War and Remembrance (114 page)

There are many children in the group, but Louis stands out. He is a privileged imp, getting more and better food than the others from a master scrounger, the naval attache. When this man found out Natalie was a Navy wife, he was enslaved. They are quite close in an intimacy of (I am certain) antiseptic purity. He brings milk, eggs, and even meat for Louis. He brought a forbidden electric hot plate too, and Natalie cooks on the balcony to dissipate
the odors. Now he is coaxing her to take the role of Eliza in
Pygmalion,
which he wants to put on with the dramatic group. She is actually considering it. Often the three of us play card games or anagrams. All in all, considering that we are on the soil of Hitler’s Germany, Natalie and I are living a strangely banal existence, like people on an endless cruise aboard a third-rate ship, forever seeking ways to kill time. Boredom is the repeating bass note of our days, fear an intermittent piccolo shriek.

Our Jewish identity is known. The German Foreign Ministry man stationed here in the Brenner’s Park has made a point of complimenting me on
A Jew’s Jesus.
In fact, he talked rather intelligently about it. At first I was appalled, but granted the thoroughness of the Germans, it now seems naive to have hoped that I would pass unnoticed. I am listed in
The International Who’s Who,
the
Writers Directory,
and various academic reference tomes. So for my Jewishness has made no difference, and my semi-celebrity has helped. Germans respect writers and professors.

This must account for the assiduous medical attention I have been receiving. Our American doctor, a Red Cross man, was inclined to shrug off my gastric troubles as “detentionitis,” his own facetious term for the malaise that afflicts our group. But in the third week I became so violently ill that he requested my hospitalization. So it was that at the Baden-Baden Municipal Hospital I met Dr. R . I will not write down his real name even in this bothersome Yiddish-letter cipher. I must draw a portrait of Dr. R— when I have more time. Natalie is calling me to lunch. We have given some of our precious Red Cross food to the hotel kitchen, which has promised to cook it up in style. We are to have corned beef hash; at last, at last, a way to doctor up those infernal potatoes.

FEBRUARY 21
.

BADEN-BADEN
.

I was very ill last night, and I am far from recovered today. However, I am determined to keep writing this record, now that I have started again. Moving a pen across a page makes me feel alive.

The hotel kitchen’s execrable bungling of the corned beef hash upset me. Anger no doubt triggered the indigestion. How could a dish be simpler to prepare? But it was burned, lumpy, cold, greasy, altogether odious. We have learned our lesson. Natalie, the attache, and I will pool our Red Cross food, and cook and eat it in our rooms, and to hell with the Boches. Others are doing it; the aroma drifts in the corridors.

The latest rumor is that the exchange and release will take place at Easter time, to show Germany’s civilized respect for religion. Pinkney Tuck himself has told me this is sheer wishful fantasy, but the rumor mill grinds
on. The psychology of this group is fascinating. A novel as good as
The Magic Mountain
could be made of it; pity I have no atom of creativity in me. If Louis were older he could well be our Thomas Mann, and possibly his acute little mind
is
recording more than we can discern.

The mention of Easter reminds me that in my Lourdes entry I started the topic of my abortive conversion to Catholicism. It is an old sad dreary story, a stirring up of cold ashes. Still, since these pages, if they survive me, may be the last testament of my brief and insignificant passage through the world, let me scrawl out the main facts. They should take but a paragraph or two. I have already described my alienation from the Oswiecim yeshiva, the key to it all.

I could not tell my father about that. Respect for parents was too deep in the grain for us Polish Jews. He was a lovable man, a dealer in farm implements, with a lively trade in bicycles. We were well-to-do, and he was pious and learned in an unquestioning way. It would have shattered him to know that I had become an
epikoros,
an unbeliever. So I went on being a star Talmud pupil, while laughing up my sleeve at Reb Laizar and the conforming young noddies around me.

Our family doctor was a Yiddishist agnostic. In those days Jewish doctors often returned from the university smelling of pork. One day on impulse I went and asked him to lend me Darwin’s book.
Dar-veen,
the yeshiva whisper went, was the very Satan of modern godlessness. Well, “Dar-veen” was hard going in German; but I devoured
The Origin of Species
on the sly by candlelight, or away from the house by day. The first actual Sabbath violation of my life was carrying the Darwin book in my pocket down to the meadow by the river. Sabbath law forbids the bearing of burdens in “the public domain,” and a book counts as a burden. Strange to say, though in spirit I was already far from the faith, the physical deed of carrying that book out of my father’s house on Saturday was a terribly hard thing to do.

Next, the doctor loaned me Haeckel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. I raced through those books as adolescents do through pornography, with mixed feelings of appetite and shame, thumbing eagerly for the irreligious parts: sneers at miracles and at God, attacks on the Bible, and the like. Two books I shall never forget, cheap German anthologies in green paper covers:
Introduction to Science,
and
Great Modern Thinkers.
Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Voltaire, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, the whole radiant company burst on me, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy lying alone on the grass by the Vistula. In a couple of weeks of feverish reading, my world and the world of my father fell in ruins: demolished, devastated, crumbled to dust, no more to be restored than the works of Ozymandias.

So my mind opened up.

When my family came to the United States, I was the precocious
wonder of a Brooklyn high school. I learned English as though it were the multiplication table, sped through the school in two years, and won a full scholarship to Harvard. By then my parents had seen me turn Yankee Doodle in speech, dress, and manners. They were proud of the Harvard scholarship, but fearful, too. Yet how could they stop me? Away I went.

At Harvard I was a prodigy. The professors and their wives made much of me, and I was invited to wealthy people’s homes, where my yeshiva-accented English was a piquant novelty. I took all the petting as my due. I was a good-looking young man then, with something of Louis Henry’s unforced charm, and a great gift for conversation. I could make the Brahmins feel my own excitement in discovering western culture. I loved America; I read prodigiously in American literature and history; I knew most of Mark Twain by heart. My yeshiva-trained memory retained everything I read. I talked with a fluency of ideas and richness of allusion that the Bostonians found dazzling. I could spice my talk with Talmudic lore, too. In that way I stumbled on the perception that later made my name; to wit, that Christians are fascinated when one presents Judaism to them, with dignity and a touch of irony, as a neglected part of their own background. Thirty years later I wrote my
Talmudic Themes in Early Christianity,
which metamorphosed into a best-seller with a catchier title, A
Jew’s Jesus.

I am not proud of what happened next, and I shall be brief. Anyway, how repetitious life is! What story is more threadbare than an infatuation between a wealthy girl and a poor tutor? Comic operas, novels, tragedies, films abound on that simple plot. I lived it. She was a Catholic girl of a prominent Boston family. In one’s early twenties one is not wise, and in love one is not honest, not with others or with oneself. My own fluency of ideas and argumentation, turned in upon myself, persuaded me that Christ had come into my heart. The rest was simple. Catholicism was the true tradition, the treasure house of Christian art and philosophy; and it was a strongly elaborated ritual system, the only sort of faith I really understood. I went through a conversion.

It was a shallow dream. The awakening was ghastly, and I pass over it in silence. At heart, through all the instruction I remained — as I still remain — the Oswiecim yeshiva boy, who came into a church out of the snow, and was shocked to his soul at seeing on the far wall the image of the crucified Christ, where in a synagogue the Holy Ark would be. If her family had not thrown me out, and if she had stood by me instead of liquefying in tears like a candy figure in the rain, I should still have lapsed. My essential condition for admiring, pitying, loving, and endlessly studying and writing about Jesus of Nazareth, as I have done, has been that I cannot believe in him.

According to the Nuremberg Laws, since all this happened before 1933
and I never did anything about “de-converting,” I may be technically safe from persecution as a Jew. The exemption, as I understand it, applies to German half-Jews, and as an American I might well get the benefit, too, if it came to that. When my passport problems grew sticky in 1941, a good friend in the Vatican procured for me photocopies of the Boston documents that recorded my conversion. I still have those dark blurry papers. I have never yet officially produced them, because I might in some way become separated from Natalie. That must not happen. If I can help her with them, I will.

As for saving my own life — well, I have lived most of it. I shall not return to the Martin Luther book. I meant to round out, with this Reformation figure, my picture of Christ moving through history. But the coarse strident Teutonism of my hero was giving me greater and greater pause, quite aside from his diatribes against the Jews, indistinguishable from the bawlings of Dr. Goebbels. That he was a religious genius I do not doubt. But he was a German genius, therefore a destroying angel. Luther’s best brilliance goes to smashing the Papacy and the Church. His eye for weaknesses is terrifying, his eloquence explosive. His bold irreverent hatred of old institutions and structures sounds the true German note, the harsh bellow out of the Teu-toburg Forest, the ring of the hammer of Thor. We shall hear it again in Marx, the Jew turned German and combining the fanatic elements of each; we shall hear it in Wagner’s music and writings; and it will shake the earth in Hitler.

Let other pens tell of what was great in Luther. I should like to write next some dialogues in the Platonic manner, ranging in the casual fashion of my Harvard conversations over the philosophical and political problems of this catastrophic century. I could contribute nothing new; but writing as I do with a light hand, I might charm a few readers into pausing, in their heedless hurry after pleasure and money, for a look at the things that matter.

Another rambling entry! But I have done my six pages. I have been writing in great abdominal pain, clenching my teeth to get the words down. I shall find it hard to rise from this chair, I feel so weak and poorly. There is something gravely wrong with me. These are not psychosomatic spasms. Alarm thrills through my system. I shall certainly see the doctor again.

FEBRUARY 26, 1943
.

BADEN-BADEN
.

I am feeling a little better than I did in the hospital. Actually, it was a relief to get away for three days from the boredom of Brenner’s Park Hotel and the smell of the bad food. The hospital jellies and custards went down
well, though I am sure they were distilled by German inventive genius out of petroleum waste or old tires. I was put through every possible gastrointestinal test. I still await the diagnosis. The hospital time passed quickly because I talked a lot with Dr. R .

He wants me to bear witness, when I return to the United States, that the “other Germany” lives on, shamed, silenced, and horrified by the Hitler regime; the Germany of the great poets and philosophers, of Goethe and Beethoven, of the scientific pioneers, of the advanced social legislators of Weimar, of the progressive labor movement that Hitler destroyed, of the good-hearted common people who in the last free election voted by an increased majority against the Nazis; only to be betrayed by the old-line politicians like Papen and the senile Hindenburg who took Hitler into the government when he had passed his peak, and brought on the great disaster.

As for what ensued, he asks me to picture the Ku Klux Klan seizing power in the United States. That is what has happened to Germany, he says. The Nazi Party is an enormous German Ku Klux Klan. He points to the dramatic use of fire rituals at night, the anti-Semitism, the bizarre uniforms, the bellicose know-nothing hatred of liberal ideas and of foreigners and so forth. I rejoined that the Klan is a mere lunatic splinter group, not a major party capable of governing the nation. Then he cited the Klan of Reconstruction days, a respectable widespread movement which many of the leading Southerners joined; also the role of the modern Klan in the Democratic politics of the twenties.