The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [359]
There were flocks of willing girls from schools for ladies, doing voluntary work. Two serious-looking ones from Cheltenham Ladies’ College were despatched on these errands, and Dorothy went over to look at her German brother in the shadow of his brim. She took his hand and measured his pulse. “Far too fast,” she said. “You should be in bed.”
In Portman Square there was happiness, a little giddy, mixed with apprehension, as the two old-young men told the little they could bear to tell of the chaos that had engulfed them. The English papers, at first cautiously welcoming, and then alarmed, had reported the succession of governments in Bavaria between early November 1918 and May Day 1919. The monarchy had been dislodged by huge crowds of the starving and desperate—mutinous soldiers and sailors, radical Saxons from the Krupp armaments factory, Schwabing Bohemians and anarchists, thousands of angry women, and an army of enraged farmers led by the blind demagogue, Ludwig Gandorfer. These had all been enchanted by the oratory of the wild-eyed and shaggy bearded socialist Kurt Eisner, who trimmed his beard and formed a government which could neither govern nor feed the people. Charles/Karl had never really supposed he would see anarchists in power. In December Erich Mühsam, to whom he had listened in the Café Stefanie as he advocated free love and all goods in common, led four hundred anarchists to occupy a newspaper office. In January there was an election in which Eisner won less than 3 per cent of the vote. In February, on his way to the Landtag to resign, he was shot down by Count Anton Arco auf Valley, a part-Jewish anti-Semite, who was himself shot down by the guards.
The anarchists took power. They were led by the gentle Jewish poet Gustav Landauer, whose beard and rhetoric were flowing. The “Schwabing Soviet” nationalised everything, closed all the cafés except Café Stefanie and put the students in charge of the universities. They searched houses for hoarded food and found none. There was no food and the Allies were blockading the borders. The Foreign Secretary, a mild man, wrote urgent letters to Lenin and the Pope, complaining that someone had stolen his lavatory key.
In April there was an attempted putsch by the government in exile, and briefly, a Bavarian soviet, led by another Jew, the Spartakist Eugen Leviné. The exiles, reluctantly, having hoped to regain Bavaria with Bavarian troops, asked for help from the federal German army. They took Starnberg and Dachau. The White Terror came next. Landauer was brutally slaughtered. Leviné was formally executed. The Ehrhardt Brigade, a Freikorps unit, wore on their gold helmets the primitive sexual symbol that had formed part of the blazon of the Thule Society, with its theories of pure and impure blood, the “ancient coil,” the hooked cross, the swastika. They sang full-throated songs in its praise. Order was restored in the Bavarian capital.
The Reds fought bravely, especially in the railway station, where they held out a day and a night.
Charles/Karl, stiffly, asked Wolfgang and Dorothy if they had news of the Stern family. They said no news had come out of Munich, no trains ran, letters went unanswered.
Charles/Karl said that Leon Stern had been killed in the railway station, fighting for his ideas. Wolfgang bent his head. There was a silence.
Charles/Karl said he had been to the Spiegelgarten of Frau Holle. Anselm Stern and Angela were as well as they could be, though thin and hungry. They thought they would move to Berlin, as Munich was now not a good place for Jews.
It had not occurred to Dorothy to ask whether her father was Jewish and he had not felt a need to tell her. She said, slowly,
“Perhaps, when all this is over, they could come here.”
They could make magical plays for a new generation of children. Angela could work, in London, in Kent, somewhere in peace. The idea seemed both possible and unreal.
• • •
They sat, the survivors, quietly round the dinner table, and drank to the memory of