Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney

Author:Darryl Pinckney
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374713140
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SEVEN

Some days only the admiration of the whole world will do, but the world just isn’t giving it. She said that they didn’t make propaganda; they made entertainment. She said some of us may not have heard of Conrad Veidt, but he was the most famous Nazi actor and he’d been a leftist Jewish sympathizer before that. She said that even though the Party knew that most of her circle had been arrested, she kept her job at Ufa until she was called up. They were sending everybody to the Eastern Front. That was in 1943. She was twenty-eight years old and handsome. She said she never lied about her age and she said what she did about having been a handsome young man, because none of the films she had bit parts in survived.

She said it was important for her to talk to the young. When she was born, her father already had been lost on his Western Front. She was a wraith, but still young and handsome when her war ended. She put on her first pair of nylons for a Soviet officer. He brought her a phonograph. They danced to big-band swing. Then one night she waited, into the morning. She never saw him again or found out what had happened to him. She didn’t have a photograph of him. But she had tucked away in a Schrank one scratched record that he had loved.

The young thought that she was old when they got their war, which was technically somebody else’s war, though America tried to make Vietnam everybody’s war, she said. She did not feel old. Perhaps it was her pearls. She was proud of them, the young. They stood up and asked their parents about her war. She said that once you learned something about it, you wanted to know more. She said she would never get to the end of it herself. It just continued. There was no relief from what you could learn once you started. She didn’t like the feeling of people trying to put the war behind them. She said some people hadn’t forgiven Marlene or Elisabeth for leaving Germany.

She said she was not born an aristocrat, like Marianne Hoppe, the darling of Aryan cinema who used her standing with Hitler to protect Jews and gays and Communists in the theater. But she was happy to live in a land where literature was taken seriously. She said she baptized herself when the new Germany was born. When the old Germany was being thrown out, she picked up a name from the debris, vintage Louis XIV stuff. She tried it on and liked it. And she loved the letters of Charlotte von der Pfalz, the unhappy wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s auntie brother.

She said that film had lost its importance. Forty years after the war, film was escape and there were no big problems that were completely unheard-of before. Her old gang was dead, dead to the world, in bed, any bed,

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