Page 16 of The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, August 1932
Freya acted on instinct. She stepped forward without thinking, standing directly in front of Wolfgang to block his view and, just as importantly, hide the pistol in his hand. Miraculously, all eyes were on Hitler and nobody seemed to have noticed the strange man in the heavy coat with his arm extended, like so many others. She and Wolfgang locked eyes, his already defeated, before he lowered the gun. Trying to assassinate the leader of the Nazi party, in a room packed with SS guards! It was suicide. Besides, there was only the slimmest of chances he’d have found his mark. Hitler was in the middle of a crowd and Wolfi was even more drunk than usual; he’d have ended up killing innocent bystanders – even if they were Nazis – before being shot himself. And she would almost certainly have been killed along with him.
All these thoughts must have raced unconsciously through her head, together with the overriding conviction that taking any human life, even Hitler’s, was wrong. Years later, though, when she was leading another life altogether, she would look back on that day and wonder whether Wolfgang had had the right idea all along. If by some miraculous chance his plan had succeeded, the world would have been spared unimaginable horror. At the time, all she could think about was getting him away from the Kaiserhof alive and unseen. She shielded him with her body until he’d replaced the pistol in his coat pocket and steered him through the hotel lobby and out of the double doors with her head down, avoiding anyone’s gaze. He stumbled beside her in an apparent daze, unresisting.
When they were outside in the fresh air and a safe distance away, she took him by the shoulders. ‘What were you thinking? Promise me you’ll never try anything like that again.’
Wolfgang put his hand in his pocket and she flinched, but all he drew out was a handkerchief to mop his forehead. His face had a yellowish tinge. ‘You were right. We have to do something.’
‘But not that,’ she said. ‘Not murder.’
He shrugged, pulling away from her and weaving across the square. A squad of Hitler Youth came marching towards him, singing as they went, but he didn’t alter his course to avoid them. Freya watched, her heart in her mouth, but the boys merely parted and flowed around him without breaking their stride or missing a note. It appeared that Wolfgang wasn’t worth the trouble of beating up – this brilliant, damaged man who’d taught her to believe in herself. He seemed set on course to self-destruct and she couldn’t bear it.
She also feared for Leon, certain he would have had no idea what Violet was up to. Instead of going home, she took a tram to the Schoneberg district and walked to the parade of shops with the blue door at the corner. She didn’t know whether he lived there now or only used the place occasionally, but she couldn’t think where else to try. There was no reply when she knocked on the door and the building was shrouded in darkness. She leaned against the wall, trying to remember the Kohls’ home address. They lived in a second-floor apartment not far from the technical university, to the west of Tiergarten; she knew the name of the street but couldn’t recall the number of the building. A sense of urgency sent her hurrying back to the tram stop, though she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and her stomach was growling.
An hour later, she had rung at least five doorbells in Gutenberg Strasse without success before the last person she’d disturbed happened to know Frau Kohl and directed her to the right apartment, a little further down the street. Unexpectedly, Leon himself came down to the main door of the building to let her in.
‘Hello, stranger! Come in,’ he said, standing back to let her pass although obviously surprised to see her. The last time they’d spoken to each other was the disastrous outing to Lake Wannsee, almost a year ago.
‘Thank you.’ Yet now Freya’s courage was failing her; she had no idea how he’d react to what she was about to say. Rather than have him throw her out of the apartment, she decided to broach the subject down in the courtyard.
‘I’m sorry to call round out of the blue,’ she began, ‘but I need to tell you what’s just happened.’
He paused under the archway. ‘That sounds serious.’
‘It concerns Fr?ulein Violet,’ she said, her hands clenched by her sides, prickling with sweat.
‘Is she in trouble?’ he asked quickly. ‘Has she sent you here?’
Freya shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. She’s fine, as far as I’m aware. But there’s something about her you should know.’
Leon frowned. ‘Very mysterious. Well, we can’t talk here. Let’s go upstairs.’
They climbed two flights without speaking, Freya’s heart pounding in her chest and her nerves increasing.
‘My mother’s working late,’ Leon said, opening the apartment door. ‘I’m cooking supper – you’ll have to excuse the mess.’
The kitchen was hot and steamy, the sink piled high with pans. He pulled out a chair for her at the table and sat opposite, his eyes wary. Without mentioning the part Wolfgang had played, she explained briefly what she’d witnessed at the hotel that evening.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Leon said when she’d finished. ‘Violet? With Joseph Goebbels at the Kaiserhof? It must have been someone who looked like her.’
‘Nobody looks like Violet,’ Freya replied. ‘I saw her clearly – and her … agent, Herr Fischer.’ A shadow crossed Leon’s face but she ploughed on. ‘He introduced her to Goebbels and they talked together until Hitler appeared. I lost sight of them after that. Maybe she spoke to him, too.’
A saucepan bubbled over on the stove and Leon got up to turn off the gas ring. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked. ‘What has Fr?ulein Violet got to do with me?’
‘Leon, I know you’re having an …’ She hesitated, before continuing. ‘I know you’re more than friends. I saw you together once.’
He flushed and looked away.
‘You don’t have to pretend,’ she went on. ‘Of course I’ve kept your secret, and I always will, but I wanted to warn you. You can’t trust Violet, Leon; an English friend told me her family are well-known Fascists. Don’t share anything with her that could land you in trouble. Any mention of your Jewish grandfather, for example.’
Leon frowned, folding his arms. ‘That’s enough, Freya. I don’t doubt you have the best motives and I thank you for your concern, but you have no need to involve yourself in my affairs. You don’t really know Violet, do you?’
‘Maybe not,’ Freya replied. ‘And maybe you don’t, either.’ An awkward silence descended, so after a moment she got to her feet. ‘Well, I’ve said my piece. Goodbye, Leon. Take care of yourself.’
The smell of cooking meat was making her mouth water, and she was half-hoping he’d press her to stay for supper with his mother, who had been Ingrid Amsel’s closest friend and whom Freya loved too. Instead, he said, ‘Look after yourself, too, kleine Freya. These are dangerous times and we must each navigate them as best we may. Can you see yourself out?’
And now, too late, she bitterly regretted having come. She had damaged her relationship with Leon, probably permanently, to no great effect, and this glimpse of cosy domesticity in the Kohls’ apartment had left her feeling more alone than ever. She leaned against the wall in the stairwell for a moment, imagining her mother’s comforting arms around her and her voice whispering, ‘Don’t despair, little one. This too shall pass.’
Ingrid had known how Freya felt about Leon: she had once caught her daughter gazing after him as he and Otto left the apartment and cupped Freya’s cheek for a moment, murmuring, ‘There will be other boys, you know.’
How angrily Freya had batted her mother’s hand away, convinced she didn’t understand, and what wouldn’t she give for Ingrid’s loving touch now!
Freya managed to avoid Violet at the Zaubergarten until Friday evening, when she was supervising costume changes in Frau Brodsky’s absence. They were surrounded by the other girls so there was no chance to talk privately, but she was aware of Violet’s hostile stare. When the performance was over, Violet drew her into the workroom and closed the door.
‘So, I gather we have a spy in the ranks,’ she said. ‘And what were you doing at the Kaiserhof, Fr?ulein Amsel?’
‘I was curious,’ Freya replied, matching Violet’s cool tone. ‘I went there with Wolfgang. We simply wanted to see what Hitler was like – we weren’t hoping for a private audience.’
‘And you think I was?’ Violet asked.
‘Who knows?’ Freya said. ‘I can’t imagine why else you’d be sucking up to Goebbels.’
Violet snorted. ‘And who else have you gone running to with your scoop of the century?’
‘No one. Wolfgang didn’t see you and I let Frau Brodsky carry on thinking you had a migraine that evening.’
‘And why should I believe that?’
‘I don’t care whether you believe it or not,’ Freya retorted, her anger growing. Why was she the one to be questioned? ‘I’ve kept your dirty little secrets long enough. Leon deserved to know the truth. I feel responsible: you only met him because of me.’
‘And I bet you wish you’d never introduced us,’ Violet said. ‘But Leon’s a grown man with a mind of his own – you can’t keep him all to yourself for ever.’
‘He’s my friend and nothing more,’ Freya said, her cheeks hot.
‘You’d like there to be, though,’ Violet said with a smile. ‘Forget about him, Freya. Find someone who’ll love you and be happy.’
‘Shut up!’ Freya cried, beside herself. ‘Do you think I need advice from a, a …’ She paused, not quite brave enough to continue.
‘A what?’ Violet asked icily.
‘An Englishwoman,’ Freya said at last, and Violet laughed.
Now they were truly enemies.
The weeks rolled by and summer turned to autumn. Adolf Hitler still hadn’t been appointed Chancellor, despite leading the largest party in the Reichstag, but surely it was only a matter of time. Gunther reported that President Hindenburg had started negotiations with Herr Hitler. And Wolfgang was proven right: the windows of the art gallery housing Maus’s exhibition were smashed and anti-Jewish slogans daubed over the photographs inside. Rumours spread around the Zaubergarten that the place could only stay open because Herr Goldstein was paying the Nazis protection money.
Life at the club became increasingly precarious: there seemed to be more Nazis in the audience every evening, identifiable by their swastika armbands and swagger, while the regular clientele were choosing to drink elsewhere. Willi, the emcee, was beaten up so badly after one too many jokes about Goebbels that he’d spent a fortnight in hospital and gone back to working in the Adlon hotel when he was discharged. Herr Schwartz took over the role but was too nervous and depressed to perform with any flair. The two men who sang satirical songs at the piano now made them so obscure no one could understand the joke, while the red- headed violinist had acquired a stormtrooper lover who didn’t like her appearing on stage and so left the company. The Zaubergarten girls were down to four: Angelika’s father had died, leaving her enough money to live on, and Sophie with the beautiful voice had found a job entertaining passengers on a liner sailing to America, and was hoping to stay there.
Frau Brodsky arrived for work later each day, the routes she took to avoid stormtroopers marching down the street becoming ever more circuitous. By now, she and Freya had developed a comfortable working relationship that suited them both. They talked about costumes, the club and the girls but left politics alone and kept their home lives private. Freya often thought how horrified Rosa Brodsky would be if she could see the picture of Herr Hitler in their living room, a copy of The Attack on the coffee table and a swastika flag hanging from the balcony.
Yet as they were stitching companionably together in the workroom one afternoon, Frau Brodsky stuck her needle in a pincushion, took off her spectacles and smoothed her face with both hands.
‘You know, this month I will have lived in Berlin for forty-five years,’ she said. ‘Not all my life, but almost.’
Freya was taken aback by this confidence. ‘Where were you before?’ she ventured.
‘I came here from Russia with my parents when I was a little girl,’ Frau Brodsky replied. ‘In Russia we lived in a place called the Settlement of Pale. Have you heard of it?’
Freya shook her head.
‘There’s no reason why you would,’ Frau Brodsky went on. ‘It was an area specifically for Jews. Anyone who wanted to travel elsewhere had to get permission and that was expensive. I was an only child but part of a big family, with many uncles, aunts and cousins who lived nearby. Times were hard but we were happy. At some point I must have realised the rest of Russia hated all of us in the Settlement, though I can’t remember when, or how. The Czar had been assassinated and people naturally blamed the Jews, although we’d had nothing to do with it. Anyway, then the Czar’s son had become Emperor Alexander III, and we were forced to put up his portrait in our houses and fly the Russian flag – the police would tear up your sheets to use if you couldn’t afford one – even though life was worse under this Alexander than his father.’ She shook her head, clicking her tongue.
‘And that’s why you came to Germany?’ Freya asked.
‘We were heading for America, but by the time we arrived in this country, we’d had to pay so many bribes along the way that there was no money left. So here we stayed.’ Frau Brodsky gave Freya a weary smile. ‘And now we have to worship at the shrine of Adolf Hitler, and hang a swastika banner from our windows. Man plans and God laughs, as they say.’
Freya hesitated, anxious not to cause offence. ‘Do you think it might be time to think about making for America again?’
Frau Brodsky gazed into the distance. ‘I can’t leave. My husband is elderly and in poor health – he’d never last the journey. My son and his family have talked about trying to go, though. There’s no future for my granddaughters here.’ She shrugged. ‘Yet who knows whether they’ll be safe even there?’
Freya picked up her work with a heavy heart, wondering why some people’s lives had to be so hard. To relieve her feelings, she bought a leather-bound notebook that fastened with a brass clasp and started writing in earnest. She wrote about the tramp of Nazi jackboots in the night, about a young man lying in hospital with a broken jaw, about the savage thrill of violence and destruction, about a love affair between a stormtrooper and a musician, about a young girl arriving in a strange country with a dream of safety. She even put herself in Walther Grube’s shoes and wrote about a fanatic’s love for Adolf Hitler, and imagined Liesl preparing to become a dutiful wife and mother in her camp for Nazi maidens. Writing became her way of making sense of an increasingly nonsensical world, a record of the extraordinary things that were happening around her so that one day she could look back and think, yes, that’s exactly how it was. If something particularly noteworthy happened in real life, she would write a diary entry, too.
Several of the pieces developed into longer stories, which she typed and put into a yellow folder in the top drawer of her chest, hidden beneath underwear. One in particular had promise, she felt: the imaginary account of Gerda, a cabaret dancer trapped in an affair with a wealthy man who turns out to be a Fascist. He introduces her to high society, taking her to receptions and dinner parties where she meets important Nazis, whom she soon comes to loathe. Gerda is red-haired and blue-eyed, and no one realises she’s Jewish. Rather than ending her relationship with this man, she decides to take advantage of the inside knowledge he allows her by devising a plan to assassinate the most important Nazi of all, Adolf Hitler, when he visits a prestigious hotel in Berlin. This story soon took fire and was a joy to write. Freya made Gerda an amalgam of Violet, both Sophies and Perle, with a touch of herself thrown in for good measure, and added background details from her other tales. She would ask Wolfgang to read it when it was finished – although it was considerably longer than anything she’d written before – and hoped he wouldn’t be offended.
Then as she was getting dressed one morning, Freya opened her drawer and realised immediately that the folder was missing. Frantically, she rifled through all her underclothes and then the contents of the entire chest. Her notebook, thank God, was still between her mattress and the bed frame; some instinct had told her to keep this precious record separately and hide it even more securely. Now she remembered her underwear drawer had been slightly ajar the night before, though she’d thought nothing of it at the time. Yet who would want to steal a folder of stories? A terrible thought occurring to her, she pulled on a dressing gown, ran into the kitchen and pulled out the ash tray of the ancient stove. It was full to the brim. And when she unhooked the lid of the fuel compartment with clumsy, panicky fingers and peered inside, she saw a tiny scrap of yellow card at the edge of the smouldering coals.
Slowly, she replaced the lid and turned around. Otto was leaning against the door frame, watching her.
‘You,’ she said, too shocked to feel angry. ‘But why?’
‘Why do you think?’ he retorted. ‘To keep you safe – and the rest of us. Imagine if Walther had found those pages. An assassination attempt on Herr Hitler! How could you even imagine such a thing? Not to mention what you wrote about Walther himself. So disrespectful! He’d have reported you, for sure.’
‘Walther would have had no business searching through my private things,’ Freya said, ‘and neither have you. I wasn’t making fun of him; I wanted to understand how he felt.’
‘You could never understand,’ Otto said loftily, ‘because your mind is focused on the gutter and the pathetic creatures who scrabble for a living there. If you must waste your time writing, focus on the strong, pure Germany that will come back again once Adolf Hitler’s in charge.’
‘You mean the strong, pure Germany whose people aren’t free to say what they think?’ Freya replied. ‘Where ideas and words on a page are so dangerous they must be burned? Tell me exactly what it is about my work that threatens you.’
‘Your work,’ Otto scoffed. ‘The ramblings of a depraved mind, more like. Father’s always been too soft on you and this is the result. As long as you live under this roof, you’ll conduct yourself decently.’
There was no point trying to reason with him. Without another word, Freya pushed past, went to her bedroom and packed a suitcase. She wrote a note for her father, propped it on the mantelpiece and left the apartment, suitcase in one hand and typewriter in the other.