Free Therefore Choose by Keith Oatley

film, Werner said, “It stirs something in me. It resonates with something true in us.”
    â€œI suppose a rally is all right for the faithful,” said George. “But wheeling out people like Robert Ley is a bit much, isn’t it? Shouldn’t he be disciplined for using his position to appropriate more motor cars and houses than anyone could possibly want?”
    â€œProbably he is a bad apple,” said Werner. “For some reason we don’t understand, it must be difficult for Hitler to dismiss him.”
    â€œAnd all the other fonctionnaires? They made the second half of the film pretty boring.”
    â€œI don’t want to listen to the airing of political sentiments,” said Werner. “But when you listen to Hitler you know he is a good person.”
    George did not say anything.
    â€œHitler has made it completely clear he doesn’t want war; nobody in Germany wants war. But we do want to be strong. If you read history, you see very soon that nations that are weak get attacked. Imagine a herd of deer, surrounded by wolves. Which deer gets attacked? It’s the slowest one, the one with a limp. Any nation that is weak invites aggression. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen. That is all.”
    Nobody spoke.
    â€œWe are not just a people who were tripped up at the beginning of the century and have been through terrible economic problems,” said Werner. “There’s something in us by which minds can join, pull together.”
    George wondered if this would be part of Werner’s thesis, the joining of German minds. He thought about making a joke about how people’s arms must ache from constantly being held out at forty-five degrees, like railway signals.
    â€œWhy does Hitler wear a military uniform?” said Anna. “Those flags and martial music. Labourers marching with spades on their shoulders as if they were rifles.”
    â€œThey like parades,” George said.
    â€œYou underestimate it,” said Anna. “That Riefenstahl is clever. She works with juxtapositions. She juxtaposes the airplane’s shadow with the church spires. Think about it in the way people in the Moscow Linguistic Circle would think about it. The airplane emerges from the clouds, like something in a Wagner opera. It represents modernity. Its shadow slides smoothly and beautifully across churches and traditional buildings of the town. Not just any town: the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, which was the First German Reich. She’s clever.”
    â€œYou think she considered all this?”
    â€œYou think she did not?”
    â€œPerhaps she liked the images.”
    â€œSomeone creates these things,” said Anna. “Perhaps not Riefenstahl on her own. Thoughtful people, artists. Men marching with spades on their shoulders — someone thought of that. What does it mean? It overturns habits of thinking, that’s what. Assimilates civilian work to the rituals of soldiering. It implies that everyone’s in the army.”
    This was Anna’s intensity.
    Werner smirked at her, not unkindly. “Not all life is literature,” he said.
    â€œYou tell me,” said Anna, agitated now. “You tell me what these parades mean. The music is corny, ta-ra, ta-ra. People march in step.”
    â€œThey mean something important,” said Werner.

    On the day after the visit to the cinema, Anna went to her office. George went to meet her there at three o’clock, and they walked together along Unter den Linden, Berlin’s grandest and most elegant boulevard. It was after they had turned and walked back along the boulevard, when they had stopped for coffee, that Anna made her startling suggestion.

14
    â€œCome live with me . Please don’t go back,” she said.
    â€œRight now?” said George. “Decide to stay right now?”
    â€œWhy don’t you stay with me, and share my bed?”
    â€œYou know