Read The Phoenix Generation Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
The Phoenix Generation (26 page)
In the evening of the day after my glimpse of Hitler, my honorary equerry in the S.A. escorted me to the station, where we parted as friends. Trains were packed with men going home after their annual beano. I promised him copies of my snapshots, but alas, I’d already-lost the address by the time the train to Munchen moved out. Perfidious Albion once again. At Munchen (how do names become anglicised, this one to Munich?) I took a cab to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, whither I had been invited to join a Presseabteilung tour conducted by an official of the Propaganda Ministerium. Found them at dinner, half a dozen British newspapermen. (There I learned that München and Monachorum both meant ‘belonging to the monks’.)
One of the party was a star Liberal political writer. He greeted our host with these words, “I don’t like Hitler, or your form of government, but all the same I trust this won’t make any difference to our personal relationship while on this tour.” To this greeting our host bowed, saying nothing. A charmingly old-fashioned hotel, luxurious to me, with a large bathroom to myself. I pinched a china ash-tray, advertising tobacco, as a souvenir next morning. An official souvenir was presented to each of us on departure, a small flask of a potent colourless liqueur called
Himbeergeist,
the spirit of raspberries. Our star Liberal journalist was given a full bottle. He seemed surprised, and did not know what to do with it, but looked at us, saying diffidently that he didn’t drink much and murmured about customs duty on arrival in England. I suggested it was worth the duty, that it was rare and expensive at home. He hesitated; but under managerial bowing his manner changed, he accepted it with a little return bow saying, “Thank you very much, most kind of you, I’m sure.” Then with a glance at us, “We’ll drink it on the journey, shall we?” “No, you keep it”, we advised. He began to look pleased, like an inhibited child with an unexpected Christmas present. He was born in a West Country town, the son of a reporter on a local paper; he turned out to be kind and friendly, and no doubt he was efficient in his own idiom of journalism.
We got into two Mercédès-Benz cars and went on to a new
autobahn
, once touching 50 m.p.h. I sat in the rear car, about five years’
old and slower than the leading car. Our host, a curious
German-American
fellow who had served as an officer in the German Navy during the war, stopped about five times on the journey to give us wine and bread and sausage, and we finally went to bed a couple of hours after midnight at Friedrichshafen in an hotel by a great lake. I was relieved to get out of the car. The driving was mediocre; the driver braked on corners downhill; the hood was closed over us.
The next morning we walked over the aluminium frame of a new Zeppelin. Everything about it suggested lightness; e.g. the bed
foundation
was a single thin silk sheet stretched tight. I wondered what would happen if a razor were accidently drawn over one in flight. No photography was allowed here.
At Stuttgart we visited the German Institute, where every German living abroad was registered, after being contacted. The idea, declared an official in a surprisingly loud and rasping voice—he had been talking with us gently before rising to his feet in a small room—was that the Fatherland wanted to know everything done by Germans everywhere. How they lived: what their houses looked like. Every German was Germany. There were masses of snapshots.
“In the old days we wanted our undesirables to emigrate. Now we say, Every emigrant must be an Ambassador, and show by his work, whether plumbing, art, farming, or science that he is heart and soul in his work!”
Speech-making seemed to be catching. The star Liberal journalist, who apparently had appointed himself (the bottle still unopened) British Representative, got up as soon as the stentorian but good speech was over and said suitable words back, often mentioning Peace. Even he had partly succumbed like the Rev. Frank Buchman on the first day, who was soon heiling Hitler and shooting out his right hand.
At 2 a.m. the next morning I stood the camera on the window-sill of my bedroom and clicked the shutter open, having first switched off the light in my room. I left it there while I undressed, washed, and got into my pyjamas. Then I leaned out of the window beside my little black metal box. After a further 2 or 3 minutes I closed the shutter, hoping all would be well.
Everywhere we went we seemed to collect new people. Hospitality was unlimited. Hock flowed down our throats from straight
swan-necked
bottles. An American girl appeared at Garmisch-Partenkirchen where I spoke to a Herr Baron who in a low voice, when asked what he thought of the new Germany replied with a shrug and the words, “Is it wise to say?”
When the baron had left with his dancer friend, together with the husband of the dancer, a Dutchman standing at the bar said to Phillip,
“Belle
amie,
ja?
Der husband is what you call complacent, ja?” He made the motion of flicking banknotes with his
fingers. “Money talks, do you Englische not know so? The Herr Baron still haf fife horses,” as he winked heavily. “Dat is
somethin
’ nowadays.”
“Does he hunt, or are they race-horses, as in England?”
“The Herr Baron he used to hav’ fifty race-horses, now it is only fife.” The Dutchman then whispered wetly in Phillip’s ear, “No good, eh?
He
make war, eh? No no, not de Baron. You do not understand. You know who will make annoder war? Not the Baron, he make water, yes, we all make water, ja, but not de war. It is come soon, yes? Money talks, and he has no money, it is true, ja?”
“Money does more than talking. It can send men to death. Hitler is only Napoleon over again.”
“That is so. No money, no gold.”
The Liberal star journalist had joined the two and was listening.
“Napoleon tried to divert the use of money as usury, you see, and so tried to create a self-sufficient and united states of Europe,” Phillip went on hopefully. “That, of course, was not the British bankers’ idea at all. They wished for trade, in order to lend, and so make more money. You know that, you and old Van Tromp with his broom to sweep the British ships off the seas.”
“Ja ja, Van Tromp, he did some sweeping, too, my friend!”
“The bankers, or banksters, of Lombard and Threadneedle Street wanted a gold-based Europe, since they had the gold in their vaults.”
“What’s wrong with that?” asked the pipe-puffing Liberal journalist.
“Bad for trade, sir. Very bad.” Phillip drank his tenth glass of champagne and said, “Zum Wohl!”, before continuing with what he had read in Birkin’s weekly paper. “You see, France after the revolution was bankrupt. So she could not afford to buy sugar and other commodities brought from the British colonies in British ‘bottoms’. So he started a new system.”
“And ten million died in Europe as a consequence.”
“Yes, when England started to blockade Europe. If Napoleon’s system had prevailed, Europe would have become self-sufficient, with a share in the trade from the East.”
“Then why did not Napoleon try peaceful overtures? Shall I tell you? Because he had a lust for power. ‘And all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Lord Acton said that, if you know your history.”
“My history, sir, is not of the law, such as Judge Jefferies and
those judges who said, or one of them, that Englishmen would not be able to sleep safely in their beds if children were no longer hanged for stealing anything to the value of half-a-crown and upwards. But the point is this, Lombard Street bellies would have to shrink if Napoleon and his system prevailed. He offered a prize for anyone who discovered a substitute for cane sugar. It was won by someone in Poland who cultivated a weed which became what today we call sugar-beet. He offered a prize often thousand francs for a substitute for bicarbonate of soda from sea-water. Someone made it. Cotton from America was substituted by silk from Lille and elsewhere. Europe was blockaded, Nelson burned Danish ships which traded with Napoleon——”
“But Napoleon used force. And found his grave in Russia——”
“Russia, under Alexander the King, double-crossed Napoleon, don’t forget. Napoleon was promised Russian wheat, then Alexander bilked and accepted a bribe of four million pounds in gold from Lombard Street not to deliver in bulk. So Napoleon went to give Alexander a punch on the nose and was defeated by General Winter. And—no, don’t interrupt me—I know your point of view, in a way it is mine too—cheerio.” He swallowed another glass of wine. “In eighteen fifteen Napoleon said, ‘These English will rue the day they refused to work with my system. In a hundred years there will arise a nation across the Rhine which will break the strangle-hold of gold in Europe. And he was one year out; for ninety-nine years later there was nineteen fourteen!”
“Who are you? Why are you talking like this in Germany, when very soon we are likely to be at war all over again?”
“My name is Phillip Maddison, and I write books.”
“Phillip Maddison? You wrote the Donkin Tetralogy? That was a fine work, an idealistic work. What has happened to you since you wrote those novels, and that even better book,
The
Water
Wanderer
? Stick to your last, my lad, and don’t try and play Hamlet.”
*
Phillip was relieved when the entourage got back to Berlin and put up at the Adlon Hotel. Too much wine and food and late nights had brought on a kind of sciatica in his left leg, which bore the purple scars of two wounds on the Somme. He limped. The American girl telephoned him one afternoon as he lay on his bed and asked him if he wanted a nurse. Alarmed that she might want to offer personal consolation, he hastily replied that he felt much better, thank you. That night a casual flier from Athens joined the
party round the table. Later they went to a tavern and sat drinking in the cellar where, it was said,
Tales
of
Hoffman
had originated.
Their host told Phillip that the night-life of Berlin had been cleaned up since the Third Reich had taken office. Beer stalls where rouged youths dressed in girls’ clothes awaiting nightly custom were no more, together with halls where pornographic films had been shown. Now the vice was no longer open. In the same café rows of girls were sitting behind the bar, each one with a seat opposite her. What did one talk about, the weather? They went to dance halls, but the Britishers kept together, occasionally dancing with the American girl from Stuttgart. In one bar Phillip saw a blond youth with the most extraordinary weary face. There were deep wrinkles round puffy eyes. He looked as though he had not slept for six months, but was kept going by being filled up with pale pink wax half-dissolved in alcohol. He was a waxen effigy, dead but giving the appearance of mechanical life. At first Phillip saw him as a hangover from the inflation, corruption, and
consequent
disintegration from defeat in the war, and the influx of the worst elements from the ghettos of Central Europe and Poland; but then he reflected, This man is German, and has corrupted himself.
In some small hotels where he went with Martin at night notices were displayed that Jews were not wanted, as coloured men were barred in some hotels in London and New York. Once as they were passing a photographer’s shop he saw a youth sticking a notice, about a quarter the size of a foolscap envelope, with printed words
Ich
bin
Jude.
An hour later when he returned that way someone had scratched at it with a fingernail. Nervously? Covertly? Timidly? It remained like that for three days. On the fourth day he saw that it had been removed. And that evening, sauntering down the Kurfürstendamm about midnight with Piers and one of the actors who was the juvenile lead in
Black
Roses,
a large Chrysler car moved slowly, as though courteously by them as the three men crossed a sidestreet junction. Usually cars rushed across, having right of way. There was no speed limit in Berlin, and frequently there were tyre-squeals as drivers braked to avoid smashes. In the Chrysler were four hefty men with prominent noses. (Why, wondered Phillip, as they were about to pass by, were German Jews so much more Jewish than those born in other countries? Or was this, if so, a phenomenon of inflation: overmuch food, drink, cigar-smoking and consequent sinus troubles and need to clear nostrils by fore-finger winkling?) He was surprised to hear Piers, who had been drinking a fair amount of Schnapps, say,
“Jah, Juden!”, for this didn’t sound like the normally courteous man he knew. The sequel was also surprising.
The car stopped. Four heads turned and regarded him. For a moment Phillip thought they were going to get out to slug Piers; but after a quarter of a minute the Chrysler went on, slowly, silently as before, leaving Phillip trying to account for the taunt. Perhaps it was lack of sleep, and the strain of working long hours in what was perhaps the worst atmosphere for a writer: a film studio. Fatigue and consequent nervous overstrain caused his own manners to deteriorate, he thought: lack of sleep and too much travelling on top of writing the trout book had made him so impatient with Lucy and critical of Felicity that he had literally flung himself away to the Gartenfeste. Even the Liberal star journalist had shown fatigue on the tour: on six different occasions when they were tired of motoring, towards evening, he had said, “We must open my bottle of Himbeergeist sometime.” It had remained unopened: his humanitarian or benevolent desire seemed to be fulfilled by the thought-expression, leaving him once more on his more commonplace level of caution.
Once or twice, Piers and I, accompanied by some of the English actors, went to the Eden bar, where various girls sat each at her table, awaiting men friends known and unknown. They were beautiful young women: cool, poised, impersonal—almost. In fact, I thought, too good to be what they were: I am an inhibited puritan with a
subconscious
fear of syphilis from early warnings by my father when pointing out the dreadful shambling figure of one of my mother’s brothers.
In fact, Melissa, I am old-fashioned. My experience, slight, in the war-years in darkened Piccadilly with such women or rather girls was that they were—except one—hard, grasping, callous. From what Piers said this evening, the Eden scene is part of a rapidly vanishing Germany. Such girls apparently do not go off with just anyone: the first consideration is that they must take a fancy, then a liking for a man, who will entertain, then be entertained by them privately.
Distinguished
amateurism rather than professionalism. Films now being made at Neubabelsberg set a standard of graciousness and gentility—false though they are. But all good manners are a kind of falsity, in that they are calculated, or consciously so. I found from my visit to the Eden tonight that I still have an adolescent fear of female beauty awaiting male appreciation.
The Adlon is different. No-one sits at the few tables or at its somewhat grim and massive bar. I almost expected the Kaiser to walk at any moment into the drawing room where the Imperial Effigy stands in an
alcove and induces the imagination to see heel-clicking, stiff-bowing, uniform’d men with shaven necks bulging over hard collars and glint of eye-glasses fixed deep into sockets above duel-scarred cheeks.
All that has gone with the war. The Adlon is now a period-piece, yet more solid-seeming than the present with its classless revolution and mental idiom of speed and of efficiency through speed, facing up to problems and solving them instantly through action.
I have to watch this in myself, again and again, and try to check it. My own built-up idiom or tempo inclines to sudden peremptory action, especially after periods of inaction and hesitancy and putting-off. I suspect this to be Hitler’s Achilles-heel, too: with consequent partial devastation, even insubordination, (Röhm, and the ‘night of the long knives?’) But so far as I have seen this effect has not yet reached the masses. Proper education for the young will eliminate the need for exhortation and drive: every man his own leader.
Yes, the Adlon gives a sense of security which somehow I cannot entirely feel in the new Germany. I expected to find lavender saches in the cupboards and drawers (no, this is sentimentality, I didn’t expect to find them) but the period is Edwardian, or late Victorian, with the old-fashioned telephone, massive bath, heavy furniture, vast
looking-glass
confronting a hollow-feeling me shaving a tenuous ghost staring from the reflecting film of hydrageum. (Quicksilver to you, my sprite my Ariel. I’ll continue tomorrow.)
There is a haunt in Berlin of American and British correspondents called
Taverne.
I went there tonight with the retired naval officer who took us on the motor tour. There my remarks met with disapproval. On hearing me say to Herr Leutnant that our youth in Britain is generally speaking leaderless, ruled by the pre-war idiom from which nearly all the younger intelligentsia react with a sort of communistic humanitarianism, one young girl sitting with her mother at the reserved Press table leaned over and said, “You are a little Englander, and ought to be ashamed of uttering such remarks about your country in a foreign capital.” Beside her mother sat a man who was the Berlin
correspondent
of a leading English newspaper.
We got into conversation, or some sort of argument, about mediocrity and that originality called greatness. She went to a school on the downs near Brighton and looked like the captain of the hockey team when she demanded across the table, “I suppose you think you are a great man?” “Oh rather,” I replied lightly. It was amusing, she was a charming creature. There were,
The
Times
had said, some grounds for the unfriendly attitude of most journalists to the Nazis. The system of news-reporting was wrong. All news collection is essentially a
keyhole
business; either that, or one has to rely on official hand-outs which, as
The
Times
correspondent near me pointed out, might give several versions, some contradictory, at intervals of perhaps several
hours, in reply to telephonic enquiries at the Ministry of Propaganda.
Exasperating for a newspaperman: the paper going to bed in London and his column still untelephoned.
The
Times
man also said, significantly, “Part of Hitler is dead beyond resurrection. He is neither homosexual, nor capable of loving a woman naturally.” I said, “You mean a phoenix?”