The Zone of Interest (39 page)

‘The Reichstag Fire – three weeks after our assumption of power. Everyone thought
we’d
done it. Because it was made in heaven for us.’ I took another swallow. ‘Anyway, we didn’t. Some Dutch anarchist did it. And he was guillotined in January ’34. But there was another man called Dieter Kruger. Are you awake, Tante?’

‘. . . Of course I’m awake!’

‘And Dieter Kruger, Dieter Kruger had a hand in one of the Dutchman’s earlier arsons – a welfare office in Neukolln. So he was executed too. For good measure. Kruger was a Communist and a—’

‘And a Jew?’

‘No. That’s not important, Tante. What’s important is that he was a published political philosopher and a fervent Communist . . . So the night before the execution Uncle Martin and a few of his friends went down to death row. With several bottles of champagne.’

‘What for? The champagne?’

‘For toasts, Tante. Kruger was already a bit bashed about, as you’d expect, but they stood him up and ripped his shirt off, and cuffed his hands behind his back. And in a mock ceremony they awarded him all these medals. The Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. The Order of the German Eagle. The Honour Chevron of the Old Guard. Et cetera. And they pinned them on his bare chest.’

‘. . . Yes?’

‘Uncle Martin and his pals gave speeches, Tantchen. They eulogised Kruger as the father of fascist autocracy. Which is how he went to his death. A decorated hero of National Socialism. Uncle Martin thought that was very funny. Do you think that’s very funny?’

‘. . . What? Giving him
medals
? No!’

‘Mm. Well.’

‘. . . He started the Reichstag Fire!’

On my last night she made an effort and rallied. She said,

‘We have so much to be proud of, Golo. Think of what he achieved, Uncle Martin. I mean personally.’

There was a silence. And an understandable silence. What? The intensification of corporal punishment in the slave camps. The cautious dissent on the question of the cosmic ice. The deSemitisation of the alphabet. The marginalising of Albert Speer. Uncle Martin wasn’t at all interested in the accoutrements of power, only in power itself, which he used, throughout, for unswervingly trivial ends . . .

‘How he took on the question of the Mischlinge,’ she said. ‘And the Jews married to Germans.’

‘Yes. And in the end we just let them be. The intermarried ones. Pretty much.’

‘Ah, but he got his Hungarians.’ She gave a soft gurgle of satisfaction. ‘Every last one of them.’

Well, not quite. As late as April ’44, with the war long lost, the cities razed, with millions of people half starved, homeless, and dressed in singed rags, the Reich still felt it made sense to divert troops to Budapest; and the deportations began. You see, Tante, it’s like that man in Linz who stabbed his wife a hundred and thirty-seven times. The second thrust was delivered to justify the first. The third to justify the second. And so it goes on, until the end of strength. Of the Jews in Hungary, two hundred thousand survived, Tantchen, while close to half a million were deported and murdered in ‘Aktion Doll’ in Kat Zet II.

‘Mm,’ she said, ‘he always insisted that that was his greatest accomplishment on the world stage. You know, his greatest contribution as a statesman.’

‘Indeed, Tante.’

‘. . . Now, Neffe. What’ll you do, my love?’

‘Go back to the law, in the end, I suppose. I’m not sure. Maybe keep at it as a translator. My English is getting quite decent. I’ve improved it
by hook or by crook
.’

‘What? It’s a hideous language, so they say. And you shouldn’t really work for the Americans, you know, Golo.’

‘I know, dear, but I am.’ OMGUS, the American Office of Military Government, and the five Ds: denazify, demilitarise, deindustrialise, decartelise, and democratise. I said, ‘Tante, I’m trying to find somebody. But the thing is – what’s her maiden name? I never asked.’

‘Golito . . . Why couldn’t you find a nice single girl?’

‘Because I found a nice married one.’

‘You look pained, dearest.’

‘I am pained. I feel I have the right to be pained about that.’

‘. . . Ah. Poor Golito. I understand. Who is the husband?’

‘They’re separated, and she won’t be using her married name. He’s being tried by the IMT.’

‘Those swine. Jewish justice. And was he a good Nazi?’

‘One of the best . . . Anyway. I’m getting nowhere. There’s nothing left you can look up.’ By which I meant that every file, every folder, every index card, every scrap of paper connected to the Third Reich was either destroyed before the capitulation or else seized and sequestered after it. ‘There’s nothing left you can look up.’

‘Golito, put a notice in the press. That’s what people do.’

‘Mm, I already tried that. More than once. Here’s a discouraging thought. Why hasn’t she found me? I wouldn’t be hard to find.’

‘Maybe she is trying, Neffe. Or I tell you what – maybe she’s dead. So many people are these days. And anyway, it’s always like that, isn’t it? After a war. Nobody knows where anybody is.’

With my flask on my lap I sat on at the bedside, thinking.

‘I wouldn’t be hard to find.’ Slowly I got to my feet. ‘It’s time, sadly, dear. I’ll have to take my leave of you, Tantchen. Tantchen?’

But Gerda was comprehensively, abysmally asleep.

‘Bless you, my angel,’ I said. I leaned over and put my lips to her waxy brow, and then joined the others in the truck.

Gerda had cancer of the uterus and died ten days later, on April 26, 1946. She was thirty-seven. And poor Volker, always a sickly baby and toddler, died the same year. He was three.

With me this had been the case for some time: I couldn’t see beauty where I couldn’t see intelligence.

But I saw Gerda with eyes of love and even on her deathbed she was beautiful. The stupid beauty of Gerda Bormann.

*

3. HANNAH: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

In September 1948 I sent myself on a fool’s errand.

The Fourth Germany, by that time, could no longer be very faithfully described as an almshouse on a slag heap. During the hyperinflation of my adolescence, money held its worth for only a few hours (on payday everyone did their week’s or their month’s shopping, and did it
instanter
); by contrast, in the post-war period money was worthless to begin with. Once again the answer lay in a change of banknote. The currency reform of June 20 put an end to the Zigaretten Wirtschaft – a state of affairs in which a Lucky Strike became too valuable to smoke – and introduced the Soziale Marktwirtschaft, or the free market (no rationing, no price controls). And it worked.

In the quixotic spirit of that summer, I procured a car, a filthy old Tornax (whose blackened and oft-needed crank kept making me think of a broken swastika), and boldly drove south-east. My purpose? My purpose was to get closer to the end of hope – to exhaust it, and so try to be rid of it. I was quieter, older, greyer (hair and eyes losing colour); but my somatic health was good, I quite liked translating for the Americans (and I had become genuinely passionate about a
pro bono
job I was doing on the side), I had men friends and even lady friends, I was plausibly to be seen in the office, in the PX store, in the restaurant, at the cabaret, at the cinema. Yet I could not construct a plausible inner life.

My OMGUS colleagues liked to say that ‘Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es’ was the new national anthem (I Didn’t Know Anything About It); and yet all Germans, around then, as they slowly regained consciousness after the Vernichtungskrieg and the Endlosung, were meant to be reformed characters. And I too was a reformed character. But I could not construct a self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure (which, at least, I did not seek to relieve by ‘joining’ anything). If I looked inside myself, all I saw was the watery milk of solitude. In the Kat Zet, like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved. And when I entertained memories of Hannah (a frequent occurrence), I didn’t have the sense of a narrative gallingly unfinished. I had the sense of a narrative almost entirely unbegun.

Earlier I said that you couldn’t live through the Third Germany without discovering who you were, more or less (always a revelation, and often untoward); and without discovering who others were, too. But now it seemed that I had barely made the acquaintance of Hannah Doll. I remembered and still tasted the complex pleasure I derived from her, from the shape of her stance, the way she held a glass, the way she talked, the way she crossed a room – the warm comedy and pathos it filled me with. And where exactly were these interactions unfolding? And what was that syrupy stench (which walls and ceilings were powerless to exclude)? And was
that man
her husband? . . . The Hannah I knew existed in a sump of misery, and in a place that even its custodians called
anus mundi
. So how could I defend myself from thoughts of a Hannah reborn and reawakened? Who would she be – who would she be in peace and freedom, trusting, trusted? Who?

Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied,
par excellence
and
a fortiori
(by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red Orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.

Who somebody really was.
That
was the zone of interest.

And so it came about that I resumed my search for a maiden name.

Hannah met Paul Doll in Rosenheim, and they spent time together in Rosenheim, and it seemed reasonably likely that they were married in Rosenheim. So I went to Rosenheim. With much snorting, knocking, and pinking, and then stalling, and then bounding, the terrible Tornax completed the sixty kilometres from Munich.

Rosenheim comprised eighteen boroughs, each with its own Standesamt: births, weddings, deaths. My project, therefore, would effortlessly consume an entire week’s leave. Well, ‘furloughs’, by now, were being audaciously referred to as ‘vacations’. Besides the abruptly available goods and services, there was something unrecognisable in the air. Whatever it was, it was not the return of normality. There had been no normality to return to, not after 1914, not in Germany. You had to be at least fifty-five to have an adult recollection of normality. But there was something in the air, and it was new.

I arrived on the Sunday, and established myself at a guest house on the fringe of the Riedergarten. First thing the next morning, in solemn consciousness of futility, I cranked the Tornax and started on the concentric circles of my rounds.

At five in the afternoon of the following Saturday, sure enough, I was drinking a glass of tea at a stall in the main square, my throat inflamed and my eyes weakly watering at the far corners. After the expenditure of much drudgery, cunning, obsequiousness, and money (those valiant new Deutschmarks), I had managed to peruse a total of three ledgers; and without the slightest edification. The trip, the enterprise, in other words, had been a ridiculous failure.

*

And so I stood there, dully looking out at the peace and freedom of the town. That was undeniable: there was peace and freedom (the capital was under blockade, and there was little peace, and no freedom, in the Russian mandate to the north-east, with rumours of hectare-wide mass graves). And what else? Many years later, I would read the first dispatch from an American journalist posted in Berlin, which consisted of four words:
Nothing sane to report
. The year was 1918.

In January 1933, when the NSDAP picked up the keys to the Chancellery, a narrow majority of Germans felt, not just horror, but the dreamlike fuddlement of the unreal; when you went outside, you were reminded of the familiar, though only as a photograph or a newsreel reminded you of the familiar; the world felt abstract, ersatz, pretend. And that was what I was a witness to, maybe, that day in Rosenheim. The beginning of the German compromise with sanity. Social realism was the genre. Not fairy tales, not Gothic novelettes, not sagas of swords and sorcery, not penny dreadfuls. And not romance, either (an outcome I was beginning to accept). Realism, and nothing else.