A Stranger in My Own Country (14 page)

The new employee happened to be in his office during one of these panic attacks. He put his arm around the old man and got him to lie down on a sofa, he sat down with him and showed him how strong he was, he told him he was a farm boy from Oldenburg, whom the country's new masters could not touch, that he was indeed one of those they wanted to have on side. So saying, Peter Suhrkamp calmed the old man down, and when the telephone rang he answered it for the old Jew and spoke for him. There was some tiresome matter to be sorted out with some government department or other, and he dealt with it in his usual efficient and businesslike manner. From then on the old publisher started to call for the chief editor of his monthly magazine, at first only when he was feeling very low, but later on also whenever there were difficult negotiations in hand; for he suddenly felt that he could trust the new arrival more than he could his long-standing colleagues, whom he had known for ages and now disregarded. To begin with he summoned him to his office as and when, but he was on a different floor in another wing of the building, and it was a long way to come; so he set up an office for him right next door to his own. In the end he arranged for all his incoming telephone calls to be routed through his young assistant, who then dealt directly with any difficult or
unwelcome matters, and similarly it was Peter Suhrkamp's job to meet and greet all visitors. Eventually he had his newly chosen adviser ride home with him in the big limousine in the evenings after work, and because the villa in its spacious grounds now seemed to him so isolated and exposed, Peter Suhrkamp also had to keep him company there in the evenings and eventually stay overnight. The old man felt easier in his mind: he had found succour, strength for his failing arm and peace for his troubled heart.

But in the editorial offices of the big city they have very keen ears, they can hear more than just the grass growing; and it wasn't long before a modern fairy-tale began to circulate – the tale of the little, unknown, insignificant editor of some footling magazine who overnight became the right-hand man of a wealthy publisher. And not long after that Peter Suhrkamp acquired the malicious nickname that stayed with him for ever: ‘the legacy-hunter'. That's what they called him, and that's how he was always known thereafter: ‘Peter Suhrkamp the legacy-hunter'.
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Now it may very well be that Peter Suhrkamp did all these things with the best of motives to begin with, only wanting to help out, for he was, as I myself had discovered, a helpful person, and a good mate to his friends. But later on he couldn't fail to notice the suspicious looks that people gave him, and the malicious ‘legacy-hunter' nickname will surely have got back to him via some gossip-monger or other. I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again now: he was a hard man. Seeing that everybody thought only the worst of him, and that nobody believed in the purity of his intentions, he said to himself: ‘All right, if that's what you think, then so be it! Yes, I
will
be the heir, the old man won't fare worse as a result, and nor will the legacy.'

In his dreams – and how different they were from the dreams of his youth! – he saw the great publishing house with its many famous authors entirely under his control, he saw the power that now lay so passively in the weak hands of the ailing old Jew passing into his own strong hands, and he would make greater use of it, he would use it to his own fame and glory! In his imagination the name of the
Jew was removed from the firm's title and his own name put in its place.

It was a prodigious dream that he dreamt: he, the little, unknown, impoverished editor aspired to become the owner and director of one of the largest German publishing houses, with great minds and men of genius at his command. This was indeed, as he proudly said to himself, a thousand times more than the dreams he had dreamt when he was tending his sheep, or reading the homespun
Tales from the Calendar
of old Johann Peter Hebel! If he could achieve that – ! It's a legacy-hunter they want? Well then, he'd soon show them, and have them bowing and scraping before the legacy-hunter!

He had made his decision, and he was just the man to act on it there and then and never look back. He started to write those cautious, clever, if somewhat dull essays, in which a man discovers National Socialism and makes its ideas his own, progressing by degrees from the position of cautious observer to follower and admirer. Hitherto he had stepped in to handle matters with the appropriate Reich and Party authorities only when asked to do so, but now he wanted to be in charge of all such negotiations, and before long he was the public face and voice of the great publishing house, representing it at all important meetings. Of course, this didn't happen without fierce internal struggles, the staff hated this parvenu, this legacy-hunter. ‘I'm living among murderers', he once said at the time. But he had what it took to live among murderers, he could kick and bite with the best of them, he could be razor-sharp and brutal, he was not afraid of anyone. And on top of that he had the old man behind him, who needed him, who could not live without him. Once Peter Suhrkamp understood this, once he realized how utterly dependent on him the old Jew was, he exploited his power ruthlessly – not least against the old man himself. There are some really shocking reports, reports of senseless torments, so bad that I don't know what to believe. So many terrible things have happened since then in Germany, and in the last few years we have become so desensitized to horror: anything is possible under such a leadership, which always expects the worst of people.

I can see him sitting there, Peter Suhrkamp, always wearing very fine shirts and dressed in a dark suit, I can see him sitting in his office outside the anxiously guarded inner sanctum of the old Jew. He is in a bad mood, having had to spend the whole day dealing with the intrigues and back-biting of his colleagues – and now the old man has overruled him in some important matter. He reflects for a while, hesitates, and then reaches for the telephone and calls the old Jew. He has disguised his voice, and now barks brusquely at the old Jew, summoning him to Gestapo headquarters for questioning the next day. He quickly replaces the receiver and goes back to studying the papers on his desk. And now the connecting door to the next office is flung open, the old man is standing in the doorway, tearing his hair in a state of total despair, already facing the firing squad in his mind. He begs his young friend to help him, but he is sullen, letting the old man know that he has done him an injustice by overruling him. How he torments him! How he makes this poor, sick creature suffer and groan! And then he gives in, he promises to get the matter sorted out, deferred at least – and pulls off a miracle: the Gestapo, the most implacable and unrelenting agency of the German state, cancels the interrogation!

And this didn't happen just the once, it happened several, many times, until the old man was reduced to a puppet, who said yea and amen to everything. To everything that Peter Suhrkamp wanted. And while this was going on he was consolidating his position, feeling his way forward, speaking with the financial backers; everything else was just a matter of skilful management. And skilful he was: when the old man finally lay dead, free at last from all his tormentors, he was the designated heir. To begin with he was just the acting manager, and then he was formally named as the new head of the company. He acquired shares, he married a wealthy woman (the fact that she was older than him, and drank, didn't trouble him); the years passed, and the day came when the name of the dead Jewish publisher was expunged, and his name was put up in its place: the dream had become reality, the hungry student begging for work had become a powerful man, master of millions. But had he completely forgotten the dream that he had
dreamt back then, when he was tending his father's sheep on the moor, with Hebel's homespun
Tales from the Calendar
in his pocket, stories as simple in their message as the lines of the song that begins: ‘Be truthful and honest in all that you do . . .'?
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Had he forgotten all that? The dream had not forgotten him, and now it rose up against him. When all was said and done he was a farm boy from Oldenburg, and made of different stuff than the gentlemen who now ruled the land. He had ingratiated himself with them when it suited his purposes, he'd become a reliable Nazi, because it was the only way to gain advancement; he had purged his publishing house of all Jewish and pro-Jewish authors, and had become a model Nazi. And as a result of all this he had come to hate the Nazis with a passion. He had sat with them and drunk with them and laughed, actually laughed at their witless jokes, their tedious bragging, and had applauded it. With them he had ruined people's lives without a twinge of conscience, and at their behest he had elevated some dreary scribbler into a literary god, arrayed like Apollo himself. But back home, hidden away in a corner, lay ten or twelve pages, covered with tiny, neat handwriting – and they had risen up against him. That he had once aspired to something like this now became more important to him than all the success he had ever achieved. Oh, how he loathed them, how he longed to spit in their stupid, vacuous faces and tell them straight out for once what he really thought of their empty slogans! But he could keep his own counsel: not for nothing did his face resemble a skull, and many things were buried inside that head of his.

So how did it happen that at some point he did let something slip? Perhaps he was drunk, or perhaps even he needed a confidant eventually, someone to whom he could unburden his heart of the hatred he felt inside. And this confidant then reported him to the authorities. I don't know. I just heard that he said too much, that he was arrested for treason, and that for all I know he is already dead as I write. Hanged by the neck. And it was all for nothing: the years of hunger and privation, the long, grey road, the struggles, the shameful treatment of the old Jew – all for nothing! All for nothing the betrayal of his own ambitions – what shall it profit a man,
⁷⁶
if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul? Oh, if only I were still tending the sheep on my father's moorland!

And this was the same man – just to touch briefly here on this aspect of his character – who came to me shortly after the Nazis took power and said: ‘Listen, Bertolt Brecht is hiding out at my place;
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I've got to get him across the border into Czechoslovakia tonight, and we're collecting money for him. How much can you give? You'll probably never get it back again.' Bertolt Brecht had only escaped arrest by a miracle. It's well known, of course, that the librettist of the
Threepenny Opera
was particularly unpopular with these gentlemen. But like the rest of us, he had no idea how much danger he was already in. He had slept soundly, drunk his breakfast coffee, and had then gone across the street just as he was, without hat and coat, to get a quick shave. When he emerged from the barber's again, there was a car parked outside his apartment building, one of those nice big cars used by the police. And there were sentries posted in front of the building. It was a five-storey apartment block, with multiple occupants, but Bertolt Brecht had the distinct feeling that this early-morning visit had to do with him. He gazed thoughtfully for a moment at the car and the sentries before turning on his heel and walking away, deep in thought, towards a very uncertain future, with no hat or coat and just a handful of coins in his pocket. He finally ended up at Peter Suhrkamp's place – and he was just the man to bring an adventure of this sort to a happy conclusion. He sketched out an itinerary, he collected money, he dug up an old car from somewhere, and he drove off at the wheel with Bertolt Brecht on board. How he managed it, I don't know, but he got him safely across the border. He was risking his job, his future prospects, even his life, in order to help a man to whom he was not personally close, and for whose literary work, given his own predilections, he can't have had much time. That's the sort of man he was, Peter Suhrkamp, the legacyhunter: no worse than that, but no better either. Much like the rest of us, in fact.

It's probably better that I recount this last commendable deed of Peter Suhrkamp here, before reverting to my account of my own
experiences. I'm rather sorry that the flow of the narrative led me to jump ahead and recount the rise of Peter Suhrkamp first. For us, back then, he was our friend and saviour. We admired him, and we put our complete trust in him. And what he did for us was fully deserving of trust and thanks. First of all he got us both out of our elegant guesthouse and shipped us off to a small country sanatorium in the Mark of Brandenburg, where we found peace and quiet, sun, and the green outdoors, where our boy could play properly again, and where we didn't just waste our days killing time, but took rest cures in the grounds and swallowed little potions that made us believe we'd acquire nerves of steel. And then, when I was finding it impossible to write during those months of inner turmoil, he set me a specific task: he sent me off to look at villas, cottages and small farms. I was told I should buy something else, a place where I could write and that would give us a project to work on. I protested that I had no more money and that I needed to sort out the business with the Sponars first, but to no avail: he was unrelenting. He insisted that I should buy something, and so in the end I did. I have already written about this in another book.
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And he took it upon himself to arrange the business with the Sponars, even turning it into a victory of sorts for me. He came up with a very simple idea, which neither I nor any lawyer had thought of: he went and sold on my mortgages to someone else. Yes, I lost money on the deal, and it was not exactly chicken feed either, but at least I was no longer tied to this beastly property. For the Sponars the sale had one very disagreeable consequence. Hitherto, needless to say, they had never had any intention of paying me interest on the mortgages; they had simply pocketed my rent and lived very well on it. And schmuck that I was, I was powerless to do anything about it. But a big bank, even under the Nazi regime, is not powerless: the back interest now had to be paid and the ongoing interest payments had to be kept up, and all the rent money I paid to the Sponars now went to the bank to cover these costs.