The Song Before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright

Author:Justin Cartwright
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9781596919723
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2007-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

12

THE PAIN OF PARTING is itself a pleasure. Mendel thinks that Axel courts the dramatic and the gefühlvoll. He requires the heroic and operatic idea of himself: leaving Oxford for the last time, leaving his friends, rejected by Elizabeth Partridge and now obliged to save Germany, secret sacred Germany. But is he a Nazi. Mendel believes that Axel can't tell the difference between the secret Germany which must rid itself of all alien influences and the Germany of Hitler. Hitler is personally loathsome to him but Hitler may be, in Hegelian fashion, the agent of necessary and inevitable change. Lionel believes he is a Nazi. Lionel has also written to Hamburger, advising caution.

Two weeks later he is having lunch with Elizabeth Partridge in London, and she tells him that Axel is playing a double game. In fact he cares deeply about the treatment of Jews. He took her one day to Sachsenhausen and they sat in his little DKW outside the camp for an hour. This is our shame that the German people will have to bear for ever. Kristallnacht was the turning point. Six thousand Jews are in there. Six thousand. Can you imagine? A group of SS guards came to see what they were doing out on the flat misty plain. Axel spoke to them sharply: I am a German. I am the Count Axel von Gottberg. I will leave when I am ready. The guards mumbled apologetically that it was a restricted area. Do you have something to hide? You must leave in five minutes, Herr Baron.

Mendel is struck by the mention of Kristallnacht, because it was only two weeks ago that Lionel, drunk, shouted at Axel, 'Did you miss Kristallnacht?

Oh God, how sheltered and self-important we are in Oxford. And he tells Elizabeth what Axel said about Israel's Department Store.

'Wilfred Israel was one of Axel's mentors,' she says. 'Axel helped him get people out with false papers from the Auswartiges Amt.'

Mendel is silent now. They are having lunch at Bianchi's in Soho, one of his favourite places. The curious thing is that nobody eats on the ground floor, yet the tables are laid every day. They are upstairs; there are some couples in uniform. The approach of war has produced a strange effect: people talk loudly, they are extravagant, they are excited. The feeling that the world may be at an end is stimulating. Also uniform seems to simplify matters: Look, it has come to this.

Elizabeth is troubled. She is torn by two completely irreconcilable desires, one to do something useful to try to stop what is coming and the other, to go to her little house in Kent and live a quiet life until it is over.

Elya tells her that Axel is in Washington trying to speak to important people. Always, important people.

'Elya, don't be harsh with Axel. He's not really an intellectual like you, but then you're not really a man of action like him.'

'Men of action have always caused trouble.'

'Honestly, Elya, that's unworthy of you.

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