The whole town seemed to have turned out for the gathering, shuffling up the steps of the unheated church in their warmest coats and blankets, nodding greetings. Mostly women and children and the elderly, but some men now too, as Germany’s soldiers gradually came limping home from hospitals, enemy combatant camps, and wherever else.
Inside, the air was solemn but festive. People carried lanterns and tallow candles—a precious commodity these days—and the shadows of their flames leapt and danced across the rafters. They reminded Martin of an illustration from Frau Vortmuller’s Bible—the spirits of the damned burning in hell. Beneath the shadows, the faded frescoes on the walls were illuminated in bursts: the trailing robe of St. Paul; Jesus’s bare and bloodied legs; the stern, pinched face of an angel that Martin would have been terrified to encounter. There was a jagged hole in place of the rose window—shattered in the bombing—and outside the sky was dark and dotted with clear winter stars.
Then the service began—a wholly foreign experience for Martin, who had attended church only a few times in his life, and never a Catholic mass. It was full of chanting in Latin, the smell of incense, and unintelligible prayers. The stone floor and walls magnified the cold, and Martin’s breath froze as soon as he opened his mouth. Slowly, the priest climbed to his pulpit and spoke. He was old and his voice echoed confusingly. “For our celebration of the Feast of Christ the King. That it would be a time of reflection on our crucified Lord, and an opportunity for us to imitate his attitude of humility . . .”
People coughed and shifted in their seats. Martin glanced at his own family, if they could be called that. Marianne sat stick straight, brow furrowed, closely attending to each word. Beside her, Elisabeth cast her gaze around the congregation, taking stock of who was present. Katarina leaned against her sister for warmth. And Fritz, bending his head in apparent concentration, scratched a design into the rough fabric of his pants. The Grabarek boys, shoulder to shoulder, dark heads nearly identical, were an island unto themselves, passing something between them—a note? A pebble? It was impossible to tell. And Ania was as unreadable as always, her eyes on the minister but seeing something else inside her own head. Martin’s mother sat on his other side. Of them all, she seemed the most absorbed, gazing up into the bit of sky framed by the broken window, lips parted, eyes soft, like a woman coming face-to-face with a benevolent God. Martin reached over and took her hand. She startled, as if seeing him for the first time. But the smile that followed was like a flash of sun across a darkened field. And for once Martin felt sustained rather than terrified by his own capacity to bring her joy.
When the priest finished, a palpable sense of relief swept through the crowd. His words had brought no one peace—penance, forgiveness, justice, sin—these were still papery abstractions that could not begin to address the everyday realities of their lives.
Then the orchestra musicians took their places on chairs brought from their own homes and began tuning their instruments. Where had they managed to hide these over the past years? It seemed a miracle that the war would have spared anything so delicate as a harp or violin. When all were ready, the church fell silent. The bundled forms onstage sat poised with bows raised, breaths held. And the conductor, a small man wearing a battered felt hat, raised his baton. The stillness intensified, and the silence had a particular starving quality. This was why the people were here. To hear music. It had been so long.
At once, the conductor jerked his baton upward and the orchestra gathered itself and dove in. The music, Beethoven’s Ninth, opened with a blast: violins, trumpet, an explosion loud enough to knock thought and worry from the mind. It was reminiscent of war—thundering footsteps, the rumble of tanks, the screech and crack of airplanes overhead, an exploding bomb. The audience sat at attention, gripping their seats. Something small and gentle might have lost them. Something tender and they might have begun to cry and never stopped. They were there, but they were not strong. They would do anything to protect themselves from sadness.
Martin was swept up in the sound—no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself. This music had been played and heard before and would be again, not only here in this church, but in places all over the world, by people living in different circumstances and different times. These musicians and this audience were allowed, for a fleeting instant, to climb on its back.
When it was over, no one spoke. The clapping faded, and the church was once again jammed with clumsy shuffling and cold. Frozen fingered, one of the violinists dropped his bow. An icicle of snot hung from the conductor’s nose.
But leaving the church, they found the night was blacker, the stars brighter, the outline of fence, roof, and road clearer and more beautiful—and the people’s faces looked oddly exposed.
In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time—and one of the only times—he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief, and guilt.
Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted—and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion. He will think of it every time he goes to a museum or a concert or a play with a long line of people waiting to get inside.
In the moment, though, he was simply buoyed along.
The walk home was magical. No one was glum. For this Christmas night they were lifted from the damning particularities of their own lives and invited to be a small piece of eternity.
Part II
Chapter Fourteen
Tollingen, May 1950