Hugenberg had heard good reports of me from the more sophisticated party members such as von Schirach. He knew, of course, that I was a friend of Mussolini’s and was glad I had become a co-religionist.
I now regret that for a while I turned away from the faith of my ancestors and embraced Rome. Sometimes it was not always easy to find others of my faith or a place to pray. I have to satisfy that spiritual dimension. I needed to pray and could not always choose where I prayed. I prayed to my mother. I prayed for Esmé. I prayed even in that synagogue. I prayed in the cathedral. For some years my yearning soul sent its messages up to heaven and received no answer.
In Germany I often felt that God had deserted not only me but the whole country. Was He in those elaborate Baroque churches with their pink cherubs and blue-eyed staring angels, their simpering Jesuses? The Greek Church is solid, its artefacts direct reminders of the early Church. These South German churches are infected with sentimental Lutheranism of the worst sort, their relish for the Baroque making them more like the contents of a confectioner’s window than a place of worship. Believe me, my flirtation with Rome did not last for long, but while it was necessary, I had to accept the best option.
At least during my time in Italy and Southern Europe I learned to understand the Romish Church. In the end it too betrayed me. There is only one foundation and expression of my inner faith, the true core of my belief, the first Church of the Christians ruled over by the benign Greek whose spiritual centre lies in Byzantium. But when in Rome, as the English always say, speak as the Romans. The Serbian Church in Latimer Road has some of that old spirit.
These churches embrace me. They are stern and take their religion seriously. Even there I do not always find sanctuary. I was in the Moscow Road church when I was arrested and charged with those loathsome crimes. Is there no respect any longer for holy sanctuary? Whoever hated me enough to accuse me, to infect innocent ears with such filth, can have no hope at all for their eternal soul.
Nothing was ever proven, of course. Before God, I am innocent. I know that my looks are against me. The English suspect anyone who is not exactly of their pink-and-pale-grey complexion. If your face has not been hacked by razors and exposed to its daily dose of grimy rain, you are at once suspect. Perhaps you bathe too much? Perhaps you have beliefs? Perhaps you are going to disturb the order of things, befriend their open-minded children, put foreign notions into their heads, infect them with broader ideas than the narrow xenophobic snobbery which the British call an education? Sometimes I yearn for Germany in the old days.
* * * *
THIRTY-EIGHT
In the intervening weeks I saw nothing of Röhm. I received the occasional word via von Schirach, but the Nazi elite were completely absorbed in politics. I was desperately short of money and forced to borrow what I could. While I could not rely on Mrs Cornelius for ‘snow’, I was lucky in my acquaintance with Kitty, for she had unlimited supplies. But she was proving an exhausting mistress. She found my little place in Corneliusstrasse insufficiently comfortable, she said. She hated the area, too. Occasionally we would go back to Prince Freddy’s bizarre and elegant apartment, but I never felt at home there. Kitty apparently felt no jealousy towards Mrs Cornelius but knew nothing of Heckie. Kitty was familiar with every foible and perversion in the sexual almanac and would have suspected me of all kinds of obscenity. Finally, to placate her, I promised her I would soon have a new, more suitable flat.
As soon as Doctor Hugenberg had personally interviewed him in London, our Old Shatterhand finally arrived to join us. Desmond Reid was in fact an excellent version of just the tight-lipped, arrogant type of Englishman I described. He wore blazers and perfect flannels, an Ascot stock at his neck rather than a tie. His square-jawed good looks and pencil-thin moustache were typical of the contemporary English actor.
Reid had already made several films with Hitchcock in Germany and England. He had featured in a number of ’Sexton Blake’ serials as Blake’s arch-enemy, the albino Count Zenith. Indeed, I admired him in the movie version of The Affair of the Runaway Prince where he had interpreted the role of Blake’s most deadly opponent, who played the violin, smoked opium and took to crime to relieve his ennui. He also appeared in The Mystery of the Silent Death, Silken Threads and The Great Office Mystery, all of them two-reelers never quite achieving the same standard and later eclipsed by Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, with a different actor playing Blake. A rapidly rising star, Desmond Reid had a classic profile and might have been a German of the higher type. Visually, he was a perfect ‘Surehand’, while his acting was adequate, as was his French and German.
We were introduced at Hugenberg’s party celebrating the re-election of President Hindenburg and the defeat of Adolf Hitler which had, by all accounts, sent the Führer into another of his retreats listening to Franz Lehar, reading Edgar Wallace, and no doubt exercising the dog whip he carried to impress Germans with his mastery of men.
Reid had just finished a job in Potsdam, where UfA had a large studio. He had played a cruel commissar in a film set against the background of the Russian Civil War, a historical nonsense, but Reid’s screen presence was unquestionable. For the sake of art, I was willing to enjoy a superficial friendship with him. Hugenberg also found him politically sympathetic, for though strongly pro-German, Reid was a great imperialist, a supporter of king and country. He thought the German war would never have been fought if the Kaiser hadn’t panicked at the socialist victories of 1914.
Hugenberg and Reid agreed energetically that the wedge driven through their great natural alliance by Edward VII’s flirtation with the French had thrown the world into chaos. Red Republicanism was the certain progeny of that bastard union arranged merely so the Prince of Wales should not lose the services of Parisian whores. For that he turned on his own German relatives. His own cousins and siblings. Later, Reid would become a famous correspondent for the Daily Mail and would frequently write articles in support of the Fascist cause.
Mussolini was Reid’s hero. The actor had known Pound, Fiorello and D’Annunzio. He had been with them in Trieste. They were all great romantics of the old school, he said. ‘Worthy to stand side by side with Marat or Browning.’ He spoke with warm admiration of those wild idealists whose actions had done so much to improve the morale of the Italian people.
By rights we should have been great friends, but there was some weakness in Reid I could not identify. He tended to avoid me, as if he guessed I could tell there was something fishy about him. I wondered if Reid were his real name. It also occurred to me that, despite his blond good looks, he might carry another secret. As Ludecke points out in his book, the worst kind of anti-Semite is that wretched creature the Halb-Jude, or even a full Jew who so hates himself he is more vitriolic in his expressions of disgust than any Rosenberg or Streicher.
My own understanding of the Jewish problem is, like Strasser’s, entirely rational. I have nothing against them as a people. I merely believe they thrive best in their own desert fiefdoms or the heightened atmosphere of stage, salon and studio! Just as my blood sings to the winds from the steppe and the roaring of the Dnepr, so must theirs long for souk and sand dune.
Reid was no fan of Goebbels, Göring or Hitler but we had a mutual acquaintance in Otto Strasser. He approved of the Strassers and of Röhm. He understood Röhm’s reputation as a swaggering adventurer was merely a persona the Stabschef adopted. At heart Röhm was an honourable member of the Reichswehr and wanted nothing more than to be reunited with the army he regarded as a mother and father. He was the right kind of Nazi, said Reid, basically a gentleman. ‘Those others, including Himmler, are gangsters with one solution for all problems.’ He drew his fingers across his throat. ‘Simple, effective, but bad economics. It would be foolish to deny a country the benefits which Jews can bring. Cromwell understood that. We should profit from the positive side, as in mathematics and music, but they should not be allowed disproportionate political influence.’ There should be citizenship requ
irements. An oath. Even in America, the cradle of liberty, Jews did not stand for Congress.
Reid had bought the English newspapers before he arrived in Munich and allowed me to glance through them. The first story I read in The Times caused me to gasp in horror. I had never hoped to read such a thing, but now, under the headline TRAGIC DEATH IN WEST END, I learned of the fall of Frau Oberhauser from a fourth-floor hotel window! My heart went out to her as a human being, but I must admit that the black shadow which had hung over me since Röhm had visited me last at Corneliusstrasse suddenly lifted. The paper spoke of her recent distress at the failure of Hitler to become Chancellor. There was a hint, in the English manner, that she had committed suicide.
I thought of Kitty, now an orphan, and wondered how she would take her mother’s death. And what of the boy who had been with her in London? Had his father come for him? The paper said nothing. In other circumstances I would have been at Kitty’s side as soon as possible, but I knew Prince Freddy had the means of comforting her.
I showed Reid the piece in the paper. I told him that I had known the lady and had once been of service to her in getting her out of Russia ahead of the Reds. Reid sympathised with me. Had she been depressed? I gathered, I said, that her ambitions had been thwarted lately. It was always the same with those Russians, Reid informed me. They were an emotional lot of buggers. All soul and no sense. Lenin’s rhetorical rubbish seduced them into Bolshevism, perhaps the most senseless political system ever devised and one of the cruellest. The whole country was run by Jews. That was what he meant when he talked about disproportionate influence! Control the Jews and there would be a Tsar back on the throne in weeks!
I wished I shared his optimism. He slapped me on the arm. ‘Cheer up, old man. Someone should point out to that chap Nietzsche that all his tosh sounds just fine in the abstract, but it doesn’t work out at all in real life. Hitler’s problem is he has no sense of the practical. How are you going to stop millions of Jews just by snapping your fingers? It can’t be done. As long as Jews are identified, we have no problem! It’s so much simpler than he makes it out to be.’
Doctor Hugenberg found these views reasonable. Jews should not be allowed disproportionate control of the media, either as producers or contributors. He agreed with me that landscape as well as race memory is in one’s blood. The forests and mountains of Germany were as natural to him as were jungles and rivers to an Amazon native.
Mr Mix of course was not with us, so I could not ask his opinion, but I was sure the same held true for the black race. The real abomination of slavery is that it uprooted the Negro from his natural habitat and put him down in a place where he could never feel at ease, never flourish. Place him in the Congo’s forests, for instance, and he becomes a different person. The same slouching, mumbling fellow one sees on a St Louis street corner transforms into the healthy, natural man Schweitzer so admired and wrote about. Transported to the Congo, American blacks would bring a level of civilisation which could only raise the region, as Doctor Schweitzer already hoped to do. I knew a number of idealistic young medics in Munich who spoke of joining Schweitzer. While most subsequently joined the SS, one man did go to Africa. His name was König. He died of dysentery within three months of taking up his post with Schweitzer. Doctoring, as Baldur von Schirach said, was a profession any man of sympathy and conscience might choose, just as lawyering was the careerist’s first choice.
During lulls in political life, Schirach again began to seek me out. That young man had grown a little estranged from the rest of his family, especially his sister, none of whom were great admirers of Hitler. He loved to talk with someone of genuine scientific imagination. I must say it gave me enormous pleasure to discuss my advanced ideas and the needs of the future with a fellow spirit who similarly brooded on the nature of technological progress.
Zoyea and I, meanwhile, continued our ‘romance’ with the Kino, under her father’s benevolent eye. Only when absent from the city itself did I abandon my Italians. Even when there was nothing to repair, they were pleased to see me. I revelled in the ambience and stuffed myself with their cooking. And, of course, I continued to indulge my little princess and became expertly familiar with the film careers of Art Accord, Jack Hoxie, Yakima Canutt, William S. Hart, J. B. Warner, Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and an entire posse of minor cowboy heroes. I saw my own films rather more often than I cared to. We went to triple features with titles like Branded a Bandit, Hell Hounds of the Plains, Blue Blazes Rawden, Behind Two Guns, The Thundering Herd, Ace of Cactus Range, Jesse James Under the Black Flag, Ranchers and Rascals, Wild Horse Mesa, Fighting Jack and Romance of the Wasteland. I remember those particular titles well. We saw them so many times I could no doubt repeat the captions word for word!
I consoled myself that I would be far more familiar with the genre when I came to play my own part. When making the Masked Buckaroo films, I was unfamiliar with the other cowboy pictures produced in such numbers. I knew many of these heroes to speak to but did not know why they were heroes. Now I saw familiar face upon familiar face, which deeply impressed my Zoyea.
In America the Western was already fading in popularity, not reviving until the singing cowboy created an even stranger version of the myth. But Westerns remained the German favourites.
I loved the boisterous version of The Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Their first talker together was a great success. Unfortunately the real-life marriage of the nation’s sweetheart and the nation’s dashing hero was rumoured to be over, Mary having discovered evidence of Jewish blood in ‘Doug’s’ recent past! Suffice to say Fairbanks was not his original name.
Good as they were in their own engaging way, few American films contained the spirit of Karl May I knew ours would have a quality even the best of Tom Mix’s films lacked — a philosophical depth and moral dimension on a different level entirely.
For a while I lost touch with Kitty. She disappeared from Munich as mysteriously as she had appeared. I heard she and Prince Freddy were back in Berlin. I took two short trips to Berlin by train but made only desultory attempts to contact them. At that stage in my life I was rather glad to have some distance between us. I was fairly sure how Doctor Hugenberg would view our association.
I kept to myself in Berlin. I was unimpressed by a city seeming to embody the most grandiose and vulgar characteristics of Chicago and Communist Moscow. A mélange of beaux-arts classicism and municipal functionalism, it reminded me of a vast Prussian barracks. The studio complex, a short car ride from the city, was bigger than anything I had seen in Hollywood. To demonstrate how deep Jewish culture ran in Berlin, the studio complex was called Neubabelsberg, in honour of the famous Russian low-life writer Isaac Babel who came there once from Paris. I met him casually, and he reminded me of someone. I asked him if he knew Odessa. He had spent some little time there, he said. He had ridden with the Red Cossacks. UfA had some idea of employing him as a scriptwriter.
UfA had made most of the famous German films of the previous fifteen years. Neubabelsberg film city was UfA’s pride and was now equipped with a superb sound system, as I knew from films like Der Kongress tanzt and Walzerparadies.
Here I first met Doctor Goebbels in Hugenberg’s private office. He was courting Alfred Hugenberg. The good opinion of my employer’s press and newsreels were crucial to the NSDAP cause. Because Hugenberg was a prominent Catholic he could therefore help them gain the blessing of the Church. In spite of his ugliness, Goebbels had a certain charm. I soon found myself telling him how I had seen him speak in Munich, how impressed I had been by what he had to say.
He had a way of taking you by the elbow and seeming to draw you into his confidence. Certain kinds of women were fascinated by him. Many years later Jack Trevor told me his technique for picking up women. He cultivated an interesting disease or wound. Women were always attracted to medical conditions. Far from being a handicap, Goebbels’s twisted foot was a sexual asset! It always struck me as odd that he should be
such an enthusiast for euthanasia, a sign, no doubt, of his euphoric retreat from reality. This was a characteristic in almost all the Nazis after 1934. The world began to slip out of their control almost as soon as they thought they had it. That was why they had to demonstrate control more and more, to prove their power to themselves. That mindset simplifies the world in order to understand it, thereby understanding less and less. By use of force they can for a time prove their version of the world. As the world refuses to comply, throwing up more and more surprises, they are forced to grow increasingly violent to sustain their ‘truth’.
Such men rarely understand how large a part luck has played in their careers. That failing becomes almost every eminent man’s Achilles heel.
I think Hitler realised his luck. He was a natural chancer, as Mr Mix put it, the ultimate opportunist, like a flea who lies dormant until a lucky wind or a useful rat comes by. Then he jumps, hoping for the best. Hitler remained in bed, reading light novels, listening to operetta on the gramophone, until his instincts recognised an opportunity. A chameleon, he would say anything, take any position, certain that the Führer Principle or blind instinct directed his changes of approach. A beautifully simple system needed a beautifully complex man like Hitler to run it. Terrified by his own complexes, Hitler disguised his fear well in company. ‘That ‘Itler could seduce ther Archbishop o’ Canterbury, slimy bugger. Ol’ Gobbles is in love wiv ‘im,’ thought Mrs Cornelius.