themselves. Before leaving for the day, I found the list of newly registered patents which Jeff kept in his office. I ran my finger down the columns until struck by the word 'Wuppertal'.
_Nr. 607537, Patentiert im Deutschen Reich vom 25 Dezember 1932. Dr Fritz Mietzsch in Wuppertal-Barmen unde Dr Josef Klarer in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. I G Farbenindustrie Akt.-Ges._
They had patented sulphonamide, but this told nothing to me or the rest of the world. I G Farben patented every brainchild born in a fragmentary caul of exploitation.
I joined the crowd flooding from the brewery, lunch tins over their shoulders, starting through the gathering darkness on foot or bicycle, lighting their pipes and cigarettes-smoking at work being forbidden on pain of instant dismissal. The newsboys were yelling. On my way to the Schwebebahn I paid my fifteen pfennigs for a special edition of the Wuppertaler Zeitung. There were big black headlines.
There seemed to be big black headlines every day in Germany at the time. They announced that President Hindenburg had signed a decree to defend the Reich against Communism. The German people were to be saved from this peril by suspending those sections of the constitution which guaranteed their civil liberties. Germans were henceforward forbidden to express any opinion they cared to, and so were their newspapers. Meetings of any kind were banned. Letters could be opened, telephones tapped. The police could arrest and search as they wished, the courts could condemn to decapitation any armed disturber of the peace. After the night's outrage of the Reichstag fire, these measures were pressed upon the President as essential by his new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
8
Campaigning from inside the Government, Goebbels exploited the State radio to the last decibel. From the wireless set at home, from loudspeakers rigged to lamp-posts in streets thick with red-white-and-black swastika banners, the Nazis blared their simple election message-a Vote for Hitler was a vote for the glorious tomorrow which belonged to Germany, a vote against was an invitation to the Communists to lay hands on every German and all his property. This was despite Communists being arrested by the lorry-load, to be beaten, tortured and slain, along with anyone else the Nazis did not care for. The Reichstag fire singed everybody in Germany.
But the German electorate was ungrateful for the energy which the Nazis expended on it. Hitler neither lost the election nor won. He had 288 seats in the Reichstag, needing the cohesion of his 52 German Nationalist allies to scrape a miserable majority of 16. The Catholic middle classes in west and south Germany had deserted their old parties for the Nazis, but still only 44 per cent of Germans voted for him. Those who did, through their good or selfish reasons, had to accept-and accept responsibility for-his policies to their gruesome limits. In Parliament, opposition to Hitler was divided, jealous, bitter and irreconcilable. Along these fatal flaws, democracy in Germany disintegrated.
I should have noticed one change in the Dieffenbachs' household. Most people read the local papers in Germany, but the Dieffenbachs' _Kцlnische Zeitung_ became replaced by the _Volkischer Beobachter_-the old _Mьnchener Beobachter_-published by Max Amann's press empire in Berlin. This was a running mate to Goebbels' _Der Angriff,_ 'Attack', first put out in 1927. The masthead title of Amann's 'National Observer' was punctuated by an eagle-crowned swastika and underscored with _Editor, Adolf Hitler._ The issue of Friday, March 24 had a photograph of the editor on the front page, in his brown shirt and Sam Browne belt, addressing the rehoused Reichstag from the stage of the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. At either hand, dark-suited, butterfly-collared officials scribbled respectfully. Behind, the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Gцring, surveyed the behaviour of his assembled deputies through a pair of binoculars.
The editor seemed to have little time for the duties of his chair. Glaring headlines in Gothic type announced that Adolf Hitler had been given unfettered power over Germany, by the votes of 441 deputies against 94. The paper did not mention those arrested, or prevented from entering, or the streets outside packed with Storm Troopers yelling, 'Full powers or else-!'
So the new Reichstag had stayed in business for just eighteen days. I turned the pages. Max Reinhardt was directing von Hofmannathal's _Das Salzburger grosse Welttheater_ at the _Deutsches Theater,_ Oscar's Elephant Review began at eight-fifteen every evening at the Winter Garden, Dr Dralle was advertising his lavender soap at 55 pfennigs a bar, and there were terrible floods in New Zealand. The puppets danced, the rain fell, the fuse was lit to blow a hole in the middle of the twentieth century.
The grey Rhineland winter was shading into spring, the gardens livened by the flower which sounds beautiful in any language_-Osterglocken, jonquille,_ daffodil. The following Sunday was Dr Dieffenbach's fifty-third birthday. He had been called to a consultation in Bonn, a small town bisected by the railway in which they said only three things ever happened-it was raining, the crossing-gates were shut, or both together. He was too poor a master of his own time to arrange a party, but I gathered that we were to dine _en famille_ unusually well from venison with Kдrntner Serviettenklцsse, savoury dumplings served in a cloth.
The doctor was indulged to be extensively reminiscent. We had been talking at table about the Oxford Union resolution passed the previous month, _This House Will in no Circumstances Fight for its King and Country._ It had been jubilantly reported in Germany as another illustration of the degeneracy of the British Empire, were one needed. Dr Dieffenbach was singularly tolerant.
'It was just a frivolity, a _jeu d'esprit,'_ he dismissed it. 'Students need an occasional outrage to save them being dulled to death with work. When I went to Kiel University from the Gymnasium to take my Tentamen Physicum, the first medical examination, I was stuffed full of Greek and Latin like a Perigord goose with corn. That was in 1898, when we were properly educated.' Dr Dieffenbach was bearded, fat and jovial, resembling King Edward VII, with whom he shared the quest for excellence in food, wine and cigars, if not women. 'A couple of years afterwards, the Government flouted the opinion of us doctors and let medical students go to university before even finishing their Gymnasium, which half demolished the intellectual level of our profession. At the same time, they let women become doctors, which completed the ruination.'
I stole a glance at spirited, argumentative Gerda, across the white-clothed table between Frau Dieffenbach and her schoolboy brother Gunter. She sat submissively sipping her hock which, like indignation, turned her a delightful pink. Her father continued in English, 'Of course, it wasn't all hard work. We had our student clubs, with their coloured caps and regalia and all that. There was a good seasoning to our young lives of _saufen and raufen.'_
I could imagine the portly, jovial doctor drinking, if not duelling. He had learned my language while 'enjoying the hospitality of Old England', as he put it. He had sailed as surgeon aboard Admiral von Spee's cruiser
He resumed in German, 'We had to pass in surgery and medicine, though the attitude lingered since the Wars of Liberation that the physician was learned, the surgeon a mere butcher of men. And Germany was as riddled with charlatans as a leper with sores. We doctors had to form the…what would you call it, my dear chappie?' he interjected in English, using the awful expression from his days of captivity. _'Gesellschaft fьr Bekдmpfung der Kurpfushertums?'_
'The Anti-Quack Society, I suppose.'
He added gloomily, 'Well, since the War they seem to be flourishing better than ever.
Dr Dieffenbach was a product of the golden age of German medicine, which produced Hermann von Helmholtz, the descendant of William Penn, who invented the ophthalmoscope to reveal the retina of the human eye. Karl Thiersch, who perfected the paper-thin skin graft. Albert Frдnkel of Berlin, who discovered the cause of pneumonia. And the indefatigable Rudolf Virchow, pathologist, anthropologist and politician, who relaid the Berlin drains, studied tattooing and stood up to Bismarck. It was the age when German doctors, unlike German lawyers, interested themselves in history, philosophy and literature, and there were two orchestras exclusively of doctors in Berlin. It was the age which finished that weekend. The Nazis could not decapitate Albert Frдnkel because he had died in 1916, so during that summer they decapitated his bust.
I remarked in German that my host shared the same university as Professor Domagk.
