Fräulein S Plays The Monkey’s Game

Fräulein S. is a most sympathetic young National Socialist of under thirty, employed by the French Military Government, somewhere in the French Zone. I met her in a railway station, a day or two after my second entry into Germany, and have learnt to love her more and more ever since. Her first words to me, after I had told her I was intending to I write a book about present-day Germany, were: “Don’t believe all ‘those people’ will tell you about us, Germans. See and judge us for yourself. That is my only request.” Fancy me believing anything of what the enemies of the New Order would tell me about Hitler’s people! But how could the girl guess?

I looked up at her with the grieved face of one who feels accused of a thing he would never dream of doing. “You do not know who I am,” I said; “otherwise you would never tell me that.”

We were standing amidst ruins. In the girl’s tall, athletic figure, in her healthy face, in the metallic gloss of her ash-blond hair in the morning sunshine, I saw the symbol of Germany’s invincible vitality. I recalled in my mind the sight of the whole country laid waste by the Allied bombs and thought, “Mortar and stone. That can be rebuilt. As long as this magnificent youth is alive, nothing matters really.” Against the background of the torn and gaping buildings, I imagined a procession of new Storm Troopers, in the resurrected National Socialist State—the irresistible future—and I smiled. Was Fräulein S to be the leader of a hundred younger Hitler Maidens in those days of my dream? I wished she would be. And then I at last asked the girl: “Have you kept the ideals that once inspired you, here in Germany?”

She seemed a little surprised at my question; and a little uneasy. “Do you mean ‘those’ ideals?” she said, referring to those that no foreigner in Germany today professes to admire.

“Yes,” I replied; “I mean the National Socialist ideals.”

“Some of us still adhere to them in the secrecy of their hearts,” she said.

“Do you?” asked I. “Whatever you might say, you have nothing to fear from me.”

She hesitated a second, and then probably reflected that I would not have spoken so openly, had I been some “agent provocateur.” She replied firmly: “I do.” My face brightened, and I took her hands in mine.

“Come and have a cup of coffee with me,” I said, “and I shall tell you who I am and why I came.”

We went to a café, and there, in a corner, after half an hour’s conversation, I gave her a handful of my leaflets.

“You wrote these?” she asked me, as she read one, carefully hiding the Swastika printed at the top.

“Yes. I.”

“And you managed to cross the border with them?”

“Yes, with over six thousand. I was lucky.”

“And what if you had been caught?”

“I was prepared for the worst. It is the only thing I can do, now, in ’48, for my Führer and for you, his people, whom I love.”

The girl was gazing at one intently. She got up. “Come,” she said, “come to my home. You are the first foreign Nazi I have ever met. But please, for heaven’s sake, not a word of politics to my old parents!”

“Why? Are they against us?”

“Goodness no! On the contrary. But they would be scared at the thought of what might happen to me if I associate with you. And I wish to associate with you, now that I know. I shall do all that is in my power to help you—or rather to help Germany through you, her faithful friend. I am so glad I met you!”

On the way to her house, she told me that her old father and mother were dependent upon her for their livelihood. She had a good job in an office of the French Military Government.

“Why you, with those people?” I asked her.

“We have to live,” she replied, “and jobs are not easy to get. Moreover, is it not preferable that I should have the post, rather than some anti-Nazi?”

I agreed that it was. Still, I felt a little uneasy, being by nature an uncompromising person, and being also a newcomer in occupied Germany.

“Do ‘they’ know your views?” I asked.

“I should think not! Why should they, anyhow? I told them the ordinary tale: that I was ‘forced’ into the Party ‘as nearly everyone was.’ And the fools believed it. They will believe anything that tends to point out that their so-called insight into German affairs is correct. And who cares, after all, what they believe? All I want is well-paid work to keep my house going. Those people think they have ‘converted’ me. I think I am exploiting them.”

I could not help admitting that there was much to be said in support of the girl’s attitude. What else could she do, without causing her parents to suffer?

We became good friends. And on several occasions Fräulein S helped me substantially, actually taking serious risks—endangering herself and her parents—for the sake of the National Socialist cause. That alone, in my eyes, proves that she is genuine. Nobody would have done what she did without being sincerely devoted to our Ideology. Yet, only a month or two before my arrest, the girl informed me that she was to be de-Nazified. I was grieved to hear of it. I took it as a matter of personal shame. To me, the idea of a comrade going through that humiliating process, was nearly as unbearable as that of a younger sister being outraged by some undesirable man.

“Why?” said I. “Must you really do it?’

“I have to,” she replied, “or else, abandon my parents to starve. I have no choice. It is a part of the routine. Allformer Party members who are now in service of the French military government must go through that formality or give up their jobs.”

And she told me of the questions she would have to answer in writing, stating that she no longer adhered to our socio-political principles and our philosophy of life—she, Fräulein S, of all people!

“I know,” she added, “how much the whole business disgusts you. It does me, too, believe me. It means writing and signing a heap of blatant lies. But what else can one do in the circumstance?”

“What would happen if one boldly wrote the truth?” I asked, knowing all the time what the answer would be.

“One would just be turned out of one’s post without being allowed to hold another in one’s own line; and one would be replaced by a person willing to lie or by some real anti-Nazi, which would be still worse.”

She paused for a second. “I know how the disgraceful show disgusts you,” she repeated. “But you are free. You can afford to be truthful. You can afford to be defiant. Nobody is depending on you for his or her livelihood. Nobody will suffer with you, if you suffer. So you can do what you feel what we all feel to be right. I cannot. Very few of us can. This is the tragedy of the matter: we are given the choice to lie or to die. That is Democracy, as you know yourself.”

“I hate from the depth of my heart those who place such a choice before you and thousands of others,” I said. And I meant it. And I mean it.

Fräulein S looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “We all do,” she said. “But we must not take them and their mad regulations too seriously. They will not be here forever, anyhow. Germany cannot be kept down indefinitely; you know that as well as anybody. And who will care for their blasted “de-Nazification” once they are gone? In the meantime, we have to submit outwardly; to play the game with them, submit—outwardly; the monkeys’ game, “Affenspiel“; “cette singerie,” she added in French. “That is indeed the right name for it in all languages.”

For all I know, the person who thus spoke less than two months ago is de-Nazified by now. And the authorities in charge of the “re-education” of the Germans believe that they have won a victory—made an extra convert to their detested Democracy—while in reality they have only added a little more bitterness to the bitterness already prevailing throughout the country, and earned a little more contempt from one extra individual.

The story of Fräulein S is by no means unique. It is the story of practically every de-Nazified German, man or woman. I have related it from the beginning and in detail, only to show that one should not hasten to brand as “turncoats” the great bulk of those Germans who consent to play the confounded comedy imposed upon them as an alternative to starvation.

-excerpted from “Gold in the Furnace” by Savitri Devi (1952)