The junkers, p.1
The Junkers, page 1
The Junkers
Piers Paul Read
Copyright © 2013, Piers Paul Read
Contents
Copyright
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Three
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
About the Author
Part
One
Chapter One
I
This is what happened to me in Germany. I was living in Berlin in 1963, posted there as second Secretary in the office of our Political Adviser to the Commander-in-Chief to serve the interests of my country, Great Britain. I spent much of my time sitting in the cafés on the Kurfürstendamm, normally Zuntz or Kempinski, watching the pretty girls eating cake and drinking coffee. Among their long legs — brown from the ultra-violet lamps in their small rooms — and the narrow trousers of their boy-friends, there were the long skirts of their landladies and, occasionally, the wide trousers with turn-ups covering polished, laced shoes — those of Helmuth von Rummelsberg.
I noticed him not because of the wide trousers and turn-ups but because of the girl who always sat with him. Of all the girls in the Zuntz or Kempinski cafés, of all those in the Old Vienna, the Paris Bar or the Eden Saloon, she was the most beautiful and she was the one I came to love.
After only a month in Berlin I started to go up to the Kurfürstendamm for tea. I was introduced to this habit by the first friend I made while I was there, Armand Foch, my equivalent in the office of the French Political Adviser. We were both free at that time of day and liked to meet to discuss our experiences of the night before or our plans for the night to come — plans and experiences of a sort …. Armand did not take to my girl but he was impressed by my fidelity to this figure at another table and in time she took on an identity and worth beyond that of all the other pretty girls.
One afternoon Armand brought a miniature camera which, he said, was standard issue to those working for the French in the East. We sat at a table quite near to the man and the girl and Armand, with professional discretion, took some snaps from which I can describe what she was like then because I have them in front of me now. There are three photographs: in two of them she was looking at Helmuth von Rummelsberg and since Armand was sitting behind him she seems now to be looking at me. It seemed clear to me when I first looked at the photograph, where she is stretching and smiling at the same time, that she was in love with the man she was looking at (but now I forget that she was looking at him and imagine that she is looking at me). The glance is as relaxed as the limbs. The eyes are as confident in him as the arms in the neutral properties of the air around them; as her body in the strength of its gravity and the friction of the seat of the chair.
She is not smiling in the other two photographs — but one smile from a German girl is rare enough. The photograph in which she is looking away from him (from me) must have been taken as the waitress was bringing the cake. She obviously liked her cake, but though the eager glance is youthful, she is leaning forward in a way that makes her look pregnant or like a nursing mother. And that gives her a look of maturity.
In the third photograph, as in the first, she is looking at me (at him) but here it is with a fixed, persistent gaze. At the time it irritated me because of the affection expressed in those eyes.
The man — the man I thought she loved: I have a photograph of him too, taken at the same time in the same café. He was old — about fifty — and seemed proprietary, sleek and self-satisfied: it was hard for me to be detached about him because I thought she loved him. He dressed in the way Continentals think an English gentleman dresses — suits with waistcoats and heavy shoes — and this gave his appearance a cosmopolitan veneer: but his features were German — sombre and straight. I recognized that he was handsome even if he was old: his hair was half-grey; his skin hung from the lines in his face. The weakening pressure of the blood had deflated his lips so that, when they closed to swallow the Russian tea, the skin above and below them met and the thin line of darker red disappeared into his mouth.
I hesitate to describe Suzi because there are sure to be some others like Armand who do not find her beautiful, who cannot understand why I took to her like that. However I can say that her hair was blonde, her nose was small and straight, her eyes were green and her ankles and wrists more delicate than any I had seen before.
I hesitate to describe myself as I was then, but it is only fair to say something and one of my chief qualities is a belief in fair play. I was that kind of Englishman. My father had been a Colonial governor — one of the last. I would probably have followed him into the Colonial Office but by the time I left university it no longer existed so I joined the Foreign Office instead. I was twenty-five. Berlin was my first post.
*
On one occasion I followed them back to their flat. (For myself I would have been quite happy just watching her every day at teatime but Armand in his French way prodded me to act.) It was not far from the Kurfürstendamm — they went down past the Jewish memorial, crossed the Kantstrasse, went on to the Steinplatz, where, at the corner of the Karmerstrasse, they entered an apartment building. I gave them a few minutes and then went to the door. There were eight white door-bells: one of them was for two people — Graf Helmuth von Rummelsberg and Gräfin Suzanne von Rummelsberg.
There is a small café in the Steinplatz next to a cinema — I went there and drank a glass of schnapps. It seemed quite probable now that they were man and wife, as I had suspected. If that conclusion saddened me, the sadness was too deep inside me to bother my conscious mind. On the contrary, my reaction was what you might expect in a young man living in times as free as they are, in a city which was still, as Armand once described it, amazingly licentious, obsessed with eroticism. The young wife of an old husband was the perfect candidate for a liaison. It also occurred to me that she might be his daughter or his niece: but didn’t her expression when she looked at him suggest more than that? Would a girl of eighteen or so go to tea on the Kurfürstendamm every afternoon with her father? Or her uncle? Not if she was like the girls I knew. Anyway, for the purposes of an affair during my time in Berlin, it would be more suitable and more amusing if she were married to him. ‘After all,’ Armand said to me, ‘it is quite possible. Fifty, for a man, is not so old … and he is handsome … and a count.’
In November they went away for three weeks — at least they did not appear on the Kurfürstendamm. Then, one Tuesday at midday, I saw them in his white Mercedes-Benz going past the Opera. They must have crossed the Zone that morning. I followed them to see him take out two pigskin cases — one larger than the other. He carried them into the building: she was not his nurse.
In December, a few days before Christmas, I went to meet Armand for lunch at the Steinplatz hotel. He stood at the bar smiling.
‘Do you know who is sitting in there?’
It was Suzi in a light-brown suit I had never seen on her before. She was talking to the head waiter, Aimé. Aimé, I knew, could hardly speak a word of German (he was employed at this hotel to add style — he had once worked in Maxim’s or the Ritz in Paris) and Suzi, evidently, could not speak French; so she was forced to gesticulate and talk loudly, which embarrassed her. Even when Aimé took her order to one of the under-waiters she looked ill at ease — as if she would prefer to be eating a toasted sandwich at the Paris Bar or black bread and sausage in her room.
Armand wanted to be quite brazen, to approach her, a risk he would never have taken in an affair of his own. I felt I had too much to lose — that I would prefer to watch Suzi in cafés and restaurants for the rest of my life than ever chance losing her: but that, at that time, was an expression of cowardice, not passion, because I was quite keen to get things going. However we had lunch at a table across the room from her and since I was a trained diplomat I was able to watch her and the green tablecloth without being noticed.
My love for Suzi at this stage was, therefore, the passion of a voyeur. After three months of watching I had not spoken to her, yet continued to be faithful to her with my eyes. I never missed an afternoon on the Kurfürstendamm. On the other hand I had other interests which might come within the general category of love, the activities of an evening, a night, the things Armand and I talked about at teatime (we rarely talked about politics or diplomacy). There was, for a few weeks in November, the young wife of an officer of the British garrison. We met whenever he was on duty at the Zone or Sector border — at night or on Sunday afternoons at the Schloss Grünewald, where it was very cold and sunny. There was no one there so we could, well, hold hands. But she had an extraordinarily thick neck which put me off.
In January there was a German girl who designed textiles. Armand took me to a party of that kind of person — intellectuals — who were drinking a lot. I was given a German brand of whisky, tried to catch up and became drunk. I went back with the girl to her wretched little flat — and went there again the next day to tell her that I did not really want an affair with her — but on that occasion and once or twice afterwards I made use of her until the day came when I did not feel like even that. We went for a walk in the Tiergarten. She wore high-heeled shoes: her feet got very wet — as i
Events, grand historical and coincidental events, forced me to discover something about Helmuth von Rummelsberg. A certain Klaus von Rummelsberg, a political leader of the refugees from eastern Germany, was decorated for his services to these refugees by the Federal government. There were protests from some quarters because he had been a member of the SS. The Federal government insisted that a denazification court had found him innocent — substantially innocent. That was good enough for us but not for some others and our Foreign Office wanted to check the court’s decision for the sake of opinion in Britain. Many of the cases brought up after 1947 were known to be worthless and Klaus’s case had been heard as late as 1949. The Embassy in Bonn passed the case on to us and the Political Adviser, Perkins, passed it on to me since, as he said, I had nothing else to do. So I opened a file on Klaus von Rummelsberg, born in Pomerania in 1905, eldest of three brothers: thus, in a sense, I had an official file on Helmuth, one of the brothers, and Suzi.
The records showed that Klaus von Rummelsberg had been attached to Strepper’s SS battalion, which was a bad mark against him. I asked Bonn through the bag if we knew what had happened to Strepper. The answer was inadequate — no more than the popular rumour that he had escaped to South America. The Israelis were still looking for him. We no longer cared, as we no longer cared about Klaus except as a political nuisance — it was considered unnecessary to worry about what Germans had done if you were concerned with what they did now. That, at any rate, was the policy and I did not care if it was right or wrong. I never knew my uncles who died in the war. The most I remember of those days was the red glow over London and sweet-rationing which hit me hard. The Italian husband of my mother’s Italian cook had been a volunteer on the fascist side in Spain — but I still let him clean my shoes and press my suits when I was at home. Of course I did not much care for Germany or the Germans — few Englishmen do — but that had as much to do with the First War and with their Lederhosen as with the Second, with their concentration camps. In practical terms this distaste for the Germans only meant that I tried to avoid German food, German beer-houses and German conversation: it did not prevent me from becoming, in a sense, a German expert. I had studied German history at university: I knew a lot about the economic policies of the Federal Republic, trade with the Zone and Allied Rights. I was quite competent to deal with the case of Klaus von Rummelsberg.
His background was unusual for a Nazi, and as far as we knew neither of his brothers had joined the Party. I began to piece together their background — first that they came from Pomerania, lesser nobility, landed gentry — what used to be called Junkers. I did not take my investigations to Pomerania where it all started — the course of their lives which now began to encircle mine — because Pomerania is not there. The Germany of today — Munich, say, or Cologne — is as far from Pomerania as Rome is from Sofia or Tripoli, as Amsterdam is from the Orkney Islands, as Beirut is from Bagdad, as Alexandria is from Istanbul. This other Germany of the von Rummelsberg ancestors no longer exists and hardly existed while Suzi or I were alive. It is not just eradicated from the modern maps of post-war Europe. Its inhabitants are gone. There are no longer Pomeranian houses, rivers, mudflats, marshes, pine-trees, beeches or cornfields. There is no Pomerania. True, there is Pomerce in Poland, province on the Baltic coast inhabited by Slavs from the Ukraine — a different kind of place from the old Pomerania: but then there was a war, atrocities of all sorts and a clean sweep of Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia — a clean sweep off the map and out of history. The smaller places — Glatz, Cranz, Oels, Jares — went too: Hundsfelt became Psie Pole and Guttentag, Dobrodzien.
As an Englishman I cared very little about the disappearance of Pomerania. Neither Suzi nor I fought in that war, nor did we suffer materially from it except for sweet-rationing. Others did but they have had their say. If I have anything to say about that war, that Second World War, it is that Suzi and I do suffer from it in our minds because for those throughout Europe who were involved, it was the penultimate act of their lifetime, the final act being to talk about it, to judge everything for us as well as for themselves in the light of it. They reminisce with a delighted nostalgia — they live in the present world as in some continuing instalment, some sequel tagged on by a Dumas or a Conan Doyle to a work that was all too successful. But a sequel is always a mistake if it tries to describe the years of happiness that follow the last page of a fairy tale, a fairy tale in which a nation of monsters slaughtered the Jews (a nation of heroes fought for their lives), imprisoned good English airmen (impounded war criminals but were vanquished …). Bored children listen while their fathers tell what they did during the war. A generation is trapped by millions of ancient mariners, soldiers, fliers, and when they grow up they are constrained by the pattern of prejudice formed through the gaffes of these same story-tellers; they are pulled up short by the dozen place-names — Munich, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, Hiroshima — which should have become the names of railway stations for any kind of real immortality.
My knowledge of Pomerania, therefore, amounts to this: first, I have had, since my student days, and have still, an overcoat with a Pomeranian collar which remains my favourite overcoat; secondly, an aunt of mine had a Pomeranian dog; and finally, without taking into consideration the expatriate Pomeranian Suzi, I am as likely to like Pomeranian girls as Bavarian girls or Jewish girls (and, of course, Jewish and Bavarian girls as much as Pomeranians). I like light blue eyes as much as dark brown eyes; cold eyes as much as warm eyes; long limbs as much as short ones. Moreover I was an Englishman with a sense of fair play and for that alone, as well as for Suzi’s sake, I would not prejudge Klaus von Rummelsberg.
I met Suzi, as I knew I would, because coincidences are very common and I have always relied on them. The Senate of West Berlin gave a reception at the Academy of Arts and I was sent to represent the Political Adviser. It was the usual provincial fling — white wine, red wine and black bread sandwiches at eight in the evening — neither cocktails nor dinner nor anything after dinner. (The French and the English were always put in a bad temper by these parties — we could never decide whether or not to go out and have a decent dinner afterwards.)
I had been there for ten minutes and was talking to a man from the festival office — a plump, shiny man — when I caught Suzi’s profile on the outer range of my retina as she came into the room. The reflex of my eye must have been sensitive to my emotion for normally I would not have noticed anything so much to my side.
Helmuth came in behind her: he overtook her and crossed the room to talk to the Senator for Culture and Education. She came up to the man I was talking to and we were introduced. It was as confusing as it is to meet a television newscaster — a face one knows so well that shows no recognition. She shook hands with me. At once I could not remember what her hands felt like. So close, her face was different — muscle and bone, the skeleton of her beauty, the tendons of her expression.
I have never used my knowledge of German less than in Berlin. Suzi, like all the others, spoke to me in English when she learnt who I was.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘you should go riding in Berlin. The Grünewald is the best place. I can tell you the name of the stables I go to by the Glienicke bridge.’
‘Well, we have stables for our cavalry in Charlottenburg,’ I replied.
‘Oh, yes, of course. The parade on the Mayfield for the Queen’s birthday. But there is nowhere so nice to ride around there.’
There was a flickered look of melancholy or something. Who can tell what the glances of women mean? Then she crossed to Helmuth von Rummelsberg and stood at his side.
‘Who is she?’ I asked the man who had introduced us.
‘Suzanne von Rummelsberg. A very charming girl, don’t you think?’
‘And who is the man?’
‘Helmuth von Rummelsberg.’
‘Is he her father … or …’
