over and every opportunity is open to them.’
It was in fact for this very reason that the Munich celebration was not such a happy event. Germany’s increasing success might have been good for the Stengel boys but it had left the National Socialist German Workers’ Party thin and ailing.
Its message of violent, uncompromising outrage and hatred had begun to sound somewhat hollow as life in the Fatherland continued to improve. In the Reichstag elections of 1924 they had gained 3 per cent of the national vote. In 1928, after four more years of screaming, shouting, marching and fist-banging up and down the country, they were down to just 2.6 per cent.
The brown-shirted men were at a loss.
Their brown-shirted leader was at a loss also. Although of course he hid his confusion behind the stern face of an ‘implacable’ and ‘unalterable’ will.
What was going wrong?
Their message was clear enough. Despite the confusing and self-contradictory ‘twenty-five points’ with which Hitler had launched the party, it really boiled down to just one thing: ‘Blame the Jews for everything.’
What could be simpler? And yet this message was proving increasingly difficult to either explain or sustain.
Should the Jews be blamed for the increasingly stable money?
The improving employment situation?
The efficient social services?
Membership of the League of Nations?
People liked all of those things. They were the very reason that in Berlin old Herr Tauber felt able to state that the country’s nightmare was over.
Even the great outrage of November 1918, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ theory which had long been a Nazi Party favourite, was beginning to sound like a paranoid obsession. Over and over again throughout the 1920s Hitler had railed against the ‘November Criminals’, those rich and cowardly Jews skulking in Berlin who had deliberately, maliciously (and for no apparent reason that Hitler cared to explain) conspired to organize the defeat of the Imperial German Army.
People had used to lap that one up but now nobody seemed to give a damn.
Germany had moved on.
The Munich Baby was dying.
And yet unbeknownst to those glum brown-shirted men sitting around the table at the house in Munich, everything was about to change. The Nazi Party would have to wait eight months for its birthday present, but when it came, it was the best they could possibly have hoped for.
Chaos.
On 24 October 1929, six and a half thousand kilometres from Schelling Street. On another street. An infinitely more famous one, called Wall Street, there began the greatest collapse in market confidence in all history and with it a global depression.
Germany’s economic recovery had been the most fragile, the abyss from which it had hauled itself the darkest and most deep. Its vulnerability to this new financial madness was therefore all the greater.
The Munich Baby was about to get its chance.
Fighting over Dagmar
OTTO WAS VERY surprised. What had got into Paulus?
Otto was a fighter, a two-fisted scrapper who never bothered with words when a blow could be more articulate, but Paulus was the opposite.
Paulus never fought unless he absolutely had to. He never lost control of his emotions either. He was passionate, certainly, but he always tempered his passion with reason.
Reason should therefore have told him that in a fist fight against Otto he was bound to get pounded.
He was taller, but he was thinner.
He had the reach but Otto had the grunt.
He was a rapier, Otto was a Howitzer.
Which was why it had come as such a shock to Otto to feel the knuckles of Paulus’s left upper cut smashing into his mouth and rattling his teeth. What was more, the sharp pain of that first unexpected blow was followed swiftly by a deep intestinal ache as Paulus buried his right into Otto’s guts.
Otto doubled forward involuntarily, as had of course been the purpose of the carefully placed blow, and shortly thereafter he found himself knocked sprawling on to the ground by a pile driver of a left hook to the side of his bowed head which split open the skin on his ear and made his vision double.
A perfect three-blow combination.
Proving just what can be achieved with surprise and cool, forensic determination. Exactly as the boys’ boxing instructor had always told them it could. Paulus had clearly been paying more attention than Otto had supposed.
The boxing classes were Wolfgang’s idea. Frieda had been dead against them.
‘Teaching them to fight might actually get them
‘They already think they can handle things they can’t,’ Wolfgang argued, ‘so we might as well try and even the odds a bit.’
That had been two years before in 1930 when almost overnight Berlin had begun once more to resemble the lunatic asylum it had been when the twins were born. Those old familiar sounds had returned to the city, breaking glass, running boots, screams and gunfire. To Frieda and Wolfgang it was as if they’d never gone away. There were the same daily battles between the same old factions. Except on the right the Nazi
‘Just like old times,’ Wolfgang remarked.
‘Not quite,’ Frieda remarked grimly. ‘This time it’s worse for us.’
She was right and Wolfgang knew it. The anti-Semitism was more pronounced than it had ever been before. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s
‘If we really had as much influence as that bastard says,’ Wolfgang commented, ‘we’d have had him fucking killed long ago.’
But the Jews of Germany were none of the things they were supposed to be. They were neither organized nor focused; the only thing that united them was the accident of genealogy that named them Jews. Accused of a collective conspiratorial aggression, they were incapable of collective defence, and all Wolfgang could do for his own family was put bars on the windows, keep a blackjack in his pocket and make sure his boys knew how to box.
Of course he had not expected them to start using their skills on each other.
Looking back, neither Paulus nor Otto could quite remember which of them it was who first admitted to being in love with Dagmar. A confession which sparked the bloodiest battle they had ever fought.
It was Silke who provoked it.
They’d been playing horse shoes with her in a muddy little patch of public gardens near the Stengel apartment, and Silke had taken the opportunity as she often did to complain about ‘Princess’ Dagmar and how more and more ‘up herself’ she had become.
‘She thinks she’s better than us because she’s so rich and so pretty,’ Silke said grumpily. ‘Just because her dad’s a millionaire.’
Stung by Silke’s contempt, one twin had told her to keep quiet, that Dagmar was OK.
Then the other volunteered that she was more than OK, she was in fact rather wonderful. Gorgeous even.
