobacco for shirt: shirt for
bread) to realise that commerce, not production, is the basic human activity. Meier knew that, which is why he could never make common cause with the extremists. His
position
was a mark of intelligence not cowardice or
self-interest
. He wasn't a Furtwängler or a Riefenstahl
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neatly sidestepping the corpses on the way to work.

M.A. Is that why you backed him?

T.B. I'm a businessman. I backed him because I expected to make money. Bread: soup: tobacco: shirt: I practise what I preach. Besides, it was an excellent tax loophole. We could use the government credits we were given for the
Unity
equipment to write off the debt on our own. The one thing I wasn't looking for – whatever anyone may say – was respectability. I'm proud of what I do. What's more, I take an interest in my medium. Meier agreed to direct a film for me. I was keen to find out what he'd bring to it.

M.A. You mean to see whether pornography could become art?

T.B. No, I mean to show that, like everyone else, the artist has pornography in his soul. And Meier was an artist: perhaps the finest of his generation: the only one who told the truth about what he saw. He taught us to trust nothing outside ourselves. No gods or prophets. No gurus or seers. The irony is that his vision was so powerful that he himself became a seer. Audiences were desperate for authority. It came of living in a century with too many memories and too few myths.

M.A. Do you have any recollections of my other friend, Luke Dent?

T.B. Yes, indeed. Many happy ones. An amiable man. Attractive. Warm. We had several fascinating talks.

M.A. Really? You surprise me. In none of his letters does he mention what you do.

T.B. Look out of the window.

M.A. I beg your pardon?

T.B. Walk over and tell me what you see.

M.A. A busy street. Pedestrians. Cars. Oh, there's an
old-fashioned
hurdy-gurdy!

T.B. Now close your eyes.

    So what do you see?

M.A. Why, nothing.

T.B. Neither did he.

M.A. I'm finding it increasingly hard to maintain an optimistic outlook on the world.

T.B. Then why try?

M.A. It's an article of faith. I understand why it must be different for someone like yourself who's seen people at their worst. But I remain convinced that that was an aberration.

T.B. Was it?

M.A. I can't accept that human nature is fundamentally wicked.

T.B. Nature has no moral faculty. It simply is. And human beings are a part of it. Let me tell you a true story. It took place in Munich, a few weeks before my family was rounded up. I was gazing idly out of the window when I saw a cat stranded on a nearby roof. It had somehow clambered up there and was stuck. I continued to watch as a young SS officer fetched a ladder and climbed to the rescue. The ladder was too short and he reached across at his
considerable
peril. He risked his life to save that cat and yet I knew that, under different circumstances, he would have had no compunction about shooting me.

M.A. The bastard.

T.B. No, he wasn't a bastard. That was what confused me. I wanted him to be one, but he'd shown himself to be a kind of hero. So either it was an anomaly, or else goodness and wickedness were more closely entwined than I'd thought.

M.A. There's a difference between goodness and sentimentality. Hitler was fond of children and animals. He was a
vegetarian
. His favourite actress was Shirley Temple, for Heaven's sake! Such people have to wear their heart on their sleeve to prove that they have one. Besides, it's easy to warm to ‘innocent' (in inverted commas) children, far harder to do so to complicated, compromised adults. Accepting them means accepting ourselves. Which is the one thing that sentimentalists can never do.

T.B. What about you?

M.A. I believe that human beings were created by God and that they occupy a unique place in a divinely ordered universe.

T.B. I've seen a woman with a mastectomy having her other breast cut off by so-called doctors for the sake of balance. I've seen men punctured like targets in a shooting gallery. I've heard the howling of children wrenched from their parents: a howling that never fades away. It seems to lurk under your bunk, waiting for nightfall in order to rise up and overpower you. What place does that occupy in your divinely ordered universe?

I'm sorry. I've done the very thing I most despise: claiming authority by dint of an experience that you are too young and too fortunate to have known in order to win an
argument
that I don't even recognise.

M.A. No, it's me who should be sorry. I came here to jog your memory, not to pick at a scab. 

T.B. Tell me, what was the saddest moment of your life? Of course, you're young; you're English; you may not have one.

M.A. The death of friends. The loss of dreams. The acceptance of failure.

T.B. Do you spend your whole life agonising over them?

M.A. I hear what you're saying, but surely it's different?

T.B. Why? If I make Hitler the defining factor of my life, then he'll have won. The camps are closed. I have a business to run.

M.A. But you must have an opinion about the people who
tortured
you.

T.B. Of course.

M.A. May I ask what it is?

T.B. That they were men – and some women – who were behaving as all men and women would when relieved of the moral and social constraints that the world had imposed. Have you ever wondered why it is that the Nazis have become such a potent source of fantasy? It's because they dared to do what others only dream of. They acknowledged the paradox at the heart of being human: the violence in the act of making love. And it wasn't just in the camps: the secret experiments in far-off locations with only the
all-seeing
, all-justifying cameras to bear witness. Remember what happened in Lithuania where commando units clubbed Jews to death in front of cheering crowds, while mothers raised children high on their shoulders to make sure that they didn't miss any of the fun. German soldiers travelled to the massacres the way that their parents had booked for the opera. There were even some couples who chose to spend their honeymoons at these festivals of blood.

M.A. It's beyond my comprehension.

T.B. No. That's too easy. There are two things that are always said to be beyond our comprehension: the crimes of the
Nazis and the ways of God. And I make no apology for connecting them since they were dreamt up in the same place.

Nor does it come as any surprise that it was God's
representative
on earth, the Pope, who, at the end of the War, authoritatively dubbed Nazi crimes satanic as if absolving humanity of guilt – while conveniently ignoring his own Faustian pact.
164
It might comfort you to consider the Third Reich an anomaly, but it was the norm. Look back across history. From the Incas to the Romans: from the Crusaders to the Inquisition: every page is steeped in blood. Peter the Great even put his own son to torture. There was no
benevolent
God on hand with a substitute ram. Or look a little closer to home: to the American soldiers in Vietnam who so exercised our seventies friends. You remember the My Lai massacre?
165
Murder innocent civilians if you must, but why scalp them? Why cut out their tongues and
disembowel
them? Why carve the company name into their chests? I simply ask the questions. I pass no judgement. The truth is that we're all little boys pulling the wings off butterflies. But, when we grow up, butterflies aren't big enough … butterflies don't scream loudly enough to assure us that we're alive. What better way can we find to say ‘Yes, I'm a man and I'm making my mark' than by causing pain? That is the truth. And I give it to people packaged in a video cassette.