The Wooden Shepherdess

  This played straight into Hitler’s hands. But it might play even more into Strasser’s: so Hitler that autumn appointed Göbbels as Gauleiter in Berlin: chiefly to keep an eye on those former Messiahs of his, the radical Strasser brothers. In short, he had to be ready at all times to contradict the official “Voice in the North of the One Indivisible Nazi Party.”

  Lothar was lucky: he somehow contrived to hold on to his City Hall job, and meanwhile was secretly working heart-and-soul for the Cause.

  When he moved to Kammstadt that summer he’d happened to find himself a room in the house where little Ernst Krebelmann’s school-teacher, Lehrer Faber, already lodged on the floor above. At first they had known each other only as fellow-lodgers, bowing stiffly without a word whenever they met on the stairs. But one day Lothar had happened to open his door just as the Lehrer passed on the tiny landing outside, those two square yards of shining parquet floor with their rubber-plant and their smell of furniture-polish; and Lothar would never forget that momentous sight, for the day had been hot enough for the Lehrer to carry his jacket over his arm which allowed a glimpse of the swastika badge that was normally hidden behind his lapel.

  This had given the young man courage to speak. As yet he himself had never officially joined the Party: indeed the only signed-up Party Member in Kammstadt then at all was the lonely Lehrer, who had to keep mighty quiet about it if only because of his job; but the latter had welcomed Lothar with open arms as a veteran of the Putsch. He took him up to his attic room with its piles of books and aroma of stale cigars (the underpaid Lehrer smoked one each Sunday, and had to live on its smell for the rest of the week).

  After some brotherly talk the Lehrer had looked for something to lend him to read. Luckner’s See-Teufel, or Junger’s In Stahlgewittern perhaps? But Lothar had read them both. Or something by Heer, or Naso, or Brehm, or Geissler? Finally Lothar had carried away both volumes of Houston Chamberlain’s Grundlagen, once he had learned that before he died last winter the septuagenarian sage had said of Hitler that “here was a man to be followed blindfold.”

  Lehrer Faber and Lothar were pioneers: there was still a long row to hoe, but during the next three years the Nazis began to gain a tiny footing even in ultra-conservative Kammstadt. There the only “Marxists” one had to fear were the highly respectable Social-Democrat councilors ruling the City Hall (for Kammstadt’s working class was a trifle larger than Ludo supposed), the only Jews were Ludo’s friends whose father was tied by the leg to the private bank he owned. Most of their first recruits had joined them simply because they liked and respected the Lehrer—anything he could belong to must be all right. These formed the as-it-were intellectual wing of the local Nazi cell, still meeting in secret and mostly discussing philosophy half through the night. But Lothar himself deserved the credit for bringing in a much more forceful recruit: one Ludwig Kettner, a bankrupt builders’ merchant nagged by a tireless energy.

  No one could ever call Kettner an intellectual! During the War he had won an Iron Cross for valor, losing an eye at Verdun. After the War was over, starting from scratch as a scrap-merchant mainly dealing in surplus government stores, he had seized the chance of the building boom to launch out on building materials proper. Kettner had seemed to be one of Kammstadt’s coming men when suddenly everyone ceased to build. Lothar had dealt with the man at the City Hall during his prosperous days: he had liked him then, and now he was on the rocks Lothar had been one of the few to befriend him still.

  By temperament more of the condottiere type, Kettner soon tired of endless midnight discussions. He wanted action.... It shows how behind the times little Kammstadt was, that is wasn’t till 1928 that Kettner had even begun recruiting an embryo S.A. squad among Kammstadt’s “veteran” organizations.

  14

  “America’s final bell....”

  That tocsin tolled on October the 29th, 1929: the climactic day of the Great American Stockmarket Crash was the day little Gillie Wadamy reached the momentous age of three (though he wasn’t allowed any cake because of a stomach-upset).

  Wall Street prices had started to fall a fortnight before, shaking out early the smallest fry—such as Anne-Marie Woodcock’s numerous Beaux (for Ree was now seventeen, and a budding beauty “with plenty of Beaux to her string and Boy does she string ’em!” was how Russell put it). But now “all her Beaux come undone,” all their chickenfeed winnings were gone; and by close of play on Tuesday the 29th, her father was broke as well.

  Bramber had thrown up his job to give his whole time to the Market, and only a fortnight before had been worth (on paper) a cool quarter-million dollars. Misled by occasional ups in the midst of the downs even after the selling began he had gone on buying, hoping to make this a half. So now he was back behind even his starting-point; for now their precious New Blandford farm would have to be sold and the proceeds go to his brokers. All-Hallow-e’en was a properly haunted affair for the Woodcocks this year, with hardly a cent in the house or a steak in the ice-box.

  Bramber could hardly expect his job back—not in a city chockfull of these Bramber Woodcocks. Earl (you remember the ocarina-player?) and Baba and even Junior were still in school: the only possible bread-winner seemed to be Ree, who could surely get some sort of personality-job even in times like these.... But the prospect held little attraction for Anne-Marie: instead she wrote to the grandmother down in Lafayette (La.) whose name she bore, sold her furs for the fare and left for the Deepest South by rail alone in a day-car.

  She promised—and meant it—to send them what help she could, if and when she could. But Grandmother Voisin had never approved of the Woodcock match, and her generosity seemed to depend on the prior claims of sundry young painters and sculptors from New Orleans. All the same, Ree expressed no intention of coming home: the young painters and sculptors were plenty fun, the countryside pleasant down there round Acadian Lafayette on Vermilion Bayou, the weather quite warm enough without any furs....

  So that was that: Junior and Earl would have to do newspaper rounds before school, and their mother must take in piece-work for garment makers.

  The height of the Crash saw perfectly sound securities finding no bidder at any price; but roughly-speaking overall prices dwindled no more than an average third from their previous peaks, and merely fell back to a rational level. This was cold comfort however to dealers in “margins”; and victims like Bramber regarded this third not as fairy gold (which had never existed except in accountants’ brains) but as genuine wealth being swallowed down by an opening earth like it swallowed those men in the Bible.

  He perked up a little when President Hoover pronounced the economy rock-bottom sound even so, and immune to whatever “healthy” and “realistic” adjustments took place in Stock Exchange ratings. But Russell was less optimistic. He stressed the economy’s new and now almost total dependence on Hire Purchase systems in retail trade: for that too (said Russ) was dependence on fairy gold. Germany’s fighting the War on the never-never had landed her later in terrible woes, so how (asked Russ) could America hope to escape them when doing the same thing in times of peace? Countless insolvent investors must fail to meet their installments on goods they had “bought,” so that half-used automobiles and washing-machines would be dumped back on dealers who thought they’d got rid of them. New production would have to slow down—and men be laid off; and with highly-paid wage-earners losing their jobs a second wave of installments must fail to be met, more goods be returned, more men be laid off....

  Bramber was quick to point out it was pretty good nerve for a sassy young Jeremiah to contradict the accredited seers. But the factory chimneys did cease to smoke; and (as Russell was brash enough to remark) things had advanced quite a bit in the business world since the bad old days when the overriding charge on a bankrupt plantation was feeding its slaves till sold. Slaves couldn’t simply be fired and left to fend for themselves, as nowadays free labor could be—and was.

  *

  If Peace is indivisible, so
is Prosperity: slow economic paralysis gripped not only the U.S.A. in 1929 but the whole of the trading world. Germany’s industries lost with their export markets the foreign exchange they needed to service their foreign loans, plunging the country’s unstable finances even more deeply into the soup.

  Hitherto, merely a million Germans had been without jobs; but Hitler was able to rub his hands as the figures mounted by leaps and bounds. By the autumn of 1930, in less than a year they had topped the three-million mark—three million hungry and desperate men, on a wholly inadequate dole for the first few months and afterwards Parish Relief.... He had merely to bide his time. By giving Strasser his head with the poor and the workless, while still refusing to rubber-stamp Strasser’s Bolshy ideas himself, he ensured the panicky middle-classes would vote for his protection against those selfsame menacing hordes who voted for Strasser—securing the Party a double harvest of votes. And indeed when polling-day came the Nazis netted more than a hundred seats in place of their previous measly gadfly dozen: the Nazis were right on the map at last—and Lepowski was eating his hat....

  “He has only to bide his time,” said Reinhold the Hitler-watcher. “A couple of years may well see unemployment double again—and likewise those hundred-odd Nazi seats. There are times when sudden and violent action is needed to change the course of events, times to simply sit still and be carried along by the tide—and Hitler always knows which. Those constant complaints of his “indecision” are simply a failure to grasp that what you do often matters so very much less than when.”

  15

  Homeless unemployed men were housed in makeshift barracks: mostly in Great War left-overs, derelict army camps like the one still only half-dismantled when Kammstadt’s Playing-Fields Scheme was shelved. Its menacing presence, a bare half-mile from the city walls and crammed with soup-kitchen scarecrows from miles around (for it served three neighboring counties), scared the pants off Kammstadt’s respectable burghers.

  And yet the Depression had scarcely touched Kammstadt itself at all. The City had less than two hundred unemployed of its own on the books at a City Hall with Flemish gables and outdoor frescoes of lords and ladies; and most of these paupers were well out of sight in a suburb down by the railway-tracks where nobody went on his Sunday walk. Merchants might do a shade less business, banks be chary of overdrafts, shoemakers find themselves using more sole-leather now for repairs than uppers-leather for new, cabinet-makers have time for occasional glasses of beer: that sort of thing—but that sort of thing was all. And yet there was fear in the air: fear of the outside world, fear of what “they” were doing “out there.” They discussed it whenever Kammstadters met in their clubs—in their Shooting Clubs, their Veterans’ Clubs, their Singing or Gardeners’ Clubs, their Patriotic Clubs (there were almost more clubs in Kammstadt than Kammstadters). What “they” were up to “out there” was the topic at every Stammtisch; and nobody knew the answer, that was the trouble.

  Meanwhile the Nazi Cell in Kammstadt was growing: they hadn’t yet reached double figures, but made up in energy what they still lacked in numbers. The principal hurdle they had to face was the common talk of Storm Troop excesses elsewhere: for they themselves behaved well enough, apart from occasional quarrels with “Marxist” Reichsbanner men only used hitherto to getting their eyes blacked by Communists. Mean-while they laid on “mammoth” public meetings in halls small enough to make them look crowded—meetings which everyone heard of, even if very few went. They staged patriotic plays, and concerts: they sang patriotic songs, and on Public Holidays Kettner paraded and marched (rather stage-army marches perhaps, importing the same Storm Troopers to march who had yesterday marched in one neighboring town and were due to march in another tomorrow). Kettner was now the Deputy Storm Troop Leader for Kammstadt County; and likely to rise even higher the more the County Leader himself succumbed to the bottle.

  Patriotism was a keynote stirring answering chords in every Kammstadter breast. Herr Krebelmann’s clients were most of them ultra-conservative “Blacks” who despised the hooligan Nazis, and Krebelmann counted as “Black” himself; but even so he could not fail to observe that these Lothars (and Fritzes and Heinzes) were young and starry-eyed, a phalanx of youth dedicated to sweeping away the Augean mess which the old men had made. For if no one else knew what “they” were up to “out there” these Nazis were certain they knew, and were ready to pay their pennies and lay down their lives to stop it....

  Still, when Ernst decided to join the Hitler Youth he deemed it wiser to keep this dark from his father as long as he could.

  Ernst was an overgrown, rather flabby thirteen in that winter of 1929: too young to join by the rules, but Ernst was his father’s son and in Kammstadt the “Deutsches Jungfolk”—the proper organization for kids—still didn’t exist. So they sent him to be enrolled at Party Headquarters (a roll-top desk in the back of a saddler’s shop, where his first Heil Hitler salute brought down a whole shelf of neat’s-foot oil). He hadn’t the foggiest notion of politics: all he desired was the heady coagulation of boy with boy which his grammar school failed to provide: the worthwhile boy-scout games, and the summer camping—but most of all, that “belonging” feeling.

  Weekly meetings were held in a country inn. No one except the Gefolgschaftführer—a humorless eighteen-year-old—wore uniform: all that the other boys wore “on duty” were badges and swastika armbands. Ernst was so much the youngest he tended at first to be somewhat despised by these working-class fifteen-to eighteen-year-olds; and his first night began with a lecture on street-fighting tactics where Ernst was utterly out of his depth (except for the little boys’ job of standing on roof-tops and dropping flowerpots). After the lecture, however, a sing-song began, and Ernst’s accordion-playing won him a bit more respect.

  Almost everything done indoors with the other boys that winter was fun; but the long formation-marches through snow and slush had even the hardiest beefing—in spite of their Leader telling them all how lucky they were to be out in the open where “men” belonged, instead of crouching over a stove like pot-bellied bourgeois. Then came the summer months, with nothing to beef about excepting the heat of the sun; and as soon as electioneering began for the autumn elections the group had plenty to do delivering hand-bills, shaking collecting-boxes, and secretly daubing slogans and swastika signs on walls. This last was what proved Ernst’s undoing, for Father caught him paint-pot in hand and had the whole story out of him. Father’s reaction at first seemed mild, merely deploring the waste of time which he ought to give to his homework; but then, as if as an afterthought, Father added he’d flog the skin off his back unless he resigned (it wasn’t till two years later that Father himself saw the light, and encouraged him to rejoin).

  Meanwhile his elders were busy electioneering too. Nazis and Stahlhelm and Reichsbanner marched and counter-marched on each others’ routes, each Laocoon-band wreathed in its boa-constricting brass and attempting to deafen the rival band with its thundering drums and its stertorous trombone work. Noses were bloodied and eyes were blacked, beer-mugs were broken, scandalous broad-sheets appeared and libel-actions were filed, “mammoth” meetings became a daily occurrence—meetings where nobody heckled twice, for Kettner’s men saw to that. The Nazi climax came with a mammoth meeting indeed, for which they had taken the Circus Hall where the human odor of sweating crowds mixed well with the lingering angry and terrorized smell of performing beasts; and the principal speaker was billed as a leading Nazi Reichstag Deputy—Hermann Göring.

  Lothar was torn in two whether or not to be there. In his adolescence, the brave young Hermann Göring—that “Nonpareil among Birdmen”—had been his hero: he longed to see him again and perhaps even shake his hand, yet he feared to be disillusioned.

  Göring had reappeared in Berlin three years ago, but less of the dashing birdman now than the canny commercial gent grown sybaritishly paunchy, dealing in aircraft equipment and spares on behalf of a Swedish firm. Hitler at first would have nothing to do with
him. Party Funds, however, were short at the time; and Göring had plutocratic and aristocratic and even royal contacts which Hitler hankered after—if only to counterbalance Strasser’s pull with the Plebs; and once he’d a foot in the door Göring would not be denied—for he hadn’t become a traveling salesman for nothing.

  A Reichstag Deputy’s income and perquisites suited his fading-film-star’s tastes much better than chancy commissions on parachute sales. He had even paraded the scars he got in the Munich Putsch to blackmail his way to a place high up in the Nazi candidates-list.

  16

  The elections of 1928 had seen Göring take his seat as one of those “Gadfly Twelve.” But return to a niche in the Nazi inner circle would not be so easy to bring about: by now it was jealously closed, and Göring could hardly expect to see a Göbbels (so newly installed himself) willingly making room for a newcomer.

  Even after those 1930 elections were finished and Hitler decided to change the S.A. Command, Göring—although in earlier days the Storm Troops had been his creation—was never even considered. Instead a letter went off to South America, summoning home his former supplanter Röhm; and home Röhm forgivingly came to be reinstated, notwithstanding that five years ago Hitler had flung him out on his ear. Thus Röhm at a single stroke was back at Hitler’s right hand, making secret high-level contacts on Hitler’s behalf in Berlin and soon to be back in command of his faithful S.A. But Göring would have to wait quite a while for the smallest chance himself of returning to Hitler’s personal favor.

  For one thing, Göring’s Reichstag duties kept him more or less tied to the City; but Hitler himself was spending as little time as he could in Berlin, where he knew that nobody liked him much: it was better to keep out of sight—and anyway, Hitler adored the Bavarian Alps. For a while he passed whole seasons in various mountain inns, biding his time (as aforesaid) and writing the second part of Mein Kampf. But at length he acquired a modest mountain retreat of his own above Berchtesgaden; and then the obvious thing had been to send for the Raubals to housekeep for him, that indigent sister and niece of Adolf’s whom Putzi had taken such pains to run to earth in Vienna.