A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

Today, he said, as never before, Germany was the plaything of her allies. They had bought her, now they were selling her. This was a fact, Karfeld said, he would not deal in theory. There were too many theories in Bonn already, he explained, and he did not propose to add to the confusion. This was fact, and it was necessary, if painful, to debate among good and reasonable friends how Germany’s allies had achieved this strange state of affairs. Germany was rich, after all: richer than France, and richer than Italy. Richer than England, he added casually, but we must not be rude to the English for the English won the war after all, and were a people of uncommon gifts. His voice remained wonderfully reasonable as he recited all the English gifts: their mini-skirts, their pop singers, their Rhine Army that sat in London, their Empire that was falling apart, their national deficit… without these English gifts, Europe would surely fail. Karfeld had always said so.

Here they laughed; it was a warming, angry laugh, and Kar­feld, shocked and perhaps the tiniest fraction disappointed that these beloved sinners, whom God had appointed him in his humility to instruct, should fall to laughing in the temple; Karfeld waited patiently until it died.

How then, if Germany was so rich, if she possessed the largest standing army in Europe, and could dominate the so-called Common Market, how was it possible for her to be sold in public places like a whore?

Leaning back in the pulpit, he removed his spectacles and made a cautious, pacifying gesture of the hand, for there were noises now of protest and indignation, and Karfeld quite clearly did not care for this at all. We must try to resolve this question in a pious, reasonable and wholly intellectual manner, he warned, without emotion and without rancour, as befits good friends! It was a plump, round hand and it might have been webbed, for he never separated his fingers, but used the whole fist singly like a club.

In seeking, then, a rational explanation for this curious ­and, for Germans at least, highly relevant – historical fact, objectivity was essential. In the first place – the fist shot upward again – we had had twelve years of Nazism and thirty-five years of anti-Nazism. Karfeld did not understand what was so very wrong about Nazism that it should be punished eternally with the whole world’s hostility. The Nazis had persecuted the Jews: and that was wrong. He wished to go on record as saying it was wrong. Just as he condemned Oliver Cromwell for his treatment of the Irish, the United States for their treatment of the blacks and for their campaigns of genocide against the Red Indians and the yellow peril of South East Asia; just as he condemned the Church for its persecution of heretics, and the British for the bombing of Dresden, so he condemned Hitler for what he had done to the Jews; and for importing that British invention, so successful in the Boer War: the con­centration camp.

Directly in front of him Turner saw the young detective’s hand softly feel for the partition of his leather coat; he heard again the little crackle of the radio. Once more he strained his eyes, scanning the crowd, the balcony, the alleys; once more he searched the doorways and the windows; and there was nothing. Nothing but the sentinels posted along the roof­tops and the militia waiting in their vans; nothing but a count­less throng of silent men and women, motionless as God’s anointed before the Presence of the Word.

Let us examine, Karfeld suggested – since it will help us to arrive at a logical and objective solution to the many questions which presently assail us – let us examine what happened after the war. After the war, Karfeld explained, it was only just that the Germans should be treated as criminals; and, because the Germans had practised racism, that their sons and grandsons should be treated as criminals too. But, because the Allies were kind people, and good people, they would go some way towards rehabilitating the Germans: as a very special treat, they would admit them to Nato.

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