The Vengeance of Rome (55 page)

I do not remember if there was sound. In those days the newsreels did not always have it, since most regional theatres were not converted. Röhm seemed unhappy with the reporting. He said that it was UfA news and that meant it was slanted towards the ideas of a few reactionary old industrialists who wanted to restore the Wittelbachs and the Kaiser. He relaxed into innocent amusement as we watched a concoction called something like
Nie wieder Liebe
. I found it mildly funny but Röhm was roaring and slapping at himself, his bottle forgotten. He was in excellent spirits when the two-reeler came on, a Western with Buck Jones. Jones was a new star, the best type of All-American boy, righting wrongs and rescuing fair maidens. Full of wild action and wholesome heroics, the film was well above the usual quality. People find it fashionable to mock at morality these days, but I see nothing amusing in showing evil thwarted and virtue triumphant. Röhm loved these tales. He nudged me once and whispered in fun that Mr Jones was an even better rider than I. The film had been given a decent budget. The subtitles were German, of course. Not a talkie, but a musical sound-track had been attached. Röhm agreed with me that he would rather have a live orchestra.

Next came a pre-war Douglas Fairbanks Keystone comedy in his old style, with organ accompaniment, the titles in Gothic German, giving them all a vaguely Victorian quality, but the sparse audience filled that great cinema with appreciative laughter. Mack Sennett was a hero in Germany. They were fond of saying how much of the technology had been invented by Germans, how many of the American film-makers had German names. I sensed a peculiar feeling of goodwill towards America in those days, because the USA had not fallen into the vengeful trap of the rest of the Allies and made vast, unmeetable reparation demands on the defeated country.

With over a third of her citizens of German origin, America had no great animosity towards Germany. America had not been the cause of inflation. Wall Street, as Germans were fond of saying at that time, was not Wisconsin. When Röhm explained the reality, it made perfect sense. Most of Germany's major national debts were either paid in deliberately inflated currency or written off. Big Business had taken advantage of a disaster which left ordinary families destitute but allowed private companies to make massive profits in foreign currency. Until the government produced the new hard mark those few fat businessmen benefited very well from inflation. Their profits were not poured back into the needy country but sent to Switzerland, England, Liechtenstein and America. Röhm understood this as well as any Bolshevik.

The understanding was beginning to dawn on the victors, too, I think, that an impoverished nation impoverishes the nations it trades with. The French and American Jews in particular had been quick to take advantage of Germany's rock-bottom prices. With his eyes fixed on the screen, Röhm talked through the Keystone comedy in a low monotone which only I could hear. He was clearly a man obsessed. He had come here with the intention of forgetting his problems, but the problems had followed him into the
Kino.

He only fell completely silent when the main feature, a glossy confection set in Vienna some time early in the nineteenth century, began, a talkie. I must admit, I was astonished by the quality of the sound. It was as if a full orchestra was playing in the theatre and the voices of the performers filled the air like a choir of angels. Slowly I was drawn into the wonderfully complex plot, featuring Metternich's various machinations with wonderful romantic performances from Lilian Harvey, Conrad Veidt and Willy Fritsch. We even saw our great Russian Emperor Tsar Alexander represented. Waltzes were danced and balls were given, peasants sang and the world was merry, full of promise, for together we had defeated the threat from Napoleon. A high moment for Europe.

Both Röhm and I were enraptured by the film. I fell in love with Lilian Harvey. I could almost smell her. She was gorgeous and naturally graceful, a girl of the people very much of the Mrs Cornelius type, with the same helmet of white-blonde hair. The vital young Englishwoman, singing beautifully in German, was a great star here. The scene where she sings on her way to visit Willy Fritsch (as Tsar Alexander) and all the peasants join in with her has been copied a million times since. The background of the charming romance was the founding of the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Austria and Russia after Napoleon had been exiled to Elba. A serious political theme,
telling us something of current political attitudes, which also engaged Röhm's attention.

The Germans, of course, had always led the field in kinematography, and there was no faulting this extraordinary operetta, the form in which they were also the unrivalled masters. The extravaganza was produced with so much more flair and taste than those more famous American musicals which came to imitate
Der Kongress tanzt
and its successors.

No wonder the Hollywood studios were all over Berlin, especially at UfA's great Neubabelsberg headquarters where American scouts were courting all the top directors and stars. Germany, as the German papers never stopped telling us, was second only to America in film production and exports. UfA owned film, distributor and the cinema we sat in.

We left just before the lights went up. Röhm said he hadn't seen a more delightful film in years. We were both humming the melodies as he led me into the street and hailed a cab, shoving me through the door and giving an address in the respectable southern suburb. Once in the cab he pulled down the blinds and relaxed. ‘Nobody on our tail,' he said.

I began to think he was disturbed. Or did he know more than I did?

I asked him where we were going, and he smiled tenderly, kissing me briefly on the cheek. ‘Home,' he said. ‘You'll love it. They'll love you. You'll behave yourself. You always do.'

Sure enough, to my enormous astonishment, Röhm was taking me to meet his family!

Röhm's mother and sister lived in a very pleasant house in a tree-lined avenue. The main parlour, where I sat while Röhm had a private word with his sister, was dominated by a mirror-polished ebony grand piano. Otherwise the room was rather sparsely furnished and seemed hardly used. It looked out through long French windows to a balcony and the wide street beyond the trees. Prints of Ney and Wellington hung on the walls, pictures of Cromwell's victories, military engravings of Prussian cavalry on parade. A bust of Beethoven in black marble looked over the piano. Pale green wall-paper. A pretty Meissen urn on the piano's dark reflection. Clearly Röhm, rather than his mother and sister, had furnished this parlour. It had an austere, masculine air to it, was not ‘lived in', but more likely ‘mused' in. Röhm played the piano less and less because his long, sensitive fingers had begun to feel, he said, as if they were full of shrapnel. I knew the sensation. Sometimes I have it in my stomach.

I could not help being mystified. First Röhm warned that our intimacy must no longer be public. Then he took me to visit his mother! I think,
looking back, that he was in emotional turmoil and I must say I cannot blame him. Perhaps he wanted me to see this other side of him because some instinct warned him that he would be ferociously libelled by his enemies within the party and, through them, by the world. Did he understand that somehow I would survive the coming deluge? Is that why he wanted me to know what I already knew, that he was a sophisticated and sensitive human being? Behind that military swagger, that Bavarian bonhomie, that fixed conservatism of his class and calling, there was, I believe, an artist, an intellectual. He could be cruel. At times he could certainly advocate and order brutality, even if he did not take part in it. But these were brutal times. Like the soldier-priests of old, a man had to cultivate the sword as well as the pen to survive in post-war Germany. I was not nervous of him. He loved me. In a way I also loved him. Germany might fear him, but I did not.

Certainly at that moment I was more nervous of meeting Frau Röhm than I was of being the victim of Hitler's vengeance. A servant girl shuffled in wearing a somewhat ill-fitting uniform, as if she had only recently taken the job and inherited the previous incumbent's clothes. With a peasant's heavy-handedness she brought in a coffee tray and a cake stand while an older, rather stooped woman followed her, carefully carrying some plates. Like the maid, the woman was dressed in black, but hers were familiar widow's weeds of the kind worn by so many women in those days. Behind this matron came a woman only a little older than Röhm himself, I guessed. She, too, wore a simple black dress with a black jacket. Her expression was amiable, on a broad, glowing Bavarian face. I detected no close family resemblance. Röhm's features were altogether finer than his relatives' and suggested that his father's had been the dominant genes. Neither woman wore much make-up. Frau Röhm had a healthy, rather scrubbed appearance. These plain women somehow looked out of place in that austere, masculine room. They needed the comforts of their class, their floral prints and chintz and china, to give them any colour at all.

They arrived like strangers and arranged stiff-backed Empire chairs around the coffee and the cakes, smiling and nodding at me vaguely, as if they were not sure I could speak. I clicked my heels and bowed in the Prussian fashion. They seemed impressed by this. We exchanged greetings. As we did so, Röhm came hurrying back into the room. He kissed his mother's hand, patted his sister on the arm, asked after his brother, who was not at home, and announced me as Herr Max Peters, the American film actor. Then I suddenly guessed he was fulfilling a promise to them. His mother and sister already knew who I was and had probably seen some of my films.
Like most women, they were curious about celebrity. A hint of Hollywood engaged even the least imaginative
Hausfrau
.

While the clumsy servant handed us our plates and offered elaborate cream pastries, I made conversation in my rather old-fashioned German. I had learned more Yiddish than German when I had worked for the Jew in Odessa, but I think I succeeded in answering their enquiry. I was not planning to go back to Hollywood immediately. I had fallen in love with Bavaria. But, of course, I was still an employee of Il Duce. This was another personality who interested them, so we chatted a little about Mussolini whom, naturally, I was not particularly well disposed towards just then. I told them what a wonderful woman Signora Rachele Mussolini was and what lovely children she had, how Signor Mussolini took a personal interest in his sons and, no matter how busy with affairs of state, was still able to give them the attention and discipline they needed from a father. I mentioned that Signora Mussolini had personally asked me to teach her son Bruno to fly. Like their father they already rode very well. The boys would grow up as true Italian gentlemen.

This news was greeted with considerable approval by the women and caused Röhm to murmur some remark into his coffee cup which had both of us smiling. But I recovered myself. I had no intention of letting Röhm down. He clearly had considerable affection for his mother yet addressed her in that familiar, faintly mocking, slightly hectoring way his generation had with older people. I think that, too, had something to do with the War. You became impatient with their sentimentality. You could not tell them of the horrors you had seen.

Frau Röhm asked me what I thought of the Vatican. Had I been received by the Pope? I told her that the Vatican did something to my soul. I would soon be granted an audience with the Pope. She said that she hoped the Pope would now be able to do something about the political situation. Mussolini had kept his word and restored the Vatican's power. She was a woman of sharp intelligence. She spoke of the crisis in the Reichstag, the threat to Brüning's chancellorship. Rather than correct her misunderstanding of the situation, Röhm chuckled and said there seemed little hope of the Chancellery now, but perhaps next time. We were trying to run before we could walk. ‘Alf's temporarily lost his powers. All we can do for the moment is keep him up there in general view. It would be fatal if he lost his position with the public now.'

Frau Röhm had listened without hearing him. When he had finished she turned to me with a pleasant smile. ‘You are a famous American cowboy
star, I understand, Herr Peters. But all Americans are from somewhere else, I know!'

I told her that my parents were from Madrid. Until recently my great-uncle had been Archbishop of Sta Maria. I did not really lie so much as use a code, letting her know how I was ‘one of us'. This stopped any barrier forming between us. She was, as a Catholic, clearly reassured by my response. That I held to the true Eastern Church was unimportant. That we both worshipped Jesus Christ was what bound us. I was telling her that I accepted her value system. It is often a mistake to accuse someone of telling a lie. Often they are telling the truth disguised by a lie.

I brought up the Jewish Question in relation to their domination of Hollywood. Contrary to later distortions, Röhm and his family were not rabidly antisemitic.

‘I've nothing against an honest Jew making a living,' said Röhm. ‘Though usury's the bane of modern economics. My complaint is that he then has to give his fifteen brothers and brothers-in-law a living—which means equally honest Germans are in the soup queues because Jews give jobs to Jews. You can't blame them. We shall have a quota system so that Jewish businesses can only employ so many non-Aryans. At least it will give us a level battlefield.' (A far cry, I think you will agree, from Treblinka!)

‘A few heads might have to roll in the present government.' He laughed. He was using conventional phrases. These were the years of strong language, of newspaper hyperbole, where the vocabulary of war had infected all aspects of everyday life, just as military language translated through sport infects modern English. He never meant literally that people's heads should be chopped off. He simply meant that Sozis and Nationalists would have to be replaced with National Socialists so that they had a large enough majority to pass such laws. He did not anticipate the punitive so-called Nuremberg Laws which Röhm had absolutely nothing to do with, of course, and which Hitler borrowed from America.