Stained Glass (2 page)

Did the countess—the subject could now safely be raised without opening the year-old wound—have any private opinion what might have happened to her son? Yes, she said, she did have a private notion, but it was so ridiculous, she did not really want to share it. We are old friends, said the mayor: Confide in me. The countess leaned over to him and pointed to the little gray kitten, asleep near the fireplace, and whispered: “Do you believe in reincarnation?” The mayor changed the subject, and went gladly back to the village to resume the war. The countess, a lifelong clairvoyant, knew Axel was alive, though no word from him or of him had reached her. Moreover, she was sure that he was well; and altogether certain that—wherever he was—he was risking his life in the fight against the Nazis.

It had been, in fact, a very near thing. Axel was roughly treated when, in civilian clothes taken from a corpse, he presented himself to a Polish captain in command of a rear guard outpost. Axel understood only enough Polish to gather that the captain had calmly given orders to take this German lad out somewhere and shoot him. But he had anticipated some such possibility, and accordingly had memorized the Polish words necessary to communicate a willingness to mark on the map the two major repositories in Warsaw of Nazi ammunition laid up by foreign commercial agents before the invasion began, one of them in a part of the city as yet unoccupied. It took less than three hours to verify this, and from the jubilation Wintergrin briefly wondered whether he would be made to stick around and serve as grand marshal of the Pulaski Day Parade. What he wanted was to be escorted out of the country. The Polish captain promised to guide him to Sopot whence, assuming Nazi airplanes did not completely close off the traffic in the Bay of Danzig during the next two or three days, he could be infiltrated by ferry into Sweden, whereafter he would become a Swedish problem. Axel's guide, Zinka, was a woman who spoke no German, and after the first two days of walking and bicycling north toward Olsztyn, his vocabulary failed him, he ran out of variations on hidden ammunition dumps, and so they walked (and sometimes ran), and ate, in silence, the stocky forty-year-old gym teacher from Warsaw, and the angular twenty-year-old Westphalian aristocrat.

Approaching Malbork, Zinka suddenly motioned Axel into a barn when she spotted the checkpoint down the road. The uniforms were Polish but confused reports, snatched here and there from overheard talk, from fragments of broadcasts on municipal radios blaring the grim news into village squares, suggested to Zinka the possibility that units of Polish troops had been conscripted by their captors. The word was that no one carrying papers unfranked by the Gestapo would be permitted to travel, and that anyone without papers of any sort would be detained. Zinka, alone, ran toward the two soldiers. Axel strained to discern what was happening but succeeded only in seeing the indistinct figures apparently in commotion, and then both soldiers racing in their motorcycles up the road over which he and Zinka had just bicycled. The girl motioned Axel to come on, and as the motorcyclists disappeared, he did so, and she described, miming rather more graphically than Axel required in order to catch the gist of her story, her complaint to the patrol that five kilometers back, a young German in soldier's uniform, jumping her from the side of the road, had raped her. Axel wondered whether the chivalrous pair of Polish soldiers was prepared to challenge the entire Nazi Army, rape being the sport in which, at this point, he assumed the German Army to be substantially engaged. He even considered the possibility that
he
would be apprehended and hanged as a rapist.

So they left the main road and traveled cross-country. As they came closer to the coast Axel's well-disciplined face brightened, even as Zinka's grew pensive and sad.
He
was moving away from the Nazis,
she
would return to their most recently occupied European capital. At the garage near the commercial pier she extended her hand, but her eyes looked down. Axel took it, bent his head formally, touching his lips to her graying hair, and, in English, said, “Goodbye, Zinka. I will never forget you.”

Axel made his way through Sweden to Norway, where he presented himself to Norwegian intelligence. After the Nazi invasion of Norway he joined the resistance. For five years he made no effort to be in touch with his mother or any other relatives in Germany or England: he would not risk retribution against his family. When the war was over he received from the Norwegian monarch the highest decoration for bravery in a simple ceremony to honor all the surviving heroes of the resistance. “Like lining up for food stamps,” one veteran grumbled. Axel returned to Germany with an undetailed story of detention in Sweden, whither he said he had escaped after a brief period of captivity in Poland and where he was held incommunicado. The story was routinely, indeed listlessly, accepted by a society crushed under the events of recent months. In such a season Marco Polo could not have commanded an audience of six people to hear out his exploits.

Axel resumed his studies, pursuing philosophy at Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers, and receiving an advanced degree after three years, working long days in the library and long afternoons in the gymnasium, where he boxed with some success as a middleweight. He was serious, but not fanatical or even obsessive in his pursuits, and though he led an apparently carefree life it was true—as later was widely remarked when every commentator in Europe undertook the definitive portrait of Axel Wintergrin—that strain was etched into a face otherwise that of a healthy twenty-eight-year-old: the calling card of Gestapo torturers in Norway who, pity the poor innocents, never even discovered that the man they were mutilating was a German. But he could smile through his calcified sadness, though nobody could quite remember when last Axel had been seen laughing. This is a very serious world, he told his closest friend Roland Himmelfarb, who as one of the few surviving German Jews—he sat out the holocaust in the strangest, strongest sanctuary of them all, serving undetected in the records department of the Gestapo in Berlin—hardly needed advertisement of the fact. Indeed, in his circle no one disagreed with him, because no one applied to Axel the conventional criteria. It was not expected of Count Wintergrin that he should join in beer-drinking contests or take his turn entertaining his associates with accounts of bawdy adventures or attend the games to cheer on his university team. Even as a boxer, he fought with a certain detachment. Although he was first-rate, adversaries and acute spectators got the impression he had a disinterested concern with the sport: often he eschewed the opportunity to cripple his opponent after maneuvering to do so—rather like throwing back into the stream the trout you have labored so hard to land. And after the match, though always affable and sportsmanlike, he would leave rather than stay on to see the other matches or join the team at refreshments. He would return to his studies, or write a letter to his mother or a friend, or write in his journal, which he never shared with anyone. His desultory romantic life was of concern to his mother, since Axel was her only child, and heir to the huge landed estate of his father. At first he obligingly escorted the ladies proffered by his mother for his attention: the neighboring blue bloods. Then others came from remoter parts of Germany. When he traveled with his mother to England in 1946, he saw for the first time, since graduating from Greyburn in 1938 after six years of English public-school life, his second cousin Caroline, herself first cousin to the reigning monarch, whom she succeeded as queen a few years later after the fatal accident. Caroline was imperious by nature and undertook to find the perfect girl for her glamorous, studious, wealthy, driven German cousin. Axel obligingly affected to be quite taken by the three girls (beautiful, literate, witty, in differing mixes) he escorted during the summer, all of whom were deeply attracted to him (Lady Leinsford in particular, though it had not amused Axel when she said to him, sighing in his arms, “For you, Axel, I'd even become a Nazi”). Axel's treatment was perfunctorily ardent. He would systematically contrive to seduce them (four days, three days, eleven days respectively), and then with much tenderness announce that he had to get back to his work, the nature of which he never specified.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Axel,” Princess Caroline once said, “that it isn't absolutely clear whether you are a nice man? I mean, I love you very much—you know that, Axel—but you are very distracted. And your interest in people seems, somehow … abstract.” She searched his eyes. “But I am certain you are going to do great things in European politics. If you don't mind, Axel, when you take over Europe could you please leave this little island to its own idolatrous pleasures? Don't forget now, Axel. That can be your bread-and-butter present to me on leaving Stamford House.” Axel smiled—and then actually appeared to … think about it. (“I do believe,” Queen Caroline said, recalling the incident in 1952 when Axel Wintergrin announced the foundation of his political party, “I do believe,” she repeated, “that when I made that flippant—that ludicrous—‘request' of Axel, back when he was a mere child [Axel had been a mere child of twenty-six], he hesitated
precisely
because he was trying to decide whether to
grant
it!”) Back home, after two months' summer indolence in England, Axel drove himself in his studies, adjourning altogether that part of his romantic activity that could be said to be oriented toward a possible marriage. “All in due course, Mother,” he comforted the countess.

After submitting his thesis and taking his degree, he spent his time traveling throughout Germany. He would know, on arriving in a city or town he had never been to, just where to go: always he would find the man, or woman, who shared his obsession. And—always—in a matter of days he had made fast friends, who as often as not became disciples. As his movement grew it became easier for him because he would come to town, check in at a hotel, and there he would be reached by those who had word of his coming. They would seek him out, sometimes a single man or woman, more often two, three, or a half-dozen people, and talk with him. He would be asked to speak to a gathering, but always he stipulated that not more than a roomful should be there. He was not ready to address large audiences.

He spoke quietly about the genuine idealism of the German people who had become united less than a hundred years earlier, and now were sundered by a consortium of powers, one partner in which had designs on human liberty everywhere, while the other partner, fatigued by a war that had roused its people from a hemispheric torpor which they once thought of as a part of the American patrimony—an American right, so to speak—was confused now and disillusioned by the ambiguous results of so heroic an effort. The Americans saw a Europe largely enslaved by Allied victory—and unconcerned about Germany. No, never count on allies beyond a certain point, he said: only Germans can reshape their own destiny. Only Germans can come, would come, to the aid of their brothers in the East. Faced with such resolve, the Russians would necessarily yield; even as, eventually, the Nazis had yielded.

Always the questions were practical, always he gave the same answer: How, in the absence of armed help from the West, could he effect the liberation of East Germany? Always he answered: by spiritual mobilization.

Did he mean the satyagraha preached by Gandhi?

Spiritual mobilization, Axel said, means the mobilization of all one's strength. Foremost is the will to live as free men. Any means appropriate to the realization of that end are licit—from peaceful resistance to ultimate weaponry.

Would he be more explicit?

In due course, he would say, and his smile was without smugness, without affectation, though he would then fasten or unfasten (his only mannerism) the two bottom buttons of his rusty-green tweed jacket, a perfect cut on his tall frame, and his light-brown hair would respond sluggishly as he shook his head to the right, his lightly chiseled, sensitive features, and sad eyes, struggling in coordination with his thoughts to frame the answer in a way so many of his followers sought.

All in good time, he answered, as if to say: Allow me to trouble myself, on your behalf, on these technical matters. I shall not let you down.

When he rose at his alma mater to announce that if the Occupation Forces would not deliver an ultimatum to the Russians to reopen the road to Berlin, the German people should do so, he was suddenly a conspicuous figure on the European scene, a man not yet thirty years old. Until then no national notice of him had been taken, only here and there a character piece in a local newspaper about the aristocratic curio who dreamed of irredentism and talked as if he would smash the Red Army with the might of his left fist, trained at the gymnasium at Heidelberg. These efforts at caricature failed when undertaken by reporters who went to hear him talk. They could no longer bring off conventional ideological denigration. (“Count Wintergrin seems to have forgotten the horrors of war …”) But after Heidelberg, all the major papers in Europe suddenly began to take notice of Axel Wintergrin and his—his what? they asked themselves. Here was someone who, biologically, could have been the grandson of Adenauer, the
de facto
leader of the country (with his Christian Democratic Union, serving as chancellor under the authority of the joint occupation command). And when direct elections came in November 1952, Adenauer would surely win—with the Social Democrats under Erich Ollenhauer taking perhaps one-third of the seats. Germany's future would be a generation's oscillation of power between these two parties, the analysts joined in predicting. There was no room for the so-called “Reunification “Party of this Wintergrin. Why so much fuss over a quixotic Heidelberg Manifesto? Why had groups in every major city in Germany suddenly invited the young count to address them: elated veterans' organizations, cynical student associations, inquisitive business associations, wary labor unions—even, here and there, always discreetly, organizations of civil servants … why the fascination with him?