Free Klaus by Allan Massie

front of the railway station. Half-an-hour to wait before the next train back to Cannes. He made for the bar, quickly from old habit surveyed it, found no one to interest him, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.
    The remarkable thing was that, whereas he had only despised and loathed the little rat, the Magician, while describing him as “a catastrophe, no doubt about that”, had nevertheless made the effort to understand him, declared that was “no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny” – as a phenomenon also, of course. Klaus had been shocked when he first read that essay and found his father calling the little rat “Brother Hitler”. How could he? Well, first because he had been able to say “Where I am, there is Germany,” and, being German, he could not deny Hitler’s Germanity. It was something we all had in common, no matter how horrifying the realisation might be. But there was more to it than that. The man was a disaster, certainly, with his unfathomable resentment and his festering vindictiveness, but he was also a failed artist, and therefore in a sense indeed his Brother. The young Hitler had been the half-baked Bohemian in his garret or Viennese dosshouse, with his basically-I’m-too-good-for-ordinarywork, and his sense of being reserved for something special, indefinable, which, if he had expressed it then, would have had those around bursting out in derisive laughter. This rejection, common to that experienced by so many young artists who feel on the cusp of greatness but are recognised by nobody, fed his rage against the world, his ferociously anxious need to justify himself, his urge to compel the world to accept him at his own valuation, to subject itself to him, to satisfy his dream of seeing those who had spurned him now prostrate before him. Lost in fear, admiration and a wild besotted love. Moreover, the Magician had insisted, Hitler’s insatiable drive for compensation for the miseries he had endured, his inability ever to be content with what he had achieved, and the need to proceed ever further and more dangerously on the path he had chosen, these too were attributes of the artist. “There is a lot of Hitler in Wagner,” the Magician had once said to Klaus during the war. “The rejection of reason and bourgeois ethics, and the incapacity for irony – irony which is the saving grace of the intellect.” If the Magician was right, Hitler was the artist’s shadowself, the dark side of the moon.
    And of course the will to self-destruction. Only Klaus felt no need to pull down the whole world with him. No Götterdämerung for him, an overdose would do the trick. He went to the bar and asked for another whisky.
    Light was fading when he was back in Cannes. The poignant loneliness of dusk. It was Miki’s night with his girl again. No point in going to the Zanzi, and indeed good reason not to: Probyn might be there. He couldn’t face that. He found another bar, a place on the terrace. There was a German couple at the next table. How strange to hear his language spoken here, spoken confidently, as if the war was so far behind them all, a mere parenthesis in history. The waiter brought him his whisky and a soda siphon. He took out his notebook and wrote:
    “Albert’s faith in Communism had been absolute, his conversion as abrupt and complete as St Paul’s on the road to Damascus. One day he had been lost, and not only because his girlfriend had walked out on him because, she said, he believed in nothing and stank of petit-bourgeois failure; the next it was as if he stood on the bluff of a hill, gazing across the river and a landscape with classical ruins like a Poussin painting towards the golden light of a new dawn, the Promised Land. It was in a mood of exhilaration that he had accepted an invitation to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. (The invitation had itself come as a surprise because he had published so little, but the editor of an exiles’ magazine