Two Brothers

Weekly Visits Berlin, 1936

OTTO DIDN’T STOP fighting but he fought less.

The fact that by behaving himself he had been able to open up a line of communication with his family was too precious a thing to put at risk, even at the price of buckling under to the Napola regime.

‘I don’t think he’s any less angry,’ Silke reported to Frieda after her third visit, ‘but he’s learning to bottle it up. The honest truth is I think that secretly he’s starting to quite enjoy the stupid curriculum. All the sport and craft and guns and hardly any of what he calls “book learning”. They mix up legends with real history and talk about mythical German heroes fighting evil dwarfs and trolls as if it had all been real.’

‘Yes,’ Paulus observed. ‘And we all know who those trolls are supposed to represent, don’t we?’

Frieda smiled. ‘Well, I’m glad Otto’s finding at least something to enjoy in that horrible place, and I’m also comforted to hear that this is how the Nazis educate their so-called “elite” because by the sound of it we’ll only have to wait for twenty years or so before the whole damn system just dies of pure ignorance.’

‘Well, from what I can see they’re certainly not going to find a substitute for Einstein out of the boys at the Berlin Spandau Napola, that’s for sure,’ Silke said, laughing.

‘Only the Jews could produce an Einstein,’ Wolfgang observed from his habitual place at the silent piano. He was a little drunk, having been able to earn a few coins that day playing accordion outside local bars.

‘What a stupid bloody thing to say, Dad!’ Paulus snapped. ‘Newton wasn’t a Jew, was he? Faraday wasn’t a Jew. Aristophanes wasn’t a Jew! The whole basis of what’s happening to us is that we’re supposed to be a race apart and we’re bloody not. Don’t you know any thick Jews? I certainly do.’

Wolfgang looked chastened.

‘No, Pauly,’ he mumbled, ‘you’re right. It was a stupid thing to say.’

There was a moment’s silence. The fact that Wolfgang was not merely losing his authority over his son, but also Paulus’s respect, was clear for all to see. Silke, who had known Wolfgang as the funny, talented, enthusiastic man he had once been, looked away in embarrassment.

‘Well, now,’ said Frieda. ‘These Sunday nights when we get news of Otto are the absolute highlight of our week, Silke. Truly they are. We are so grateful that you can do this for us, you do know that, don’t you, dear?’

‘Of course I do, Frieda, but you must know how much I love to do it. Sundays are my best day as well. Seeing Ottsy… And of course coming here.’

Silke smiled awkwardly and went a little red beneath her spring tan.

Frieda smiled back. ‘Yes, Ottsy and all of us.’

A far less astute observer than Frieda could scarcely have missed how much Silke was relishing the special place she now held in Otto’s life and also within the brotherhood of the Stengel twins. For the first time since that faraway day in 1926 when Herr Fischer had first brought his little princess for a music lesson, Silke was centre-stage with her beloved boys once more. Their only link. The glue that continued to bind them all together.

Silke had known for as many years as she could remember that Otto and Paulus loved Dagmar more than they loved her. She knew very well that while she was their ‘mate’, Dagmar was their passion. The person for whom both boys would gladly risk anything. At first the jealousy she had felt over this had just been that of a little girl who knew her place in the pecking order of childhood friendship. But in the previous two or three years her feelings had grown more painful and all-consuming.

And Silke also knew that those feelings were no longer as evenly placed as they had been when the three of them were children.

For while Silke was merely jealous and irritated that Paulus preferred Dagmar’s company to hers, the fact that Otto did caused her that unique private agony that only unrequited love can inflict.

Silke knew now that she was in love with Otto. And while she also knew very well that Otto was in love with Dagmar, Otto could no longer see Dagmar.

He could only see her.

She was the only one he could talk to and confide in. Share his secrets and his pain. Even Paulus, his life companion, was barred to him, and any conversation Otto wished to have with his brother he had to conduct through her.

This was a new and exciting intimacy, which Silke in her tough, rough-and-ready life had never remotely experienced before. Her home life was cold, alienating and occasionally violent. Her school and BDM friendships were always suspect to her because unlike most of the girls she was not in love with Hitler. But now she had Otto.

Every week she would visit him and he was so very pleased to see her and actually said so, which he had certainly never done in the past.

And then they’d walk the grounds of the Napola together and he’d want to talk and she would gasp in suitable girlish admiration at his stories of winning races and being the sharpest shot and showing all those Nazi arseholes what a Jew could do. And then she’d tut and scold him over the cuts and bruises that he still sustained from all the fights he could not avoid. And she’d make him laugh with descriptions of all the silly leaping and jumping about and balletic scarf swirling she was required to do in the BDM.

‘And you can bet those pervy party guys make sure to be around just to check our little white gym dresses are good and short,’ she’d laugh. ‘We know their game all right.’

Then, when they’d found the quietest possible place in the wooded parkland, they’d sit beneath a tree and Otto would listen in rapt silence while Silke told him all the news from his family.

And sometimes, particularly when she talked about his mother, Silke would even find herself holding him. Just every now and then, when the hopeless loneliness of his new life all became too much for Otto. When he was even prepared to cry a little and to let her see. Which he would have died before doing in his previous life.

And sometimes after the tears came the anger, when he would swear vengeance on the whole Nazi state.

‘One day I’ll burn this fucking school down,’ he’d say. ‘Sometimes in the dorm at night I plan it out. How I’ll steal the fuel and where I’ll set the fires. I’ll choose a time when the lads are out at sport because some of them aren’t so bad for all the fact they think they’re going to rule the world. But that fucking grinning, patronizing principal and all his master race of teachers, they’ll have to take their chance. We’ll see if they’re such supermen then, eh? I might even lock the doors before I set the match.’

Otto scared Silke when he talked like that. But then when he was at his most angry and his face became violent and his voice was filled with hate, Silke would hold him closer and whisper, ‘Ottsy, don’t turn into them,’ and then tears would come again and he’d put his head on her shoulder and she’d put her arms around him and tell him that in the end everything would be all right.

And in those times Silke dared to hope. As they sat together, beneath their favourite tree on the little grassy rise which overlooked the soccer pitch, she dared to hope that perhaps now she would have her chance to be more than Otto’s friend. To actually be his girl. That perhaps today or next week or the week after that, he would turn to her, look deep into her eyes and kiss her.

It didn’t seem as mad an idea as it had once been.

Silke knew that she had turned out quite pretty. Her looks were suited to the times. Girlish, youthful, blonde, blue-eyed and tanned. She looked like a not quite so perfect version of the girls shaking tins on the Nazi fundraising posters. Certainly the other Napola boys she and Otto encountered as they walked around the school grounds always grinned and nudged each other in evident approval as they passed. One or two had even whistled.

‘Why don’t you introduce us to your girlfriend, Stengel,’ one boy called out, which made Silke flush red, as she always seemed to be doing these days.

But she was pleased all the same.

She certainly felt like she was his girlfriend. Visiting him each week and attending the formal tea with him to which most boys only brought their mothers.

Otto was the envy of plenty of jealous eyes as he escorted Silke to her place and she knew it. Many nice-looking boys, impeccably dressed in their smart uniforms, tried to smile at her but she turned haughtily away, making it clear that she was interested only in the handsome boy who had brought her.

She loved sitting down beside Otto at the beautifully laid out table and then leaping up again as the principal entered and welcomed the guests. She enjoyed the robust masculine atmosphere as every single boy in the room snapped to attention in one perfectly synchronized action and shouted ‘Welcome, guests!’ on cue.

She was one of the guests.

Otto’s guest, and very proud to be so.

He was as smart and as disciplined as any boy in the school. Delivering his Hitler salute, stamping the floor and singing the Horst Wessel song with as much gusto as any of them. And he did those hated things because it was the only way he could maintain his privileges. The only way that he could continue to see her.

And then as Otto sat down having delivered the salute, Silke would nudge his hand in the shared knowledge that his fingers had been slightly crossed. And she would feel him smiling inwardly as he pressed his knee against hers beneath the table and grabbed the biggest slice of cake for her.

It was heady stuff for a girl like Silke.

A girl whose mother was a cleaner and whose stepdad was an occasionally employed SA thug.

A girl who had always thought herself a plain second best to every other girl in Berlin. Particularly to Dagmar.

A girl who was so hopelessly in love with Otto.