Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The leader seemed — like Propaganda Minister Goebbels in Germany — to place great value on his doctorate. The man who introduced him only ever referred to him as ‘Dr Rolf Henne’, and Henne himself peppered his speech with phrases like ‘as a scholar of the law I can tell you’. The first thing that struck Hillel about him was his Schaffhausen accent, which always sounds slightly ludicrous to someone from Zurich. There was nothing obviously threatening about the man as a whole. He spoke hurriedly, was proud of his own arguments, couldn’t wait to put them forward and in this reminded Hillel of his own father. When Henne became combative, and that always happened all of a sudden, as if the moments were written down in the manuscript of his address, and he only noticed the instruction at the very last minute, he clenched his hand into a fist and struck the lectern two or three times, but very carefully, like someone who isn’t entirely at ease with physical force.

The subject of the meeting was department stores and the threat they represented to Swiss craftspeople. Henne only ever called them Jew shops. They were the root of all economic evil, he declared, because with their tempting sale offers they drove the small shopkeeper into a price competition that he would never be able to win. Their big turnover also meant that the market was excessively saturated, which would lead to a drop in manufacturing and thus unemployment, plummeting tax revenue and general ruin. His argument rambled on: thus for example he explained in detail and with an expression of extreme rage that the bristles of brushes bought at a one-price store were shorter and less firmly ensconced than in specialist shops, or that all metal goods were manufactured from lighter materials than had previously been the case.

This obsession with detail made his address not more credible, but less. Only someone unsure of his own case needs to make such an effort to prove his own theses.

At first Hillel had planned to pay very close attention, but there was something soporific about Henne’s style. Even the other members of the audience, who had responded to his harangue with occasional words of agreement, seemed to feel much the same. Even Böhni, sitting next to him, seemed to have glazed over.

‘And that’s your idol?’ Hillel whispered to him.

‘Henne’s right in what he says,’ Böhni whispered back. ‘But he is a lawyer, and they always make things complicated.’

One of the Harst men saw their two heads stretching towards each other, and took a menacing step towards them. Chatting was not tolerated at this meeting.

The speaker noticed that the hall was slipping away from him and only woke up when he started talking about the Jews. So he concentrated more and more on that subject and explained that it wasn’t just the department stores that were controlled by Jewish cultural Bolshevism, but also half the press — one need only think of the Galician Volksrecht and the Basel ‘ Zionalzeitung ’ — and obviously the dark red city council. They were all in it together, and that was why a flyer against department stores and one-price stores published by the National Front had been forbidden and confiscated. That provoked fury, the listeners woke up again, and Henne’s closing sentence, ‘One cannot improve Jews, one can only get rid of them,’ was received with shouts of ‘Quite right!’ and much applause.

So far everything had gone well for Hillel, and in fact he had already won the bet. The longer Böhni sat next to him without announcing him as the arch-enemy who had crept in secretly, the safer he felt. One had to acknowledge that. Böhni played fair.

But then things went wrong.

The people were already getting up and starting to talk to each other, while an official reminded them from the lectern to turn up at the following weekend’s propaganda march. Then suddenly two of their fellow pupils made their way across the hall to Hillel and Böhni. They had witnessed the bet in the dormitory, and now come to observe its outcome on the spot.

‘Well, Böhni,’ thundered one of them from a distance, ‘we’ll be watching you brushing shoes from tomorrow.’

‘And cleaning the shithouse,’ laughed the other.

‘Shh!’ said Böhni.

‘Didn’t think Rosenthal had it in him, did you?’

‘Shh!’

‘But respect where it’s due,’ said the first boy, as loudly as if he was summoning the cattle in the meadow. He slapped Hillel appreciatively on the shoulder. ‘That’s quite some achievement, coming here as a Jew.’

And that was it. The people had been bored all evening, and now at last they had the opportunity to do politics the way they liked to, with their fists. Particularly the men from the Harst, for whom a meeting without a brawl was an evening wasted, really came to life.

Böhni saw a circle of people coming towards them, grabbed Hillel by the hand and cried, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’

They made it to the door, and that was their great good fortune, because the anteroom was too narrow for a proper free-for-all. Their two fellow pupils fought with them, because even if they didn’t particularly like Rosenthal, he was in their class, and when it came to fighting the principle was, ‘One for all and all for one.’

The Fröntlers came at them from all sides. Hillel didn’t even have time to wonder why Böhni was suddenly standing shoulder to shoulder with him and defending him. They found each other very disagreeable, after all, and friends, no, they certainly weren’t friends.

It wasn’t a long scrap. The policemen who were getting mightily bored outside on the terrace in front of their beer glasses, from which they still weren’t allowed to drink, were relieved when they were finally able to grab their truncheons and let rip. If nothing at all happened, there were no laurels to be earned on Front patrol. They came thundering into the anteroom and discharged their duties.

Soon the two sides had been driven apart, and the landlord’s damages claim had been recorded.

Of the participants in the scuffle, only two people had not stopped in time and were arrested. One had a bloody nose and the other was starting to get a black eye.

‘Name?’

‘Böhni, Walter.’

‘And you?’

‘Rosenthal, Hillel.’

‘Hillel? How do you spell that?’

‘His name’s actually Heinrich,’ said Böhni.

‘My name is Hillel. It’s a good Jewish first name.’

‘A Jew? Great,’ said the constable.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It means we’ve got one of each. Our commander’s been saying for ages, “That’s the only way we can make an example, so that there’s peace in this city at long last.”’

‘But we weren’t fighting with each other.’ It isn’t easy to argue when you have to press a bloody handkerchief to your sore nose at the same time.

‘Then you can tell that to the judge,’ said the policeman. ‘Except it won’t interest him. Who against whom — it’s completely irrelevant. Paragraph 133. Disturbance of the peace. You’re liable for prosecution just by being there.’

‘But that’s not fair!’

‘You should have thought of that before,’ said the policeman. ‘Take them away!’

He was in a hurry. Once you’ve finished the day’s work, no one can stop you having a beer.

Herr Grün’s illness dragged on. The fever had subsided, certainly, and his lungs sounded quite normal again, but he just couldn’t get back on his feet. Arthur said he had noticed such things in other patients, but most of them had been much older people. Rachel would have to imagine it as something like a flood, where someone would cling on to something with the last of their strength and keep themselves above water. If he lost his strength and let go, it would be hard for him to grab hold of anything else.