An Infinity of Mirrors

  “They are paid to say that?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the people who pay them know that Germans will vote their way because the men say such things?”

  He stared at her with uncertainty while the crowds churned around them on the platform. “I don’t understand it,” he said haltingly. “It has something to do with all the unemployment and the fear. I mean to say, really, Paule, it isn’t normal.”

  She was white with astonishment; her first thought was of her father, who had said that it was the Jews who had saved and made and sustained the renaissance of art and letters in Europe after the long dark ages. Jews were her father and Maître Gitlin, Sarah Bernhardt, Proust and Henri Bergson. As soon as she was alone she must find out about these grotesque election slogans which the slack-mouthed young men had sung so happily for tiny amounts of money. Her hands clung to each other so that they would not shake. Veelee had been talking to her, perhaps explaining, but she had not heard him clearly. Now something caught his eye in the crowd. He waved and bellowed, “Gretel!” then cried out with delight as though the impossible had happened, “My sisters are here!”

  Maître Gitlin got off the train slowly and finished directing the porters about their baggage. “Are you all right, Paule?” he asked. “You are very pale.”

  “It’s just the excitement,” she said.

  A tall, gray-eyed, handsome woman came whinnying and charging through the crowd and took Paule in her arms and covered her with kisses. “Oh! You are beautiful!” the woman said. “He never said how beautiful you are.”

  “Paule, this is my sister Gretel,” but before Paule could respond another sister was upon her, squealing with pleasure. Gisele was tiny. She had dark red hair, smoked cigars after dinner, was passionately committed to Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Shaw—in that order—and had won prizes for her roses. Gretel was tall and slender, four years older than Veelee and two years older than Gisele. She was as blond as Veelee, had his wonderful smile, knew everything that had happened that morning in the German Army as well as all of its regulations, codes, manuals, and shibboleths, never read books, and did thirty-five minutes of calisthenics each morning and evening.

  Veelee introduced Gretel’s husband. He wore the uniform of a full general, had gray moustaches with soaring ends, a monocle, very naughty light-blue eyes, and a laugh like a lumber saw. Then Gisele pulled her husband into view. He was an important figure at the Foreign Office; thin, wore a pince-nez, a magnificent cravat and flashing stickpin, tons of cologne, and an English-cut suit and bowler. Then Paule introduced Maître Gitlin to everyone while Gretel told them she had secured the most wonderful apartment for them in Charlottenburg.

  It was a sunny, six-room flat, with high ceilings, on the second floor of a four-story building facing the Friedrich Karl Platz across the Spandauerstrasse from the Schlossgarten. Gretel lived two streets away; Gisele was on the same street, two doors down. Biedermeier abounded in the apartment: chairs and tables with curved underframes and legs, high-backed chairs with smooth wooden plats, gilded swans, cornucopias, griffins, and foliage carved out of birch, pear wood, and grained ash. The rolled horsehair upholstery under flowered calico made Paule happy; her new world also had old-fashioned reassuring comforts. The wallpaper shouted welcome in many shapes of fruits and flowers, and there were draped curtains, multicolored tablecloths and carpets. There were vases filled with flowers from a dozen of Veelee’s friends. Paule couldn’t wait to get to work and change it all; she decided to spare only the canary, the gramophone, and the prodigious collection of records.

  The marriage ceremony went off to Maître Gitlin’s satisfaction. Gretel, Gisele, and their husbands were official witnesses, and they all celebrated earnestly at Horcher’s afterward. Before he went back to Paris, Maître Gitlin explained to Veelee that Paule’s father had left her an income of fifteen hundred marks a month while she lived outside France. He did not elaborate on Paule’s fortune, nor did Veelee show any interest—he was overwhelmed at their combined riches. His pay was eight hundred marks a month, a very handsome sum; at a time when the economic crisis had caused all civilian salaries to be reduced, the income of army officers remained unchanged.

  On her third day in Berlin, while he was still on leave, Paule and Veelee went to Klein-Kusserow, where the von Rhode family had lived throughout their recorded history. Klein-Kusserow had eighty-six souls. The family’s second seat in Pomerania, Wusterwitz, had sixty-seven people. Everything was clustered around the large wooden main houses. There was a minister who had a tiny church, a schoolmaster, a blacksmith, a police constable; all the other people were tenants and farm hands. The crops were turnips, barley, rye, and potatoes, although Veelee said that as he remembered it the principal crop was fir trees. He said proudly that Pomeranian cattle could eat food from which goats turned away. The glacier had left eskers, kettles, marshes, and boulders. The highest point in the region was three hundred and two feet—hummocks tufted with green forests. Somewhere between the bogs and the hummock tops the people struggled to harvest crops from an acid, young, unfriendly soil.

  It was summer and barefoot peasant women wearing white kerchiefs dotted the fields. At harvest time the estate used seasonal workers from Poland, most of them female, and the whole countryside of sand dunes, heather, fir trees, and pastures would present a pattern of white handkerchiefs. Veelee remembered the Polish girls as being very pretty, and told Paule that it was the sub-steward’s right to choose any of them as mistresses for the season. The men of the Rhode family chose their mistresses from among the sub-stewards’ wives, but Veelee had been sent away to learn about the army at nine, so this was no more than legend to him. “It is all going now,” he told Paule wistfully. “Small farms are better for agricultural survival in this part of the world. But my family still clings stubbornly to the last two estates we have, which is why we are quite poor and perhaps why the men of the family have been soldiers in an almost unbroken line. What we did not have the wit to do with a plow we have done most gloriously with a sword.”

  It was an idyllic honeymoon. Paule felt that they had been lifted into the peace of heaven.

  They returned to Berlin on the 27th of July, 1932, and on the 28th Veelee returned to duty. It was three nights before the national elections. The National Socialists had sent their storm troopers into the streets to demonstrate destruction, and the carnage was more appalling than anything Germany had ever seen. In an army staff car Paule and Gretel were being driven through the center of Berlin when the uncomprehensible brutality began all around them. The car could move only at snail’s pace through the rioting Brown Shirts. Women were knocked down and kicked, and bricks were flung through shop windows as young men shouted for the death of all Jews; the car moved sedately, as if reviewing the spectacle. Truncheons were used on the aged; children were flung into the gutters and under cars. They made their way to Paule’s flat as quickly as they could. Gretel was retching so badly that Paule stretched her out on the tile floor and held her stomach. There was a doctor in the building; he came at once and gave Gretel sedatives.

  When the doctor had gone and her sister-in-law had been put to bed, Paule stood at the window of the room and watched the people beneath run back and forth like ants under a threat.

  “I cannot believe what I saw. I can’t, I can’t,” Gretel said. “How can you be so calm, Paule?”

  “I am a Jew. That makes a difference. You see it as a German and wonder what is happening to your people. I see it as a Jew and I wonder what will happen to me.”

  “Nothing will happen to you, Paule. You are a von Rhode now.”

  “Wouldn’t you have said that what you saw could not have happened to your people—to your industrious, kind, cheerful, good people?”

  Martial law was declared after seventy-five people had been killed and two hundred and eighty-five had been maimed and shattered. But the force which the Germany Army, as ordered by General von Rundstedt, had sent out to enforce the state of
martial law against four hundred thousand exultant, blood-drunk storm troopers was a lieutenant and twelve men who were ordered to make the “necessary arrests.”

  For the first time since she had come to Germany, Paule felt dazed and ill. The German Army was Veelee and Veelee was the army. The army was encouraging the murder of Jews in the streets. She pushed the thought down and down into her mind, to suffocate it. Her father was gone. Veelee would understand. All she needed to remember was that she loved Veelee and that he loved her; the fact of these terrible events could not change what she felt for him and needed from him, nor what he felt for her. She began to read the newspapers with the avidity of an opposition editor. She read them all, and she took a morbid fascination in the tiny outrages as well as the massive murders. The Nazis won two hundred and thirty seats in the Reichstag, and though they lacked a majority, they were the largest party represented. On the day of the elections, after three days of rioting throughout the country, she got a long, ebullient, loving, and passionate letter from Veelee at the cavalry school at Wuensdorf. Among other things, he pointed out that the election campaign had made one thing clear: the Nazis were not against the Jews as everyone had supposed. All inside army information—the only reliable information since the newspapers were owned by a pack of Socialists and union radicals—showed that the riots had only been against the Communists and some Catholics. As a German, he felt he should thank God that there was some force which could openly attack the Communists; the army’s hands were certainly tied, and the Communists were trying to “eat the very heart out of our country.” The essential opposition, of course, had made him proud as a soldier, but most of all it had dispersed the terrible alarm he had first felt that she might be frightened at the threat of what might have seemed like danger. He would be home soon and hold her in his arms.

  Paule had two servants. One, who had come as a present from Gisele, seemed to know how to cook everything everyone in the combined Rhode family liked to eat, from Westfälisches Gaenschenschwarzsuer to Crambamboli. The other, a charwoman who came in twice a week, Gretel had found. Paule concentrated on her house, on becoming a good German wife, and on learning to think and feel like a German. She read the Nibelungenlied because Gretel told her that it had influenced the attitudes of the German Army. She read Kudrun because Gisele had said it was her favorite story of the North Sea coasts. She read sixteenth-century Jesuit dramas from which German opera had evolved. She read the works of Christian Weisse, which advocated rational behavior and the art of getting on in a realistically apprehended world; and her mind tottered forward with a small cry of gratitude when Klopstock enforced his credo that feeling must dominate reason; she went on into the rococo abandon of Wieland, turned to the common sense of Lessing as an antidote, then backtracked to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. She avoided Heine because he had been a Jew. The point of her search was to seek the keys to people who not only were not Jews, but who seemed to be able to blind themselves to all of the sensitive things in Jews which Heine represented. She could not make her way through the dialect literature of Hebel, Groth, and Reuter. She had already read Neitzsche and it had made her giggle, but she reread him with the memory of the storm troopers at earnest work all around the army staff car. She felt at home with Stefan George and von Hofmannstahl, though George’s work had been used recently to make the Nazis more palatable in German intellectual circles. She would not read Kafka, the Czech whom the Germans adored; she could not afford hopelessness.

  The music library of Paule’s landlord had every opera known to man, and while she knitted she listened to Beethoven, Gluck, Brahms, Mozart, and Wagner. Abjuring Bach, she played Brahms and Wagner and Wagner and Brahms over and over again until finally she told Veelee that Wagner surely must have been commissioned to provide recruiting music for the Nazi party. But Veelee did not seem to want to understand.

  After Paule had studied German culture for seventeen months she was more French than she had been before, and she fancied she could hear her father’s raucous laughter roaring at her from a ribald heaven.

  From the second day of their arrival in Germany, they had received invitations from the aristocratic society of Berlin and Potsdam for every sort of event: lunches, teas, dinners, balls, hunts, cocktails, and Kaffeetafeln. Many of the invitations came from the wives of cavalry officers with whom Veelee had served in the Royal Prussian Army. But Paule’s closest friends were Veelee’s sisters and their husbands. These warm and loving people had made her a part of the family instantly and, though she was never aware of it, defied any member of German society to consider her in any other light. Gretel was the most intelligent of the von Rhodes, and she had insight and a deft intuition as well. Gisele, forged in the cold furnace of Foreign Office society, was a social automaton who could talk about anything without being indiscreet but could hardly utter a sentence of substance. Still, she had a loving heart and was a generous, pretty woman. Gretel’s husband, Generalleutnant Franz Heller, was called Hansel (by the family only) because of his wife’s name. He was a bulky, witty man who, whenever he was able to relax in civilian clothes, wore a Scotch tam-o’-shanter with a bright-blue boss to keep drafts from his bald head. He had a roving eye and contributed to Paule’s welcome by flirting with her continuously. Gisele’s husband, Philip Miles-Meltzer, was a dark, intense man who was absorbed in dress, health, and Mexican cuisine—the last, perhaps, because it was as far removed as possible from his work. He was a Ministerialdirektor at the Foreign Office.

  Other entertainment for Paule and Veelee was provided by a shifting population of officers and their wives, a few lawyers, and now and then people of the Berlin theatre and of touring companies of foreign theatre. Nevertheless, Paule was alone a great deal. Veelee was commanding officer of the Krafthahrabteilung 3, at Wuensdorf, with instructions to turn it into a mobile reconnaissance force. In theory he was supposed to be free to return home five nights a week, because Wuensdorf was a village only twenty-five miles from Berlin. But it was a new command and so many complications arose that Veelee rarely came home more than twice a week.

  When she walked through Berlin alone during the days, Paule watched the fear on the Jewish faces. They thought they were carrying expressions of neutrality or boredom, but sudden street sounds and too-loud voices nearby would make their hands tremble as they lit cigarettes. The pressure from above was making everyone uneasy and anxious. Paule, the new Jew in a new world of Jewishness, became more sensitive to everything which had not yet happened. Only horses and dogs in Berlin seemed to be well-adjusted and happy. She watched storm troopers and SS men fondle large, jolly dogs in the Schlossgarten across the square from her house. They would rub their dogs, play with them, croon to them, and gaze down at them with tenderness while the dogs urinated against lampposts. No German dogs were nervous, and the horses were happy—but not the children, not the people, and not the Jews.

  Veelee and Paule belonged to the tennis club. They fenced twice a week. They had a small boat, big enough to hold themselves and a basket of food and wine for the laziest kind of floating on the Mugglesee. Only when they had a family party did they entertain at home.

  On fine autumn days, when she could not bear to stay in the flat alone, Paule would go for walks. These strolls were seemingly aimless, but she would usually find herself drawn to the Huldschinsky house on the Standartenstrasse, which Captain Roehm, the storm-troop chief, had rented from a Silesian industrialist and for which, her brother-in-law Miles-Meltzer said, Huldschinsky was never paid. The mansion had held art treasures, but now it housed pederasts, cases of champagne stacked in salons, and tables of delicacies which streamed into the house from Kempinsky’s restaurant to feed the hairy orgies which Roehm savored and tittered over drunkenly. When Kempinsky sent its enormous bill for a month of Brown Shirts at the trough, it was not paid; and when Kempinsky sent two men to insist on payment, Captain Roehm broke lamps and vases in a drunken rage while he shouted at them that Kempinsky was owned by Jews and did they reall
y think that Roehm would pay a Jew for anything, except with bullets?

  Paule would wander around the streets surrounding the house which symbolized the storm troopers of her nightmares, moving slowly and staring up at it, trying to equate what it now represented with the lessons her father had taught her every Friday evening.

  Now, operating from within the government, the Nazi press had new standing. Attacks on Jews began in earnest. At a signal from Goebbels and Streicher, in cities, towns, and villages all over the country, “spontaneous demonstrations” were mounted. They were all the same demonstration, of course. Crowds led by the SA would enter the law courts and drive out all Jewish lawyers, magistrates, and judges; other crowds drove customers out of Jewish department stores. When the press outside Germany reported these incidents, Goebbels held the German Jews for a form of ransom by organizing a general boycott which would last, he swore, until the foreign press made their reports more favorable to the Nazis. This threat was withdrawn at once, but the first racial law, retiring all civil servants who were not of Aryan descent, was passed. The draft of a law prohibiting mixed marriages, which would also make extra-marital relations between Jews and non-Jews a punishable offense, was published. Jews were taken out of their homes in the middle of the night to be manhandled in SA barracks; some were shot “while trying to escape.” When Goebbel’s newspaper accused Jews of having rioted to prevent the showing of an anti-Semitic film in the west end of Berlin, windows of cafés were smashed by SA toughs and Jews were beaten up in the streets.

  Paule pored over every newspaper. The Nazi press used a jargon of its own, triumphantly justified murder, and employed such arcane devices as pornography to attract readers. Everything outside Germany, the papers intoned, was evil and threatening, every German must relearn that fact every day. Only Germany was preserving the right way of life, the good way, the path of national honor and social justice.