Look Who's Back (34 page)

At any rate, there was no question of a retreat back then, nor now in this unpleasant beer tent. The situation is never hopeless if one possesses a fanatical will to victory. One only need think of the miracle which blessed the House of Brandenburg in 1762. Tsarina Elisabeth dies, her son, Peter, concludes peace, and Frederick the Great is saved. Had Frederick surrendered beforehand, there would have been no miracle, no Kingdom of Prussia, nothing at all, just a dead Tsarina. Many people say one cannot count on miracles. I say one can. One need only wait for them to appear. Until that time one must hold one’s position. For an hour, a year, a decade.

“You know, madam,” I said, winning myself some time, “I’m so pleased to be back here again, in beautiful Munich, the capital city of my movement – did you know that?”

“No, how interesting,” she squeaked cluelessly, and ran her fingers through my hair. For bints like this it is the simplest matter in the world to belittle a figure of authority by upsetting his appearance. If Providence had a miracle up her sleeve, then now was the time to unveil it.

All of a sudden one of the photographers thrust a fat, black pen under my nose.

“Why don’t you sign the dirndl?”

“The dirndl?”

“Of course!”

“Yeah! Fab idea!” This comment was fired from one his colleagues.

The basest human instincts are the most reliable of allies, especially if one lacks any others. The wench had not the slightest interest in having her dress signed. The photographers were most insistent, however; they must have scented a variation on the usual lewd cleavage photo. And she could offer only limited resistance to their entreaties. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, even if the sword is no more than a camera. In any event I spied an opportunity to stall the enemy, maybe even bring up some reinforcements.

“May I, madam?”

“But only on the material,” she squealed hesitantly. “And don’t make it too big.”

“Of course,” I said, and got down to business. Every second of time I won here counted double, so I augmented my signature
with a few embellishments. I felt quite foolish, and after a while had to stop; I was beginning to resemble one of those little girls doodling in her friendship book.

“Finished,” I said regretfully.

One of the photographers said “Flipping heck!” The woman followed his gaze.

I watched with surprise as her horrified eyes widened to the size of saucers.

“Do excuse me, I know it’s a bit messy in the folds. That wouldn’t have happened, of course, with a normal drawing block. Did you know I used to be a painter once …?”

“Are you off you head?” she screeched, leaping off my lap. I could scarcely believe it. The Oktoberfest miracle.

“I’m sorry, madam?” I said. “I’m not sure I quite understand you.”

“I can’t go wandering around the Oktoberfest with a swastika on my chest!”

“But of course you can,” I reassured her. “This isn’t 1924, you know. This country may not have a sensible government, but the parliamentary windbags absolutely swear by freedom of expression, and …”

She was no longer listening; instead she was rubbing so furiously around her décolleté that it almost looked indecent. And even if I could not fully grasp her despair, the situation seemed to have been saved. She was the one who ended up not looking so good in the photographs. And in fact the television reports were even better; she could be seen springing up, her face hideously contorted and issuing a volley of insults. Most of the reports concluded with her driving off a few minutes later in
a taxicab, looking livid and firing off the most astonishing expletives.

When all is said and done I would have preferred a more dignified appearance. But given the circumstances the outcome was more than respectable. At any rate I considered my own losses to have been lower than those of the enemy. The Volk always loves the watchful victor, he who knows how to defend himself, he who wastes no more effort on such a person than he would on a fly.

I was about to order another mineral water when one was set on the table before me. “From the gentleman over there, with his compliments,” the waitress said, pointing into the distance. Peering through the throng of people, I saw, several tables away, a blonde figure whose face was the colour of a farmyard hen. His wrinkles gave him the appearance of an ancient Luis Trenker, all in all making him look as if he were pulling a bizarre grin. When he caught my gaze, the gentleman raised an arm in greeting, his fist balled and his thumb sticking upwards. He tried desperately to broaden his leathery smile, but to no avail.

I rubbed my eyes and resolved to decamp as soon as I could. It was conceivable that the drinks here were being adulterated. For right beside that gentleman sat a carbon copy of the wench who had just left the tent with a swastika on her chest.

I
t is amazing the paths that Providence will find to reach her goal. She allows one man to die in the trenches, and another to survive. She guides a simple corporal to the conference of a tiny splinter party, which he will later lead as it attracts millions of members. Some who are destined for greatness she sentences to a year of incarceration in the very middle of their life’s undertaking, so that they can find the time to write an illustrious book. She also makes provision for an indispensable Führer to fetch up on the programme of a Turkish imp, only to surpass the latter with such ease that he has his own programme thrust upon him. And I am also sure that it was down to Providence that Fräulein Krömeier knew nothing about razor blades.

Once more it was time to pause for thought. Although I had always believed in the significance of my return, in the onslaught of current events my quest to ascertain this significance had temporarily taken a back seat. And for the time being there were no other urgent matters to attend to; at present the Volk seemed to be free of the grosser hardships and humiliations. But now Fate resolved to open my eyes, as once it had in Vienna.

Hitherto I had engaged in minimal contact with everyday
life; Fräulein Krömeier had relieved me of any minor chores. It was only when I decided to run a few errands myself that I discovered the extent to which many things had changed. Of late I had been missing my good old safety razor. Until now I’d had to familiarise myself with a makeshift plastic apparatus, the purported virtue of which was that it combined several inadequate blades which scraped the skin simultaneously, but unpleasantly. As I was able to discern from the packaging, this was regarded as major progress, especially in relation to the former version, which contained one fewer blade. But I could see no advantage vis-à-vis a single blade. I attempted to describe to Fräulein Krömeier what one of these looked like and how it functioned, in vain. And so I was forced to make the trip myself.

The last time I had properly gone shopping was back in 1924 or 1925. In those days one would go to a haberdashery or soap shop. To purchase a razor nowadays, one had to frequent the chemist’s; Fräulein Krömeier had told me how to get there, Rossmann was the name. Upon arrival I realised that the appearance of the chemist’s had changed out of all recognition. Once upon a time there was a counter, and behind this counter were the goods. Although there was still a counter, now it was situated close to the entrance. Behind it was nothing but a window display. The actual goods were stacked on an endless succession of shelves, for every man to help himself. My initial supposition was that there were dozens of sales assistants, all in informal dress. But it turned out that these were the customers, who wandered about collecting their items and then took these to the counter. It was most disconcerting. Rarely had I felt so
impolitely treated. It was as if I had been told on the way in to look for the paltry razor blades myself, as the chemist had better things to do.

Gradually, however, I grasped the logistics inherent here. There were indeed a number of advantages to this system. First of all the chemist could make large sections of his sales depot accessible, thus affording him greater selling space. Furthermore, it was obvious that one hundred customers would serve themselves quicker than ten or even twenty shop assistants could have done. And, last but not least, one could save money by dispensing with these shop assistants. The benefits were crystal clear. I made a swift estimate that by introducing this principle across the board, 100,000 to 200,000 troops could be freed up for immediate deployment at the front. This was so impressive that I intended to congratulate the ingenious chemist straight away. I hurried over to one of the counters and asked for Herr Rossmann.

“Which Herr Rossmann?”

“For goodness’ sake, the man who owns this chemist’s!”

“He’s not here.”

This was a great shame, but I soon discovered my congratulations would have been premature, for clever Herr Rossmann did not, regrettably, sell my razor blades. I was sent to another chemist’s, one belonging to Herr Müller.

To be brief, Herr Müller had likewise implemented Herr Rossmann’s inspired idea. But he didn’t have my blades either, nor did Herr Schlecker, whose frightfully squalid premises were run according to an even more extreme principle: even the cash desk was unmanned here. Which in a way was perfectly logical
because I couldn’t find my razor blades. The conclusion I drew from my dismal experience was that fewer shop assistants in Germany were selling no razor blades. It may not have been a happy state of affairs, but at least it was efficient.

At a loss, I continued to wander past parades of shops. Once again my decision to have worn a simple lounge suit had proved to be the right one. I was able to acquire at close quarters a genuine impression of the circumstances of the German Volk, their fears, their concerns and their razor-blade hardships. And now that I had been made aware of the fact, I realised that not only the chemist’s, but the whole of society had been organised according to this curious work principle. Every clothing shop, every bookshop, every shoe shop, every department store, even grocers and restaurants – all of these were virtually unstaffed. And money, it turned out, was no longer obtained from the bank, but from machines. Exactly the same was true of tickets for travel, and stamps – they were liquidating the post offices one and all. Packages, too, were pushed into a machine, from which they had to be fetched by the recipient. Given all this, the new Wehrmacht ought to have had an army of millions at its fingertips. In reality, however, it had with difficulty scraped together only twice the number to which we had been restricted by the scandalous Treaty of Versailles. It was puzzling.

Where were all those people?

My initial assumption had been that they must be building autobahns, draining swamps and suchlike. Yet this was not the case. Swamps were a rarity these days and tended to be refilled rather than drained. And autobahns were still being built by
Poles, White Russians, Ukrainians and other foreign workers, for wages that were more cost-effective for the Reich than any war. Had I known back then just how cheap it was to employ Poles, I might as well have leapfrogged their country.

One lives and learns.

The thought did occur to me that the German Volk might have shrunk, with the result that all these extra people simply didn’t exist. The statistics, however, showed that there were 81 million living Germans. I expect you are wondering why I had not considered the possibility of unemployment. The reason being that my mind had a very different recollection of what unemployed men looked like.

The jobless man I remembered from the past went out onto the street with a placard around his neck that read “Looking for any type of work”. When he’d had enough of drifting fruitlessly around in this manner, he would remove the placard, grab a red flag handed to him by a loitering Bolshevist, and return to the street. An army of millions of angry jobless men was fertile ground for any radical party, and I was fortunate enough to have led the most radical of them all. But in the streets of today I could not see any unemployed men. Nor was there any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that they had been rounded up for some labour service or sent to a camp. Instead, as I later discovered, the country had chosen the capricious solution of a certain Herr Hartz.

This gentleman had established that one does not earn the favour of the workers only through higher wages and suchlike, but also by supplying their representatives with money and Brazilian lovers. By means of a number of laws this formula
had been extended to the workers themselves, albeit with lesser inducements, of course. Rather than running to the millions, the sum was considerably more modest, and rather than real Brazilians, there were pictures of Hungarian or Romanian ladies of pleasure on the Internetwork, which presupposed that every jobless man was in possession of one or more computer. In this way, Herr Rossmann and Herr Müller were able to go on filling their pockets in their staff-less and razorblade-less trade without having to fear that the unemployed might smash their shop windows. The whole scheme was paid for out of the taxes of the small man from the munitions factory. And for the experienced National Socialist, everything pointed to a conspiracy of capital, of Jewish finance. Using the money of the poor, the even poorer were placated to the benefit of the rich in such a way that their businesses could happily continue to profit from the crisis. Politicians on the left never tired of pointing this out, although by neglecting to mention the Jewish element their explanations fell short. There could be no question that not only Jewish finance, but world Jewry as a whole must be involved here. Only now was the true villainy of the plot revealed. And this – it struck me like a thunderbolt – was the task Providence had reserved for me. In this liberal–bourgeois world of make-believe, I alone was able to recognise and expose the truth.

Superficially, one could make a strong case that Herr Hartz and his social-democratic accomplices had achieved their purported objectives. A White Russian woman on the computer, a warm, dry apartment and sufficient food – did all these not represent redistribution in the socialist sense?