Two Brothers (18 page)

The Fischers perhaps imagined that the children spent their time in improving pursuits, reading and listening to records. Or playing board games, Snakes and Ladders perhaps, or the newly arrived and hugely popular Monopoly that Herr Fischer thought wonderful and most educational. What the kids were actually doing was wandering the streets of Friedrichshain getting up to whatever mischief they felt inclined to, which was plenty. Frieda worked on Saturdays, and Wolfgang, who could not put up with the noise of four children going wild in a small apartment, simply turfed them out, allowing them to spend glorious free and easy hours ducking in and out of tenement courtyards, playing hopscotch, throwing stones, pinching fruit from stalls and occasionally inspecting each other’s private parts.

In this last activity Dagmar was a spectator only. She never ever showed, not even her knickers, although the boys got round that one by simply lifting up her skirt. Silke, on the other hand, was happy to give the boys a look any time they wanted. She couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Thus, as the months went by, a strong bond formed between the four youngsters, a bond separate to their school friends and their individual lives. They were the Saturday Club, a secret society of which only the four of them were aware and which none other could join. Many solemn oaths and secret vows were taken, binding each of them always to be loyal to the club and to each other. It is true that the bit about loyalty to each other was often broken by internal feuding, particularly by the girls, who made a habit of crossing their fingers behind their backs when swearing, whispering ‘except Dagmar’ or ‘not including Silke’ under their breath. But nonetheless the friendship in the Saturday Club was real. Paulus, Otto, Dagmar and Silke were a true gang of four.

Of course the boys saw far more of Silke than they did of Dagmar, and in her innocence Silke fondly imagined that this made her the insider of the two girls, that there was an elite gang within a gang. The opposite was the case. Dagmar’s absence lent her mystery, which in combination with her effortless superiority simply made her all the more fascinating. Silke could never quite understand how the meaner and more snooty and more indifferent Dagmar behaved towards the boys, the more they seemed to like her. Whereas her own eagerness to please just led to her being taken for granted or, worse still, ignored.

It was to be two years before the three Friedrichshain members of the Saturday Club bumped into their elegant Kurfürstendamm comrade on anything other than their name day. It happened at Lake Wannsee during an inter-school swimming gala. These were the Weimar years of increasing egalitarianism, and expensive private schools like Dagmar’s occasionally found themselves competing in sporting competitions with their state-supported rivals.

Paulus and Otto were sitting about on the beautiful banks of the swimming lake when they spotted Dagmar laughing with her friends quite close by. They decided not to make themselves known, partly out of shyness, there being so many other posh girls with her, but also from the sheer unfamiliarity of seeing her outside their usual haunts. Instead they were content to watch, fascinated to see their long-legged friend in her bathing costume, and in some strange, half-understood way enjoying the spectacle.

That was until they saw her approaching the victory podium.

‘What’s she doing?’ Paulus said. ‘Bloody hell! She’s not going to mess around with the cups, is she?’

Dagmar was certainly making her way towards the table where the trophies were displayed.

Tea had been announced a few minutes earlier, and with the various teachers and judges all intent on claiming their share of the refreshments, Dagmar had accepted a dare. Paulus and Otto watched in wonder as she sidled up to the table, took up the grand trophy and stepped up on to the little jetty which led to the diving platforms to pose for a photograph.

Unfortunately the jetty was wet and she slipped, dropping the splendid trophy and breaking its base. Stunned at what she’d done, she simply stood, quaking in terror as a whistle was blown to mark the end of tea and the resumption of the gala. It was then that Paulus and Otto charged up and grabbed the broken trophy from her.

‘Get out of it, Dag!’ Paulus blurted. ‘Get back to your friends!’

Moments later the judges returned to find two contrite little boys in bathing trunks holding the broken trophy.

‘What is the explanation of this?’ the master thundered through his snow-white whiskers. Every inch the old professor with his stiff collar and frock coat and his cane.

‘Some rough boys were playing with it!’ Paulus said.

‘We were playing with it. It was us!’ Otto declared simultaneously.

‘We chased them into those woods and got the cup back,’ Paulus went on.

‘We broke it. It was us, we did it!’ Otto said.

The two boys turned to each other.

‘You idiot,’ Paulus said.

The upshot was that the Stengel boys were given a public beating, which Dagmar watched, astonished at their kindness and thrilled at their bravery. And, if she were honest with herself, rather pleased: it’s not every girl who gets publicly defended in front of all her friends by two strange tousle-headed boys who don’t even cry when they get ten on the backside. Plus four extra for Paulus for trying to make up a story.

They might perhaps have given way to tears if they had received their beatings alone, but neither was prepared to be the first to break in front of the other.

And particularly not in front of Dagmar.

Silke was also present at the gala with her school and, although she hadn’t seen the incident, she quickly heard all about it, as word of what had happened spread like wildfire amongst the children. Later when the competition resumed (minus the disgraced Stengel twins), Silke pushed her way through the various school groups to confront Dagmar. Facing each other, the two little girls made quite a contrast. Dagmar, tall for eight, her beautifully fitted school swimsuit of the latest two-way stretch elastic. Silke, small and tough, in a baggy suit of knitted wool (holed in a number of places), her legs bruised and scratched as they always were from some fight or other.

‘You got our boys a beating!’ Silke snarled.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dagmar replied loftily. ‘I didn’t ask them to take the blame, did I?’

‘You should have said! They wouldn’t have whipped a girl.’

‘That would have just looked ridiculous. Paulus and Otto had already given different stories. I don’t think a third would have helped, would it? They’d still have been beaten. Besides, the boys wanted to help me, isn’t that what the Saturday Club’s about? I think it was very noble.’

Silke’s fists clenched. She was red-faced. Angry but also embarrassed and ill-at-ease, a scruffy kid amongst so many little rich girls, all dressed in the same identical, beautiful bathing costumes that Dagmar was wearing.

‘Who is this child?’ a stern female voice snapped as Dagmar’s forbidding-looking teacher approached. ‘She should be with her own school. Girl, why have you left your group?’

‘I came to talk to Dagmar, miss,’ Silke mumbled at the ground.

‘Chin up and speak out, girl! We are not at home to Mrs Mumble here,’ the teacher snapped, provoking much giggling from the posh girls, which turned Silke positively crimson.

‘I came to see Dagmar Fischer,’ Silke said, raising her head a little.

The school mistress gave Dagmar a dubious look.

‘Do you know this little girl, Fräulein Fischer?’

‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim. She is the daughter of the woman who cleans the apartment where I have my music lessons.’

Silke’s jaw dropped to hear herself so dismissively described.

‘We’re friends!’ Silke asserted.

This caused further giggling amongst Dagmar’s classmates and it was Dagmar’s turn to go red.

‘Well, she must run along now,’ Frau Sinzheim said with a dubious look at Silke, ‘as the finals are upon us and you need to concentrate, Dagmar. Under-tens freestyle, breaststroke and the relay. I look to you to deliver Gold in all three.’

‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim.’

The mistress turned back to Silke.

‘Get away now, little girl. You have no business here.’

Frau Sinzheim moved on, leaving Silke staring at Dagmar with blazing eyes and poking out her tongue.

‘Come on, Silke,’ Dagmar said. ‘You’re just jealous. You wouldn’t have minded one bit if it had been
you
the boys took a whipping for. But do you think they would have done?’

Silke looked as if she was about to reply but then didn’t. It seemed that perhaps Dagmar’s observation had hit the mark.

Two Parties and a Crash

Munich, Berlin and New York, 1929

TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY.

Two birthday parties.

One in an apartment in Friedrichshain, Berlin.

The other in Munich in a house at Schellingstrasse 50.

Paulus, Otto and the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
.

All nine years old that day.

Only one of them would live to beyond the age of twenty-five.

The other two, like countless millions of other youngsters around the world, were doomed.

The Munich nine-year-old would murder them before perishing itself.

The birthday party in Berlin was a very jolly affair.

There were games and cake and American soda. The awkwardness of the meeting up of Paulus and Otto’s school friends with Dagmar and Silke from the Saturday Club was soon overcome. Dagmar even let her hair down sufficiently to take her turn with the blindfold in Blind Man’s Bluff.

There was much to celebrate, as the boys’ grandfather pointed out in a rather lengthy toast that he insisted on being allowed to make during tea and which the children largely ignored, not unnaturally preferring to concentrate on the rolls and cold chicken.

‘These lucky boys will achieve more than we ever have,’ Herr Tauber said, ‘for Germany’s long nightmare is over and every opportunity is open to them.’

It was in fact for this very reason that the Munich celebration was not such a happy event. Germany’s increasing success might have been good for the Stengel boys but it had left the National Socialist German Workers’ Party thin and ailing.

Its message of violent, uncompromising outrage and hatred had begun to sound somewhat hollow as life in the Fatherland continued to improve. In the Reichstag elections of 1924 they had gained 3 per cent of the national vote. In 1928, after four more years of screaming, shouting, marching and fist-banging up and down the country, they were down to just 2.6 per cent.

The brown-shirted men were at a loss.

Their brown-shirted leader was at a loss also. Although of course he hid his confusion behind the stern face of an ‘implacable’ and ‘unalterable’ will.

What was going wrong?

Their message was clear enough. Despite the confusing and self-contradictory ‘twenty-five points’ with which Hitler had launched the party, it really boiled down to just one thing: ‘Blame the Jews for everything.’

What could be simpler? And yet this message was proving increasingly difficult to either explain or sustain.

Should the Jews be blamed for the increasingly stable money?

The improving employment situation?

The efficient social services?

Membership of the League of Nations?

People liked all of those things. They were the very reason that in Berlin old Herr Tauber felt able to state that the country’s nightmare was over.

Even the great outrage of November 1918, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ theory which had long been a Nazi Party favourite, was beginning to sound like a paranoid obsession. Over and over again throughout the 1920s Hitler had railed against the ‘November Criminals’, those rich and cowardly Jews skulking in Berlin who had deliberately, maliciously (and for no apparent reason that Hitler cared to explain) conspired to organize the defeat of the Imperial German Army.

People had used to lap that one up but now nobody seemed to give a damn.

Germany had moved on.

The Munich Baby was dying.

And yet unbeknownst to those glum brown-shirted men sitting around the table at the house in Munich, everything was about to change. The Nazi Party would have to wait eight months for its birthday present, but when it came, it was the best they could possibly have hoped for.

Chaos.

On 24 October 1929, six and a half thousand kilometres from Schelling Street. On another street. An infinitely more famous one, called Wall Street, there began the greatest collapse in market confidence in all history and with it a global depression.

Germany’s economic recovery had been the most fragile, the abyss from which it had hauled itself the darkest and most deep. Its vulnerability to this new financial madness was therefore all the greater.

The Munich Baby was about to get its chance.

Fighting over Dagmar

Berlin, 1932

OTTO WAS VERY surprised. What had got into Paulus?

Otto was a fighter, a two-fisted scrapper who never bothered with words when a blow could be more articulate, but Paulus was the opposite.