Whenever the passage of history allows – and the fact that he doesn’t do it forcibly at an early point is what distinguishes him from the unadulterated propagandists of his Party – Stieve brings in the Jew as the distorted counterpart to the man of feeling, and from here on the specifically Nazi expressions accumulate, or rather they are amplified in a negative direction. ‘Zersetzung {subversion}’ is now a central word. It began with Junges Deutschland. ‘Two Jewish writers, Heine and Lion Baruch, known as Ludwig Börne following his baptism’, are the first demagogues from the ranks of the ‘chosen’ people. (I believe auserwählt {chosen} to be the word from which the LTI’s ironic inverted commas first sprung.) The materialistic spirit of the age suits the hereditary characteristics of the members of this foreign race and the traits they acquired whilst in exile, and is itself encouraged by them. Now the Nazi vocabulary can blossom: ‘niederreißende Kritik {destructive criticism}’, ‘zerfasernder Intellekt {hairsplitting intellect}’, ‘tödliche Gleichmacherei {deadly levelling down}’, ‘Auflösung {dissolution}, ‘Unterhöhlung {undermining}’, ‘Entwurzelung {rootless- ness}’, ‘Durchbrechung der nationalen Schranke {undermining national boundaries}’; ‘Marxism’ for socialism, because real socialism is the prerogative of Hitlerism, and the false one must be marked out as the heresy of the Jew Karl Marx. (The Jew Marx, the Jew Heine, not simply Marx or Heine, is a special technique for hammering something home stylistically which had already occurred in the ancient epitheton ornans.) Defeat in the First World War lends further weight to this branch of the LTI: now there is talk of ‘teuflischen Giften der Zersetzung {the diabolic poison of subversion}’, of ‘roten Hetzern {malicious red agitators}’ . . . The third intensification derives from the belligerent position taken against bolshevism and communism: the ‘sinister hordes’ of the red front battalions crop up. A strain played on the one and only, most national {volkstümlichst} string of the LTI! I had heard it resound long before reading this Nazi literary history and truly de profundis. ‘You racial traitor {Du artvergessenes Weib!}’ Clemens the Hitter said to my wife every time he searched the house, and Weser the Spitter added, ‘Didn’t you know that it says in the Talmud that “a foreigner is of less value than a whore”?’ This is repeated every time word for word like a messenger’s brief in Homer. ‘You racial traitor! Didn’t you know . . .’ Again and again during these years, and with particular fervour during the weeks in Falkenstein, I asked myself the same question, and am still today unable to find an answer: how was it possible for educated people to betray their entire education, culture and humanity to such an extent? The Hitter and the Spitter were primitive beasts (despite holding the rank of officer); you have to put up with that sort of thing until you can kill it. But you don’t have to rack your brains over it. But an educated man like this literary historian! And behind him I discern a multitude of literary figures, writers, journalists, a multitude of academics. Betrayal as far as the eye can see. he was no rabble-rouser and he was averse to any kind of inflexibility. And he was thoroughly decent, he had learned a good deal and was possessed of a clear head. He knew what a terrible thing war was, and was fully capable of judging the insanity of Germany’s plans to master the world by the strength of the opposing forces. For many years I had not heard anything from him and, immersed in my subject, I had restricted my newspaper reading to the local paper. If alive at all, Harms must by now have been nearer eighty than seventy, and long since gone into retirement. and then I saw the Leipziger Neuesten again. And every three or four days there was a political article in it with the old signature P.H. But it was not ‘Paul Harms’ any more, it was just one of many hundreds of variations of Goebbels’s weekly texts, which were to be found every day in every newspaper of Greater Germany, there was global Jewry and the steppe, there was the British betrayal of Europe, there was the Teutonic world fighting selflessly for the freedom of the West and the world at large, there was the entire LTI – putting my theory to the test. A sad test for me, because these particular lines spoke to me with an individual voice, with a familiar intonation behind the equally familiar, in fact all-too-familiar, words – words which, coming out of this mouth, were quite unexpected. When I heard during the following summer that Harms had died a few days before the entry of Russian troops into Zehlendorf, it came to me almost as a relief; at the very last minute he had been, as the pious saying goes, put beyond the reach of mortal judgement. I have forgotten to report that the vet not only talked about the wonder weapon yesterday but also, in a similarly devout manner, about a repeatedly observed phenomenon, namely that whole buildings had collapsed except for the ‘wall with Hitler’s portrait’, which had been left standing. I wasn’t afraid of the bombs or the hedgehoppers, nor even of death – it was simply the Gestapo. Constantly the same fear that someone would come up behind me, or meet me head-on, or wait for me at my house to take me away {holen}. (‘Holen!’ now I’m using this language as well!) All that matters is that I don’t fall into the hands of my enemies! Was what I said to myself every day with a deep sigh. And what is more: the domestic library contained a further, equally old, thick and well-thumbed book from whose politics it was also impossible to draw any conclusions about the attitudes of the house’s current occupants. The late farmer had been a very active beekeeper, and this final work in the house was a beekeeping yearbook by Baron August von Berlepsch. The author, whose introduction is dated Coburg, 15 August 1868, is evidently not only an expert, but also a moralist and scholarly citizen. ‘I know many people (he writes) who before becoming beekeepers used every minute of their free time (who indeed took time off at their own expense) in order to head to the nearest pub for a drink, to play cards or get into a lather over futile political disputes. But as soon as they became beekeepers they stayed at home with their families; when the weather was fine they spent their leisure hours with their bees, and when it was inclement they read magazines about beekeeping, made hives, repaired their beekeeping equipment – in short they enjoyed home life and hard work. “Staying at home” is of course the shibboleth of the responsible citizen . . .’ It was on that day, 28 February, that I heard the Doctor for the last time. In terms of content it was exactly the same as all his speeches and articles during the final period: brutal sporting imagery and final victory and ill-concealed despair. But his manner of speaking seemed to me to have changed. He dispensed with any variations in modulation; he uttered the individual words slowly, in a uniformly emphatic tone, beat by beat, pause by pause, just like a pile-driver. they brought home news from outside as well, because here it didn’t just rain chaff, as was later the case in Falkenstein. As well as this silver paper, which, together with the vestiges of the winter snow, also made the forests of fir and pine look far more festive than the springlike mixed woodland of the Erzgebirge, there were also leaflets, which were keenly collected and studied. For the most part they repeated what was said in the broadcasts of ‘the other’: appeals to renounce a criminal and insane government intent on continuing to fight an irretrievably lost war until Germany was totally destroyed. Finally, on very rare occasions, these thoroughly modern and informative discussions were supplemented by a very different source of enlightenment: passages from the Bible were quoted – Agnes’s elderly but very sprightly father spoke at great length about the Queen of Sheba – which unequivocally prophesied the arrival of the Russians. Initially I wanted to categorize this impact of the Bible on the LTI as an exclusively rural phenomenon, but then in good time I was reminded of our Babisnau poplar along with the widespread fondness for astrology amongst the leadership and the nation as a whole. I made a note to myself to the effect that migrations of this kind should be investigated in temporal, geographical and social terms. Someone once told me that the Gestapo had spread a rumour in Berlin and then studied how long it took to reach Munich and how it got there. The next twelve days on the run were full of exertions, of hunger, of sleeping on the bare stone floor of a railway station, of bombs dropped on the moving train and on the waiting room where we were supposed to be fed at last, of walking at night along the bombed railway line, of wading in streams alongside smashed bridges, of cowering in bunkers, of sweating, of freezing and shivering in sodden footwear, of rattling bursts of fire from hedgehoppers – but much worse than all that was the ceaseless and agonizing fear of being challenged and imprisoned. Hans had given us ample money and means of support, but had refused to give us the poison I had begged for in case of dire emergency – ‘Don’t let us fall into the hands of our enemies, they are a hundred times more terrible than any death!’ But in terms of their use of the LTI it was always the same: they cursed Nazism and did so using its own expressions. No, despite the fact that there was so much to be experienced during the final days of the war (and afterwards on the journey home) – and these were real experiences, not the false kind promulgated by the language of the Hitler regime – I didn’t find anything to add to the LTI or any departure from what I had observed from the restricted vantage point of our particular place of suffering. It really was total, it truly encompassed and contaminated the whole of Greater Germany in its absolute uniformity. That very afternoon we celebrated our move into our new accommodation. Along with many other comforts, these lodgings afforded us a very special pleasure. For a whole week we didn’t have to worry about pine cones and brushwood – we had better fuel. During better Nazi times the HJ and the like had lived in this house, and the rooms had been chock-full of beautifully framed portraits of Hitler, the movement’s wall banners, flags and wooden swastikas. All of this, together with the huge swastika above the door and the display case for the Stürmer from the hallway, had been removed and taken to the loft, where it formed a huge, jumbled heap. Next to the loft there was the bright attic which we had chosen for ourselves, and in which we spent a number of weeks. For the whole of the first week I kept the room warm with portraits of Hitler and their frames, with swastikas and flags bearing swastikas and yet more portraits of Hitler, and each time it was bliss. Once the last picture had been incinerated the display case was due to come a cropper. But it had been made of heavy, thick planks and I couldn’t manage it by kicking or brute force. In the house I found a little hatchet and a small handsaw. I tried with the hatchet and I tried with the saw. But the frame refused to give. The wood was much too thick and solid, and after all that had happened my heart couldn’t take too much strain any more. ‘Let’s go and collect pine cones in the wood instead,’ my wife said, ‘it’s more enjoyable and more healthy.’ So we moved over to different fuel and the display case for the Stürmer remained intact. Now, when I receive letters from Bavaria, I am sometimes reminded of it . . . For two bad years we were forced to share the flat with Käthchen Sara, and at least once a day she stormed into our room without knocking, and sometimes on a Sunday morning we woke to find her sitting on our bed, and each time she said: ‘Write it down – you must write it down!’ and then, with the same emotion, she would report on the latest house search, the latest suicide, the latest cut in ration cards. She believed in my role as chronicler, and in her childish eyes it was as if no other chronicler of the age would appear other than me, whom she so often saw sitting at the writing desk. But hard on the heels of Käthchen’s childishly over-enthusiastic voice I heard the half-sympathetic, half-sarcastic tones of good old Stühler, with whom we had been brought together following a new rounding-up. It occurred much later, by which time Käthchen Sara had long since disappeared for ever in Poland. Stühler also didn’t live to see the day of salvation. He was allowed to stay in the country and die a natural, Gestapo-free death, yet he too is a victim of the Third reich, because, but for the preceding suffering, the young man would have had more power of resistance. And he suffered much more than poor Käthchen, because his soul was not a slate, and because he was tormented by worry for his wife and son, a highly gifted boy who was robbed of any school education by Nazi law. ‘Stop doing all that writing and have an extra hour’s sleep’, was invariably his reaction on noticing that I had got up too early; ‘Your writing is merely putting you in danger. And do you really think that you are experiencing anything special? Don’t you realize that thousands of others are suffering thousands of times more than you are? And don’t you think that in time there will be more than enough historians to write about all this? People with better material and a better overview than you? What can you see, what can you record from your confinement here? Everyone has to go to the factory, many are beaten, and no one makes a fuss about being spat at any longer . . .’ He often went on in this vein for a long time as we stood together in the kitchen when we had time off and helped our wives with the washing up or scrubbing vegetables. I didn’t let myself be led astray at the time, I got up each morning at half-past three and noted down what had happened during the previous day before starting work at the factory. I told myself: you hear with your own ears, and what matters is that you listen in specifically to the everyday, ordinary and average things, all that is devoid of glamour and heroism . . . And moreover: I kept hold of my balancing pole, and it kept hold of me . . . But now, with the danger gone and a new life opening up in front of me, I ended up asking myself how I should initially fill it up and whether it wouldn’t be conceited and a waste of time to bury myself in my bulging diaries. And Käthchen and Stühler fought over me. Until a single word made up my mind for me. Amongst the refugees in the village there was a worker from Berlin with her two little daughters. I don’t know how it came about that we got talking to one another even before the Americans marched in. By that time it had already given me pleasure for a day or two, on passing her by, to hear her speaking with an unadulterated Berlin accent in the heart of upper Bavaria. She was sociable, and recognized immediately that we were kindred spirits politically. She told us almost at once that her husband had spent a long time in prison for being a communist and, if he was even still alive, was now God knows where in a punishment battalion. And she herself, as she proudly reported, had also been locked up for a year, and would still be there today but for the fact that the prisons were overcrowded and that they needed her as a worker. ‘Why were you in prison?’ I asked. ‘Well, ’cos of certain expressions {wejen Ausdrücken} . . .’ (She had insulted the Führer along with the symbols and institutions of the Third reich.) For me this was the revelation. It was this word that made me see clearly. ’Cos of certain expressions. That was the why and the wherefore of my setting to work on the diaries. I wanted to separate the balancing pole from the mass of other things, and just sketch in the hands that held it. That is how this book came about, less out of conceit, I hope, than ’cos of certain expressions. CHARLOTTE. (Quietly, definitively:) I signed it. (Tension fills the room.) And I said to myself, “I’ll still do whatever I want.” Ich mache doch was ich will. DOUG. And then they left. CHARLOTTE. Ja, ja. (Another pause. Charlotte turns cagey:) Meine Tante Luise always said, “Be as smart as the snakes; it’s in the Bible.” She said, “Never forget that you are living in the lion’s den. Sometimes, you must howl with the wolves.”