The Winds of War

mind.”

“He intends to write me a letter of commendation about you.”

“He does? That’s fine. Has he got any word on Natalie?”

“Just that she’s gone to Stockholm. You’ll start on that report tonight?”

“Sure.”

Byron left the house after dinner and returned at two in the morning. Pug was awake, working in the library and worrying about his son, who blithely told him he had gone with other Americans to the opera. Under his arm Byron carried a new copy of Mein Kampf in English. Next day when Pug left the house Byron was up and dressed, lounging on the back porch in slacks and a sweater, drinking coffee and reading Mein Kampf. At seven in the evening the father found Byron in the same place, in the same chair, drinking a highball. He was well into the thick tome, which lay open on his lap. Rubbing bleary eyes, he gave his father a listless wave.

Pug said, “Did you start on that report?”

“I’ll get to it, Dad. Say, this is an interesting book. Did you read it?”

“I did, but I didn’t find it interesting. About fifty pages of those ravings give you the picture. I thought I should finish it, so I did, but it was like wading through mud.”

Byron shook his head. “Really amazing,” and turned the page.

He went out again at night, returned late, and fell asleep with his clothes on, an old habit that ground on Pug’s nerves. Byron woke around eleven, and found himself undressed and under the covers, his clothes draped on a chair, with a note propped on them: WRITE THAT GODDAMN REPORT.

* * *

He was idling along the Kurfurstendamm that afternoon, with Mein Kampf under his arm, when Leslie Slote went hurrying past him, halted, and turned. “Well, there you are! That’s luck. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Are you coming back to the States with us or not? Our transportation’s set for Thursday.”

“I’m not sure. How about some coffee and pastry? Let’s be a couple of Berliners.”

Slote pursed his lips. “To tell the truth, I skipped lunch. All right. What the devil are you reading that monstrosity for?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Great! That’s an unusual comment.”

They sat at a table in an enormous sidewalk cafe, where potted flowering bushes broke up the expanse of tables and chairs, and a brass band played gay waltzes in the sunshine.

“God, this is the life,” Byron said, as they gave orders to a bowing smiling waiter. “Look at all these nice, polite, cordial, joking, happy Berliners, will you? Did you ever see a nicer city? So clean! All those fine statues and baroque buildings, like that marvellous opera, and all the spanking new modern ones, and all the gardens and trees — why, I’ve never seen such a green, clean city! Berlin’s almost like a city built in a forest. And all the canals, and the quaint little boats — did you see that tug that sort of tips its smokestack to get under the bridges? Completely charming. The only thing is, these pleasant folks have just been blowing the hell out of Poland, machine-gunning people from the sky — I’ve got the scar to prove it — pounding a city just as nice as Berlin to a horrible pulp. It’s a puzzle, you might say.”

Slote shook his head and smiled. “The contrast between the war front and the back area is always startling. No doubt Paris was as charming as ever while Napoleon was out doing his butcheries.”

“Slote, you can’t tell me the Germans aren’t strange.”

“Oh, yes, the Germans are strange.”

“Well, that’s why I’ve been reading this book, to try to figure them out. It’s their leader’s book. Now, it turns out this is the writing of an absolute nut. The Jews are secretly running the world, he says. That’s his whole message. They’re the capitalists, but they’re the Bolsheviks too, and they’re conspiring to destroy the German people, who by rights should really be running the world. Well, he’s going to become dictator, see, wipe out the Jews, crush France, and carve off half of Bolshevist Russia for more German living space. Have I got it right so far?”

“A bit simplified, but yes — pretty much.” Slote sounded amused but uneasy, glancing at the tables nearby.

“Okay. Now, all these nice Berliners like this guy. Right? They voted for him. They follow him. They salute him. They cheer him. Don’t they? How is that? Isn’t that very strange? How come he’s their leader? Haven’t they read this book? How come they didn’t put him in a padded cell? Don’t they have insane asylums? And who do they put in there, if not this guy?”

Slote, while stuffing his pipe, kept looking here and there at the people around them. Satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping, he said in a low tone, “Are you just discovering the phenomenon of Adolf Hitler?”

“I just got shot in the head by a German. That sort of called my attention to it.”

“Well, you won’t learn much from Mein Kampf. That’s just froth on top of the kettle.”

“Do you understand Hitler and the Germans?”

Slote lit his pipe and stared at the air for several seconds. Then he spoke, with a wry little smile of academic condescension. “I have an opinion, the result of a lot of study.”

“Can I hear it? I’m interested.”

“It’s a terribly long story, Byron, and quite involved.” Slote glanced around again. “Some other time and place I’ll be glad to, but -”

“Would you give me the names of books to read, then?”

“Are you serious? You’d let yourself in for some dull plodding.”

“I’ll read anything you tell me to.”

“Well, let me have your book.”

On the flyleaf of Mein Kampf, Slote listed authors and titles all the way down the page, in a neat slanted hand, in purple Polish ink. Running his eye down the list, Byron felt his heart sink at the unfamiliar array of Teutonic authors, each name followed by a heavy book title, some by two:

…Treitschke — Moeller van den Bruck — Fries — Menzel — Fichte — Schlegel — Arndt — Jahn — Ruhs — Lagarde — Lanebehn — Spengler…

Among them, like black raisins in much gray dough, a few names from his contemporary civilization course at Columbia caught his eye: Luther — Kant — Hegel — Schopenhauer — Nietzsche. He remembered that course as a nuisance and a nightmare. He had passed with a D minus, after frantic all-night cramming of smudgy lecture notes from the fraternity files. Slote drew a heavy line, and added more books with equally forbidding authors’ names:

…Santayana — Mann — Veblen — Renan — Heine — Kolnai — Rauschning…

“Below the line are critics and analysts,” he remarked as he wrote. “Above are some German antecedents of Hitler. I think you must grasp these to grasp him.”

Byron said dolefully, “Really? The philosophers too? Hegel and Schopenhauer? Why? And Martin Luther, for pity’s sake?”

Contemplating the list with a certain arid satisfaction, Slote added a name or two as he pulled hard at his pipe, making the bowl hiss. “My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture — a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion.

They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets — all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror. But I—”

The waiter was approaching. Slote shut up and said not a word while they were being served. Watching the waiter until he went out of sight, the Foreign Service man drank coffee and ate cake. Then he started again, almost in an undertone.

“But I don’t believe it. To me Nazism is unthinkable without its roots in German nineteenth-century thought: romanticism, idealism, nationalism, the whole outpouring. It’s in those books. If you’re not prepared to read every word of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, for instance, give up. It’s basic.” He shoved the book back to Byron, open at