Unity (9 page)

I hope that this is along the lines that you were expecting. As I said at the start, feel free to use as much or as little as you wish – although you’d better go easy on the Gerald stuff. It would be just my luck if some snotty-nosed kid in the back row turned out to be the son – scion? – of his agent.

Meanwhile, this comes with the very best wishes of one who is definitely not acting when he signs himself,

Ever your devoted pal,

Luke.

8 München 40

Giselastrasse 23,

West Germany

20th Sept 1977

Dear Michael,

I’m afraid this isn’t a Greetings from Merry Munich letter. In fact, I suggest you save it until you’re feeling strong. I’ve been confronting the reality of Nazism. And, with all due respect to the poster in my office, it wasn’t Sally Bowles singing while the
Reichstag
burned. Life isn’t a cabaret, old chum. Or if it is, it’s set in an operating theatre and performed by a cast of amputees. I’m not naive (no, the time for jokes is truly over). Having grown up in the Sudan, I’m under no illusions about mankind’s capacity for violence. But that was tribal. It was nasty people doing nasty things to each other.
TO EACH OTHER
! It was the same lust for power that has driven every tyrant from Genghis Khan to Stalin. It was a perversion of humanity but it was humanity all the same. The Holocaust, however, was different. The Holocaust was hate in the abstract: hate by decree. It was inhumanity on such a scale that the human race can never recover. The most it can hope for is to make amends.

The Holocaust … Nazis … the words are muffled by figures. The litany of the dead drowning out the roll-call of the damned. I think that’s the problem. I can’t get my head around the figures. Perhaps I’ve been asking for explanations from the wrong people. I should look to mathematicians rather than historians. Six million murdered … six million! It’s the ‘million’ that’s the killer. As a kid, I imagined a million to be another word for infinity. It was the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now it’s the dust that lines a mass grave.

There again, perhaps the problem is the words. Look at how quickly they lose their meaning. Take conscience. You’ve read
Hamlet
. It’s what makes cowards of us all. But you’ve also read the glossary. In Shakespeare’s day, it meant consciousness – what Hamlet had too much of – not the guilt feelings that forced Claudius to his knees. I’m no etymologist (now there’s a good word, clear-cut, one which could never refer to anything else), but I long to know at what point in the last four hundred years the meaning changed. Who was it that decided Hamlet out, Claudius in? The question is, admittedly, in every sense academic, since Hitler rejected the very concept of conscience – or rather he took the Claudius sense of the word and placed it in the Hamlet sentence. He derided conscience as a Jewish invention. He didn’t merely destroy their humanity; he destroyed his own.

Conscience is a big word (although, in German, it’s slightly shorter
42
). What about a smaller one, such as Jew? ‘What do you call that thing standing in front of you, Fritzi?’ (I’m sorry, but this is one instance when stereotypes strike me as justified). ‘It’s a man, Papi.’ ‘Take a closer look.’ ‘It’s a man like the sky, Papi, with a star on his coat.’ ‘No, it’s a rat – a Jew rat.’ ‘But he doesn’t have a tail. Don’t rats have tails, Papi?’ ‘They chop them off, Fritzi. When baby Jews are born, they’re taken to a rabbi – that’s a special Jewish butcher – to have their tails cut off. They may look like you and me but they’re rats. And what do we do with rats, Fritzi?’ ‘We put down poison for them, Papi.’ ‘That’s right, Fritzi.’ ‘And what do we do with Jews?’ ‘We put down poison for them, Papi?’ ‘Good boy, Fritzi. You’ll make the Führer proud.’

And that, O Best Beloved, is how the Jew lost his meaning.

But wait, because there are more words – and more lost
meanings
. As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’ve been to Dachau. I shall try to put down my thoughts about it – no, I shall have to put down my thoughts about it – later. The Nazis went to
extraordinary
lengths to deny their victims’ humanity, stripping them of
clothes, of colour, of hair, of flesh, so that killing them came to seem more like refuse collection than murder (the fact that they needed to go to such lengths was, of course, a testament to the very humanity they were determined to deny). They also stripped them of language. Inmates of concentration camps were forbidden to use words such as casualty or corpse; they were ordered to describe the living as
pieces
and the dead as
rags
. They were non-people suffering a non-death. This went way beyond the necessary disposal of bodies. It went way beyond the common negation of truth. It was so patently untrue that it became an elaborate game. For the first time, I felt some sympathy with those philosophers who claim that nothing has value any more, who place a tea-bag and a Monet side by side and insist that they amount to the same.

I also understand why Simon Lister circulated his petition round Cambridge demanding that the Oxford English Dictionary remove one of its definitions of
Jew
. I can’t remember the exact phrase but I know that it was something offensive about being a usurer or a miser. It’s still there so you can look it up for yourself. Perhaps you signed. To my shame, I refused. I argued that the meaning should stand (secondary and obsolete, of course) as a way of understanding the past (along with
fig
and
dug
and all those other remaindered idioms). But, having understood the past in Munich, I’ve changed my mind. Such bigotry should go. It has no place in a living work of reference. Do you remember the talk after the
Faust
screening in Edinburgh when Wolfram linked British integrity with Oxford accents? Huh!

I’d hate to touch a nerve, but do you feel as strongly about words like
pouf
and
queer
43
? I’ve never realised until now how similar
the process of denigration is. You put your feet on a pouf; you turn a Jew into a lampshade. They’re part of the same linguistic scheme.

On the heels of the words come the jokes. Manfred, who’s playing Goebbels, has done some research – the sort that I should have done before tossing off a May Week entertainment – and found that Goebbels was partial to Jewish humour. Do you suppose that was humour about Jews, as in ‘how many Jews does it take to plug a gas leak?’, or humour by Jews, as in ‘died a death at Dachau’? Of course, the best joke of all was the one told by that prince of comedians, Adolf Hitler. But then he was the Führer, so he had a duty to excel. As we know, our Adolf didn’t have much time for God, or for his son. I expect he didn’t care for the
competition
. But he couldn’t risk alienating the millions of pious Germans. So, to absolve them of any taint of
Rassenschande
, he declared that, according to strict Nazi classification, Jesus wasn’t a Jew, since, by virtue of the Virgin Birth, he only had two Jewish grandparents. Boom boom!

Well, it had them rolling in the aisles at Nuremberg.

But how many of them? That’s what’s bothering me. I’ve been questioning some of the German actors who say that the hardest thing for them to accept when growing up was that everyone they knew had been an anti-fascist. They were left baffled as to how the Nazis had ever gained power. I know that there were six million victims, but how large was the number of the perpetrators? I search for an answer in the face of anyone over fifty I see on the street. Fliss accuses me of boorishness, but it’s a moral quest. Last week, after filming, I took a stroll down Murderer’s Lane. Did you realise that Hitler’s flat – the one in which he lived with his niece Geli – is still standing? As I gazed up at the windows trying to guess which had been his, this elegant elderly lady, with hair like crystallised ginger, emerged from the door. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you?’ But, of course, she knew full well
what I wanted. It was another game. ‘Never mind what I want. How much did you know?’ was what I longed to reply. But of course, I didn’t. I’m an Englishman. Putting someone on the spot just isn’t playing the game. So I smiled and, saying that I was a student of architecture, admired her gables.

I find the women hard to pin down. Whereas I can dress the men in makeshift uniforms, ‘What did you do in the War, Mutti?’ evokes a more equivocal response. Beate, the make-up supervisor, told me about her mother who works as a cleaner for the widow of a Nazi general. Since military pensions are based on rank, she is very well off, whereas Beate’s mother, whose husband was in the Resistance, receives nothing. Her mother has heard her employer agitating on the phone about the Jewish menace and knows that she funds neo-Nazi youths (then, when they’re sent to jail, she bakes them cakes). Beate has begged her to report her to the authorities, but she refuses. She says that she is happy in the job; the woman is kind to her. And, besides, didn’t Beate’s father bring enough trouble on them?

It might almost be the plot of one of Wolfram’s films.

Do you think that ‘Don’t ask me; I’m only the cleaning lady,’ may have been the prevalent attitude forty years ago? The evidence points two different ways. On the one hand, you read that the boycott of Jewish shops, which Hitler instituted after coming to power, gained so little support that it was quietly dropped and that, the day that Jews were made to wear the Yellow Star, Berliners averted their eyes to avoid embarrassing them. On the other, I discovered at Dachau that there were 10,000 – you said that you’ve been finding my letters difficult to decipher, so I’ll write that again and, this time, in words, ten thousand – concentration camps. I’d assumed that there were just a handful: the infamous names that are trotted out
repeatedly
as a shortcut to shame. But 10,000 … how could people not have known?

In the Sixties, parts of China were infested with sparrows. The government decreed that citizens should drive them away by
clapping
their hands. This they did in true revolutionary spirit and, because they had nowhere to land, the birds were quickly
eliminated
. Do you think that the Germans may have taken a similar line in the Third Reich, believing that, if they clapped their hands (or closed their eyes), the Jews would all disappear?

We went to Dachau last Sunday, much as Munichers on a trip to London might visit Hampton Court – that’s to say, it’s about the same distance from the city centre, although there the
resemblance
ends. When we left (I’m sorry but I have to tell the story in reverse), I felt so bad that I wanted to go to church. No, I haven’t suddenly found religion. Indeed, if anything were guaranteed to turn my wishy-washy ‘don’t know’ into a hard-and-fast ‘don’t believe’, it was what I’d just seen. I went, not to look for God, but to remind myself of the many generations who had trusted in him and trusted that all they had to do was to put a cross on the roof of a building and he would be there. But as we sat, surrounded by that unique ecclesiastical dampness which my mother and her friends take for sanctity, we heard the unmistakable roar of a passing train. Fliss and I looked at each other with a thought too obvious to put into words. Unless the organist had been a
dedicated
party member who pulled out the stops at the first distant rumble, there was no way that that congregation could plead
ignorance
. Nor, if he exists, could God.

Wolfram arranged with Thomas, our backer (I think I may have mentioned that he’d been sent to Auschwitz), for us to be given a guided tour. I assured him that we wouldn’t be going as tourists. ‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘I hope that’s just how you will go.’ To my dismay, he called up an acquaintance who’d been a prisoner there. Fliss dismissed my qualms, saying that I hadn’t objected when Lord Montagu showed us personally round Beaulieu. It struck me as hardly the same.

Josef, the guide, was as gnarled as a woodcut of Winter. He’d been brought to Dachau in 1943, which was itself something of an anomaly since it wasn’t designed to take Jews (in fact, many of the prisoners were priests). He owed his survival to his skills as a carpenter (although he never again picked up his tools after leaving the camp). One of the fruits of his handiwork, the whipping-block, is prominently displayed in the museum. ‘I saw my friends and fellow-inmates beaten and tortured on this,’ he said. Then, very softly, he began to wail – except that he wasn’t wailing but reciting a list of names. ‘Why don’t you ask the
question
that’s lying on your tongue?’ he said. ‘How many lashes were they given?’ I asked. ‘No, the question that you really want to ask,’ he said with a hint of scorn. ‘Do you feel guilty?’ I asked, projecting my own feelings on to him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘the moment people begin to lie again in Dachau, it should be razed to the ground.’ Then he took both our hands. ‘Touch it,’ he said, in defiance of the notice. We tentatively rubbed the wood. ‘You see. After more than thirty years, it’s still smooth. I made sure that, however butchered their backs, not a single splinter would pierce their chests. Does that answer your question?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, even though it didn’t. ‘Thank you,’ I added, praying that he wouldn’t ask me again.

He took us to the main gate with its infamous
Arbeit Macht Frei
fretwork, which appeared even more sinister when read from behind. You know about that, of course, but what you may not have known (I certainly didn’t) is that it was a cynical allusion to the Great Depression and the success of the Nazi employment programme. Another day, another irony … and another abuse of language, although this one served a dual purpose. Work might not make the inmates free but nor, the authorities were
determined
, would anything else. Which was why they reacted so
furiously
when anyone committed suicide. You might have thought that they’d have been pleased. After all, it was one prisoner less to
worry about. But it struck right to the heart of their self-image. What was the point of playing God if they were denied the power of life and death?

He took us into the central square where he spoke of standing for hours during evening roll call, watching the sun setting over the Alps. When I suggested that such beauty must have given him hope, he said that, on the contrary, it was more chilling than any of the guards. I was relieved to escape into the barracks. But further horrors lay in store as he described the significance of the bunks with all the composure of Lord Montagu discussing a bed that had been slept in by royalty. They were constructed on three tiers and the life expectancy of their occupants was similarly graded. He stressed that there were no rules but, on average, the men at the top could hope to last for two to three months; the men in the middle for a week; while, at the bottom, they would be lucky to live through the night. When Fliss asked why, he pointed to the gaps in the slats through which excreta dripped down from sick and squashed prisoners, turning the bunk into a cess pit.