The Gravediggers by Hauke Friederichs

Author:Hauke Friederichs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

SATURDAY 24 DECEMBER CHRISTMAS EVE

KPD Stirring Up Trouble

Police on Red Alert 1932: A Christmas Catastrophe

– Der Angriff

Another Appeal to Hitler?

Reichstag on 9 January?

Dissolution and New Elections?

– Tägliche Rundschau

Christmas Eve. Five degrees. Rain. So much for a white Christmas in Berlin.

Members of the SS were putting up the Goebbels’ Christmas tree. Helga, their four-month-old, smiled as she watched. Joseph Goebbels envied his daughter her childish ignorance: he’d just heard from the hospital that his wife’s condition was critical. Magda was fighting for her life. Elsewhere, the world was settling down for a peaceful Christmas, and Goebbels just wanted to be alone, somewhere high among the mountains. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing.

A poem by Mascha Kaléko. Her book would soon be on the market. This poem she’d entitled ‘Single Man on 24 December’, and it began thus:

There is no other room as bare

As mine now. The last shopgirls are

walking home

– Christmas lunges, I’m caught unaware.

Not everybody had shut up shop, however. The ever-industrious Quaatz had gone to see Meissner, reckoning that a quick chat couldn’t hurt. Later that day he reported to Hugenberg: ‘Today I dropped by my friend, since he’ll be travelling for a few days after Christmas, and I read him your letter. In response he said again that there is a willingness to appoint DNVP party members to leading roles. We then discussed the situation, and I hinted that the mood against Schleicher within our party is darkening.’

So much for goodwill to all men.

The birth of Christ had no spiritual significance for Abraham Plotkin, who was Jewish, but he’d observed that many German Jews put up trees in their homes and celebrated the day in their own style. That year, Christmas Eve also happened to fall on the first day of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of light.

Yet Plotkin was not in a celebratory mood. Despite the mizzle, he took a walk through one of Berlin’s working-class neighbourhoods then spent the next few hours helping at a community kitchen in Wedding. They were handing out double portions in honour of the season. Taking the opportunity to nose around, he found that the unemployed locals had set up a library that included books by Goethe and Schiller, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Upton Sinclair. On his way home, he saw a boy no older than five playing in the street – wearing slippers. Another boy was standing outside a bakery, gazing through the window. Plotkin, who had noticed him there on the way to the kitchens, asked why the child had lingered so long.

No answer. ‘Either he couldn’t tell or was frightened,’ Plotkin speculated. ‘Or was it that the sight of cookies was too tempting to leave?’

The American literary power couple Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis had also deserted Berlin over Christmas. They were celebrating the holidays in Semmering, a resort town not far from Vienna, where they were joined by numerous friends, including the Mowrers. They were going to spend ten days in the unspoiled countryside, tobogganing, breathing fresh air and generally enjoying life.

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