Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

On 7 May 1945 we heard very distant bells. General Jodl had signed unconditional surrender, then was allowed to address his captors, his troops, the world:

In this war, which has lasted more than five years, the German people and armed forces have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in any other place. I can only hope that the victors will treat them generously.

The apartment, high in a pillared, lemon-tinted crescent off rue des Cinq-Fils, had a largeness unrelated to size, considerable though this was. Light from oblong windows flowed with radiance, promise; space was extended by blue-and-white arches replacing doors, by the Juan Gris, Derain, Matisse reaching deep into an atmosphere leisured and calm. Flowers glowed on Buhl tables, white ledges; stone carvings glimmered in alcoves, silvery, grey, roseate, spiky and metallic, one, more tender, of a nude oriental girl, was cut, I always thought, by Wilfrid himself. Two bronze Cambodian Buddhas were slyly humorous. Tiny enamel boxes, jewels in antique settings, Persian miniatures, tiles decorated with heraldic stags, with butterflies, even a Viennese lorgnon, gleamed beneath books precisely arranged to their language. Prints, folios, maps, were stacked in gold-and-black Louis Quinze cabinets, and, in a small octagonal study, shelves of records: Mozart and Haydn quartets, alongside such chanteurs as Sablon, Trenet and Piaf. ‘I agree’, Wilfrid said, ‘with Cellini, that an architect should be adept not only in draughtsmanship but in music.’

From above our crescent we would contemplate night-time Paris: a gigantic illuminated S, a neon spray across steep slanted roofs, a spire above dim, massed trees, the floodlit Column balancing the Dôme, then Sacré Cœur, aloft, like a bright, unblinking eye.

I might sit with him as he worked. Sometimes he talked without looking up, pausing when flowers or cut-glass moved from shadows into a flake of sunlight.

Throughout, the telephone rang, Wilfrid patiently, leniently, listening to pleas, complaints, enquiries, then suggesting a scheme, recommending a doctor, bank, hotel, often with a minute demur, small joke, murmur of comfort.

I heard him name the best available chocolates, an inexpensive but reliable Left Bank restaurant, the last Nazi Governor of Paris, a Jacob Wasserman novel, a youth hostel to be avoided, the whereabouts of an SS fugitive, the inadvisability of a wedding night in a wagon-lit.

‘Wilfrid, you overdo it. Some take advantage.You’re a permanent Court of Appeal.’

‘That, wouldn’t you say, is better than a Supreme Court.’

Sometimes I considered him not a court but an astrologer, advising on cosmetic surgery, the outcome of a peace congress, the desirability of an abortion.

Lisette, cheerful, assiduous, grateful for some past, unrevealed services, came daily to housekeep. To my curiosity about her he replied that he preferred paintings without too many details. ‘Lisette is on terms with her neighbours.Very bad terms.’

Minor housework was provided by myself and Marc-Henri, dark in eyes, skin, personality, younger than me and of similar amorphous status. Slight, he was uncommunicative yet knowing and unfailingly resentful of me. No more than of Lisette did I know his origins. He would stand at a mirror ruffling his black, crêpe-like hair, restyling; then shaking it back to its usual sprawl. My attempts at conversation he would interrupt by saying he had lost interest. Occasionally, he deigned to play tennis with me, his hectic anxiety to win costing him too many points.Wilfrid, he said, was the better player, ‘by not too much’. He spoke with the grudge habitual when forced to admit another’s superiority. His incessant loss of interest guaranteed that I had lost mine, and we co-existed in armed truce, poison-sacs not dried but in abeyance.

Nothing could detract from my elation at the gifts of a city at peace: I was a child thrilled by the infinite promise of Tomorrow, free to wander through summer charting the half-real Paris of Revolution, Empire, Occupation, absorbing as a murder trail. Statues, churches, monuments, parks, street names – rue du Pasteur-Wagner, rue des Grands-Augustins, rue Gambetta, rue du Temple, place Victor-Hugo.

Over twenty, I was stateless, rather sententiously regarding myself as European, emotionally independent, uncluttered by petty allegiances, though requiring temporary visas, unreliable permits. Adenauer’s West Germany was vigorously productive but no more alluring than a millionaire’s swimming pool. East Germany was a Soviet satellite.Where, Goethe had demanded, does Germany lie, where is the whole? Incessant revelations of the Third Reich finally amputated ancestral hallucinations; only Pahlen was left unsmirched. Germania had been a brawling Valhalla, prettified into Thuringian Grail-seekers, operatic robber-knights, Hollywood castles. The Hohenstaufen were forgotten, the Meistersingers were silent, Goethe and Schiller at one with the White Rose. Thomas Mann dared his protests but from America.

Romance was very plainly an outcome of distance and song. Ballads dripped blood. A gilded coach, hussar’s belt, ‘Merry Widow Waltz’, cherry-and-chocolate torte were no more than themselves. Lohengrin farewell.

Newspapers were daily jolts from the wider world. Reconstruction had steadied European chaos but had not arrested the drift into what was being called the Cold War. Korea, Berlin Air Lift, tensions between the two Germanies, Eastern Bloc. Despite nominal protests from Washington and London, Stalin, grimly unassailable, had planted Estonia with Russians, the native professional classes shredded by deportations, gaolings, executions.

I read that Jodl had been hanged, Laval shot, Pétain sentenced to death, then sent to life imprisonment. Mon Général, contemptuous of boulevards stacked with jeering communists, had stalked away into history though his very absence made him inescapable, the affronted saviour capable of a second coming. General Halder, rescued from Dachau after accusation of complicity in the July Plot, was reported by Paris-Match to be collaborating with American historians. From Nuremburg, as from Paris a century and a half earlier, came the monotonous bleat, ‘But I only obeyed orders.’ The concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Goethe’s home, was now a Soviet Transit Camp, fatal for traitors, speculators, class enemies.

As if countenancing my resistance to opportunities in West Germany, Wilfrid passed me an envelope. I extracted the dossier of Herr Ludwig Ramdohr, ‘Protector of the Poor and Oppressed’, Chief of the Ravensbrück Political Department, recently hanged for torture, despite relatives insisting on his love of nature and all living things. ‘Walking in the country, he sometimes gave queer little jumps to avoid crushing a snail or a lizard.’

Wilfrid listened as he might to Socrates or Buddha, to my account of the Turret, islands, Forest, the girl who ran. ‘You will not’, his sigh was perfunctory, ‘inherit the Grafschalt of Diephlz or the more cosmopolitan Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and you have never reminded me of Heinrich der Lowe, save, of course, in physique…’ he was resigned to making the best of my deprivations, ‘but you have very well understood that line of Baudelaire’s about the world appearing limitless by lamplight.’

When I mentioned Stefan George, he was at once sombre, light-blue eyes elsewhere. ‘We grew away from him, necessarily. But from such as he we learnt that poetry was more than idealized feelings that come too easily. Poetry, you may agree, should be more like a rock face. He spoke ten languages, desired, I think, some international aristocracy of the sensitive and gifted, yet craved and received disciples, surely a weakness.Always. They poisoned him with incense. But he refused temptations from Goebbels. An honourable epitaph, earned by rather too few. If you look at the great musicians…’