Speak, Silence by Carole Angier

Author:Carole Angier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Philippa Comber in 1982.

Gordon Turner doesn’t like to speak about Max’s emotional troubles. At most he’ll talk of his cafards, his having the blues. If you press him on depressions he’ll admit they happened, but insist that they weren’t permanent, that they passed.34 That is true, and they passed especially with people like Gordon. For when Max liked and trusted someone, he could relax and be happy. So he was always happy with his sisters and their families, with Ursula and Kasus, with friends like Gordon and Michael Hamburger. It happened now with Kristin Völker.35

In 1985 the Goethe Institute sent Kristin to England for five years. And once a year or so, on Max’s rare trips to London, they would meet. He was writing some of his darkest work in that time – After Nature and Vertigo – and his despairing moments would never leave him now, but Kristin didn’t see them. He could always be gloomy, about the university, for instance, which was a madhouse. But mostly he was relaxed and cheerful, and as amusing as ever. They sat in her office, or on the terrace of the Polish Club in Exhibition Road, a few doors down from the Goethe Institute, and chatted and laughed as they’d done in Munich. One of their subjects was painting, Kristin remembers. They talked about Pisanello’s extraordinary painting of St George in a straw hat, which Max would put into Vertigo, and his perennial favourite, Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander, as he’d done with Martine a quarter of a century before. And like Martine, Kristin felt the closeness of his mind, but no more. He never asked her about her own life. And he never touched her, not even to share the usual hug on meeting or parting. That hadn’t changed either.

Kristin remembers two other things they talked about, both of them serious, and both full of coincidences, which seem to hover around her like one of his moths, which carry the souls of the dead.

One of those topics was the war. Kristin lived through it as a small child in Hamburg, and Max very much wanted to hear about that. Hamburg was heavily bombed from the start. As a result thousands of children were evacuated, as they were from British cities, and in 1944, after the worst bombing of all, Kristin’s mother decided that she should go too. She took her little daughter to the safest place she could think of: Bad Hindelang, near Sonthofen in the Allgäu.

Kristin no longer recalls what Max said when she told him this astonishing coincidence, but being Max, he may not have been astonished at all. And it was not the only one. The terrible bombing that had decided her mother was Operation Gomorrah,36 the devastating Allied bombing raids of July 1943 described in Nossack’s Der Untergang,37 which Max was making his students read. Gomorrah created one of the worst firestorms of the war, killing 42,600 civilians and virtually destroying Hamburg. She would never forget, Kristin told

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