Page 15 of The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, April 1932
Adolf Hitler was back in the aeroplane on another whistle-stop tour of the country so that he could speak at bierkellers, town halls and stadiums in as many as four or five towns a day. Goebbels had organised the whole tour. A planeload of journalists flew in advance of these visits, filling newspapers the next day with photographs and reports of the adoring masses who had turned out to greet their glorious leader. He would start off quietly, telling them almost sadly how unfairly they’d been treated by the rest of the world since the war, how mercilessly exploited by their current government as well as the Jews, before whipping himself into a frenzy as he announced those days would be over once he gained power. If they gave him the chance, he would speak up for the working man and return the Fatherland to its former glory. He used short, catchy phrases that were chanted back to him by his audience, soon equally transported. He was on their side: passionate, fearless and honest, a contrast to the corrupt elite who’d been living high on the hog for years at their expense. No wonder they loved him.
Thousands came to hear Hitler talk at Berlin’s Sportpalast arena in Schoneberg, and Freya had to fight her way through the streets to get home after work. Everywhere she looked, posters on lampposts and hoardings exhorted her to vote for him, and squads of passing stormtroopers waved the swastika flag she was expected to salute – the flag that now flew proudly from their balcony at home. Freya felt sick at the sight of it, and knew her mother would have been horrified, too. Walther Grube strutted about the apartment with renewed confidence, waiting for his hero to achieve due recognition, and was to be seen more often as a brownshirt, tapping his baton and with handcuffs dangling from his belt. He’d latched on to the family’s maid and was often to be found in the kitchen, filling her head with visions of the promised land that would be theirs once the Nazis were in power. Hedwig proved to be a willing audience, to Freya’s relief, as it meant Grube was paying less attention to her. Ernst was jubilant too. Why, hadn’t Herr Hitler worked as a house painter himself before the war? He was a man of the people.
Meanwhile, brown-shirted stormtroopers and the fearsome SS paramilitaries roamed the streets, terrorising Jews, Communists and anyone else who displeased them merely by existing. There were running gun battles throughout the country on a scale that had never been seen before. In the middle of July, a gang of Nazis under police escort marched into a Communist area of Hamburg and opened fire; nineteen people were killed and over 300 injured. As the election neared, an Urgent Call for Unity was published in a national newspaper. Signed by over thirty scientists, authors and artists, it appealed to the Communist and Socialist parties to join forces and keep the Nazis out of government. Posters with the same message appeared throughout Berlin, jostling for space on the crowded hoardings.
‘Ha!’ crowed Herr Grube at breakfast one morning. ‘See how worried those fools are? They know their days are numbered.’
And Freya was worried, too. She woke each morning to a sense of dread that the door to a brighter future, so tantalisingly within reach, was about to be slammed in her face. She felt the loss of her mother more acutely than ever, isolated as she was in an apartment full of Nazi sympathisers, and longed to talk things over with Leon – the Leon of before. He felt like a stranger to her now, the memory of their last, awkward encounter seared into her memory. Yet she couldn’t bear to think they would lose touch for ever; she had to believe that someday she would find him again.
In Leon and Ingrid’s absence, she confided in Wolfgang Berger. He’d become a friend by now, and she was as likely to talk to him about politics as writing.
‘Do you think Hitler will actually gain power?’ she asked.
Berger sighed. ‘He might, but who knows whether he can keep it. Once people see his true agenda, they’ll vote against him.’
‘And what is that agenda, beyond persecuting Jews and Communists?’
‘Another war, I believe,’ Berger replied, his face grave. ‘That’s the point of all this marching, of the uniforms and brainwashing at youth camps. He’s training young men to fight, and young women to bear children who will grow up to serve the Reich. I’m glad not to be teaching anymore. Today’s students have been indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda at school and their minds are closed. There are professors they won’t engage with and books they won’t open because they don’t want to be challenged.’ He shook his head. ‘Just when they should be reading anything and everything, and deciding for themselves what to think!’
‘Can’t people see how dangerous Hitler is?’ Freya exclaimed. ‘There must be something we can do to stop him!’
The walls were closing in around her and she alternated between anger and despair. When election day came around at last, one sunny Sunday at the end of July, she got up early to walk to the polling station alone. She’d only recently turned twenty so this was the first election in which she’d been able to vote, and she didn’t want the gloating company of Herr Grube and her father and brother to spoil such a momentous occasion. She’d always been so proud of her country, not for its military might but for producing such giants as Beethoven, Wagner, Albert Einstein, Berthold Brecht and Thomas Mann. Her beloved Berlin had seemed the most exciting city of all, despite the wretched poverty and unemployment, because of the hotchpotch of people who lived there – making music, art, poetry, literature, films, inspiring architecture and so much more. Only recently, she had gone with Wolfgang, Maus and Elke to see The Blue Light , an extraordinary film starring Leni Riefenstahl as Junta, a girl who lived half-wild in the mountains. Fr?ulein Riefenstahl had directed the film as well as starring in it, using innovative camera techniques that left the audience breathless.
‘You see? Women can do anything,’ Maus had said afterwards, squeezing Freya’s arm. ‘We just need the chance.’
And Freya had a glimpse of the life she might lead, were she free to follow her dreams.
Election day itself passed peacefully, despite dire predictions of violence, with Berliners patiently queueing in long lines outside the polling places. After she’d cast her vote – for the Social Democrats, who seemed the least bad option – Freya found a quiet corner of the Tiergarten park to lie on the grass and doze in the sun for a while. On the way home, she passed a café where on past weekends, Leon would often meet Otto and other friends, but there was no sign of him. She spent the afternoon writing, locked away in her room, before leaving to join Elke and Maus at Haus Vaterland: a huge pleasure palace on the south side of Potsdamer Platz.
‘One last hurrah before the curtain falls,’ Maus had said, and suddenly all Freya wanted was to lose herself in the crowd, to drink and dance without having to think what the next day might bring. She wanted to grab life with both hands and wring it dry while she still had the chance. Darkness was falling as she approached Haus Vaterland, the lights on its vast dome winking at her in sequence as though they were moving. Thousands of people could be swallowed up in the restaurants, bars and dance halls on each of those six floors, so Maus had given her strict instructions as to exactly where in the Wild West saloon she and Elke were to be found. They were more than just friends, Freya had discovered, and lived together in a small apartment above a bookshop in the Jewish area of the city. Rupert, an inveterate gossip, had told her that Maus had once been in love with Violet but her feelings weren’t reciprocated. It was all deliciously complicated and interesting.
Once inside Haus Vaterland, she ran up the spectacular staircases, one after another, until she reached the fourth floor and pushed open the swing doors to the American bar, where a Negro band played jazz and the bartenders wore cowboy hats. Maus had suggested the venue. They could have been drinking wine under grapevines in the Rhine Terrace, where thunder growled and lightning flashed in a pretend storm every hour, but Maus declared she was sick of Europe and preferred the New World to the Old. She and Elke were sitting at a table beside a large fake cactus, bourbon glasses in hand. Maus wore a long gown in gold lamé and Elke crêpe-de-chine trousers and a velvet smoking jacket with nothing underneath, her hair tumbling in waves down her back.
‘Freya! At last,’ Maus shouted above the screeching music. ‘We thought you might have stood us up.’
Like the rest of Wolfgang’s friends, she and Elke seemed to have adopted Freya as their mascot. They regularly included her in their outings, asked her opinion about their work, their lives and their problems, and listened to what she had to say – even Gunther, who was terrifyingly well-informed about everything, and sophisticated Rupert, who introduced her to Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, and quizzed her about Heinrich Heine.
‘Why wouldn’t we love you?’ Maus told her once. ‘You’re young and sweet, and you think we’re all marvellous. It’s a winning combination.’
Yet sometimes Freya felt a hundred years old; tonight, especially. She slid on to the banquette and took a gulp of the whisky that Elke had pushed across the table, feeling its warmth spread through her veins. She was wearing Franz Schwartz’s opera cloak, which he’d once let her borrow and luckily forgotten about, over an ivory silk nightdress of her mother’s that she’d turned into a backless evening gown. What would Ingrid say if she could see her now? Freya lit a cigarette, tossed back her hair and glanced away from her reflection in one of the many mirrors dotted around the room.
‘Done the deed?’ Elke asked, squeezing her shoulder.
Freya nodded. ‘For all the difference it’ll make.’ Elke was a Communist, despite her gentle demeanour, and Maus was Jewish, so there was no need to ask where their allegiance lay.
‘And that’s enough politics for now,’ Maus said. ‘Tomorrow will come soon enough.’
Besides, they couldn’t hear themselves think. Freya sat back, surrendering to the jaunty music as she watched couples gyrating on the crowded dance floor: kicking out their feet, slapping their hips and throwing up their arms in versions of the Charleston and the Black Bottom – dances that had long since gone out of fashion but which seemed strangely appropriate now. If she narrowed her eyes, they looked like mechanical toys in the harsh light, their faces contorted in gaiety and their limbs jerking as though exorcising some inner demon. Maus caught Freya’s eye and smiled, shaking her head, but when the next number began, she and Elke got up to take their turn on the floor.
Freya ordered another round of drinks and threw hers back in double time, relaxing in a haze of alcohol. The band had taken a break and only a single saxophonist stood under the spotlight, playing such a haunting melody that tears came to Freya’s eyes as she watched Elke glide across the room with Maus in her arms. Her new friends had become inexpressibly dear. What lay in store for them all? But now a young man in a dazzling white shirt was approaching the table with his hand outstretched, asking her to dance. She pulled herself together and let him lead her into the throng, laying her cheek against his crisp cotton chest and closing her eyes so she could pretend he was Leon.
The night passed in a blur. At some stage Rupert joined them, and then Gunther and Wolfgang. Freya could only remember isolated scenes, frozen in time: Rupert sending the cork of a champagne bottle ricocheting off a chandelier, Maus standing on the table to strike a pose like a shimmering column of gold, Wolfgang watching them all before turning to tell her solemnly, ‘We are dancing on the edge of a volcano,’ and then sliding to the ground.
He was right. Freya’s hangover the next day was made worse by hearing on the wireless that the Nazis had won 230 seats – not sufficient to give them an overall majority, but enough to make them the largest party in the Reichstag.
Life went on, as it must. A few weeks later, Maus’s photographic exhibition opened in a small gallery near her apartment: fleeting glimpses of everyday life, captured for posterity. A toothless old woman danced in a courtyard before a wind-up gramophone, hat on the ground for spare change; children fished for coins through the grate of a drain; teenage girls lounged among the chimneys in a roof garden, listening to the radio; a hausfrau with her hands in the sink and her eyes closed to feel the sun on her face; a horse-drawn cart delivering milk laboured up a cobbled street. There were several solarised portraits, too, and three superimposed images of a nude Elke forming one stunning picture: the centrepiece of the exhibition.
Freya had worked with Maus to suggest titles and a brief narrative for many of the pictures: a line or two evoking emotion or locating a setting, sometimes using the subject’s own words if those were especially resonant. She was touched by Maus’s trust in her, loved the collaborative process and felt proud of having played a small part in the display. Seeing her text in print on the wall was a wonderful thrill.
‘You see? Freya was the perfect girl for the job,’ Rupert told Maus. ‘She has a feel for the domestic.’
The usual friends had turned up at the opening to toast Maus’s success and then carry on the party back at her and Elke’s apartment. They put on a brave front, but an undercurrent of melancholy ran beneath the celebration.
Wolfgang grew more sombre with every drink. ‘How long before the brownshirts smash your windows and close you down?’ he asked. ‘We should run a sweepstake. I say a fortnight.’
‘Don’t be so pessimistic,’ Gunther said. ‘Hitler’s not running the show yet.’
Maus reached for Elke’s hand, the smile dropping from her face. ‘Wolfi’s right,’ she said. ‘Elke and I are thinking of moving to Paris. It’s all right for you, Gunther. You’re blond and blue-eyed and you have a girlfriend. Everyone knows how much Hitler hates queers.’
‘No!’ Freya burst out, unable to restrain herself. ‘You can’t go! Not when we’ve only just met.’
Elke smiled. ‘Come with us. Why not? You can make costumes for the Folies Bergère.’
‘The most wonderful city in the world, ruined by those louts,’ Rupert said bitterly. ‘I shan’t go back to dreary old England; it would be the death of me. Maybe I’ll try America next. Or Morocco? Tangier has a certain appeal.’
Freya wondered briefly whether Violet would leave too. What if Leon went with her? He wouldn’t consider it, though, not with his mother alone in Berlin and his studies to finish. And she couldn’t abandon her country either.
‘There have to be people to stay and speak up for what’s right,’ she said. ‘We can’t let the Nazis drive everyone out.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Wolfgang declared, draining his glass. ‘We must stand together and resist!’
‘Good luck with that,’ Gunther said. ‘Half the country’s mad for Hitler – they’re not going to pay any attention to a few intellectuals worried about their artistic freedom.’
Wolfgang sprang to his feet. ‘Then we have to make them listen! This isn’t just a question of censorship, though that’s bad enough. The man is evil. Have you read Mein Kampf ? He wants to crush anyone who doesn’t share his warped views. God knows what will happen if he gets a chance to put those ideas into practice.’
‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic,’ Gunther replied, crossing his legs on the coffee table. ‘Von Schleicher and the old elite might allow him the illusion of power but they’ll be holding his puppet strings, you can be sure of that. Once he’s helped them get rid of the Communists, they’ll soon boot him out. Trust me, I know how these things work.’
‘No, you don’t!’ Wolfgang’s eyes were blazing. ‘You shan’t have the last word on everything. This is different. Hitler’s … well, he’s a … a maniac.’
But it was too late in the evening and he’d drunk too much to articulate more clearly than that; he slumped back in the chair, glowering.
To fill the awkward silence, Freya asked Gunther, ‘Have you heard Herr Hitler’s going to inspect the new Nazi members of the Reichstag tomorrow? There’s to be a gathering of the party faithful at the Kaiserhof. Goebbels is going to be there too.’
The Kaiserhof was a smart hotel in the government district, opposite the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler stayed on his infrequent visits to Berlin. It was said that he took a corner suite with windows looking directly into the Chancellor’s office: the very place he wanted to be.
‘How did you find that out?’ Maus asked. ‘Are you on the guest list?’
Freya laughed. ‘Our lodger, Herr Grube, told me. He’s going along to pay homage. Apparently anyone can turn up – I was thinking of attending myself. Might be my only chance to see Hitler in the flesh.’
Elke shuddered. ‘Who’d want to?’
It was a legitimate question. Yet Freya was curious: she wanted to watch Adolf Hitler in action, see his spell working on those around her and find out whether she was susceptible.
Wolfgang roused himself. ‘I’ll come with you. Let’s see the whites of the devil’s eyes.’
‘I’d heard something to that effect,’ Gunther said. ‘I’ll be there. But don’t tell anyone else – we don’t want this turning into a free-for-all.’
Luckily, there could be no question of Walther Grube taking Freya to the Kaiserhof, as he was attending a meeting near the hotel immediately beforehand. She told him she would be there, though, hoping to catch a glimpse of Herr Hitler.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said with evident surprise. ‘And does this mean you’ll be supporting the party, Fr?ulein?’
‘Who knows?’ she replied, to keep him guessing. Gunther had asked her to pass on any useful pieces of information Grube might let slip and while she couldn’t bring herself to be friendly to the man, she was less actively hostile. Herr Grube didn’t affect her so much now that she had a circle of friends and a life outside work and home.
‘We never see you,’ Otto was prone to grumble. ‘God knows what you’re up to. Playing fast and loose around town, no doubt.’
Yet he was out more often in the evening himself, courting the daughter of a builder working on the Horseshoe Estate. Liesl was the opposite of Freya in every respect: long blonde hair in braids, demure floral dresses – apart from the blue skirt, white blouse and heavy walking shoes of the Nazi League of German Girls that she wore as she set off to attend summer camp. She was eighteen and about to graduate from secretarial college. Hanging on his every word, Liesl’s dreamy blue eyes focused on Otto’s face as though she couldn’t quite believe he was real. If he’d told her to lie down in the street in front of a tram, she would have obliged without question.
The famous housing estate was nearing completion; no doubt Otto had his eye on a choice apartment into which Liesl could be slotted, along with the mini Ottos and Liesls who would soon appear. Freya tried to get along with her brother for Ingrid’s sake, but that was becoming increasingly difficult. She couldn’t forget the expression on his face when he’d attacked Leon, and she hated the way he and Walther Grube held forth about the state of the country, shouting down any opposing view. Otto would have dismissed her friends as degenerates; he and Grube loved to make fun of ‘warm brothers’, or homosexuals, although Freya felt that Grube himself, like Rupert, admired the male body more than the female. She’d never been convinced by his supposed romantic interest in her, and had often caught him glancing lasciviously at Otto when he thought no one was watching.
Herr Grube certainly wouldn’t have approved of Wolfgang’s appearance that afternoon in the lobby of the Kaiserhof hotel. Unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and his hair unkempt, he’d thrown an unseasonally heavy coat over his clothes from the night before, which looked as though he’d slept in them. Freya was surprised he’d been allowed through the door.
‘Are you feeling all right, Wolfi?’ she asked cautiously. ‘Maybe you should spruce yourself up in the men’s room.’
‘What?’ He looked at her blearily. ‘Oh yes, perhaps. Will you order me a brandy?’
Freya found an unobtrusive table for two beside a pillar in the grand, high-ceilinged room, ordered drinks from a waiter and looked around. Several Nazi officials in dark suits with swastika armbands sat drinking beer, and a group of foreign correspondents and photographers stood gossiping with each other, keeping an eye on the side doors for any glimpse of the Herr Hitler. She saw Gunther, who gave her a brief nod; he didn’t like to mix business with pleasure. And there was Joseph Goebbels, immediately recognisable thanks to his cadaverous face and pronounced limp, entering the lobby with his statuesque wife. They struck up a conversation with a tall man in brown SA uniform, festooned with gold braid, insignia and medals, who’d been pacing around the room.
‘Who’s that talking to Goebbels?’ Freya asked Wolfgang on his return.
‘Count von Helldorff,’ he replied briefly. ‘Head of the Berlin stormtroopers. He was behind that trouble on Kurfürstendamm last year.’
So Violet had been right. Freya remembered the figure in the Jeep, screaming abuse as he was driven up and down the boulevard. She watched him now, so charming and urbane as he bent to catch some remark of Goebbels’ which made him chuckle.
‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,’ she said uneasily. ‘Shall we go? Who knows when Hitler’s going to turn up. He might not come at all.’
‘You can leave but I’m staying,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘You’re right: this might be our only chance to see the enemy up close.’
At least he looked more presentable now, but he was in a strange mood: distracted, jittery, tapping his fingers against his thigh as he stared about. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead but he refused to take off the coat, merely mopping his brow occasionally. Time dragged by and the journalists gradually left in twos and threes, tired of waiting. Meanwhile, the lobby filled with Nazis and a few curious tourists. Walther Grube appeared in a group of identical crop-headed young men, casting disdainful glances at the hoi polloi around them.
Freya shrank behind the pillar so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge Grube and he wouldn’t see she was with Wolfgang, peeking out a few minutes later to witness several extraordinary things happen in quick succession. Firstly, the last couple in the world she expected to see walked into the Kaiserhof. The woman wore a halter-neck gown in green silk that showed off her beautiful back to its best advantage; the man was less remarkable, short and dark, also in evening dress. The crowd parted to let them pass and Freya watched, hardly believing her eyes, as Maxim Fischer walked up to the Goebbels, greeted them and introduced Violet. He kissed Frau Goebbels’ hand and engaged her in conversation while Herr Goebbels talked to Violet, drawing her a little way apart; he was a notorious womaniser, despite his club foot and short stature. Violet listened with her head on one side and a radiant smile on her face.
Shocked, Freya nudged Wolfgang. ‘Have you seen who’s over there?’ Violet should have been on stage at the Zaubergarten, rather than cosying up to Hitler’s propaganda chief. What on earth was she up to?
Wolfgang didn’t reply, because now the side doors were opening and a flood of senior Nazis poured into the room, their uniforms decorated with gold braid and colourful insignia. They strutted about like peacocks, ridiculous (to Freya’s eyes) in their widely cut brown jodhpurs, before lining up in ranks. Black-uniformed members of the dreaded SS, Hitler’s bodyguards, surveyed the action from the side of the room. Freya lost sight of Violet and was relieved she and Wolfgang were also hidden by the throng. And then, as a murmur of anticipation spread through the lobby, suddenly their leader was walking among them. She craned forward to catch a brief glimpse of that sallow, belligerent face with its toothbrush moustache, so familiar from posters and the portrait that dominated their living room at home. A forest of arms flew up and cries of ‘Heil!’ filled the air.
Freya couldn’t bring herself to do the same, and was relieved no one seemed to be looking at her. She turned to speak to Wolfgang, but the words died on her lips when she saw him. His hand was raised, though not in salute. He was holding a pistol, which he managed to cock with shaking fingers and aim at Adolf Hitler.