Clara (18 page)

AFTERWARDS PETER SAID
the whole thing had been terrible. He said they’d been travelling in the chancellor’s private railroad car, a lavish affair, but the mood had been tense. For much of the journey the chancellor had sat in a chair in the far corner and read briefs that his secretary, Mrs. Helwig, passed him from a black leather case. She sat taking notes.

Shortly before they arrived, Dr. Richard Bachmann, the chancellor’s senior adviser and diplomat, sat down next to Peter and reminded him that Hitler had signed an agreement not to invade Austria, an agreement that was not renegotiable. The chancellor would be reminding Hitler of that, and Peter would be the international witness.

At the station they were met by SS guards and drivers in two Mercedes cars and whisked away to Hitler’s elaborate mountain residence. There was no formal reception,
no one to greet them other than more SS in black uniforms who took them into a long ante-hall and told them to wait.

They waited for more than half an hour and eventually a door at the end of the hall opened and an SS major came their way and asked if they were ready.

They all stood up. Mrs. Helwig dropped some papers and Peter crouched to pick them up for her.

Just the chancellor, said the SS major.

They watched them walk away, their blond earnest chancellor and the major, through the door that then closed and only minutes later the shouting began. It was at least two rooms away but it was so loud, Peter said, they could understand every word, every humiliating threat of invasion and devastation and of levelling Austria, country of the man’s own birth, down to burnt soil, down to nothing, nothing, nothing, they heard him shout. To nothing for a thousand years.

Mrs. Helwig in her nice dark-blue secretary’s suit with the white lace collar sat round-eyed and shocked, and Richard Bachmann would not look up from his lap, he was so embarrassed.

They sat, the three of them, on wooden chairs in the hall hearing the shower of abuse while the SS men stood unmoving in their blacks and in their shined boots and gun holsters. They stood like statues with their hands clasped behind their backs, and never once did they unclasp their hands or turn their heads or pay the least attention to the foreign visitors.

Eventually the door opened and their chancellor came out white-faced with the SS major at his side.

Through that same door, Peter said, he saw Hitler just turning away. Peter was strangely detailed and troubled about it when he told her. He said he kept seeing that five-second image for days after, like some never-ending coiling motion in dim light, and he caught a glance from those black eyes and he saw the moustache and the strand of black hair across the pale forehead, and he saw the shoulder and then the man had turned away and the doors were closing.

On the journey home the chancellor told them the threat had been that unless he signed the agreement on the table right there the invasion would begin within the hour. He believed it, the chancellor said. The agreement committed him among other things to appoint the leader of Austria’s Nazi Party as minister of security. In charge of police, the chancellor said.

Peter asked if he had considered refusing.

Of course he had, the chancellor said. But then he had looked into the man’s eyes and he had absolutely believed the threats of burning things to the ground, to nothing.

A FEW DAYS LATER
at the apartment Clara heard Hitler’s unmistakeable voice on the radio. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and he was making a speech, saying that he was no longer willing to tolerate the suppression of millions of fellow countrymen across the border. He
now wanted a full union with Austria. For our combined strength, he shouted. Our prosperity.

She packed a lunch of two nice ham sandwiches with mustard and sliced pickles and on her bicycle rode to see Peter at his office.

“A full union,” he said to her. “I have no idea where that is suddenly coming from.”

She sat in a chair by his desk with her feet on the lower rail of the other chair, unwrapping their lunch. She pushed his across. In the office, doors stood open and telephones were ringing. He told her she could stay, but he was expecting someone and had no time to eat. But he took one big bite of his sandwich, chewed, and took another bite.

“Not bad,” he said. “Where do you find real ham these days?”

“In the officers’ kitchen at the Landshut base.”

“Of course. Where else.” He kept eating. When he was finished he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He balled up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. He grinned at her.

The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up and spoke into it. He hung up. “That’s him. He’s at the reception. If you put all that away and wipe your hands and sit like a lady, I’ll introduce you, sister-dear. You never know when you might need a friend in Switzerland. Especially you.”

The receptionist showed him in, a man Peter’s age in a good dark suit and rimless glasses with a trenchcoat over
his arm. Peter shook hands with him while she swept breadcrumbs off her skirt.

“My sister, Doctor Herzog,” said Peter. “Doctor Hufnagel is the chief diplomat at our office in Geneva. My sister is a lecturer and a writer.”

Hufnagel said it was a pleasure. While he searched his pockets for a business card he said, “A writer. Indeed! Interesting times, are they not? But what is it the Chinese say about interesting times?”

“They say may you not be living in them.”

“Ha! And yet.” He handed her a card and smiled at her. To Peter he said, “Washington is thinking about it, by the way.”

“Are they?” said Peter. “And London?”

“Well,” said Dr. Hufnagel. “They haven’t said no. But it’s the Americans who are now beginning to say that the Versailles Treaty was perhaps flawed. The first journalists are saying that, not the politicians.”

She was about to open her mouth, but Peter looked at her and shook his head ever so slightly. He said, “Let’s stop blaming the treaty. It’s a distraction. Hitler did not need any excuse.”

When she left, Dr. Hufnagel said again that it had been a pleasure and he hoped to see her again. Peter showed her out. At the office entrance he said he was glad she’d kept her mouth shut about Versailles. None of that sort of talk was helpful now, he said. Urgent appeals had gone out to the other members of the League of Nations to come to
Austria’s help, and the issue was tabled for the next Assembly in Geneva, but that was months away.

“So frustrating,” he said. “Always so slow. This need for consensus among so many.”

At the elevator she pushed the bell and then leaned and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for the beautiful crystal bowl,” she said. “Danni brought it and we unpacked it. It’s on the sideboard. Maybe in the summer I’ll put fruit in it. I’m living in the house on the base now. It’s a bit small but I think I can make it nice.”

He stood looking pale and worried.

“Dear Peter,” she said and patted his cheek. “Go back inside to Mr. Hufnagel. Sort out this crisis. I’m in Vienna all week and maybe we can have coffee. Give my love to Danni. And if this elevator takes much longer I think I’ll walk.”

She waited until the door was closed and then walked down the stairs, her heels loud on the stone steps. There was something else she was thinking about. She felt she knew, but she’d wait another week or so and then take the train to St. Töllden and see Dr. Mannheim.

NEXT DAY
Chancellor Schuschnigg in his own speech on the radio said that Austria did not want a union with Germany. No
Anschluss
, he said. He proposed a plebiscite to make certain.

Hitler angrily forbade a plebiscite, threatening invasion again, within the hour.

Schuschnigg backed down once more, and this time
Hitler went over his head and demanded from the Austrian president that the chancellor who had suddenly, so unexpectedly, stood up to him be fired and the new minister of security, the Nazi Seyss-Inquart, be appointed in his place.

On March 11 Schuschnigg resigned his post. In the name of peace, he said, and the president, Dr. Wilhelm Miklas, accepted the resignation.

Hitler promptly broke his promises not to invade, and German troops poured into Austria. At many points along their route they were met by jubilant crowds.

She was not in Vienna that day, but Peter said they could see much of it from the office windows. The office had a staff of six and they all crowded the windows overlooking Mariahilferstrasse and parts of the Ring, and they all knew they’d soon be out of work. The motorcade rolled past with Hitler standing like royalty in his fine yellow-and-chrome Mercedes convertible, holding on with one hand to a handrail there and saluting with the other.

Later he posed in front of the parliament building. By his side stood Mr. Seyss-Inquart in a long black coat, slicked-back hair, and round glasses. The newspaper had a picture of them shaking hands.

Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest and then kept in solitary confinement in the cellars at Gestapo headquarters. A year later she learned that he’d been taken to the concentration camp at Dachau and then to Sachsenhausen.

THE NEXT TIME
she arrived at the university administration building she was not allowed through the police line. The policemen looked different somehow and their uniforms seemed to fit in a new way, more filled out from within, as from some new important office that had swelled their collective breast.

She walked through the inner city, and it looked different too. Libraries and bookstores closed, Nazi flags on public buildings. Strangers with swastika party pins everywhere. New arrivals from Germany, Erika said at the apartment. They had come for the jobs because so many teachers and civil servants and elected officials were being fired and replaced by Nazis.

Next day she returned to the university, and this time she was allowed in. Men with party pins in their lapels were everywhere. In the libraries they were going through
the stacks, pulling books and tossing them into carts. In the rector’s office and in the department offices men unknown to her were sitting behind desks, going through papers and interviewing professors.

One of the pin-men asked her to sit down. He wore black shiny sleeve protectors fixed with elastics between wrist and elbow. He searched the files and found her name.

“A teaching assistant,” he said. “I don’t think so. But come back in a few days if you like.”

It was astonishing. She walked the halls as smoke drifted in from the fires in the courtyard; she thought of Professor Roland Emmerich sitting cross-legged on the desk, talking about the deep irrelevance of passing social phenomena. She thought of Professor Ferdinand reciting E. C. Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis”:

The pin-men would not see her for three days. By then her professors and most of the faculty had been sacked and replaced. Word was that, were they to apply for party membership, they might be able to come back, but that was by no means certain because party membership now had to be earned, and the department chairs and teaching positions were taken by people who
had been quicker to join the new order.

Much of the material that had been taught in Vienna was now suspect and in need of review. Many books in the library had been thrown out the courtyard windows, and down there they smouldered in fires from which dense smoke and ashes rose to the roof. Erika had heard that early on even Nietzsche had been questionable, until someone in Berlin decided that thanks to his Superman idea his works might have merit after all.

She did not see Professors Ferdinand and Emmerich again, and she hoped they’d be all right. Emmerich had been her very favourite; it was impossible to imagine him with a Nazi pin in his lapel, and so she knew he would not be back. He would withdraw from the current madness, she thought. Define it for himself, step back and wait it out. He, a man who could probably spend the rest of his life sitting in one chair while the light in the room changed from day to night and to day again, and he could survive on his inner resources that would forever be renewing themselves with thoughts as yet unexplored.

This was the fabulous thing about good and disciplined thinking; it was something he had tried to hammer into them, that good thinking was always fresh and progressive and one insight would lead to another.

Good thinking, he had told them, was what got you through life in an interesting way. Good thinking helped you live, and it would help you die.

In the end her pin-man with the sleeve protectors informed her that her services would not be required. He said the mark next to her name was a problem, but if she applied for party membership, she might eventually be able to work as a secretary.

“A secretary,” she said. “I have no interest in working as a secretary. And what mark? For what?”

He ignored that. “Mind you,” he said. “Party membership is a privilege and a fairly exclusive one. You may not qualify.”