Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899-1945 by Deighton Len

Author:Deighton, Len [Deighton, Len]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book, Suspense
ISBN: 9780586068953
Publisher: Harper
Published: 1987-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

1932

‘Was that more shouting in the street?’

In Berlin-Schöneberg, the evening of Sunday, April 10, 1932, was miserable. The sky had been overcast all day, it had got dark early, and the unrelenting rain was enough to persuade many people not to vote in the second presidential election. The whole city was plastered with election posters. Under the light of the streetlamps were regiments of Hitlers and rows of swastikas, shiny now in the persistent downpour. There weren’t many people about, except for small squads of uniformed SA men, whose studded jackboots could be heard on the street, and sometimes their strident voices, too, as they sang their songs and looked for Jews to beat up or communists to battle with.

In fashionable Haberlandstrasse, a few houses from the apartment where Albert Einstein – the world’s most famous scientist – had lived, the Isaac Volkmanns were preparing for a dinner party. The host was Isaac Volkmann, a prematurely balding thirty-six-year-old who would have been strikingly handsome but for the nose broken in a boxing match at school. Even so, his damaged nose, and a scar on his cheek, gave him the look of a slightly overweight pugilist, which some people, including his wife, thought attractive. But Volkmann was not a professional fighter, he was a fashionable dentist, whose clients included many of Berlin’s most famous film and theatre stars. His particular skills included the fitting of beautifully made crowns and the general ability, by means of all sorts of magic tricks, to make a mouthful of crooked, yellow, neglected teeth into something even, white and beautiful.

Frau Volkmann – a petite young woman with carefully plucked eyebrows and a sensuous mouth that too often pouted – was twelve years younger than her husband and still found the role of hostess somewhat stressful. For that reason the Volkmanns would often take their guests to a restaurant. Lately they had been favouring the newly furbished Restaurant Traube on Leipziger Strasse with its tropical gardens and the tables arranged round a lily pond. Or the Café Berlin next door, where the orchestra was directed by Emil Schugalté, who, before the revolution had been one of the most brilliant violin students of the conservatoire in Saint Petersburg.

But tonight the Volkmanns were entertaining at home, in their apartment, where Isaac’s superb collection of prints and paintings were on every wall. Feininger, Nolde, Grosz, and all sorts of bizarre examples of Dadaism. That magnificent collection was, it was whispered, the reason so many of Berlin’s artists had notably fine teeth.

But Isaac Volkmann hadn’t invited his guests to see his art collection. He was engaging in a tricky exercise in social engineering: trying to re-establish the former close relationship between the Winter brothers. The men had not taken a meal together since Peter’s visit to the Obersalzberg at Christmas 1930. If it didn’t work, if his two friends resented this contrived meeting – he’d not warned either of them – and there was some awful row, better then, that it should take place at his home than in a restaurant for all the world to see.

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