The Dower House (27 page)

My precious little Felix!

I have learned from the Americans that you survived the war, and the KL at Mauthausen, they say, and so this is the happiest Week in my life for many Years. And you are safely in England, too, which makes me happier still. Let us all hope that Europe has now lost its Appetite for Wars for ever. After so much Suffering we deserve it, and you most certainly deserve Prosperity and a good Life in England.

But now I must risk making more Unhappiness for you, though when you read these Letters from your Father you will understand why it must be so. And later, perhaps, when you take in Everything he has to tell you, you will feel as proud of him as any Son could be. But first I must explain why there are two Letters from me, both with the same date. This one is to tell you Everything you need to know before you read the first Letter from your Father. The second is to explain certain Things to you after you have read all he has to say. His Letters were certainly not written on the same Day – not even in the same Decade. He did not date them, which was typical, but the first was written in Berlin, in your old Apartment there, shortly before the War broke out; the second was written quite a long Time after we moved to Kiel, which we did in February, 1942.

To me it will always be just Yesterday that he went away, and the Pain of it is as sharp as ever it was. For you, I hope it may have something of an opposite Effect. Your last Parting with your Father was full of Anger and Bitterness, but you were in the Right and he in the Wrong. I tell you that now. But I think I know my dear little Felix well enough to be sure that all those awful Things that have happened to you since have softened your Judgement – also that these Letters, one of them the last your Father ever wrote, will bring you all the Way back to the Love and Admiration you would surely feel if he were here at my right Hand and you at my left. Oh, if only I could make that Bridge right now! To take each of you by your Hands and join them. I would give those few Years that now remain to me – all of them I'd give – to be able to do that.

Well, if I can't do it in this Life, I'll do it in the next. And this Letter and its Contents are a Preparation for such a wonderful Moment. I know you don't believe in all that, but you will see. I shall have the last Laugh.

Now you'll see there is another Letter from me in this Packet. Please read the Letters from your Father before opening that one. I'll say no more now. Open your Father's letters and read them.

All my Love

Tante Uschi.

My dear Son,

It is now three years since you left Berlin. News reaches me now and then – you are in Prague . . . in Vienna . . . in Paris. Perhaps you are in all three – and more? Back with my brother in America? Otto tells me you are on Goebbels' list of decadent artists – the ones they threaten to liquidate. Willi agrees you are on the list but very low down. Does this, I wonder, mean you are not a very good decadent artist? Maybe you have a base in England from which you make these visits? I hope so. But where shall I send this letter? Would ‘Felix Breit, Paris' find you? If you are that famous, then I must eat every word I spoke to you when we parted for what is now, probably, the final time. Anyway, I write in the hope that this will one day, somehow, reach you. The minute I hear of a reliable address for you, I will send it. All Germany's finest are now scattered to the winds. Europe is quite simply not possible with this Third Reich at its heart.

If it reaches you – and where it reaches you – will depend mostly, I'm afraid, on how efficient the Nazis are with their racial genealogies. My father was such a Jew-hater that I always suspected we were of Jewish descent, but, for the sake of peace, I never raised the question with him and I never passed on my doubts to you. I was an agnostic with tendencies toward Buddhism; you – when I last knew you – were an ardent atheist. (‘God is a cancer on the face of Reason' remember?) Why upset ourselves with a past that had no bearing?

Well, now it most certainly has a bearing. Old Billy Breit's anti-Semitism was so fierce and so public that all the world (except us) suspected he had been born a Jew. He didn't look Jewish. Nor do I. Nor do you. But these Nazis are bound to have recorded that suspicion (to put it at its weakest) somewhere. They miss nothing and they follow up everything. They have even persuaded the Catholics to hand over all records of Jews who converted. If there is a war, I hope they will lose it not because of bad generals but because they will be too busy hunting down Jews, communists, poofs, and other subhumans to fight properly. If my suspicions are true, then I am only what these new ‘Nuremberg Laws' call a Mischling – a half-Jew. I would be permitted to keep a caged bird but not to walk in the state forests and I could only sit out on a balcony over a main street after dark. (I'm inventing these rules but it will be something like that.) Perhaps they will expel all full-Jews before they start on the half-ones. And you would only be a quarter-Jew.

And I'm certain they mean to expel every last Jew from the Fatherland. They talk of Madagascar as a new Jewish homeland, but if war comes before that gets going, they'll deport them to the East, among the Slavs, whom they also classify as less than human. Jews and Slavs as neighbours? What does history teach about that! Maybe they mean the Slavs to finish the Jews off this time – which they will do willingly before the Master Race turns on them.

It's all our own fault, of course, for voting for the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz in '33 – carte blanche for them. When the Allies took away our colonies after 1918 we smarted. Then the Nazis gave us this vision of becoming the colonial master-race of Europe and, like all colonial masters – the English, the French, the Americans are no different – we liberals believed in democracy and freedom and equality but not for our colonial subjects.

The one great hopeful sign for me personally is that I'm still a member of the Reichschriftumskammer and so can still continue to write and be published. They've expelled all the Jews, who can now only write and sell their work abroad, for a fraction of what they used to earn here in Germany. But what do we write? Tales of Jacob – Mann; something historical about Austria-Hungary – Roth; Nero – Feuchtwanger; Erasmus – Zweig . . . old history. Who dares to write anything about modern Germany?

All these thoughts of mine can be boiled down to one sentence: Do not even consider coming home. If you are in France, go to England. If in England, then America. You cannot get far enough away from these swine. I see them every day in the streets – here in our beautiful Berlin where, just a few years ago, life was so vital, so rich – I see them humiliating the Jews, making their lives a misery. Last week an old Jewess – she must have been eighty if not more – she dropped a glass jar of Sauerkraut and it smashed on the pavement, and two of this new breed of policemen made her go down on her hands and knees and eat it up – while they made noises snorting like pigs. And laughing, of course. Even when she cut her tongue on the glass they did not let her stop. And I did nothing! Well, I came back home and I drew their faces, quite good likenesses, and I wrote a full statement and perhaps one day, with a different regime, something will be done. One brave Lutheran pastor told them the old woman had had enough and they should stop; they just took his name and address and went on tormenting her (in the language of Goethe and Schiller, too). Next week, next month, his congregation will be told their pastor has gone for ‘re-education'. And when he comes back, he will no longer obstruct the police.

When things like this happen – and they happen often – the people just stand and watch, as if it were an opera – yes, something very familiar by Wagner. I'm surprised they don't bring opera glasses.

I would leave this miserable country myself except that I cannot desert Tante Uschi. But I'll explain that later. First, I want to tell you where I believe everything went wrong between us, you and me. It started when your mother drowned in that dreadful accident with Opa; all I wanted for myself was to be dead, too. I know we argued a lot, and quite bitterly, but it was a kind of love, you know. I cannot say I actually hated you but I resented your being there, needing me to take care of you, feed you, buy your clothes, schoolbooks, take you on holidays – I didn't know your mother did so many things for your welfare and upbringing until she was no longer there. And, like every adolescent boy, you were too absorbed in the rages and passions and miseries of growing up even to notice what sacrifices I was making. (These are the thoughts and feelings of me-then, not me-now.) You grieved for your mother, you grieved often, but you never grieved for very long each time. Grief was something you fitted in between going down to the park with your pals, and bantering with the girls, and doing stunts on your bicycle, and all those other things that took you out of the house while I did the household accounts and answered letters from your teachers and tried to find out from your friends' mothers where to buy clothes for you and what to do for acne and . . . on and on like that. My grief was day-long and night-long and yours came in such short bursts. Intense, yes, but soon spent. We were as different as Day and Night in our grieving.

I don't believe that our father-son friendship – and son-father friendship, too – ever recovered from the absence between us of your mother. What made it worse was that I never spoke of it to you and so you had no way of opening the subject with me. I understand that so clearly now, but back then, since something within me refused to broach the subject, I – what is that word the psychologists use? Transferred? Projected? Displaced? No matter – I did all of that in criticizing, opposing, mocking, belittling you.

Sometimes nowadays I go off to sleep very quickly and then, quite soon, wake up again, filled with a great unease. And then I know what's coming next. I will recall, word for word, angry look for angry look, some argument we had in those awful years. But even more shaming to me than the perfect re-enacting of the words and tones of our voices, is the bitterness it brings flooding back into my heart, almost like a taste on my tongue, and the precise texture of my feelings, like a rasp inside my brain. But now there is another self there, too, overlaying all of this. And he, or I, for it is me as I am now, I want to shout, ‘Stop! For the satisfaction of overwhelming your son with clever, bitter words' – and I could always do that, alas! – ‘you are storing up miseries that will haunt you for the rest of your life!'

If I were truly clever with words, instead of just smart, I would write a play or a novel about it, and it would be in two parts. In the first part someone would say something quite trivial and no one would pick up on it and life would go on and at the end of the first act – so, OK, it's going to be a play – the audience would wonder where it's going. Then the second act would open in precisely the same situation, same dialogue, as the first. And those quite trivial words would be spoken again but this time someone would pick up on them, and so there's discussion, and argument, and shouting and . . . murder? Divorce? Father and son who part, never to see each other again?

And so I would use an art that, sadly, I do not have, to sublimate . . . that's the word! Sublimate! I would sublimate the guilt I feel and the unhappiness it gives me by producing a work of art. And so that – my own dear son – is what I truly hope for you, now: that my parting words to you – ‘You are not an artist and never will be anything but a pasticheur and you are just hoodwinking yourself into the free life' – I hope I was never more wrong in all my life. Indeed, I hope you are truly the artist you thought you were and that you have managed what I can not – to sublimate all that bitterness and bad blood into works of art that are pure and serene.

Half of me wants you to read these words tomorrow and, heedless of my advice, to come post-haste back here and allow us to indulge in an orgy of reconciliation and a healing of so many old wounds. The other half hopes that will never happen – so that I can chastise myself and heap miseries upon my head in endless atonement. So it's true – you can take the man out of Jewry but not the Jew out of the man!

At least I may truly sign myself . . .

Your ever-loving

Vati

PS: It was Tante Uschi, your second mother, who rescued both of us from total collapse into barbarism. I know I should take my own advice and get out of Germany as fast as I can but she needs me and, as she did not desert us, even when we were at our worst, so I cannot leave her now. I must take my chance and sing the old song quietly: ‘Berlin – halt ein! Dein Tänzer ist der Tod!'

PPS: Someone in the Konditorei down on the corner left this on one of the tables yesterday. I thought it quite clever:

MU
S
SOLINI

HI
T
LER

FR
A
NCO

DA
L
ADIER

BR
I
TANNIA

ME
N
SCHHEIT

Cui bono?