He sat down on the sofa and poured brown liquid into both of the glasses. “Brandy,” he said, holding one glass out to her.
Maggie accepted it. She and Gottlieb both swallowed. Maggie’s throat burned. But she did feel a tiny bit better.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
“No.”
Gottlieb finished his own drink, then poured another. “Sit down. Please.”
Maggie sat, but as far away from him as the sofa would allow.
“You asked me, in the Tiergarten, if I believed in evil,” he continued. “Ten years ago, I would have said no—that there’s no such thing as ‘evil,’ just the absence of God’s love. However, since then, I’ve changed my mind. I do believe in evil. I do believe in Satan. I believe that we all are in hell here—in Berlin, in Germany—and the reason we are is that we didn’t speak up sooner. There are things going on … It’s not just the invasions, the conquering.”
“The Jews,” Maggie said. “Yes, we all know. We heard about Kristallnacht.”
Gottlieb winced. “No, you don’t, or at least you don’t know the half of it. Back in the early thirties, many people saw Nazism as an answer to Communism, to atheism—and thought that, with the Nazis, we could fix the economy and keep our churches. Well, they’ve let us hang on to our churches, but as soon as the war is over, they’ll demolish them, too. They want a pagan, warrior society. With no room for love, for empathy, for compassion.”
“Yes, I know that.” Maggie swallowed more brandy.
“No, you still don’t know the full extent of the horror. They’re killing children. They’ve started killing large numbers of German children who are mad or deaf or dumb. Or missing an arm or a leg. Or drooling. Or ‘disruptive.’ They’re sending them to special hospitals and gassing them.”
“What?” Maggie blinked. She heard the words but couldn’t comprehend them.
“I’m telling you—they’re killing children. And now they have all these Jews out of Germany, in concentration camps in Poland. What do you think they’re going to do with them? They can barely feed them now—what about this winter?”
Maggie was silent.
“There are stories about the Nazis setting up a Jewish colony in Madagascar—more like a police state. But I’ve heard about what’s going on, in the ghettos, in the camps. They’re working them to exhaustion. Then they’re shooting them, rounding them up and shooting them, and dumping the bodies into mass graves. But—if they’re willing to gas children—how long do you think it will take them to start gassing the Jews?”
“They’re killing …” Maggie finally managed to say, “children?” Her brain felt paralyzed. “Why?” was the only word she could find.
“Do you know anything about art?” Gottlieb asked.
“Art?” Maggie made her frozen head nod. What on earth does art have to do with killing children?
“When the Nazis came into power, they had an enormous exhibit of the so-called degenerate art of the Jews and Communists. It was ugly. The painting, the sculptures were about war, and the brutality of war. The wounds of the injured. The pain of death. About the agony of the living. It was the art of the avant-garde. This art was seen as the violence of the Jews and Bolsheviks—often considered one and the same—against the German people.
“In the place of real art, they put neoclassical statues, because the Greeks and Romans were untouched by Jews. Sentimental ‘blood and soil’ paintings touting the glories of war, the bravery of soldiers, the valor of wives and mothers, and the value of racial purity and obedience.”
“Propaganda, in other words.”
“Bad art.” He spat. “Kitsch.”
“And who gave them the right to decide for everyone? Who are they to decide?”
“They see themselves as gods on Mt. Olympus. Protectors of a racial utopia.”
Maggie gasped. “The hubris! But what does all of this have to do with the children? And the Jews?”
“What Hitler did to our art, he wants to do with our people. The disfigured, the blind, the Gypsies, the Jews—they’re all parts of our society that he finds ugly. Hitler’s determined to make over Germany in his own vision—a pagan warrior culture, where everyone is racially pure, everyone is strong, everyone is perfect. He’s doing ‘aesthetic’ cleansing, but not just with art and architecture—with human beings.”
Maggie shuddered. “But,” she said, thinking the metaphor through to its ultimate conclusion, “everyone ultimately gets old. What happens then?”