A Stranger in My Own Country (13 page)

He became a teacher again, he taught at a grammar school, at a
woodland school – but none of it was what he really wanted. Once again he burned all his bridges behind him, heading off once again, virtually penniless, to the big city, to Berlin. Here he discovered the misery of waiting for long hours in the outer offices of editorial departments, chasing commissions, churning out the lines, and the despicable behaviour of those who had made it, resolutely boycotting a man they suspected of real talent. And all he had to show for it were a few paltry articles – nobody ever gave him a break. He went hungrier than ever, his best suit was becoming shabby, the soles of his shoes were letting in water.

And then his luck turned, and he saw it as a real stroke of luck: he got a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and became the assistant editor of a big magazine. Magazines, let's remember, were for a time very fashionable in Germany, the latest big thing from America. There were all sorts of them at all sorts of prices, magazines for little girls and magazines for elegant ladies, but what they all had in common was that they started with a lengthy and usually rather racy love story, before descending into snobbery and more or less veiled eroticism in the later sections. And all of them had lots of pictures, beautiful landscapes and beautiful girls, the latter more or less undressed (usually more rather than less).

Such was the good fortune that came his way, to become assistant editor at one of these magazines, after twenty years of struggle, hunger and study. At least it was the one publication in Germany that was trying to raise the tone of these magazines: they didn't rely on sex and smut to sell copies, but published good, exciting short stories by wellknown writers, preferred to be amusing rather than smutty, and gave only as much space to snobbery as was necessary to keep the readership loyal. It was during these years of his editorship that I got to know Peter Suhrkamp. He had written me a letter and gave me a commission. It was just around the time I was starting to become known, I was still fresh and hungry for work, and I was interested in every new proposal. The first commissioned piece was well received, and many more followed. I became a permanent staff member at the magazine,
and some of my best short stories – a form that doesn't really suit me, because I need a broader canvas – were published there.
⁶⁹
Some things worked, some things didn't. As an editor he was still a teacher at heart, and he had a matter-of-fact way of pointing out the weaknesses in my stories without ever giving offence. It was always as if the teacher was handing back a German essay that he had marked. The relationship between us remained like this: he was the teacher, I was the pupil. He was always in the dominant position, and that emerged even more clearly when he became our helper and adviser in the business with the Sponars. I'll come on later to the story of how he sorted that out, but for now I'd like to continue with the account of this man's remarkable life. My wife of course had also got to know him – and like him – during this period, and sometimes he would come and see us of an evening in our exotic caravanserai, or more often we would go to him. He lived in a bachelor flat on the sixth floor of a large apartment block way out in the west end of Berlin; from his balcony we often looked out across the city, sparkling with light, while the nearby radio mast threw out its beams of light, like outstretched arms, into the night sky. Today it is all just a vast expanse of rubble, misery and ash, just as our friendship has been reduced to ash – be still, o heart of mine! But back then we chatted away merrily and laughed, the world was our oyster, we were just starting out, we were on the way up, life's possibilities seemed endless. We smoked countless cigarettes, we drank wine or whisky (he just became ashen-faced and colder when he drank, I've never seen the least sign of drunkenness in him, and his body was like a burned-out shell from years of privation, all leather and bones), we yelled at each other: ‘Have you read this? And this?' We would leap up and grab a book from the shelves, scouring it for a particular passage . . . By that time Peter Suhrkamp had also discovered women, the second great discovery of his life, but far less important than the first one. When I first met him he had already been married once, I think, and was now divorced, but I'm not exactly sure. At the time he was living with an attractive, leggy, vivacious woman, a correspondent for some newspaper, and a lively participant in our discussions. And
she was no mean drinker either, whereas my dear wife never quite managed to overcome an innate – as I supposed – aversion to alcohol, no matter how good the wine. Like the rest of us, Mrs Schubring
⁷⁰
was a fanatical Nazi-hater, though later on she chose a different path. She left her boyfriend Peter Suhrkamp and married a much younger man, a man with very different ideas, who wrote books so rooted in the soil of the fatherland that you could actually smell the earth . . . He was highly esteemed by the Nazis, the sort of person that the actor Emil Jannings
⁷¹
(of whom more later) liked to call ‘a Nazi hack'. Under the influence of this man Mrs Schubring, now a high-born countess, cast down all the idols she had once worshipped and became a fervent Nazi herself, persecuting her former friends, and especially their achievements, with implacable fury, eternally jealous because her husband enjoyed only meagre success.

But at the time, thank God, she was not yet that woman, and I was often entranced by her vivacity and intelligence, but also by her affectionate and deferential manner towards her man – not to mention by her really remarkably fine legs, which she knew how to use to captivating effect. While Peter Suhrkamp did indeed have his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder now as assistant editor of a big magazine, and money worries as such were a thing of the past, his future was by no means secure, because there was of course another editor above him, on whose goodwill he was entirely dependent. The senior editor in question, a Mr Kroner,
⁷²
was a fair-haired Jew, always immaculately turned out, and as it happens one of the most serious nutcases ever to occupy an editorial chair. The fact that half of his editor's inner sanctum was completely taken over by an electric railway layout on seven or eight levels was only the half of it. This model railway, complete with electric points, mountain scenery, stations, tunnels, level crossings, sidings and dozens of trains, was something Mr Kroner liked to play with during editorial meetings. He made the trains stop and go, changed the electric points by remote control, prevented collisions by a hair's breadth, made the trains go faster and slower, and all the while was explaining to his somewhat irritated listener exactly what he had in mind for the next
issue of the magazine. Mr Kroner always had something in mind, but the actual work was then done by his assistant editor Peter Suhrkamp. As I say, this thing with the trains was only the half of it, doubtless just a pose or affectation, designed to make him look important. But Mr Kroner had other strange habits besides this. For example, he asked me why I looked so depressed. I told him I had had a spot of bother, not to say serious worries. To which Mr Kroner replied: ‘Worries? What are you on about? It's all in your imagination! Go and get a haircut, this very day, and see how you feel then! You won't even think about your worries then!'

Or else he would insist on my accompanying him to a men's outfitters on Leipziger Strasse, where he would make me buy a new tie that I disliked intensely. I had to put it on right there in the shop. ‘You can chuck your other ties away! With a tie like that you'll never write a decent short story. You can take my word for it! But with this tie, you can't put a foot wrong!'

It is not hard to see that two so utterly different characters as Mr Kroner and his assistant editor Peter Suhrkamp were bound to come to blows one day. Mr Kroner had one of his ideas – totally mad, I imagine – but this time not relating to the attire of his contributors, but to the magazine itself. This idea had to be acted upon, and Peter Suhrkamp refused to do so. He still refused after he had been threatened with instant dismissal. So he was fired. Once again he was out on the street, and of course he had not put any money by. Whisky, women and books – and the pay of an assistant editor has never been very high. But he was in luck again. A highly respected book publisher, one of the biggest and most respected in Germany, published a weighty monthly magazine containing a mix of fiction and essays on contemporary themes. Many leading authors had had their first work published here. In earlier times, decades previously, this magazine had been young and full of youthful vigour, but gradually it had entered the more mature years of its manhood, and now the mellow sheen of old age had sometimes lain across its pages; in short, and despite the high regard in which it was still held, it had become just a little bit boring. So the decision had
been made to give it an infusion of fresh blood with a new chief editor, and my friend Peter Suhrkamp was the candidate of choice. It really was a great stroke of good fortune, because a job like that attracted hundreds of applicants. So he was at least six or ten rungs up the ladder already! Yesterday the assistant editor of a dodgy lightweight magazine, today the chief editor of a publication that picked its contributors from among the leading lights of the nation and felt free to approach any government minister for an article. It was just a few months before the Nazis came to power that Peter Suhrkamp started in his new job. I was really pleased for him. Now at last he had an opportunity to realize his own writing ambitions. I thought about the ten or twelve pages that he had briefly shown me once – he'd be able to publish a fragment such as this in his own magazine, his name would become known, I was already jealous of his fame. But what then appeared many months later, when we had already drifted apart, were cautious, tentative essays by a man who was seeking to accommodate himself to National Socialism. You could tell from the writing that this was a man doing his best to see the good side of something that was fundamentally bad, a man who was forcing himself to think in ways that were alien to him. What a change was here! What had happened to him? I have it on good authority from people who were around him all the time in those days: he had seen his great opportunity, and was determined to make the most of it, case-hardened as he was. The founder, owner and still the head of the big publishing house
⁷³
was an old Jew, a clever old man with that deep instinct for quality that so many Jews have. He had discovered many young talents, encouraging, developing and nurturing them, and he had also persuaded them to stay with him after they found fame, which is the greatest achievement of all for a publisher. As a result, his publishing business had grown very large, and the small, ageing and ailing Jew was still sitting there in his great publishing house, still pulling all the strings. Better than anybody else who worked for him, he had known everything from the very beginning; he knew better than anyone the foibles of his authors that had to be handled with care, their vanities and conceits, he knew the ones who could be trusted with large sums of
money, and the other ones, of whom there were many, who had to be fobbed off all the time with small instalment payments. In this manner he had shrewdly and wisely steered the fortunes of his great publishing house – until the day the Nazis seized power, which changed everything. For now there entered into the life of the old man something that he could not understand. National Socialism: he'd heard of it of course, his magazine had published essays about it, a political party, one of twelve, one of thirty-six. And anti-Semitism, yes, he knew about that too, and had been directly exposed to it himself, the way one is exposed to many things in life, good and bad. But what was coming now, this was something else. These people who now held the reins of power, they did not represent a political party that one could belong to or reject; no, they had it in for the old man, his heart, his life, his whole life's work. They claimed he was an inferior human being, a bad human being from the day he was born; everything he had done had been done for bad reasons, and so it was a service to mankind to exterminate him and his kind. How could the old man understand such a thing? It was simply impossible! ‘Look here', he might have said to himself, ‘I have a hundred authors in my publishing house, or maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred – whatever. And not even a quarter of all these authors are Jewish, three-quarters of them are Christian, or as you like to call it today, “Aryan”. And among those three-quarters of Aryan authors are the biggest names writing in Germany today. They were young and unsure of themselves when they first came to me, under me they grew up, and I did my little bit to help them grow up. And now everything that I've done over all these years is somehow “bad”? Now I am to be exterminated and all my work spat upon? But this work of mine, these men who grew up under me, you're not spitting on them, them you are honouring, the men who are a part of my work? And me you want to destroy?' Helpless and full of fear, these thoughts were just going round and round in his head. And he was afraid, the old man, physically afraid of being beaten and roughed up. The real world was all around him, after all, the telephone rang in his office and someone was on the line telling him about some new arrest where someone was knocked to
the ground and kicked. The old man shook with fear. And if he stood at the window and gazed down into the street, the moment always came when the band struck up, the banners fluttered, the tramp of marching feet was heard, and he saw the brown columns filing past, and gazed once again into these young and oh-so vacuous, so coarse faces, faces quite different from those he had looked upon all his life, hard faces without a trace of pity in them. And when they broke into song, and he heard a line about the blade that must run with Jewish blood, he trembled all over and cried out and tore at the curtain and wrapped himself in it to block out the light, as though he could shut out the new world that was so darkly dawning with a few metres of fabric. And he shouted and raved in his fear, the old Jew, and told them to remove the telephone from his office, he didn't want to hear any more, and it was a real job to calm him down again.