Making History

MODERN HISTORY

Firestone

‘I need you Steve. You have to help me find a library.’

Steve dropped some dollar bills onto the beer-sodden table and hurried after me.

‘Jesus man, what has gotten into you?’

‘Where’s the nearest?’

‘Library? God’s sake, this is Princeton.’

‘Any good one will do. Please!’

‘Okay, okay. There’s the Firestone on campus, just across the street.’

‘Come on then!’

We ran past a post-office, up the side of Palmer Square and into Nassau, across which I hurled myself without a sideways glance.

‘Heck, Mikey. You ever hear of jay-walking?’

‘I’m sorry, but I have to know.’

The Firestone Library was a gaunt, stone cathedral of a building, crowned by a huge tower finned with sharp buttresses that launched up from the roof like a rocket. I stood in the doorway and turned to Steve. ‘This has everything?’

Steve shook his head with something approaching despair. ‘Mikey,’ he said. ‘There’s over eleven million books on campus and most of them are here.’

‘And I’m allowed to use it?’

He nodded with glum resignation and pushed open the door.

‘History,’ I hissed to him as we walked towards a massive central desk. ‘Where’s Modern European History?’

‘I think maybe we’d better reserve a carrel,’ was his response.

‘A what?’

‘You know, a carrel…’

I shook my head in puzzlement.

‘A room,’ said Steve irritably, plucking a white paper slip from the desk. ‘A private room for reading. A carrel. What the hell else do you call them?’

§

After half an hour’s bureaucratic delay and whispered shelf-raiding we found ourselves in one of these carrels: a small, square room equipped with a desk, a chair and handsome prints of eighteenth century Princeton on the walls. On the table in front of me lay our hoard of twelve books. I sat down, picked up a ‘Chronicle of World History’, took a deep breath and turned to H for ‘Hitler’.

Nothing.

‘You don’t have to stay,’ I said to Steve over my shoulder.

‘That’s okay,’ said Steve, who was settling himself in the corner in a lotus position, a pictorial book of military history laid out from knee to knee. ‘Hey, I might even learn something.’

Maybe he did learn something. I was too engrossed to pay much attention.

I turned to N for Nazi and after staring for a while at this strange new name, to G for ‘Gloder’. My fingers scrabbled at the paper, peeling back page after page of the entry, to see how much was given over to this one man. Seventy pages, listed under different headings, each contributed by a different historian. The first entry pronounced itself to be a chronological biography.

Gloder, Rudolf. (1894-1966) Founder and leader of the Nazi Party, Reich Chancellor and guiding spirit of the Greater German Reich from 1928 until his overthrow in 1963. Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Führer of the German Peoples.’ Born Bayreuth, Bavaria on 17 August, 1894, the only son of a professional oboist and music-teacher, Heinrich Gloder (q.v.) and his second wife Paula von Meissner und Groth (q.v.), the young Rudolf was encouraged by his mother, who considered that she had married beneath herself, to believe that he came of aristocratic stock. Much has been written about Paula’s connections with the German and Austrian aristocracy (see: Gloder: the Nobleman, A L Parlange, Louisiana State University Press, 1972; Prince Rudolf Mouton and Grover, Toulane, 1982, etc.) but there is little real evidence to show that his background was anything but that of a typical middle-class Bavarian family of the period. In later life, when ascending to power, Gloder went to great lengths to stress the ordinariness of his formative years, even hinting at years of poverty and hardship, but these claims bear as little inspection as his later claims of descendancy from a Habsburg line.

As a child there is no doubt that the young Rudolf was a considerable prodigy, proving himself an accomplished musician, equestrian, artist, athlete and swordsman. He was able to read and write in four languages, as well as the obligatory Latin and Greek expected of any Gymnasium student, by the time he was fourteen. Such contemporary accounts as can be trusted show that he was popular with his school-fellows and teachers and the papers relating to his admission to the military academy at Munich in 1910, when he was sixteen, offer glowing testimonials to the high esteem in which he was held by all who knew him.

At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 Gloder joined the 16th Bavarian Infantry Reserve Regiment as an enlisted man, a decision which distressed his mother and puzzled many of his friends. His own account of his wartime experiences (Kampfparolen, Munich 1923, ‘Fighting Words’ trans. Hugo Ubermayer, London 1924) a masterpiece of false modesty and glamorous self-romanticization, makes the claim that he wished to fight shoulder to shoulder with ordinary Germans. There can be no question, certainly, that had he joined as an officer in any of the smarter regiments which would have welcomed a cadet of such impressive qualifications, he would never have been able to match the unexampled achievement of his giddy rise through the ranks from Private Gemeiner to full Staff Major, collecting on the way, amongst other decorations, the Iron Cross, First Class, in the Oak Leaf and Diamond orders.

I lowered the book for a moment and stared at the wall facing me. The 16th Bavarian Infantry Reserve. The Regiment List. Hitler’s regiment.

The Germany to which Gloder returned late in 1918 following the signing of the 11th November Armistice was a nation in political uproar. Assigned the role of Vertrauensmann by Colonel Karl Mayr of the Bavarian Army Propaganda Unit, with a brief to keep an eye on the scores of burgeoning right- and left-wing political organizations springing up almost daily in the political-vacuum left by Munich’s abortive revolution of April 1919, Gloder attended in the September of that year a meeting of the fringe ultra-right faction, the Deutsche Arbeiterspartei, the German Workers’ Party, led and founded by Anton Drexler (q.v.), a 36-year-old railway yard toolmaker. Although numbering fewer than fifty members, Gloder saw the DAP’s apparently self-contradictory blend of anti-Marxist socialism and anti-capitalist nationalism as containing exactly the right ingredients for a party of national unity. Within six months Gloder had cut off all official contact with the Reichswehr, resigned from Mayr’s propaganda unit, joined the DAP, ousted the ‘National Chairman’, a Thule Society agitator named Karl Harrer (q.v.) and elbowed aside Drexler himself to assume full leadership as Führer or leader of the party.

In 1921, he added the prefix Nationalsozialistisch to the DAP’s official title. Despite his loathing of socialism and labour unions, Gloder recognised the need for his party to attract ordinary working men who might otherwise be drawn into Marxism and Bolshevism. The NSDAP rapidly acquired, from the German pronunciation of the first four letters of its title, the universally applied sobriquet ‘Nazi’, claiming for its own the Hakenkreuz or swastika as its proprietary symbol, much to the disgust of other right-wing groups who had used it since the previous century in their literature and street banners.

Gloder’s greatest gifts, in the early days of the party, were of organization and of demagoguery. Known for his ready, caustic wit, early rivals dismissed him as a comedian, but he was able to turn the unkindly meant nicknames of Gloder, der ulkige Vogtl, or Rudi der Clown, into weapons of rhetorical attack against his enemies. There is no question however, that it was his charm that won him the most friends and the steady stream of new recruits from all classes of society to the party, that by the early 1920s had swelled to a flood. Naturally endowed with good looks, an athletic bearing and a movie star smile, Gloder’s ability to cultivate the admiration and trust of natural political enemies was legendary. The industrial and military classes had faith in him, the ordinary man admired and envied him and women all over Germany (and beyond) openly worshipped him.

Organizationally, he grouped the party into sections which were to deal with issues that he considered critical to the achievement of the growth of this fledgling party and the wider growth, when the time came, of greater Germany herself.

Propaganda was of huge importance and the recruitment to the party of Josef Gobbels (q.v.), an academic Rhinelander of strict Catholic upbringing who had been rejected for war service on account of a polio-crippled leg, could not have been more timely. Gobbels’ fear of being considered a ‘bourgeois intellectual’ and his own sense of physical inferiority had led him to formulate a sentimental mythology of blond Nordic purity and manly Spartan virtues: in Gobbels’ eyes, Rudolf Gloder was the physical, spiritual and intellectual embodiment of all these Aryan ideals and from their first meeting, Gobbels’ considerable gifts of oratory and his natural, modern grasp of the techniques of newsreel and radio, were placed entirely at his Führer’s service.

Propaganda was for Gloder the means to achieve and maintain political power, but over the years he came to the view that an almost equal significance lay in the potential of science, engineering, and technological innovation. Swallowing his natural anti-Semitism, Gloder went out of his way to court the physicists of Gottingen University and other centers of scientific excellence, where developments in atomic and quantum physics were reaching far ahead of any comparable institutions outside Germany. It was Gloder’s belief, prophetic as it turned out, that the good faith of the scientific community was essential for the future of Germany. This firmly held view ran counter to the instincts of ideologs such as Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher (q.q.q.v.) and even his close friend Gobbels who believed, with the others, that ‘Jew Science’ could only pollute a new Germany. Dietrich Eckart, the title of whose poem Deutschland Erwache! became the first slogan of Nazism, had helped fund the purchase of the Valkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the NSDAP, but fell out with Gloder over what he now saw as his leader’s soft-pedalling tactics against the Jews and the two never spoke again before Eckart’s death in 1923. At the time of Eckart’s funeral, Gloder complained to Gobbels that Eckart never understood that to frighten the Jews away early would be a tactical error. (Am Anjang, Rudolf Gloder, Berlin 1932, ‘My Early Life’, trans. Gottlob Blumenbach, New York 1933) Gloder would use anti-Semitism amongst the workers as a unifying slogan, but not at the expense of wasting the vital resources of Jewish science and banking. In secret meetings with the Jewish community throughout his early years, meetings of which even his most trusted allies were unaware, Gloder was able to convince prominent Jews that his party’s anti-Semitism was public posture and that Jews in Germany had less to fear from him than from the Marxists and other rightist factions.

Gloder’s third plank of policy in these early days was to organize an inner cadre, under the ruthless leadership of Ernst Rohm (q.v.), which used violent techniques of street-fightina and intimidation to frighten off opponents and to quell heckling and counter demonstrations from the left. Although these lawless squads of ex-servicemen and unemployed manual workers inspired fear and contempt in the liberal intellectuals of the time, Gloder managed privately to disavow and deprecate, to those who mattered, the brutal methods of his own party. He personally made friends with many writers, scientists, intellectuals, industrialists and jurists for whom Nazism seemed anathema, apparently convincing them that the tactics of Rohm, the party’s second-m-command and Gloder’s personally appointed deputy, were a temporary expedient, a price worth paying for the defeat of communism. At the same time, Gloder travelled regularly and extensively, visiting France, Britain, Russia and the United States, making great use of his linguistic gifts and charm of manner. Although during this period (1922-1925) the Nazi Party had not run in a single election, it had grown within four years to become, after the Social Democrats (q.v.) and Communists, the third largest party in Germany and a real force to be reckoned with. Gloder’s journeys abroad, in his famous red Fokker airplane (trading none too subtly on the universally respected image of Baron von Richthofen with whom he also later claimed kinship) were designed to demonstrate to the world and to Germans back home that he was a reasonable, civilized man, a man of culture and statecraft who cut a credible figure on the world stage. He explained to those foreign politicians who would receive him (and there were many) that he could not put his party up for election until he was able to ameliorate the terms of the Versailles Treaty (q.v.). In this way he outflanked the Social Democrats, forged links with power-brokers in Europe and America and made a name for himself in the international arena at a time when Germany was an almost entirely inward-looking nation, still dealing with the shame of military defeat and the humiliation of the enforced peace. During these years of travel, Gloder appeared in a Hollywood silent picture, guying his own reputation for oratory and wit (The Public Speaker, Hal Roach, 1924), played golf with the Prince of Wales (q.v.), danced with Josephine Baker (q.v.), climbed the Matter-horn and forged many friendships and alliances which were to prove crucial in the years to come.

In 1923 Gloder repelled the advances of Erich Ludendorff (q.v.) whose dreams of power encompassed the dismantling of the Weimar Republic (q.v.) and the installation of a military-style junta in its place. Ludendorff had attempted to seize power once before in Berlin during the abortive Kapp putsch of 1920 and Gloder distrusted the veteran General’s political judgement. He distrusted even more the extreme forms of paranoia against Freemasonry, Jesuitism and Judaism exhibited by Ludendorffs insistence that ‘supranational powers’ had caused the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (q.v.) in Sarajevo as well as the military defeat of Germany in 1918. The General had even gone so far as to claim that both Mozart and Schiller had been murdered by ‘the grand Cheka of the supranational secret society’. Gloder gave orders that no Nazi should assist Ludendorff in this new attempt to take the reins of power and it is probable he tipped off the Weimar authorities in November when, at the head of an army of barely two hundred, Ludendorff rode into the center of Munich from the Burgerbraukeller, to be summarily arrested on a charge of treason.

This ability on the part of Gloder to wait for the right moment was best tested five years later in 1928, when he once more refused to allow the NSDAP to run in the national elections. He persuaded the upper echelons of his party that they could not expect to win such an election and that even were they to do so, the economic conditions were not propitious. An element of prosperity was entering German life and the Social Democrats were riding high in public opinion. It was far better to exercise patience and to wait.

A few months later, the Wall Street Crash (q.v.) and the onset of the Great Depression (q.v.) was to prove the acumen of this political judgement. Hjalmar Schacht, Fritz Thyssen, Gustav Krupp, Friedrich Flick (q.q.q.q.v.) and other wealthy German industrial magnates quickly gauged the incompetence of the Social Democrats in the face of this unprecedented world slump and began to pour money into the coffers of Gloder’s Nazi party, by now convinced that only he possessed the necessary combination of sophisticated statecraft and popular backing to lead Germany out of its spiraling economic crisis.

By the Fall of 1929, with hyperinflation rampant and unemployment reaching epidemic proportions it was clear that…

‘Christ, Mikey, how much longer are you gonna be?’

I looked up, startled. ‘What time is it?’

‘Damn near six o’clock.’

‘Hell, I’ve only just begun. Can I take these books away with me?’

Steve shook his head. ‘Not the reference stuff, not the encyclopaedias and all. They have to stay on site. Guess you can take out these okay…’

He went to the table and picked up two smaller books. Textbooks on European History.

‘I’ll take them then,’ I said and stood and stretched. ‘Christ I’m sorry. You must have been so-o-o bored, Steve. Why didn’t you go? I reckon I know my way back to Henry Hall by now.’

Steve tucked the books under his arm. ‘I’ll tag along,’ he said.

‘Honestly, you don’t have to.’

He looked down at the carpet, embarrassed. ‘Fact is, Mikey…’

‘What?’

‘See, Professor Taylor, he told me not to let you out of my sight.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes. I see. Thinks I’m dangerous, does he?’

‘Maybe he figures you might get lost. You know, get yourself into trouble, do yourself some more damage.’

I nodded. ‘Well, it’s awful for you. I’m sorry.’

‘Hey, will you do me a favour? Will you stop apologising all the time?’

‘It’s an English habit,’ I said. ‘We’ve so much to be sorry for.’

‘Yeah, right.’

As I opened the door into the corridor, Steve stopped. ‘Gee! I just had a thought. Does it have to be books?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How about carts?’

‘Carts?’

‘Yeah, if you wanna study history you can take out carts.’

‘I don’t want to sound stupid,’ I said, ‘but what the hell is a cart?’

Ten minutes later we were walking out of the Firestone building, two borrowable library books and a stack of carts under my arm.

‘So,’ said Steve. ‘You going to tell me what this is all about? This sudden need to know all about the Nazi Party?’

‘I wish I could tell you,’ I said. ‘But I know you’d just think I was mad.’

Steve stopped and considered for a moment. ‘Here’s what we do. See that building over there? That’s the Chancellor Green Student Center. We go in. We pick up some pizzas and some donuts and some soda and whatever stuff else we feel like and we take it back to your place. Then you tell me everything that’s in your mind. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ I said.

I was relieved to arrive back at Henry Hall. The sight of so many students in the Rotunda at the Student Center had unnerved me, reminded me of how adrift I was, how alienated. The particularities of foreign food, foreign ways of serving it, foreign money, foreign shouts and calls, foreign laughing, foreign smells and foreign looks…they had hemmed me in on all sides until I wanted to scream. My room in Henry Hall, so strange to me this morning, now took on all the comfort and familiarity of an old pair of docksiders.

We dumped the brown paper bags of food onto the desk by the window. It was still light, but I wrestled with the blind-rod until the slats closed and switched on a lamp. There was a feeling I had, a hunted feeling, a need to nest down.

As we champed on our wedges of pizza I looked up at the walls.

‘These people here,’ I said, pointing to a poster. ‘Who the hell are they?’

‘You kidding?’

‘No, really. Tell me.’

‘They are the New York Yankees, Mike. You take a train to Penn Station to watch them play most every time you can.’

‘Oh, and them?’

‘Mandrax.’

‘Mandrax,’ I repeated. ‘They’re a band, right?’

‘They’re a band.’

‘And I like them do I?’.

Steve nodded with a smile.

‘They look like the saddest load of old farts I’ve ever seen,’ I said. ‘Are you sure I like them?’

‘Sure/ he nodded. ‘They’re neat.’

‘Neat are they? Well, if they’re neat I must be crazy about them. I happen to love neat. How about the Beatles? Do I like them? The Rolling Stones? Led Zeppelin? Elton John? Blur? Oily-Moily? Oasis?’

I laughed with pleasure at his blank stare. ‘Christ, I am going to make a killing’ I giggled. ‘Here, listen to this. Ha-hem! Yesterday? all my troubles seemed so far away! Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh I believe in yes-ter-day. What do you reckon?’

‘Ouch!’ said Steve, his hands over his ears.

‘Mm, you have to hear the harmonies, I suppose…what about this, then? Imagine there’s no heaven…No, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I’ll need some time alone with a synthesiser.’

I stood and walked around the walls. ‘Who’s this then?’

‘Luke White.’

He s a singer?

‘Get outta here! He’s a movie star.’

‘Hm, rather cute, isn’t he? Why’ve I got him up on my wall?’

‘That’s what a lot of people would like to know,’ Steve said and then turned a furious shade of red.

As he tried to cover up his confusion by concentrating on the interior of a donut, a thought that I had been carrying at the back of my mind forced itself upon me.

‘Um, Steve. This is going to sound like a really stupid question, but I’m not gay am I?’

Steve frowned. ‘Gay? Sometimes, I guess. Sure.’

‘No, no, you misunderstand me. Am I…you know, like…um, you know…?’

‘Huh?’

‘You know! Am I…a fairy? Queer?’

Steve went absolutely white. ‘Fuck’s sake, Mikey!’

‘Well, it isn’t so strange a question, is it? I mean, you know. You said I didn’t have any girlfriends. And then I thought, well, these posters…I just, you know…wondered, that’s all.’

‘Jesus, man. Are you crazy?’

‘Well, I know I never used to be, in Camb…in my memory, that is. At least I don’t think I was. Particularly. You know…any more than normal. I had a girlfriend, but frankly, it was a pretty weird relationship in some ways. She was older than me and it was as much convenience as anything, sharing a house, that sort of thing. I mean I loved her and everything, but I often used to envy James and Double Eddie slightly. Perhaps all the time I was…hell, I just wondered, you know. I expect it’s normal. No big deal.’

Steve was staring at his Coke can as if it held the secret of life. ‘No big deal?’ he said unsteadily. ‘You shouldn’t talk like that, Mikey. You’ll go getting yourself into trouble.’

‘Into trouble? You talk about it as if it’s a crime. I mean, all I’m asking is, am I now, or have I ever been…oh my God!’ I broke off abruptly, the rhythms of that old McCarthyite mantra causing a sudden terrible understanding to dawn. ‘It is, isn’t it? It’s a crime!’

He turned to me and I could almost believe that there were tears in his eyes. ‘Of course it’s a fucking crime, you asshole! Where the hell have you been living?’

‘Well that’s just it, Steve,’ I said. ‘That just it. You see, where I come from it isn’t a crime.’

‘Oh, right. Sure. Like on Mars, in the valley of the Big Rock Candy Mountain where marshmallows grow on the candy-cane trees and everybody skips and jumps and bakes cherry pie for strangers.’

I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Steve finished the Coke, pressed the sides of the can in with his thumbs and fumbled for a cigarette.

I lit one too and cleared my throat, hating the silence. ‘I assume that we’ve never…that is…the two of us…’

He glared at me furiously.

‘Mm. I’ll take that as a no then.’

He leaned forward in his chair and looked down between his legs at the carpet, his hair flopping straight down and obscuring his face.

Once more silence reigned.

‘Look Steve,’ I said. ‘If I told you that I did come from Mars, you’d think I was mad, wouldn’t you? But suppose, just suppose I came from…another place, just as strange, from a culture quite different from your own?’

Steve said nothing, just continued to scrutinise the carpet.

‘You’re a rational man,’ I went on. ‘You must concede that what has apparently happened to me is hard to explain. The way I talk, it’s not put on, you know that. Even Professor Taylor saw it and he’s genuinely English. Well genuinely over-English, frankly. You’ve seen me change, in a second — one sudden nanosecond, against a wall in Palmer Square — change from the guy you knew, all-American, philosophy-majoring, baseball-pitching, tooth-flossing regular old Mikey Young into someone completely different. I’m not different on the outside, but on the inside I am. You can’t deny that. It’s as plain as the hair on your head, which for some reason is all I can see of you at the moment. I know thousands of things I never knew before, but thousands of things I should know — I don’t. I don’t know who’s President of the United States, I don’t know where Hertford Connecticut is, I’m not even that sure where Connecticut itself is, come to that — somewhere on the right-hand-side, that’s all I’m sure of. I had never seen this campus before in my life until this morning, you know I wasn’t faking that. But I can tell you things about European History before 1920 that I couldn’t possibly know unless I’d studied it deeply. Here, I’ll prove it. Take this book and ask me any fact. Anything.’

Steve took the proffered book doubtfully. ‘So maybe you know stuff about Europe. So what?’

‘You know me pretty well…you think you know me pretty well. Look around you at my bookshelves, not one single history book. Did I do any history in my first two years? Take any courses in it?’

‘Guess not.’

‘Right. So test me. Anything from before 1930, say.’

Steve flipped through the book and stopped at a page. ‘Okay then, what was the Holy Alliance?’

I smiled. ‘Sir, please sir, easy-peasy, sir!’ I said, shooting my hand up in the air. ‘The Holy Alliance was the name given to a compact, sir, a compact signed by the extremely unholy trinity of…let me see, the Tsar of Russia — that would have been Alexander the First — and by Friedrich Wilhelm the Third of Prussia and by the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis the Second, though of course he was just plain old Francis the First of Austria now, wasn’t he? — what with Napoleon’s arse being whipped at Waterloo and all.’

‘Who else signed it?’ Steve was studying the book carefully.

‘Well, sir, Naples, sir, Sardinia, sir, France and Spain, sir. It was subsequently signed and ratified by Britain — the Prince Regent, later George IV, his father being potty at the time of course, though Britain was part of the Quadruple Alliance which was quite different. And the Ottoman Sultan signed it too. Though I’m afraid to say I can’t remember his name, if I ever knew it, and of course the Pope blessed it with a great blessing. The compact was signed in 1815. For an extra ten points and the holiday in Barbados I would go for 26th September. Am I right?’

‘Okay, okay…’ Steve rifled through the book again. ‘How about…Benjamin Disraeli?’

‘Benjamin Disraeli? What can’t I tell you?’ I was just humming now, in my element, skating elegantly on thick ice. ‘Born 1804, 21st December I think. Coined the phrase “the greasy pole” to describe his rise from humble Jewish origins to the Prime Ministership of high Victorian England and Empire. Son of a Sephardic dilettante, writer, antiquarian and sweetie by the name of Isaac who converted his whole family to Christianity in 1817. Ben started off as a law apprentice, dropped a bundle on bad investments and so turned himself into a novelist and wit to fund his dandy lifestyle and political aspirations. Wrote a series of books known as the Young England Novels, notably Coningsby, or the Younger Generation and Sybil, or the Two Nations. He’d been first elected to parliament a few years earlier, round about 1837 think, his fifth attempt at a seat. Anti-Whig, anti-utilitarian, he made a name for himself attacking his own government. He coined the phrase “organised hypocrisy” to describe Robert Peel’s attempts to repeal the Corn Laws. Hung around for years after that as leader of the party, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby, framing the Second Reform Act of 1860 which extended the vote to borough householders. Briefly became Prime Minister in 1868. Finally won an election against his great rival, William Ewart Gladstone in 1874, first Conservative win since 1841. Shoved through a load of trade-union and social reforms, borrowed four million quid to purchase the Suez Canal for Queen Victoria who was crazy about him, especially after he gave her the official new title “Empress of India”. He returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 claiming “Peace with Honour”, not unlike Chamberlain after Munich — though that won’t be in your book, I’m afraid — was created the First Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, having turned down a dukedom earlier, died in 1881 after being booted out of office the previous year. 19th April was the day he died, eight years and a day before the birth of Adolf Hitler, of whom you’ve also never heard. His followers call themselves the Primrose League and to this day go on about One Nation Conservatism. His wife called him “Dizzy” and she was famous for her devotion, lack of tact and general goofiness. Once travelled with him in a carriage to Parliament with her fingers jammed in the door in agony and never told him because she didn’t want to put him off his preparations for a big speech. Another time, she was in a garden with a couple of Victorian ladies and they tittered blushingly at a naked male statue’s generous endowment. “Oh that’s nothing,” she said, “you should see my Dizzy when he’s in the bath.” He described his final years as being his “anecdotage”. What else do you want to know?’

Steve didn’t look up from the book. ‘Give me the titles of some of his other novels.’

‘Phew, don’t want much, do you? Well, his first was called something like Dorian Gray. Obviously not that, but something like it. Vivien Grey! Was that it? There was another called The Young Duke, his last was Endymion, I know that. Wrote it in 1880. And I’m pretty sure there was another one with a woman’s name in the title…Henrietta, I think. Henrietta Tempest, something like that?’

‘Henrietta Temple, actually,’ said Steve closing the book. ‘Okay, so you know some history. What does that mean?’

‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘Does it square with what you know of me? Let me tell you every American president this century.’

‘Oh, like, big deal. Every schoolkid of ten can do that.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘William McKinley (assassinated 1901), Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Wood-row Wilson, Warren G Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C Hoover, FDR, FDR, FDR, Harry S Truman, Dwight D Eisenhower, Eisenhower again, John F Kennedy (assassinated ‘63), Lyndon B Johnson, Richard M Nixon, Nixon again (resigned ‘74), Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Reagan again, George Bush and finally, ladies and gentlemen, the forty-second President of these United States, Bill Clinton of Little Rock, Arkansas. How’s that?’

There was a puzzled look on Steve’s face. ‘I kinda got lost somewhere in the middle.’

‘Of course you did, after FDR, right?’

‘Right. There was a whole load of names there I never heard before. And you said Nixon resigned?’

‘So you’ve heard of Nixon then?’

‘Come on, Mikey. Get real.’

‘Richard Milhouse Nixon, Tricky Dicky. Resigned in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1973.’

‘For your information Richard Nixon was President three times from 1960 to 1972.’

‘I see. But Kennedy, Carter, Bush, LBJ, Clinton…they mean nothing to you?’

‘My little brother is called Clinton, but he sure as hell isn’t president.’

‘There! You see?’ I lit another cigarette and started to pace up and down. ‘Everything you know is different from what I know. How can that be?’

‘Your accent is different than it was yesterday. Some ways, you’re a different person than you were. I see that. But, Mikey, it’s your head. It’s all in your head.’

‘Oh, and a crack to the skull gave me a scholar’s knowledge of European history did it? It gave me the details of American Presidents you’ve never heard of and about whom I could talk in front of a lie detector for two hours without causing the needle to tremble once. It filled my mind with movies and songs and stories you’ve never heard before? Play it again Sam. I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. The force may be with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. The Truth Is Out There. Hasta la vista, baby. Catch 22. There will be no white wash at the White House. The Tin Drum. What’s The Story, Morning Glory? Schindler’s List. The name’s Bond, James Bond. Ich bin ein Berliner. Catcher in the Rye. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Perhaps some day you’ll join me, and the wo-o-o-rld will live as one. Beam me up, Scotty. I shall return. Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Never, in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. From Here to Eternity. Never mind the bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols. The Bridge on the River Kwai. Marlene Dietrich. ET phone home. What good is sitting, alone in a room, come hear, the music play, life is a cabaret, old friend, it’s only a cabaret. The Zapruda film and the grassy knoll. The Dirty Dozen. It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, football’s coming home. Where Eagles Dare. I smoked it but I didn’t inhale. Where’s the beef? Read my lips, no new taxes. Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you? We’ve got some work for you now. There!’

I paused for breath, sweating from the combination of effort, exhilaration and hot pepperoni. On Steve’s face I saw an expression in which admiration, astonishment, amusement, bafflement and fear were racing for the lead. Astonishment was ahead by half a length, but the others were pressing hard.

‘Face up to it Steve, I’m giving you a problem here that you can’t solve by talking about bumps and amnesia. I come from somewhere else.’ I ruffled my hair to allow air to pass through and cool the sweat. ‘Don’t think I don’t know how mad I’m sounding. God knows, I’ve seen enough movies to know how hard it is for the alien time-travelling hero to persuade anyone to listen to him. They usually end up by turning him in.’

‘Time travel?’ Steve closed his eyes tight in despair. ‘Oh Jesus, Mikey, you need help. You can’t be…’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Let me call Doc Ballinger,’ he pleaded. ‘Mikey, I don’t know what’s happening, but…I care about you, I mean I care about what happens to you, I don’t want you to go nuts.’

‘I know what you mean, Steve, but please, just listen. That’s not what I’m saying. I haven’t travelled in time. That is, not exactly. It’s just that time has…time has travelled in me. No, that’s not right. Listen to me, will you? Just listen. I’ll tell you a story. Imagine it’s just an idea, okay, a plot for a movie, something like that? Hear it with open ears…what’s the phrase? Without prejudice. Hear it without prejudice. Interrupt only if something is unclear. And when you’ve heard it, then you can decide what to do. Deal?’

‘I guess so.’

I moved the books and carts to one side of the desk and hauled myself onto it, swinging my legs below me. Steve sat on the floor tailor-fashion, looking up at me like a toddler on the playmat at story time.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Imagine a guy. A youngish guy. English. About my age. He’s researching for a history doctorate in an English University town. Let’s call it Cambridge…’

§

Times passes. The sun sinks slowly in the west. Sounds penetrate the room. Basketballs slapping on the corridor floor. The squeal of skidding trainers. Blue-grass music playing in the room above. Doors slamming. Shouts. The flicking of towels on flesh. A badly tuned guitar across the hall. Distant bells chiming the hours that slip past unheeded.

§

‘…a pizza, some coke and some absolutely disgusting jam doughnuts and came back to this dorm building, this Henry Hall. There he decided to tell his new friend Steve everything that had happened, telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God. The End.’

I stood from the desk and stretched. Darkness had fallen outside and within Henry Hall silence reigned.

Steve stayed down on the floor. His only movement was to lean forward from time to time and flick the end of the cigarette into the cola can, which was now so full of butts and sludge that it had long since ceased to fizz at each new fall of hot ash.

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said at last, ‘is how come, if this is all true, how come you can remember about it?’

‘Exactly!’ I said. ‘That’s what beats me too,’ I said. ‘I mean if my body is out here, then why is my consciousness still part of the old world?’

‘I guess,’ said Steve slowly. ‘I guess if this guy Zuckermann was generating an artificial quantum singularity and you got caught in the event horizon then maybe…I don’t know…’ he shrugged helplessly. ‘Heck, Mikey, nothing you’ve said means anything to me.’

‘But you do believe me? You do, don’t you?’

He spread his hands. ‘I can’t think of a better explanation for the way you’ve been behaving. But in theory this could happen all the time, you know? Maybe it’s happened many times before. We’d never know it. Maybe there’s a thousand twentieth centuries. A million.

All with different outcomes. You generated one of your own and you’re stuck in it.’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘But in my arrogance I thought I’d generated a better one. I thought if Hitler wasn’t born the century would have less to be ashamed of. I suppose I should have known better. The circumstances were still the same in Europe. There was still a vacuum in Germany waiting to be filled. There was still fifty years of anti-Semitism and nationalism ready to be exploited. There was still a Versailles Treaty and a Wall Street Crash and a Great Depression. But one thing at least…’

‘What?’

‘Well, this Rudolf Gloder, this Führer. I mean, at least he wasn’t as bad as Hitler. From what I could tell of him from that book he was human at least, sane. I mean there weren’t any death camps, no Zyklon B, no holocaust, no frothing monomania, no genocide.’

Steve stood slowly, easing the cramp in his legs. ‘Oh Mikey,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘Oh Mikey, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This Hitler of yours, what happened to him?’

‘He committed suicide as the Russians were pressing in on Berlin on one side and the Americans and British on the other. Shot himself and was burned in petrol in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. 30th April, 1945.’

‘I think maybe,’ said Steve going over to the computer, ‘that it’s time you had a look at some of these carts.’

He picked one up from the pile we had collected at the library, a small square box about three inches by four, and half an inch thick. He pulled at the casing and removed a smaller square of black plastic.

‘Why can’t you tell me what it is you want me to know?’

‘Unlike you,’ said Steve, pushing the black square into a slit below the computer’s monitor, I’m no history scholar.’

‘So this is what, some sort of video then? Or is it like a CD ROM?’

‘It’s not like anything,’ said Steve. ‘It’s a cart. It’s just a cart.’

I looked around the desk with a helpless air. ‘And where’s the keyboard?’

Steve shook his head. ‘Heck Mikey, what do you think this is, a frigging piano?’ He flicked a switch on the monitor and the screen lit up in orange and black. ‘You wanna watch from the beginning?’

He tossed me the cart’s casing. I looked at its title, printed in thick black German gothic above a huge flaming swastika.

THE FALL OF EUROPE

‘Oh shit,’ I said, filled with bowel-dropping dread. ‘Yes. From the beginning.’

Steve put his finger on the surface of the TV and a menu flashed up, blue lettering in big block squares. He touched the first square. A faint spinning noise came from the interior of the computer and almost immediately an orchestral fanfare blasted from speakers in the corners of the room. Steve dived towards a fader switch and the volume dropped. Not before the wall was thumped and a bleary shout had told us to keep the frigging noise down.

Steve handed me some earphones and guided my hands to the volume fader.

‘Donaldson and Webb Wo-o-rld History Series!’ a voice proclaimed, as if announcing a heavyweight title bout. ‘The Fall of Europe.’ The menu faded to a title screen, in the same gothic lettering.

I dropped down into the chair in front of the monitor.

The film, and it was a kind of film — marginally interactive, allowing me to pause and access little side-boxes of information using my finger on the screen — seemed to me to be aimed more at schools than at an Ivy League major, but it was just what I needed.

Just what I didn’t need.

‘Here,’ said Steve, ‘this goes with it.’ The clear plastic casing of the cart-holder contained a shiny printed cover, like the cover of a CD album. Steve pulled it out and gave it to me and from time to time I referred to this leaflet as I watched.

Donaldson and Webb Educational Media Cartridges

Series 3. World History.

Part V: The Fall Of Europe.

Search index

Track 1

May 1932: The Nazi Party elected to the Reichstag. Versailles Treaty renegotiated with Britain, France and America. Pact with Stalin.

Track 2

1933-34: Launch of Deutschwagen Rotary Engined Automobile. Development of miniature evacuated tube components transforms burgeoning German electronics industry.

Track 3

1935-36: Edinburgh Agreement ensures mutual trade arrangements between British Empire and The New Reich. Licensing of German technological developments in return for British rubber concessions and use of eastern trade routes. Berlin Olympics attended by President Roosevelt and King George V.

Track 4

1937:German-wide social welfare and national insurance scheme launched. Austria and Germany united. Gloder awarded Nobel Peace Prize. Addresses League of Nations on ‘The Modern State ‘.

Track 5

1938 Part 1: Fourth Nazi Congress: shock announcement by Gloder of development at Gottingen Institute of weaponry harnessing power of the atom. Paris Conference boycotted by Germany. Detonation of atomic bombs devastates Moscow and Leningrad, killing Stalin and entire Politburo. German invasion of Soviet Union. Annexation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, Turkey and the Baltic States.

Track 6

1938 Part 2: Capitulation of Scandinavia, Benelux, France and the United Kingdom. First Greater German Reich Conference in Berlin attended by King Edward VIII of Great Britain, Marshal Petain, Benito Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco and other heads of state. Terms of cooperation agreed with United States of America. Mutual agreement brokered by Germany to divide Pacific control between America and Imperial Japan. British possessions in India, Australia and Africa effectively under German control. Canada allowed to remain neutral.

Track 7

1939: All Jews forced to evacuate countries under the control of Greater German Reich and emigrate to new ‘Jewish Free State’ in area carved out between Montenegro and Herzegovina under control of Reichsminister Heydrich. American protests ignored. Rebellion in Britain quashed, over five thousand executed, including leading politicians and the Duke of York, brother of British King.

Track 8

1940-41: United States announces separate development of atom bomb. State of Cold War between Greater Germany and America. All diplomatic contacts closed.

Track 9

1942: Rumours of ill-treatment and mass-murder of citizens of Balkan Jewish Free State bring America to the brink of nuclear war with Greater Germany. Announcements of innovations in Germany rocketry and electronic telemetry cause United States government to back down. Rebellion in Russia ruthlessly crushed.

Track 10

1943: Unified system of education imposed across New Europe. German to become first language of all Europeans. Discovery by Berlin government of secret American supplies to resistance movement in Portugal brings new threat of war between the United States and Germany.

Track 11

Credits. Copyright notice. Course notes. Suggested reading.

I watched the whole cart, Steve told me afterwards, with my mouth open. It seems my attitude never shifted, my hands never moved, my legs never crossed or uncrossed, massaging my shoulder never dropped. It was as if, he said, I was in a state of near catalepsy. Only the movement of my eyes between the screen and the printed search index in my hands betrayed any sign of life or consciousness.

When it had finished, Steve leaned forward, flicked a switch on the computer and put a hand on my shoulder. I stared into the screen’s grey emptiness as the cart slid from its drive.

‘Oh Christ,’ I said, in a kind of whimper. ‘What have I done? What have I done?’

‘Hey, don’t worry,’ said Steve, shoulders. ‘It’s history. It’s all history.’

‘Steve, what happened to the Jews? This Jewish Free State, does it still exist?’

‘Look that was years ago, things have changed now. America and Europe are on pretty good terms. Europe even has free elections. More or less free.’

‘You haven’t answered my question. The Jews, what about them?’

‘There aren’t any. Not in Europe.’

‘You mean they were moved? To Israel? What happened?’

A sudden loud knock on the door caused Steve to whip his hand from my shoulder and leap back to the centre of the room. In answer to my raised eyebrows he shook his head, as puzzled as me as to who the hell might be calling on me at one o’clock in the morning.

The knock came again, louder this time.

‘Come in!’ I said.

Two men entered the room. They both wore the same checked short-sleeved shirts I had seen earlier in the day when Steve and I had sat at a table next to them in the outside courtyard of the Alchemist and Barrister while they bickered over maps.