The Zone of Interest

  ‘Not everyone’s brave, my dear.’

  ‘True, Golo. Excellent coffee, this. Mm, the Poles. Well, even I thought it was a bit on the sporty side. Telling three hundred circus strongmen they’re about to be topped.’

  ‘Still, you assumed . . .’

  ‘That Mobius had done the necessary. Which he had. But Doll. We mustn’t be mean, Golo. Let’s just say Doll was beholden to his brown trousers.’

  ‘And everyone could tell.’

  ‘He gave out a whimper and sort of waggled his arms in the air. Like this. Mobius went, Commandant! And Doll’s breath smelled of sick.’

  ‘Anyway.’ I refilled our cups, adding Boris’s three sugars and stirring them in. ‘Anyway, you went ahead with it.’

  ‘They were Home Army. It was the first sensible order I’d had in months . . . Mm, they certainly knew how to die. Chest out, head up.’

  We ate in silence.

  ‘Oh, stop it, Golo. That look.’

  I said, ‘Indulge your old friend. I won’t do it often. Most of the time I’m in agony.’

  ‘About what? The waiting? About what?’

  ‘Being here. This is . . . This is no place for delicate feelings, Boris.’ Yes, I thought. I used to be numb; now I’m raw. ‘Being here.’

  ‘Mm. Here.’

  After some thought I said, ‘I’m going to take a vow of silence on Hannah. But before I do I just want you to . . . I’m in love.’

  Boris’s shoulders went slack. ‘Oh, no.’

  I gathered the plates and the cutlery. ‘All right, I don’t disagree, brother. It’s hard to imagine it ending well. Now. That’ll do.’

  We sat smoking in the other room. The illustrious mouser, Maksik (newly arrived), his undercarriage an inch from the floor, was nosing round the low kitchen shelves; abruptly he sat and, in incensed irritation, scratched his ear with a violent hindpaw.

  ‘She’s not bad, is she . . .’ Boris meant Agnes. ‘Oh and Esther – Esther’s fine for now, by the way. I got her off the vet detail,’ he said with (I thought) a touch of smugness. ‘Too much outdoor work. Yes, and I saw Alisz Seisser. Had you heard?’

  ‘Yes. Roma or Sinti?’

  ‘Alisz is a Sintiza,’ he said wistfully. ‘So sweet.’

  ‘So she’s ruled out too.’

  ‘Mm. Give Alisz so much as a peck on the cheek, and you’re breaking the law. The Law, Golo, for the Protection of German Blood.’

  ‘And German Honour, Boris. What do you get for that?’

  ‘Depends who you are. It’s usually all right so long as you’re the Aryan. And so long as you’re the man, of course. But me, I’m on probation.’ He took his lower lip between his teeth. ‘And it’d be just like them to give me another year here. Oh, and nice news from Egypt, isn’t it.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. This was the defeat of Germany’s ablest soldier, Rommel, by the British at El Alamein. ‘And why’s everyone gone quiet about Stalingrad?’

  Boris examined the coal of his cigarette. ‘I haven’t done it for years, but I’m thinking more about the past. Now.’

  ‘We all are.’

  It was a Tuesday. That afternoon at four o’clock Hannah came out of the glass doors of the breakfast room and took a five-minute turn round the garden – under an umbrella, and wrapped up in a kind of hoodless duffel coat. She didn’t look in what she knew to be my direction. I was up in the Monopoly Building, where they keep all the uniforms, the boots, the belts . . .

  Paul Doll was not her first lover.

  1928, and Hannah had just enrolled at the University of Rosenheim in southern Bavaria (French and English); Dieter Kruger was on the faculty (Marx and Engels). With two friends she started going to a course of lectures he was giving – for the simple reason that he was so handsome. We all had mad crushes on him. One day he took her aside and asked her if she felt passionate about the Communist cause; she untruthfully said that she did. He then asked her to come along to the weekly meetings he chaired in the back room of a downtown Kaffeehaus. This was the Group. So it emerged that the husky Kruger was not just an academic but also an activist, not just a don but a streetfighter (there were running battles – with guns, even grenades: the Roter Frontkampferbund versus an array of Right factions, including the NSDAP). He and Hannah began an affair and moved in together, more or less (it was known as taking adjacent rooms). Kruger was thirty-four; Hannah was eighteen.

  He left her six months later.

  I thought he must’ve stopped wanting to go to bed with me, she said, in the gazebo on the border of the Zone, but it didn’t seem that way. He kept coming back – you know, just for the night. Or have me go to him. He said, You know what the real trouble is? You’re not nearly Left enough. And I wasn’t. I didn’t believe in it. I didn’t like the Utopia. And it drove him wild when I kept falling asleep at the Group.

  Paul Doll, too, was of the Group. I didn’t find this surprising. At that time there were thousands of men who went back and forth from fascism to Communism without even glancing at liberalism. She went on,

  Then Dieter got very badly beaten up by a gang of Browns. And it made him even more steely. He said it was ‘inconceivable’ that someone like him could be with a woman who wasn’t really of the faith. So he went for good . . . I was pathetic. I had a complete breakdown. I even tried to kill myself. Wrists. And she showed me the white seams, cross-hatching the blue veins. It was Paul who found me and took me to hospital. Paul was being very kind to me around then . . .

  I asked, wonderingly, about her parents.

  D’you know what I mean by ‘an autumn crocus’? Well that’s what I was. I’ve got two brothers and two sisters a generation older than me. My mum and dad are lovely, but they’d stopped being parents. What they cared about was Esperanto and theosophy. They cared about Ludwig Zamenhof and Rudolf Steiner.

  Paul was nursing me and giving me my medicine. My sedatives. I mustn’t make excuses for myself but it was all like a dreadful dream. The next thing I knew I was pregnant. And the next thing I knew I was married . . .

  In March 1933, of course, after the Reichstag Fire (February 27), four thousand Leftist notables were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, and Dieter Kruger was one of them.

  Dieter Kruger went to Dachau; and among his jailers, early on, was Corporal Doll.

  I put aside my ambivalence and after a false start or two established contact (by teletype and then by telephone) with an old friend of my father’s in Berlin, Konrad Peters of the SD – the Sicherheitsdienst Reichsfuhrer-SS, or Party Intelligence. Peters was formerly a professor of modern history at Humboldt; now he helped monitor the foes of National Socialism (sardonically specialising in the Freemasons).

  ‘And speak freely, Thomsen,’ he said. ‘This line’s a virgin.’

  ‘It’s very good of you to take the trouble, sir.’

  ‘Happy to help. I miss Max and Anna.’

  We shared a brief silence. I said,

  ‘Arrested in Munich on March first. To Dachau on March twenty-third.’

  ‘Oh. In the first batch. Under Wackerle. That must’ve been enjoyable.’

  ‘Wackerle, sir? Not Eicke?’

  ‘No. At that point Eicke was still in the lunatic asylum in Wurzburg. Then Himmler sprung him and had him declared sane. It was actually worse under Wackerle.’

  Konrad Peters, although far more exalted, was like me. We were obstruktive Mitlaufer. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the parquet, but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us.

  I said, ‘Transferred to Brandenburg Penitentiary in September. That’s all I have.’

  ‘Give me a day or two. He’s not family, is he?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That’s a relief. Just a friend then.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  By early November the change in the ergonomics of the Buna-Werke had become palpable: a marked relaxation of tempo (par
ticularly evident in the Yard), and a significant burst of progress. Accordingly I made an appointment with the head of the Politische Abteilung, Fritz Mobius.

  ‘He’ll be about half an hour,’ said Jurgen Horder (thirtyish, of medium build, with slicked grey hair worn almost romantically long). ‘Are you going to the thing on Monday? I haven’t been invited.’

  ‘Officers,’ I said, ‘and their wives. Mandatory. Your boss’ll represent you.’

  ‘Lucky him. It’ll be colder than a witch’s tit.’

  We were on the ground floor of Bunker 13, one of the Stammlager’s many three-storey slabs of dull grey brick; its few windows were all boarded up, so there was a blind quality, and a sealed quality (as well as the devious acoustics you found everywhere in the Kat Zet). For the first ten minutes I could hear, from the cellars, a succession of slowly building, slowly bursting screams of pain. Then there was a long silence, followed by the sound of boots on dusty or even gravelly stone steps. Michael Off entered, wiping his hands with a tea towel (in his cream singlet he looked like the young man at the travelling funfair who synchronised the dodgems). Nodding, he stared at me while apparently counting his teeth with his tongue, first the lower, then the upper. He took a packet of Davidoffs from the shelf and went back down again, and the slowly building, slowly bursting screams resumed.

  ‘Good day. Please sit. How can I help you?’

  ‘I hope you can help me, Herr Mobius. This is somewhat embarrassing.’

  Mobius was originally a penpusher at the HQ of the Secret State Police, the Gestapa – not to be confused with the Gestapo (the actual Secret State Police), or the Sipo (the Security Police), or the Cripo (the Criminal Police), or the Orpo (the Order Police), or the Schupo (the Protection Police), or the Teno (the Auxiliary Police), or the Geheime Feldpolizei (the Secret Field Police), or the Gemeindepolizei (the Municipal Police), or the Abwehrpolizei (the Counter-Espionage Police), or the Bereitschaftpolizei (the Party Police), or the Kasernierte Polizei (the Barracks Police), or the Grenzpolizei (the Border Police), or the Ortspolizei (the Local Police), or the Gendarmerie (the Rural Police). Mobius had prospered in his wing of the policing business because he turned out to have a talent for cruelty, a talent that was widely discussed, even here.

  ‘All going forward at the Buna-Werke? You’re winning? We do need that buna.’

  ‘Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Rubber – it’s like ball bearings. You can’t make war without it.’

  ‘So, Herr Thomsen. What seems to be the difficulty?’

  Almost completely bald, with a few shreds of straight black hair daubed round his ears and extending to the nape of his neck, dark-eyed, strong-nosed, even-mouthed, he looked like a warmly intelligent academic. Meanwhile, Mobius’s most controversial novelty was his use, during interrogations, of an experienced surgeon – Professor Entress of the Hygienic Institute.

  ‘This is awkward, Untersturmfuhrer. And slightly distasteful.’

  ‘It’s not always fun to do one’s duty, Obersturmfuhrer.’

  The last word was stressed with some fastidiousness (because it was voguish, in the secret police, to despise rank and other outward forms of power. Secrecy, hiddenness, was power, they knew). I said,

  ‘Please regard all this as tentative. But I don’t see any way round it.’

  Mobius twitched a shoulder and said, ‘Proceed.’

  ‘At Buna progress is steady, and we’ll get the thing done, and not significantly behind schedule. As long as we go on using the established methods.’ I exhaled through my nose. ‘Frithuric Burckl.’

  Mobius said, ‘The moneyman.’

  ‘If he’d confined himself to a stray remark I’d have let it go. But he harps on it. He appears to have some very peculiar notions about our uh, about our Red Sea pedestrians . . . Sometimes I wonder if he has the slightest grasp of the ideals of National Socialism. Of the delicate equipoise of our inseparable twin aims.’

  ‘Kreative Vernichtung. The postulate of all revolutions. Kreative Vernichtung.’

  ‘Quite. Now hear this. Burckl says the Jews are good workers, can you believe, so long as you treat them gently. And he says they’d do even better on a full stomach.’

  ‘Lunacy.’

  ‘I implored him to see sense. But the man’s deaf to reason.’

  ‘Tell me, what are the objective consequences?’

  ‘Entirely predictable. Classic erosion of the chain of command. Burckl doesn’t goad the foremen, the foremen don’t bully the guards, the guards don’t terrorise the Kapos, and the Kapos don’t thrash the Haftlinge. A kind of rot’s set in. We need someone who . . .’

  Mobius took out his fountain pen. ‘Go on. More details, please. You’re doing the right thing, Herr Thomsen. Go on.’

  Walking reasonably steadily but unbelievably slowly, his stride somewhere between a parade march and a goose step, and with neck tipped back as if monitoring a distant aeroplane, Paul Doll came down the aisle between the two halves of the standing audience and climbed the little staircase to the low stage. It was minus fourteen Celsius, and snow, tinged brown by the pyre and the smokestacks, was purposefully falling. I looked to my right at Boris, and then to my more distant left at Hannah. We were all bundled up to the thickness of mattresses, like experienced tramps in a wintry northern town.

  Doll jolted to a halt in front of the banner-draped podium. Behind him, ranged out over the boards, fourteen wreaths leaned against fourteen ‘urns’ (tar-blackened flowerpots), which weakly flickered and fumed. The Commandant extended his tubed lips and paused. And for a moment it really did seem as if he had gathered us there, that murky noon, to listen to him whistle . . . But now he reached into the folds of his fleeced greatcoat and wrenched out a typescript of inauspicious bulk. The grey sky went from oyster to mackerel. Doll looked out and said loudly,

  ‘Jawohl . . . Well might the firmament darken. Jawohl. Well might the heavens sob their burden to the ground. On this, the Reich Day of Mourning! . . . November the ninth, my friends. November the ninth.’

  Although everyone knew that Doll was not wholly sober, he seemed, for now, to have dosed himself with some care. Those judicious shots of liquor had rendered him calorific (and deepened his voice); and his teeth had already stopped chattering. He now produced from a nook beneath the sloped wooden surface a large glass of colourless liquid; it gave off a faint vapour as he raised it to his mouth.

  ‘Yech, November the ninth. A holy day of threefold import for this – for this irresistible movement of ours . . . On November 9, 1918, 1918, the Jewish war profiteers, in their crowning swindle, effectively auctioned off our beloved fatherland to their co-religionists in Wall Street, in the Bank of England, and in the Bourse . . . On November 9, 1938, 1938, after the cowardly murder of our ambassador to Paris by a man with the interesting name of uh, “Herschel Grynszpan”? – Reichskristallnacht! Reichskristallnacht, when the German folk, after so many years of unbearable provocation, spontaneously rose up in their simple quest for justice . . . But I want to talk to you about November 9, 1923. 1923 – as we duly honour this, the Reich Day of Mourning.’

  Boris nudged me with his padded elbow. November 9, 1923, saw the ridiculous debacle of the Pub Putsch in Bavaria. On that date, about nineteen hundred assorted tub-thumpers and layabouts, cranks and freebooters, embittered militiamen, power-mad ploughboys, disillusioned seminary students, and ruined storekeepers (all shapes and sizes, and of all ages, all armed and all in ill-fitting brown uniforms, and each of them paid two billion marks, which, on that particular day, equalled three dollars and four or five cents) gathered in and around the Burgerbraukeller, near the Odeonplatz in Munich. At the appointed hour, led by a triumvirate of eccentric celebrities (the de facto military dictator of 1916–18, Erich von Ludendorff, the Biggles-style Luftwaffe ace, Hermann Goring, and, in the van, the boss of the NSDAP, the fiery corporal from Austria), they dribbled out of the basement and began their advance on the Feldherrhalle. This was to be the first leg of the revolutionary March on Berli
n.

  ‘Off they stepped,’ said Doll, ‘grave yet gay, iron-willed but easy-hearted, laughing but full of moist emotion as they shivered to the joyous cries of the crowd. Before them shone the inspiring example of Mussolini – and his triumphant march on Rome! Still joking, still singing – ja, even whilst they jeered and spat at the raised carbines of the Republican State Police! . . . A gunshot, a volley, a fusillade! General Ludendorff shouldered his way on, trembling with righteous fury. Goring fell, grievously wounded in the leg. And the Deliverer, the future Reichskanzler himself? Ach, despite his two broken arms he braved the flying bullets to carry a helpless child to safety! . . . And when the acrid smell of cordite at last dispersed, fourteen men, fourteen brothers, fourteen warrior-poets lay sprawled in the dust! . . . Fourteen widows. Fourteen widows, and three score fatherless bairns. Jawohl, that is what we are here to honour today. German sacrifice. They laid down their lives that we should have hope – hope of rebirth and the promise of a brighter morn.’

  The brown snow had long been thinning and now quite suddenly and silently ceased. Doll looked up and smiled with gratitude at the sky. And then in the space of a few heartbeats he seemed to falter, to tire, to tire and age; he slumped forward and took the whole lectern roughly in his arms.

  ‘. . . Now I unfurl . . . this sacred banner – our very own Blood Flag.’ He held it up for all to see. ‘Symbolically stained – with Rotwein . . . Trans uh, transubstantiation. Like the Eucharist, nicht?’

  Again I turned to my left – coming into disastrous contact with Hannah’s eyes. She resteadied her gaze forward with a mittened hand clamped to her nose. And for the next passage of time I urgently and strenuously contended with the pressure in my chest, trying not to follow Doll’s voice as it slewed and skidded on, about medals, signet rings, coats of arms, brooches, torches, chants, vows, oaths, rites, clans, crypts, shrines . . .