The Secret History of Modernism by C. K. Stead

Author:C. K. Stead [C. K. Stead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

The Goldstein Story – 2

FRIEDRICH GOLDSTEIN HAD been old enough to be aware that his father was banished from the house among pines on the slopes of Mount Carmel because he had done something wrong. This made the boy anxious, and the anxiety increased when Hilde took him back to Germany. Already he understood he was a Jew, or partly a Jew, and that in Germany it was not a good or a safe thing to be. Soon he was to hear his mother’s family talking, in half whispers, sentences cut short when it was noticed he was listening, of “protecting little Freddy”, even of “saving” him.

One memory he retained was of arriving on the platform of a railway station where Hilde was asked for their papers and, after a brief and frosty exchange, was told to follow the uniformed questioner into an office. Freddy was left beside a pile of luggage and told to wait. Time passed – it seemed to him a very long time – and he found himself on a platform now empty, feeling a kind of certainty-in-terror that he would never see his mother again, and that soon he would be taken away and something unspeakable would be done to him.

When Hilde came out of the office she was ruffled, insulted, angry. It was a mood which continued and increased during that year. Hilde’s family didn’t like the Nazis, but made excuses for them and praised their achievements. Germany’s humiliation after the Great War, the Great Inflation, the Great Depression – how much more, they asked, could be loaded on a nation and a people, before the time came for them to assert their pride and reclaim what was rightfully theirs?

And yes, Hilde would concede, there was some truth in that. But if that was all there was at stake – a reassertion of national honour and pride – why were they, her own good Aryan family, always warning her not to raise her voice in public places, to be careful what she said on the telephone, and not to make jokes about Hitler and his cronies?

Hitler said he was not a dictator, he had only made democracy simpler. But what kind of democracy was it when you couldn’t speak your thoughts, when books were burned, phones tapped, informers encouraged, and listening to foreign radio broadcasts forbidden on pain of imprisonment or death?

“You are all afraid,” Hilde told them. “I can feel it. Fear. All Germany smells of it. How is that better than what we had before?”

And always, everywhere, there was the hate chorus against the Jews. Slogans: “The Jews are our Misfortune.” “Whoever knows the Jew knows the Devil.” “Synagogues are Dens of Thieves.” “Who buys from Jews is a Traitor to the Nation.”

In the newspaper she read of a “scientific study of the Jewish character” which showed it to be composed of “cruelty, hatred, violence, cunning and avarice”. In a broadcast speech she heard Dr Goebells say that the Jews “should be exterminated like fleas and bedbugs”.

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