Therefore Choose (22 page)

“But different from before.”

“Before what?”

“Different from during the Nazis,” George said. “As I understand it, for twelve years, education wasn't the education you and I had. It wasn't about scholarship or understanding. Isn't that right?”

Werner did not reply.

“Weren't things of that sort regarded as too soft?” said George. “Didn't education become different — the production of physically fit and hardened citizens of the Reich?”

Werner remained silent.

George had read a pronouncement that Hitler made about his form of education for the young people of Germany. “My pedagogy is harsh,” Hitler had said. “Weakness must be chipped away. The youth that will grow up in my fortresses will frighten the world. I want a brutal, authoritarian, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all of this. It must be able to bear pain. It must not have anything weak and gentle. The light of the free, marvellous beast of prey must once again shine from their eyes.… Then I will be able to create the new.”

Hitler's pronouncement was not something George could ask Werner about. He thought that when he'd mentioned the idea of producing fit and hardened citizens, he had moved too quickly. Perhaps I'm angry, he thought. Angry with the Germans, angry with Werner for being indifferent when I've made a long journey to come to see him.

Perhaps Werner saw that George's question about going into education was tendentious. But the Werner George knew was always ready to grasp a point, whether he agreed with it or not. If he realized a question was rhetorical, he would enlarge on it to make fun of it. In any case he would say something to move the conversation on.

“I'm sorry,” George said. “We shouldn't be talking politics.”

Conversation about Anna was closed off yesterday. Now there could be no talk about education. What could they talk about?

They found themselves walking along a kind of promenade, with chestnut trees on one side and on the other a long bench, behind which was the top of the city wall, up to waist height here, like a balustrade, so that one could look over it, through treetops towards the lake.

George was still wondering what kind of mental illness Werner was suffering from. A memory came to him, a lecture on agoraphobia, in which the lecturer said that women and men were quite different. Women were afraid of leaving home because they felt that in the streets they were in peril from others, from lewd persons — George remembered the phrase — and from thugs. By contrast, men with this condition wouldn't leave home because they were afraid that, on an impulse when they were crossing a bridge or when they were in some high place, they might throw themselves off. Werner and George were not very high up, but the top of the city wall and its outlook over the town below must have prompted the memory.

“This is quite a bench,” said George.

“Le plus long banc du monde,” said a man in a well-tailored suit who was walking past.

George sat down on the bench, the music book on his lap.

Werner sat down too and, after a moment, picked up the music from George's lap and opened it.

“Goldberg,” he said.

Then, almost as if he had read George's thought about agoraphobia, he turned round, knelt on the bench's seat, stretched himself across the bench's back in an ungainly fashion, and looked out across the top of the city wall, still holding the music book.

“Be careful.”

“Sorry,” said Werner. “I dropped your music.”

George saw the music book was no longer in his hand. Would they be able, he wondered, to go round and find it below? He felt he could not be bothered.

Werner sat down again on the bench.

“After I qualified, I decided I couldn't be a doctor,” George said. “I don't have the right personality for it. I joined the civil service. I'm in Berlin, in the British sector. There's hoards of British there, organizing things. I'm one of them, but I'm still wondering … I'm very unsettled.”

“We made mistakes,” said Werner.

“I'm sure you're right,” George said.

He felt alarmed that they were going to discuss the war, but maybe they could keep to generalities.

“We could have neutralized you. The Americans wouldn't have come in. We didn't have to invade Russia so soon. We could have mopped them up later, after we invaded you.”

“Invaded us …”

“I worked on the plan to invade the south of England. In 1940, the Führer put out an order. I was part of the planning group. I knew the country, I spoke the language.”

“A serious plan?”

“With England neutralized, things would have gone very differently.”

George doubted if they were going to agree about that. He tried to pull himself together. He thought of the conversation in medical terms. What would bring Werner out of his self-preoccupation?

“Would you like me to ask the matron about the piano?” George said. “Find out if it's any good, whether it's in tune?”

“We would have succeeded. Several ports on the south coast of England had no real defences. You were totally unprepared.”

Suddenly Werner was talking quickly, as if this was something familiar.

“Take Bridport, other small places with docks and not much defence, motorized attack on Bristol, decent roads, fast drive to London, drive in from the west and south simultaneously. You were hopelessly unready. Look how we invaded France, more than twice the size of Britain. It took us six weeks.”

Would such an attack have succeeded? George wondered. How could one know? That was the time when he was preparing to go to Scotland to practise for the invasion of Norway. Even after the events, when history could be written, nothing seemed very clear.

“We needed to re-establish what we were under Bismarck,” said Werner.

Should I feel relieved, thought George, that he's talking now, animated?

“The German people have a right to exist. Just like the English.”

Was this a way forward? What could he reply?

“You don't realize,” Werner said. “The Communists hated us. The Jews hated us. We had to defend ourselves.”

“You invaded Poland, then Russia,” George said.

“The Social Democrats and the Communists, they undermined us. Then you and France thought you'd try to stop us gaining access to living space in Poland.”

“A sovereign country.”

George realized he should not have said this.

“You English,” he said. “It was a long time until I understood it when I was in Cambridge. I realized it was not that you think yourselves superior. You are above all that, superior to superiority. Others are not even in the game. Of course you think that Germany has no right to assert itself. Who are the Germans that they can throw their weight about? Wogs start at Calais.”

“I've never treated you in that way.”

“It's not a belief. It is a deep knowledge, like the knowledge that gravity will keep you on the ground. English condescension. But what if you are wrong? What if it is Germany that is right? What if we are the true inheritors of civilization? What if you've stood in our way, again, like after the first war?”

George found it hard to believe what he was hearing.

Werner continued. “You're thinking it's me that is in the asylum.”

“That's not it.”

“You could have kept your empire. You could have been there with us. Or if you couldn't manage to think your way towards that, and we invaded you, you'd have come to terms. Vichy England.”

At one time George could have liked the idea of England and Germany standing side by side. How things had changed. Fighting a war for nearly six years, thinking about it — that the invasion of Poland and Russia seemed to be pure, unprovoked aggression — seeing the devastation, thinking about the V-1s and the V-2s, thinking about Belsen.

Was Werner right? Isn't everyone brought up to believe in his country? The Germans had come to believe in a strong Germany. It was the Germany they had longed for, with an empire.

George said, “I suppose that, after certain events, wars become hard to stop.”

“You're saying we started the war?” Werner said. “You declared war on Germany, remember?”

George didn't know what to say.

“The Russians always hated us,” said Werner. “They still do. Communism made them worse. What you saw, on the Western Front, was gentlemanly. You can't imagine the Russians. The Russians …”

George thought about the Russians. Wondered if Anna had been in Berlin when the Russians overran it.

“And the bombing,” said Werner. “Bombing German cities. Civilians, women, children, useless in military terms, but it made you think you were doing something. You thought you could do it by being above it all, up there in the air, without the courage to have your men fight it out on the ground. What were you in all that? A bomber pilot?”

“I was an artillery officer,” George said.

“So you shelled people, destroyed their homes, killed old women?”

“I don't know what I would have done if I'd been German.”

“We came to the table late,” said Werner. “That was the problem. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we weren't united, so we didn't get to America and Africa and China and India. But why go overseas? Agricultural goods, labour, raw materials. They're on our doorstep, to the east. It's …”

Werner stopped. He seemed abstracted. George waited.

“They're not brown or yellow or black like the people in your colonies,” Werner said. “But it's still their place, as in your colonies, their place is to work. And we are like the Greeks, the Romans, like every empire, like the British Empire. You always need work. Plato saw it. The governors, the soldiers, and then the third group, the labourers. That's all some people are cut out for. It's a fact of life.”

George thought of his visit to the London Docks before the war, and of Peter talking about those goods, about virtual slave labour. Werner echoed thoughts that had persecuted him.

“What about your empire now?” Werner said. “Right now they've had enough. Right? What about India?”

“Do you want to walk?” said George. “Or shall we go back to the cathedral and find a taxi?”

George got up and started to walk along the promenade. Werner stood too and walked beside him. Perhaps walking will be good for him, George thought.

“We had a better idea. There are certain problems, of course, but we were on our way to solving them in Poland and the Ukraine, to keep the labourers in their place. And we could see what had succeeded elsewhere. America, where you killed off the Red Indians, then kept the Negroes in line. South Africa, where the natives are separate and have to work. It's a technical problem, a problem of control.”

This is an educated man, thought George. What did we talk about, he wondered, when we were undergraduates? Beauty and Truth.

“So much for the Great British Empire now,” said Werner. “All those colonies, possessions. The sun never sets …”

He was angry now. They both stopped. Werner looked at George and scowled.

“First it was America. They left. Now it's India. They're off. Then it will be all the rest. All leaving. You didn't solve the problem of control.”

Werner was shouting now, taunting George, who was also becoming angry. But he mustn't. He knew he had to think of this as a medical case, maintain the proper demeanour. What would a psychiatrist say? What would Bernardette say? That the activation of anger in the patient was good because it wakened him from the inertia of despair?

They were facing each other now.

“With Poland close, we weren't stretched across the sea. The ideal place for labour. Russia too. That's all they know, how to work. With new ideas we could have prevented a decline and fall.”

“Rounding people up and putting them in camps?”

“Labour camps. Aren't you listening?”

George was aware that people were looking at them, and he started walking again.

“I'm explaining it to you,” Werner said. “We needed the labour. Or you're thinking of the Jewish problem, which people are agitated about now? It was a mistake.”

“The camps,” said George.

“The Jews,” said Werner. “I've learned from Husserl, Wittgenstein. The Jews could have emigrated. The whole lot of them, gone to America. That's the land of immigrants. Think of what the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus said. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses …' Plenty of room there.”

“Do you want a cup of tea or anything? Or go back now? Or walk down to the lake? What would you like?”

“Unbelievable space in America,” Werner said. “We Germans don't want outsiders. We have our own land. We needed to establish ourselves, properly, in a way that we never had the chance to. German language, the German people.”

“Many people think the Jews were central to the Nazis' idea of the War,” said George.

“Too many scientists were lost, went to America. I told you that. It was a mistake. They could have worked on weapons to stop the Russians.”

They were among buildings now. George thought that maybe they would try to find a taxi.

“You made mistakes too,” Werner said. “You should have joined us. You could have done, easily, in 1940, when we drove you into the sea at Dunkirk. You would have been welcomed, even then you would have been welcomed. The natural division is Germans and English, and maybe even the Americans as well, to keep those Russians in their place.”

“There's something in what you say, but still …”

“Central Europe, some of Europe's great capitals, Prague, Budapest. Invaded from the East. That's what you can see now. Right? The Russians.”

“Do you remember when we met?” said George.

“Iron Curtain. That's what Churchill calls it. Who's it between? Russians on one side.” Werner jabbed with a hand bent almost into a fist, to represent Russians, perhaps. “On the other side the Germans … the French … the English … the Americans.”