Fall of Giants

She had learned to cook and much else besides. A kindly neighbor, an older woman, had taken pity on the bewildered aristocrat and taught her how to make a bed, iron a shirt, and clean a bathtub. It had all come as something of a shock.

They lived in a middle-class town house. They had not been able to spend any money on it, nor could they afford the servants Maud had always been used to, and they had a lot of secondhand furniture that Maud secretly thought was dreadfully suburban.

They had looked forward to better times, but in fact things had got worse: Walter’s career in the foreign ministry had been dead-ended by his marriage to an Englishwoman, and he would have moved on to something else, but in the economic chaos he was lucky to have any job at all. And Maud’s early dissatisfactions seemed petty now, four years of poverty later. There was patched upholstery where the children had torn it, broken windows covered with cardboard, and paintwork peeling everywhere.

But Maud had no regrets. Any time she liked she could kiss Walter, slide her tongue into his mouth, unbutton his trousers, and lie with him on the bed or the couch or even the floor, and that made up for everything else.

Walter’s parents came to the party bringing half a ham and two bottles of wine. Otto had lost his family estate, Zumwald, which was now in Poland. His savings had been reduced to nothing by inflation. However, the large garden of his Berlin house produced potatoes, and he still had a lot of prewar wine.

“How did you manage to find ham?” Walter said incredulously. Such things could normally be bought only with American dollars.

“I traded it for a bottle of vintage champagne,” said Otto.

The grandparents put the children to bed. Otto told them a folktale. From what Maud could hear, it was about a queen who had her brother beheaded. She shuddered, but did not interfere. Afterward Susanne sang lullabies in a reedy voice and the children went to sleep, apparently none the worse for their grandfather’s bloodthirsty story.

Robert and Jörg arrived, wearing identical red ties. Otto greeted them warmly. He seemed to have no idea of their relationship, apparently accepting that Jörg was simply Robert’s flatmate. Indeed, that was how the men behaved when they were with older folk. Maud thought that Susanne probably guessed the truth. Women were harder to fool. Fortunately they were more accepting.

Robert and Jörg could be very different in liberal company. At parties in their own home they made no secret of their romantic love. Many of their friends were the same. Maud had been startled at first: she had never seen men kissing, admiring one another’s outfits, and flirting like schoolgirls. But such behavior was no longer taboo, at least in Berlin. And Maud had read Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, which seemed to suggest that this kind of thing had always gone on.

Tonight, however, Robert and Jörg were on their best behavior. Over dinner everyone talked about what was happening in Bavaria. On Thursday an association of paramilitary groups called the Kampf bund had declared a national revolution in a beer hall in Munich.

Maud could hardly bear to read the news these days. Workers went on strike, so right-wing bullyboys beat up the strikers. Housewives marched to protest against the shortage of provisions, and their protests turned into food riots. Everyone in Germany was angry about the Versailles Treaty, yet the Social Democratic government had accepted it in full. People believed reparations were crippling the economy, even though Germany had paid only a fraction of the amount and obviously had no intention of trying to clear the total.

The Munich beer hall putsch had everyone worked up. The war hero Erich Ludendorff was its most prominent supporter. So-called storm troopers in their brown shirts and students from the Officers Infantry School had seized control of key buildings. City councilors had been taken hostage and prominent Jews arrested.

On Friday the legitimate government had counterattacked. Four policemen and sixteen paramilitaries had been killed. Maud was not able to judge, from the news that had reached Berlin so far, whether the insurrection was over or not. If the extremists took control of Bavaria, would the whole country fall to them?

It made Walter angry. “We have a democratically elected government,” he said. “Why can’t people let them get on with the job?”

“Our government has betrayed us,” said his father.

“In your opinion. So what? In America, when the Republicans won the last election, the Democrats didn’t riot!”

“The United States is not being subverted by Bolsheviks and Jews.”

“If you’re worried about the Bolsheviks, tell people not to vote for them. And what is this obsession with Jews?”

“They are a pernicious influence.”