The Vengeance of Rome

FIFTY-ONE

German materialism, French eroticism, Roman superstition, English and American greed. What can counter these influences? Only Russian spirituality. And of all Slavs, the Cossacks are the truest Russians. We worshipped our tsar-batiushka. Just as the Jews have done in Palestine, my ancestors established their khutora whenever it was possible to reclaim land from the Tatars. Some true Cossacks rode with the German forces but most of those were merely Great Russians claiming Cossack blood in order to get out of the POW camps. I am sure there were few true Cossacks fought for the Germans, though this did not stop Stalin from killing so many. Not that I hated all Germans, even during my years in Dachau. I had the library, at least until it became distasteful to me. I began to forget my Russian roots and believe, because I only had Goethe and his compatriots to comfort me, that German was the finest language for expressing human metaphysics and spirituality.

I think the Sturmführer got the idea for our orchestra and choir from me. He would play me Bach and Beethoven on his gramophone. Beethoven I did not mind, though I preferred, of course, Tchaikovsky. The orchestra soon broke up and we were again reduced to gramophone records. Yet I do not think I could have survived in those early months without music. Today everything is drowned out by the thump-thump of Negro drums, the angry repetitions of the jungle we hoped to conquer but which somehow is conquering us. I had seen that schloss as a place of God, a fortress of civilisation, whose family represented all that was admirable and exemplary in German civilisation, yet Mussolini had known better. Today I understand they sell pizza from a kiosk in the grounds and in summer rock-and-roll bands offer concerts to the crowds of soft-faced children whose only knowledge of German culture is the frankfurter and the hamburger.

The Cornelius girl is proud of her new BMW motorcycle. One ride on the pillion was enough for me. German ideas were the ruin of Russia but Russia, through the Holy Church, can still be the salvation of Europe. Rome has failed her. The proof is everywhere. The proof is manifest. Les donneurs de sérénades. Je respire enfin. Les petites fetnmes. Il est très joli, très sublime. Moi? Je suis un monstre. Appréhendez vous? Non. Non. Non. La sexualité. C’est fini. C’est dangereux pour les enfants? Ah oui, mais je suis un celebrant. I do not lack intellect, only education. And for that I am forced to blame Germany. Another year or two and my schooling would have been complete. Simplicissimus himself was never as unfortunate. May I touch her? It is all I wish to do. Either she is real or I am. C’est impossible pour les deux. All I wished to do was purchase some furniture. Violento, those colorados. Wie spät ist es? Hören Sie sie singen? Sie will nach Wienfahren. Wirfahren zusammen ins Gebirge. Ein Flugzeug? Die Sonne geht spät unter. Dunkle Wolken. Stürmisch. That weather! Yet it is the summers I remember best. If you have never heard marching in a city you could not imagine it. It begins as a kind of rustling sound, like a breeze in autumn trees, then it develops into a rhythmic banging, as sticks pop in a fire, then as if boys beat on dustbins until it takes on a mechanical, deafening quality, not like any human sound at all, but overwhelming your senses. A voice sounds like a loud fault in an engine. When it stops, you want to vomit. I heard that sound in London when the Boys Brigade practised for Armistice Day, reminding me that the British and Germans were not so different. For a while I had an inferior copy of Grimmelshausen, actually in my locker, but that was either confiscated or stolen, I forget.

I am not one of those. Jenseits von Gut und Böse? Hier liegt Dynamit indeed. For me there was no Erlosung. Schnauben made that clear. He insisted I hear and absorb this message. And was he wrong? I still do not know. Spengler said he understood all too well. If we continued on the road to materialism and relied increasingly on technology, China must inevitably come to rule the world. ‘That is the reason for the difference between the Chinese and our friends the Japs,’ he told me.

Quelling my panic, I continued to stand at attention.

‘There is nothing more effective than the Japanese war machine,’ he insisted. ‘It will conquer Asia.’ Of course, he was wrong. Their machines have conquered Europe and America. Von Morgen bis Mitternacht we must struggle against this, he said. But he wronged me. I could never join his Maschinenstürmer no matter what the inducement. I gave the Sphinx the correct answer. Some of us prefer to answer the questions anyway. Some of us would remain silent until death. I do not have this English habit of talking about everything. They have no dignity. They will never have even a glimpse of paradise. Furcht und Elend is their only future. No one has ever accused me of lacking Innigkeit. The rain on those old cobbled Munich streets smelled sweet as a wheatfield with the dawn dew still upon it and I breathed in the distant air, remembering those cobbles in Kiev, yellow Kiev, gold and full of raw gems. Then came the Stahlgewitter. I fled down the long tunnel which ultimately took me to America, then to Africa, Europe and finally to England. How was this Verwandlung accomplished? Das Urteil ist yours. I was fated to become the organ-grinder’s monkey. They say it is nonsense that the Jews controlled everything, but while they did not own every newspaper (the Jew Pork Times) or every film studio (Jew Knighted Artistes) consider the books they did publish, the movie-plays they did write. Yet I still do not say I agreed with Hitler. The trouble is, of course, that the propaganda against him was inaccurate and absurd so that all his critics were discredited. These Americans are no different. They all believe in flying saucers. As a result nobody wished to build mein Flügelhotel, which would make its way round the world landing at exotic cities and picturesque landscapes then fly my visitors home again. Das einfache Leben! But they said I was mad. I had nothing to do with flying saucers or for that matter cups or plates.

But even in the depths of the ancient forests where sunlight slants between tall trunks, there is a waterfall and a pool where a dragon drinks. That dragon guards a treasure which can only be won by a hero with a magic sword. Bathe in the dragon’s blood, sang the bird, and you will be for ever invincible, only beware the linden leaves. And, of course, it was a falling leaf which was to be my ruin. Seryozha had changed for the worse. I did not like him any better. He had shown me a cartoon by Bakst. He said it was of himself. Those beautiful leaves, all mellow. Autumn is my favourite time of year. It was surprising to find him there. He had read Proust in prison, he said. ‘From my hundred and first week,’ he said. ‘It was relatively civilised. Then they sent me here. But you? Why would you be in Dachau? Now, I mean.’ It was my lot to be for ever ‘Category C’. It gave me no real status. Mosley looked down on me, I know, even on the Isle of Man, where I was for a short time. To be ‘Category C’ was to be a nonentity. At the time I was upset. Later, I came again to appreciate the anonymity. I wrote an article for the News Chronicle concerning the virtues of Cossack arranged marriages but I heard nothing from them. They, too, were clearly prejudiced against class C internees.

They have no idea what it means to be a refugee, beginning one life after another, constantly settling, constantly forced to move on, unable to speak one’s own language, save to other refugees. It was even worse for me since I despised so many Russians — Trotskyists and left-wingers of every stripe who had wheedled their way into the confidence of the BBC and the Foreign Service. Reduced to a number. They do not realise it. I had no number in Dachau. Or rather the number often changed. No imprinted number. Five. A finif. A fin. Quarter of a pound. And even at full stretch all I am is an obscure dinosaur. If only I had been permitted by history to retain my own, noble name. But they would not have been realistic. Not in this day and age.

They keep looking back. Their happiest memories are mixed up with sunken munitions ships, blazing buildings, fragmented planes and grey balloons. The crash of bombs reminds them of their former glory days.

Germany is the custodian of human culture, Seryozha says. We are the bastion against the degenerate Red, the corrupted democrat, the aggressive conservative. We are the only genuine radicals and guardians of culture and German culture is the highest of all.

They formed us into a team and made us pull the great water-filled roller around the streets of the camp, levelling them, making all tidy, so that the stretch between the poplars looked like a French avenue. I heard the Dachaulied on the wireless when I was living in Paddington; some youth choir, I thought they said, or possibly émigrés. They were singing a song about Dachau some priest had written.

I cannot forget that Christian priest and the barbed-wire crown they forced him to make and wear, the big beam he carried, the Jews they made spit at him. I never worked on the plantation which the SS said was for our food, but they sold it in the town. Yet it brought, if the wind was right, a smell of growing green, of some small memory of rural paradise. I met a prisoner who had once counted butterflies for a living. He was some sort of scholar and came in for especially cruel treatment from the guards which was why I took pains to disguise my origins. I told them I had been a mechanic and that got me privileges working on the SS and Gestapo cars.

Schnauben asked my opinion.

‘I have never been interested in abstraction,’ I said. ‘I am a practical engineer.’

He made a mouth. ‘Hier liegt Dynamit.’

‘What?’ I was afraid he would accuse me of some kind of sabotage, of being an arsonist. ’I’m no fire-starter. Fire is far too volatile. You never know what it’s going to do. As for explosives . . .’

He seemed amused and bored at the same time. ‘Just a sort of joke,’ he said.

I laughed appropriately.

‘You had better go to the library,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you another pass. Get something out for me, too.’

During that period, before I developed a loathing for literature, I read a good deal, almost all in German. There were a few political books but mostly poetry, non-fiction and novels. I reported the political books, although it had not been my intention to expose the librarian, a Catholic, who was dismissed and replaced by a monarchist. I read Der Totenwolf and other books by Ernst Wiechert which were there in several different editions, and that is where I found Grimmelshausen, but I longed for something in English, to remind me of my boyhood. Sexton Blake, needless to say, was not a favourite of the Nazis. Otto Wenninger was another author I found interesting. I admired him for his philosophy and read Geschlecht und Charakter more than once. Of the classics, I suppose Tieck was my favourite. Mein Kampf, which I pretended to like, was boring; either too obvious or too obscure, and thoroughly long-winded. I found that it revived unwanted memories. They terrified me. I lived in fear of a day when, by unlucky chance, Hitler put two and two together. Karl May and Charles Sealsfeld, whose Nathan, der Squatter-Regulator struck an especially familiar note with me, continued to be great favourites. I was astonished to learn later that this Austrian Augustinian monk had travelled under several aliases in America and elsewhere. Another man of the cloth I enjoyed was Johan Klepper, who brought me a certain amount of solace, also. Many of the others I forget and my reading was suddenly terminated when an SS guard found me with a copy of a play called Sladek, der Schwarze Reichswehrmann. I do not remember the authors name, but apparently he was proscribed. Even when my privileges were given back to me, I found I had not only lost my taste for reading, I despised the activity.