Another Green World (20 page)

The two of them ambled over without need of consultation, wading through grasses topped with nut-brown heads that shattered on contact, the seeds clinging to skin and hair and clothes. They found a place to sit where the ground was relatively clear and the footing soft, with a clear view of the stage. Ingo recognized the song-in-progress, a ballad about a bird that warbles happily for an afternoon but at sunset dies in sorrow. The singer's voice was high and clear, a countertenor. Ingo breathed slowly in and out, in and out, feeling the nervousness and anxiety ease out of him. Then belatedly, like a joke sprung with masterly timing, the truth struck
home. The red bicycle. Undeniable. In plain view. And suddenly, the only thing you could look at.

A short distance away, close enough to toss a paper ball at, two other boys sat listening to the music. One was a little bigger and stockier than the other, but they were dressed alike in green tunics and both wore their hair closely cropped. The first had his arm draped around the smaller boy's shoulders. It might have been a brotherly sort of embrace, but just about the time you started to think so, the second boy turned to gaze up into his friend's face, staring intently into his eyes, and there was no mistaking what kind of look that was. Then they kissed: lightly, delicately, lip-to-lip, holding it for the longest second Ingo had ever lived. After that, they went back to listening to the music. The song was the same; the bird had not yet tumbled from its branch. Only the Earth was different.

It was Anton, after that, who spoke—the older-seeming Anton, the botanical authority, an expert on native life-forms. “This is common in the Movement,” he said. “I found it strange at first, coming from Galizien. But here…”

He gave Ingo a particular kind of look, and Ingo responded with a look of his own. They were deep in the secret language now, somewhere past ordinary consciousness but short of Dionysian rapture. An in-between stage,
Zwischenstufe
, no euphemism after all.

They turned to follow the performance, or at least to look in that direction. The music played on. The world rotated around them. It was a glorious afternoon, deep in the countryside at the center of Germany, toward the end of summer in the year 1929. There never had been a day like this, never in human history, and Ingo was certain it would go on forever. The sun would never sink. He would never get tired or hungry. Nothing would change that really mattered. The future would unfold, his destiny would dawn, when Ingo was good and ready, not before. He knew these things with sublime certainty. And he was not, repeat not, going insane.

The discussion of Stefan George and his work began at three o'clock and drew a sizable crowd. He and Anton found themselves pressed between two packs whose contrasting uniforms represented, Ingo feared, antagonistic
Bünde.
Onstage, half a dozen guys representing various factions of the Youth Movement, all about Ingo's age or a bit older, sat in deck chairs arranged in a semicircle, shuffling notes and eyeing one another with what, even at this distance, seemed a notable lack of comradely warmth.

The whole affair was highly organized and well-thought-out until the
moment when, right on schedule, the first speaker opened his mouth. Within seconds, Frau Holle awoke from her hundred-year nap and the whole mountain gave a shudder. Whatever Ingo had expected from a poetry discussion, if anything at all, it certainly was not this.

The speaker was a tall fellow dressed like an assistant professor in a jacket with flaring lapels and many buttons. Armed with a monograph, a severely knotted tie and a pair of half-glasses that made him look ten years older, he declared in crisp, Lutheran German: “There can be no doubt that the Master, Stefan George, is a hero of the Homosexual Emancipation Movement.”

Immediately a second young man, this one dressed in Wandervogel style, rose from his chair and shouted: “I protest! I object to the intrusion of this kind of language, which is all too typical of the Hirschfeld cabal, into this forum. Such a manner of speaking degrades noble Eros by reducing it to the status of a medical diagnosis. Moreover, this is anathema to genuine Friend-love, which is healthful and beneficial for any youth of finer temper, and which has
nothing
to do—nothing whatever!— with the gross cravings of degenerates and effeminates and male prostitutes, or those denizens of noisy basements whom we may call Berlin's Third Sex.”

Fighting words, evidently. The ensuing furor erupted even before the man had finished uttering them. The scheduled speaker tried to go on with his prepared remarks, but whatever he was saying in that academic voice got drowned in the clamor. Ingo caught a few isolated phrases, slogans perhaps, but could make no sense of the arguments tossed out from the stage and hurled back from the meadow. Off to the left a boy stood shaking his fist, declaring that one of the speakers (Ingo was not sure which) ought to go back to France, where he belonged. Anton shrank from the ruckus, pressing himself closer to Ingo's side.

Finally a tall and solemn-looking man rose from a chair at the center of the stage. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance— university-age, conservative clothing—yet there was an air of authority about him, a strength in his silence. The others must have felt it, because one by one they took their seats. A sudden calm spread like a wave through the crowd until the whole field was, if not silent, at least down to a murmur.

“Who's that?” Ingo whispered.

“One of the Counts von Stauffenberg,” Anton said quietly. “The younger one, I think. They are very close to George, part of the inner circle. The Master himself has chosen not to attend—they say he never goes anywhere these days—but he sometimes sends one of his Elect.”

All this with no tinge of cynicism. The Master. His Elect.

Every eye was on the young count. He spoke finally in a voice just loud enough to carry across the meadow. “Wer je die flamme umschritt,” he intoned, “bleibe der flamme trabant!”

“He's reciting George!” breathed Anton excitedly.

Ingo knew. It was a famous poem, a kind of anthem.
Whoever has circled the flame will forever remain its vassal.

By the end, the crowd had taken it up like a liturgical chant, a rote invocation.
However he may wander and roam, the radiance will still reach him, and he will never stray from his goal.
Ingo felt the hairs rising on his neck. Beside him he sensed Anton's body stiffen with the electric thrill of the moment: hundreds of young Germans speaking as one, uttering the words of the Prophet. So much for irony.

“Now, we have all come here,” said the young aristocrat, “to talk among ourselves as friends, and to honor the man whom we all admire, whose words have touched us so deeply. We may not agree always on what those words mean. But we all are brothers in the Movement and I
hope”—
pause—” that we may disagree without mistaking the other man for an enemy.”

“But there are enemies here!” someone called back from the crowd.

“There are no enemies here,” Stauffenberg said calmly.

“There are Jews!” A different voice this time. “There are Bolsheviks! Parasites that feast on the blood of the German people.”

The handsome count held his ground. “We have come to talk about Stefan George.”

“Indeed we have,” said another man onstage, a muscular-looking fellow whose snow-white tunic gave him the look of a medieval squire. “And has not George himself foretold the coming of a ‘leader with his völkisch banner’—”

“George does not use this term in a crude racialist sense.”

“— and warned us to seek the company only of the superior breed of men? And does not your own sect, mein Graf, open its meetings with the words ‘Leave the temple of foreign gods’? Surely these commandments are identical: to eschew what is alien to the German folk-soul, and instead to join with others of our own kind to forge a ‘new nobility’— saving your feelings, sir, I'm simply quoting George here—' whose warrant no longer derives from crown or escutcheon.' “

The young count gave a slight, mocking bow. “I'm sure we're all impressed by your aspirations to nobility, Herr Gruppenführer. And I certainly shall not embarrass you by correcting your quaint misimpression of the dj.1.11, which, after all, it is not your business to comprehend. But I assure you, no one would be more surprised than George himself to hear that in all these passages, he was really talking about—what was it again?—
the German folk-soul.”

Laughter ensued, but the other man kept his composure. “What, then, mein Graf, do you make of the Master's call to heed ‘germ and breeding in every waking movement of your tribe’?”

“It is more to our point here,” the Wandervogel broke in, “to heed George's deeper message: ‘The new salvation will come only through a new kind of love.’ Here is the clue, gentlemen, to what superior breed of men the poet was thinking of. It is a question not of blood, but of beauty. Beauty of spirit as well as body. This is stated explicitly in
The Seventh Ring
, when the Master tells us, the greatest service one can render the Volk is to bring forth one's own deepest loveliness. Only then may one understand what it means to ‘bind oneself in a circle closed by love.’ “

Ingo glanced at Anton, who was sitting raptly, nodding now and then in agreement.

“George speaks here,” the man went on, “of the love of friends and of male youth—the love extolled by Socrates and Hölderlin, by Shakespeare in his sonnets, and not least by the Master himself, in his many poems to young Maximin. This love that is higher than mere reproductive lust, and infinitely more spiritual, indeed more sacred, than the crude libidinousness which is of such fascination to certain psychoanalytic types—I say this with all respect to our friend from Berlin.”

The assistant professor glowered. Count von Stauffenberg sat down. A smatter of applause came from the group of boys on Ingo's right, but this was not enough to silence the burly fellow in the white shirt.

“Very good, gentlemen. If you wish to speak of Friend-love, let's do so in plain German. It hardly does the poet honor to make him out to be weak or naïve, in either political or sexual matters. The Master knows perfectly well what is entailed when we set out to create a New Reich. In the first place, the Old Reich must be got rid of. Yes, I'm speaking of the sickness that is Weimar—but more than that, the gross distortions of our Kultur that have transpired since the year 1849. You know what I am talking about, my good gentlemen, and so naturally does Stefan George. I say this as an admirer of the poet! As one of you, in blood and spirit! George has instructed us to look back to the noble Athenians—but what does that
mean, exactly? It means harking back to a time when our community was ruled rightly, by a peerage of strong men, a brotherly elite. Not this enfeebled, modern, bastardized, cosmopolitan ‘society’ wherein women enslave us by the tyranny of the womb and Jews wrap us in chains of usury and priests heap upon us an intolerable burden of guilt!”

There was a stirring in the meadow, but Ingo couldn't figure out what prompted it—agreement, repulsion, surprise? Maybe a bit of everything.

The burly man strode back and forth, flexing his arms powerfully, as if to clinch the argument by sheer physical force. “George challenges us to find the strength within ourselves, not merely to cast off such un-German accretions, but to destroy them, utterly and forever! We are to ascend from the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah to the ‘aeries of dread birds.’ We are to become as gods. Not the weak and forgiving god of the desert people— no, the fierce and avenging gods of the North! We are bound in a circle of love, yes—for our comrades, our brothers within the circle. Toward those outside, it is correct, in fact it is necessary, to feel otherwise. We must feel—here I am sure the Count will understand me—the cold, steel-hard sureness of our own superiority.

“Friend-love is noble: on that we can agree. But it is noble precisely because it strengthens and purifies us. By withholding our seed, we deprive women of their power to weaken and distract us. By preserving German blood in its full vigor and potency, we avoid the racial morbidity that has weakened other nations of the West. And by consorting only with other young men of a good type—except insofar, of course, when in due time we must choose a proper candidate to bear and raise our healthy progeny—we avoid the danger of odious corruption by all that is foreign or unwholesome, all that is unworthy of our tribe. That is the message of Stefan George. And I can say quite firmly, gentlemen, that any full and honest reading of the text will bear me out.”

That was not the last word. One thing Ingo was learning about this movement was that no word, however loud or cutting or resolutely spoken, could ever be the last. There were too many viewpoints, each more eccentric or alarming than the last. After a while you felt dazed by it all; you longed for a bit of straight, Yankee-style talk. Sit down and shut up. That's nuts. Pass the mustard.

It was funny, in a way. Ingo had waited so long to find this place. Yet now that he'd arrived, he was ready to move on. He was tempted to slip away and join the boys swimming around the pier. They were still at it—you
could hear splashing and laughter from that direction—though the sun had drifted lower and the chill of a mountain evening crept in on the lengthening shadows.

What held him back, of course, was Anton, sitting there upright and alert, attending to each little speech and every question and retort, not all of them polite, from the audience. His brown hair, pulled back behind his ears, gave him an elfin look, and his skin had taken on olive tones in the yellowing light. There was something quirky about his face, something not quite perfectly arranged or matched-up. Whatever it was, it suited him, like some stray adornment—a scarf, say, or a hat—that shouldn't have looked right with the rest of his outfit, only it did.

Anton must have felt himself being stared at. He turned to look Ingo straight in the eyes. His own eyes were round and dark, almost childlike in their unguardedness. Most of his attention was still directed toward the stage, though he freed up enough of it to give Ingo a warm, happy smile. Then back to the stage again, the smile still on his lips.