Ben Elton - Two Brothers

It was a Sunday afternoon, the most boring time of the week. Paulus and Otto were sitting with Dagmar in her bedroom, one of the few places in Berlin from which they weren’t barred.

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t think ourselves special, Pauly,’ Dagmar interjected, stretching out on the bed and blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘After all, we have to put up with enough because of it.’

‘Because, Dags,’ Paulus replied, ‘going on about being the chosen people is just the same elitist racial bullshit that they spout. People are people and we all started out as monkeys anyway. Otto’d probably have been a Nazi if he wasn’t Jewish.’

‘Fuck you,’ Otto grunted, hands behind his head, red-faced and bulging-veined.

‘Oh, very erudite, I must say,’ Paulus sneered. ‘“You’re a twat.” “Fuck you.” Brilliant argument, Ottsy. I can see how you got to be one of the chosen people. It must have been your language skills.’

‘ Ninety-two. Ninety-three ,’ Otto gasped.

‘Whoopee, the ape can count,’ Paulus said.

‘One hundred!’ Otto gasped triumphantly, lying back, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. ‘I’m just saying , Pauly,’ he went on, ‘that the reason they won’t let Dag swim is because they’re scared she’d win.’

‘Of course I’d win!’ Dagmar said angrily. ‘I always do… Or I always did. Now what do I do? I can’t run at the track, I can’t swim at the pool or the lakes. I’ll just get fat and old sitting in this bloody house!’

Dagmar and her mother still occupied the same big house in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf that they had lived in before the Nazis, although now many of the rooms were shut up and Frau Fischer employed a much reduced staff, Jews being no longer allowed to employ Aryans.

The big house had become a prison. Ever since her husband’s death, Frau Fischer had been trying desperately to get their aborted immigration back on track. But while they still had an entry visa for the USA, their German exit visas had been withdrawn. The Nazis were nothing if not vindictive and they had decided that, for Isaac Fischer, paying with his life was not a sufficient punishment for telling the truth about the German state, his family would have to suffer also. Only the previous week Frau Fischer had received another rejection to her application to leave the country. A rejection made all the more sad and wearisome because she had queued for six hours at the offices on the Wilhelmstrasse to make her application.

‘They say we’ll spread lies about them so they’re not going to let us go,’ Dagmar explained miserably.

‘Well, maybe it’ll work out for the best in the end, eh?’ Otto said, still lying on his back while bench-pressing Dagmar’s dressing-table chair, ‘because you can come with me to Palestine.’

‘Palestine?’ Dagmar asked in some surprise, having never heard Otto even mention the place before.

‘Oh yes,’ Paulus said with heavy sarcasm, ‘haven’t you heard? Otto’s a Zionist now. Fuck, Otts, you don’t even know where Palestine is!’

‘Yes I do!’ Otto protested. ‘It’s the next one down after Turkey — sort of. Isn’t it?’

‘It’s in the Middle East and it’s already full of Arabs,’ Paulus said.

Otto’s recent announcement that he had decided to become a Zionist had both amused and frustrated his brother. Lots of Jews in Berlin had begun talking about trying to get to Palestine. The Nazis themselves even raised the idea as a possible way of dealing with their ‘problem’.

‘It’s our homeland,’ Otto continued defiantly, ‘that’s all I need to know about it. Next year in Jerusalem!’

Even Dagmar giggled at this. In the past there could have been no less political individual than Otto Stengel. And no less a religious or spiritual one either for that matter. Otto was an archetypal teenage boy. His interests were sports, machines, food, music and Dagmar. At school the only classes he had ever enjoyed were woodwork and art, and the only remotely reflective pursuit he indulged in was music. Now, having picked up a few illegal pamphlets in Jewish coffee shops, Otto had suddenly begun using the language of Zionist politics.

‘Homeland!’ Paulus protested. ‘Homeland? Two thousand years ago, Otts! Believe it or not, mate, things have moved on. Palestine is now the homeland of — who? Oh, let me see. Oh yes, I remember: the Palestinians . Get it? The Palestinians live in Palestine . There’s a clue in the names. And I don’t think they will take very kindly to a fifteen-year-old German Jew boy turning up and saying he owns the place.’

‘We’ll take it back,’ Otto said darkly. ‘We have no choice.’

‘Great!’ Paulus snapped. ‘And when you do maybe you can ban all the Arabs from using the parks and swimming pools.’

This point reminded Dagmar of her own more immediate distress.

‘Ten years I’ve been using our local pool,’ she said bitterly. ‘Since I was five. I know every attendant, most of them have made passes at me. And then yesterday they told me I couldn’t swim. It was a school trip too. I had to wait in an office with two other Jewish girls while my class all went in. It was so humiliating . Girls used to beg to be on my squad. And the school got all the team cossies from Daddy’s store at cost. They’re still wearing them!’

And she cried once more. Desperate helpless tears.

Even aside from the dreadful blow of her father’s death, the change in Dagmar’s circumstances had been steeper and more brutal than it had been for most of Berlin’s Jews. They, like any ordinary people, had at least some experience of the petty restrictions, humiliations and disappointments of existence. Dagmar’s life, however, up until 30 January 1933, had been almost uniquely fabulous and blessed. The beloved only daughter of enormously wealthy and doting parents living at the very heart of the most exciting city in Europe. Few girls on earth were so cosseted and few could look forward to a future more exciting or glamorous. Now the glittering memory of that life taunted Dagmar. Every day she encountered someone or other who had once fawned upon her and whom she now suspected of gloating at her distress.

Dagmar wiped the tears from her eyes, looking for a handkerchief and pretending to sneeze.

‘You see,’ Otto muttered, casting a dark glance at Paulus. ‘You see what’s happening? They’re grinding us down. We need to do something.’

‘I am doing something,’ Paulus said.

‘What? Studying? ’

‘Yes. Studying.’

‘Ha! What bloody good is that? Jews have always studied! Study study study! Mum never shuts up about it. Why? What good has it done us? Fuck that. You want to be a lawyer? What a joke! What’s the law to us? It’s the law that’s fucking us. Besides, Jews aren’t allowed to be lawyers, are they? Or any sort of decent job. You’re just going to end up a really really well-qualified beggar!’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you this,’ Paulus replied. ‘When I get out of this country, whether it’s Palestine, London or Timbuktu, I’ll be ready. I’ll have skills to offer. It’s all very well you lifting weights and going about with a knife in your pocket, but you can’t fight them all. You need to plan .’

Paulus might have continued his lecture but he was sitting on the floor with his back against the end of Dagmar’s bed. She had stretched out her long legs so that her bare feet were hanging over the edge, quite close to Paulus’s face, and even his analytical mind was incapable of remaining focused while in such proximity to any part of Dagmar’s naked skin.