‘Exemplifying the finest German virtues while showing due respect for the Red Man’s innate nobility and purity of soul.’
‘Dead right, Ive. So?’
‘This is extraordinary.’ I could think of no finer part to play. Yet I had become so used to movies presenting the lowest common denominator. ‘You are certain, Mrs Cornelius, that your Baron wants to make a film series based on Karl May’s famous philosophical adventure tales? The “Winnetou” books?’
‘On the money, Ive.’
‘I am honoured.’
I added that I heard the May company was wary of vulgarising the Master’s work on film. She assured me Hugenberg had secured rights by demonstrating to the family his sincere reverence, patriotism and belief in promoting Karl May’s serious ideas concerning brotherly love and the right of all races to live on their own traditional land, unthreatened by invaders of any kind, whether with guns or with an alien culture. This matched what I had already heard of Alfred Hugenberg. He was a Cabinet minister, leader of a major German political party and German through and through. I had read one of his election addresses while waiting for Kitty to come out of the toilet at the Kino. Mutual respect was the secret of civil discourse between nations. While he understood the benefits of democracy, he still supported a monarch on the German throne. A monarch represented the state in a way a president could not. He admired Hindenburg, felt that the old Field Marshal really wished to see a Kaiser restored, and was also obsessed with der alte Fritz, Frederick the Great. Germany would only hold her head up in the world once more when she had an emperor. Mrs Cornelius said it was well known in film circles that if you wanted to get a start with UfA, you should suggest an ‘Old Fritz’ theme to Huggy Bear.
Doctor Hugenberg had been granted the May rights because he was leader of the Nationalist Monarchists and an influential director of Krupp. Since the War he had built up a publishing empire to spread his ideas and had saved the German film industry from extinction or absorption by the Americans. During the hard, hungry years he had turned a bankrupt concern into one of the most powerful and profitable in the world. He could offer the public conscientious and respectable versions of the May books and thus introduce him to Britain and America.
Nowadays, as with everything else, such great men find their names dragged in the mud, and every detail of their past dug up and dissected by the Daily Mail, so it is no surprise Der Spiegel and its kind, forever attacking their own country and its leaders, published scurrilous tales of Karl May’s early life which they claimed had been led as a con man! They also said he had spent some seven years in prison as punishment for his crimes. His ‘crime’ in fact seemed to be possession of a rich and wide imagination! Sufficient crime in a Prussian Germany to have him jailed.
How hard it is for the unimaginative man to imagine the imaginative man. How hard for the intelligent man to enjoy the simple terrors of the dullard. Does the stationmaster waving his green flag to signal that the train is safe to leave the station ever anticipate the twisted rail, the broken signal up ahead? No, he is satisfied that he has accomplished everything possible. The train arrives safely. The train leaves safely. Whatever takes place on the train or outside the limits of his responsibility is nothing to do with him. He never connects. He never understands the nature of collective responsibility. But I see the whole rail system. I am part of the problem. I take some of the responsibility. I know that it is always my fault when something goes wrong, but it is not very much my fault. Any man’s death, says the poet, makes me smaller, because I am everyman. I am everyman. My dreams are what made me exemplary. My experience is what makes me extraordinary. But I am otherwise no different to you. Believe me, Karl May was not the only one to suffer because he was different and above the herd. Today I would be living in luxury on an island in Scotland, tranquil and unassailable, were it not for several bitter twists of fate, any one of which might have sent another mad. But I have my creed . . .
Gott schiitze unseren Zaren!
Den Bewahrer unseres Ruhms!
Und zerschmettere unsere Feinde!
Oh alter, orthodoxer Zar!
They cry out for justice. History mourns. God Himself is chastened before their outrage. I take my hope from the best minds of Europe . . .
Gott schrieb die Schöpfung nicht als Trauerspiel;
ein tragisch Ende kann es nirgends geben.
Zwar jedes Leben ringt nach einem Ziel,
Doch dieses Ziel hegt stets im nachsten Leben.
How we long for truth and justice to rule, for black and white to regard each other with mutual dignity and cultivate their own cultures, their own proud traditions. Believe me, I am not one of those who say that Karl May laid the sentimental groundwork for German imperial expansion. This is arrant nonsense. Germany had an almost impeccable colonial record. It is the Belgians, with whom she waged war, who committed the atrocities, and Germany punished her for it, yet Germany was depicted as the aggressor in the French and British press.
The Belgian rape of Africa became the German rape of Belgian nuns! Is it any surprise that when the Jews began in the thirties to make their hysterical charges against Germany they were not believed? The air was filled with tales of horror. The screens showed their pessimistic view of the sacrifices we had made with such monuments of misery as All Quiet on the Western Front, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Drei Tage Mittelarrest.
Next day Mr Mix told me that his dream had come true when he ran into Ingram’s crew shooting in Morocco and was able to secure not only a bit part but a passport to Europe. Ingram, though disgruntled and unhappy with his film, had been a sympathetic employer, Mix said. But Ingram had returned to Nice, and Mr Mix found no more film work. He eventually joined a travelling minstrel show in Lyons, and learned to play the banjo and the guitar.
‘I guess I’m just destined to be in show business all my life, Herr Max.’ He had made his way from Lyons, travelling across the country as an entertainer, singing mostly Al Jolson songs, working briefly in Paris with Josephine Baker before coming to Berlin with a show called Black Birds, which was still doing well. There he had gone to an audition and discovered the songstress he would accompany was none other than his old benefactress Mrs Cornelius!
We all had a meal together. “Old ‘ome week,’ said Mrs C. He had been happy to rejoin her when she, too, transferred from Berlin to Munich. He had become quite a sophisticate with a taste for good tailoring. Clearly not all the Munich Fräuleins saw him as a mere darkie entertainer. Even I admitted there was something wonderfully masculine about Mr Mix. You felt as if you were in the presence of a wild leopard, always in some degree of danger when he was near. And sometimes I think he knew his power.
He told me how they had performed their act in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Bonn, and had dates already promised for Paris, Amsterdam and even, perhaps, London. It soon became clear to me that it was in my interest to maintain close contact with my old friends. Now here he was, my compañero of cattle truck and Caliphate!
I had greeted Mr Mix with a genuine sense of warmth, feelings he reciprocated when he learned of all my adventures abroad. He enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘Ich liebe Deutschland!’ That is the kind of emotion Germany inspired at the time, even in those not born there.
So, too, said Adolf Hitler and so said the German people. Goebbels, who had only recently condemned Hitler as the bourgeois puppet of the industrialists Strasser still claimed him to be, stood up in the public squares of all the cities in Germany and reminded the people how the country had been stabbed in the back by alien financiers with German politicians in their power, supporting the machinations of Jewish socialism, the Trojan horse of Bolshevik Russia. He pointed out, with surprising eloquence, how their professed pacifism, exhibited in such films as The Game of Guns, was no more than an effort further to weaken the German soldier and turn him into a creature without character or meaning, who had fought for nothing, died for nothing and come home to nothing. Who was now nothing, with
nothing to value, nothing to defend. Who was only useful as a puppet, a slave to the forces of Big Business, which would gobble him up unless they were stopped. The only countering force strong enough and wise enough to stop them was Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP Party.
I saw Goebbels give this speech in Munich in early 1932. He had a way of getting the crowd’s sympathy for his deformity, refusing assistance as he climbed to the podium, his spindly arms akimbo as his skull-face regarded the audience. He could have been a villain in a boys’ story, yet within moments he had the audience on his side by joking, appealing to their reason, their sentiments, their love of country.
He had learned from Hitler how to begin quietly and build up, to establish his commonality with the audience, to share its humour and way of seeing the world. But then with a catch in his voice and a tear in his eye, he would remind us what humiliation the great German nation had suffered. ‘Look,’ he would say, ‘I’m just an ordinary chap trying to do his best in the world, trying to understand what’s going on. We have the same questions in common. The same problems.’ He couldn’t help noticing how Germany had been tricked into war and then tricked into defeat. How aliens of every stripe had taken advantage of German hospitality, German goodwill, German honour and who now bled their host nation dry. How only Adolf Hitler, that brave young leader, who had known the same terrors and deprivations as his fellow Germans, could unite the country and make it great again. It was time for dynamic new ideas, fresh will-power, vigorous, healthy Young Germany rising triumphant from the ashes of the Old. A Third Reich, strong and proud, holding dominion over her own lands, the lands the Allies had stripped in their hideous feeding frenzy, rewarding the alien businessmen who had helped them march into Germany and despoil her monuments, her traditions, even her women! Black troops had entered the Rhineland leaving black babies behind. The evidence was there for all to see!
Those troops were the threat the Allies used to control Germany! Whenever they felt like it they could release thousands of Algerians, Somalis, Egyptians and Indians upon the entire country. Germania would then truly know what it was to feel the heel of the black barbarian upon her neck. And, jested Goebbels grimly in a vulgar aside, not only her neck would suffer.
I went to the meeting with Mrs Cornelius, her ‘Baron’ and Seryozha. Mr Mix had also insisted on attending, though the guards controlling the crowd had not allowed him to come in very close. He grinned at me and waved when from the crowd his eyes met mine.
While I now had my friends back, I was still something of a prisoner in Corneliusstrasse. Mrs Cornelius, Mr Mix and Seryozha were not always available to me, and I wondered if the film contract would ever become reality. I was again beginning to resume my earlier plan of getting to Mr Green, my Uncle Semyon’s agent in England, picking up my inheritance and, if possible, settling in the UK for a while.
It crossed my mind that the British Foreign Office would be more than interested in what I had to show them. Von Schirach and Röhm had so far failed to interest anyone in my designs. Röhm said it was because everyone’s attention was focused on getting and keeping power. Hitler had promised him the Reichswehr if he played a good hand. He told me not to approach Göring, whom he loathed increasingly, and I was beginning to wonder if Ernstie had any serious intention of helping me.
If it had not been for Baldur von Schirach, I might have despaired of the NSDAP altogether. I had some substantial conversations with the Youth Leader. Von Schirach shared my enthusiasm for the future. Once he saw my designs, he was ecstatic. Instinct told me he would understand them. He was deeply impressed. ‘But Herr Peters, you are a genius! I had no idea you possessed such sophisticated engineering skills. Surely you have studied at a great university!’ I told him how I had been the youngest Professor of Physics at St Petersburg University.
‘Russia?’ He was startled, frowning, no doubt working out my age.
Of course not, I told him. Florida. Thus I avoided a too complicated explanation. I had forgotten it was unwise to say anything of my Russian education or even of the important aristocrats with whom I mixed in those days. I had friends to protect. My American passport was worth too much to me. There was, too, always a chance that Mussolini would realise how he had been tricked into turning against me and recall me to Rome, even though I now had work, plentiful sources of sneg from the hospitable Prince Freddy, and a pleasant choice of lovers.
Little Zoyea continued to drag me to the cowboy pictures, even as I prepared for my role as the great Lord of the Prairie. I was besotted with her. She, of course, was equally besotted, mostly with my fame, though I think she saw in me some kind of twin spirit. Our ‘romance’ blossomed. Her father, knowing our relationship to be as harmless as Lewis Carroll with his Alices, continued to smile on us especially since I was able to keep his organ and those of his extended family in spanking condition for a fraction of what it would cost them elsewhere. So I remained a popular fellow in Munich’s ‘Little Italy’.
One Saturday night, when I had returned home from the Fraus’ alone, I found a black Mercedes and its driver outside Corneliusstrasse. I recognised both, and sure enough Röhm was waiting for me when I got upstairs. He was a little distracted. While he had made every attempt to protect me, Frau Oberhauser had grown suspicious of his delays and wanted to know when I would be arrested. She now had the ear of Göring, and possibly of Goebbels, and she was threatening to take her case against me to them! Röhm was doing everything he could, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep her away from the others. We would have to make a decision soon. I told my friend and patron he could make whatever decision was necessary, as long as her lies did not become public. I was about to embark on an important new aspect of my career. She could ruin me. She could destroy me. Soon I would have some money. If that would help, he would have my first cheque. He embraced me very tenderly and said that would not be necessary. Indeed, he had brought me an envelope.
There was something profoundly sensitive about his last, almost embarrassed kiss.
In the following weeks my life changed dramatically. In spite of his geniality in Rome, Doctor Hugenberg was at first by no means friendly. He probably saw me as a rival for Mrs Cornelius’s affections. He was mollified to some large extent by my enthusiasm for the great Karl May, my contempt for those who had attempted to blacken his name.
With his impeccably waxed iron-grey moustache, a sparkling grin and a rather boyish enthusiasm for flags and uniforms, Hugenberg was a man of about my height, of stiff, rather than military bearing with old-world charm. He wore high collars, pre-war finery. He had not served at the front but admired men of action and loved the cinema. During the War he had risen high in the ranks of Krupp. He still had connections to the firm but had realised early how control of the media was of utmost importance in a populist democracy. Bit by bit he had gained majority holdings in almost all the important German studios. He also purchased many publications and was now in a position to publicise his own films and promote his own political ideas in a dozen popular forms. Hugenberg was no socialist and rather suspected Hitler’s socialism. He was in fact a convinced monarchist, pointing to British and Scandinavian stability under a constitutional monarch. But he was a realist, prepared to believe what he called ‘the brown rabble’ to be a useful defence against Bolshevism.
When Doctor Hugenberg learned from Mrs Cornelius that I had fought against the Reds and was an officer in the White Cossack cavalry, his manner warmed all the more. He wanted to know how a young American flyer had wound up in such strange circumstances. I said that I had wanted to take a crack at the Bolshevists. In normal times, of course, I would not have risen to the rank of Colonel. He understood, he said. He knew how rapidly they had wiped out White officers wherever they could. A relative of his was a great friend of Hetman Skorapadsky. He had heard some wonderful tales of Cossack courage. I had a poorer opinion of the Hetman. He had fled back to Berlin leaving us at the mercy of Petlyura, for whom I had been forced to build my
Violet Ray and who failed to save Kiev because he lacked the sense to defend the electric power lines feeding my invention.
Petlyura was assassinated in Paris by an angry Jew furious at his alleged pogroms, but his lieutenants were ingratiating themselves with the German authorities as White exiles. The only thing Greens had in common with Whites was that both had been defeated by the Blacks and the Reds in alliance. That the Reds had betrayed the Blacks was almost inevitable, so now we even had Blacks, as well as disaffected Reds and Greens, pretending to be White. Enough, Mrs Cornelius remarked, to turn anyone Blue. Meanwhile, Hitler’s Browns made strategic alliances with men offering the bright, multicoloured banners of monarchy! He was convinced, said Doctor Hugenberg at dinner one night, that variety and tolerance were the watchwords of a constitutional monarchy A republic was always too open to corruption. Look at America with her gangsters and crooked judges! Karl May himself made such points in his romances.
I reminded my new employer how, as Russia collapsed into chaos, I consoled myself with the works of Karl May, absorbing the tales of Arab and Apache, which May had collected on his own adventurings in the Middle East and Far West. Baron Huggy Bear smiled when I assured him that no calumnies levelled against that great German novelist by Red cynicism or right revisionism would ever be received by me with anything but the utmost contempt and disgust. I reminded him that Benito Mussolini, also a keen reader as well as a published novelist, supported King Victor Emmanuel. Hugenberg let me know that Hitler, too, was a fan, though, sadly, scarcely a king. A set of May’s books had accompanied Albert Schweitzer into the Congo on his personal mission of honour. A great Christian, said Hugenberg dutifully. He himself was a devout Catholic and was clearly relieved to know of my Spanish connections and my uncle, the cardinal.