Herr Sinne gets up slowly.
‘Herr Cohn, you always greeted me in such a friendly way every day,’ he says shrilly. ‘You never looked as if you had anything to complain of.’
‘Herr Sinne,’ says the judge mildly, ‘I am convinced that many people greeted you courteously because they were frightened of you.’
‘Frightened of me? A sick old man!’
‘Just look at this ageing face,’ cries out the defence lawyer pathetically. ‘Does it look as if it could frighten anyone?’
One of the women witnesses becomes hysterical.
‘Think instead,’ she screams, ‘of the faces of the old Jewish men in Herr Sinne’s section!’
Herr Sinne explains that everything is lies, the balcony in question is not visible from his window, he has never said that his section was to be free of Jews, and he has never forbidden anyone to shop in his section. The case is postponed for a week, and then the shopkeepers will be called in as witnesses, and Herr Sinne, all alone and with his gaze fixed on some point in the past goes his way with a childish seventy-three-year-old forehead raised proudly against the contempt murmuring behind him.
The Walter case is simple but interesting. Walter himself is a giant with a club-foot who the moment he enters throws his stick on the table and accuses the Hessen government of corruption, but he is bluntly silenced by the judge. Walter was an official in a Nazi commission and is accused of being an informer, but what is interesting is that Herr Walter is still in the same commission in 1946 and it is in 1946 that he has had enough money to buy a farm in Hessen. He has been reported by Herr Bauer, a fat and slow-witted horse-dealer who does not look as if he has gone hungry for one moment in the land of hunger. It soon turns out that the horse-dealer’s motives are not as noble as they might have appeared. The two gentlemen have quite simply quarrelled with each other over an illegal consignment of oats, delivered to a nameless American major, of whose existence next day’s newspaper report very properly remains silent. The horse-dealer then suddenly remembered his competitor’s Nazism and reported him. The case is adjourned for lack of evidence, but the judge cannot forgo a sarcastic remark to the horse-dealer:
‘The old masters were easier to deal with, weren’t they?’
But the horse-dealer confidently replies: ‘The new ones are all right too, My Lord.’
And what he says is true, and what is so hopeless and idiotic and tragic is that the new masters in commissions and in decision-making organs are in fact ‘all right’ for anyone who is sufficiently free of prejudice, for anyone who knows the art of wearing whatever colours he chooses. It is harder for the victims of Nazism because they meet obstacles everywhere. They have the right to seats in trains and priority in queues, but would never dare dream of making use of such a right, but for Messrs Walter and Bauer a providential power, often of American nationality, has placed redeeming trap-doors in the lamentable stage-boards of the denazification courts.
Cold Day in Munich
I
A Sunday in early winter in Munich, with a cold sun. The long Prinzregentenstrasse, from which one of the unhappiest heroes of world literature once started his journey towards death in Venice, lies deserted in the frosty morning light. There is nothing in the world so deserted and lonely as an empty main street on a cold morning in a bombed city. The sun glitters on the gold of the angel of peace, the angel of peace which divides Prinzregentenstrasse into two monumental gradual slopes down to the bridge over the Isar and which Hitler should have been able to view from his house on Prinzregentenplatz. The gardens in the old ambassadorial palaces lie full of tumbled pillars. On the newly frozen ice of the sports arena a few early-morning Americans are skating, but die grüne Isar is green as usual and far down under the bridge some bombs have made a jigsaw puzzle out of a pond.
The dirty Jeep lurches along the endless street. The severe-looking government building is there, between well-roasted façades of ruins; that is where Minister-President Dr Högner spends several hours a day playing with the idea of letting Bavaria renounce its connection with the rest of Germany, according to a theory which says that Prussia has twice brought Bavaria to a state of ruin and should not be allowed the chance of doing so a third time. Bavaria, cold-bloodedly sending evacuees from Hamburg, Hannover and Essen back to the total impossibilities of their native cities, is of course a selfish, hard-hearted and tough region, but that is not the whole truth. At least a quarter of the truth is that Bavaria has no feeling of belonging to the rest of Germany and that — in spite of a general belief to the contrary — there was a not insignificant degree of passive resistance to Nazism in Bavaria.
But not far from Prinzregentenstrasse lie the ruins of the Brown House. The first bloody Hitler putsch was played out in Munich in 1923 and the remains of Bürgerbräukeller still testify that the history of Nazism has deep roots here. No doubt, says the humorous native of Munich, but perhaps that is because of the föhn in spring, that wind from the mountains which gives the whole of Munich an intolerable month-long headache; he points out too that after the Nazis had made it compulsory for pedestrians to bare their heads as they passed Feldherrenhalle, where the memorial to the sixteen victims of the putsch was set up, the density of the pedestrian traffic in that once so thronging part of Munich noticeably diminished.
On Prinzregentenstrasse lies too die Export-Schau, accommodated in one of those sexless pseudo-classical Hitler buildings which do not look ancient until they are ruins. The Export Exhibition is a sadistic arrangement where the city authorities, with a remarkable psychological insight and for an entry fee of one mark, display what Bavarian industry can achieve, that is, what Bavarian industry can export to America. There, bombed-out housewives can look at fine dream-like porcelain they will never eat off; big bottles stand full of real German beer which one can no longer drink; and lengths of splendid fabrics hang which one is forbidden to touch. For anyone poor and hungry this must feel like landing up in a disastrous dream, where everything is certainly unreal as in a dream, but where the dreamer is constantly aware of his own hunger and his own poverty.
II
A few minutes away from Prinzregentenstrasse is Königsplatz, that desert built by the architects of Nazism, which more than most other examples of the type reveals the lack of style, the desolation and the patent sadism of the Nazi ideals. One enters through narrow openings in a broken triumphal arch or between the two elevated marble tombs of the sixteen Munich martyrs, where their zinc coffins, eight in each grave, lay buried until the Americans on their arrival moved them to an unknown alternative site. The former graves are flanked by two huge palaces, characteristic buildings of the Hitler period, that look like mausoleums in honour not of any particular death but of death itself as a principle. In one of these mausoleums the Munich Agreement of 1933 was signed. At that time the triumphal arch was still whole and it is easy to close one’s eyes and imagine how the cavalcade of the signatories’ cars came through the arch and in a gentle curve over the square approached the monumental tomb-like buildings, where for the moment the world’s destiny lay buried, and today on this cold morning in early winter something is going to happen which for an hour or two will conjure the dead from their graves.
Below the triumphal arch a brass band is assembling. The cold sunlight glitters from the instruments, the breath from the mouths of the players is white. You walk across this endless square, whose surface of huge ashlar stones gives a curious impression of being indoors, into the vast entry-hall of the locked castle like those we have dreams about. The heavy American lorries sweeping along the white traffic-ways in under the arch appear quite unreal in these surroundings. A few hundred stamping and shivering people have gathered before the band; there is an American woman correspondent in uniform, one of those strange creatures who seem to have been born wearing a camera; two lorries have driven round behind the band in such a way that standing there back to back they form a platform for journalists and speakers. A steady stream of people is flowing in, and by ten o’clock ten thousand stand waiting.