Chapter 8
Markenburg: November 1929
There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it.
There is only an eternally new now that builds and
creates itself out of the best as the past withdraws.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Gunther had seen her and spoken with her again, an encounter even more exciting than the first. Being in close proximity to Ruth was thrilling and he was exhilarated at meeting her once more. However, this time the occasion had a sad, confusing finale.
The days were shorter now and it was much colder. Gunther decided that if Ruth appeared regularly on the jetty, then whenever the opportunity arose, he would go down there and see her. Viktor and Elena had a vague suspicion that he may well be on a romantic quest on his evening forays into town, but they maintained a diplomatic silence. He was becoming a man, and they knew when to stand back.
It was just before 7 pm when Gunther stepped onto the jetty, but there was no sign of Ruth. However, the swans and the ducks all streamed towards him as they obviously thought that he was the bearer of their supper. It was so peaceful by the water and this river, his river, was beautiful. The cold breeze had a promise of the harsher imminent winter as it rustled through the thick reeds and scattered dry leaves along the bank. He looked up at the hills and although the sun had long set, they stood out in stark black silhouettes against dark sky tinged with a hint of red on the horizon. Gunther wondered if he should abandon his ideas of escaping all this. Maybe it was a paradise, and if he left, then perhaps the outside world would change him as it had Albert.
The ducks were making so much noise that at first he didn’t hear Ruth’s lovely voice over his shoulder.
“Are you trying to take my job?”
Heart beating, he turned to face her. In the twilight, wearing a dark green cloak with a hood, she looked like a finely painted and mysteriously dusky princess from some fairy-tale book. And her fragrance was there again, borne on the cool evening air, that hint of warm gardens, of honeysuckle, of musk.
“I knew you’d be down here,” he said, “and I decided to come and meet you.” She walked a couple of paces past him, and with her back to him, began distributing the morsels of old bread from her basket.
“You have your brother’s faults,” she said.
“His faults?”
“Yes. Persistence. And you’re unpredictable.”
“How can persistence be a fault?” he asked, “and isn’t being predictable just as boring as being unpredictable?”
She turned around and regarded him, this time unsmiling and serious.
“You’re logical, though. That’s more than your brother is. Your family is not very popular right now.”
Gunther caught his breath. What was this she was saying? What had they done?
“I’m sorry … what on earth makes you say that?”
She turned to face the swans again and carried on feeding them.
“You should talk to the tailor, Herschel Blum, about that.”
“Herschel Blum? My family? Unpopular? I don’t understand…”
She scattered the final handful of bread and blew the remaining crumbs from her hands.
“Come with me,” she said.
She began to walk briskly and he followed her along the jetty. They went along the river bank to a park bench beneath the trees and Ruth sat down. He desperately wanted to snuggle up to her, to feel her warmth, but had to check himself; he knew he was fantasising again. With their backs to the river, they were facing the town, and through the archway between Muller’s Beer Hall and Kersten’s furniture store, he could see the brightly lit market place with its new electric lighting, and the town hall. Ruth placed her empty basket alongside her on the bench and stared ahead.
“When my father brought us here, he thought it would mean a simpler, better life.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it? It has to be better than Berlin or Munich?”
She shook her head.
“Like birds caught in the snare, like fish in a trap, are we when bad luck falls upon us. Do you know where that saying is from?”
“It sounds biblical. But it’s depressing.”
“Yes. It’s from the Torah. One remembers these things when your father’s a Rabbi. ‘Do not be scornful of anyone, or doubt that anything can happen, for there is no person without his hour, nothing without its place.’ That’s another little saying I’ve heard him utter. What a pity this kind of wisdom seems to have escaped your family.”
Gunther took hold of her shoulder and forced her to face him.
“What is all this about? Why do you keep saying things about my family? What harm have we done you?”
She gave a short, cynical laugh.
“Oh, you’re such a pretty boy, Gunther, but don’t hide behind your good looks. It’s your big brother and his nasty, evil associates. Did he not tell you what they’d been up to whilst he was home?”
Gunther’s heart sank. Had Albert and his illogical lurch into Nazi anti-Semitism seeped out from Munich and soiled his own home patch? He knew about the S.A. having members in Markenburg, but the thought that Albert was connected to their stupidity made him feel sick.
“I’m sorry, Ruth. You’ll have to tell me. I know he’s become involved with those Hitler maniacs, and I can only speak for myself and my parents when I say that we find it all very depressing. What has he been up to?”
“Your beloved Albert,“ she replied, “distributed some very unpleasant leaflets around the town. Then his so-called comrades, Ruckerl and Hausser, decided to smear shit on the door to Herschel Blum’s tailoring shop. Ruckerl and Hausser and some of the older S.A. members in town are all as dumb as brain-dead sheep, but I thought better of Albert Reisemann. There was a time that he’d fight for my attention; he was so keen to know me. He had a reputation for intelligence. So, we imagine now that the Reisemann house must be a newly recruited branch of the NSDAP. The station master, Herr Prien, who respects my family, already knows about your mad Uncle Karl and his rantings and ravings. So, once again, it’s the Jews. We simply can’t put a foot right. You close every avenue down to us, so we become bakers, tailors and academics, we try to live our own lives and never preach to the Christians. And God gives me such twisted luck and he places a sweet, good looking young man in my path, but he is tainted.”
“No!” he almost spat the word, “No, no, this is nottrue. Yes, Albert has been lost to us. Something has happened to him, but not to me, or my parents. You are wrongto say these things!”
She closed her eyes and threw her head back.
“Hisham’ru lakhem pen yif’teh l’vav’khem
v’sar’tem va’avad’tem Elohim acheirim v’hish’tachavitem lahem”
Gunther looked up at the night sky where the brilliant stars shone innocently down. Sitting there beneath the trees, what he had hoped might be a heart-warming liaison had turned into something disturbingly bleak and sad. This strange, alien utterance, despite it sounding exotic, emanating from that mouth he longed to kiss, simply made everything more confusing.
“What does that mean?” he almost wailed, “is that Hebrew or something?”
She leaned forward and turned her face toward his. Her dark eyes burned with a new intensity. Her full, red lips parted and despite everything he still had to fight back the desire to draw her close, to embrace her, to show his love.
“Yes, little Nazi boy! Deuteronomy 11:13-21 ‘Beware, lest your heart be deceived and you turn and serve other Gods and worship them.’”
In acute despair he sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
“Oh, Ruth. I tell you the absolute truth when I say that neither I, nor my parents, knew anything about this. My father and mother are not Nazis and neither am I, although I can’t speak for Uncle Karl. But I will personally, tomorrow morning, come into town and meet Herschel Blum, to apologise for what has happened. That will not make things right, but I can’t have the Reisemann family name ruined by my brother’s stupidity. Would I have come down here looking for you if I’d known what had happened? Look at me! Look into my face and tell me I’m evil!”
She looked away, but he took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him again. Their eyes met and they gazed at one another for what seemed like minutes yet were only a few seconds. Gunther felt he could have looked into those lovely eyes for ever and ever. She stared down at her hands in her lap.
“No, you’re not evil. But you know about the way disease can get into the vines and ruin the harvest … I fear that’s what is happening to Germany. Your brother and his cronies are a virus, a germ, and the crop will be ruined.”
He took her hand and kissed it. She did not resist. It was a slender hand, soft, warm, with elegant, long well-manicured fingers, and the thrill he felt as his lips touched her flesh was exquisite. Then she stood up, pulled her hood forward and began to walk away. She turned and looked back at him, but she was not smiling.
“Can I see you again?” he asked.
“I can’t stop you,” she said, and walked off.
He watched her move gracefully through the gloom and listened to the steady click of her heels on the cobblestones. Then she was gone.
He sat there in the dark for a long time and the whole world around him, which had seemed a paradise a few minutes earlier, pressed upon his shoulders like a bone-crushing weight.
His visit the next morning to Herschel Blum’s shop was not a comfortable one, yet it was an event preferable to the miserable experience of telling his parents about what Albert and his thugs had done. The Reisemanns, respected in Markenburg, had always got along well with all their neighbours. So the revelation that Albert, who since childhood had been held in affection in the neighbourhood, had become some kind of hateful hooligan, was bound to be the source of much pain and concern.
When Gunther arrived at Blum’s modest tailor shop off Friedrichstrasse, a narrow little street which ran parallel to the back of the town hall, Blum, as was the custom, was sitting in his window, cross-legged, making a jacket. When he saw Gunther approaching, he stopped, clambered down from the table and began to furiously gesticulate for him to go away.
Yet Gunther simply had no choice but to persist, and knocked furiously on his door until, at long last, Herschel appeared. His expression was one of defiance, yet it seemed to fluctuate with the odd flash of fear. Herschel Blum was a small man in his late 50s with long white hair and sharp grey eyes. The small Jewish community in Markenburg were very traditional with their faith. Blum always wore his black velvet skullcap, the yamulka, or ‘kippah’. A memory came back to Gunther. He recalled, as a boy, asking him about his headgear and the tailor told him that it was to remind the Jews that God was ‘above’ and that there was something higher than man. He had always been a rather jolly old soul, but today he was very agitated by Gunther’s presence.
“You come to put more dreck on my door? Who sent you here, your bully boy brother? And to to think I made clothes for your family. Where’s your swastika, boy? Or do you want me to embroider one for you? I’ll do you a nice one, very cheap. Isn’t that what Jews do? Make nice, cheap things for the goyim?” Yet as Gunther stood there, head hung in shame for some time as Blum continued to rail against him, eventually his voice trailed off and he stepped off the doorstep and stood very close, looking his visitor straight in the face.
“Well? Gunther Reisemann – state your case or fuck off!”
It was awful to see this normally pleasant old tailor made angry enough to swear. Gunther took a deep breath.
“Herr Blum, I am not here with any bad intention. I’ve come to apologise, on behalf my family, for the behaviour of my brother and his so-called brown shirt friends. My mother and father also send their apologies, and they want you to know how sorry they are and how ashamed we all feel. Something has happened to my brother Albert whilst he’s been living in Munich, but whatever it is, it’s out of our control.” Blum stood there for a while absorbing Gunther’s words, and his expression softened slightly.
“You know, son, when we live in a community, if a link is broken, the whole chain breaks. A fool says what he knows, and a wise man knows what he says. Which one will you grow into – fool or wise man?”
“I don’t know how to answer, but I’d like to be wise.”
Blum stroked his chin and broke into a faint smile.
“Well, I accept your apology young Gunther. But the next time you see your brother, remind him that talking comes by nature, silence by wisdom. He and his nasty mates should keep their foul mouths closed and find something to do which brings them honour, not shame. They called me vermin and a rat – can you believe that? Herschel Blum, whose sons died for this country in the war. No wonder that lot wear brown shirts – it’s the same colour of the shit which comes out of their shkutz lips. Now go home, son. I appreciate you coming, and tell your mother and father that I share their concern and disappointment. Now, I’ve got pants to make. Bugger off!”
After Albert’s disastrous home visit Gunther began to take more of an interest in politics. He needed to know how he could make his country into a better place to live without resorting to the extreme views of his brother, yet although he felt opposed to the wicked and illogical propaganda about the Jews, perhaps many of the other political points being made about the situation in Germany seemed to suggest other possibilities. Perhaps, he thought, like the Russians, who took the old order and destroyed it to build something new, Germans could do something similar. He knew he would have to keep reading and listening in order to understand. He understood why a well-travelled man like Uncle Karl reacted the way he did when something really serious happened. Karl’s latest soap box for complaint was something called the Liberty Law. This campaign had begun on October 16 against yet another ‘plan’ concerning the payment of war reparations. Apparently, the so-called ‘victorious allies’ had finally realised that Germany could ill afford the vast sums of money being paid annually, and this new plan, ‘The Young Plan’ was an attempt to re-structure these payments to a more manageable framework. As usual, Uncle Karl had explained it to the family in tedious detail.
“As I understand it, there’s this very rich man called Alfred Hugenberg who runs the German Nationalist Party the DNVP. He was elected to the Reichstag and because he has so much bloody money he can fund his political campaigns against the Versailles Treaty, the Locarno Treaty and the Young Plan. This Hugenberg fellow is now funding Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. So, there are many people who oppose all the plans and the reparations, but the Reichstag seems to recognise that the law is the law, and only a majority of the voters can alter it. However, the Nazi Party has joined a coalition of conservative groups under Hugenberg’s leadership to oppose the Young Plan. It will be interesting to see what success they have. So, let’s see – but at least Germany is fighting back.” As ever, a visit from Uncle Karl had left everyone reeling from another gale of information.
To Gunther’s surprise and dismay, he’d received a package in the post from Albert. It contained a brochure, written by the same man who wrote the article which was pinned to the kitchen door. Entitled ‘Those Damn Nazis’, when he showed it to his parents, Viktor immediately went over to the kitchen door, removed the Joseph Goebbels newspaper clipping and threw it onto the fire. He then ripped up the brochure and burnt that, too. Neither Gunther or Uncle Karl had ever seen him so cross and agitated. Yet Gunther had torn out one page of the brochure. He felt he needed to know why the Nazis, and Albert, hated the Jews so much. There were a few pages on this subject, and some of it made his mother cry. She said that she feared that her oldest son had sold his soul to Satan, and that the Nazis were the total opposite of everything Christian. The extract Gunther had copied was very worrying.
Anti-Semitism is not Christian. That means that it is Christian to allow the Jews to go on as they are, stripping the skin from our bodies and mocking us. To be a Christian means to love one’s neighbour as oneself! My neighbour is my racial and blood brother. If I love him, I have to hate his enemies. He who thinks German must despise the Jews. The one requires the other. Christ himself saw that love did not always work. When he found the moneychangers in the temple, he did not say: “Children, love one another!” He took up a whip and drove them out.
Gunther thought of Ruth. How horrible it must be to be regarded in such a foul way by a steadily growing body of people.
There had been a disaster in the finance houses and banks in America which both Uncle Karl and father believed would now make life in Germany even worse than it already was. During his latest visit, Karl appeared more agitated than ever.
“The bloody swines are calling it the ‘Wall Street Crash’ and I know about a lot of things but the ways of international finance puzzle me. How can the stupid speculation of very rich men four thousand miles away be allowed to make our family life more of a struggle than it already is? My God! They should have just rolled across the land in 1918 and shot and gassed the bloody lot of us. I know how you feel, Viktor and Elena, about the Nazis. But this is not 1918, we’ve moved on and they’re all we’ve got standing between us and total penury.” Viktor shook his head.
“You’re forgetting something, Karl, the Presidential elections. Paul von Hindenburg was the people’s choice - We’ve re-elected him. He’s tradition. The Nazis don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.”
Karl gave a dry, rasping sardonic laugh.
“He’s old, Viktor! He won’t last much longer. We need new blood. I’m sorry that you feel the way you do about the Jews. But in the end you’ll have to accept the reality, however grim it is.”
Viktor bowed his head and sighed.
“And what’s that, then. Karl?”
“Simple. Hitler is right.”