Four years to write a book that will probably end up about the same length as The Great Gatsby (short). No commission. No publisher. Complete madness. An exercise in deep topography: digging up what is probably best left buried. The first version heroically unreadable. The next version too polite. The one after I forget. Now it gets to where it is possible to distinguish, I hope, between scaffolding and structure, and what needs to be taken down is obvious. I fought very hard and long with myself to retain the following section. At first I was going to cut the crossed-through parts Then I took it all out. The Battle of the Landscape Architects is no more. Always shorter. If you are French and write the fat version of this stuff you get a Prix Goncourt.
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It was billed as the battle of the landscape architects. Heinrich Wiepking-Jurgensmann, representative of Landscape Care and Design at Konrad Meyer’s Reich Commission for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, came from Berlin and lectured to a full house, preceded by his deadly rival Alwin Seifert. With so much colonial expansion and taming required, landscape architects were seen as stars of the future. Wiepking-Jurgensmann versus Seifert was talked up as a public shootout.
Michael Heimendorf was for Wiepking-Jurgensmann. A student of his had applied already to their office to write his dissertation on the redesign of what Heimendorf now called our town. Seifert’s reputation was based on landscape consultancy work for the autobahn, ensuring it was sculpted in harmony with the terrain and reintroducing to verges and embankments such native plants as the sloe, whitethorn, hazel, pear, linden and white cherry. But Michael Heimendorf thought his real skill was sucking up to party bosses, as a result of which he had sold the fad of bio-dynamic farming to half of them. That most had acquired huge estates might have had something to do with it.
Elizabeth began to wonder if Michael Heimendorf possessed a mind of his own. He never spoke openly about anything. None did unless it was confined to acceptable grumbling. She understood how everything was driven by a grand vision which could not be criticised but within that she was learning to see how it was possible to be highly opinionated as long as the concept itself remained unquestioned. Their minds were being zoned as surely as the camp territories; that was more or less understood and accepted. Whole areas were off-limits with regard to what could not be said. Elizabeth sensed she was able to talk more freely to Lieutenant Roth than to Frau Höss, who still insisted on her continued attendance to inspect progress on the pool. She wondered if Michael Heimendorf might be amenable to what she came to think of as secret discussion but decided however much she longed to speak her mind – without knowing what that might consist of or if she really had anything to say – it seemed more prudent to keep her mouth shut.
Alwin Seifert talked of the acoustic footprint. This was the extent of border planting required to muffle the noise of traffic. The idea intrigued Elizabeth without knowing why, beyond the fact of screening being essential to where they were: guards, barriers, passes, fences, no-go areas and danger zones, as well as the map in her head which led her to avoid the gravel pits and the road at the back of the prison. The question of what must remain unsaid preyed on her. She could refer to the Reichsführer-SS as Uncle Heine – they all did – but not say she disliked men with moustaches. Roth had laughed when she said this (thinking of her drunken father) then told her in his casual way that people had been shot for less.
Seifert favoured homespun indigo dyes, corduroy and leather sandals, and brought to his lecture a message of caring and kindness to landscape. What was previously harsh and neglected would be turned into a tended reflection of the German soul. Laziness was evident everywhere in Polish landscape management. The clogged state of the streams and soil had long disqualified them from the right to ownership. As weeds must be pulled from a garden, so inferior races had no place in a replanted world. Pole or Jew was as alien to Seifert’s thesis as Japanese knotweed.
Dr Stosberg afterwards described Seifert as cunningly humble for the way he talked of cosmos and harmony and daring to dream. He made jokes against Jews, espoused the holistic, derided cultural crookedness and careless landscape. When he spoke of the need for originality Heimendorf leaned across to Elizabeth and whispered that the man’s bio-dynamic theories had been lifted straight from Rudolf Steiner.
Tidiness and working order were better than fright and chaos, she supposed. But she was baffled too. Nature had always been just there and now everyone talked about it as a huge business. She decided she disliked Seifert in the same way he disliked others. According to his version, she could see herself being ordered around much like all the rest. She felt barely included and worried how she was supposed to fit into this idyllic future and where she might be in five years. Probably living in one of Dr Stosberg’s houses with her man and however many children they were supposed to have, saving up for a motor car and planning holidays.
As the dream of the eastern territories faded, so did Seifert. He survived the war to limp along as a minor political fixer, failing in his ambition to work for the autobahn administration of the new federal republic, despite his efforts to downgrade the Nazi career into an apolitical fight for nature. His most lasting contribution was a book on garden composting, published in the 1950s, which remained in print. His name appeared in academic essays noting vigorous antisemitism and colloquial reference to faulty bricks as Jews, a term picked up from construction crews in concentration camps.
Afterwards Dr Stosberg invited them back to the Deutches Haus. Elizabeth was nervous of being seen with what was dismissed as the civilian crowd but saw she needn’t have worried because everybody was well into what was called the Friday night smash. Dr Stosberg announced himself unimpressed by Siefert. “Health of the body politic. Personal hygiene. Health of landscape. Reintroduction of beavers! Cheers!” When they were drunk he said he had a favour to ask of her, two, actually. She glanced at Michael Heimendorf who gave nothing away. Dr Stosberg wanted to know what the SS made of Seifert. There was the vexed issue of inadequate sewage disposal in the new camp, as predicted by Dr Zeigler of the civilian administration, and Seifert had met with Zeigler and was offering himself as a consultant. He intended to generate gas from the feces of camp inmates. That set them all off. Vulgarity became the man, Elizabeth thought drunkenly and was surprised to see Michael Heimendorf looking so discomposed and red-faced from laughing. The bar had got so loud that Dr Stosberg had to shout in her ear. He wanted to know if she knew of Dr Kammler. She didn’t. Kammler was the new SS head of construction and was supposed to visit the camp soon but no one would tell him when. Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. It sounded like the business with Frau Höss all over again. She was drunk enough to ask if he wanted a swimming pool dug. Michael Heimendorf sat with one hand over his eye in an effort to focus and Elizabeth thought she might be sick. Stale vomit and disinfectant was a common daytime smell walking past the place. Stosberg shouted that he needed to meet Kammler. He was bound to be staying in rooms upstairs and if he knew when he was coming he could approach him unofficially. He said he wasn’t expecting her to spy for him.
She was duly able to report that Dr Kammler’s visit was scheduled for the second week of June. It had required no initiative. His name was on the general notice board under forthcoming inspections.
Heinrich Weipking-Jurgensmann’s lecture was more enthusiastically attended and better timed, with the start of the Russian campaign. Their glorious troops advanced unopposed, sweeping all before. A blank canvas awaited. Landscape was forever. People were not. The man’s hawkish manner left none in doubt of his thrilling, predatory instincts.
History consisted of significant lines of migration, he told them, none more than the extraordinary exodus in 1939 of thousands of Germans coming from outside the Reich. Willed by destiny to return to their spiritual homeland, they had since become these new settlers and farming pioneers.
Elizabeth had featured in a magazine spread showing BDM girls handing out bread rolls to a transportation of ethnic Germans arriving in Stettin, with loudspeakers and songs, including the one about the flowers of the heath. Later they had been extras in a Ministry of Propaganda film welcoming the arrival of a huge exodus that had come overland. Triumphant newsreels had showed a biblical procession of photogenic wagons and carts. Elizabeth preferred that vision to her own memory of being bossed around in the freezing cold by men with megaphones who told them to do everything again and again while the settlers grew more querulous with every shouted order.
Her job for the BDM had been to welcome and train these incomers for their new lives: bemused arrivals warmly greeted, put at ease, politely screened and categorised by sympathetic white-coated doctors and officials, all with qualifications of racial expertise, all young and idealistic.
She had never questioned the politics behind the huge exodus. None had. Everyone was happy to believe the propaganda of a scattered people unable to resist its calling and spontaneously upping sticks. They weren’t told how the government had been bartering abandoned homes and businesses against future supplies of grain and oil. Nor that Germany had a shortage of workers. Nor that the choreographed welcome hid a policy of repatriation to balance the deficit. Nor that the new pioneer movement had a mandatory failure rate of thirty percent, allowing the surplus dross to be sent to the Reich for compulsory labour.
Nor that selection lay at the heart of the system where it remained.