Group Portrait with Lady (29 page)

“Not surprisingly, he never finished high school, dropped out in grade nine and became an apprentice right off, got his green apron, and that was the end, the year was 1914, and if you ask me: 1914 wasn’t only the end for Walter and his education, it was the end of everything, everything, I was twenty-four, and I know what I’m saying: it was the end of any kind of socialism in Germany. The end. To think that those idiots let themselves be bamboozled by that soppy crappy Kaiser of theirs! Heinz, Walter’s father, realized that too, and finally gave up his amateurish experiments. He had to join up, like me—and the two of us—out of rage, I tell you, out of fury and grief and rage—became sergeants. I hated them, those
greenhorns, those new recruits, nicely brought up, servile, full of shit in both senses. I hated them and bullied them. Yes, I got to be a sergeant major, I sent them off by the score, by the battalion, from the Häcketauer barracks that were identical with the barracks in Bromberg, identical, down to the last detail—so that you could find the office of Company 3 in your sleep, like in Bromberg—I trained them by the score and sent them off to the front. In my pocket, in my wallet, a little photo of Rosa Luxemburg. I carried it around like a saint’s picture, it finally got as dog-eared as a saint’s picture. Anyway, I was
not
a member of a Soldiers’ Council, no sir: in 1914 German history came to an end for me—and then of course they killed Rosa Luxemburg,
had
her killed, those gentlemen of the Social Democratic party—and then even our Sonny Boy got into the war, and maybe that was the only smart thing to do, collect gold teeth and dollar bills. His mother was a nice soul, Adelheid, she must have actually been pretty at one time, but then she soon turned sour, her nose got red and pointed, and she got that bitter, sour twist to her mouth that I can’t stand in women: my grandmother had it, my mother too, those lovely faces left with nothing but
suffering
, sourpusses, listening to nobody but those damn priests and first thing in the morning off to early Mass and in the afternoon off again with their rosaries and in the evening once again with their rosaries—anyway, we had to go quite often to church or the cemetery chapel because we had a rental service for potted palms and such-like, and Adelheid’s church connections came in nice and handy and at club evenings and office parties and so on—well, if I could’ve had my way I’d have spat at the altar, I didn’t, though, because of Adelheid.

“Then to cap it all Heinz started drinking.… Well, I must say I could understand Sonny Boy staying away from home, digging up dead Yanks, then joining the Liberation Front for six months, in Silesia I think it was. After that he stayed in town
for a while, took up boxing—professionally, but that wasn’t very profitable, he did a bit of pimping—first with the really cheap tarts who would do it for a cup of coffee, later on the higher-class ones—and then he actually became a Communist, a card-carrying member, but that didn’t last long either. He was never much of a talker, and it didn’t bother him that he wasn’t making much out of his real estate, he’d never done any gardening, your hands get pretty dirty from that, you see, the dirt eats into the creases of your skin—and our Sonny Boy was always spick-and-span and very health-conscious: went jogging every morning, then a shower, hot and cold, breakfast at home was too frugal for him, ersatz coffee and turnip jam, he’d head straight for his whores’ cafés, order himself eggs, real coffee, and a brandy—all paid for later by the girls’ beaus. And as soon as he could, of course, he got himself a car, even if it was only a Hanomag.”

Résumé of the conversation under the syringa bush: “I must say, he was always nice to his parents, really nice, I fancy he really loved them. Never a harsh word to his mother, never even laughed at her, and Adelheid was getting more and more fretful, she didn’t die of grief, she fretted her life away, went sour, it was too bad—she’d been as pretty as a picture at one time; in 1904, when I joined the business, she was a bonny woman. Then later, when Walter sometimes drove around with us delivering potted palms, you should’ve seen how convincingly he genuflected, dipped a hand in the holy-water stoup … as if to the manner born. Then in ’32 he joined the Storm Troopers, and early in ’33 he took part in the rounding up of prominent politicians, but he never turned any in, he cashed in instead and let them go in exchange for the family jewels and cash—that must’ve been pretty lucrative, right off there was a new car, new clothes, and by then, of course, there were cheap Jewish properties to be bought too, here a little shop, there a building site, and he calls that ‘being a bit rough.’

“And all of a sudden he turned into a fine gentleman, manicured nails and all, he married at thirty-four, money of course, Prumtel’s daughter Eva—you know, one of those girls who’re always thinking of higher things; not a bad sort, just a bit hysterical; her old man had some kind of office where you could get credit for installment buying, and later a few pawnshops too—and the daughter, well, she read Rilke and played the flute. Anyway, her dowry contained a few properties and a pile of cash. After ’34 he became an officer in an elite Storm Trooper commando, but he kept out of all the dirty goings-on, out of the brutal ones too, he can’t be accused of that—of being brutal—just of having a sharp eye for property. The funny thing was that, the richer he got, the more humane he became, even that night when they broke the windows of every Jewish store in town he didn’t join in the looting. All he did now was sit around in cafés, the kind where there’s an orchestra playing, go to the opera (season ticket, of course), produce children, two cute kids he idolized, Walter and little Eva, then in ’36 he finally took over the nursery garden, when Heinz had actually drunk himself to death, emaciated, bitter—well anyway, I became Sonny Boy’s business manager, the orders placed by the Party got us started in the wreath business, and he made me a gift of that part of the nursery that still belongs to me, generous, one must say, and never a cross word, never petty. The business started looking up when Heinz and poor Adelheid were under the ground.”

Résumé of the conversation under the laburnum tree: “Some folk think it would be an insult even to a Nazi to call Walter a Nazi. The change in him came in the middle of ’44, during that business with Leni and the Russian. The welfare of those two was constantly being hammered into him, by phone calls, in conversations. The change was that he started thinking, Walter did. Even he knew the war had been lost and that after the war it wouldn’t do him any harm to have treated a Russian
and the Gruyten girl decently—but: how much longer was the war going to last? That was the question that was driving us all crazy: how to survive those last few months, when every minute someone was being hanged or shot, you weren’t safe either as an old Nazi or as a non-Nazi—and damn it, how long did it take for the Americans to reach the Rhine from Aachen? Almost six months. My belief is that Sonny Boy, always in the pink and worshipping his two kids, was now experiencing something he’d never known before: inner conflict. He lived out there in his villa, with two pampered dogs, two cute kids, his car, and more and more real estate. He’d sold the original properties for housing developments and barracks, not for cash, oh no, he didn’t care that much about cash, what he was after was real values; he took payment in lots a bit farther toward the outskirts, double, triple the size of what he disposed of. He was an optimist, you see. He was a great one for keeping fit, still going for his regular morning jog through the park, taking a shower, having a hearty breakfast—at home now—and the odd time he had to go to church, still (or again) managing to bring off an impressive genuflection or a swift sign of the cross.

“But now there were those two, Leni and Boris, he liked them, they were his best workers, they were protected by higher powers, powers he didn’t know—and then there were other higher powers at work, powers that could settle a person’s hash very quickly, have him shot or sent to a concentration camp. Now let’s have no misunderstanding, don’t imagine that Sonny Boy suddenly discovered in himself the foreign body that some human beings call conscience, or that suddenly, quaking with fear or curiosity, he began to approach that outlandish word or continent, a mystery to him to this day, that’s sometimes called morality. Oh no. Never at odds with himself but sometimes with others, he had run into occasional trouble with Party or Storm Troopers, he had achieved wealth. He had often been in tight corners, mind you, in all those activities of his from the
quartermaster corps to the prominent politicians he let go in ’33 in exchange for cash and the family jewels. Charges had been laid against him, in both Party and regular courts, especially when he overdid it with his wreath- and ribbon-recycling. There’d been plenty of those tight corners, and he’d faced them head on, never turning a hair and getting out of them by pointing out the national and economic importance of whatever he was doing in his capacity of tireless opponent of that national enemy known at the time as the ‘penny gobbler.’ Tight corners yes, but conflict with himself as to what was really to his advantage—that was something new to him. He cared no more about Jews than he did about Russians or Communists or Social Democrats, you name it—but how was he supposed to behave now, with one lot of higher powers opposing another lot, and with his fondness for Boris and Leni and—what a coincidence!—discovering that they were profitable? He didn’t care a rap about the war being lost, he was no more interested in politics than he was in the ‘German nation’s struggle for existence’—but damn it all, who could tell in July 1944 how many eons it might take for the war to come to an end? He was convinced that the right thing to do was to switch horses and count on a lost war, but when should he, or could he, make that final switch?”

A kind of summary would seem to be in order here, as well as a few questions to be answered by the reader himself. First, the statistical and external details. To imagine Pelzer as a cigar-smoking, shifty individual would be mistaken. He was (and is) very clean, attired in custom-made suits, wore (and wears) the latest thing in ties, which do, in fact, still look good on the seventy-year-old Pelzer. He smokes cigarettes, was (and is) a perfect gentleman, and if he has once been described here as having spat, it must be added that he spits very seldom, almost
never, and in that instance his spitting operates as historical punctuation, possibly even as an indication of partiality. He lives in a villa that he does not call a villa. He is six foot one, weighs—according to his son, who is a doctor and whose patient he is—171 pounds, with very thick hair that was once dark and is now just beginning to turn gray. Must we really regard him as the classic example of
mens sana in corpore sano?
Has he ever known S., or T. and W.? Although his sense of confidence in Being seems to be complete, not one of the eight adjectives listed in the paragraph on L. would be applicable to his L., and his occasional smile has always resembled the Mona Lisa’s rather than Buddha’s. Taking him as a person who does not shrink from external conflicts and knows no inner ones, who by 1944 has reached the age of forty-four without ever experiencing an inner conflict, has increased his father’s business fivefold, and does not shrink from the “every little bit” that “helps,” it must be realized that at the relatively advanced age of forty-four he was for the first time catapulted out of his total sense of confidence in Being and is now entering upon virgin territory with some trepidation.

Then if we take one of his most marked characteristics, an almost inordinately powerful sensuality (his breakfast habits are a perfect reflection of Leni’s), the conflict in which he found himself from the middle of 1944 on may perhaps be imagined; and if we take a further marked characteristic of Pelzer’s, an almost inordinately high vitality, the conflict in which he found himself after the events of July 1944 can be imagined. The Au. has in his possession some detailed information that may serve to typify Pelzer’s behavior at approximately the end of the war.

On March 1, 1945, a few days before the Americans marched into the city, Pelzer announced, by way of registered letter, his resignation from both Party and Storm Troopers, dissociated himself from the crimes of this organization, and declared himself (the certified copy of this letter may
be inspected at the Au.’s) to be “a decent German who was duped and led astray.” He must actually have managed to find, almost on the eve of the arrival of the Americans, a German post office that was still functioning, or at least a responsible post-office official. The registration receipt, albeit disfigured by a Nazi ruptured vulture, is also on hand. When the Americans entered the city Pelzer could therefore truthfully assert that he was not a member of a Nazi organization. He obtained a permit to operate a nursery garden and wreathmaking business since burials still continued to take place, although in considerably reduced numbers. Pelzer’s comment on the stability of his trade: “There’ll always be people dying.”

For the time being, however, he has to get through almost one whole additional war year in circumstances of increasing difficulty, and he took to saying, when asked for favors (vacation, advance, raise, special flowers): “I’m not a monster, you know.” This expression, and the frequency with which it was used, is confirmed by all surviving and traceable witnesses from the wreath business. “It got to be almost a kind of litany” (Hölthohne) “that he rattled off, there was almost a kind of exorcism about it, as if he had to persuade himself that he really wasn’t a monster, and sometimes he’d say it on occasions when it didn’t fit at all, for example once when I asked him how his family was, he answered: ‘I’m not a monster, you know,’ and once, when someone—I forget who—asked him what day it was—whether Monday or Tuesday, he said: ‘I’m not a monster, you know.’ People began making fun of it, even Boris mimicked him, discreetly of course, and he’d say, for instance, when I handed him a wreath that was ready for its ribbon: ‘I’m not a monster, you know.’ It was interesting, I must say, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, to observe what was happening to Walter Pelzer.”