Group Portrait With Lady

  “But now there were those two, Leni and Boris, he liked them, they were his best workers, they were protected by higher powers, powers he didn’t know—and then there were other higher powers at work, powers that could settle a person’s hash very quickly, have him shot or sent to a concentration camp. Now let’s have no misunderstanding, don’t imagine that Sonny Boy suddenly discovered in himself the foreign body that some human beings call conscience, or that suddenly, quaking with fear or curiosity, he began to approach that outlandish word or continent, a mystery to him to this day, that’s sometimes called morality. Oh no. Never at odds with himself but sometimes with others, he had run into occasional trouble with Party or Storm Troopers, he had achieved wealth. He had often been in tight corners, mind you, in all those activities of his from the quartermaster corps to the prominent politicians he let go in ’33 in exchange for cash and the family jewels. Charges had been laid against him, in both Party and regular courts, especially when he overdid it with his wreath- and ribbon-recycling. There’d been plenty of those tight corners, and he’d faced them head on, never turning a hair and getting out of them by pointing out the national and economic importance of whatever he was doing in his capacity of tireless opponent of that national enemy known at the time as the ‘penny gobbler.’ Tight corners yes, but conflict with himself as to what was really to his advantage—that was something new to him. He cared no more about Jews than he did about Russians or Communists or Social Democrats, you name it—but how was he supposed to behave now, with one lot of higher powers opposing another lot, and with his fondness for Boris and Leni and—what a coincidence!—discovering that they were profitable? He didn’t care a rap about the war being lost, he was no more interested in politics than he was in the ‘German nation’s struggle for existence’—but damn it all, who could tell in July 1944 how many eons it might take for the war to come to an end? He was convinced that the right thing to do was to switch horses and count on a lost war, but when should he, or could he, make that final switch?”

  A kind of summary would seem to be in order here, as well as a few questions to be answered by the reader himself. First, the statistical and external details. To imagine Pelzer as a cigar-smoking, shifty individual would be mistaken. He was (and is) very clean, attired in custom-made suits, wore (and wears) the latest thing in ties, which do, in fact, still look good on the seventy-year-old Pelzer. He smokes cigarettes, was (and is) a perfect gentleman, and if he has once been described here as having spat, it must be added that he spits very seldom, almost never, and in that instance his spitting operates as historical punctuation, possibly even as an indication of partiality. He lives in a villa that he does not call a villa. He is six foot one, weighs—according to his son, who is a doctor and whose patient he is—171 pounds, with very thick hair that was once dark and is now just beginning to turn gray. Must we really regard him as the classic example of mens sana in corpore sano? Has he ever known S., or T. and W.? Although his sense of confidence in Being seems to be complete, not one of the eight adjectives listed in the paragraph on L. would be applicable to his L., and his occasional smile has always resembled the Mona Lisa’s rather than Buddha’s. Taking him as a person who does not shrink from external conflicts and knows no inner ones, who by 1944 has reached the age of forty-four without ever experiencing an inner conflict, has increased his father’s business fivefold, and does not shrink from the “every little bit” that “helps,” it must be realized that at the relatively advanced age of forty-four he was for the first time catapulted out of his total sense of confidence in Being and is now entering upon virgin territory with some trepidation.

  Then if we take one of his most marked characteristics, an almost inordinately powerful sensuality (his breakfast habits are a perfect reflection of Leni’s), the conflict in which he found himself from the middle of 1944 on may perhaps be imagined; and if we take a further marked characteristic of Pelzer’s, an almost inordinately high vitality, the conflict in which he found himself after the events of July 1944 can be imagined. The Au. has in his possession some detailed information that may serve to typify Pelzer’s behavior at approximately the end of the war.

  On March 1, 1945, a few days before the Americans marched into the city, Pelzer announced, by way of registered letter, his resignation from both Party and Storm Troopers, dissociated himself from the crimes of this organization, and declared himself (the certified copy of this letter may be inspected at the Au.’s) to be “a decent German who was duped and led astray.” He must actually have managed to find, almost on the eve of the arrival of the Americans, a German post office that was still functioning, or at least a responsible post-office official. The registration receipt, albeit disfigured by a Nazi ruptured vulture, is also on hand. When the Americans entered the city Pelzer could therefore truthfully assert that he was not a member of a Nazi organization. He obtained a permit to operate a nursery garden and wreathmaking business since burials still continued to take place, although in considerably reduced numbers. Pelzer’s comment on the stability of his trade: “There’ll always be people dying.”

  For the time being, however, he has to get through almost one whole additional war year in circumstances of increasing difficulty, and he took to saying, when asked for favors (vacation, advance, raise, special flowers): “I’m not a monster, you know.” This expression, and the frequency with which it was used, is confirmed by all surviving and traceable witnesses from the wreath business. “It got to be almost a kind of litany” (Hölthohne) “that he rattled off, there was almost a kind of exorcism about it, as if he had to persuade himself that he really wasn’t a monster, and sometimes he’d say it on occasions when it didn’t fit at all, for example once when I asked him how his family was, he answered: ‘I’m not a monster, you know,’ and once, when someone—I forget who—asked him what day it was—whether Monday or Tuesday, he said: ‘I’m not a monster, you know.’ People began making fun of it, even Boris mimicked him, discreetly of course, and he’d say, for instance, when I handed him a wreath that was ready for its ribbon: ‘I’m not a monster, you know.’ It was interesting, I must say, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, to observe what was happening to Walter Pelzer.”

  Ilse Kremer fully confirmed Pelzer’s litanesque utterance both as to quantity and quality: “Oh yes, he used to say it so often you didn’t even hear it any more, it was like the words in church ‘The Lord be with you’ or ‘Have mercy upon us,’ and later on he had two variations of it, ‘I’m not a monster, you know,’ and ‘Do you take me for a monster?’ ”

  Grundtsch (during a subsequent short visit that unfortunately did not permit a cozy session under elderberry or similar bushes): “Yes, that’s true. Quite true. ‘I’m not a monster, you know’—’Do you take me for a monster?’—sometimes he’d even mutter it to himself when he was alone. I often heard it and then forgot about it, because in time it came to him as naturally as breathing. Well anyway” (wicked laugh on G.’s part), “maybe those gold teeth were lying a bit heavy on his stomach, and the wreaths he pinched, and the ribbons and flowers, and those little parcels of land he kept on collecting even in wartime. By the way, just think for a moment how two or three or maybe four handfuls of gold teeth of assorted nationalities can be turned into real estate that looks unprepossessing at first but today, fifty years later, is a property with a large important building of the Federal Army standing on it that pays our Sonny Boy a pretty nice rent—”

  It was even possible to pick up the trail of that high-ranking member of the Weimar Government, a trail which turned up again in Switzerland, where only the politician’s widow was still to be found. A tall, extremely frail-looking lady in a Basel hotel remembers the incident exactly. “Well, for us what mattered most is that we owe our lives to him. I mean it. He saved our lives—but at the same time you mustn’t forget how high or how low one’s position had to be in those days in order to find oneself saving another person’s life. This is the aspect of favors that is alw
ays forgotten: when Göring later claimed to have saved the lives of a few Jews, we must not forget: who could really save anyone’s life, and what conditions of dictatorship are those in which a human life depends on a favor? What happened was that in February 1933 we were tracked down while staying with friends in a house in Bad Godesberg, and this person—Pelzer? Perhaps, I never knew his name—demanded all my jewelry, all our cash, even a check as well, as coldbloodedly as a highwayman, not for a bribe, oh no, do you know how he put it? ‘I’ll sell you my motorcycle, you’ll find it down by the garden gate, and I’ll give you a tip: drive through the Eifel, not to Belgium or Luxembourg, then drive beyond Saarbrücken to the border and get someone to help you across. I’m not a monster, you know,’ he said, ‘and the question is, of course, whether my motorbike’s worth that much to you and whether you can ride it. It’s a Zündap.’ Luckily my husband had been a motorcycle fan in his young days, but they—those young days—were twenty years back even then, and don’t ask me how we drove to Altenahr and to Prüm and from Prüm to Trier, with me on the pillion—well, luckily we had Party friends in Trier who got us to the Saar territory—not they personally but through contacts. True, we owe our lives to him—but it’s also true that he held our lives in his hand. No, don’t remind me of it again please, and now go, if you don’t mind. No, I don’t wish to know the name of that person.”

  Pelzer himself denies almost nothing of all this: he merely has a different interpretation of it from everyone else’s. Since he loves and needs to talk, the Au. is free at any time to call him up, go and see him, have a chat with him, for as long as he likes. Once again the reader is urged to remember: Pelzer seems in no way obscure or shifty or dubious. He is thoroughly confidence-inspiring: he would seem highly suitable as a bank manager, be accepted as chairman of the board and, were he introduced to one as a retired cabinet minister, the only cause for surprise would be that he has already retired, for he does not look in the least like a man of seventy, more like a man of sixty-four who succeeds in looking like sixty-one.

  When asked about his job with the quartermaster corps, he did not try to change the subject, but he neither denied nor admitted anything, merely resorting to a quasi-philosophical interpretation: “You see, if there’s one thing I’ve always hated, and still do, it’s senseless waste: I emphasize the senseless—waste itself is a good thing so long as it has purpose and meaning: like splurging once in a while, giving a generous gift or something, but senseless waste really burns me up, and to my mind the way the Americans carried on with their dead came under the heading of ‘senseless waste’—think of the cost in money, personnel, and material to send back to Wisconsin, in 1923 or 1922, the body of some Jimmy or other from—say, Bernkastel, where he died in a field hospital in 1919. What for? And does every gold tooth, every wedding ring, every gold amulet chain you find among the remains have to go along too? And you wouldn’t believe what we collected—a few years earlier—in the way of wallets, after the battle of the Lys and after Cambrai—do you imagine that if we hadn’t taken those dollars they’d have got much farther than the orderly room or the battalion office? And besides: the price of a motorbike is determined by the historical situation and the purse of whoever happens to need it in that historical situation.

  “Good God, haven’t I proved I can be generous too? And act contrary to my own interests when it’s a matter of human concern? Are you in any position to judge the spot I was in from the middle of ’44 on? Deliberately and knowingly I acted contrary to my duty as a citizen in order to make it possible for those two young people to enjoy their brief happiness. Didn’t I see how she laid her hand on him, and later on watch how they would keep disappearing for two or three or four minutes at the far end of the greenhouse, where we kept the peat moss and straw and heather and the various tying greens—and do you think I didn’t notice something that it seems the others actually didn’t notice, that during air raids those two sometimes disappeared for an hour or more? And I acted not only contrary to my duty as a citizen but also contrary to my own sexual interests as a man, for I don’t mind admitting—I’ve never made any secret of my interest in sex—that I’d cast an eye, two eyes, in Leni’s direction myself. Even today, I don’t mind your telling her, even today I’m still quite interested. We war veterans and gardeners can be crude fellows, and in those days we called what today is described so subtly and elaborately and sophisticatedly, we called that simple ‘wrestling’—and to prove to you how honest I am I’ll revert to my way of speaking and thinking in those days. I’d like to have had a ‘wrestle’ with Leni. So, not only as a citizen, as a boss, as a Party member, but also as a man, I made sacrifices. And while I object in principle to love affairs, lovemaking, wrestling if you like, between boss and employees, when the feeling came over me I used to throw those objections overboard and behave spontaneously and, well, go to it, and every so often I’d—to use another of our expressions for it—I’d lay one of them.

  “Occasionally there’d be trouble with the girls, little troubles and big ones, the biggest was over Adele Kreten, she was in love with me, had a child by me and was dead set on marrying me, wanted me to get a divorce and so forth, but frankly I don’t believe in divorce, I think it’s the wrong solution for complex problems, so I set Adele up in a flowershop in the Hohenzollern Allee, supported the child, and now Albert’s settled as a high-school teacher, and Adele’s a sensible woman, very comfortably off. That starry-eyed Adele—she was one of those idealistic gardeners, as we specialists call them, always rhapsodizing about Nature and so forth—has become a good little businesswoman. And that business with Boris and Leni made me start sweating blood even early in 1944, out of sheer panic, and I’d be obliged if you’d find somebody, anybody, who can justly claim that I was a monster.”

  As a matter of fact, not one of the persons involved has been able to claim with any conviction that Pelzer was a monster. However, it must be noted and remembered at this point that Pelzer was not economical in his sweating of fear and blood. He sweated six months too soon, and it is up to the reader to decide whether or not to give him credit for this.

  Pelzer’s glassed-in office (still there and used today by Grundtsch as a despatch room, where he sets out, ready to be picked up, the potted flowers and dwarf Christmas trees for the graves) was situated at the center of his whole operation: assuming an adjusted topographical position, from east, north, and south three greenhouses abutted in their entire width onto this office, where Pelzer kept accurate records (a job later delegated to Boris) of flowers grown in the greenhouses before passing some of them on to the trimming tables, others to Grundtsch (who was in sole charge of the perpetual-grave-care business, which in those days did not amount to much yet), and some to the relatively legitimate flower trade. On the west side of the office was the wreath workshop, which ran the width of the three greenhouses and had direct access to two of the three greenhouses, giving Pelzer an unobstructed view of every movement. What he may actually have seen is Leni and Boris sometimes going, one soon after the other, either to the toilet, which was not segregated as to sex, or to pick up material from one of the two greenhouses.

  According to repeated statements by Mr. von den Driesch, the local air-raid warden, air-raid shelter conditions at Pelzer’s were “criminal,” the nearest shelter, which barely met requirements, being some two hundred and fifty yards away in the cemetery administration building, and the use of this shelter—again according to regulations—was prohibited to Jews, Soviet individuals, and Poles. The ones who insisted most vehemently on keeping to this rule were—predictably—Kremp, Marga Wanft, and the Schelf woman; where, then, was the Soviet individual to go when British or American bombs were falling, bombs which, although not directed at him, could hit him? The hitting of a Soviet individual was not that important. Kremp expressed it thus: “One less, what’s the difference?” (Witness Kremer.) But then a further complication arose: who was to guard the Soviet individual while German life was being pro
tected (if only fictitiously) in the shelter? Could he be left alone, unguarded, with a chance to make a bid for the condition that is known, if not familiar, to all: freedom? Pelzer’s solution to the problem was a drastic one. He refused point-blank to so much as set foot in the shelter, disputing that it “offered even minimal protection. It’s nothing but a coffin”—facts which even the civic authorities unofficially regarded as indisputable; during air raids he stayed in his office, guaranteeing that the Soviet individual would not find it “that easy” to make a bid for freedom. “I’ve been a soldier, after all, and know my duty.” Leni, however, who has never in her life set foot in an air-raid shelter or cellar (a further instance of similarity between her and Pelzer) said she “used simply to go out into the cemetery and wait for the all-clear.” What gradually happened was that “everyone simply went off somewhere, even the complaints of that fool von den Driesch had no effect, Sonny Boy simply saw to it that his written protests were intercepted by a good friend” (Grundtsch). “It was really a joke, that air-raid shelter in the administration building, an asphyxiation chamber, that’s all it was, a mere fiction, an ordinary cellar reinforced by a couple of inches of cement, even an incendiary bomb would’ve gone through that.” Result: when the air-raid siren sounded, anarchy ensued: work had to stop, the Soviet individual was not to be let out of sight, and all the others ran off “somewhere.” Pelzer stayed in his office and assumed responsibility for Boris, glancing from time to time at the clock and bemoaning the passage of work time that was at his expense and totally unproductive. Since, moreover, von den Driesch was constantly finding fault with Pelzer’s blackout blinds, he “eventually simply turned out the light—and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Grundtsch).

  So what happened in this darkness?