"Shall we go?" she asked.
"If you would enjoy it."
"I think it would be ducky!" Then, after some reflection: "You and I really make a pretty good social team, don’t we, Lanny!"
7. I Have Seen Tempests
I
THE results of the election had set Heinrich Jung in a seat of authority. He called Lanny on the telephone and poured out his exultation. There was no party but the N.S.D.A.P., and Heinrich was its prophet! Therefore, would Lanny come to his home some evening and meet his wife and one of his friends? Lanny said he would be happy to do so; he had just received a letter from Rick, saying that the German vote had made a great impression in England, and if Lanny would send a bunch of literature and some of his own notes as to the state of mind of the country, Rick could write an article for one of the weeklies. Lanny wanted to help his friend, and thought the English people ought to understand what the new movement signified. This, of course, was right down Heinrich’s alley; he volunteered to assemble a load of literature—and even to have the article written and save Rick the bother!
Lanny left his wife in a comfortable family bridge game while he drove out to the suburbs toward Potsdam, where the young official lived in a modest cottage. Heinrich had chosen himself a proper deutsches Mädel with eyes as blue as his own, and according to the Nazi-Nordic principles they had set to work to increase the ruling race. They proudly showed two blond darlings asleep in their cribs, and one glance at Ilsa Jung was enough to inform Lanny that another would soon be added. There was a peculiarity of the Nazi doctrine which Lanny had observed already among the Italian Fascists. Out of one side of their mouths they said that the nation had to expand in order to have room for its growing population, while out of the other side they said that their population must be increased in order that they might be able to expand. In the land of Mussolini this need was known as sacro egoismo, and Lanny had tried in vain to puzzle out why a quality which was, considered so offensive in an individual should become holy when exhibited by a group. He hoped that a day might come when nations would be gentlemen.
Heinrich had invited to meet his guest a sports director of one of the youth groups in Berlin. Hugo Behr was his name, and he was another exemplar of the Nordic ideal—which oddly enough a great many of the party leaders were not. There was a joke going the rounds among Berlin’s smart intellectuals that the ideal "Aryan" was required to be as blond as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Goring, and so on, as far as your malicious memory would carry you. But Hugo had smooth rosy cheeks and wavy golden hair, and doubtless when in a gym costume presented a figure like that of a young Hermes. He had until recently been an ardent Social-Democrat, a worker in the youth movement in that party; not only could he tell all its scandals, but he knew how to present National Socialism as the only true and real Socialism, by which the German workers were to win freedom for themselves and later for the workers of the world.
The human mind is a strange thing. Both this pair had read Mein Kampf as their holy book, and had picked out what they wanted from it. They knew that Lanny had also read the book, and assumed that he would have picked out the same things. But Lanny had noted other passages, in which the Führer had made it clear that he hadn’t the slightest interest in giving freedom to the workers of other nations or races, but on the contrary was determined to put them all to work for the benefit of the master race. "Aryan" was merely a fancy word for German—and for other persons of education and social position who were willing to join with the Nazis and help them to seize power.
However, Lanny wasn’t there to convert two Nazi officials. He permitted Hugo Behr to speak to him as one comrade to another, and now and then he made notes of something which might be of interest to the reading public of Britain. Hugo was newer in the movement than Heinrich, and more naive; he had swallowed the original Nazi program, hook, line, and sinker; that was the creed, and when you had quoted it, you had settled the point at issue. Lanny Budd, cynical worldling, product of several decadent cultures, wanted to say: "How can Hitler be getting funds from von Papen and the other Junkers if he really means to break up the great landed estates of Prussia? How can he be getting funds from Fritz Thyssen and the other steel kings if he means to socialize big industry?" But what good would it do? Hugo doubtless thought that all the party funds came from the pfennigs of the workers; that banners and brassards, brown shirts and shiny boots, automatic pistols and Budd machine guns were purchased with the profits of literature sales! Heinrich, perhaps, knew better, but wouldn’t admit it, and Lanny wasn’t free to name the sources of his own information. Better simply to listen, and make careful notes, and let Rick write an article entitled: "England, Awake!"
II
Right after the elections came a trial in Berlin of three officers charged with having made Nazi propaganda in the army. It attracted a great deal of public attention, and Adolf Hitler appeared as a witness and delivered one of his characteristic tirades, declaring that when his party took power the "November criminals," meaning the men who had established the Republic, would be judged by a people’s tribunal. "Heads will roll in the sand," he said. Such language shocked the civilized German people, and Johannes Robin took it as a proof of what he had been saying to Lanny, that all you had to do was to give this fellow rope enough and he would hang himself. There was a demand from many quarters that Hitler be tried for treason; but probably the government was of the same opinion as Johannes. Why hang a man who was so ready to hang himself? The three officers were dismissed from the army, and Adi went on making his propaganda—in the army as everywhere else.
Lanny invited Hauptmann Emil Meissner to lunch with him, and they talked about these problems. Kurt’s eldest brother, a World War veteran, had the younger’s pale blue eyes and close-cropped straw-colored hair, but not his ardent temperament; he agreed with Lanny that Kurt had been led astray, and that the Führer was a dangerous fanatic. Emil was loyal to the existing government; he said that would always be the attitude of the army, and was the obligation of every officer, no matter how much he might disapprove the policies of the politicians in control.
"Would you obey the Nazis if they should take power?" inquired the American.
Emil shut his eyes for a moment, as if to hide the painful reaction which such a question caused in him. "I don’t think it is necessary to contemplate that," he said.
Lanny replied: "The present election has made me do it." But he didn’t press the point.
Emil placed his faith in Germany’s symbol of loyalty, Feldmarschall and now Prasident Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. The old commander had won the battle of Tannenberg, the one complete victory the Germans had gained, with the result that the people had idolized him all through the rest of the war. In every town they had set up huge wooden statues of him, and it had been the supreme act of patriotism to buy nails and drive them into this statue, the money going to the German Red Cross. The Hindenburg line had been another name for national security, and now the Hindenburg presidency was the same. But the stern old titan was now eighty-three years old, and his wits were growing dim; it was hard for him to concentrate upon complex matters. The politicians swarmed about him, they pulled him this way and that, and it was painful to him and tragic to those who saw it.