Homecoming Read online

  Vonlanden's article examines the relationship between the chivalric tradition and modern warfare. The siege of Leningrad, with its goal of starving the population as a means of conquering and destroying the city, serves as his exemplary material. He concedes that he is perhaps overcomplicating the issue: chivalry vis-à-vis Bolshevism? But he does not want to oversimplify either; one should not make the use of chivalry contingent upon the quality of the enemy. One is chivalrous for one's own sake, not to please or spite another.

  Vonlanden derives chivalry from his iron rule: to be chivalrous is to demand nothing of others that one is not ready to demand of oneself. Germany was engaged in a life-and-death struggle and had demanded the ultimate of every man, woman, and child. It was thus chivalrous to meet the fray no holds barred.

  Then he stops and asks, Does not the usual definition of chivalry mean quite the opposite, consideration on the part of the strong for the weak, for women, children, the elderly? How does that tally with the “iron rule” brand of chivalry?

  I expected the answer would have to do with the third world-epoch, its rejection of the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one's neighbor, and its return to the law of nature: brute force, combat, and victory. But he transforms that return into progress, a movement toward greater equality: chivalrous behavior now includes regarding and treating the weak as equals. In peacetime this means recognizing they have a capacity and need, equal to those of the strong, to be happy. Thus, whereas in peacetime the usual definition of chivalry is valid, in wartime it is false. In wartime too the weak are to be regarded as equals of the strong because they are equally capable and ready to kill. Kill? Yes, the weakest of the weak is strong enough to kill.

  The article points out that partisan women are fighting side by side with partisan men, that they are aided by child and graybeard alike, no one being too old or too young to pull a trigger, throw a grenade, plant a mine. And as they are our equals in their capacity and need to kill us, so we treat them as our equals when we besiege, starve, conquer, and destroy them. The article concludes as follows:

  Thus unfolds before our eyes a battle for a city the likes of which has not been seen since the battle for Troy. This is no ordinary battle: it may be as quiet before the gates of Leningrad as it was for much of the time during the ten-year siege before the gates of Troy. Unlike the Leningraders, the Trojans did not undergo starvation, but they were so worn down and made so blind and mindless that they themselves let the enemy in. The Trojans were not bombarded or even fired upon, but the fighting outside the gates was merciless. The final clash was of a violence so appalling and sublime that it could end only with the razing of the city. The final clash over Leningrad will likewise be appalling and sublimely violent and likewise end with the razing of the city—the chivalrous end of a chivalrous battle.

  14

  IF THAT WERE NOT ENOUGH, I had a call from my historian friend, who had found out how Hanke met his death.

  Whether he never made it to Schörner or had a falling-out with him, or whether it was too late to agree or disagree about anything, on May 4, he fled with others of his kind. They spent the night in Komotau, at the house of a German farmer, but the farmer's Czech stable boy reported them to the local partisans, and they were captured and taken to a prison in Gorkau. There they stayed a few weeks, officers and civilians both, during which time neither the partisans nor the guards recognized Hanke for who he was. Next they were sent with another group of prisoners to Seestadtl.

  It was a sunny spring day. There were many people out, and the guards had the prisoners walk along the railway embankment, which ran parallel to the street. At first they walked on the tracks, but when a train made its appearance they stepped to one side. As the train approached, Hanke scrambled across the tracks. Others followed. They scurried down the slope toward a stream, bushes, and thicket, but the train was short and soon passed, and the guards fired at the fleeing figures from the embankment. Other prisoners ran off in the opposite direction with other armed Czechs in close pursuit. Two men who had been hit by the locomotive while running across the tracks bled to death. A prisoner who later made a statement about the incident spoke of chaotic running, shooting, and shouting. Hanke and two others were brought down by the guards' bullets and then beaten to death. The others got away.

  Including Volker Vonlanden? Had he fled Breslau with Hanke, been captured by the partisans, run across the tracks, made it down the slope?

  Be that as it may, I had the author of my homecoming story. In 1940–41 he had studied in the city I was living in, lodging with the Lampe family at Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 and making an unsuccessful play for Beate Lampe. During the winter of 1941–42 Hanke took him under his wing and sponsored or appointed him as a war correspondent. During the summer of 1942 he saw Beate again and had greater success. It is highly likely that he was in Hanke's orbit during the latter's last few weeks or months. It is also highly likely that he went back to Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 after the war. He would have written the novel sometime between this second visit and the midfifties, when my grandparents gave me the bound galleys.

  I liked him because he liked The Odyssey and had played with it; because his lively novel was my first encounter with light fiction; because its open ending, which was not of course his ending, made me wonder. Besides, it is impossible to spend so much time with a person without coming to like him.

  Or hate him. And while I can't say I actually hated him, the playful quality I found attractive in the novel seemed repellent in his letters and articles. With the same levity he had employed to make Hades a dream, the sea a desert, and the glossy-plaited Calypso the full-breasted Kalinka, he had made ruthlessness an ethical principle, the siege of Leningrad an act of chivalry, and the seduction of Beate a tribute to justice.

  Did I want to know any more about him? I still wondered how the novel ended. I had imagined so many sequels to the encounter at Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 that I wanted to see how he would wind it up. It might be a homecoming that had never before been told, never before been imagined. It might be the archetypal homecoming.

  15

  MAX WAS LOATH TO BELIEVE that an evil person could come up with the homecoming of all homecomings. Children always hope against hope that what is good is true and beautiful and what is evil is false and ugly. I too bore remnants of that hope in my breast and would not have been disappointed had the novel fallen flat at the end. I just wanted to know what the ending was.

  Not that there was much I could do about it. I put classified ads in the major dailies and weeklies characterizing Volker Vonlanden with the data I had at my disposal and posed as a historian looking for more. Two detectives offered their services, a genealogist offered to draw up his family tree, and a “former friend” asked for an advance of five hundred marks for “important information.”

  I wrote to Freda von Fircks, who answered that she did not recall having met a Volker Vonlanden. The prisoner who had been with Hanke and perhaps Vonlanden and had made the statement about the embankment incident had given it to a reporter with the Norddeutsche Zeitung in 1949. I would have to find the reporter to find the prisoner, who would be old and feeble and most likely unwilling to say any more than he had told the reporter. So I gave up on that front.

  I switched my attention to Hanke. My historian friend had come up with some articles Hanke had written for the Schlesische Tageszeitung and speeches he had given, and sent them to me. They were all of a piece and sounded familiar. Could Volker Vonlanden have been his ghost writer?

  Hanke took the threat of defeat seriously. He wrote nothing about miracle weapons and sudden turnabouts; he wrote of past glory rather than imminent victory:

  Only twelve years ago Bolshevism was on the point of annexing the Reich to Asia. Just as then it attempted to achieve its goal by political means, so now it is trying to overrun the Reich and Europe by straining its last military reserves. We thank Fate for having sent us these twelve years and granted us the possibility to resist the
foe gun in hand. Had Bolshevism prevailed in the Reich twelve years ago, those of us who survived would have regarded the current situation as manna from heaven.

  In an article in which he took on what had apparently become a flood of enemy leaflets, he found time for a brief etymological study:

  Our Führer's name is his program. Genealogical research has shown that his grandfather spelled his name Hüttler. It thus derives from Hütte, hut. And in fact Hitler tells us in Mein Kampf that his father was the son of a poor villager with nothing but a hut to his name. Hitler's ancestors came from a rugged countryside on the Danube much like our mountain regions. When we say Heil Hitler! we are saying Hail Hut Dweller! and are thus greeting ourselves, born as we were in mountain huts. The Hitler flag is thus a hut-dweller's flag, and we can only agree with the enemy propaganda that labels this war Hitler's war: it is the war of us hut dwellers.

  In his last speech, which was broadcast over the radio and printed in the Völkischer Beobachter, Hanke abandoned all pretense at making military sense of the defense of the Breslau Fortress, taking instead an existentialist stance:

  The reason for it is that we have jettisoned all the ballast we have been dragging through our lives and falsely calling culture when it was in fact nothing but cheap civilization. We often believed that by destroying this external backdrop to our day-to-day existence we would be destroying ourselves. That is not true. Tens of thousands of men and women in the Breslau Fortress have learned that they can take leave of everything they regarded as an integral part of their existence—their homes, their heirlooms, their goods and chattels, a thousand trifles they have always clung to—and hold up perfectly well.

  When we spoke earlier of total war, we meant what we said, but only now do we know what waging total war truly involves.

  My historian friend also included an eyewitness report describing Hanke's bunker: a broad carpet protected by runners led down into a broad passageway—it too covered with runners—flanked by functional offices and with a narrow passageway leading to a modern kitchen, showers and toilets, bedrooms, and another, more modest kitchen for the personnel. Hanke's room stood at the very end; it was large, brightly lit by concealed lights, and furnished with heavy furniture and valuable paintings and rugs. Here the Hanke who enjoyed surrounding himself with beautiful women by day would hold “boisterous parties attended again by beautiful women, elegantly dressed, women as charming and enticing as the models in peacetime fashion magazines. Where did they come from in this chaos? Nobody knows: the ones who did know went down with Breslau.”

  16

  MY MOTHER RETIRED in the summer of 1989, and I gave her a week in the canton of Ticino as a retirement gift. When I was a child, she told me of a trip she had taken there, of the slow, quiet funicular that runs from Locarno to the pilgrimage church with its view of the blue lake, of the tables and chairs along the Ascona shore and the piano music wafting out of the hotels, of a boat trip around islands with enchanted gardens and heavily wooded valleys where wolves still howled. I would not have been surprised if she had turned the offer down, but she accepted.

  The relationship between single mothers and only sons has a bit of the married couple to it. This does not make it a happy one: it can be just as loveless and aggressive, just as much of a power struggle as a marriage. As in marriage, though in its own way, there is no third party or parties—no father, no siblings—to drain off the tension that inevitably arises in so intimate an association. The tension does not truly dissipate until the son leaves the mother, and often the dissipation takes the form of a nonrelationship much like that of a divorced couple. It may also turn into a lively, intimate, tension-free relationship, and after years of going through the motions with my mother—seldom making trouble and always a bit bored—I was looking forward to our week together as a promise of better things to come. And in fact we enjoyed what we did and saw. Mother was so involved that there were times when I could have sworn the dismissive, derisive look on her face had disappeared. We talked over her plans for the years ahead and my dream of starting a publishing venture of my own—she with unfeigned interest in my questions and I with unfeigned interest in hers. I was surprised at how clearly she saw the possibilities and problems of my dream from the vantage point of her years in the business world.

  As everything was going so well, I asked her one evening in Ascona, “You've never told me how you got through the war. How about it?”

  “What makes you think there's something to tell?” she countered.

  “You're from Silesia. You knew Breslau, Gauleiter Hanke. You were there when the Russians surrounded the city; you were there for the Allied victory, the expulsion of the German population. I'd like to hear what it was like.”

  “Why?”

  I filled her in on my progress with the Karl story. “He's the one who led me to your neck of the woods.”

  “My neck of the woods? I come from Upper Silesia. Breslau and Hanke are Lower Silesia.”

  “There, you see? You have to tell me. I don't even know the difference between Upper and Lower Silesia.”

  She laughed. “I don't ‘see’ anything. There's absolutely nothing to tell about the difference between Upper and Lower Silesia.” She paused, hoping I too would laugh and move on to something else. But at last she shrugged, a sign she had given up, and went on. “We moved from Neurade to Breslau in the autumn of 1944. Father was asked to take over a job he had done before at the Department of Public Works, but don't ask me what it was exactly. They needed engineers, and although he had retired by then they recalled him. But when they declared the city Breslau Fortress, he and Mother had to leave. They were strafed by a low-flying plane as they fled.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?” She gave me a look that seemed to ask what made me want to know. “I . . . I stayed in Breslau until the war was over. Then I came here.”

  “Were you there for the entire ‘Fortress' period? What was it like? Did you ever meet Hanke? Or his people? Were you ever in his bunker? Did you—”

  She laughed and held up her hands. “Not so many questions at once!” But she showed no indication of answering even one. We were looking out at the lake. The hotels no longer had pianists, but there were some young people in a rowboat singing the latest Italian hits, their voices first soft, then louder, mixed with laughter and shouting, and finally soft again and distant.

  “The worst part was building the landing strip through the city. The lifting and dragging and pushing; the endless commands, shouts, curses. I'll never forget the buzzing, sawing, roaring, clattering sound of the planes and machine guns, the bullets smacking into the stone. We had to run into buildings for shelter, but the wider the strip got the farther we had to run, and as we ran the planes would hunt us down. It wasn't so bad for the young people like me, but if you were old . . . One night I came home to find half the house gone. Long before I got there, I could see the curtains blowing in the wind, red roses on a yellow background, and I thought to myself, Funny, they look like mine. That night there was a firebomb attack, and by the next morning the curtains and everything else in the flat had burned to a crisp. Standing outside, I could look up at the sky through the window openings.”

  Mother turned and looked me in the eye. “Or do you want to hear about our soldiers breaking into houses and looting? Or their basement orgies and their whores? Or the bomb that hit the post office and ripped a woman into so many pieces—here the head, there a leg, there the guts—that they could fit them all into a small box. Or the bomb that hit a cart, killing the horse and hurling the soldier across the road and into a garden, and just as he got to his feet—smiling at me, amazed he was still whole—the house behind him collapsed and buried him? Or do you want to hear about the poorest of the poor, the workers brought in from conquered territories who were done for the moment they were wounded?”

  She talked louder and louder, faster and faster. The people at the table next to ours were staring at us. She turn
ed her head and looked back at the water. “But spring did come. When I woke up on my birthday, I could hear a blackbird singing, and there were snowdrops blooming in the garden, lilacs budding. It was a beautiful morning, though rubble and ruins were everywhere. The rain was beautiful too. It had rained during Holy Week, the first rain in a long time. It began at night. I was sleeping in an open basement facing a garden and woke up to the patter of rain. I lay there listening, trying not to fall asleep again it was so beautiful. It was a gentle spring rain; I could smell the dust growing wet . . .” She shrugged her shoulders after a pause and said, “Well, that's how it was.”

  “Thanks. Is that it for today or is that it for good?”

  She gave me a look of relief mixed with coquetry. “For good? How do I know?”

  17

  WE COULD HAVE MADE the trip home in a day, but I wanted to stop off in the village where my grandparents had lived. I wanted to see their house again, see the pine trees, the apple tree, the bushes, the field, the garden; I wanted to sit on the shore, gaze out at the water and feed the swans and ducks; I wanted to hear whether the stations still signaled the departure of a train to each other by ringing a bell; I wanted to show Mother the world Father had grown up in. I may also have wanted to use the occasion to shake her up a little, open her up, break down her reserve. In any case, I refrained from telling her where we were until we had unpacked and showered and were walking along the lake before dinner.