Gossip from the Forest (30 page)

Authors: Thomas Keneally

BOOK: Gossip from the Forest

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Maiberling had fewer demands on his time. He stayed in the country and when he came to Berlin was escorted by two large young men, former sergeants in the Bavarian infantry. Flinching, he would call them his Praetorians.

In the summer of 1919 Erzberger became Vice-Chancellor and, more fatally, a reforming finance minister. He denied all the old kingdoms: Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, and the others, by taxing Germans directly from Berlin. As a means of freezing army pay he froze army promotion. He enacted other reforms that are best inquired of from historians.

All at once he was the darling target of respectable conservatives and their bastard brothers of the secret parties, the private armies.

Karl Helferrich, who had once been a finance minister, began tearing at him in articles published by
Kreuzzietung
. Each article was headed
Away with Erzberger
. Later the articles were gathered into a booklet of the same title. In the vicious journals of the north Erzberger and the others were called “the November criminals.” When Matthias first heard the term his predestinarian guts said, there it is, a stage in a process that can't be begged off.

Helferrich's people stole his tax returns. Helferrich indicated irregularities; said that while a director of Thyssen's Matthias had warned a shipping and engineering subsidiary of some government intention; accused him of perjury.

On such grounds a priest giving consecrated bread in a parish church in Weimar came to Erzberger, recognized him from his photograph in maligning papers, refused him the Eucharist.

Paula Erzberger:
You can't sue a priest. My love.

Erzberger:
You can sue Helferrich.

The trial began in the new year. The galleries in the dim courtroom in Berlin-Moabit were full of those young men who called themselves “the disinherited of 1918.” They cheered Helferrich, his counsel and his witnesses. They catcalled and yowled at Erzberger and his counsel. The judge threatened to clear the galleries if the noise continued. The noise continued. He never cleared the galleries. Similarly, when Helferrich called old members of the imperial cabinet they were fetched by clerks and bowed into court. When Erzberger called ministers of the republic they were bawled for by ushers.

On 26 January it was like midnight when the court adjourned. Erzberger went to his car, stepped in, and sat by his secretary. His lawyer talked to him through the lowered window. All their speculation went up in vapor.

One of the young men from the galleries stepped to the lawyer's side, bent past the wound-down pane, had a Mauser in his hands and fired twice. The noise horrified Matthias. There was no other keen pain. A bullet went into his right shoulder but the one that would have killed him was deflected into the upholstery by his big rustic watch chain.

The boy's name was Hirschfeld. Yes, a former subaltern. At his trial his defense lawyer compared him to Cicero gunning for Catiline. He got eighteen months.

In March Helferrich was found guilty of making false accusations and fined the nothing sum of 300 marks. Erzberger, it was found, was guilty of impropriety, perjury, the mixing of business and politics. There, the court said. He deserves to be denied sacraments and to have Mausers pointed at him.

He resigned his portfolio. Friends and doctors told him to rest and let the psychopaths forget him. It was a tender, wistful summer for Matthias Erzberger. He scarcely campaigned but was returned in the June elections for the Swabian constituency of Biberach. He thought, at least down there in my home valleys there's still a sort of political temperate zone.

In the House he kept his silence. At home he was most tender with fragile Paula. Their infant Gabrielle played on the beach at SwinemÃ¼nde that hazy summer.
(Erzberger:
Thank God she's got your hips.) His damaged shoulder foretold thunderstorms. His elder daughter Maria wanted to go to Holland and become a Carmelite. They argued about it. He had always taken nuns for granted. They were other people's lost children. There was so much ripeness in her that he hated her to go as a tithe.

By the summer there were a few hints in political columns that he might be seeking a place in the cabinet. He found reasons to feed to Paula but thought it best not to tell her as well that working short hours disgruntled him. He told her, and seems to have four-fifths believed himself, that he would not be further menaced. The assassins of Walter Rathenau at midsummer had said that they shot him because he was part of the Jewish industrial and cultural plot. There, Matthias said, they have moved on from fantasies of November criminals to Jews.

There was time, he said, to think about it. He had them booked into three Black Forest hotels for July and August. First, Jordanbad. Firs and sharp air and apolitical locals in braided shirts.

On 8 August onto Beuron by village taxi. A dear old yokel at the wheel. On 19 August to the Sisters of Charity pension at Bad Greisach and nut-brown people in peasant knickers.

The Mother-Superior asked to see his watch chain.

Mother Superior:
A miracle.

Erzberger:
Perhaps not in the strict sense.

Mother Superior:
How do you know?

Erzberger:
Indeed. How do I?

Mother Superior:
And all because you simply wanted taxes collected.

She made his policies seem the sunny apex of good sense.

He walked every day, often with Paula. But there were many wild thunderstorms.

On 25 August, for example, a falling conifer broke down power lines, and candles had to be lit in the pension lounge. A guest began playing old mountain songs on the piano and everyone, the nuns too, began singing in the dusk. Erzberger sang in baritone, Gabrielle on his knee. Candlelight sat bland on her baby-broad face and on her father's.

That evening a friend called Herr Diez arrived in Bad Greisach by train from Freudenstadt. Herr Diez was also in the Reichstag. He and Matthias went to a tavern and got mildly tipsy.

The next morning Matthias and Diez planned to go walking up the mountain road toward Kneibis.

Paula made him take an umbrella because there would be more thunderstorms.

Paula:
Admit it. You can feel it in your shoulder.

Halfway up the hill they could see the Kinzig flowing cobalt between the lazy clockwork towns.

They got to the top, sat a while, talking politics. No one was on the road except two young climbers.

Who, when they got to Diez and Erzberger, called greetings, put their packs down and took army pistols from them.

Erzberger had forgotten his dream of 1918. All he had was the normal sense of
dÃ©jÃ vu
. Impelled by it he opened his umbrella. Diez hit them with his. But Erzberger yielded to his supine nub and blotted them out with black silk.

Through this false hemisphere he was shot in the chest and forehead. He walked the little way to the edge of the road and fell ten meters down the embankment. They slid after him and shot him in the lung, the stomach, the thigh. He was still quite conscious and, while they loaded again, tried to hide behind a fir tree. Here they came and put into him the last three of the eight shots he suffered.

Then they mounted the embankment, picked up their haversacks and disappeared in the wood.

Diez, bleeding from the chest, took the news to Bad Greisach.

The body was left
in situ
all night to enable senior police to determine the circumstances of the crime. That, anyhow, was the reason police gave for leaving Matthias's corpse all the high-summer night in the forest. Not that they caught the killers. It was twenty-seven years later, in a season of retribution, that they were caught and tried and sentenced.

The autopsy in Oppenau showed that the victim's heart and kidneys were gravely enlarged and that he would not have had long, in any case, to live.

About the Author

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel
Schindler's
List. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler's courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneallywas included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three timesâfor his novels
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest
, and
Confederates
âbefore winning the award for
Schindler's List
in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2674-1

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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