My Life is like a Fairy Tale E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 503

Beschreibung

This is the story of Sonja Heda and her rise from humble beginnings as a waitress in Holland to walk-on appearances in such famous German films of the Weimar and Nazi eras as The Blue Angel, The Gypsy Baron, Jew Süss, Habanera, Munchausen and, eventually, the starring role in the Nazi screwball comedy Bagdad Capers. Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Hans Albers, Eva Braun, Lillian Harvey, Albert Speer, Marika Rökk since she knew them all, it was inevitable that she should think of writing her autobiography. Though she does not get very far with it, she does pass idle moments composing the reviews she hopes to get for My Life Is like a Fairy Tale: Sonja Heda's stunning autobiography left this reviewer feeling that life is so unfair, for not only can she act and dance, but she can write and how she can write! . . . At last the book that takes the lid off the steamy world of German film-making . . . An insightful portrait of the Nazi elite by the beautiful woman who was at its centre. But this fairy story, a narrative of diminishing options and the advance to death and destruction, is very dark indeed and perhaps that is the nature of both fairy tale and supremacist ideology.

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Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperpack

MY LIFE IS LIKE A FAIRY TALE

Robert Irwin (born 1946) is a novelist, historian, critic and scholar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He is the author of seven previous novels, all published by Dedalus: The Arabian Nightmare, The Limits of Vision, The Mysteries of Algiers, Exquisite Corpse, Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh, Satan Wants Me and Wonders Will Never Cease.

All of Robert’s novels have enjoyed substantial publicity and commercial success although he is best known for The Arabian Nightmare (1983) which has been translated into twenty languages and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest literary fantasy novels of the twentieth century.

Contents

Title

My Life is like a Fairy Tale

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Eighteen Months Later in Munich

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The Rainer Maria Rilke poem ‘Autumn Day’ here has been translated by Tom Beck.

The film images used on the cover and at the beginning and end of the text are courtesy of Barbara and Ted Irwin Collectables.

Chapter One

A shot rang out. After a momentary pause the young man who had fired the shot screamed and then fell to the floor in front of the large mirror which could now be seen to be cracked from top to bottom. Where before there had been silence there was now an excited babble.

Sonja disliked films with lots of snow in them, films featuring cripples, anything with Emil Jannings in it, documentaries, any film by or starring Leni Riefenstahl, foreign language films, sad films about women who end up committing suicide like those ones that Kristina Söderbaum kept starring in, and, above all, she hated horror films: symphonies of grey, exotic hook-nosed faces, claw-like hands, candlelit cellars, yawning sepulchres, panic-stricken drives across desolate moors, and bafflingly mysterious plots about man’s dual nature, at once angelic and bestial, or some such bogusly profound theme. There were enough horrors in real life. One did not need them on the screen as well. She had just been watching the shooting of the final scene of a remake of the 1926 version of The Student of Prague and, though this was the only shoot that she had stayed to watch, it was obviously a horror film and she would not bother with it when it reached the cinemas.

Needing some fresh air, she walked out of the studio. The Great Hall where the really big scenes were shot towered over the other long huts of Universum-Film AG studios which were laid out in an orderly fashion, as if the place was a barracks or a work camp. Well, it was a sort of work camp she supposed, but quite a pleasant one, and not like the ones to which the communists and Jews were being sent. The huts, comprising the studios (some of which were glass-roofed), the workshops, the props store, the costume store and the make-up room, had all been set up to facilitate the industrialised production of fantasy.

At length, feeling the cold, she entered the UFA canteen and fished out the big new notebook from her bag. How to begin? Where should she start her story? Some films started in the middle of the story, before going on to work with flashbacks, but probably it would be easier to start with her birth, her childhood schooling and all that. Now she thought about it, flashbacks only really came in during the thirties. In the same way, close-ups were rare in the films she had watched as a child. It took some getting used to, seeing heads with no bodies or people moving about with no visible legs. But she was drifting. Back to the autobiography. If only she had had a more exciting childhood and if only she had realised then that she was going to want some early excitement in her life in order to make the mature woman’s proposed book work. If only it was possible to literally flashback and return to one of her younger selves. But no, she was rambling again. She must make a proper start, once, that is, she had got a cigarette alight. Now for the start. She was about to put pen to paper when she felt a hand upon her shoulder. It was Werner, one of the focus pullers. Had he come as messenger to tell her that a new part had been found for her? But no. It was not good news.

‘There was a man at the gate asking questions about you. He was very persistent. Apparently they had a lot of trouble sending him on his way.’ Then seeing the expression on her face, Werner continued, ‘Don’t worry. He didn’t look anything like Gestapo.’

If only it had been someone from the Gestapo. Sonja had nothing to fear from them. Dear Joseph would continue to look after her. It must be Wieland, still haunting her. She wished that he were dead, so that his haunting was only that of a ghost. Inside the empire of the UFA studios at Neue Babelsberg she might be safe from him, but only there, and the filming of The Woman of My Dreams was nearly complete and, unless she secured the role that she thought she had been promised in Kolberg, she would be unemployed and find herself to be, like Wieland, vainly seeking entrance to the dream factory. After Marika Rökk’s big dance number that was just now being filmed, there were a few remaining outdoor scenes to shoot and then inevitably there would be some retakes, particularly since the crew still had limited experience in lighting sets for a film in colour. But the work might be finished in a matter of weeks or even days.

Werner interrupted her reverie, ‘The man left a message. It was that he had something of yours. Something which you badly need to have back. He said that he would be in touch.’

Sonja nodded and tried to dismiss Wieland and the world outside Babelsberg from her mind and for a while she succeeded. She was very good at not thinking about things that she did not want to think about. She could switch off thinking about Wieland, or Rommel’s retreat from Libya, or the Russian advance on Kursk, or the poor reception of Baghdad Capers, or her mislaid ration card, or the imminence of her next birthday.

Instead she thought back to the big dance scene towards the end of The Woman of My Dreams. Marika had performed her third ethnic dance on a vast glittery set that was painted orange and gold and dominated by an enormous white cascade of a staircase whose steps led nowhere and which was there for no better reason than to demonstrate Marika’s ability to tap dance up and down staircases. The supporting chorines, dressed in a romantically bogus Spanish fashion, wore mantillas and sported fans. Sonja had been one of them. They paraded like eerily disciplined goldfish behind Marika, who swayed sinuously and, as she did so, showed a lot of thigh. Sonja doubted whether that was going to get past the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Anyway Marika’s legs were too fat and her body was stubby. The camera and lighting crews had to work hard to conceal this. She had been leaping about like a kangaroo. Sonja did not call that dancing. In an interview to the press, Marika had described herself as ‘volcanic’. But who wants to see a dancing volcano?

Belatedly Sonja decided that it was also time to dismiss Marika from her mind. The autobiography was more important. She picked up her pencil again and looked down on the notebook which was still empty. She needed to summon up memories of growing up in Dordrecht. There were memories of peacetime and childish innocence and of the gabled houses and their wavering reflection in the water of the canals. Beside those canals old men in blue linen jackets and baggy trousers sat on stoops and smoked clay pipes or chewed tobacco. It was all a bit boring. There always seemed to be jackdaws hovering round the belfry of Dordrecht’s main church. The cobbled streets had been eerily quiet. Yes, certainly quiet – and this was not personal enough. She should start instead with her family and her toys. Memories… memories. It was like that game where one had to look at a medley of objects on a tray and then, once they had been covered by a cloth, one tried to list them all. She had had two china dolls. There was a board game based on a battle in the Franco-Prussian War, a small collection of musical boxes, a glass box containing a maze which a silver ball had to find its way through, a tiny wooden ape that could climb its wooden ladder and a large volume containing the Dutch syndicated version of comic strips featuring the misadventures of Little Nemo in his dream world.

Still much too dull? It was a bit like a séance in which the only message that comes to her from the spirit world is that she has forgotten to buy potatoes earlier that morning. She had supposed that one should start at the beginning and go on to the end. But why should German readers be at all interested in her childhood in Holland? And then there was the awkward fact that Dordrecht had suffered horribly during the German invasion of 1940. It had been a garrison town, there had been heavy fighting and many of the historic buildings that she should be describing had been destroyed. On the one hand, it might be a good idea to paint a picture of girlhood in a dull, provincial town in order to make a contrast with the glamorous life she now led. On the other hand, dullness was dullness. Perhaps it would be best to start with Wieland after all – the serpent who had found its way into the garden of innocence. What could be said for Wieland was that he would be interesting to read about. But then there was the danger that he was so interesting that he might take over her autobiography.

Perhaps childhood in Dordrecht was the wrong place to start the memoirs of a film star? Rather, she should begin with her starring role in Baghdad Capers and then present her younger self in a series of flashbacks? Or perhaps she should give an account of what she could call her ‘friendship’ with Goebbels. What is the best way to write a memoir? And what should her title be? My Path to Stardom sounded arrogant and, come to that, a little premature. How about Memories of the Dream Factory? No, that seemed to imply that her career was almost over. Maybe Everything Has Gone Well? Or From Clogs to… to something or other.

The book should be produced on proper creamy white paper, not the brittle stuff that things were printed on nowadays and which went brown so quickly. There was no point in publishing her book before Hitler launched his secret weapon and the Russians, who were fighting on over-extended supply lines, would be forced into a humiliating retreat. Only then, with the war won and the time of hardships over, would the public be ready to read her inspiring story. It occurred to Sonja that her book should contain snapshots. A star pupil at dance school receiving her prize. Her appearance in her first supporting role, in Habanera. Her lunch with Goebbels and his delightful family. At a birthday party for Emil Jannings. At the premiere of The Great Love. Her big star number in Baghdad Capers. Her name in big letters above the entrance to the UFA Palace by the zoo. Chatting with Hans Albers on the set of Munchausen. Being presented to Hitler at the Berghof.

Everybody’s life should be like a film. In The Woman of My Dreams, Julia, the famous stage performer (played, curse it, by Marika) clad only in a fur coat and her underwear, suddenly flees stardom and having disembarked from the train at the wrong place, she gets lost in an Alpine snowstorm. But then she finds refuge in the mountain cabin of two handsome young engineers, Peter and Erwin. Both are struck by Julia’s beauty and vivacity (this last madly overplayed by Marika). Julia keeps her identity as a big star a secret and in what follows all sorts of misunderstandings transpire and she is almost killed by a landslide when she tries to run away. Eventually she does make her way back to Berlin and reassumes her role as the big star, signing autographs and contracts and making it up with her manager. Peter, who had resolved never to see her again, nevertheless does see her performing in a series of spectacular dances of which the Spanish sequence was one and he realises that she is the only woman for him, the woman of his dreams. As a final twist, they quarrel when he visits her in her changing room. The film ends with Julia realising that she loves him after all and so she has to rush out of the theatre and chase after him. The two are reunited in each other’s arms.

Our life is no film, but it can and should become one. Once Sonja reached the pinnacle of her career she hoped that she would do as Julia did and renounce the trappings of fame for love. She would abandon her former life as a femme fatale and settle down in comfortable domesticity. Yet it seemed to her necessary to become famous before rejecting all that fame might bring. She believed that one day she would come to prefer the love of one strong man to the adoration of so many admirers. Would she settle for Peter the engineer? Played by Wolfgang Lukschy in this film, he was very handsome, but oh so serious – and apparently not rich.

So far as she was concerned there was no man alive who could match Rudolph Valentino. At least she had not met one yet. Her parents had not allowed her to see Blood and Sand or The Sheik. That would have been unthinkable, but Sonja had covertly studied the stills of Valentino in film magazines and much later when he died in 1926 she read everything she could about his funeral. It was rumoured that he had been poisoned by a former mistress. A hundred thousand people marched behind his coffin. Apparently four Blackshirts delivered a wreath from Mussolini. Pola Negri, who claimed to be Valentino’s fiancée, collapsed over his grave. All over America women committed suicide on hearing of the death of the Latin Lover. Every year, on the anniversary of that death, a veiled woman dressed in black and carrying a red rose appeared at his grave. It was only after Sonja fled to Germany that she was able to see the actual films, starting with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That picture was now banned by the Nazis for being anti-war, but this was too late for Sonja, since by then she had irrevocably fallen in love with a dead man. Was it possible to be in love with a handful of dust? None of the German film stars could come near Valentino, not even Hans Albers. In Germany the men of the SS and the Wehrmacht strutted about and gave orders, but on the Nazi cinema screens it was the women who ruled – Zarah Leander, Christina Söderbaum, Lida Baarova, Ilse Werner and (curse it) Marika Rökk.

Of course, the part of Julia should have been given to Sonja. Though Sonja had only been given a small part, she took comfort from Tilde having quoted Stanislavski to her: ‘Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors’. The reason that Sonja had agreed to appear as a hat-check girl and then again in the Japanese dance sequence in The Woman of My Dreams is that she hoped that Joseph would give her a bigger part in Kolberg. Everybody was talking about Kolberg. Planning for this film was far advanced and not only would it again be in colour, but it would be by far the biggest, most expensive, most spectacular film ever shot in Germany. It would be superlative and the world would watch it and marvel.

Cigarette break.

Maybe Wieland had her missing ration card? If so, so what? It would certainly be troublesome, but she could get another one and, if there were difficulties, she could appeal to Joseph for help. She was not going to go on her knees before Wieland for an old ration card.

Now it occurred to her that she should write her memoir in such a way that it cried out to be made into a film. To that end she must make her story visual. So, as well as flashbacks, it should have fade-ins, dissolves, jump cuts, montage and all sorts of other filmic tricks that she was a bit vague about. Also her life story ought to have the same sort of happy ending that The Woman of My Dreams was offering.

While it was tempting to skip over her dull childhood in Dordrecht, it was important that her readers should realise the humble and quite ordinary beginnings she started from. And that they should be aware that, despite her somewhat oriental appearance, she has no Jewish blood in her. There were no Jews in Dordrecht. At least she never saw any. Anyway, back to the dullness. Except for Sundays, every day was the same and Tuesday seemed the same as Monday, for only the name of the day had changed and then Wednesday was the same as Tuesday… the only promise of another world and the presage of future glamour, love, violence and the exotic came from films. This was where she should start, since that there led to this here. Then she was distracted by her memory of Wieland starting a campaign to abolish Wednesdays so that the working week would be shortened.

But no, back to her memories of a Dutch childhood. At first there was no bioscope or cinematograph house in Dordrecht, but travelling showmen brought screens and projectors with them and presented their shows where they could. Several competing booths were set up in July when the summer fair took place and the local women paraded in traditional dress. Film barkers in top hats stood in front of the tents and bellowed out the details of forthcoming attractions. Sonja’s parents had reluctantly permitted her to go to films which might be thought to have some religious content. So Sonja had seen Quo Vadis, The Queen of Sheba, Intolerance, The Kiss of Judas, The Ten Commandments, Judith of Bethulia and Ben Hur and she knew about the grey and ancient Bible lands which were peopled by languorous oriental princesses wearing thick mascara and who were waited upon by slaves wielding ostrich-feather fans. The film barker stood beside the sheet on which the films were projected and he shouted out the plot and supplied some of the dialogue. He had to shout in order to drown out the noise of the projector.

But there were other films she was forbidden to see – for example, the Biograph Company masterpiece: The Battle of Elderbush Gulch. The poster showed a white woman lying unconscious in the middle of a prairie. A fierce Red Indian knelt over her and held a screaming baby over his head. Had the woman just been ravished? Or would she surrender herself to the savage in order to save the life of her child? It all looked quite exciting. Then there was the poster for Cleopatra, which showed Theda Bara (Arab Death to her anagrammatically knowing fans) standing with arms folded in a hieratic pose in front of a disc covered with hieroglyphics. Hers was the gaze that commanded the destinies of men. She was indeed Death incarnate.

Now Sonja recalled that when she was a child there was always plenty to eat – herrings, black rye bread, split-pea soup, bacon, onions, gherkins, cheese and apples. Not like now. The UFA canteen provided more and better food than could be found in all but a handful of restaurants in Berlin. Even so, for almost two years now Sonja had been eating powdered eggs, bread that was made from something that caused her to fart a lot and ersatz marmalade. It was pleasant then to linger in memory over laden tables and busy restaurants in Dordrecht, so pleasant that Sonja now wondered if her autobiography would ever get any further. Perhaps she and her readers might settle for dining on memories.

But reflecting on restaurants brought Wieland back into the picture. Sonja had found temporary work in a restaurant in Dordrecht, her first job. It was a Saturday lunchtime and they had a dozen customers, which, considering the times, was unusually good business…

But no this was not the right place to start. (Sonja was beginning to understand that the main business of writing was ordering one’s material.) So another beginning. This time in Amsterdam. She was seventeen or eighteen then and in a tram that was caught behind a convoy of horse-drawn delivery carts. She was thinking that a funeral cortege would have delivered her to her destination faster. Just then the strange young man sitting beside her gave her a nudge.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ he said, ‘but I have to take some medicine now. I don’t suppose you happen to have a glass of water on you of which I could avail myself?’

‘No, sorry. I don’t.’

But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than she was thinking what the hell am I apologising to this lunatic for?’ How am I going to have a glass of water on me while travelling on a tram? Did he think I had one in my coat pocket filled and ready for the emergencies of travelling strangers? If only the tram were not so crowded, I could change seats. Otherwise the next thing he will ask me for is a stethoscope or a bottle of surgical spirits. Or is his silliness the new way of chatting up girls? He must think me a fool! Damn him for his impudence!

Sonja turned back to the window. The young man did not seem put out at being rebuffed by her. Now she could see in the window’s reflection that he was tapping the shoulder of an older woman sitting on the seat in front of him and he was repeating his crazy request, adding that it was really rather urgent. His accent was foreign – German probably. Sonja looked to the woman to see how she would deal with the madman.

Although the woman looked alarmed and confused, she started to forage about in her large handbag, in course of which she apparently discovered all sorts of stuff which she had forgotten was in there. But finally, with a triumphant flourish, she did produce a glass of water. This the young man grabbed and, after some fumbling in his coat pockets, he found a large pill which he proceeded to swallow with the aid of that water. Having drained the glass, he returned it to the woman with the most profuse thanks. She just looked confused and embarrassed.

The man, the lunatic, had an extraordinarily long face, in the midst of which was an extraordinarily long nose. His eyes were hooded and he had wispy blond hair. He did not look entirely human. At the next stop along the Amstel the lunatic alighted and Sonja in a daze watched him pull his coat tight around him before he slouched off into the darkness of one of the narrow streets that led to the Rembrandtsplein. So the world was not as Sonja had supposed. There were holes in it through which one could tumble and find oneself in another reality. The tram, still stuck behind those carts, was moving slowly when Sonja rose from her seat, pushed her way to the rear platform and jumped. She landed ankle-deep in slush and hurried back to the little street. She thought that this was the beginning of an adventure and she was right.

Chapter Two

Cigarette break.

Sonja paused in her writing. Should this sort of crazy stuff feature in the beginning of a film star’s autobiography? Moreover, she did not want Wieland to take over her book. But she could write it out anyway and perhaps throw it away later. Meanwhile writing about it might function as a kind of exorcism. But first she supposed it was necessary to give a sense of the city in which her first encounter with Wieland took place.

She was last in Amsterdam about twenty years later in the winter of 1941-2 for the filming of Eternal Rembrandt, directed by Hans Steinhoff. She was not one of the cast. Steinhoff had told her that, with her glossy dark hair, slightly slanting eyes and dark complexion, she just did not look Dutch enough. He was looking for a flaxen haired Hausfrau – for the film at least. Still, she had been loaned by UFA to Terra productions to serve as interpreter and to advise on props and locations. This was yet another of those films about a towering Germanic genius who faced great obstacles before triumphing over lesser folk, the sub-humans who populated most of Europe. Rembrandt was a perfect example of the ‘creative brain’ that Hitler had praised in Mein Kampf. The plot centred round Rembrandt’s painting of The Night Watch and the company of burghers-posturing-as-soldiers who had protested that some of their members could hardly be seen in the deep shadows that the great artist had painted them into. And meanwhile his wife, Saskia, was dying. Sonja would have loved that part, but she had to acknowledge that she did not look right for the part.

In some ways that winter in Holland was hard. Of course, there was a blackout. Also food for the actors and film crew had to be brought in from Germany. The locals were unfriendly. Several times Sonja was spat at and, when she ventured to protest that she was Dutch like them that just made it worse. She was judged to be one of those tarts who slept with the enemy in exchange for food and cigarettes. She could understand their response and she even sympathised with it a little, even though, in some cases, she guessed that they were just jealous.

Despite the resentment of the locals, there were good times to be had. At the end of a day’s shooting there always seemed to be a limitless supply of Dutch gin. The wonderful thing about being in the film business was the number of parties. And besides, parties were fun that also happened to be work. As Sonja saw it, parties were hiring fairs and, if she was not at the parties, she would be forgotten about and not be hired. So she felt that there was a strange kind of virtue in going to a party, getting very drunk and going to bed with someone afterwards. But none of that was relevant and none of it should appear in her autobiography.

She should now give some picture of Amsterdam as it appeared to her when, as a young woman, she first met Wieland. It was just that she had such a dizzy mind and she was aware that she inclined to wander from subject to subject and from memory to memory. People thought this charming, she was sure. But just now she knew she needed mental discipline. Perhaps she should take up algebra or Sanskrit? But not now. Now she needed to concentrate on Amsterdam and that first meeting with Wieland.

Sonja had ran the length of Pilgrims Paarden Straat. Rembrandtsplein was almost deserted. The lunatic was nowhere in sight. She was back in the world of the familiar and the dull. Soon she would be returning to Dordrecht and that interrupted course on stenography. Just as she was walking past the Café Schiller and thinking about the closure of the magic hole into another world, she caught a glimpse through the café’s frosted window of the lunatic sitting at a table with four other young men, lunatics also presumably. They were mostly silent and seemed to be waiting for someone. Then a woman brushed past Sonja and, having entered the café, joined the gathering of lunatics. They were certainly lunatics for, as she arrived at their table, they all burst into manic laughter. The woman turned and gestured, apparently pointing to something that had happened outside the café. She had long black hair and, though her face was ugly, her eyes were bright with wild glee and now Sonja recognised her as the woman with the providential handbag on the tram.

This was too much. Sonja was going to confront these people and demand an explanation. She entered the café, but then stood close by the door uncertain what to do next. The wispy haired man had his back to her, but the woman with the handbag eventually saw Sonja and clearly recognised her. She raised a finger to summon her over. Sonja moved like a sleepwalker towards the group. She had no idea at all what she was going to say.

The lunatic was saying something to the woman, it was impossible to hear what, until, directed by the woman’s gaze, he turned at last to look at Sonja.

‘Ach! It is the beautiful girl from the tram!’

The table was lit by a candle and the shadows it created made the lunatic’s face seem stranger than ever. He might have been an apparition conjured up in a séance.

He sprang to his feet and seized one of Sonja’s hands.

‘I kiss the hand!’ he declared with mock formality and he bowed and clicked his heels as he did so. Then he spoiled the effect by bursting into laughter.

‘Please be seated!’ he said and dragged another chair over and pressed her into it. ‘My name is Wieland. Then he introduced her to the others. They were all Germans and the woman’s name was Mechtilde.

‘I will get you a schnapps,’ said Wieland.

Then they sat in silence, the young men studying Sonja’s face intently as if they hoped to learn something from it. Wieland returned with the schnapps.

‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘But, if you have pursued us in the hope of getting any kind of apology, you should put such a thought out of your mind. We never apologise. What is your name please?’ Wieland’s manner was defiant, yet nervous. With a shaking hand he tried to light a cigarette.

‘Sonja Heda.’

‘Well, Miss Heda, you should feel flattered. I only chose you for our little drama because I liked your face.’

Sonja did not feel flattered.

‘Where are you from?’ Wieland asked. ‘You look foreign. You are not Dutch.’

‘I am Dutch. I am from Dordrecht,’ Sonja replied. (When she was young she was proud of coming from Dordrecht, God knows why.) Then she continued, ‘What do you do – apart from play stupid tricks on people?’

‘Trickery is an art form and not necessarily such a stupid one either,’ Wieland replied slowly. He was having difficulty finding the right words in Dutch. ‘I think of the charade this evening as a dramatic performance… why should drama always be crammed onto a tiny stage in a stuffy little arts theatre filled with bourgeois folk intent on improving their cultural understanding? Why should all the parts go to actors? Theatre should be out in the streets and it should be making life more exciting for the people who trudge along those streets. Art is part of life… not an alternative to it.’

Suddenly Wieland looked sad and he continued, ‘Just now we, Mechtilde and I, had wanted to give you mystery as a gift. But you have spoilt it all by insisting on following us and discovering the duller reality behind the mystery. So goodbye mystery! And goodbye you! Go now!’

The young men with Wieland continued to stare at her as if they were willing her to go.

And Sonja went. At the door she turned and shouted, ‘Grow up!’

Adults playing childish games. If only they had gone no further…

Having written an account of all this, the story of her first encounter with Wieland, she realised that, despite her first intention, she had given her future readers no idea of what Amsterdam was or is like. The truth was that on that early visit, she had hardly registered her surroundings. She had been thinking about stenography, the Spanish flu, the prospects of enrolling in a dance class and doubtless other stuff which by now she had forgotten. It was really some twenty years later that Richard Angst taught her to look at the city. She thought it was twenty years ago, but really she was hopeless at chronology and it might have been more or less. She even found the order of the days of the week a problem. On waking up in the morning, her default position was that it was Tuesday. It was surprising how often it really was Tuesday. Richard was the lighting cameraman on Eternal Rembrandt. As a young man Richard had worked on filming the shadowy and bizarre architecture of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and he was by now at the top of his profession. He and his crew were steeped in the works not just of Rembrandt, but also of Ruysdael, De Hooch and Jan Steen. For them the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis constituted grand manuals of lighting techniques and camera angles and they talked about the paintings constantly. They also studied the canals and took photographs of the play of light on the water and the reflections of sunlight under the bridges. It was Richard in consultation with Hans Steinhof who had decided that in the early scenes featuring Rembrandt the blacks and whites should be in crisp contrast with one another and that, wherever possible, the scenes should be shot in deep focus (as in a De Hooch painting in which the spectator’s eye passes from a room, through an open door down a corridor and out into a courtyard). But in the scenes featuring Rembrandt in old age the perspective should be much shortened and everything should take place in a kind of sepia fog.

Richard’s team took lots of photographs of Amsterdam’s architecture, for, rather than shoot on location and be at the mercy of the weather, they preferred where possible to re-construct the necessary exterior scenes later in lots at Babelsberg where the lighting could be controlled by the gaffer and best boy. The whole city presented streets composed of potential sets and so their houses were examined as possible backcloths to human dramas. Richard and Sonja walked through a city of smoke and fog, out of which rose the great gabled buildings that were built centuries ago by the grand merchants and that now were a testament to Holland’s lost grandeur and the empire that Holland had forfeited to the Japanese. It might have been Rembrandt’s Amsterdam that they were walking in, since almost all cars had been sequestered by the German authorities and bicycles too and, apart from the trams, what little traffic that passed in the streets was horse-drawn. Because of the blackout, gas lamps were not lit and people used torches as they cautiously felt their way through the night. Accidents were common, for the canals presented a particular hazard in the dark. The city appeared to have been conjured up from the waters and it seemed that it might, when its time was decreed, sink back into those waters.

Sonja knew that it was important for an actress to stay on the right side of the camera and lighting crew. They had it in their power to make her look ravishing or, if they were in the mood, they could make her seem even older than she was. God knows, if they took it into their heads, they could make even someone like Dietrich look ordinary. Sonja’s face should be filmed in soft light from the front, rather than in profile and sometimes a back spotlight from the top might be used to give her a halo effect… there now! She was rambling again. And the stuff about being extra friendly with cameramen was not going into her autobiography. She knew that she ought to be describing the architecture of Amsterdam, but she lacked the vocabulary to do so. She had not had that sort of an education. She decided to leave the architecture of Amsterdam till later, when she could copy the details out of some old guide book.

At this point she was for once thankful to be interrupted by Gunther, who was as usual clutching a portfolio of sketches. The lugubrious Gunther haunted the UFA studios, in search of people who were not actually busy and whom he hoped might listen to him for an hour or two. He was a man on a mission. The Nazi cartoon! So far the Nazis had made no cartoon films and only used animation to illustrate certain facts in their documentaries. This was a cultural gap and it was to Germany’s shame that it had no great artist who could measure up to Walt Disney. And yet both Hitler and Goebbels were known to be enormous enthusiasts for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. So Gunther was eternally optimistic, if gloomily so. Sonja was a particular target of his since he had often seen her in the company of Goebbels. Now he wanted Sonja to get the Reichs Minister interested in Max and Moritz, a nineteenth-century comic strip about two naughty boys who ended up being eaten by ducks. To hear Gunther talk, a feature-length film based on Max and Moritz could turn into something as grand as Metropolis or The Nibelungs. In fact Sonja had once mentioned the possibility of cartoons to Goebbels, but he had cut her short. He would not contemplate the making of cartoon films, since he associated them with the experiments made by Jewish and Bolshevik artists in the Weimar period. Besides, Germany’s cinema screens needed heroes and this cartoons could not deliver. Now Gunther was going on and on about his latest wheeze and Sonja was easily bored and Max and Moritz sounded very boring to her and she tried to think of a polite way of telling him so. But she was saved from that necessity when Gunther spotted someone more important to talk to, Fritz Hippler, chief of the film division in the Propaganda Ministry. As Gunther hurried away, Sonja was momentarily offended, but then she realised that she did the same sort of thing herself.

Gunther would never give up. He was a typical Taurus. Then Sonja realised with a start that she had not looked at her horoscope that day. She never bothered with the political and military news. That would only depress her and what would be the point of that? The horoscope was usually more cheerful and certainly more useful, as the horoscope told her what was going to happen, whereas the news only told you what had happened. Since she was finding the autobiography business rather difficult, she was hoping that her horoscope would tell her to give the whole notion up. She was a typical Libra, warm and sociable. Alas, when she consulted the advice for Librans in the coming week, this was what she read: ‘Since the new moon four weeks ago, you have been very uncertain about what you should do next and what possibilities are open to you. You are finding it difficult to plan ahead. But you must press on with what you have decided on earlier. Yes, it will be challenging, but that will be good for you and you will find that your way will get easier if you persist.’ Damn! So she was stuck with the autobiography. (And she still did not even have a title for the book. She was fed up with thinking about it as ‘the autobiography’.)

So now perhaps she must buckle down to write about the strange business in the restaurant in Dordrecht. (She had had no idea that writing could be so difficult. Free association would not do.) Back then, so many years ago, she had found temporary work in a restaurant in the town, her first job. It was a Saturday lunchtime and they had a dozen customers in, which, considering the times, was unusually good business. She was stacking dishes in the kitchen when Katje, the other waitress, came back from the dining room and asked Sonja, ‘There is no turbot on the menu is there?’

‘No, of course not. We do not do fish dishes. If anyone wants fish, he or she will have to go to another restaurant. The Windjammer does fish.’

Katje could be so stupid at times – well, all of the time really.

Katje persisted, ‘But there is a party at the corner table demanding turbot.’

‘Katje, they cannot have it. We do not have it. Point out to them that it is not on the menu.’

‘But there is a man at the next table who is especially recommending the turbot. He says our turbot is excellent and definitely the best thing on the menu.’

‘He is mistaken. We don’t serve turbot – excellent or otherwise.’

‘But he says it was on his menu and there is turbot on his plate. He is kissing his fingers and going into ecstasies about it.’

‘Don’t be silly, Katje.’

‘It is definitely turbot. He invited me to examine it closely. The fish is rather flat with a greyish back and it seems to have been steamed.’

Katje tugged at Sonja’s sleeve. Sonja sighed. But then, as she walked into the dining room, she gave a cry of dismay. It was Wieland who sat with knife and fork poised over the fish.

‘Really excellent turbot! Done to perfection!’ he shouted as Sonja appeared in the doorway. ‘If my friends here cannot have the same, they should be told why.’

He winked at Sonja, before turning to his neighbours to urge them on to demand their rights. Such an excellent dish should be enjoyed by everyone, not just by favoured customers. Did the restaurant have a secret menu? The restaurant’s owner had been sitting by his wife’s sickbed upstairs, but now drawn by the commotion he came down to see what the matter was. Claus Van Doorn was a big man and he loomed over Wieland who quivered in his seat. Claus insisted that Wieland should leave the restaurant immediately. Wieland defiantly argued that he could not possibly leave without paying for what he had eaten. If he could just have the bill, so that he could pay for the turbot (and compliments to the chef, by the way), then he would be happy to pay up and go. Claus was not having any more of this nonsense. He picked Wieland up off his chair by the scruff of his neck and forced him out of the restaurant.

Two hours later, when the restaurant closed for the afternoon, Sonja found Wieland outside in the street, waiting for her.

‘I kiss the hand,’ and he managed to do so before she snatched it away.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I have come to find you,’ he replied.

‘How did you find me?’

‘There is only one Sonja Heda in Dordrecht. Indeed, there is only one Sonja Heda in the world and I have come for you.’

‘What for? Have you come all this way to apologise?’

Wieland looked a little irritated.

‘Of course not. I never apologise. I have decided that after all you are the incarnation of mystery and so I have come for you. I have hardly slept since that evening in Amsterdam. You have the face that can lure men to their doom and I have chosen you to lure me to my doom. I will make you great. What is it that you want to do? Who is it that you want to be?’

‘I want to work in a restaurant?’

Wieland waved his hand dismissively, ‘No, no, no. That sort of thing is for the girl next door and you do not have the look of a girl next door. You are too beautiful to be a waitress. What do you dream of becoming?’

Sonja obstinately insisted that she liked working in a restaurant and she intended to continue doing so. But this was not the truth.

Time for another cigarette… by now stagehands were moving in to dismantle the set of The Woman of My Dreams and that was a bit distracting. The truth was that from quite an early age she had wanted to be a film star. Now Sonja’s readers would want to know why she had to be in films, rather than be content just to watch them. What was it that set her on the path to stardom? What was it that took her steps towards the Holy Kingdom of Shadows and Silence?

Not what but who. Pola Negri. Sonja had seen Pola Negri in Madame Dubarry, Sumurun, and The Eyes of Mummy Ma. Sonja had seen her as the sultry Madame Du Barry, as she presented a petition to Louis XV before leaping onto the lap of the startled king. And in Sumurun, the epic Arabian romance, Pola as Annaia danced herself towards her death in the harem. Sonja had screamed when, in The Eyes of the Mummy Ma, the coffin lid was raised to reveal the hypnotic eyes of Radu, Egypt’s answer to Rasputin. A few moments later Ma, the maiden played by Negri, was released from captivity in the tiny chamber beyond the coffin. Yet it is of course her ultimate fate to perish with the sinister Radu and Sonja had screamed again when Ma was stabbed and fell backwards down the stairs. In Gypsy Blood she had lured her lovers to their deaths with a rose between her teeth. Pola Negri carried her fated doom with her in most of the films Sonja had seen her in – old films lit by lanterns and candles. Pola had gypsy blood. She was rumoured to have been the lover of Valentino. Prudish critics said she was a man-crazy vamp. She had a Roman bath in the middle of her living room. She took a tiger for a walk down Hollywood Boulevard. She was Hitler’s favourite actress and she was Sonja’s heroine.

So finally Sonja confessed to Wieland, ‘I want to be a film star.’

Again he was disappointed.

‘That is a shop girl’s dream. That is so banal. I want to make you truly great. Listen. With the triumph of America and the establishment of the League of Nations, history has come to an end. No country can think of doing anything except emulate America. Everywhere dull, decent men of bourgeois origins have taken power: Poincaré, Baldwin, Coolidge, my President Ebert and your Prime Minister Charles de Beerenbrouck. The dark shadow of boredom is sweeping over Europe. Germany needs me. Europe needs me. I am the man of destiny who will awaken my country from its somnolence. I will lead my followers (though admittedly they are few so far) from street theatre to total theatre. I will have thousands, no hundreds of thousands marching and performing at my command. Forget the cinematograph. It is a sideshow – like those booths where idiotic punters pay money to gaze at the bearded lady, the Siamese twins or the man who eats coal. The craze for going to see films is part of the end of history. It is a fad like the craze for the diabolo. It has no future. Right now the cinematograph is feted as a novelty, yet it is destined to follow the magic lantern, the praxinoscope and the stereoscopic photograph into obscurity. Anyway, the Dutch don’t make films,’ he ended bathetically.

Such crazy stuff! But Sonja thought it safer to be polite.

‘I am sorry. That is what I really want to do – to be in films.’

‘Come away with me, Sonja Heda. Together we will do great things.’

She shook her head.

‘Then have dinner with me. I will buy you dinner at The Windjammer and we shall see if I can get you to change your mind.’

But Sonja pointed out that in the evening she would once again be waitressing in the restaurant.

‘In that case,’ said Wieland, ‘I shall return in exactly a year’s time. By then perhaps you will have changed your mind – no, I am sure of it. In the meantime I will have done great things. You may even read about me in the newspapers.’

Sonja doubted this as she did not read newspapers, except for the horoscopes, but she said nothing in reply.

Wieland shrugged and started to walk away. Then he turned and shouted at her, ‘The eternal in woman draws us on.’

What was he talking about?

Wieland turned out to be right in that he did get into the newspapers and Sonja turned out to be right in that she did not read about him, since she really never read the news.

Chapter Three

She knew she ought to describe her parents, but then that would inevitably lead on to their encounter with the Spanish Lady. The Spanish Lady, with bones clacking like castanets, had walked the streets by day and night. Her head was covered by a black lace mantilla and she was heavily made up in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal from customers that her face was really just a skull. Wielding a large fan with one hand, she kept the other one free to reach out for trade. Dukes, duchesses, bank managers, clerks, maids and porters all embraced the Spanish Lady, and, having done so, they coughed until they died. One saw the Spanish Lady everywhere on warning posters in the streets and in cartoons in the newspapers.

Sonja did not like to think of dead people. It was too depressing and she wanted her book to be a happy one, full of inspirational uplift. So she did not want to dwell on the Spanish flu and the hard times after the end of the Great War. She could write it all up briefly some other time. Meanwhile on to Berlin and the bright lights! Berlin, the city of the future, her future! Now the capital of a Thousand Year Reich!

She had enough money saved from waitressing to keep her going for a few weeks in the new city. Wieland was just about right that no films were being made in Holland, but Germany was a different matter. Pola Negri had starred in lots of German films. Moreover, Sonja knew that the famous film star had started out as a dancer. So the first thing Sonja was going to do, after she had reached Berlin and found some temporary job, was to take dancing lessons. She certainly was not going to hang around for a year in Dordrecht, waiting for that long-faced, wispy-haired goon to reappear. Wieland was hardly Prince Charming.

She had found a flat above a stamp dealer’s shop in the Charottenburg quarter of Berlin. The impact of the city on a small-town girl from Holland was overwhelming. She used to see the city wake up as she woke up. Gates, shutters, windows, doors and sleepy eyes were all opening at more or less the same time. At first the streets she looked upon were mostly empty, and only wind, water and discarded rags flowed through them. But soon they became crowded as workers in cloth caps, students in peaked caps, businessmen in homburgs, dandies in panamas and women in cloche hats streamed by. Policemen in flat-topped shako helmets sought to control the crowds. (At first Sonja had mistaken them for soldiers.) As she walked through the city, she found the criss-crossing of so many roads, railways and human lives exhilarating, for this all seemed to signal that there were so many futures for life, for her life to take. The city seethed with energy and so did she. She remembered those first impressions. At least she thought she did. She is not sure when she saw Ruttman’s film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, but, ever since seeing it, the film’s images have infected her memories and have made her uncertain of how much of all that she really saw back then.

She had loved to go out early in the morning and watch the riders in the Tiergarten and their steeds advancing through the mist like ghosts. But the nights were just as good. At night the streetcars and taxis moved along glistening rainswept streets, reflecting the lights from open windows and flashing neon lights. In the evenings there were films, cabaret shows, dance contests and thousands of people danced to the drumbeat of the future and they came out from the halls and cinemas, quite tired, to watch triumphal firework displays, before going home to sleep. Oh, to sleep. Oh the days when she was young and could do that. And no sirens and no flak and no bombs.

Some things that could be seen then were now gone. When she first came to the city she saw many soldiers who had been disabled in the Great War begging and they competed with the able-bodied unemployed who advertised their claims to charity with pitiful scrawls on bits of cardboard. There also used to be lots of Jews in the streets. They were gone. The Reichstag was gone, of course. It was just a burnt-out shell. The pigeon fanciers’ cart that used to stop outside the stamp shop no longer did so.

She had loved the displays of stamps in the ground-floor shop window. One week there would be pages of stamps from Imperial China with their delicately intricate designs, and then it would be the turn of the elaborate calligraphy of the issues of Hejaz and Najd and then perhaps the stamps of the British Empire, every one of which bore the head of one of its villainous monarchs. Next it would be pages of the stamps of the German States: Bavaria, Thurn and Taxis, Baden, Mecklenburg, Prussia and others, most of their stamps resembling tiny ancient banknotes. She thought them a bit boring. But then other displays followed which featured utterly unfamiliar countries, whose stamps presented tiny vignettes of unknown mountains and bays, exotic animals and forgotten statesmen.

There were no more displays now and the window was empty. Manasseh turned out to be Jewish and he was gone. She was so bad at spotting who was Jewish and who was not. Similarly she was hopeless at spotting who might be homosexual. And what did freemasons look like? Was there a masonic look? She really must try to be more observant. David used to say that she would be categorised as a scatterbrain, if only she had any brains to scatter. ‘We must find you a screwball comedy to star in.’ Not that it mattered any more about not recognising Jews, since one never seemed to see them about these days. All the Jews were being taken east to places in Poland (or whatever it was called now) where they could be re-educated and settled. In a way it was a pity and she felt sorry for them. On the other hand, the dismissal of all those Jews from UFA and the smaller studios meant that there was now more work for people like her. Anyway she was not going to write about Jews. Her book was going to be filled with sunshine and romance.

It was unfortunate that the short train journey back from Potsdam to Berlin offered nothing in the way of sunshine or romance. The glass was gone from the windows of the carriage and all the seats were taken. She always dreaded the end of filming and her return to the city and her flat (if she still had a flat, if the building was still standing). Would she get some sleep or will there be another raid? It was sad now to walk through the necropolis of Berlin at night. One had to pick one’s way through the rubble and sometimes it was unclear where a street had been and there were so many facades without interiors. Sad and dangerous. Once off the train, she tried to stay in the company of UFA people for as long as possible, since in the blackout women were always in danger of assault by the conscripted foreign labourers.

The Berlin of her youth had vanished in smoke and flame like an enchanted city from The Arabian Nights, or, no, like the city of Atlanta as it was engulfed in flames in Gone with the Wind. Sonja thought that she was a lot like Scarlet O’Hara. She too had known a life of grace, courtesy and plenty and that life had been ruined, almost annihilated by unscrupulous ideologues and warmongers, but she was going to rebuild her life once more and with it her own version of Tara.

She thought of the Kufurstendam as it once was and how pleasant it was in peacetime days to pass by its shops and cafes on sunny summer afternoons. Then she recalled something else that happened soon after her arrival in Berlin. She had just found a job as a waitress and so she was cheerful as she walked down that street. Then a voice summoned her, ‘Sonja Heda.’

Sonja looked round and saw that it was a smartly dressed woman sitting outside a café who was summoning her over. Puzzled, Sonja walked over and sat down at the woman’s table. Who was she? She was obviously a Pisces. The typical Pisces was dreamy, mystical sensitive and ever changeable. Beyond that Sonja could not place her.

‘We met in Amsterdam,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Mechtilde, if you remember.’

Sonja looked more closely at her. She was dressed according to what in the Weimar days was regarded as high fashion. (And Sonja, looking back on this, bitterly reflected that it still would be high fashion, if only they could afford it nowadays.) Mechtilde’s hair was now short in a pageboy cut and it was under a cloche hat. She wore a loose pale yellow dress that only reached to the knees. Her make-up was immaculate, but no make-up, no matter how copious and how skilfully applied, could compensate for the lopsided and somewhat horse-like face. Still, those glittering eyes…