Darkness into Light Box Set Page 2

  They both sat at Walther’s desk, looking down at the deserted windswept factory, sipping harsh brandy from ugly glasses.

  ‘It must not finish here,’ Walther said. ‘I’ve invested too much.’

  ‘Let’s hope none of the workers are ill,’ said Martin Kiliani. ‘Let’s hope they all

  come back.’

  Rathenau yawned massively. It made Kiliani laugh. Rathenau laughed with him.

  ‘Go on, go home,’ Rathenau said. ‘It doesn’t take two of us to watch a Prussian wind blow.’

  ‘Oh, you do have a turn of phrase, sir, you really do,’ Kiliani said, only half mockingly. ‘There’s one for your book of aphorisms, then.’

  ‘Oh, shut up’

  ‘Oooh. And there’s you supposed to be an enlightened capitalist, darling.’ Kiliani

  swigged back the rest of his brandy in one. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘Get me another brandy, there’s a good girl. I’m so bloody tired I might just do what you want me to do.’

  ‘Oh well, in that case. I’ll open another bottle.’

  Rathenau fell asleep at his desk some time after midnight. He awoke to find Martin Kiliani coming back up to the balcony from downstairs.

  ‘I think it’s working. That damned acid has stopped bubbling. The air’s quite fresh

  down there.’

  ‘Tomorrow…’

  ‘Yes, it’s always tomorrow with you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shut up! Tomorrow, we’ll switch the processes to natrium and ferrosilesium. See if that will work on a lower voltage.’

  Kiliani raised an ironic toast and swallowed more Weinbrand. ‘OK boss. Whatever

  you say.’

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Rathenau.’

  Walther made an impatient wince. ‘Call me Walther, when we’re alone. And use the du form’

  ‘Up yours!’

  ‘Martin, look, it’s my father’s birthday, soon. December 11th. Why don’t you come

  over and help me celebrate it?’

  Kiliani smiled mischievously. ‘What, just the two of us?’

  ‘Precisely. I’ll make you a meal and run some of my ideas past you.’

  ‘Can’t wait. What, your ideas about abolishing the proletariat?’

  ‘Making them unnecessary, yes. So man can have joy in work and produce only the

  goods society needs.’

  Kiliani muttered under his breath. ‘Patronising homo.’ And then, aloud. ‘So when do we create the aesthetic state, then? All your big ideas.’ He gave a quite passable imitation of Rathenau’s honeyed tones ‘ “The years of labour requisite for some delicate embroidery, have been filched from the clothing of the poorest among us” Load of windy bollocks. So when do we win freedom for renewed creation, then. Eh?’

  Rathenau laughed. ‘As soon as I can reorganise the world. Will you come? Come to dinner? Please. Martin. My dear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell the wife and kids?’

  ‘As little as possible.’

  Chapter Two

  Carl Fürstenberg visited the Bitterfeld factory on behalf on the AEG board at least once a month. Fürstenberg was exceptionally tall, almost, but not quite, as tall as Rathenau. He was mild of manner and slow of speech. He tended to wear grey or navy suits, with or without chalk stripe and an American style fedora hat.

  On this particular occasion he was far from happy, evidenced by a bloodhound droop to all his heavy features, but especially the eyes. He faced Walther in the tiny

  Director’s Office, backing onto the balcony overlooking the factory.

  The reason for his anxiety was the Chemical Factory Griesheim Electro, known as

  CFGE. It was producing lye and chlorinated lime by electrolysis in nearby Greppin, also on the lignite field, and was considerably more successfully than the AEG plant was producing anything at all.

  In particular, they appeared to have stabilised lye production at higher voltages, precisely the problem which had caused the AEG factory to shut down completely, albeit briefly. It was lye, as Fürstenberg was pointing out, though he hardly needed to, which was regarded as the most promising application of electrolysis, at least at this early stage. The potential for use in cleaning materials and even foodstuffs was huge, if production volume and costs could be stabilised.

  ‘How did they do it?’ Rathenau moaned. His lightning mind ran over and over the

  processes they could have used, the adjustments they could have made…

  ‘We don’t know,’ Fürstenberg said. ‘But we are quite sure that they have. In at

  least two other applications we have good reason to believe that they are also well ahead of us. If they reach potential manufacturers before we do…’

  ‘…why should the manufacturers ever change to us?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  At that moment, with the gloomy laid in front of them, the secretary Hugo Geitner came in and sat down uninvited. So that was two of Emil’s men in the room. Walther felt outnumbered.

  ‘The outlook is poor,’ Geitner said without preamble, uncharacteristically blunt for him.

  ‘They have taken out quite a few patents,’ Fürstenberg murmured.

  Rathenau nearly yelled out ‘HOW?’ but realised it would sound too despairing. His

  intuition told him that a crisis meeting had been sprung on him.

  He remembered the day – 1893 it was – when he had cajoled a sceptical Emil into investing two million marks in an Elektrochemische Werke at Bitterfeld. The proviso was that he, Walther, would head it, would guarantee its success. And now…

  Closure may not yet be quite imminent but a plan of some sort was imperative, to keep the board happy. If not a plan at least an idea, a way forward.

  ‘I’ll arrange a meeting with Hugo Stinnes,’ Walther said crisply. ‘I’ll suggest co-operation with CFGE.’

  ‘A merger?’ said Fürstenberg, doubtfully.

  ‘Most certainly not. I said “co-operation” and that is what I meant. Co-operation right across the board, with production, with sales, everything.’

  ‘Why on earth should they agree to that?’ The normally diffident Geitner sounded

  almost contemptuous. ‘They are ahead of us in every respect. I’m sorry Dr Rathenau, but that makes no sense.’

  Rathenau stared at him with a faint smile. Geitner dropped his gaze first. Rathenau addressed Carl Fürstenberg as if Geitner had not spoken. ‘I will arrange a series of meetings with Stinnes. We will go through everything, top to bottom. Leave it to me.’

  Geitner started to speak again, but Fürstenberg waved him to silence. ‘When the first meeting is arranged, I will report to the AEG Board that that is our plan.’

  ‘Plan with your support?’

  Fürstenberg hesitated.

  ‘Come on Carl! I need this. I’ve been buried in this hole for over six years. Don’t tell me it was all for nothing, please. Please! Carl, I’m begging you!’

  Fürstenberg shook his head, embarrassed, impatient. ‘Yes. Get one meeting with

  Stinnes and I’ll back you with your father and the Board.’

  *

  Rathenau’s letter to Stinnes, his initial contact with the man who was to instigate his death, survives among his papers. It is worth quoting in full because it illustrates his characteristic self-abnegation when he wanted something:

  ‘My dear Herr Stinnes,

  I have long been an admirer of your industrial and commercial achievements, in the Ruhr. We are of the same generation, you and I, the coming men, and so I wonder that we have not met before. I ask you most warmly to give me the opportunity to get to know you personally. Would you give me the pleasure of joining me next Friday for luncheon at the German Automobile Club, in Pariser Platz? If you can come, I require no response.

  With warm good wishes,

  Yours, Walther Rathenau.’

  Carl Fürstenberg did indeed ask the AEG Board t
o await the outcome, as he had promised, adding a personal plea that young Walther be given a little time to save the precarious situation.

  To Rathenau’s immense but well-disguised relief, Hugo Stinnes appeared promptly at the Automobile Club, an exclusive wood-panelled private members club in the centre of Berlin. Over stodgy food, more plentiful than refined, which neither of them had the slightest interest in, Walther Rathenau and one of his murderers shrewdly and genially took each other’s measure.

  They had much in common: Stinnes, too, had been born into an industrial dynasty and had struggled from the shadow of a successful father into the light. Stinnes was from the Ruhr; the family wealth rested on the bedrock of coal. He was a leading figure in the Rhine-Westphalian Coal Syndicate; a dominating presence in the Coal Bureau. Yet he was young, four years younger than Walther.

  They had a similar configuration of beard round the lower jaw, though Hugo had

  managed to retain more of the hair on his head than Walther had. The main physical

  difference, naturally enough, was height. Hugo Stinnes was a stocky, bull of a man.

  Fully extended he reached mid-way up Rathenau’s sternum.

  But the affect, or aura, of the two men was radically different: Rathenau always had the air of an aristocrat, Stinnes that of a worker.

  It was said of Stinnes that his face resembled a piece of coal from one of his own mines. He had trained as a mining apprentice; a Praktikum, not a theoretical study. He was of the people; or so he presented himself. He was always proud that he could drive through the poorest workers’ quarters of any German city in his automobile without arousing resentment.

  Rathenau, thoroughly at ease, not only came straight to the point, he took the bull

  Stinnes by the horns, admitting flatly that the Stinnes concern CFGE was quite capable of wiping out the AEG concern in Bitterfeld within months if not weeks.

  ‘Quick as that, eh?’ Stinnes said, failing to mask genuine surprise.

  Rathenau argued fluently that of course the elimination of a competitor represented a business gain but in this case that gain would be strictly short-term. Because of the vast amounts of power required to drive energy in the new age and the consequent rapid need for new power stations, the future belonged to large companies – or at the very least agglomerations of small ones.

  Stinnes’ CFGE may indeed be able to eliminate the Bitterfeld plant but it would soon need an alliance with a larger corporation. The overall direction of German industry was toward consolidation, a direction mapped not least by the Stinnes family and the other Ruhr magnates. Stinnes needed not only AEG’s new power stations but its distribution capacity, too.

  Rathenau deftly suggested that AEG was a better friend than enemy, offering

  amusing anecdotes (not entirely invented) of his beloved father’s ability to crush smaller competitors and even suppliers who resisted his clever desire for vertical integration.

  Stinnes knew of some of these cases. Indeed, Emil’s early spotting of the need to control every aspect of business from raw material to point of sale was widely admired.

  The main battle, then, was quickly won. Co-operation it would be.

  Co-operation at a price. Rathenau had to surrender the lye production by electrolysis. Although he had struggled with this technically, it was widely held to be the most profitable application. He was left with highways and byways; aluminium, and even some of the more distant prospects he had studied in his student days under August Kundt at Munich – chrome, natrium and ferrosilicium. He felt he was going backwards.

  The production lines at Bitterfeld would need to be re-organised. Some workers, perhaps as much as a third of the workforce, would have to be dispensed with.

  Rathenau thought of Martin Kiliani. He would never understand. He would think him a hypocrite. The champion of the proletariat laying off workers. And perhaps, Rathenau thought, perhaps he would be right.

  Chapter Three

  The letters, unpleasant letters, blackmailing letters, had been plaguing Rathenau’s drab Bitterfeld life for some months. They were hand-scrawled in pencil, block capitals on cheap paper. Put into equally cheap envelopes, they were really more notes than letters. They consisted of a common insulting term for homosexuals. Only one had referred to his Jewish race. Sometimes they mentioned Kiliani by name, more often they referred to ‘an honest German worker.’

  The sums demanded were, to Rathenau, surprisingly small - twenty marks usually, once it was ten, only twice as much as fifty. They always instructed that the money be placed in the envelope and the envelope replaced where Rathenau found it. The procedure specifically, and ingeniously, involved the return of the threatening notes, so that Rathenau did not possess any of them and could not prove the blackmail, even if he wished to, which he did not.

  The letters were left on his desk or occasionally, when he started to lock the office, pushed under the door. The envelope with the threatening note and the money was collected overnight. The one time he had hidden in the building, watching the office door from concealment, the envelope had not been collected. The next note threatened exposure if Rathenau tried such behaviour again.

  The blackmail made Rathenau even more miserable than he had been before, which he thought was not possible. Exposure as a homosexual, of course, would mean the end of any public or working life. He lost weight; his insomnia became chronic. He broke off all but formal work contact with Martin Kiliani, which made him suffer even more, though Kiliani himself seemed hardly to notice.

  The demands were becoming more frequent, at first every couple of months they were now arriving fortnightly. He never seriously considered refusing payment.

  But for once he had forgotten the blackmail when Geitner brought him news that Carl Fürstenberg had arrived. This was another crisis meeting, perhaps the final one. Stinnes had indeed taken to heart Rathenau’s honeyed lectures on the need for co-operation, but he had just signed a co-operation agreement with Siemens-Halske, leaving AEG out in the cold.

  With only the rump of unprofitably expensive electrolysis applications, Bitterfeld was in the red. The few patents he had managed to take out were proving an expensive mistake, as others had found more efficient processes. The lignite seams were not as thick as AEG had been led to believe. Lignite costs had actually gone up, not down as they had hoped, even with regular bulk orders.

  ‘I lack the constitution for this work’, Walther thought to himself. His mind a white mist, he fled his office and ran toward the stairs, as if heading off Carl Fürstenberg were to head off disaster. He had long planned a return to the artistic life, either as a painter or a writer or both. He should never have contemplated anything else.

  They had grown careless, Martin Kiliani and another man, a red-headed nonentity called Knapp. They were opening the envelope and taking out his money there on the stairs outside his office as Walther passed them. Walther shot Kiliani a glance. It was not angry - more surprised, even with a touch of amusement. Kiliani blushed. He muttered ‘Sorry. Sorry Walther’ but so softly that Rathenau heard the voice but not the words.

  Fürstenberg, once intercepted and ushered into the office, was cold and formal. He

  insisted on waiting for the secretary, Hugo Geitner, before saying anything at all. During the uneasy silence, while Walther twisted and fidgeted in his chair, he had the distinct feeling that Geitner knew as well as Fürstenberg what was about to be said.

  The second Geitner appeared, muttering apologies, Fürstenberg intoned what was clearly a prepared speech. The AEG factory at Bitterfeld stood weeks, perhaps even days, before bankruptcy. Fortunately, a tenant had been found, prepared to lease the

  premises, so some losses could be recouped.

  Walther was to travel to Berlin immediately, to see Emil. A car had been sent for him, it was waiting outside. Walther was to leave immediately. Fürstenberg would make a brief address to the staff, leaving Hugo Geitner to discuss detailed arrangements. Most, but not all of
the workers would lose their jobs.

  *

  Walther was in Berlin later that night. His meeting with Emil was brief. He had been appointed to the AEG Main Board, Emil said. His salary was to be a massive 15,000 Marks per annum, with a one-and-a-half percent share of all AEG profits. His specific responsibility was to supervise the commissioning and building of power stations and transport systems across the world. Much of AEG’s future would rest on his shoulders.

  ‘Thank you, Papa,’ Walther said.

  He was thirty-two years of age at this point.

  PART II: THE GREAT WAR 1914- 1918

  Chapter Four

  Walther produced a really superb self-portrait sketch in the last days of peace in Europe. It showed his upper body in raffish leather jacket and cap, black goatee-beard slicked, with a roll-up cigarette dangling between his lips, the dome of his head prematurely bald. This was the outfit and the look he wore to drift incognito among the homosexual demi-monde of Berlin:

  There was the Café Dallas – also known as the Angel’s Palace – in Neue- Schönhauserstrasse. Reese’s Restaurant, bathed in its red light. Albert’s Cellar in Weinmeisterstrasse, where the regulars, who were mainly criminals, were so regular they had their mail sent there. The Cigar Box, a place whose very name, in the semiotic of the half-world, means burglar. Walther used to say it was the best place in Berlin to pick up an S-hook, with which you could open anything, anything at all.

  But the hearts of Kirsch the Burglar, Tegeler Willy, Hartmut Plaas, or Apache Fritz could not be opened with an S-hook; they could not be opened at all. Walther had tried, in bed and out.

  The others, nameless and numerous and transient as waves in the sea, were met and

  engaged at the all-night steam baths at the Admiral’s Palace in Friedrichstrasse. For just twenty marks per night, there were blue-eyed blonds of the Aryan race filling the place - the Siegfried types, as Kirsch the Burglar and Tegeler Willy, Hartmut Plaas and Apache Fritz all were, and as all Walther’s lovers past and future were - except brown-eyed, brown-haired Kiliani from Bitterfeld.