A Stranger in My Own Country

  Life goes on, his time is taken up with piano lessons, teaching simple songs, going through easy dance steps. The children are his delight – the invincible life force, the power and the glory, the pure light of the stars, fetched down from the heavens to this defiled earth! Being around them, you can almost forget about the increasingly ugly world we live in. And then there is the love of a good woman, love and comradeship, yes, comrade, we live from hand to mouth, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. In this Third Reich of ours nobody’s life is safe any more. But we are still alive! So let us go forward together, towards the sun that will surely rise again one day!

  And then one day he was arrested without warning; his former comrade had indeed been caught, and now the wretched man had named no fewer than thirty-five people, men, women and girls, with whom he was allegedly in contact. One of them was Sas – and this was his revenge on the former party comrade who had abandoned the fight! His lady friend, who wasn’t living with him, heard about the arrest immediately; she still had time to search her friend’s apartment for anything incriminating before the Gestapo got there. She found nothing, he had always been so careful, living only for his music. She didn’t think of looking in the attic: she knew nothing about the suitcase. (How she tormented herself later with terrible, agonizing self-reproaches!) The suitcase was discovered, inside was a portable printing press, which had been used to produce Communist pamphlets. A few printed copies were also in the case. But even now all was not lost, the evidence against him was not that damning – despite having been denounced by his former party comrade. As the Gestapo men who searched the house themselves noted, the case was covered with the dust of many years, and the oil in the mechanism had gone thick, meaning it had not been used for a very long time. Sas’s explanation had the ring of truth about it: the examining magistrate refused to issue an arrest warrant, and Sas was released from jail. So all was well? All was not well! It was very far indeed from being well. Because of course we now have two governments in Germany, two top-to-bottom systems co-existing side by side: the state, and the Party. Sas was released by the judicial authority of the Reich, but at the gates of the police headquarters he was arrested by Himmler’s hellhounds. He was taken back to the same cell where he had just been held as a prisoner of the judiciary, but now he was a prisoner of the SS, removed from the jurisdiction of any judge, deprived of all rights, abandoned to a completely uncertain fate. But the officials who interrogated him had words of consolation for his lady friend: a couple of years in a concentration camp, perhaps – how bad is that? In today’s Germany, where tens of thousands are living in the camps? The main thing is not to lose heart, because he hasn’t really done anything! Or nothing much at least, nothing that can’t be put right with a couple of years of concentration camp! Of course, he should have reported the meeting with his old Communist acquaintance immediately to the Gestapo, and he should have handed the suitcase in rather than storing it up in the attic! But a couple of years in a concentration camp would soon put that right; it was a criminal act, of course, but even in the German Reich it was not considered any more serious than that! Sometimes she was allowed to visit her friend for a few minutes. She saw him behind bars, hollow-eyed, unshaven, his blue prison uniform hanging off him. They were allowed to exchange a few inconsequential words, but every time she went home feeling strengthened again: his spirit was unbroken, the old love was stronger than ever, she had now become the purpose and object of his life, all his thoughts revolved around his lady friend. She was not permitted to do anything for him, the food in the prison was terrible and completely inadequate, but she was not permitted to bring him anything to eat. Or do anything else that could have made his life easier. Except for one thing: she was allowed to wash his underwear, in the interests not of the prisoner but of the prison authorities, who saved on soap, linen and work.

  And then she was not allowed to visit him for long weeks on end; she learned that an epidemic of typhus had swept through the prison, carrying off victims in their hundreds. All the better – it saved a lot of work, a process leading quickly to death, all the better! And in this time of fear and trembling, of deep faith and fondest love, she got a phone call from a completely unknown lawyer: could she come and see him at once, it’s about her friend!

  She hurried to the lawyer’s office, from the sign on the door she saw that the lawyer belonged to the National Socialist ‘League of Guardians of the Law’, and the man standing before her a few minutes later was wearing a Party membership badge. The lawyer informed her in a few brief words that her friend could be released the following Friday if she paid him 5000 marks within 48 hours. She was not allowed to ask any questions. With that she was dismissed and out on the street again, her heart pounding with emotion. She did not trouble herself about the morality of such an arrangement. She had after all been living in the German Reich for many years now, and she had heard too much and seen too much to be surprised or outraged by any dirty dealings. But what was she to do now, from a purely practical point of view? What was she to do? She earned a living by giving lessons, she was not wealthy, and she could never hope to scrape together 5000 marks from her own resources. But she had friends, and Sas had friends; it was possible to come up with that sum of money. But should she do it? Wouldn’t they just take her money and keep him in prison anyway? How could she place any trust in the honesty of a lawyer who made such a proposal? What was she to do? Would she not blame herself bitterly one day if she did not hand over the money, and her friend remained in prison for years on end? Would she not always be saying to herself: perhaps they would have let him out? And that ‘perhaps’ decided her. She approached us too, and I must confess that I was hardnosed enough to say ‘No’. I didn’t want to give my money to these criminals. I was convinced that it was all lies, a con trick designed to take advantage of a woman in distress. She managed to get the money together without me, and took it to the lawyer’s office. The Friday came, by early morning she was already waiting outside the gates of the building on Alexanderplatz, doubt giving way to despair and then again to hope, a crazy little spark of hope in her heart that the enemy might, just this once, do the decent thing. And the gate opened and her friend came out. Her joy knew no bounds, she was ready to bless her enemies. She spent just one day with him in Berlin, so that he could freshen himself up a bit, and then she travelled with him to his little home village in the Sudetenland, to stay with his baker relatives, where the half-starved man could feed himself up again. But when they arrived in the village Sas was re-arrested by the SS. They were men of honour: for 5000 marks they had kept their word. He had been released on the Friday – for how long, that was never said. She never saw him again. He was taken straight back to Berlin, in a cramped prison van, and then shipped on to the Oranienburg concentration camp. There he was put to work. Month after month he worked as a bricklayer, his musician’s hands were ruined for good. But she was allowed to write to him once a month, and from time to time she was allowed to send him a food parcel, saved from her own meagre rations. But at least she was allowed to hope . . . The day must come . . . And then she heard that he was back in Berlin. He had been removed from the custody of the SS and was now to stand trial in a court of law, despite the fact that the examining magistrate had previously refused to issue a warrant for his arrest. Now he was to appear before the notorious ‘People’s Court’. The Communist whom Sas had met in the street that time was being put on trial, along with 35 co-defendants, including Sas. The defence lawyer was expecting a relatively short prison sentence. So her hopes rose again. This was better than the concentration camp; here he would be sentenced for a specific period of time, which would come to an end, whereas the concentration camp was indeterminate, open-ended; it could be a life sentence, or he could be let out after three months – the worst part was the agonizing uncertainty! No, the People’s Court was better. And it really was very good, this instrument of Himmler’s functioned beautifully, and all the accused were sentenced
to death! In the name of the German people! Found guilty of carrying a suitcase and keeping it in his house . . . sentenced to death by hanging . . . in the name of the German people! So not over yet? Not yet finished, this litany of torment and suffering, this everyday story of German life during the glorious days of the Third Reich, under the aegis of our beloved Führer, who is so fond of children, and so sensitive that he has passed a law for the protection of animals containing dozens of provisions for the humane slaughter of animals, but who in the process has quite forgotten to observe just a smidgen of humanity when it comes to slaughtering human beings? No, not over yet – not by a long chalk! In the ‘Plötze’, the prison by the Plötzensee lake, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, who have been sentenced to death, and who are now privileged to await their death. Sometimes the jangle of keys is heard at a certain hour in the morning, and then all the prisoners in their cells know that one more of their number is being led to the hangman – and to freedom. But there are many days when the jangle of keys is not heard. There’s no hurry, for these men sentenced to die; they should be pleased that they have been granted another day, another week, even another month, and then another after that. Meanwhile their relatives are running back and forth with petitions and appeals, demeaning themselves before Party bigwigs, having abuse heaped upon them because only persons of degenerate character could possibly care about the fate of a convicted traitor. They run back and forth, they plead and implore, and yet in their heart of hearts they know that these Party high-ups do not hear them, do not want to hear them, that every last spark of humanity died in them a long time ago: and yet they dare not cease from running and pleading! Perhaps there is still a chance . . .! There must be a reason, after all, why the death sentence has not been carried out yet? Surely they will pardon him, even if it is commuted to life imprisonment! Better that than death! And sure enough, a doctor discovers that Sas suffered a head wound in the First World War. It must have caused him problems ever since, he must have been mad when he took the suitcase and kept it in his house – they can’t hang him, they’ll have to put him in a mental asylum! Cue more petitions, more running around, more begging and pleading!

  And then the deed is done – and one last letter from him is all she gets. Her heart is filled with a solemn stillness. So peace comes to her at last, as it has come to him. Here is the letter that he wrote, in the fourth year of the war, under threat of death, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. It reads as follows:106 . . . But that’s not all. This is just one of the few, there are others whose stories I could tell. We have witnessed all this, been through it all together, and we have had to fear every hour for the lives of our loved ones and our own lives – for eleven long years now. Eleven years without respite or peace! And meanwhile these fools are sitting comfortably abroad,107 not in any kind of danger, denouncing us as opportunists, as Nazi hirelings – blaming us for being weak, for doing nothing, for failing to resist! But we have stuck it out, and they have not; we have lived with fear every single day, and they have not; we have done our work, tilled our acre of land, brought up our children, our lives constantly under threat, and we have spoken a word here, a word there, giving each other strength and support, we have endured, even though we were often afraid – and they have not!

  And something else. Here is a man whom everyone has heard of, the illustrator E.O. Plauen,108 real name Ohser, who came from the Saxon town of Plauen, renowned for its many weaving looms. He was a man like a child, an elephant who could walk a tightrope, who was perhaps best known for his savage cartoons in the weekly Das Reich, but who remains unforgettable for children and parents alike for his ‘Father and Son’ comic strip stories. Here we see the man himself, big and heavily built, but with such a wonderfully childlike laugh, and his son, his only son, a wily, weasel-faced creature full of laughter. (When writing about Plauen one is constantly using the word ‘laughter’; laughter was his natural element, laughter was as natural to him as breathing, and I don’t believe there was a single day in his life when he didn’t laugh.) A wonderful man, because he was like a child, still holding on to the paradise world of childhood. I got to know him relatively late. My publisher wanted to put a cartoon of me on the cover of my book of memoirs, Our Home Today, and Plauen was given the commission. I went to see him in his studio on Budapesterstrasse, with a clear view over the trees in the Zoological Gardens. We hit it off immediately. He was a wonderful host, fetched water straightaway and brewed up a splendid pot of real coffee – in the middle of the war, when coffee beans were like gold dust. He quickly discovered my fondness for strong liquor, and conjured up a little bottle of vodka, just enough to make me animated, but not so much that I became tipsy. He had amazingly good cigarettes. We chatted away, we were immediately of one mind. In those days you could soon sniff out a kindred spirit, and with Plauen you just knew that this man was no informer, that he was completely genuine. I asked him how he, hating the Nazis as much as I did, and with the same absolute conviction that this war could never be won by them, because at the end of the day evil cannot prevail, how he could bring himself to draw political cartoons every week for the magazine put out by Dr Goebbels.109 He smiled, and told me: ‘But they are our enemies, when all is said and done, your Churchills and your Roosevelts and your Stalins – and there’s no shame in fighting your enemies. I’m only doing to them what they do to us. But one thing I won’t do: I will never draw an anti-Semitic cartoon, and I’m not going to play that filthy game.’ One day, however, his wife told me the deeper reason behind his drawing, why he felt compelled to draw and to keep on drawing. It was during the time of the worst air raids on Berlin, when the Americans were stepping up their campaign of carpet bombing. Mrs Plauen said: ‘When Berlin has been reduced to rubble he’ll be sitting on the ruins and drawing, the last survivor – because drawing is what he has to do!’ That ‘has to’ is the key here – he could not do otherwise: Das Reich gave him an opportunity, and he took it.

  I duly admired the collection of kitsch items in his studio, which was a constant delight to him: wonderful postcards of lovers kissing, harmless images that you had to hold up to the light to discover the naughty bits, a seashell with silver-limbed nymphs painted on its mother-ofpearl lining – all the delights of bourgeois desires unchained. Such things gave him much pleasure, and made him roar with laughter. Later on I was able to send him another item for his collection from Paris, which I acquired one night in the Metro, a big-bosomed lady dressed in green with long, brown stockings; it was almost as if you caught a glimpse of the mysterious darkness into which these brown stockings disappeared . . .

  All that’s left today is a scene of devastation, the house in Budapesterstrasse has been reduced to a pile of rubble, and Plauen’s little collection of saucy kitsch is lost and gone forever. Also lost are the sketchbooks, endless numbers of them, which this tireless worker filled with . . . female nudes. His political cartoons did not demand a lot of effort. He churned them out with efficient regularity, like doing school homework. He didn’t fret or worry about inspiration beforehand. One day he would browse through the newspapers, looking for ideas, and the next day he would draw the cartoons, usually five or six at a time, sometimes even seven. You really needed to see the originals, carefully drawn with a pen, often on a colour wash background – the newsprint reproduction gives only a feeble impression of the real thing. But it was just a sideline for him. His real interest lay in his female nudes. He dragged women and girls in off the street, plucked them from cafés and parties, and drew them in all manner of poses and contortions. ‘I never tire’, he said, ‘of looking at the female body and drawing it.’ He wasn’t interested in beauty, only in truth. He went into minute detail, and many of his nudes are verging on the disgusting, while others, with the soft curves of their seated bottoms, are ravishingly beautiful. What fluidity of form in repose! How one thing flowed into another in a seamless transition, a cosmos within the cosmos! But he was always the cartoonist, even when drawing his n
udes. He would put the head of a resentful, envious old maid on a magnificent body. He would draw a naked woman down on all fours like an animal, the ends of her shrivelled and impossibly elongated tits scraping the floor! He had drawn a Leda whose swan had his head emerging from her mouth, cackling in agitation! In short, he was an impossible person, as impossible as every unspoilt artist, living life to the full, bursting with vitality. In addition he was virtually deaf. You had to speak quite loudly to make yourself understood, and he often spoke very loudly himself: like many deaf people, he had no sense of the volume at which he spoke. Which was not without its dangers, given the things we talked about. It would not have done to have a spy lurking behind the door. Plauen was full of jokes and witticisms about the Nazi regime, his own and other people’s. He tossed them out as they occurred to him, as carefree as you like, and nobody enjoyed his jokes more than he did. He laughed like a drain. And then thought of another one. He bustled around his studio, this elephant of a man was like a cat in his movements, soft-footed and watchful. In fact, for all his merry laughter there was something quiet and melancholy about him, a sense of deep-seated sorrow – only fools could be blithely cheerful in these times, everyone else felt a deep undercurrent of sorrow in their hearts.