Two Brothers

Except not quite the same.

There was one difference between the two boys. A difference that went almost without comment at the time. A difference that was entirely irrelevant to Frieda and Wolfgang. But a difference that would in the fullness of time become a matter of life and death. One child was Jewish, the other was not.

Another Baby Munich, 1920

ON THE SAME day that the two Stengel brothers were born, 24 February 1920, some few hundred miles from Berlin, at the Hofbrauhaus Bierkeller in Munich, another baby came into the world. Like many babies (not least Paulus and Otto themselves), this one was noisy and wild. When it found its voice it was only to shout and to scream, and when it found its fists it was only to beat the air in fury because the world was not as it wished it to be.

Most babies grow up. They develop reason and a conscience, they become socialized. This baby never did. It was the National Socialist German Workers Party, named that day out of the ashes of a previous, failed incarnation. The voice that screamed and the fists that pounded were those of its emerging leader, a thirty-one-year-old corporal in the political unit of the Bavarian Reichswehr. His name was Adolf Hitler.

That fateful night, along with giving the party its new name, Hitler outlined twenty-five points that were to be the ‘inalienable’ and ‘unalterable’ basis of the party programme. Most of these points were quickly forgotten by both Hitler and his rapidly growing party, sops as they were to the quasi-socialist principles of its roots. Other points, however, were very much Hitler’s own and he never wavered in his commitment to them until the moment he drew his last breath. A union of all German-speaking peoples. A complete repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. And, above all, a ‘settlement’ with the Jews. This was the most crucial point of all and on that cold winter evening the penniless, unknown soldier, voice almost gone after three hours of oration, fists clenched, arms flailing in the air, spit floating in the smoky beams of light, gave notice that the Jews were the source of all Germany’s ills and that he, Adolf Hitler, would be their nemesis. He would deprive every one of them of their Reich citizenship. No Jew would be allowed to hold any official office. No Jew would be allowed to write for a newspaper. And any Jew who had arrived in Germany after 1914 would be instantly deported.

It was heady stuff and the crowd roared their approval. Here at last was a man who knew why Germany had lost the war. Why instead of being victors living fat in Paris and London, decent Germans were paupers eking out their beer and tobacco in Munich.

It was the Jews. Despite being only 0.75 per cent of the population, the Jews, in their fiendish cunning, had done it all and this man would cut the bastards down to size.

No one, not even Hitler himself, imagined that night in 1920 just how much more he would do to them than that.

An Operation is Cancelled Berlin, 1920

FRIEDA AND WOLFGANG took the decision not to have Paulus and Otto circumcised for the strangest and most incongruous of reasons. It happened as a result of a failed attempt by reactionary fanatics to seize control of the German state.

‘It was pure Dada really,’ Wolfgang liked to joke when he told the story in later years (the boys glowing red in the corner at having their penises discussed at their parents’ parties). ‘The ultimate Surrealist non-sequitur. Some idiot tries to do a Mussolini in Berlin and my lads get to hang on to their foreskins — figuratively speaking, I mean, of course. How’s that for a random and chaotic juxtaposition? Life imitating art!’

They had certainly intended to have their boys circumcised.

‘We have to do it,’ Frieda said, when they brought the babies home from the hospital, ‘it means so much to my parents.’

‘My mum and dad wouldn’t care either way, but I suppose being dead their opinions don’t count against the mighty Tauber family,’ Wolfgang commented.

Wolfgang’s parents had both died the year before. Like so many millions of other Europeans, they had survived the war only to be struck down by flu.

‘Please don’t turn this into another rant about my dad,’ Frieda insisted. ‘I say we just get on with it. It never did you any harm.’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ Wolfgang growled with mock lasciviousness. ‘Who knows what powers of passion I’d deploy if I had a hooded helmet?’

Frieda silenced him with one of her looks. Having given birth only days before she wasn’t in much of a mood for dirty jokes. ‘Just book the rabbi,’ she said.

But as fate would have it, Wolfgang’s misgivings were irrelevant because there was to be no circumcision anyway. On the date when tradition required the deed to be done, all the water dried up in Frieda and Wolfgang’s apartment.

They were standing by the kitchen sink into which they had just placed two shitty-bottomed babies in dire need of a bath and all they got when they turned on the taps was a distant clanking sound.

‘We’ve got no water,’ Frieda said.

‘Shit,’ Wolfgang replied, glancing ruefully at his soiled babies before adding, ‘and lots of it.’

At which point the twins, who although as yet unable to speak could still sense a crisis in the air, knew it was their job to compound it and began to scream blue murder.

‘Why us!’ Frieda shouted above the din, but in fact it was not just them, the water had dried up all over Berlin. The electricity had gone too. Also the gas and the trams, the post and the police. The whole municipal infrastructure which had continued to function throughout the war and then somewhat more sporadically through two years of famine and street fighting had suddenly ground to a complete halt.

The reason the great city had been left without a single modern convenience was that there had been an insurrection. A local political nonentity named Kapp had marched through the Brandenburg Gate at the head of a notoriously brutal brigade of Freikorps, occupied the President’s Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse and announced that he was Germany’s new leader and that everybody had to do what he said. In reply the unions had called a general strike, cutting off all services and bringing Berlin to a filthy, stinking standstill. Wolfgang and Frieda had no water for their babies and the hapless Kapp had no paper on which to print a proclamation informing Germany that due to his firm leadership their nation was strong once more.

It was of course the water that the parents of the two puking, pooping new babies missed most. There was enough to drink from local standpipes but they couldn’t clean the kids.

Therefore when Frieda’s father brought Rabbi Jakobovitz round on the appointed day with his little bag of ancient-looking tools and powders, Frieda refused to let him near the boys.

‘It’s an operation, for God’s sake, Papa,’ she said in reply to her father’s embarrassed protests. ‘It’s a medical procedure which requires proper hygiene!’

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous,’ her father replied. ‘It’s just a little nick, there’s hardly even any blood.’

In vain did the old rabbi protest that he’d scarcely lost a boy in years, that his shield, knife and spice box were all regularly polished and he always rubbed his sharpened thumbnail with alcohol before he did the deed. Frieda was adamant.

‘You’re not doing it. Certainly not until the taps are back on. What’s wrong with foreskins anyway?’

‘Please, Frieda!’ Herr Tauber spluttered. ‘The rabbi!’

‘Yes, the rabbi,’ Wolfgang commented laconically from the corner of the room where despite the early hour he was pouring himself a glass of schnapps, it not being possible to make any coffee. ‘Perhaps he can answer the question. What is wrong with foreskins?’

Herr Tauber began to stammer his apologies but the rabbi insisted sagely that he was perfectly happy to