Two Brothers

A Friendly Nazi Berlin, 1934

WOLFGANG WAS PLAYING piano in a bar down by the river.

It was not yet completely illegal for Jews to perform in front of non-Jews but Wolfgang did not make a point of admitting his racial status if he could avoid it. He was only playing for drinks and tips anyway and since the landlord, who was a jazz fan, didn’t ask, Wolfgang did not tell.

He kept his dirty little secret. A secret of which he was supposed to be ashamed. And because of that, in a vague, difficult to define sort of a way, he was ashamed.

Scarcely a year after Hitler had been handed power, something of what he had always claimed about the Jews had actually come to pass.

He said they were different.

And they had become different.

He had accused them of being furtive and sneaky.

And they had become furtive and sneaky. Covering up. Lying low. Watching the door. Hiding away. Survival rats. Constantly nervous, trying to blend in, avoiding people’s eyes, keeping out of people’s way. Attempting wherever possible to conceal the fundamental truth about themselves.

Exactly as Goebbels and Streicher said they did.

‘It’s a kind of ghettoization of the soul,’ Frieda said.

Wolfgang sat in the little bar with the smoke-blackened ceiling and played. Eyes closed, his mind transported far away by the music.

Yes, sir! That’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean maybe.

Slow and rolling, not like Lee Morse had immortalized it back in ’25, but soulful, like a blues. A faraway blues. Far away in America.

‘Hello, Wolfgang.’

The voice came from behind him. It was quiet, gentle even, but it shattered his reverie just as surely as if it had been the voice of the Leader himself. Wolfgang was, after all, vermin. A rat or a cockroach, startled, terrified, looking for a skirting board to scuttle under.

Warily he opened his eyes and glanced around. A handsome blond man in his late twenties or early thirties was standing just behind him, elegantly dressed, with a rakish pencil-thin moustache and a sardonic, knowing smile.

And a Gold Nazi Party badge on his lapel.

Wolfgang turned back to his piano, his fingers stumbling on the keys, clumsy with fear.

Gold party members were real Nazis.

Only the first hundred thousand members owned such a badge. People who’d joined when the rest of the nation were dismissing Hitler as a lunatic. These were true believers who despised the so-called Septemberlinge who had begun to flock to the swastika after Hitler’s first electoral breakthrough in September 1930.

And this Gold Party member knew his name. And if he knew his name, he knew he was a Jew. And if he knew he was a Jew then Wolfgang was at the mercy of his slightest whim.

‘I’m not sure I ever heard you play piano before,’ the man said, still from behind Wolfgang’s back.

‘Well, you’re hearing me now, mister,’ Wolfgang replied, concentrating on his keyboard, ‘and if you’ve been listening, then a few coins or maybe a beer would be much appreciated.’

‘Oh absolutely. Always a pleasure to drink with an old friend. Single malt’s your tipple, if I recall. Am I right, Mr Trumpet?’

Wolfgang remembered now. It was the use of that old nickname that did it. ‘Mr Trumpet’ had been Kurt’s invention but all his gang had used it.

‘Hello, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, stopping playing and turning around on his stool.

‘Ah. That’s better,’ Helmut said with what appeared to be a genuinely friendly smile, pressing a tumbler of scotch into Wolfgang’s hand.

It had been eleven years but, apart from the moustache, the slim, handsome, somewhat effete young man Wolfgang had known in another life had not really changed all that much.

‘Long time since the Joplin Club.’

‘Indeed. Eleven years,’ Helmut replied cheerfully.

‘Eleven years for you. Eternity for me.’

‘Ah yes,’ Helmut said with a nod but nothing more.

Wolfgang raised his glass. ‘How about we drink to Kurt?’

‘Yes. Why not? To Kurt. I still miss him. I remember warning him at the time: if you can’t afford decent drugs, don’t take any. Such a shame. Mind you, perhaps it was for the best. I don’t think he’d have fared very well in our brave new Fatherland.’

‘Unlike you, Helmut,’ Wolfgang said, nodding at the badge on his companion’s lapel. ‘You seem to be faring all right.’

‘Ah yes. Bend with the wind, that’s me. And I saw the way it was blowing earlier than most. Drink up.’ Helmut ordered another round of drinks. ‘You’re still playing music, I see, and I’m very glad, I might add.’

‘Well, things are a little more difficult these days of course,’ Wolfgang answered warily. ‘I play when I’m allowed. This isn’t a job, you know. I do it for tips, that’s all. I’m not employed here.’

‘Please, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said. ‘I wear this badge because it is practical to do so. It has nothing to do with who my friends are.’

Wolfgang sipped at his second whisky, focusing on that brief, now unfamiliar luxury rather than the demeaning fact that whatever Helmut might say, Wolfgang was still a Jew and so they were not friends. Their relationship, such as it was, existed only on sufferance. It was simply impossible to ignore the fact that socially they were polar opposites. One the master, the other the dog. And no matter what kindnesses a master might show a dog, the dog was still a dog.

‘And you?’ Wolfgang said finally. ‘Are you still—’

‘A queer pimp? Oh yes, very much so. More than ever. My brown-shirted comrades have tremendous appetites, some of them most exotic. Funny really, the more they rail against depravity the more they seem to want it. Perhaps they’re just checking that it really is as bad as they say it is. You know, for purposes of research. For how can one really know how wicked it is to batter open the arse of a penniless unemployed youth who only wanted bread and a uniform until you’ve actually done it?’

Wolfgang tried to smile at Helmut’s levity, his newly acquired dog instincts prompting him to want to be ingratiating, despite seeing no humour in what was being discussed. ‘Well, you know what they say about power corrupting,’ he observed, gratefully accepting one of Helmut’s American Camel cigarettes. Wolfgang himself could now only afford to smoke cheap local brands, and not even as many of those as he would have liked.

‘Yes and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ Helmut said, grinning, ‘which of course is what we Nazis have got, so absolute it’s positively tasteless. Hey ho. ’Twas ever thus, and in the meantime the standard-bearers of New Europe are fucking themselves senseless and there are more shivering little girls and boys working the pavements of Schöneberg and the Potsdamer Strasse than ever there were under decadent old Weimar. Ain’t life a scream?’

‘You said brown-shirted “comrades” a moment ago,’ Wolfgang said, looking his companion properly in the eye for the first time. ‘Are you in the SA, Helmut?’

‘Oh absolutely. Since 1927 in fact… almost an Alter Kämpfer, don’t you know. Not that I’ve ever been in a fight in my life, you understand. No, I went straight to the top. Pimp-in-chief to Röhm himself. Funny, don’t you think? That a man who commands three million devotedly obedient young men needs a chap like me to fix him up. I suppose it avoids small talk, although I can’t imagine dear Ernst’s small talk consists of much more than “Get your trousers off, lad, turn around and bend over”.’

Wolfgang was most surprised at Helmut’s indiscretion. Of course everyone in Germany had heard the rumours that the SA’s all-powerful leader was a homosexual and one with a brutal and rapacious appetite, but Wolfgang could not imagine anyone being so open about it.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Helmut laughed. ‘In a way me and old Ernst are a bit like you, in so much as we’re officially blood enemies of National Socialism. The party’s terribly down on us homos, you know. There’s talk of having us sterilized, which is hilarious, don’t you think? I mean, what would be the point of sterilizing a queer? But that’s my dear party colleagues for you. Never let an inconsistency get in the way of brutality. Thick as two short planks every one of them. My dear, you won’t believe the ignorance.’

Helmut was making no effort to lower his tone and one or two of the other drinkers in the bar were beginning to shift about, casting aggressive glances in his direction. They looked away again, however, when Helmut ostentatiously displayed the black and red badge ringed with gold that was pinned on his lapel.

‘Come on,’ Helmut said. ‘If you’re not officially working here, you can take the evening off, can’t you? Let me buy you dinner. There’s no one here I’m interested in anyway. Did you ever see an uglier bunch?’

‘Dinner? You want to eat with me?’

‘That’s right, a Jew and queer, eh? The SS would love that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps we can plot an assassination attempt.’

At first Wolfgang was astonished at Helmut’s provocative behaviour, but he soon recognized that it was not so very surprising and certainly not brave. The Nazis respected nothing more than authority, and as a senior SA man close to Ernst Röhm, Helmut was invulnerable. Wolfgang decided therefore to try and relax for an hour or two and enjoy a free dinner.

After all, he could be in no safer company in all of Berlin.

And besides, there was something he very much wanted to ask Helmut. He raised it the moment they had sat down in a cosy little restaurant and ordered their drinks and food.

‘Do you ever see Katharina?’ Wolfgang asked.

A shadow of sadness passed across Helmut’s habitually amused countenance.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you were rather in love with her, weren’t you?’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘Glaring, my dear. Glaring. And who can blame you? Katharina, lovely Katharina, she was such a very exquisite creature. Loveliest of them all.’

‘Was?’ Wolfgang asked, the shadow passing from Helmut’s face to his own.

‘Yes — was, I’m afraid,’ Helmut replied, staring sadly into his Martini.

‘Helmut. Please don’t tell me she’s dead.’

‘No. Not dead. Not yet. I don’t think so anyway. But she’s been very ill for years. Not a nice condition at all; sad to say, she has syphilis.’

‘Oh my God. Not Katharina.’

‘It’s quite advanced and so of course she’s rather disfigured. Such terrible luck. You know how reserved she was, never loose at all, not like most of us that year. She told me it was one mistake. A film producer. She wanted to be an actress, you recall.’

‘Yes, I recall.’

Wolfgang felt such pain. Real physical pain. Katharina was his secret. The funny, wistful little might-have-been that he kept hidden in a box somewhere deep in his heart. He scarcely even looked into the box any more. He had plenty else to worry about, after all. But it was always there, a sweet memory of something beautiful that had passed him by.

‘I’m sorry, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, sniffing the wine the waiter had offered him. ‘I know how much she meant to you… you didn’t ever… did you?’

‘No, no, we didn’t,’ Wolfgang said, ‘but not for want of desire on my part. I tried one night, when I was drunk, but she put me in my place. She didn’t sleep with married men.’

‘For which you should be very grateful. You may have had a lucky escape. Life is undoubtedly unfair and cruel and swinish.’

The waiter brought the soup and they ate for a few moments in silence.

‘What more can I tell you?’ Helmut went on. ‘She pretty much retired from everything and went to live with her mother. I saw her about a year or two ago. The symptoms were in remission but she was very scarred.’

‘I should like to see her.’

‘I very very much doubt she would want that, Wolfgang. Besides…’

Helmut left the sentence hanging where it was while he studied the diamond on his cigarette case. He didn’t need to say more. It was pretty obvious that the last thing any distressed girl needed was a Jew trying to befriend her.

Wolfgang could be of no help to anyone. Not Katharina, not his family, not himself.

‘Best to remember her as she was, don’t you think?’ Helmut said. ‘Beautiful, captivating Katharina.’

They ate their meal together. Sharing happier memories of the great and glorious Joplin Club, memories which for Wolfgang were destined always now to be suffused with an intolerable sadness.

It was certainly no consolation that all the other members of Kurt’s old gang were doing very well in the newly awoken Germany. Dorf the bookish money launderer was now with Schacht at the Reichsbank.

‘Still juggling debt,’ Helmut laughed. ‘The only difference is that now he does it while he’s sober. And you remember Hans? Believe it or not, he’s also at exactly the same game as he was in 1923. Acquiring expensive motor cars on the cheap from those who find they have to liquidate their assets urgently.’

Wolfgang nodded. Wondering how many of those fine cars that had pulled up outside the Kempinski hotel for the Fischers’ ‘farewell’ party a year before had since been bought short and sold long by his old friend Hans. The Fischer Mercedes probably amongst them.

‘And Helene, of course,’ Helmut went on. ‘You remember dear sparkling Helene? She is the star of us all, still passing out at the end of parties but now she does it in the homes of ambassadors and in ballrooms on the Wilhelmstrasse. A friend of Goering, no less. Who as we all know does love a pretty girl.’

‘Helene’s a Nazi?’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Oh yes,’ said Helmut, ‘and not from convenience either. She’s not like me, I’m just a fair weather National Socialist, but she’s the real thing. She’s besotted with the whole business. Loves it. The flags, the uniforms. The power. She honestly believes that Germany’s woken up. From what and to what she never really explains. It’s just woken up that’s all, new dawn, young nation, pure blood. The lot. She’s hysterically in love with Adolf, of course, but then so many otherwise perfectly sensible women are. They dream of him marching into their boudoirs and ordering them sternly to bed where they will lie back rigidly to attention with right arm outstretched while he tells them that it’s his unalterable will that he ravishes them. Honestly, I bow to no one in my appreciation of male beauty but that one I really cannot see.’

Wolfgang thought back to the Helene he had known. Young and bright and intelligent. In love with fashion and fun. And now she was in love with Hitler.

‘She was a fashion buyer for Isaac Fischer,’ Wolfgang said.

‘Well, the Jews enslaved us all before the awakening, don’t you know,’ Helmut said with a smile.

Wolfgang almost smiled too. Helmut didn’t care what he joked about; he never had.

‘She was such a free spirit,’ Wolfgang went on. ‘And a good heart, too, I know she was. We laughed together all the time. She loved The Sheik of Araby and Avalon. Doesn’t she mind? I mean about all the hatred and violence.’

‘She doesn’t think about it, dear. And if she did, she’d think it was all lies, just Jewish moaning and a few sweet, over-excited SA boys getting carried away. People like Helene are having too much fun to want any of this to stop. Everyone is having too much fun. Every day another parade assuring us that we’re better than everyone else in the whole world, so invigorating. You can see why people love it, surely? I mean if Adolf had decided to pick on, say, left-handed people and let Jews join his gang, you’d be strutting about with everybody else, wouldn’t you?’

‘I hope not. Not me. But I’m sure plenty would. Of course it wouldn’t happen though. It’s always the Jews who get it. It’s why we’re here.’

‘Apropos of which, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, producing a pen and a little leather notebook on which a swastika was embossed, ‘I’m going to write down my telephone number for you. If you need help, and of course you will, you may call me. Be discreet, of course, when you explain yourself, but I promise that I will do what I can for you, for friendship, you know, for old times’ sake.’ Helmut tore the piece of paper from his book and got to his feet. ‘And now I’m afraid I must go. I fear I have a long long night on the train ahead. I’d only popped into your little bar to see if I could pick up a bit of company for the journey. Love a bit of fresh trade, you know, can never resist the lure of the new, but now I fear I shall just have to read a book.’

‘Where are you off to?’ Wolfgang said. ‘Somewhere nice?’

‘Munich! Heart of the movement, my friend! Home of big bellies and small minds. Thank God I’m just passing through. Off to Bad Wiessee, a charming little spa resort. Have you been?’

‘No. I’ve never had a holiday, as it happens. We had our kids too young, never had the time, never had the money.’

‘And of course when we were young Berlin was a holiday. Why would one have gone anywhere else?’

‘That’s true.’

A wistful shared moment hung between them. Then Helmut drained his wineglass and his Cognac and called for the bill.

‘Anyway, you certainly aren’t missing much on this trip. Bad Wiessee itself is beautiful but the company won’t be. Hey ho! Duty beckons, all work and no play makes Chief of Staff SA Röhm a dull boy and I must go and line up his playmates.’

As they parted Helmut took Wolfgang’s hand.

‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘I can help you. I’m SA and we can do what we like. Pretty soon there won’t be an army, or a police, or even a government in Germany, just us, the SA. We are the party, and we are the nation. Even Adolf is scared of Röhm, you know. Well, who wouldn’t be? Three million troops? The SA is the biggest army in Europe and it answers to Queen Ernst, not King Adolf.’

‘I’m grateful, Helmut. Thank you.’

They emerged from the restaurant and parted, Helmut in a black Mercedes that had been waiting for him, Wolfgang to make his way home on foot.

As he did so his thoughts were far away and long ago. Back in the Berlin of 1923, at a bar, talking theatre and art with an intoxicating girl.

He didn’t love Katharina any more. He had never loved her in the truest sense. He loved Frieda and Frieda alone, Katharina had been a crush, an infatuation. But a beautiful and sincere one nonetheless, based as much on a meeting of minds as it had been on her sexual allure, and his heart ached to think of her in such abject misery. If he had ever loved another woman it would certainly have been beautiful, thrilling Katharina.

All those nights talking art and theatre. All that style. That captivating beauty.

And now.

Wolfgang had seen the faces of those ravaged by that cruel disease.

Forcing such images from his mind he focused once more on the beautiful nineteen-year-old with the severest shining black bobbed hair he had ever seen. The smoky stare. The purple lips. Chattering about Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Stealing Lucky after Lucky from the packet on the bar between them.

Lost as he was in 1923, Wolfgang wasn’t concentrating on the present.

Had he been, he might perhaps have noticed the large black van parked opposite their apartment building. He might have seen the little gang of kids standing nearby, as if waiting for something to happen, throwing glances his way and giggling. He might have sensed the nervous excitement with which the concierge grunted her guten Abend, her manner even ruder and more abrupt than usual, her door closing quickly as he passed.

But preoccupied and half drunk, the first inkling Wolfgang had that something was wrong was when the creaking, clanking old lift began to settle as it arrived at his floor. That was when he noticed through the metal diamonds of the cage that the front door to their apartment was wide open.

That was certainly unusual.

Then a moment later as he was pulling back the concertinaed door and stepping out, Wolfgang heard Paulus’s voice shouting out. Shouting out a warning. ‘Run, Dad, run!’

But it was too late.

He turned but they were already all around him, reaching hold and dragging him into his own apartment, where Frieda was standing in silent terror, her arms around her sons.

There were half a dozen men present, one in plain clothes, the others dressed in a uniform that Wolfgang had only seen in news reels. A terrifying, all black affair, on the caps of which was a skull and crossbones.

One of the black-clad figures was holding the print that for ten years had hung above Wolfgang’s piano. The one by Georg Grosz depicting an army medical team from 1918 passing a skeleton fit for active service.

The man holding the print had put his leather-gloved fist through it, glass and all. The jagged shards lay broken at his feet.

‘You admire this decadent?’ the man said with a superior sneer.

Decadent? Even in that moment of dawning horror Wolfgang’s mind recoiled at the strange outrage of a thug who, having invaded a private home, ripped a picture from the wall and smashed it with his fist, then had the effrontery to call the artist decadent.

‘Yes,’ was all Wolfgang could think of in reply. Knowing very well that from this point of complete disaster onwards what he said was irrelevant anyway. They had come for him, that was all. He did not know why, but no one ever did. He had lost enough friends over the previous year to know that once these people had you in their sights there was no hope…

Another officer spoke up. He had hold of Wolfgang’s beloved trumpet.

‘You play nigger music?’ the man asked.

The same casual sneer. These people genuinely seemed to feel that they were the civilized ones.

‘Well… I did play jazz… but now I…’

The plainclothed officer spoke up. Obviously a Gestapo man, dressed as ever in the inevitable gabardine coat and Homburg which every German, even the most fervent Nazi, had come to dread.

‘We have received intelligence that you are a dangerous subversive. A dangerous Jewish subversive. You will come with us.’

‘Dangerous? I play music.’

‘Nigger music.’

‘How is that dangerous?’

‘It is morally corrupting. Germany protects itself from decadent and inferior culture. You will come now.’

Frieda cried out in desperate protest.

‘But, sir, officer, I’ve explained!’ she pleaded. ‘It must be a mistake, he’s just a poor musician. A harmless nobody. I am a doctor, I’m known in the neighbourhood, many Aryans of my acquaintance can vouch that my husband is of no consequence. The local Lutheran minister, he will speak for us, I know it… Please, let me call him!’

‘Stengel,’ the plainclothed figure commanded, pointing at Wolfgang, ‘come quietly or we will subdue you. I presume you would not wish your children to see that.’

Wolfgang glanced across at his family.

Frieda scrabbling in her address book for the pastor’s number.

Otto looking ferocious, ready to kill… His hand playing with something in his pocket.

Paulus glancing about, his eyes darting from one black-clad figure to another, trying to think of something, anything.

Wolfgang knew that the longer he drew this out, the more chance there was of his boys doing something very stupid. Particularly Otto.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will come. Boys, be calm. For Mum’s sake. Be calm.’

‘No! Take me!’ Otto shouted. ‘I’m the subversive. Whoever called you must have meant me! Look, I’ve got a—’

Otto’s hand was emerging from his pocket but Paulus, seeing what Otto intended to do, stepped forward, holding Otto’s arm and positioning himself in front of his brother. ‘Wait,’ he said, trying to smile, ‘I’ve got it! I know what this is about. There’s been a mix up. Your informant must have meant those other Stengels! The Communist ones. They live on — oh, where is it? — that’s right, Boxhagener Strasse! We’re always getting mixed up with them. If you just…’

It was a good effort but the home-invaders weren’t listening. The Gestapo man barked a command and two of the black-clad figures took hold of Wolfgang. Frieda screamed in terror, leaping forward and holding on to him, struggling in the grasp of his tormentors.

During the moment of confusion when the room seemed to have twice as many bodies in it as a moment before, Wolfgang was able to grab at his wallet and press it into his wife’s hand.

‘Here, take what I have, there’s a little money — for the boys,’ he said, before leaning forward into her desperate embrace and whispering, ‘The number. Call it, ask for Helmut, tell him.’

Then the SS men dragged Wolfgang away.

As the last one, the Gestapo man, was leaving, his figure framed in the doorway, Otto pulled his knife from his pocket. There was a click and the blade sprung open. A vicious gleaming spike. Otto raised the weapon, blind hatred in his eyes, poised to spring. Paulus saw the danger just in time and shoulder-charged his brother, sending him sprawling on the floor as the door to their apartment closed.

‘You lunatic!’ Paulus snarled. ‘You stupid bloody lunatic. Do you want to get Mum killed as well?’

Otto turned on his brother, furious for a moment, then blank, and then, quite suddenly, he began to cry. Perhaps it was the words ‘as well’ which set him off. Had their father been dragged away to be killed? Both boys knew it was possible. Probable.

Paulus cried also. Perhaps Frieda would have done so too but she was too busy searching in Wolfgang’s wallet.

Outside they heard the groan and clank of the lift as it began its descent.