The Vengeance of Rome

Mrs Cornelius says Brodmann would be eighty at least. She says I live too much in the past. And where else should I live? I ask. How good does the future look to you? And has the future provided you with experience? Why should the present suit you better than the past? Is there something wrong with the past? You can forget. You can. What you must lose is the memory of desire, the sensation of innocence, the inability to tolerate what is disgusting. All these will become virtues enabling you to forget desire, innocence, intolerance, love. You will forget and yet memory will persist as a cold sense of loss, a yearning for something better and sweeter which you have forbidden yourself. For with memory comes loss, with desire comes pain, with hope comes despair. Hell offers an absence of virtue. It offers an eternity when all you yearn for is time.

I am an old man. My only consolations are my memories. I cultivate my past like a favourite garden; I order it like a beloved library. I go back to the years of my youth and my power when my good looks were favourably compared to Rudolph Valentino’s and Cesar Romero’s and my future was golden. I was a la mode.

Until you think back you do not understand how much your physical appearance determined your destiny. I hardly realised at the time what I had in common with the early Nazis. More than any other people, Germans celebrated youth as healthy, untainted by the poisons of the past, unburdened with the compromises and struggles of the ‘Men of War’. The Nazis were young. Most of the men who came to run the Third Reich were in their thirties. Their youth, inexperience and idealism were part of their great appeal. Ordinary Germans accepted the Nazis as the vital force to channel that youthful energy back into constructive action. Their idealism united the nation, forming ranks against the common enemy. If their youthful rhetoric was a little fiery, people tolerated it. Watch Things to Come if you want to know how we felt about putting the old ways behind us and building a rational world where technology assured our enduring security. H. G. Wells was not above borrowing the odd idea or two from the despised little corporal!

Most Germans had known only war, disintegration and violent struggle. Perpetual uncertainty is anathema to that honest, amiable German soul yearning to translate its experience of comradeship into a greater community to include all Germans, rich or poor, noble and commoner. They had been told so many lies for so long, they refused to listen. They equated education with the manipulations of the ruling class. They had lost faith in conventional politics. They wanted not a state in the old sense, but a national community of equals: a mighty German family practising the old German family virtues. These sentiments were repeated over and over again. Jews wanted it, too. Those idealists were not brutes.

The Reds and liberals were mostly men of the older generation. They had amply demonstrated their ineptitude in government, their inability to keep their promises. Yet people still yearned for that promised breaking down of class tensions which shackled Germany. They wanted stability first and foremost. Hitler promised a just and ordered future. Nationalism and socialism had failed, but perhaps national-socialism would balance the best of both philosophies. Ordinary Germans had seen Russia collapse into a civil war almost touching their borders, engulfing Poland and Finland, Romania and Ukraine. Germany could well be next. Their hatred of extremists led the German people to vote NSDAP.

Only the Brown Tide could resist the Red. Röhm was convinced of that. He was dedicated to the elimination of Communism and Big Business Capitalism. But he was no fanatic. He was just as dedicated to his pleasures. It had been a long time, he said, since he felt so truly in love. There was something, he said, about my skin. And those dark Mediterranean eyes. He used to joke about my looking too Jewish for my own good. He was by his own admission completely besotted with me. ‘I am a childish and romantic man of a wicked disposition.’ He believed he had his own measure. I, however, found him generous and sensitive, loyal to his friends, faithful to his duty. His modesty would be his undoing. I suppose I loved him, too, a little. I was definitely flattered by his attention. Röhm was even more famous than Hitler in many circles. A light would burn in that oddly vulnerable, horribly scarred face when he tried to explain his feeling for me. ‘There is a quality in you, Max, that I recognise and need.’

I was at once charmed and compromised. I had important business to complete in Rome. For me this interlude was no more than a holiday. I said nothing of Mussolini to Röhm but reminded him how I was not entirely a free agent, that I worked for the Italian aircraft industry.

Röhm had no problem with this. He was, however, deeply interested in my South Russian battle experiences, assuming that, as an American flyer, I had longed for action. He himself had considered joining the Air Corps if only to get out of the trenches, but he was already too old. I had to describe for him in detail the period I spent fighting beside the Cossacks during that ruthless war between Red and White. He was trying to guess what might happen to his Germany in the event of a civil war. He listened with deep sympathy to my stories of capture and torture.