The Vengeance of Rome

THIRTY-SIX

And so began what would in retrospect be my epiphany when one dream would begin to be realised and another dashed for ever. Here I again discovered the peaks of joy and an abyss of despair, my ‘Alpine’ period, a wonderful time of self-expression, personal peril and vocational satisfaction. Ultimately, as always, disappointment would bring not only emotional exhaustion but also physical danger.

For thirty months I came at last to anticipate fulfilment of my original Life Plan. During 1932-34, I found love, artistic expression, serious interest in my political philosophy, respect as a scientist and as an artist. Was the misery that followed the years of my European wanderings worth the pleasures of that time when the world blossomed with glorious hope, before the final betrayals which, I fear, continue to characterise this century? I lay the blame squarely at the door of Herr Adolf Hitler. Once the lie was only common currency in diplomacy and politics. Now it is a familiar instrument of public discourse.

I grew up in a world with firms whose names you could trust. Now those names are turned into manipulative illusions, false promises.

‘Alas!’ Hitler said at the end.’ My Germans have failed me!’ Hitler’s interests were neither national nor socialist; they were personal. He was prepared to kill an entire people to fulfil his dream.

The Germans survived and rejoined the family of civilised nations, but now it is too late. Heinz and Nestle own all the food. These firms are secretly controlled by alien interests. At any time they can decide to kill vast numbers of people. All they have to do is pick up a telephone and give an order. Cyanide will be injected into enough tins of baked beans to kill every British schoolboy overnight.

They already introduce narcotics into our food to make us more easily manipulated by their subliminal advertising, their aggressive attacks on all our old values. I do not totally dismiss the theory that Adolf Hitler, after the death of Angela Raubal, was secretly poisoned, causing all his subsequent decisions. So in the end he fell into the hands of his enemies. He had made enemies of the Jews, when he could have enlisted some at least as willing helpers in his dream to build a new Germany. I speak from experience. There are altruistic Jews. It is a fact. I met one in Odessa. In Germany Strasser had already sketched a perfectly workable plan, which would take no one’s dignity or livelihood from them. Typically, too much talk and not enough cash was given to the problem, and so it worsened rather than improved. Julius Streicher must accept much of the responsibility, but overall I do blame Hitler.

The secret little Zoyea and I shared was a mutual enthusiasm which I discovered by chance after she came to accept me. Initially, there was scant intercourse between us. Indeed, she avoided me. The boy was more communicative, but I had no special liking for him. I would occasionally pass on to him an adventure paper and discuss the stories with him, but he had a dull mind, though more amiable than he seemed.

The magazines, some pre-war, were from a huge collection I had found under my bed, together with a whole shelf of Edgar Wallace in French and German. They had belonged to Baldur von Schirach and were fascinating. Most were in English, containing graphic depictions of airships, of rocket-driven space liners, of gigantic vehicles capable of travelling across the American plains without use of rails or roads. My first thought was that the authors had stolen my ideas, but some were clearly unworkable. In the Aldine Library of Invention, Travel & Adventure, I found, for instance a tale called ‘Across the Frozen Sea’, published some time before the world conflict, which proposed a preposterous schooner for sailing on giant skis across the Arctic ice! The power—weight ratio alone would not permit such nonsense! And the presumption that the Arctic plain is as smooth as Streatham Ice Rink is equally unscientific!

The English-speaking von Schirach possessed an interest in engineering and futuristic invention he had not revealed to me. Here were Frank Reade, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, Science and Invention, Amazing Science Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Scientific American, Dusty Ayres and his Battle Aces and a dozen others. There were German and French tales from Jules Verne and his followers. Stories featuring Fantomas, Die Fledermaus and Doctor Mabuse were less imaginative. A rather primitive version of my articulated submarine was anticipated in a tale called ‘Into the Maelstrom’. My flying cities drawn for the American pulp covers in lurid colours were at last part of the common idea of the future. Here were visionaries much like myself. Rather than suspect them of stealing my ideas, for indeed I had anticipated them in almost every sphere, I acknowledged these writers and artists as equals, confirmation that I was not alone! Here were men who thought like me, who had the same kind of practical and romantic imagination. Possibly, at some future date, we could all come together as one scientific family to bring reason and order to the world. Within a generation we could abolish disease and hold death itself at bay. We would grow food for the whole planet and ensure no one was ever hungry. Great aerial ships could carry goods cheaply and quickly from place to place delivering food and medicines where they were needed. All that was required was the political will and the vision of business to back it; then we should have had not the bleak, mechanistic future of Metropolis, but the clean, aesthetic nobility of Things to Come, with white motorways curving between green hills, twisting alongside glittering lakes and sparkling rivers beneath blue and sunny skies, on which electrical cars move silently, directed by robot guides with sensors buried in roads, cars and lamp-posts to ensure the impossibility of a crash. It was H. G. Wells’s great dream. Out of the ashes of war rises a virgin world, ruled by wise, well-educated men, eugenically perfect, who guide us through to the new path which takes us directly to a bright, wholesome future, without disease, deformity or risk. A well-regulated but humane future, emphasising education, health, stability and predictability, the great boons and the continuing goals of a rational scientific society. This was the vision of von Schirach as well as Röhm and Strasser, but the shoulders expected to carry the burden of our plan into the second half of the twentieth century were simply not strong enough for the task. Germany did not fail Hitler. Hitler, it must be said, in the end failed Germany.

What a different world it would have been if the Strassers, Röhm and Hoch, for instance, had controlled the National Socialist Party. Röhm would have kept his ‘pact of steel’ with Stalin and become partners to create an economic miracle to revive Europe with Russia and Germany at its head. German influence on Russia would have modified the Bolsheviks, forcing them eventually to restore the Tsar, while Germany would return some form of monarch to the throne. In Munich, of course, there was a powerful argument for replacing the Kaiser with one of the Wittelbachs. This might well have happened under Röhm, though he would have limited such a ruler’s powers.

An admirer of Cromwell, Röhm was an egalitarian through and through but would have preferred a traditional beneficent monarch to a contemporary dictator. He never intended so much power to be concentrated in one man’s hands.

Röhm continued to make rare visits to Corneliusstrasse, now a comfortable apartment for myself and my occasional visitors. I could also now offer them wine and coffee or a snack, though Röhm never ate and rarely drank when he came, usually after dark. I was always glad to see him, if only for a couple of hours to break the monotony of my life. I had little money and little freedom of movement. Röhm still advised me to lie low. Frequently I was at my wits’ end for something to do. I complained to him that I felt the loss of music, of ordinary boulevard acquaintances. He told me to be patient. He would take care of things. We both had to be careful. Hitler had not forgotten that evening at Tegernsee. I had best become used to a quiet, uneventful life. An eventful one would not be to my taste. Wasn’t that a little vague? I asked.

Röhm apologised Soon he would be able to relax. At present Hitler was proving a handful. He was back in the running but going up and down emotionally like a whore’s drawers. Handling him was very tiring. They were getting new recruits into the SA every day. Quality as well as quantity, he said. First-rate officer material. There could be no objection any longer from the Reichswehr. The sooner his boys were incorporated into the regular army, the better for all. The SA numbers were certainly making Hitler’s Big Business friends look up, and the army was equally aware of the troops which could be very quickly fielded.

I read the newspapers only occasionally, usually helping myself to a free copy of the VB from the boy on the corner. He knew me now, but never seemed comfortable with my dipping into his barrow. I did not care what he thought. I had tried and failed to make friends with him. The Völkischer Beobachter was inclined to go into paroxysms of extravagant praise for the man I had last seen in the flesh in Tegernsee, covered in blood and excrement and gasping for more. It is a tribute to his peculiar magnetism that when I saw him enlarged on the great cinema screen, I was fascinated and convinced!

Many mocked Hitler as an imitator of Charlie Chaplin. They do not realise how much Hitler admired Chaplin, though the feeling was not mutual. Hitler was able to speak to us all because of his common touch, which meant that he enjoyed ordinary pleasures quite as much as the more esoteric escapes of the powerful. He understood the media because he understood what we wanted from it. And he gave us exactly what we wanted. I was not among them, but I have known grown men used to brutal authority moved to tears by their love of the Führer. I suppose I was too well informed and too wise ever to have that kind of response. My heart has always belonged to God rather than Man.

I found von Schirach’s collection of scientific magazines far more interesting than speculation about whether the socialists or the nationalists or the communists or the Catholic centrists were going to win this election or that vote. Such things were confusing for the average German, let alone a foreigner like myself.

For the first week or two that she and her family were back in the market Zoyea was quietly self-contained. Her smiles were artificial, entirely for the audience. In repose her face became rather serious and thoughtful.

Platonically I longed for her. Indeed, I longed for any feminine company. I could not feel complete without some sort of woman friend. I do not speak of lust but of my humanity, my need to be a whole man. Moreover, I could not afford to pay a whore. I had just enough for my basic needs. Even if I was careful, my store of sneg would be gone by the middle of January. Röhm could not be relied upon. He was still in Berlin more than he was in Munich. If he wasn’t in Berlin he was at a rally in Hamburg or a political meeting in Cologne.

Not only was I growing starved of intellectual company, I was sure someone had followed me to Munich, perhaps one of my enemies. Röhm constantly reassured me that Hitler was not on to me. Yet it seemed he would soon see Röhm as the link between himself and the creature who had brought him to catharsis that night. Could Röhm be followed without his knowledge? My only consolation was that Hitler’s men would be looking for a girl. Yet might they consider me the link between the girl and Röhm? Twice von Schirach passed on information. Someone had been enquiring for me in the beer cellars and cabarets. I begged him to remain discreet.

Forced to avoid all public places, I longed for music as much as I longed for conversation and eventually found an old radio down in the offices, which I requisitioned. But the set only received a local station, which was provincial and dull and rather too full of Hitler and Co. It would sometimes broadcast operettas. Jazz was forbidden. The music I heard coming from Munich’s few basement cabarets was largely made by accordions and can be imagined. I complained to Röhm, but he was too busy to listen with any great attention. Or so I thought.

One morning I was woken up by a loud banging on the door. Alarmed, I dragged on a dressing gown and, keeping my door on its chain, looked to see who it was. A hard-faced brown-uniformed monster wearing a swastika armband stood there. It was Karl Weber, one of Hitler’s ‘old fighters’, an SA lieutenant who sometimes called at Corneliusstrasse on party business, and who had been friendly enough in the past. He stooped, picking up in both hands a large wooden cabinet on top of which was a cardboard box. ‘The Stabschef told me to bring this round to you, Prof. Where do you want it?’ He put it on my table, an expensive portable phonograph with a box full of black, brittle discs. I had music!

‘That’s so kind! Where on earth did you find it?’

Weber laughed. ‘Not that far from here. One of our lads liberated it from some Bolshy Jewboy they were evicting on behalf of his landlord. They’d been told to keep a lookout for something like this. So here you are. Everyone benefits!’ He raised his arm in the familiar Ben-Hur salute and was on his way.

As my coffee was brewing I greedily inspected the records, which were mostly familiar German labels like Parlophon, Ultraphon and Homocord. Some were American, Electrola and Victrola. A few of the records had familiar songs and performers. Most seemed to be songs from current Berlin shows. I wound up the machine, took an Al Jolson record from its cardboard sleeve, placed it on the turntable, started the phonograph and carefully lowered the amplifier arm on to the spinning disc.

Not only was the machine excellent, the records had been well kept. Soon my mornings were spent to the tune of ’Sonny Boy’ and ‘Mammy’ or the harsh, catchy cabaret songs of Berlin. ‘Die Muschel von Margate’ was a biting attack on the oil business. I also enjoyed the haunting ‘Surabaya Johnny’ or the catchy ‘Tango Angele’. Germany was full of such clever, sardonic music in those Weimar years. Most of it disappeared, of course, under the floods of jazz, which Hitler and his Nazis did their absolute best to curb. Not for nothing were the worst juvenile delinquents of the Nazi period called ‘jazz-kiddies’.

So powerful an influence was this Negro music that juvenile delinquency actually rose to near epidemic proportions under the Third Reich. No matter how much authority was exerted, the music continued to be played. Eventually, the Nazis gave up and allowed their own jazz bands to broadcast. These wartime songs could often be picked up in England and were often witty, such as Onward Conscript Army / Marching off to war / To fight for Jewish bosses / And die for Jewish whores / Dressed by Monty Burton / Fed on Lyons’ Pies / Fight for Marks and Spencer’s / Die for Jewish lies! All sung to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s rousing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’! and done as an upbeat jazz number.

Signor Frau’s barrel organ, meanwhile, was not as healthy as my new phonograph. While it had earlier shown signs of problems, playing wrong notes, dropping others, wheezing somewhat in certain chords, the machine was what Signor Frau called ‘missing’. He would turn the handle but the machinery would not do what it was supposed to do. The notes the organ did play were often wrong, and it was developing a positively ugly sound, as likely to drive away customers as attract them. Some regular passers-by were beginning to laugh or even jeer.

There was nothing that a little intelligence and mechanical skill could not fix. Surely the instrument would not be expensive to repair? I had myself tinkered with a couple of mechanical fairground organs when I worked for the Armenian in Kiev. I mentioned this to Signor Frau. He said any repairs would absorb most of his profit, but with Christmas coming up, he would have to get a specialist to restore it. He was depressed. The thing had already been overhauled once at the beginning of the year.

Familiar with the Strassenorgel’s mechanics, I asked if I might have a look. He let down the back on hinges and showed me the interior. The straightforward device consisted of a large bellows, a number of pipes of various gauges, a spiked cylinder rather like a player-piano’s, over which passed a series of punched cards, triggering or stopping the appropriate pipes. A bellows supplied the air for the simple system. A borrowed screwdriver, a bicycle repair kit, a can of fine oil, a pair of jeweller’s pliers and some wire, and I soon had the Leierkasten working at full capacity, its voice issuing strong and melodic from the diaphragm at the front. Signor Frau could not thank me enough. He was genuinely delighted. I had made the difference between good times and bad for his little family.

Sitting on a wooden stool one of the traders had lent us, I replaced the casing of the barrel organ feeling that for the first time in months I had done something useful with myself. As I turned to speak to the boy, who had held the tools for me, I saw Zoyea come up to me like a vision. A peck on the cheek, a curtsy and she said very earnestly: ‘You are a friend of our family, Herr Peters, and we thank you for your kindness.’

Thereafter, not only did I have a friend, I had employment. My engineering genius, applied to the primitive mechanism of the barrel organ, was in great demand. Those Italians thought me a wonder! And so I began to earn a few marks from other Italians in the same fraternity. Some still spoke habitually in Italian and were delighted that I could converse with them. I was Il Professore again, and my meals were also assured. Every evening I was welcome in the homes of families, most of whom were also admirers of Mussolini. I found myself in warm and sympathetic company.

They all lived on the other side of the River Isar in the area of old run-down wooden houses known as Glockenbach-Viertel, built on both sides of a muddy stream running into Munich’s chief river. I had grown up in just such a neighbourhood. The buildings had had floors added at random over the past hundred years or so. They had no common design and little sense of order. The houses leaned one against another, forming a kind of organic whole. If one key beam or wall were removed, all the others, so densely packed together and full of humanity, might collapse like cards. Damp rotted much of the woodwork and added to the prevailing smell. Some buildings had been repaired so often with such poor materials they resembled wrecked ships or ramshackle piles of timber. The unmade streets were twisting alleys beneath overhanging balconies and galleries, with blind oiled paper windows and dark, irregular openings running at all angles, and reminded me of the nightmare that was Doctor Caligari. Only slowly did it become clear that there were people living within.

I spent happy hours in the district they called the Stables, an old brick mews belonging to a carriage business in the previous century, now housing machinery as well as animals. Here, many of the street sellers stored their stalls, street organs and so on. There was an entire gypsy-style wagon and others in differing stages of repair. There was a show wagon which broke down into a shooting gallery. The game’s parts, the rifles and targets, had long since disappeared, but it was still a handsome vehicle. It belonged to the Frau family. He had had some idea about putting it all back together and taking it around the county, but the Reds, of course, had brought in all kinds of petty gambling laws, and he had neither time nor money to obtain the appropriate permits.

I have noticed how the Germans and the Americans get a satisfaction from making laws against human nature. No wonder their prisons are full to bursting. Such laws make you an outlaw simply by being a person.

The Fraus did not use the van because of the cost of re-equipping it. The other vans were more easily adapted for living but were less sturdy. In the crooked building which ran along the whole back wall of the mews was a busy aviary, which I understood to be a secret. Judging by the quality of the ornamental ironwork, the whole thing had been stolen from some Wittelbachian fantasy. Birds from macaws to finches were kept here, and a boy was employed to play a big barrel organ when their screeches became too obvious.

I was never sure if the ranks and ranks of caged birds were for sale, to eat or for company. Neither did I know for certain if it was illegal to keep them. Such age-old practices are usually the first things the Reds outlaw! For instance, in the courtyard one afternoon I witnessed a cockfight. I was privileged to attend as a friend of Heinrich Frau. They were proud of their birds. English fighting cocks, they said, with all the aggression of that tiny island nation. The best blood on earth. Smuggled in from Ireland. The spurs were not elaborate, simply little pieces of leather tied on to the bird’s leg through which had been poked a finely sharpened nail, the fighting spur. The sport was a bloody business. Once a bit of glinting feathered flesh struck me in the mouth, but in my excitement, I hardly noticed.

Every night you had to be in the mews by a certain time. A great grille was drawn across the entrance and was not opened again until morning. All was overseen by a horrible old Turkish woman they called the Gatekeeper, which in their argot was also a term for the anal sphincter. She ruled the place while working for an absent owner, Klosterheim, who never appeared and was known only as the Major. Everyone paid their rent to the Gatekeeper, and it was to her they complained. They were convinced she never passed anything but their money on to the Major, rumoured to be a member of the Wittelbach family which had only recently ceased to rule Bavaria.

Sometimes when I worked in the mews repairing the barrel organs and other engines the Italian community used, old Father Bernhardt would pay us a visit. He spoke good Italian and made it his mission to serve the local community, all devout Catholics who worshipped at his church. I took great pleasure in my meetings with a man of refined intellect in that place, and we had some good talks, especially about the Pope and Il Duce. He was a monkey in a cassock, all mouth and no chin, flamboyant gesticulation and brilliant moving eyes, with crimson lips, which in Kiev would have made us call him a ‘borscht-fiend’ in fun. I think he drank. He certainly gambled, because I saw him slipping his bet to one of the boys who acted as a courier for a famous local gang. ‘I long only for the cross and crown,’ he used to say, usually after a bad day’s gambling. The rumour was he sold church artefacts to pay for his habit, but nobody judged him. He was well liked in the Stables.

Despite its poverty the Glockenbach-Viertel area felt very much like home. What streets were paved at all were cobbled, but some were still nothing but packed earth. Here and there could be seen patches of tarred road, like the hardening scabs of some disease. The gutters were filthy. Some of the houses reeked of sewage. Thin dogs ran everywhere. Ragged, often dirty, children played among the piles of garbage. The river, though useful, was not always pleasant to smell. Yet the people living there were hospitable and generous with what little they had. I found it a considerable relief to join a circle of acquaintances who had nothing to do with the NSDAP or, indeed, the Fascist Party. Politics was meaningless to most of them. They thought in terms of patrons, if they thought of such things at all. They paid a couple of grubby German lawyers when they got into trouble, but mostly they kept their noses out of things. They saw little difference between the Sozis and the Nazis still viciously fighting in nearby streets and wanted none of it. Who could blame them?

While I was nominally a member of both groups, I had never felt at all comfortable in uniform. Now I knew it was not always possible to trust one’s party comrades, whereas here, among the Leierkasten, the other Strassenhändler, their friends and relatives, I enjoyed the easygoing acceptance I had experienced earlier in Odessa, where to be part of one family was to be part of many.

These Italians were, of course, not all street organists! Some sold religious plaster figurines from barrows; others sold ice cream in the summer and hot chestnuts in the winter. Some played the accordion or mandolin and sang. Some even worked at steady jobs in Munich. As in Moldavanka, their lives were neither easy nor lavish, yet they knew the security of their extended family, the knowledge that no one would ever starve. The food was not entirely familiar to me but had much of the quality I knew in Odessa. On those clear autumn evenings, we sat on the banks of the Glockenbach watching distant boats and listening to the sound of a band drifting from the faraway English gardens.

Now to Heckie, my Zoyea, I was no longer Herr Peters, but ‘Uncle Mac’, and our mutual enthusiasm was for the Kino. Only too delighted to discover a young lady with the same relish as myself, I proposed to her father very properly that I take Heckie with me on my next cinema visit. We could go after she had completed her performances in the market. Old Frau was delighted. I was now a brother, he declared, part of the family. His little princess deserved a break. He and the boy could cope. She could go with me at least once a week. When I consulted her, Heckie declared joyfully that she was glad to see whatever films I chose, but her personal taste was for historical epics and adventure films, preferably with cowboys. She shared every German child’s fascination for the ‘Wild West’. These films were generally cheaper and more plentiful than the serious films and musical comedies I personally favoured.

I had not until then realised how the Masked Buckaroo was still a familiar favourite with the movie-starved Munichers. With considerable surprise and some trepidation I found myself and Heckie watching, at a cinema which had not yet gone over to sound, an episode of Buckaroo’s Bride, with its outstanding train sequences. By chance the film was one of the few where my face was unmasked in most scenes, largely because of the romance between myself and ‘Gloria Cornish’ as Mrs Cornelius was known professionally. It was based on the original Warwick Colvin Jr novel, A Buckaroo’s Courtship.

Thereafter, I became my little Zoyea’s absolute hero. Her reserve vanished completely. She became warm, vibrant, full of innocent affection. Who would not have fallen in love with the child! She insisted on our going several times to the same programme until it changed. We had to be sure, she said, to see the remaining two episodes. She spent any spare time looking through old film magazines for pictures of Max Peters, the Masked Buckaroo. Someone gave her a couple of German translations of the Colvin novels, which she read quickly, but said she found disappointing. Zoyea was also a keen fan of Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, though she assured me kindly that her favourite remained the Masked Buckaroo.

Half an Italian in the house is worse than none, as the Germans say, but those Italians provided my lifeline back to some kind of normality. Much of the time I could forget that terrible night with Hitler, I could forget Brodmann’s relentless pursuit of me, I could even forget my relationship with Röhm, as it became increasingly tense.

That Christmas, however, thanks to a chance meeting with Baldur’s gracious sister, Rosalind von Schirach, who heard that I had no plans for the holidays, I spent with the Hanfstaengl family. They were determined to forget the cares of Berlin and enjoy the season no matter what. Putzi and his wife had a strong sense of family and valued their private life above politics, a preference which would get them in trouble later when Hitler had absolute power. They took over a hotel in Nuremberg so we could all visit ‘the Capital of Christmas’ and experience the wonder of the Christkindlmarkt, its lights glistening in the falling snow, as the bells of the city declared Peace on Earth to All and Good Will to the World, while happy citizens carried their cakes and geese and trees and candles home to their firesides where they prayed that tranquillity would come again to Germany and the blight of war would be banished for ever.

Our hotel faced out on to the great square and the market and a city where huge brands in brackets illuminated the ancient walls of castles and churches. Rich shadows moved like ghostly gods against the big old stones. The stalls were heaped with Christmas toys, with boxes of model soldiers for which Nuremberg was famous, with golden angels and musical caskets, tin drums and trumpets, flags and play swords. Everywhere were piles of pastries and candies, treasures of dazzling colour and harmony. A brass band and a small orchestra played carols and other Christmas music. We were distracted by puppet shows and toy theatres, clowns and St Nicholas and a huge nativity scene. Few were not in good humour in spite of the relative poverty. Nuremberg, without doubt, was at her very best, and I could imagine no finer place to spend Christmas. Something about that ancient walled city found echoes in every European soul. The streets wound around the hill like a chord of music creating a magnificent medieval fantasy, maintained and extended by successive generations. The hotel, with its black beams and dark panelling, festooned with glass decorations and greenery, had erected a tall Christmas tree in the ballroom around which were heaped presents for everyone staying there.

All the Hanfstaengls’ party thought for themselves, and no unhealthy Führer-worship was found here. Indeed, they often spoke irreverently not only of Hitler but also of colleagues such as Goebbels, Göring, Rosenberg, Himmler and others. Relaxing company indeed! Christmas Eve would be the celebratory feast before, in more contemplative spirit, we recalled the birth of the Saviour on the following day. Hanfstaengl, a Catholic, took us off to the midnight mass, a full service in all its sonorous grandeur, with the organ sending massive vibrations through my legs and groin. The cathedral was a symphony of blazing light, crowded with lifted voices celebrating in one joyous chorus the birth of the Prince of Peace. We prayed that 1932 would bring Germany peace and stability again and shared the sentiments of the presiding priest, who asked that leadership and direction quickly be restored to the nation.

I must admit that most of the spiritual message passed me by because, to my initial astonishment, Katerina von Ruckstühl was one of the Hanfstaengls’ other guests. She sought me out. Now she leaned her vibrant little form against me to make it evident that her mind was not entirely engaged with the sublime eternals. I was both pleased and disturbed to see her, though fearing at first that her demon-mother was with her; but Mama, I learned, had decided to visit friends in England. Katerina was quick to tell me that she was on my side in the matter, that her mother could be ‘something of a bitch’, and that Alfred, her half-brother, was certainly not my child.

Kitty stayed with me after the service. Slender and quick as a cat, narrow-shouldered, long-legged, with an almost triangular little face framed by her short, dark red hair, she had wide-set blue-green eyes, a broad, sensual mouth and a sleepy, mocking manner which was sexually provocative but which I pretended not to notice. She wore near-transparent pastel silk dresses, preferring green and rust, with flesh-coloured silk stockings and patent-leather high heels that shone as brightly as her lacquered head.

Kitty had been abandoned, she told me later as we toasted one another preparatory to retiring. Her mother was in England because she had a new ‘flame’, someone in the diplomatic corps.

‘She still hates you!’ Kitty whispered just before we parted. ‘I’d love to know exactly why.’

The next day she insisted we take a tour of the old city, which seemed even more of an insane fantasy than Ludwig’s famous palace. Everything was of the same red stone tending to a grotesque heaviness when not adulterated by ordinary shops and the market. The Nurembergers had a way of decorating their city to give it a liveable scale. During the Middle Ages their castle meant security and power, but now it was merely grim. The museums, with their many edged weapons and martial paintings, added to this peculiar mixture of attractive romanticism and brute threat.

When we returned to our party that afternoon Putzi was entertaining his guests. The man who came to be known as ‘Hitler’s clown’ was a great pianist and singer of comic songs, as he was pleased to demonstrate. He had always cheered the Führer up during those melancholy days of exile and struggle. At the drop of a hat the gentle ‘Smokestack’, as Kitty nicknamed him, would sit down at the hotel piano, a cigarette between his smiling lips, and pound out some rather Teutonic Gershwin. He took boyish pride in our pleasure.

Hanfstaengl had also been involved in the Fräulein Raubal business and was very concerned for his Chief. When we were alone later, he confided in me. He was planning a big event for Hitler’s birthday, still some months off. While in London, he had fallen in love with Gilbert and Sullivan all over again, and he was seeking volunteers with good operetta-quality voices, planning to surprise Hitler with a performance of The Mikado. His other idea was to put on some sort of minstrel show, but he did not think the Führer would be familiar enough with the conventions of the Cakewalk and the coon dance.

I agreed he should do something in the European tradition. America’s chief contribution to world culture was to cheapen the air with Negro jazz noise and chattering Jews in banal talkies.

Hanfstaengl became defensive. He was proud of his American blood. But in the end his huge head nodded in reluctant agreement, confiding that he had returned to Munich and the family print business because it was impossible to love both art and politics in America. Sales were at last beginning to improve, especially now he had an exclusive contract with the party. I had been to his shop with Röhm. It now sold mostly good-quality posters representing the Nazi hierarchy. Röhm had wanted me to see him larger than life-size, I think! Both Hoffmann, Hitler’s exclusive photographer, and Hanfstaengl were making fortunes from their leader’s rise to fame. Hitler trusted few Berliners and liked to have Bavarians and Austrians about him whenever possible.

Though the Führer got a royalty, Hanfstaengl was doing so well from his posters that he felt he owed Hitler something. He was having the costumes specially made in London and sent over. They were identical to those worn by the D’Oyly Carte Theatre Company. Like many Americans, Hanfstaengl was more appreciative of the Savoy Balladeers than the English, who tend to dismiss their greatest creative artists and keep them, as a matter of course, from any sort of real advancement.

Hanfstaengl tried to drag me into the scheme as a fellow American. I reminded him I had not been raised in the English tradition. He apologised. He was desperate for volunteers and most of his friends were dashing hither and yon trying to get the Nazis elected to majority power in the Reichstag. These were to be the crucial years, dependent as much upon luck as strategy, like all politics. Hitler never acknowledged his good luck and so aroused the ire of the gods who had first blessed him. The Greeks would have written a play about him! Indeed, Hanfstaengl confided in me that Hitler often saw Pericles as his model. He had read some potted popular history which he was always fond of quoting.

Kitty had not come down from Berlin as I thought. She had old friends in Munich and had arrived at about the time she first visited me. By and large she had not mixed much with the Nazi people. They were altogether too grim and serious for her taste.

Kitty told everyone I had a birthday approaching. The Hanfstaengls loved celebrations and insisted on a party specifically for that occasion. So I celebrated my thirty-second year, quite unexpectedly, in warm company and pleasant surroundings. They held my party all through the day on 1 January, forever finding excuses to toast me and bump me and clap me on the back. The Germans can never resist a chance to enjoy an anniversary. It felt wonderful to be so accepted.

Next morning, the first moment we were alone at breakfast, Kitty asked me urgently if I had any ‘coca-een’, which was what the drug was called locally. She had a very good source in Munich but had run out. Did I have any spare?

I had not brought enough for two but reasoned to myself that since her contact would be useful to me, I could afford to let her have some now and avail myself of her suppliers later.

‘I have a little,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m short of money to buy more.’

It sent a shock through my yearning system when she stared into my eyes as boldly as any seasoned whore. They called it ‘the Berlin look’ in Munich. ‘You can fuck me for a gram,’ she said.

We settled for half a gram.

I began 1932 in a spirit of considerable optimism.

Once the sneg had relaxed her, Kitty expanded on her reasons for being in Bavaria. She had followed ‘the Mongol’ here when he found it convenient to leave Berlin. She told me with a quick, self-conscious grin, that she was part of his ‘entourage’. ‘I stay there. At his flat.’ She had been with him in London but found that not only were prices extravagantly high there (£3 10s for an ounce of raw cocaine), the general climate was puritanical and critical as well. The English were stones. They had no sense of fun. All their most amusing people were already in Berlin. The Mongol had soon shaken the English dust off his perfect pumps.

I had heard of the Mongol. He was notorious. His picture occasionally appeared in a society paper. His name was actually Prince Friedrich (‘Freddy’) Badehoff-Krasnya, late Protector of Mirenburg, exiled by the Austrian invasion, returned for three weeks by the short-lived nationalist coalition, then deposed by the province’s Red Soviet. I knew of him from Röhm, too. The Stabschef had rather admired him. Prince Freddy was a subtle mixture of white and yellow, what some considered the worst possible blend of Prussian and Hungarian blood.

A small, delicate man with immense charm, Badehoff-Krasnya’s Mongol ancestry was very evident in his rather devilish features. Röhm found him personable and always willing to help in discreet matters if he could. He had bailed Röhm out once or twice in the old days. I knew also from Major Nye that Prince Freddy was not welcome in many European drawing rooms and received few invitations to receptions. A notorious debauchee, he supported his deplorable habits by putting himself at the service of other rich sensualists. He was the chief means of support of many a degenerate and demi-mondaine in the Berlin underworld.

Kitty was enormously attracted to him. ‘He can make a slave of me, as he does of so many women.’ She told me something of his demands, which she could, she said, only accept under certain conditions and circumstances. He was, however, an easy source of amusement and, of course, of her beloved ‘coca’, but it was her mother’s need for morphine that had first brought her together with Prince Freddy. I was reassured to know Frau Oberhauser had a vice.

Major Nye had told me how Badehoff-Krasnya was famous for supplying English girls to special friends. ‘Distasteful as it is to an Englishman’s mind, the fact remains that the most sought-after dancers, demi-mondaines and entertainers in Berlin are English. So many of our unfortunate little youngsters have fallen into the hands of the Hun traffickers. The procurers know the returns their percentages will bring in Berlin. It’s a filthy trade and that man is at the rotten core of it.’

Major Nye had added that if Prince Freddy’s talents had been turned in a constructive direction, he would have been one of the leaders of his day. Röhm had thought much the same. That combination of Asian and Teutonic was volatile and at the same time cold. His character contained a particular kind of hunger often only satisfied by opium or some other form of narcissistic hedonism. The Mongol had tenacity, analytical genius, personal magnetism but also a fatal taste for depravity. Outwardly a suave and gentle little man, delicate and old-fashioned in his courtesy, exquisitely neat in his person, he secreted beneath his modest exterior the most refined and excessive sadism. Kitty’s mocking cynicism became a kind of fixed grimace when she talked about his vices, but her eyes betrayed her addiction. La vie sensuelle would soon devour her. It was not easy to remember that once I had watched her playing gaily in her short skirts and woollen stockings about the deck of HMS Rio Cruz as we steamed away from Odessa, exiles together. Now her face was already beginning to show signs of dissolution. I think she was twenty-four. But I cannot deny her attractions.

I soon discovered that the reason Kitty hated her mother was because, in her desperation for morphine, Frau Oberhauser had effectively sold her daughter to Prince Freddy. She could do nothing now, she said, because she was weak. But didn’t I think it was wrong for a parent to expose a child to such dangerous company?

Of course, this was, perversely, to my own advantage. In hating her mother, Kitty was inclined to love those her mother hated. No wonder Weimar was a happy hunting ground for Freud’s army of Jewish pseudo-scientists preying upon the wealthy in Berlin and Vienna. Release your repressions! they cried. And a black monster with red jaws and glittering fangs, with grasping paws and a huge scarlet prick, was called into being. With him came the ghosts of those ruins yet to be. The ruins of Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin. The ruins upon which such monsters thrive. Aggressive carrion willing to seduce when they can or rape if they have to. All innocence is defiled, all belief eroded, all virtue reviled.

The red-and-black monster roars and its saliva is poison dripping upon all that remains of our honour and our wealth. Once there was a power to defend us against the monster. A new Siegfried, we thought, who would drive the dragon of Bolshevism from our midst and establish a bright new order across Europe. Instead, Siegfried took the dragon into himself, or the dragon turned itself into Siegfried. Whatever the result, compromise was the cause. And Hitler’s willingness to compromise, his failure to concentrate on the essential issues led him to his monumental, melodramatic self-destruction.

Prince Freddy was related to the Wittelbachs. This meant that certain fawning nationalist interests in the Bavarian capital were willingly blind and deaf to the rumours about him so long as his royal blood graced them with its acquaintance. As a result he was not living in obscurity. According to Kitty, his habit was to make sure that his private life appeared solidly conventional. I would eventually discover that the rooms to which casual visitors were admitted were full of panelling and leather and baize, with hunting trophies and various other masculine badges with which the average wealthy man advertises his vitality and prowess. He also displayed pictures of relatives whose names were associated with the height of breeding and respectability. The bedroom they might see would be sparse and equally redolent of masculine values. He would subscribe to local political parties, charities, business ventures. People would find him a gentleman through and through and roar in angry defence of him if any hint was offered concerning other practices. Indeed, should they find within themselves a desire to taste these forbidden pleasures, Prince Freddy would warn them of what became of people who developed such habits. If they persisted, they were his for ever. Kitty told me this and shrugged weakly. So it was with her.

In some ways the holiday in Nuremberg was my last ordinary innocent pleasure. When it was over, my descent into several kinds of hell began. I had no intimation of it, of course. After the break, as soon as we were back in Munich, Kitty arranged for us to visit Prince Freddy’s extraordinary flat where, she assured me, ‘snow’ was always in plentiful supply. He could not seduce me, of course. I knew how to control my appetites.

In a note Prince Freddy told Kitty he would be delighted to see her guest. He already knew that the famous American film star, Max Peters, was in town, and he longed to meet me. He had seen many of my films and was immensely flattered that I should want to visit him.

His huge apartment was in a very well-to-do-suburb of the city, not far from where I had met Frau and Fräulein Röhm. The house itself was a rather fanciful one, owing a little to the extravagance of the Wittelbachs, so I was not surprised it had been built by one of that family. It was now owned by a Ruhr industrialist who used it occasionally as a holiday place but rented the upper part to Badehoff-Krasnya. The suburb’s broad tree-lined roads were largely unmade at that time and carried little motor traffic but were well kept with sweepers and porters, even through the depths of the Depression.

Only the very wealthy weathered the crisis leading to the establishment of the new gold mark. Few feared a continuation of the poverty experienced in the early 1920s. Germany was a naturally prosperous country, growing more so every day. People feared civil war and were prepared to do almost anything to avoid it. The idea of Nationalist Bavaria marching against Socialist Prussia was anathema to modern Germans. That was why a party whose name included a compromise, which resolved the differences and united the people, was attractive to so many who knew little of the real Nazi policies and therefore did not properly support them when the time came. The fatal flaw was there from the beginning.

We were admitted into the Prince Badehoff-Krasnya’s building by a uniformed porter who directed us to an electric lift which took us up a couple of floors. Here on the landing Prince Freddy awaited us. Slender, short and very dark, he reminded me of a Borgia dagger, but he was charming. One could easily see how he had ruined countless lives. His oiled hair was brushed straight back on his head, he had a pencil-thin moustache and rimless pince-nez through which his silver-blue eyes gazed mildly and wonderingly. His lips were thin, tight against his teeth. His hands and feet were tiny but perfectly formed, while his bearing was that of an infinitely cultured, highly bred man of the world, chivalrous, gentle and courteous to a degree. He apologised for his inconvenient living quarters. This floor and the turret were completely cut off from the rest of the house so that privacy was assured.

He escorted us through the conventional apartment then pulled back a curtain disguising a door into a small lobby. From this a staircase rose. He led us up to the top. Soundproofed double doors shut the staircase off from the landing and led into an entrance hall hung with astonishingly vivid futurist tapestries, more extreme than anything of Fiorello’s! From the ceiling hung octagonal glass spikes of irregular length, stained dazzling red, green, blue, orange, rose du Barry. Inside the glass glowed electric light bulbs. Beneath them in clashing contrast sat a life-sized bronze of the Naples Hercules, pensive, solid in its colossal power.

As the doors closed behind us dead silence fell. Every door and shutter in that strange flat must have been equally soundproofed. Heavy curtains divided the apartment, hiding doors, windows and walls. The rooms and alcoves were dimly lit with more coloured lamps. It was unsettling to find something so exotic in the middle of Bavaria! Even in Berlin this would have seemed more like a film set than an individual’s flat. I could hardly believe these were temporary quarters. The Prince’s house in Berlin, said Kitty, was similarly decorated but was much larger and with special rooms.

The apartment’s interior gave the appearance of tremendous space and loftiness. Each wall was panelled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Between them, a foot in breadth, were wooden columns on which vaguely obscene mural frescos were painted in vibrant reds and yellows and blues. The ceiling was mirror glass; mirrors lined the shutters; the glare was toned down by pastel-coloured curtains, divans, cushions and silk hangings. A great, wide, canopied divan occupied half one wall; a cabinet gramophone, with piles of records, stood beside it. In a corner, inexplicably tangled up with electric wires, cables and green baize shades, was an enormous arc light. The floor was thickly carpeted so our feet were also soundless.

Prince Freddy was self-deprecating. ‘I have a taste for the exotic and the modern,’ he admitted. ‘There is a little Eastern vulgarity in me, I fear. But without the vulgar, we die of good taste, do we not?’

Meanwhile, he made us welcome. He had a Japanese servant he called ‘Monsieur Frank’. If we required anything, Monsieur Frank was at our service. Kitty explained how she ‘owed’ me some coca from Nuremberg. ‘You must tell me all about Nuremberg.’ He crossed to a lacquered cabinet from which he produced a long yellow Venetian glass bottle. From the bottle he poured into a phial at least an ounce of the life-giving powder. ‘I hear it is a children’s paradise.’

Refusing money, he assured me that my films had already entertained him so thoroughly he owed me at least that. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘There is more. There is always more.’

As Kitty and I were leaving, Prince Freddy recommended that we visit the Flashlite Klub, which had opened a few days earlier across the river near Zeppelinstrasse. He had a small investment in the place and could recommend the English girl there. She was unusually talented. He smiled and rested his hand on my arm. I was bound to know her.

For a terrible moment I thought he referred to Esmé, who had so badly let me down in Egypt. Then the Prince produced a handbill to show me who he meant. I was astonished. The star chanteuse at the Flashlite Klub was Gloria Cornish! My old friend Mrs Cornelius! I was amused and delighted by the irony. A few days earlier I had yearned for feminine company and worried where I would find my next supply of ‘snow’. Now, it seemed, I had an excess of both!