Once the show closed, Goering helped himself to several works for his collection of plundered art. So did other officials. The remainder of the work from the show was sold at auction in Switzerland. ‘We might as well make some money from this trash,’ said Goebbels.
Willi could not risk going to see the exhibition. Benno and Margarete went the first day and they described it for him. ‘It’s so crowded you can hardly move. Strangely enough, once inside, people are mostly silent, out of respect, maybe. Or maybe it’s a sense of grief.’
Lola went to see it with her friend Sofia. She couldn’t stop talking about it. ‘I’m sorry you can’t go,’ she said to Willi. ‘I think everyone should see it.’
Heinz Schleiffer did not think everyone should see it. He found the work just as disturbing as the labels said it was. He stood in front of a Picasso painting of ‘Two Harlequins,’ shaking his head from side to side. ‘He can’t even paint,’ he said. ‘It’s dreary and smeared. They don’t look like real people. It’s depressing.’
Tomas Schleiffer stood beside his father. He had come to Munich just to see the show, then had decided – now he wondered what he could have been thinking – to invite his father to go with him. Why not make peace with the old Nazi? he thought. Whatever else he is, he is still my father. Heinz hadn’t even recognized Tomas when he had knocked on the door. It had been that long. ‘Hallo, Papa,’ said Tomas and held out his hand.
‘Ja, Tomas!’ said Heinz. ‘What are you doing here?’
Tomas explained that he had come to Munich to see the big art show, and his mother had suggested he look up his father while he was here, and, well, here he was. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘I can’t, Tomas,’ said Heinz. ‘I’ve got stuff to do. I’m busy.’
‘You’re still in your pajamas, Papa. Please come. We’ll get lunch together. My treat.’
What’s this? thought Heinz. The little pissant has grown up and learned some manners. Maybe I should go; I’m his father, after all. What have I got to lose? ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said. It was a beautiful day. Tomas waited on the bench outside on Tullemannstraße.
Heinz got out his brown uniform, laid it across the bed and stared at it for a while before putting it back and taking out his suit and tie instead. He dressed and looked at himself in the mirror. He wet his hair and brushed it across his head, then he went outside. Tomas was standing talking to Frau Schimmel who was sitting on the bench. ‘Herr Schleiffer,’ she said, ‘I’ve just met your charming son. He tells me you’re going to the modern art show.’
‘Yes,’ said Schleiffer. ‘He’s studying art history, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘So you’ve told me.’
‘Oh,’ said Heinz. ‘Well,’ he said after what seemed to him an interminable silence, ‘we better be going.’
‘Would you like to come with us, Frau Schimmel?’ said Tomas.
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you,’ said Frau Schimmel. ‘But I’m a little tired after my walk. I think I’ll just sit here for a while and watch the birds. But thank you, Tomas.’
‘You do that, Frau Schimmel,’ said Heinz, relieved – he wasn’t sure why – that she wouldn’t be with them. ‘You sit there and take it easy.’ They shook hands and parted. ‘I help her out with her groceries sometimes,’ said Heinz. ‘She’s really quite sick. Cancer.’
‘Is she?’ said Tomas, studying his father as though he were seeing him for the first time.
Heinz wanted paintings to be beautiful. He wanted them to look real. He wanted them to make him happy, not depressed. ‘I understand, Papa,’ said Tomas, trying his best to understand. Then he talked to Heinz about Picasso’s ‘Two Harlequins,’ pointing at details as he spoke. He explained that the ‘ugliness’ that Heinz saw in the colors, in the brushwork, in the skinny, awkward, bent figures was intentional. Picasso meant for the two figures to be unsettling. He wasn’t painting two people so much as he was painting their inner lives: their anguish, the pain of their poverty and loneliness and hunger. Here were two ‘clowns,’ whose job it was to entertain us, sharing a meager meal. They had been beaten down. Their lives were hard. They were hungry, maybe starving. The paint was thick, it was applied roughly and quickly, but with great skill to reveal their suffering and to give you a feeling for their world.
Not everything Tomas said made sense to Heinz, but some of it did. It didn’t make him actually like any of the works either. But he did like hearing Tomas talk about them. He watched Tomas while he was talking, gesturing toward the painting. Heinz felt something that resembled pride. This was his son: a man. And he was smart and educated. And he, Heinz Schleiffer, could take at least some credit for what Tomas had become. Couldn’t he?
At lunch at the Three Crowns, Heinz and Tomas talked about Germany and world politics. That was when things got tense. Tomas said he wasn’t political, but in the next sentence he said something about how he didn’t think it was right to censor art and literature. Free expression was important for a people. The right to express themselves freely and without fear in their art and writing was sacred. It was wrong to burn books or paintings; literature and art shouldn’t be disrespected.
‘Listen, Tomas,’ said Heinz, ‘you’re young. You have a lot to learn. Germany has to speak with one voice. We are under assault from all sides. The Jews are undermining our culture. The French and the British have been bleeding us dry with their unjust reparations. We have to be one people under the Führer in order to be a great country again.’
‘We can be one people, Papa, without having only one thought. We can be different and yet united
