Kindergarten (12 page)

H
E HAD
a picture in his mind of Germany in the early 1930s, before the bombs started falling, before all the millions of people were led away into the darkness, a picture made up from books he had read, films and television documentaries he had seen.

In the countryside lived girls called Heidi, with braided blonde hair, who stood on the mountainsides with their hands on their hips, smiling, in dazzlingly bright sunshine. They wore white blouses with big puffed sleeves, little white embroidered aprons, and lace-up bodices like the one that the Walt Disney version of Snow White wore. Unlike Snow White, they had big breasts. Every mountainside was crowded with big-breasted blonde girls with their hands on their hips, simpering at the camera. All the men were called Fritz and wore leather shorts, and little hats with feathers in them. They carried big ornate beer steins in their right hands, and sometimes they yodelled. Behind them were their brightly painted wooden houses, exact copies of the weather-houses and cuckoo clocks that were made inside them. Heidi and Fritz smiled and smiled in the bright sunshine, and tried to look like reality in the brightly coloured posters in the travel agencies all over the world. Their teeth were very white.

The mountains encircled the plain, and between the mountains and the plain were the forests, surrounding it on every side. The forests were very dark, and the trees were fir-trees, immensely tall. It was possible to see only a yard or so into the forest, into the blackness, and there was no grass. It would be terrifying to be lost in that darkness in which nothing grew. The mountains and the plain and the forest were the countryside. At the centre of the plain was the city. Long straight roads converged across the flat bleak plain towards the city. They were not tree-lined. Tree-lined roads were French.

Germany was the city, and the city was called Berlin.

The picture he had in his mind was in black and white. He could not imagine a colour picture of Germany in the 1930s.

“I am sure that he will like Berlin. It’s a city made for children.”

That was what Frau Wirth, the baker’s wife, had said to Emil’s mother, Frau Tischbein, bending over a basin as she had her hair washed.

“What a din the traffic made! Why, there were streets which are just as brightly lighted at night as during the day.”

The motor cars rushed past the tram honking and squealing, signalling right and left turns, swinging round corners, while other cars followed immediately behind them. How noisy the traffic was! And there were so many people on the pavement as well! And from every side street came delivery vans, tramcars, and double-decker buses! There were newspaper stands at every corner, and wonderful shop-windows filled with flowers and fruit, and others filled with books, gold watches, clothes, and silk underwear. And how very, very tall the buildings were.

So this was Berlin.

It had already grown dark. Electric signs flared up everywhere. The elevated railway thundered past. The underground railway rumbled and the noise from the trams and buses and cycles joined together in a wild concert. Dance music was being played in the Café Woerz. The cinemas in the Nollendorf Square began their last performance of the evening. And crowds of people pushed their way into them.

“Berlin is wonderful, of course,” Emil continued, “but I’m not so sure that I’d like to live here always. Just imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found all of you, and were quite alone here. It scares me even to think of such a thing.”

A
S FAR
as the eye could see, the hundred thousand streets and squares of the immense sprawling baroque city stretched on and on to the horizon in every direction. It was a cold, bleak city, the third largest city on earth, a grey city of stone façades and neo-classical pillars and columns. Massive stone official buildings, bleak, formidable, on a larger-than-human scale, stretched down broad triumphal ways, their frontages inset with many balconies and steep-set small-paned windows, their surrounds encrusted with curly decorative scrolls and ornate shields, and the figures of gods and goddesses. Wires crossed from side to side of wide boulevards, suspending lamps and traffic-lights, and cables for trolleys. Tram-lines stretched away like curves left by skaters in ice, down streets traced with the slim graceful columns of lampposts, elaborate filigree metal curls, lamps suspended like pendants from their arched tops. Opera houses, theatres and concert halls, churches, and government buildings lined the main streets, raising domes, spires, and pillars high into a low sky from which rain was falling.

The great crowds spilled across the streets, beneath the trees and the domes and the spires. The streets were wide and bordered by trees, and the crowds thronged them at all hours of the day and night, spilled out of trolley-cars, strode briskly across the tram-lines, passed the packed terraces of outdoor cafés, filled the roads so that only the tops of cars showed, strolled through parks with formal gardens and playing fountains, sheltered from the rain under the trees as boys in sailor suits watched model yachts on rain-pocked ponds and nursemaids pushed high-wheeled prams. More and more poured out of Friedrichstrasse Station and the Zoological Gardens Station, their platforms jammed as crowds flooded out of the trains. The four million figures moved down Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, across Potsdamer Platz and the Tiergarten; scurrying across vast squares under umbrellas as the rain streamed down; scuttling into shop doorways beneath striped awnings bearing Gothic script; hurrying past huge department stores (Wertheim, Tietz, Karstadt-Haus, KDW); past cylindrical advertising columns, and newspaper stands; rushing down wet flights of stone steps into the passages of the underground.

The women wore coats which reached to the middle of their calves, turban-like hats, seamed stockings, and thick fox furs round their necks. The employed men wore dark double-breasted suits with turn-ups, and no man was bareheaded: they all wore hats, with rims and dark bands. The thousands of unemployed men wore collarless shirts, and caps with large peaks, and moved restlessly amongst the crowds, gathering on street-corners, or sat with bowed heads around the edges of the bowls of the fountains. Their backs were turned on the naked marble figures at the centre of the basin, where the waters from the fountain trickled down into the cold marble. All the men were in an identical posture, their faces hidden, heads down and backs bowed, their elbows resting on their knees, and the palms of their hands pressed against their ears, staring down at the ground between their feet, looking as if they were shutting out the sounds and sights of everything around them, as if, by not noticing their surroundings, they would not be noticed themselves. Bent over, alone amidst others all the same, the bowed figures concentrated on the rain-darkened ground between their feet, their hands pressed against the sides of their heads as if shutting out some tremendous sound. Long queues stretched outside the shops, cinemas, and theatres.

Cars were square and sharp-edged, had running-boards, immense mudguards, their large headlamps prominent on either side of heavy radiator grilles. They were soft-topped and open-topped, and had spare wheels in the centre of their boots, seemingly too large, and out of proportion. They pushed slowly through the crowds. Motorcycles had side-cars, and bicycles were everywhere. Buses with outside stairs and single-decked trolley-cars moved jerkily between the pedestrians. There were many horses in the streets, and heavy cart-horses drew long carts laden with logs of wood and barrels of beer.

All over the city, thousands of children sat in rigid rows in dark heavy-wood desks, the sort with the seat attached and an ink-well inset in the top right-hand corner. The windows were high and narrow, above eye-level, and the walls beneath the windows were tiled in browns, creams, and dark greens. White chalk curled in neat Gothic script across the blackboards. The dusty light-shades were at the end of long cords suspended from high ceilings. The children repeated their nine-times table, phrases from foreign languages, irregular verbs, the dates of wars and battles in which their country had been victorious. Their words echoed in the gloomy interiors. The pens had rusty metal nibs and had to be dipped into the ink-wells after every half-sentence. In every school the hands moved backwards and forwards between the ink-wells and the paper, the hands rose into the air to answer questions, the mouths opened and closed in unison.

Young men and women in knee-length shorts, carrying tall sticks, strode up hills beneath dark fir-trees. Crowds sprawled along the shores of lakes white with the sails of boats, huddled beneath striped umbrellas, eating, sleeping, lying with eyes closed, waiting for the sun. Actresses stood at the tops of steps outside aeroplanes and waved. The planes had propellers and wicker furniture. Pilots had goggles and white silk scarves around their necks. Cigarettes dangled carelessly from the corners of their mouths. Zeppelins slid silently across the skies, half-lost in low clouds, and the crowds in the parks and beside the lakes looked up and pointed. Vast throngs rotated listlessly in cavernous dance-halls. People fought, outside, in the dark-ness, in the crowded streets, in, the parks, and violence erupted at any time, murders sensational and squalid. Everywhere, there were crippled men with missing arms and legs, supporting themselves on crutches, or pushing themselves along on cut-down perambulators or little wheeled carts, past the middle-aged prostitutes leaning in groups against the walls, smoking and laughing, their faces thick with make-up.

In hundreds of cheap night-clubs, smelling of stale beer, gloomy with cigarette smoke, down dark stairs from street-level, a young woman wearing a top hat lounged back on a barrel, leaning to the left. Her right leg, nearer the audience, was drawn up until its heel rested against the knee of her left leg. Her hands were clasped around the raised knee. She was wearing high heels, dark stockings, and a suspender belt, and her short skirt was bunched up around her thighs, her frilled knickers exposed. The expression on her face was mocking, amused, sardonic. Middle-aged men watched her, rapt, awed, aroused, as she lay back sneering at them. Thin undernourished girls posed naked in shaky tableaux on tiny stages, the beams of the floodlights cloudy with the dust rising from the bare boards beneath their dirty feet, their bodies shiny with sweat, dark hair sprouting in clumps from their armpits as they raised their arms. Young men dressed as carefully made-up young women, in filmy billowing dresses, struck poses of immense hauteur, their heads arched back, their profiles sharp, believing themselves to look glamorous and desirable, as they preened, and kissed each other. They were too tall, and their hands were too large, though they painstakingly shaved their jaws and legs.

In dark cluttered rooms all over the city, in the enormous wastelands of tall tenements, the crowded acres behind the public buildings, children, boys and girls with pale and tired faces, lay on unmade beds with dirty sheets, pushed into corners, as foreigners who could not speak German undressed them and fondled their bodies. They did exactly all that they were told to do. Their faces had the worn, joyless look of people who were hungry and needed money.

In scores of cinemas, vast crowds sat in smoky darkness and watched impassively as, all across the city, the same images recurred in intensely contrasted black and white in all the films, full of dark shadows, claustrophobic and intensely enclosed, themes of madness and monsters, unimaginable horrors lying just behind the surface of everyday life. A terrifying figure with long hanging fingers and hypnotic eyes lurched across the angled roofs of a stylised city. A city lay deep beneath the surface of the earth, the mindless corridors of an oppressive city of the future, crowded with thousands of dehumanised people moving as one, the buried, submerged workers. A web of electricity created a powerful robot which looked like a beautiful woman. Floods poured through underground passages towards forgotten children. Hands clutched and gesticulated. A monster, made of clay, was brought to life to save a persecuted people. A murderer of children, tracked down through the crowded streets of a great city, his face avid and tortured, was unable to explain what made him do what he had to do as he moved towards a little girl, who looked up, smiling, towards the unseen killer, his shadow thrown across a poster behind her, seeking help to trap a murderer. A master criminal held the power of life and death over people who had not even heard of him as he worked to dominate the world secretly, altering and deciding the lives of millions. The director of an asylum, controlled by his patients, was hypnotised by a madman. Dancers moved in geometric patterns, absolutely in step, their bodies a tiny part of a larger design.

Audiences sat and watched as the flickering light from the screens played on their faces in the smoky halls, now in darkness, now in light.

An image of a man filled the whole screen. The camera looked up at him from below, so that he seemed larger than life, towering upwards like a statue in a temple to which crowds brought worship and sacrifice. His right arm was raised, rigid, and away from his body, so that the arm, the light behind it, was a dark and solid diagonal across the screen from the top left to the centre. His left hand clasped the heavy square buckle on the thick leather belt around his waist. The knuckles were pronounced in the heavy shadowing of the black-and-white image. A belt ran diagonally across his chest from his right shoulder, paralleling the dark line of the right arm. Pockets with buttoned flaps were on either side of this belt, to the right and left of his chest, the right pocket slightly raised and puckered by the raising of the arm. His tie, with a tiny knot, was slightly awry. His eyes were in heavy darkness, and the dark moustache, with the shadow from his nose, blotted out the area from the nostrils to below the top lip, like dark blood from a bleeding nose. His neck was in deep shadow, and his ears protruded. He leaned back slightly to accommodate the balance of his body against the raised arm. He was posed against the sky, and clouds moved behind him as he stood there, exalted, godlike, carefully posed in this startlingly histrionic position, assuming an expression of stern resolve. Stirring music played, and he stood there, amid the clouds, greater than life, his shadow immense, his power absolute, his confidence unshakeable, staring into a future which would be of his creation. Nothing else mattered but this.