Richard Gordon: THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'What were you doing, going to see Professor Dr Domagk this morning?' asked Gerda, unable to suppress her curiosity any longer.

'Don't be nosy.'

'Oh! I'm sorry.' She looked so crushed that I felt ashamed. I was learning how tender she was. She was aggressive only in her defencelessness, she feared to slacken the tight rein on her emotions lest they drove her headlong.

'I was bringing him a present from another professor,' I told her, relenting.

Her face brightened, all women being interested in presents, even for other people. 'Something nice?'

'A long lecture, reprinted as a pamphlet on best quality paper and signed by the author.'

'That doesn't sound very exciting.'

'Academic personages often exchange their lectures, with a great flourish of politeness. It's like gentlemen with their visiting cards.'

She returned her eyes to her work. 'I thought you might be seeing Professor Dr Domagk to find a better job.'

'Why? I'm perfectly happy where I am.'

'I can't understand how an intelligent chemist like you can bring himself to work in a brewery,' she said with contempt.

'Louis Pasteur worked with fermenting wine, and now there's statues of him all over France.'

'The American pays you a good salary, particularly with the rate of exchange,' Gerda said thoughtfully. She had quickly ferreted the figure out of me. I could not decide whether her serious-minded concern for my welfare was flattering or irritating. 'But why come to Germany? You could have sailed to India, like all the other English. Or Australia or Africa. There's no future in Germany, not if things go on as they are.'

'I don't fancy myself as a pukka sahib with a topi and a fly whisk.'

The Empire provided the British nation with easygoing if warmish jobs, cheap food and a sense of purpose. Though it was a cardboard palace, glittering and showy in the sunshine, artfully realistic with its plumed hats and gorgeous uniforms and battleships firing ceremonial salvos of blank ammunition, doomed since it saw defeat down the rifles of a few Boer farmers. Hitler never realized this before the day he shot himself.

'I don't know that I should like to meet your friend Herr Beckerman,' she went on. 'He sounds like a gangster.'

'You'd find him charming. He's more like an All-America footballer. I'm lucky to work for him.' Jeff Beckerman had been looking for a reliable chemist in London on his way from New York, and Sir Edward Tiplady had mentioned my name while treating him for some small ailment at the Savoy. Young Jeff always selected the best hotels as well as the best doctors.

'I hope none of the beer reaches America. Then you would be participating in something illegal.'

'Prohibition's on its way out,' I reassured her. 'It was futile of President Wilson, trying to save the American people from the horrors of drink by passing a lot of laws in 1917. Just as futile as trying to save the whole world from the horrors of war by passing a lot more in 1918. Don't tell me I'm a cynic.' I wagged my finger. 'I'm a chemist, so I look at life practically. Talking about Americans, there's a super musical film on next week called _Blondie of the Follies._ It's got Marion Davies in it. How about coming along?'

This invitation caused her schoolmistress's red-ink fountain pen to pause in mid-air and her cheeks to turn the colour of the table-cloth.

'Whatever made you think of such a thing?' she reprimanded me.

'Professor Dr Domagk. He said the only items I could find amusing in Wuppertal were the cinema and your company.'

'The professor would never make a remark like that.'

'Ask your father to telephone and find out.'

'You mustn't mention a word of this to Papa,' she exclaimed, delightfully flustered.

Gerda saw my invitation as a serious matter with serious implications. She seemed not to have-or she did not dare to have-any casual men friends. She was thought in the tail of childhood, in an age when marriage was an excitement preserved until the third decade, when contraception was unreliable, unobtainable and unmentionable, when abortion carried a prison sentence and the maidenhead had not yet suffered the fate of much else and become disposable. Relations between men and women were wary and ceremonious, sex a delicate dish rather than a staple diet. Such attitudes were particularly strong in the middle-classes, in Catholics, in Germany and in girls like Gerda.

She added, 'Of course, Herr Elgar, I enjoy discussing international politics with you, because you are intelligent and have been to Cambridge University. But I thought you regarded me as a sensible woman, whom you could talk to in a dispassionate way.'

'That's precisely why I want to ask you to the pictures.'

'But I almost never go the cinema,' she said, by way of another objection.

'In one so seriously-minded as yourself, Frдulein Dieffenbach,' I countered, 'self-denial is but another pleasure.'

'As you insist, I shall ask Mama if it would be all right,' she said more cheerfully, shifting responsibility.

I was calmly confident. I had noticed how she generally contrived to take the same Schwebebahn to work every morning as myself.

This is a story of drugs, not politics. I am a biochemist, not a historian. But it is also the story of a coincidence, which occurred in Germany over thirty-seven days astride Silversterabend, New Year's Eve, 1933.

The second of these dates was Monday, January 30, 1933. The better schooled of my present biochemistry students in London can identify it as the day which ushered Adolf Hitler to power, and so comparable with St Peter's Day 1338, when the buboes of the Black Death first festered upon Englishmen among the sailors of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. The earlier date was December 24, 1932. Even my fellow-professors can remember nothing in particular about that Christmas Eve. Which suggests that the evil of the 1930s lives after them, the good was interred with the hurried riddance of their bones.

The cauldron of German democracy, which had been simmering fitfully for fourteen years since its flame was lit in the haunts of Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, came furiously to the boil that Saturday when I first met Gerhard Domagk. And nobody realized that the brew was already poisoned. No party had a majority in the Reichstag, though the Nazis-which was slang, to match 'Sozi' for Socialist-were the biggest, after advancing sensationally to 230 seats in the elections of the previous July. They always seemed to be having elections in Germany. During the past year, the Rhineland had seen five-two for the reinstatement of President Hindenburg, another for a Prussian parliament which vanished almost immediately in a local _coup d'йtat,_ and two more for the Reichstag. They were neither the decorous cricket match contests of England nor the raucous carnivals of America. They were violent, bloody and murderous. Since the collapse of Hermann Mailer's coalition government in 1930, there was still democracy in Germany. But it was democracy gone mad, like a man gripped with mania, who performs life's normal functions of sitting, standing and speaking with a fury which seems liable to tear him to pieces.

Over the same period, Berlin had seen three Reich chancellors. The austere Catholic Heinrich Brьning had been ousted in May by a fifty-four year old political dilettante, the 'gentleman showjumper' Franz von Papen, lion faced and serpent hearted. His name was already known to the world, from being thrown out of Washington early in the Great War, a neutral diplomat trying to blow up the United States railroads. The gentleman showjumper recruited other gentlemen to his 'Barons' Cabinet' from the fashionable Herrenklub in the Vosstrasse of Berlin, as British prime ministers enlisted their schoolfriends from Eton. But before Christmas, sly von Papen was outfoxed by the affable, sharp-nosed, portly 'Socialist General' Kurt von Schleicher, whose name in German meant 'Artful Dodger', very appropriately.