War with Russia
1916
‘What kind of dopes are they to keep coming that way?’
1917
‘Not so loud, voices carry in the night’
1918
‘The war is won, isn’t it?’
1922
‘Berlin is so far away and I miss you so much’
1924
‘Who are those dreadful men?’
1925
‘You don’t have to be a mathematician’
1927
‘That’s all they ask in return’
1929
‘There is nothing safer than a zeppelin’
1930
A family Christmas
1932
‘Was that more shouting in the street?’
1933
‘We think something is definitely brewing over there’
1934
‘Gesundheit!’
1936
‘Rinse and spit out’
1937
‘You know what these old cops are like’
1938
‘Being innocent is no defence’
1939
‘Moscow?’ said Pauli
1940
The sound stage
1941
‘It was on the radio’
1942
‘I knew you’d wait’
1943
‘Happy and victorious’
1944
‘We’re all serious’
1945
‘It’s a labour of love’
Introduction
This is how it started. It was Friday afternoon – exactly 2.20 pm – and the snow was falling. The flakes that hit the car’s windscreen were not the soft, watery sort that slide downwards and fade away like old soldiers. These were solid bullets of ice, perfectly formed and determined to stay put. These were German snowflakes. Our elderly Volvo was on the road heading west from Munich, with the cold waters of the Ammersee close at hand and my sons on the back seat politely starving to death. My wife was at the wheel. ‘The next place we see; we stop,’ I said. ‘It’s getting late. I don’t care if it’s just a currywurst van parked on the roadside.’
The ‘next place’ was the Gasthof Kramerhof. It was a typical Bavarian inn, with a large restaurant that attracted locals and a few well-kept rooms for travellers. It was sited well back from the road and had an extensive parking area, which is often a measure of an inn’s popularity. Now lunchtime had ended and there were no cars there. The loops of tyre tracks that marked their departure were now disappearing under the continuing snowfall. But in such a Gasthof all travellers are welcome and mealtime lasts all day. Soon we were relishing a Bavarian meal: kraftbrühe – clear soup – followed by pork cutlets in a sour cream sauce with spätzle on the same plate. Had I been better informed about German food I might have guessed that the owners were Schwabs, for these were the long square-sided ‘pasta’ that is a delight of Schwabian cooking.
Outside, the snow was conquering the world. The sky was steely grey and descending upon the treetops. Stacked on the Volvo’s oversized roof rack, our bags and boxes now looked like a scale model of the Alps. What else was there to do? We stayed there for the weekend. That’s all it took for the Kramerhof to become our home and we remained there for many months. From the hotel room we moved one floor higher where I set up my portable typewriter in the attic rooms originally furnished for a mother-in-law. It was cramped under the steeply sloping roof and I banged my head a lot but this was the sort of Germany I wanted to write about. All the events of the neighborhood were celebrated there under our noses, from weddings – complete with amateur brass band – to hunting-dinners from which the smell of wine-rich venison drifted upwards to reach us in the early hours of morning.
My wife’s fluent German impressed the lady in the village post office and we soon knew everything about everyone. There was enough social life to furnish a dozen lurid novels. Retired military men abounded. I met a relative of General Gehlen, one of the very few spies who influenced history. The Kramerhof food was wonderful, the customers were entertaining and the owners became friends. They allowed us into the well-ordered kitchen where we learned how to make Schwabian spätzle and much more.
Winter was a biography of the Germany I had come to know over the years. We had lived in Vienna and in an Austrian village near Salzburg, which was now not all that far away, and my sons spoke a strongly accented German. For many Germans, and many historians too, Germany and Austria do not have a separate existence. AJP Taylor, who taught me so much about German history, persuaded me to consider both in unison and for that reason the story of Winter begins in Vienna. One of our neighbours in Riederau village had a son writing for a newspaper in Vienna. At my request, he rummaged through the archives to find out what the weather was like in Vienna on ‘the final evening of the 1800s’. Now I had no excuse for delay.
I knew what I wanted to say; I had been planning it for years. My hesitation had come from the problems of continuity. In the beneficial absence of formal instruction in the skills of writing fiction, I found it natural to write sequences in ‘real time’. In my book conversations and physical actions as depicted were apt to take about the same time as the reader took in reading about them. Of course there were expansions and compressions so that only the highlights of dinner party chit-chat were necessary; split-second reactions were expanded to encompass thought and reactions. But now I was going to relate the events of fifty years; I faced many problems I never even guessed about. Somerset Maugham, a writer I much admired, would often write in the first person of a man who observed the events of which he wrote. Maugham’s voice was apt to bridge his narrative with ‘…it was three years before I was to see either of them again, and it was in very different circumstances’. As a reader I rather delighted in this voyeur writer but I didn’t feel confident enough to use such leaps in time. And the frantic pace of German history would not survive a leisurely survey.
I sought advice from my literary agents Jonathan and Ann Clowes – the most widely read friends I have – and examined several family saga novels, old; and new. There was a lot to learn. More than once I decided to abandon my project but while I was sorting and sifting my research
