The Princess of Berlin Ch five:Seafire

Syncopated music, trumpet to clarinet, fills the lobby of the guesthouse on WP’s sodden evening entry. The gramophone, on the corner table across from the lobby counter, plays the officially frowned upon music 



William Patrick has had no ‘ear for music’. He dances poorly and half listens to whatever band plays in the background. Yet this sound is so unique, fusing Polynesia and the blues. Haunting and defiant, it pushes back against the sleet cold rain and the chill of 1937 as the North Sea comes to reclaim its islands.



Half smiling, the woman behind the counter meets and holds his gaze. She has the flax colour hair and the high-cheeked well-defined bone structure, the long face, the blue eyes of the Frisian -Saxon people. She wears and needs little makeup.



Één Meer plaats die zou ik willen worden

Één Meer plaats die zou.



Één meer plaats die zou ik willen worden

Één meer plaats die zou ik graag zien

Om naar te kijken die oude klim van de Blue Ridge Mountains

Zoals ik rijd ol ' nummer negen.





Als ik sterf gelieve bury me diep

Down at the end of Bleecker Street

Dus kan ik horen ol ' nummer negen

Zoals ze Rollin ' gaat door.



“It’s Dutch, but us Frisians are still allowed to speak our neighbours’ language. This musician is banned from recording in Germany... You are our new guest, Mr. – Hitler? A familiar name - the nephew from  -reland?”, she laughs…



"Only for the night. I leave with Raeder. Please , tell me more about the musicians...”



“It is King Oscar and his Colored Review. We once had an annual end of summer jazz festival on the island. Mid-September, after the family trade had left. It extended our tourist season, as well as entertaining the locals... Oscar is the offspring of a lonely colonial officer and a princess from Samoa. He was raised in Hamburg, which used to make him German, along with his musicians."



She remembers nights in September when the warm anti cyclone carries the fragrant smell of dune and heather from the mainland. The artistic people would take over the island. Jazz bands thronged the bandstands. New and hopeful musicians swayed the nightclubs, halls and beer gardens. On the far secluded beaches, naturalists tanned on the sands and frolicked in the summer warmed surf.

Body and Soul

Meine Tage haben sich mittlerweile

so einsam Für dich wein,

nur für Sie, liebe Warum

haben Sie es gesehen?

Ich bin für Sie

, Körper und Seele……]



My days have grown so lonely

For you I cry, for you dear only

Why haven’t you seen it?

I’m all for you, body and soul



I spend my days in longing

I’m wondering why it’s me you’re wronging

I tell you I mean it

I’m all for you, body and soul



I can’t believe it; it’s hard to conceive it

That you’d throw away romance

Are you pretending?

It looks like the ending

Unless, I could have one more chance

To prove dear



My life a hell you’re making

You know I’m yours for just the takin’

I’d gladly surrender

What lies before me?

A future that’s stormy

A winter that’s gray and cold



Unless there’s magic

The end will be tragic

And echo a tale that’s been told

So often



My life revolves about you

What earthly good am I without you?

Oh I tell you I mean it

I’m all for you, body and soul

“

Korper und seele, she muses, remembering  1932 -  2.00 am  on a night when sleep is no longer needed, when the music sweeps you away,  when Gertrude Lawrence,  holidaying on the island, takes to the stage  to sing her inpromtou cameo. The band digs deeper,  finds the measure and beat , wavering the saxophones in and out of the lyrics in this fall of 1932, the end of  German summers. The last of our good free years. The Weimar era.



A future that is stormy a winter that is grey and cold, that is we now. The last beleaguered remmants of free Frisia, playing our gramophones in the night.

Body and soul...





Two men, one woman, one mid-week, partly deserted Wangerooge  island tavern where Werner, Patrick and Gertrude linger over dark ale and late food. The sweet smell of tobacco drifts into the Ladies and Escorts section through the swing doors from the men’s preserve -the public bar.



Gertrude enjoys these evenings. Her guesthouse is financially recovering from the great depression when three years of parsimony and deferred expense have required careful cash management. She is grateful for both the holiday trade growth, and the offseason guests that the Nazi regime has provided.

Holidays outside Germany are discouraged, the great KDF resorts are far away on the time horizon,  the independent proprietors have profited.

The new military outposts have kept the taverns both refurbished and open into the off-season. Good clothing is taxed and  expensive, and her compulsory check off party funds, taxes, license fees, and security dues restrict the cash flow.

Tonight Gertrude has a new winter hat, tilted and brimmed in practical wool and rayon. She has a matching suit on order, for cash, from a Jewish milliner now unable to obtain material. Therefore, Gertrude has traded with a drummer guest for a half bolt of good wool and rayon dry goods blend that complements the new hat.

Her outdated cloche is consigned to weekday weather trips. Her sturdy winter boots with the hidden stiletto pocket remain. A prudent young woman, a businessperson, our Gertrude. The riots of 1933 in the port cities of Germany fresh in her memory, she keeps watch.

The sleet and salt tainted wet snow thumps softly againstt the bar window. Gertrude is reminded of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’. 'A howl of winter, a village pub, and an Irish at our table to boot' she chuckles.The wind rattles and force drafts across the chimney tops stir the fireplace, reddening the coals. She switches from beer to tea, content to listen to the story of the rogue wave that came close to capsizing the day’s island work train.



Gertrude is not a rebel. She is glad to see the anarchy of the SA vs. KPD years gone. She hopes that the new Reich’s repressive measures will be a passing phase, and that resort life will increase and be prosperous. She hopes that the Frisian dialect will continue.



Gertrude joined, like all prudent business people on Wangerooge, the Nazi party. She keeps a thin stiletto hidden behind her desk at her summer hotel and guesthouse. She has the prudent, conservative ways of woman, raised without a childhood.

Gertrude is above all else, lonely. At twenty-seven, in post war Germany, the marriage market  is dwindled by emigration and closed, by the lost men of war, above the age of thirty-five. An orphan of war and a child who has buried her mother. She soldiers on alone, self-reliant.

Werner Raeder both intrigues and attracts her. Tonight she is defending why she has her new Nazi membership.

“Legitimacy is a sliding scale, not an absolute, my dear Werner... If you want perfect justice, seek it in the next world.” She likes to remind  Werner of the blockade year, 1919. “The camps are I am sure, deplorable. We are a nation of laws, Werner, and the need for internment will pass, surely…

You never grew up with a despondent, defeated mother, with your father and brother dead in battle. You never stood alone, a scared nine-year-old girl, to collect the ‘ration ‘of seal meat while your mother waited in the bakery line for heavy bread, the flour stretched with sawdust. That was 1919, Werner…”

Raeder listens to her, carefully. The song of  middle class Germany- rising from its ashes- on a questionable leaven of slogans.

“I can tolerate the forced labour, Gertrude,  as long as we need  to build emergency defenses to cover Emden and Wilhelmshaven. Conditions are worse for the impressed than they have to be. I realise that the Reich is short of capital and we need defenses for our harbours...

I see the hardening, that we  will become so used to forced labour, Gertrude, that we just- look the other way… anyway, the storm has put an end to the construction work until 1935. Maybe next year the world stabilises. Are you taking a vacation this winter?”

Gertrude, about to reply, sees Hans, the village patrol officer, in the swinging doors. Hans, off duty shrugging off a long weary day. He has processed the photo film and left his report with the night operator. Then he  wisely vanished before the Wilhelmshaven SD and the party bureaucracy set the wires humming to his ‘chief’. Tomorrow he is booked for an early patrol by horse and trap of the north beaches, searching for remnants of the storm. Hans, the  intelligent officer, backbone of a recently expanded force of outsiders.



Gertrude waves him to the table. Hans is another ‘prospect’. The proprietor stirs the coal fires. The public bar noise lessens as the  older drinkers  leave for  home, anticipating the early rise for  a clearing of the  roofs and walks before  work. The wind gusts are  lower, but the falling snow is now heavy, wet, blanketing the island . Still melting on the road, yet accumulating in the side gutters.

“I’m hoping for Slovenia. The coast at Fiume. KDF  has an excursion train in January. The hotel can keep for once.  Young Gretel can run it for two weeks.  I’ve- never been  away for the winter anywhere. Mother and father honeymooned in Dalmatia before the war.”

Hans loosens his collar, off duty, out of uniform, ordering one draft beer- heavy bock. “Maybe we will see KDF on the island someday. They are planning a massive resort, Prora, at Rugen. 20,000 guests at one time".

“Sure, not Rugen for vacations in the winter?” laughs Werner “Germany will run out of snowshoes. Have you seen Rugen, Gertrude?”

“Not yet “she laughs. I have had a hotel to pay for. Gretel wants to buy into the business, open a morning restaurant. Serve breakfast at five. She is much too serious for an eighteen year old. Perhaps we can start renovating when I return form Fiume. I wanted to expand  the hotel to the back lot, add an extra story on the addition. Perhaps I’ll have a new suite built over her restaurant.”



A day of overload, an evening rest  that ended the peace Gertrude would say years later. The strange break in weather, the rogue wave. The track washing to  the sea as the train pulled clear. The settling of winter into our lives. 1934's  passing left us all – drained and guarded. Our peaceful cycle of island lives was ending and the greater cycle of Germany was capturing us all and yet- we clung like children that night to the warmth and each other’s company.

In addition, I was clinging to the first daddy I had since I was seven- the Nazi party and its leader. How we hoped the simple solution would be, had to be, the right solution. All I really wanted, then, was to protect my inheritance, to find the man to love, to have our children.

We tried so hard to love, so hard to believe…

On this night in the waning of 1937 when the Island of Wagenroog settles and makes its peace with winter, she walks arm in arm with the man she cares for but cannot yet admit to, quietly back to the hotel she inherited, on a night where the new snow brings both magic and illusion. Gertrude knows that he will rise at five in the darkness, that he will leave her for a world that he carefully audits, but for her sake, does not reveal.

Gertrude knows that in Germany of the third decade the divisions are deep, if muted between the classes. Werner is nobility. She is a Strasser. She is island bound. She is a NASDAP member, if a passive one and the Party will bite back if crossed.

Gertrude is single, and birth control is – unpredictable, yet for tonight, if he kisses her, she will not resist. If he comes to her rooms, he will be- welcome. For today is the  present, tomorrow is uncertain. She suspects that there is another woman, off island, although he has not spoken of another.

Honor bound men are becoming rare in the new Reich where the NASDAP leaders openly keep mistresses and the terrible rumours of Geli Rabaul’s fate linger. The age of repression of truth, but not sexuality, spawns in this New Germany.

He stayed away that night, and in the years between Gertrude often wondered  if and how their futures would have changed if he had stayed, if she had asked If duty had not called, if the watch on the Reich had not summoned Werner Raeder to  that duty. Lost in his tangled, hopeless, romantic attempt to change history for the better. The dice of time had rolled and their Germany marched to a new and terrible drummer.

In the new pre-dawn, Werner Raeder rouses William Patrick Hitler. He, carries his  sea bag quietly past the door where Gertrude sleeps, where Gertrude dreams. Quietly down the stairs, past the stilled gramophone, past the quiet radio.

In the icebound streets, all homes are still, the occasional light where sleepy early risers  begin their day. The two men walk to the Bannhaus, where an early attendant, Werner’s man, pours coffee for Werner's crewmembers They  down hot coffee and warmed pastries, seasonal fruit, fresh cream.



“There are two Fiesler Storch light craft arriving this morning. We have cleared the asphalt taxiway. The Storch can land on a dime, lift off on a nickel. Anything larger can’t land until the sodden grass strip hardens for ski planes, or until spring dries the runway.”



The dawn sky clears from the west. The late stars are fading, the half-moon lights the cleared narrow strip of asphalt. Werner checks his watch. His ground crew lays out torch pots, gasoline lamps to define the improvised runway. Red flares will mark the beginning and the end zone.

From the east, form the light, the soft rumble of Argus engines. Werner lights the touch down flares. Slowly, gently, flaps and wing leading edges extended, the first Storch touches down, rolls to the runway end. The second small craft arrives, floating butterflies, oil gear softly hissing, absorbing the shock.



“We are off to see Admiral Canaris, then to visit your extended family at your Uncle’s leisure.” Werner says. “Next stop Wilhelmshaven. Can you circle the Island?” he asks the pilots. “There was a major storm wave yesterday, and I would like to check for damage.

The pilots spin their flight computers, check their fuel bobbin gauges... “One pass, or else we have to refuel. Preferably, we want to take off from this strip of yours with minimal fuel’ grins the lead pilot, pointing to the narrow strip of asphalt rimmed by ice.

Werner’s crew pushes both light craft to the Far East end of the taxiway. The dawn sea breeze, freshening, quivers through the wings. Both passengers strap in. The silver arc spins, the spindly aircraft roll down the improvised airstrip, rising like pheasants into the lightening sky. The craft climb until the dawn sun catches their silver wings, orbiting the island of Wagenroog. Hans mounted on his pre-dawn shore patrol, pauses and waves. His rival in love, his mysterious query, neatly airborne, neatly out of the way.

In the roadways to Wilhelmshaven Werner counted the vessels driven on the mud flats- dredges, local coasters, and three freighters.  He saw the smoke of coal tugs leaving harbour for the morning’s tow and recovery, ships creeping, water bugs. Buoy boats bob and weave through the debris fields, marking the safe channels anew.

Strange wave thought Werner. The idea rose in his mind that something has been disturbed on the coastal island that should have been respected, but he put the thought aside.  Just sand islands, guarding our harbours shifted by wind and waves. I have been working too hard.