‘Newspapers in Germany,’ Cripps said, ‘are calling for the death penalty for any witness who appears here on behalf of the defence. It is clear that in such an atmosphere no proper defence of the accused will be possible in that country.’
Hans put his arm around my waist and squeezed, like old times.
My memories of the four days that followed are like the memories of a day at a fair, or a wedding. Or perhaps a trip on a ship, where you see all the same people each morning at breakfast. I glimpsed a future in which these months of exile would be a small, strange phase in our lives. The world would soon come to its senses. It would withdraw support for Hitler and we could go home.
On the second day, Toller took his place in the witness box. The room quietened as for a movie star, or a prince. He wore a fine English herringbone jacket, and took his time. Without a word he garnered the attention of the room; his eyes seemed to catch every one of us.
‘I am not,’ he began in his magnificent baritone, ‘a member of the Communist Party. Nor any party. I have striven to do what I consider my duty as a writer in the cause of social justice.’ He leaned forward, his hands on the box. ‘On the day after the fire Stormtroopers entered my apartment to arrest me…’
I looked at Dora. She was watching him unblinking, hands abandoned in her lap.
‘They also visited the houses of other well-known writers,’ Toller went on, ‘such as Carl von Ossietzky, Ludwig Renn and Erich Mühsam, and arrested them. The National Socialists wished to bring them into connection with the fire and to defame their reputations.’ He opened out his arms to the crowd, ‘I believe,’ he said, very softly, ‘the fire was a prearranged plan.’ Then he paused.
There was not a rustle or cough. Toller drew breath. ‘I do not know with what I was to be charged. There are thousands of people in concentration camps today who have no idea what they are charged with. I refuse,’ his voice was magisterial now, ‘to recognise the right of the present rulers in Germany to rule, for they do not represent the noble sentiments and aspirations of the German people.’
The room erupted into applause. Some people stood up, clapping their hands wildly in front of them. By the end we were all standing. I saw then why people had followed him into death in the war and into revolution at Dachau. And as I watched Dora watching him, I could see why, for her, no one else came close.
Dora’s own coup came on the last day. In typical style, it was one that would never be attributable to her. A large, older man, very upright, with a balding head and protruding eyes under bushy eyebrows, lumbered up to the stand. This was Albert Grzesinski, the former President of Police in Berlin. Grzesinski spoke in the deep rumble of a seasoned political operator. He told the court that after the Nazis had raided the offices of the Communist Party on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, they used the membership list they’d stolen to draw up arrest warrants for the four thousand people on it. The warrants, complete with addresses and, in most cases, photographs, were ready and signed the day before the fire; only the date of the action remained to be inserted.
Then Grzesinski told us he could confirm, from his own personal knowledge, ‘There is an underground tunnel directly connecting the Reichstag with Minister Göring’s residence.’
There was a moment of shock and then heated murmuring started. There remained no doubt in anyone’s mind.
At the end, the commission could find no evidence against the four co-accused. The chairman announced that because those who lit the fire probably came through the tunnel from Göring’s house, and because the fire greatly benefited the Nazis, ‘grave grounds existed for suspecting that the Reichstag was set on fire by, or on behalf of, leading personalities of the National Socialist Party’.
People whooped and cheered, threw off their hats. Tears of relief welled in my eyes as I hugged Hans. I had been more afraid than I’d known.
Back in Germany Hitler fumed. Later we listened to his address to the Reichstag on the wireless, because we wanted to see what effect the counter-trial had had on him. ‘An army of emigrants is active against Germany,’ the Leader thundered. ‘Courts are being established in full public view overseas in an attempt to influence the German justice system … revolutionary German newspapers are continually being printed and smuggled into Germany. They contain open calls to acts of violence.’ He paused, then added, ‘So-called “black radio” programs made abroad are broadcast into Germany calling for assassinations.’
We hadn’t known about the resistance radio stations, but as for the counter-trial and the newspapers, we took this as a bullseye, a sign that our work was hitting home. We were not frightened.
The Nazis still went ahead and executed poor, destitute van der Lubbe, their scapegoat for the fire. But the parliamentarian Torgler and the three Bulgarian Communists alleged to have helped him got off–it simply wasn’t possible, in the face of the global publicity our London trial had generated, to execute them all.
Afterwards, we felt as if our situation itself had changed, though no law about our status had been altered. Newspaper reports from London to Paris to New York acknowledged that our homeland had been taken over by a regime of terror. Our flight was seen as legitimate. We hoped that the restrictions on us here would soon be eased, so we could talk freely about what was happening in Germany, and maybe even work openly against the regime.
As we milled on the steps outside the court someone wanted to take a photo. We stood close together, a motley group of exiles. Dora and Toller were a step below me, to my left.
‘Good speech,’ I heard her say, looking straight ahead.
‘Thank you,’ Toller replied, as if he meant it. She looked at him.
‘No, really. All your doing,’ she smiled. And then he turned and kissed her squarely on the lips. It was the only time I ever saw anything in public between them. Somewhere, there must be a picture.
Dora went off with Toller and the other organisers to dine with the judges. Hans and I walked with Mathilde and Eugen Brehm to a pub near the law courts. We felt we could take up more room on the pavement, speak louder now. The pub was dim and smoky even at lunchtime and the tables nearly full. Hans’s friend Werner was already there, waiting for us. We ordered pints of beer and vodka shots, bowls of nuts.
Hans was regaling the table with jokes about Göring’s cocaine-fuelled dress-up games–the bearskins with medals hanging off them, his prettyboys; how the vain giant played tennis in a hairnet. Well, not jokes really, because it was all true, but we laughed and slapped the table. Werner shrieked and shook his head. As usual, ridicule made us feel safer. Hans was enjoying the lasciviousness of his tales and the attention. After a punchline he ran his hand up my thigh and squeezed the top, hard as punctuation.
I spied Helmut coming through the crowd, side-forging his way through the dim air to our table. When he reached us he stood there with his cap in both hands. He was hollow and grey-skinned again. The others stopped chuckling.
‘Seventy-two hours,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I have to report to the German embassy in seventy-two hours. Scotland Yard has given me over.’
The victory was over. I burst into tears. The others scrabbled to make room for him to sit down. Mathilde found me a clean handkerchief. Helmut perched on the bench seat as if he were about to be dragged by the elbows from here, or as if he could barely decide, in his last days of freedom, where to spend each of their minutes. His eyes had a yellow cast, he was talking so fast spittle collected at the corners of his mouth.
At the trades union conference, incensed by Lessing’s assassination and thinking himself among friends, he’d been unable to stop himself, he said. He had stood up in the plenary and announced that Nazi Germany was a threat not only to those within its borders, but those outside. ‘All I said was that the international trades union movement,’ he raised his fist as he told us, ‘must support all its members, no matter where they find themselves. That’s all.’ He stared into the middle of the table.
In the foyer of th
e conference building a Scotland Yard officer in mufti had politely introduced himself and asked to see Helmut’s identity papers and residence permit. The officer copied out his address and wished Helmut a good afternoon. Three days later his residency was cancelled. Now they were handing him back to Hitler.
We knew there was no way, without a passport, of getting Helmut out of the country. He was almost certainly being followed. Anyone who helped him would be thrown out with him. I caught Hans’s eye. They were probably here, in the pub. They would, of course, have been watching our flat.
Helmut downed two vodkas. He kept running his hands through his hair. He didn’t know which camp it would be, he told us wryly. ‘But I’m sure there’ll be plenty of comrades in there.’
I felt a swift black chasm open up right under the beer-ringed table, between those who might survive and this man who probably would not.
When Helmut got to Oranienburg they broke his nose and jaw. They had a close friend of his from the typesetters’ union do the rest. The friend cried bitterly but lashed Helmut all the same, until his skin lifted off. The last we heard of him, Helmut had cholera and was cleaning the camp latrines.
When Hans and I got home from the pub Toller’s jacket was hanging over a chair in the kitchen. Hans was pacing the room, unable to sit down.
‘Come to bed,’ I said.
He couldn’t stop moving. ‘We can’t stay here!’ he cried. His hands were stiff-fingered and open wide. ‘We’re sitting ducks up here.’ The whites of his eyes were veined. He looked like he might break something. ‘War I can do!’ he cried, steadying himself on the arm of the green couch. ‘I can do mud, dark–the blood and the fighting and the dying. But this–this invisible stuff, this waiting…’ His voice was high, he sat down heavily. ‘We are useless. Refugees are weak. And useless.’
I moved closer, then thought better of it and sat on a chair at the table. Hans was normally a benign if occasionally sardonic drunk, his face crumpling easily to laughter at his own jokes. Other times he swung between self-pity and self-hatred. But tonight was different. Fear makes a person more alone than they have ever been. Picked out by death’s steely finger, they are separated from their peers and shown their own personal end-time, the card with their number on it raised in their face.
He sprang up. ‘Our efforts are pathetic, ’ he exploded, lurching into the hall and rattling the door of the file cupboard. It was locked, as usual. ‘See? She doesn’t even trust us!’
‘Don’t.’ I went to hold him but he shook me off.
‘Or should I say me.’ His eyes were slits. ‘She doesn’t trust me. Whatever the fuck it is in here,’ he thumped the cupboard door with the side of his fist, ‘is making us targets–all of us.’ He formed a two-finger pistol and put it to my head, then back to his. ‘You, me, Dora–pfaff!–all targets.’
‘Come outside.’ I pulled his sleeve. ‘Please, you’ll wake them.’
On the balcony he stood facing out, his back to me. I took a chair. After some time the air around him changed. He came and turned my chin up to him, gently.
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ He searched my face, as if I might be hiding my fear somewhere in order to leave him the more alone.
‘I am.’ I moved my head out of his hands. I should have given him more comfort. But that is not what I did. ‘We can’t not do this,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else for us to be doing.’
He squatted in front of me with his forearms on his knees, looking down at the ground. ‘You’re so…’ His teeth were gritted and his head was shaking. I flinched. ‘…good.’ Then his knees hit the concrete and he heaved up a terrible animal noise, in uneven spasms. His face ran shiny with mucus and his eyes were small, hot holes. He let me hold him. After some minutes he drew breath enough to say something.
‘What?’ I asked. His head was in my chest.
‘I–am–no one.’
Inside he poured a whisky and then another and smoked in the kitchen. When we went to bed he calmed his breathing by force, pretended to sleep. He wouldn’t be touched. Eventually I slept before he did, the brittle, lonely sleep of half a bed.
TOLLER
I wasn’t sure how much the Scotland Yard boy was there to protect me and how much to report back on my ‘political’ activities. One day I doubled back quickly and grabbed his elbow in the street. He had blue eyes and black lashes and looked terrified–less of me, I think, than that he would be found not to be doing his job properly. ‘You should look out for the German team,’ I said, ‘they’ve been on my tail for weeks.’ He just blinked.
‘You know,’ I added, ‘if you pooled resources you could probably have every second day off.’ He didn’t even break a smile.
On the morning I went to address the counter-trial I tipped my hat to him. Then I left him outside the court building, milling with refugees and reporters. And no doubt others, uniformed and not, German and English, who were keeping an eye on us all.
The counter-trial was a triumph. I hadn’t actually been in Berlin when the Reichstag burnt, but Dora had told me all she knew, and I would, of course, lend myself to her efforts wherever I could. My performance seems ridiculous to me now, because she had been arrested in my stead. If she was a backroom girl, what does that make me–her frontman?
Afterwards the maître d’ at Claridge’s recognised me and gave us my favourite table. We dined like kings: foie gras and beef and French wine and cigars. At the end of dinner, a refugee I didn’t know approached our table and bent to Dora’s ear. All joy drained from her face, like a light going out. Scotland Yard was expelling one of the Socialist Workers Party members here, on account of his political activity. Dora wanted to go home immediately.
The double bed at the flat took up most of her room, there was nowhere else to sit or stand. Papers were stacked along the wall under the window, and to the side of the door, in what she referred to, ironically, as her ‘filing system’. She often worked on the bed.
Dora sat on the edge of the bed and faced the windows, picking at her fingers in a fury. She’d warned Helmut to be careful, she said. But she seemed more angry with herself than anyone else, as if by some act of impossible intelligence and foresight she might have prevented what happened. I stood at the window. It was dark and raining. A sorry-looking fellow I hadn’t seen before was walking from one end of the block opposite to the other, his coat collar up under his hat.
‘My Scotland Yard shadow forgot his umbrella today,’ I said.
‘That’s just it,’ she cried, flinging a hand towards the window. ‘They don’t even need to send the Gestapo here. Whitehall is doing Hitler’s work for him.’
Hers was the kind of anger close to tears. I wasn’t sure what to do. Sometimes I was in awe around her, like a child tiptoeing their way around the mood of a parent. I moved a manila folder off the bed and sat down. To touch, or not. In the end we chose touch, found comfort in these minutes, this threadbare flesh.
I lay with my head on the pillow while she sat up and smoked. The ceiling of the little room was crazed and uneven as a living thing, the palm of a pale hand hovering over us. I turned on my side. Small notes were pinned on the wall next to the bed–reminders to herself, lists, quotes, a photograph of her father on skis.
I recognised part of a speech we’d written together and slipped it from under its thumbtack.
‘“Fear is the psychological foundation of dictatorship,”’ I read out. ‘“The dictator knows only that the man who has overcome fear lives beyond his power and is his sole dangerous enemy. For whoever has conquered fear has conquered death.”’ I looked back at the ceiling. ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘If I say so myself.’
Dora blew a smoke ring. ‘I don’t see much conquering of fear going on around here,’ she said. ‘Nor of death, for that matter.’ She was sitting against the headboard with an arm across her belly and her other elbow resting on its wrist. A small mole sat just above her nipple, a perfect black dot. She looked down at me. ‘To be honest, I never rea
lly understood that one.’ The hardness was gone from her voice.
Dora thought I sometimes got carried away by my own rhetoric, the sound of the words generating more of themselves with no effort of mind behind them, like the parthenogenesis of self-reproducing creatures, their rousing, hortatory qualities overcoming any parsable sense. It was her job to rein me in. This hadn’t been one of those times.
I turned on one hip, my chin in my palm. Her eyes were black, watchful. ‘I don’t mean we can conquer death in any literal way,’ I said. ‘What I mean is that if we are not afraid to die, Hitler cannot hold us to ransom. He cannot bribe us with our lives to make us stop.’
She nodded. Then she stubbed out the cigarette in the jam-jar lid she used as an ashtray and slipped down the covers to face me. Put a hand to the side of my head. ‘You aren’t afraid to die?’ She was looking at me, from one eye into the other.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said, ‘but I am not afraid.’ We heard the front door open and close, Hans’s and Ruth’s voices in the flat. Her chapped lips parted to speak. I put two fingers to her mouth. ‘Sometimes, though, it is hard not to want it.’
She didn’t get up and exhort me to action, to proof corrections, to just one more practical thing. She didn’t fill the awkward air with words for false comfort. That was her courage: to see what was there. And that was when I knew she understood the black times. I took my fingers from her mouth and the words tumbled out.
‘Don’t leave me,’ she said.
After that it was tender again, love for love’s sake. When we finished we heard a man’s sobs, wretched and unpredictable, coming from the kitchen.
RUTH
I woke first. I could tell by the light in the room it would be a good day for the docks. Then the night–Helmut–came back to me like a blow. I didn’t move, waiting for Hans to stir. I hoped sleep had solved something, that the darkness had closed over his terrors. But when he sat up on the bed away from me, the weight of it was still there in his shoulders.