Free Klaus by Allan Massie Page B

I can say confidently that we are making a success of it. No surprise there: we Germans are after all the most efficient race in the world. Believe me, my friend, in the new Europe that must some day be constructed, we shall take the lead, even if we have for a time to disguise our mastery…”
    Klaus turned to look at him. A perfectly ordinary man, a bit fleshy, but with a frank open face, well dressed, nothing repulsive about him, giving the impression of contentment, as if the twelve years of the Reich had been no more than a regrettable experience, something to be put behind him, like a bad dream the memory of which you shake off as soon as you’ve had your breakfast coffee. No doubt he thought that no one on the terrace understood German. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Why should he? He had come through. The war was behind him and there was business to be done.
    Not for the first time Klaus reproached himself for his own failure fully to comprehend the depth of the national psychosis. The truth was that he had been too bound up in his own life, which was certainly interesting enough, to bother to do so. He had been bored and disgusted by the savage boasts, but not sufficiently frightened. He hadn’t grasped the brutality that went hand in hand with resentment and an inferiority complex. Instead he had travelled giving lectures on European culture and amusing himself – and his audiences – with flippant dismissal of the brown-shirted barbarians. Extraordinary though it was, he couldn’t acquit himself of complacency. But then, he thought, what could he acquit himself of?
    To be fair to himself, something he had always found difficult, he had learned at last. It was the young actor who taught him the lesson, the young actor to whom in Mephisto he gave the name of Hans Miklas. He had known him in Hamburg where he was a junior member of the company, an angry and resentful one, with his poverty, his undernourished physique, his hollow cheeks and his too-red lips. Klaus had been immediately attracted to him – the boy was so evidently unhappy. Even his ferocious jealousy of Gustaf had been appealing. At first, anyway. But the attraction was quickly replaced by disgust, for young Hans – which wasn’t his real name but for a moment Klaus couldn’t remember what that had been – was, he learned, a Nazi, had indeed joined the Party’s Youth Movement as soon as he was able to, had done so originally to spite his father, an elementary schoolteacher and a Social Democrat. In the theatre canteen, after a single glass of beer, he would hold forth against Jews and plutocrats and the degenerates who were destroying Germany and corrupting German youth. Klaus soon understood that he was included among them. And yet, mingled with his disgust, there was pity. The boy was so horribly sincere and also idealistic; he really believed that, when Hitler had made, as he put it, “a clean sweep of that mob”, a new purer Germany would be born. “Yes,” he said, “whatever you think, the future belongs to us, and it will be a new world, one that is clean and honest and noble.”
    What a fool! But there was nothing to be done about it. You couldn’t possibly rescue him. There were moments when Klaus would have liked to take him in his arms and cover his face with kisses and speak soothingly to him. Impossible of course – the boy would have hit him, spat in his face. Gustaf loathed him, and took pleasure in humiliating him at rehearsal. “Not like that, you dolt. Are you a clodhopping peasant? Like this, with an airy elegance, that’s what your part demands. Of course, if you’re not up to it, you can go back on the streets and caterwaul with your Nazis. You’re a joke, but I’m not going to allow you to destroy my production. Now do it again, if you can…” That sort of thing. And the poor boy, now blushing, now pale and quivering as if he had just been told his mother was dead, repeated the required movements again and