R.H.I. Page 12

  ‘I don’t disown him. I guess the same people tried to kill him, chased him off. I would have liked to have known him—why not?’

  ‘So there’s something to say to them after all.’

  ‘Oh God, there’s always something to say to them. Not that it does any good. We’re surrounded.’

  She was leaning back—they both were—and he looked at her beside him, at her face side on. A smile, or that was just how her face was. He was always surprised afresh by her bravery. And she was exhausted, he saw that too.

  Isi said, ‘No, you can’t convince them of anything.’

  He said, ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You want to show them the error of their ways. That’s why you want them to come at us for what we believe instead of your ancestry.’

  ‘Well? Don’t you think it would be a worthwhile conversation?’

  She said, ‘Don’t give them credit.’

  ‘Oh, not the thirteen-year-old who came to me today.’

  ‘Hitler?’

  ‘Not him, either.’

  She didn’t need to say, ‘Who, then?’

  He stood, looked down at her, smiled an unfelt smile, sat.

  And again, with the others in his circle, in the upstairs studio: ‘My father was Jewish, apparently. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t even know if it’s true.’

  Blumenthal: ‘I suppose if they say it’s true, then it’s true.’

  ‘Unless I fight it.’

  ‘Would you want to fight for your good Aryan status?’

  Silence.

  H said, ‘But now, I really can’t work. There’s no possibility.’

  Silence again. Blumenthal himself had been drafted. A lid was sinking; it was closing off the small spaces left in the city for them. This studio would soon be vacated. Blumenthal himself, at least, would be fed and clothed, or so it seemed to H at the time. No, and his own situation was not so desperate. It wasn’t. Many of them were scratching out a living with private sales of work, or drawing, where possible, politically neutral illustrations for magazines.

  And, again, a reversal of the judgement, one that nonetheless left the original judgement in force. Through another contact of one of the circle’s members, H managed to meet with a genealogical expert at the Foreign Ministry. H half listened. His father had been born in Bessarabia, and it was difficult to establish the full story. The conversation, in fact, was merely something to be endured for the results it might bear. The man was genial and obsessed, myopically unaware of the consequences of his research. H nodded and appeared to follow.

  Finally, a special permit to work was forthcoming, revocable at any time, for official projects only. This was the way in which they made him, for the time being, theirs. Moreover, all these events were related: the audible bombings (the intrusion of the war into their ‘felt lifeworld’), the racial verdict, and the consequent blackmail. Something was compressed in these events—nothing conscious (they weren’t capable of such consciousness), but there was an equation involving the first signs of the onslaught of the war’s physical world into the city and the need to quash independent building, to enlist BUILDING itself (and not just H) in that physics: action and reaction. H was, in this sense, only History’s representative—and not the only one (Günther W was in the same position). And, in this position, it felt utterly clear to H that any argument with the regime could not be played out, as he had hoped, in any face-to-face manner, in any lesson or conversation. Isi was right—people could not be persuaded, were not in any important sense for the persuading. Or, well, there were other forces and facts, distributions of matter, structures spread over the landscape, all of them now reminded of their vulnerability under a new sky. This was the manner in which IDEAS would now play themselves out, in the age of mutability, he thought, I wrote. It was a slow mutability, or at least the upward growth was (the collapse, on the other hand, was instant). Ideas, both solid and fleeting, would show themselves only in the passing of years.

  Im Reichsgau Wartheland; im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren; in Berlin. The town itself, across the border to the east, was made into a place of administration: people were moved, occupying camps in the fields at its periphery, shunted here and there in trains or trucks. H and Günther W were in the same office, and stayed for days at a time at the same hotel by the town square. They were at first put to work on quick designs for camp buildings. The town was simply activity and movement, a noisy choreography of it. It was the behind-the-scenes business of war, in part familiar from Berlin, but here it had become the town’s only purpose. There was another purpose and another project, however, in the surrounding countryside: a RECLAIMED EARTH. The site for that project was occupied already by some empty farm buildings.

  ‘There,’ said their employer. ‘We will, soon no doubt, have occupants ready to move in.’

  H and Günther did not ask where the previous farmers were now—though the question linked all the town’s activity also to their new project: people were being moved, and not only soldiers and prisoners of war. The regime was, as was now visible, reshuffling the earth and its people, putting them in new places.

  Their employer, however, saw different movements: a world rising up from the ground. ‘That is what you need to capture in your designs. These have to be the farmyard buildings worthy of this place and its people. No more of these overcast skies.’

  The architects largely remained silent for the visit to the site—but they allowed their eyes to meet at this comment. They too imagined a war fought against the sky. A German earth would drive the clouds away east. Some science was invented to account for that.

  ‘I suppose this is only the usual problem for an architect,’ said H, later, during a moment when they were alone. ‘Being hired for a job over which one has no say.’

  Günther said, ‘Designing a traditional German farmyard? How does someone do that, design tradition, in the first place?’

  ‘They’ll want some kitsch symbol.’

  ‘I know.’

  H said, ‘You’re right, though. Everything we submit will be inadequate because it will not have grown up spontaneously from the ground.’

  This ground, this faith in the earth—that was what differentiated H, as well as his wife, his colleagues and friends, his ‘circle’, from the regime. This was the mistake: to think that, if the larger enemy emerged from the sky, then it should necessarily be fought from out of the soil. They had a tendency to stoop down and find some peaty lump to squash between their fingers, sniff it and feel it, placing too much hope in what might be grown: a tidy, weedless and fertile world. Soil without dirt, lands free of invasive species. ‘They imagine changelessness; we perceive change.’

  Where this change-in-the-name-of-changelessness was clearest was to the south, in the architect Stosberg’s new German town of Auschwitz. The new town would be spread out into the surrounding countryside, in discrete districts—this was how a town was made earth, by flattening itself, extending itself, and becoming an organisation of smaller villages, each looking inward. EARTH, here, meant ease of control, or so H thought to himself, I wrote, each district under the eye of a local official; and EARTH meant distributing the town’s targets away from the bombs—there would be no vulnerable centre. What bomb could destroy soil itself? EARTH meant a people’s attempt to borrow imperviousness from the ground; EARTH meant establishing settlements in occupied territory—‘facts on the ground’. Although EARTH meant all this—emergence from the soil, safety in the soil, love of the soil—it meant moving the indigenous populations away from their land. This was the STRUCTURE of H’s thought, not its actual words, according to my notes. For H, for his comrades, there was another lesson: the cities, the people in them, their vulnerability to the sky, this mass of people exposed there to the bombs, the mass of people that Hitler wanted to spread out into their countryside—it was these people who would find their own strength, not returning to some promised land, but remaining in the ci
ty and rebuilding it, remaking that fragile place.

  Finally, towards the end of the war, H was working for Godber Nissen on the Avia aircraft works in Prague; and Isi and the children—now five in number—were living not far away in her uncle’s house in Schreiberhau to avoid the bombs. Like his previous work in industrial design, the job was something of a relief. The work on a building was always work on its inhabitants, its humans; but here, humans were only in service of the new jet aircraft. In this sense, it was work for a different enemy; it was work for an inevitable future. He didn’t feel it, the way some of the men who oversaw the actual production did—the thrill of speed. Where planes had hung in the sky in what seemed like a simple defiance of gravity, the new engines took them and made projectiles of them. But H only admired them for the ambiguous meaning they carried, physics enlisted again, made available—and what use might the coming communism make of them?

  One evening Erich O called him at his hotel.

  ‘When are you coming to Berlin?’

  ‘In the next few days, I think.’

  ‘Come now. Please?’

  Something about Erich’s voice worried him. There was nothing of his usual irony and laughter, the confidence which underlay all his complaining with the certainty that he would survive it all. ‘I can come with the next train. That would be okay.’

  ‘Meet me in Potsdamer Platz.’

  That was all he would say. He hung up quickly—again, uncharacteristically quickly, foregoing the usual banter. H packed up his papers and clothes into his small case and left the room. He was always concerned in the hotel room not to say too much, too loudly, so even if Erich had wanted to tell him more, H could hardly have asked. Nonetheless, he glanced over his shoulder as he walked to the station and boarded the train. Walking, he saw no obvious Nazi types. He was no good at intrigue in any case—he had learned to keep his head down, like anyone, but it was possible they were keeping an eye on him without his knowledge. In any case, he had done nothing wrong. Had he? On board the train, he found himself engaging, despite himself, in covert investigations as to the character of his fellow travellers. Erich’s tone had contained a quiver, a pang of distress that had infected H. Blumenthal was, by now, dead, shot in the back in Russia. Their group continued, after a fashion, but its spirit was troubled. Erich had survived by drawing for some of the official publications; and by selling works privately, some of which had done well.

  When H finally made it to Potsdamer Platz—still carrying his case, having come straight from the train—Erich O was waiting near the corner of Potsdamer Strasse. He said, ‘I made sure I wasn’t followed.’

  H said, ‘Oh. I think I wasn’t followed either …’

  ‘Would they have followed you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Erich looked around him. He looked deflated. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘I’ve been reported to the regime for subversive opinions. It was in a bomb shelter, and I just said what I thought, about the war, about this—’ He waved his hand and then became quickly still, before once again his eyes began to roam.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘There is an SS Officer and his wife living in the house where we are staying. I had no idea. The landlord came to warn me early this morning.’

  ‘God, Erich. You have to leave.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You have to go immediately.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘You can go to Isi in Schreiberhau, and from there it’s possible to get to Prague … I think you could reach Yugoslavia. I have colleagues in Prague. But the main thing is to get you out of here.’

  ‘No. My wife and boy.’

  ‘There’s no time. If you’ve talked to an SS Officer … ?’

  ‘They will be punished on my behalf.’

  A pause.

  H said, ‘You might be right.’

  ‘I am. You don’t think I can get out of it? I’ve done good work for the Reich, the caricatures and so on. People like them. I’ve proven my loyalty. We should be able to argue for it, with enough support.’

  H said nothing for a second. Why had Erich called him here? ‘I think you should go.’

  ‘No, no, you know I can’t.’

  ‘That’s the only advice I have for you.’

  Erich looked at him. H had never seen this look on Erich’s face before, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Erich, it seemed clear, wanted different advice. ‘Can you help?’

  ‘Help? If you can get to Schreiberhau quickly—’

  ‘That’s not what I need.’

  ‘I don’t think my word is worth anything. A tolerated, half-Jewish architect?’

  ‘The others?’

  H said, ‘I don’t think we have friends any more. Not those sorts of friends. Bombs are falling, Erich.’

  ‘How do we make them stop?’

  Erich’s look was one of effort—the most strenuous mental effort, the effort to constitute something around him. It was the effort to remake their ‘circle’, the group of people who might mobilise around any one of its members; it was the effort to turn back time and make the group stand in, once again, for a future. Could that be done, in this square with its bomb damage and traffic, with its soldiers and its sample of those few civilians who remained in the city? H should really be checking in at Nissen’s Berlin office, so that his departure would seem normal. But now, time was concerned mostly with ends; it could not be turned back to that hopeful sense of a beginning. Time was organised around destruction—it made itself felt in explosions and noise. Erich, we might say, called out to time, implored it, hoped for just the faintest hint of something that might show him a future. Even as they stood looking at each other—how long for?—there was a sense of things falling, collapsing around them. Structures required so little, just the smallest impulse, for them to fall in on themselves. One thing set another off. And their conversation was over.

  Not long afterwards, Erich was dead. He committed suicide in his prison cell, leaving a note for his wife and son. She was allowed to see the body. When H saw her, she said, ‘We have to get out of this city.’

  Erich (now a kind of ghost) said, ‘Yes, leave. Leave and go to England, go to America. As far away as possible.’

  She said, ‘I don’t understand why this had to happen.’

  H said, ‘Is there a reason?’

  Erich said, ‘I took my own life. I was acting as an agent of collapse, of absent reasons.’

  Letzter Feuerregen. The Americans and British had developed ways to turn a city, its buildings and the contents of rooms, against itself. Research took place on the materials making up German furniture, books, carpets, curtains, wooden toys and the balconies and struts of houses, and into the combination of explosives and incendiaries that would best set this material into action, lighting a city-wide fire that could not be extinguished. All that was required, says Jörg Friedrich in a televised conversation with Alexander Kluge, was an external impulse that would transform the city’s homes into a weapon. The material of daily life would become deadly. A city cannot, says Friedrich, be blown up—it must be burned down. The point of such a campaign was to transform the whole environment. Everything familiar would be reduced to nothing, and so the life experience, the reality of the survivors, reduced to an illusion, and so also to nothing. The change in the city would be absolutely incomprehensible to its survivors, and it would mean that the survivors also died by virtue of having nothing remaining of themselves as they had known themselves. The familiar moral relationship between individual acts and their punishment would be destroyed, as punishment was visited arbitrarily from the sky on everyone, irrespective of their deeds. This, thought H, was the nature of the physical world, which knew nothing of the moral balance between acts and rewards. The bombers that brought about this ‘loss of reality’ (Kluge) were another aspect of the future: unlike the fast, small jets that they were building in Prague, these bo
mbers became flying factories, arranged into industrial districts in the sky. They flew in formations of an enormous scale, complexes of planes up to a kilometre wide; they fanned out from predetermined points and the shape of the fan corresponded to a triangle on the ground, a triangular area wiped out from the centre of a city, in a process that took minutes. In any case the war was effectively, strategically over—the Red Army would not be held back from Berlin—but the carpet bombings had less a strategic purpose than a theatrical one, says Friedrich to Kluge. It was a demonstration of what was possible; a demonstration of the fragility of the daily reality of people, that it could be removed, quickly and thoroughly, from above. This was only one of the technologies for the removal of reality that were being developed and employed at around this time. The audience: the German people? The advancing Soviets, whom the bombing was nominally intended to support? It didn’t matter—what mattered was the demonstration. ‘Our lives, altered, removed, without warning.’

  And around this time, defeat was palpable. H’s pay started to arrive late, and then not at all. Nissen was apologetic. Few, whether loyal to the regime or not, were working with any enthusiasm. Instead, he, his comrades, like many others, lived on the sense of the future, the taste that it would come and bring a new world. Optimism of a sort was inevitable. It was optimism caught up inevitably in the very destruction offered by the Allied bombing—an optimism that was difficult, even impossible, to think through. How could they feel hopeful about the destruction and the death and the LOSS OF REALITY it brought with it? DIALECTICS demanded that everything be combined with its opposite, he thought, I wrote. It was not only that it meant the downfall of Hitler—this much was as good as certain in any case, one of History’s simpler and sweeter promises. It was, I wrote, more in the nature of a seed nourished by fire, a small dose of the future present in every catastrophic change. We have, I wrote to myself, more as an aside than anything, perhaps lost this sense that change can contain hope even within its most hellish aspects.