'I really don't understand why I should do without my dinner. After all, the war
I discovered the next morning that Wuppertal too was mostly demolished. The brewery had gone. The final air-raids had created a hurricane of fire which had boiled the tar from the streets. Like other embattled towns, parts of it were almost untouched. The Allied Armies had commandeered the entire fashionable area where twelve years before I lodged-furniture, paintings, grand pianos and all-simply evicting the inhabitants. We messed with the British Army, in a stone-built mansion which I faintly remembered. It had later belonged to the rich owner of an 'aryanized' textile works, everywhere now scratched by boots, filled with the sound of American Forces Network from Munich and somebody always playing ping-pong.
I went eagerly in search of the Dieffenbachs, but their house was one of the unlucky ones, blank eyed, burnt out, dead. I stood wondering sombrely what had happened to the family. Then I noticed the centipede's legs astride the river Wupper, and one of the familiar cars sailing peacefully beneath them. Having survived the Kaiser, the Schwebebahn had outlasted Hitler. I thought that Greenparish might be able to draw some parallel with German politics and German technology.
The first man it was my duty to interrogate was Gerhard Domagk.
I had been in Wuppertal a fortnight. One of the nearby commandeered houses had been turned into offices, with trestle tables and filing cabinets and metal-framed chairs. There were red-capped military policemen stamping about with revolvers, but I managed to shoo them away. Domagk had not changed greatly. His close cropped hair was no greyer and no thinner. He still wore his neat triangular bristle of moustache. He had lost weight, but so had everyone in Germany. He was poorly dressed, but he had worn old clothes even when the shops were full of new ones.
'You are Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk?' I started reading formally in German from a manilla file. He stood facing me across the trestle table with understandable wariness. 'You were born at Lagow, in the Province of Brandenburg, on October 13, 1895? Your parents were Paul Domagk, schoolmaster, and his wife Martha, maiden name Reimer?'
He nodded silently. I motioned him to sit. 'You don't remember me?' I asked unsmilingly.
He stared, but shook his head. 'How is your daughter? She must be about sixteen now.'
Domagk looked at me with even more suspicion. It occurred to me that he imagined I was about to screw information from him by threatening his family. It was a fear well-justified by the rule just lifted from Germany. In the last stages of the war, the whole families of deserters were shot as a matter of course.
'Her arm recovered, so I heard,' I continued. 'Yes, I heard that after our countries were at war. I heard at the same time that you were arrested by the Gestapo.'
His blank stare was followed by a look of amazement and a slow smile. 'You and that American with the beautiful car-'
'You remember? Herr Elgar. I visited your labs.' I nodded in the direction of the I G Farben works. The factory had been bombed, but the research department was almost intact. 'I went in the American's car to fetch the 'Protosil' tablets for your daughter. Now I can make a confession. I stole a second phial of the tablets which I happened to find there.'
He was hugely relieved at being faced by an enemy he knew. 'I don't think the loss was noticed in the agonizing circumstances,' he replied.
The atmosphere thawed as we talked for a while about his child's illness. I offered him a Woodbine. 'I remember how I feared for my daughter's life,' he reflected. 'It still amazes me how the world now accepts complete recovery in such cases as a matter of course.'
'My loot ended in good hands. Yours was the first 'Prontosil' ever used by Colebrook to treat puerperal fever. Though unfortunately without the success of your daughter's case.'
'Of course, I read everything Colebrook had to say about sulphonamide. His work at Queen Charlotte's Hospital was most impressive. The progress of his patients was closely checked by the bacteriological laboratory, which we never achieved with our earlier trials here in Wuppertal.'
'Have you still your painting by Otto Dix?'
Domagk smiled again. 'Otto Dix…he was called 'subversive' by the Ministry of Propaganda, though I heard he went away somewhere and continued to paint exactly as he felt. Yes, I kept that picture from my laboratory. It remained discreetly in my home, even after my arrest. Though what has happened to the painting now…'
He had been evicted from his house in Walkьrieallee. When I had strolled to inspect it, half a dozen bored GIs were amusing themselves playing football in the garden, one of them wearing over his combat dress Domagk's evening tail suit.
Domagk stared with interest round the room which he could not leave without my permission. But before starting my interrogation, I had a more pressing question. 'Is Dr Dieffenbach still in Wuppertal?'
The answer was a look of horror. 'But didn't you know, Herr Elgar? Dr Dieffenbach and his wife were both taken away by the SS. It was in 1941, about Christmas time. They both died in a concentration camp.'
'Oh, God! And the daughter-'
'Frдulein Gerde kept her post in the school throughout the war. But last March or April, when everything started to disintegrate, she disappeared. Where she is now, who can say? Families are separated all over Germany. There are plenty of people here in Elberfeld whose relatives are in the Russian Zone, and there's no knowing if they'll ever meet again. I heard a rumour that she had been arrested by the British. But there are rumours everywhere about everyone. The boy was killed you know. In the attack on Liege in 1940.
I sat savouring these bitter dregs of war.
'But why should Dr Dieffenbach be arrested? I remember him as a Nazi supporter.'
'I understood it was for behaviour prejudicial to the State, and making subversive remarks. They were common charges, when the SS wanted to do away with somebody.'
'Then what made him change his opinions about Hitler?'
'Like many professional men, he found the Nazis no friends of the middle classes. The Nazis wanted to create a society where all men were equal-equal under the domination of their own officials. The Nazi Party was a duplicate state in Germany, you know. I was certainly never a member of the Party. I never supported Hitler. I acquiesced, I agree. Through prudence, and through fear. You will understand that, Herr Elgar?'
Domagk laid his hand on the bare table with a resigned gesture. 'My country was at war, and I backed the war patriotically. My work was on drugs of no military significance. Drugs which may benefit all mankind. I spent my time trying to extend the range of the sulphonamide drugs to tuberculosis, though unfortunately without success. So I turned my attention instead to the thiosemicarbazones, which as you know are related to the sulphonamides. Have you heard of Tb-I 698? I found that to have a definite action against the tubercule bacillus. And all through the war I continued my work on natural and acquired immunity to tumours, and on drugs against cancer.'
'Do you know about penicillin?'
'Oh, yes. A Penicillin Committee was set up in Berlin last year. We began to grow a little of the mould, in the way described by Florey. Had the war continued another year, I'm sure that German chemistry would have produced plenty of it.'
Domagk stubbed out his cigarette. I noticed that he had pronounced arthritis of the hands. 'Will you answer a question which I have been wanting to ask all the war, Professor? Why precisely did you concentrate on the sulphonamide dyes against streptococci? In the I G Farben works you had an enormous choice of chemicals to experiment with.'
'I was testing about three thousand different chemical compounds a year,' Domagk agreed. He thought for some moments, his head inclined to one side, as I remembered him. 'I started with the notion that bacteria were destroyed by the natural defences of the body very much more easily if they were damaged somehow first-'
'That was in the reprint you gave me for Sir Gowland Hopkins. He told me recently that-re-reading your paper-it made inevitable your becoming the discoverer of modern chemotherapy.'
Domagk accepted the flattery with a smile.
'Hopkins is still alive?'
'A spry eighty-four. He only retired as Professor during the war.'
'My first attempt was to damage the invading streptococci with mild heat-it was only for demonstrating the reaction to students, using the living mouse. Then instead of heat I turned to various chemicals-gold, acridines, finally the azo dyes synthesized by Dr Meitzsch and Dr Klarer, one of which damaged the streptococci so thoroughly
