A BITTER

PILL

Andrew Gimson talks to a Hungarian,

conscripted by the Wehrmacht, whose love for Germany has turned sour

Baden-Baden ANDOR Preyer, an aged and infirm Hun- garian living in Baden-Baden, got in touch with me when I was working as a journalist in Berlin and asked if I would translate a letter he had written to the Queen Moth- er. This is how I tried to render his Ger- man into English: May it please Your Majesty, With deepest respect and admiration I bow before a Queen who with unwearying dedi- cation and energy guided Britain to victory in the darkest days of the second world war.

I am a Hungarian and I assure Your Majesty that I and my people have always regarded the British royal family with affection, even when the overwhelming power of the Ger- mans made this difficult to express. While studying natural sciences at Budapest Uni- versity I was drafted against my will into the Hungarian army when it was under the com- mand of the German Wehrmacht. All my attempts to free myself from military service were in vain. It was war!

God helped me, because of my posting to a signals company, at least to be spared the worst horrors.

At that time I knew nothing of the German conception of justice, and did not realise this avaricious, power-obsessed and inhumane nation posed an explosive threat to the peo- ples of Europe. Churchill's remark comes to mind, that the Germans are either at your feet or at your throat. There could be no better description of them.

My naivety and good faith had bitter conse- quences. Despite my four years of enforced war service, and despite the grievous losses I suffered as a result — parents, family, home- land, property — the federal German gov- ernment in Bonn, and its courts, have denied me any compensation or help of the kind so generously given to war criminals and SS members.

My pension has turned out to be very small because, although I worked for 31 years as a civilian for the American occupying forces, the German authorities tell me my employ- ers only paid very low contributions on my behalf. My pension is only enough to pay the monthly rent. The small sum paid by the social-security office allows me — cut off despite my university education from cultur- al life — to vegetate from one day to the next until I die.

Still more disappointing than the injustice perpetrated by the government is the cold- ness shown by the people who answer the many letters I have written asking for help either with 'no' or with silence.

I do not believe that my war service for Ger- many has nothing to do with the Germans: I think service for the Fatherland concerns each one of them. For a good German, it cannot be a matter of indifference whether a former soldier is justly treated or not. . • .

I ask, Your Majesty, if there is any way in which you may be able to help me? I have the honour to be, Madam, Your Royal Highness's most humble and obedient ser- vant, Andor Preyer, former Hungarian sergeant, 81 years old

This letter produced a short reply from Captain Sir Alastair Aird, private secretary to the Queen Mother, saying she had read Mr Preyer's letter 'with sympathy' but was sure he would appreciate that she had 'no jurisdiction over government policy or decisions and is therefore not in a position to help you'. She had, however, forwarded the letter to the Foreign Office 'in case they may be able to give you some advice'.

Some months later the Foreign Office wrote to Mr Preyer, expressing sympathy with his predicament but pointing out that he wrote about 'a matter essentially for the German and Hungarian governments'. From an official point of view this is cer- tainly true, and readers may feel I was at fault in helping Mr Preyer to write a letter My wife's got no nose... which would waste people's time in Lon- don without leading to any improvement in his circumstances. The truth is I had by then become fond of him, and did not have the heart to refuse.

We were brought together by our shared aversion to Helmut Kohl. In March 1997 the magazine Der Spiegel published a hostile article by me about the then chancellor under the headline 'Kohl Is a Liar'. Many Germans wrote to express their agreement with this verdict, but Andor — I cannot go on referring to him as Mr Preyer — was the only correspondent with whom I stayed in touch. We spoke frequently on the tele- phone. He is a wonderful mixture of laugh- ter, idealism and savage indignation. We did not agree about the Germans: while I considered the German nation to be in much better shape than its political class, which disgusted me by its sheeplike confor- mity, Andor, who in his youth had taken the Germans for a people of the highest cul- ture, said that after 20 years of living among them he had come to the conclusion that he was 'not among friends' and the Germans were egoists, materialists and hypocrites.

'They're not so bad,' I would object.

'You're not so bitterly affected by their filthy behaviour as I am,' he would reply. 'I get nowhere because I'rn only one man.

When in the end I'm murdered, they'll call it a natural death. In the end they'll be rid of us all and then they'll be innocent, with a clean slate, and can say how good life is and how noble the Germans are. I should have been stronger and left, but now it's too late.'

Andor was certainly in great difficulties. Until the age of 79 he worked as a reception- ist in a hotel in Baden-Baden, and the extra income from this job enabled him to make ends meet. But then he fell down a flight of stairs at work and fractured his arm. The hotel's accident insurers paid him for three months, after which they said he was well enough to work, but his employers told him he was too great a health risk for them to take him back. He is now almost 83 and has heart, prostate and bowel conditions, which cause him great pain. He receives an old-age pension of about £350 a month (1,100DM), barely enough to cover the rent of his flat, and the social services pay him another £55 a month (176DM), together with a similar amount to settle his gas and electricity bills.

Most of his medical expenses are met by the compulsory health-insurance scheme to which he belongs, but he cannot possibly live on so little money and feels it is grossly unfair that the Germans will not take his four years of war service into account when calculating his pension. At the end of the war, when he was taken prisoner in Ger- many by the Americans, his family warned him on no account to return to Hungary, where most of his male relations perished in the labour camps set up by the Communists.

In the 1970s Andor applied to the West Ger- man government for the status of an expellee, which would have entitled him to compensation for the loss of his homeland, but was refused. He considers it grotesquely unjust — indeed, racist — that Hungarians of German descent who could not return home after the war were granted compensa- tion, whereas he, who fought alongside them, was not. One of the judges who decid- ed his case told him that since he did better in French than in German at school, he was plainly not devoted to German culture.

This summer I at last managed to make the journey to Baden-Baden to meet Andor. He received me one Saturday morning in his front room which, although he has been forced to sell his most valuable things, still gives an impression of surprising richness: pictures in large gilt frames, a desk and cof- fee table of inlaid wood, porcelain in glass- fronted cabinets, two samovars, a collection of minerals, huge oriental pots, one contain- mg a palm that reaches to the ceiling. Andor himself looked better than I had feared: a small, bright-eyed man who bus- tled about bringing tea and cake. He gave me copies of the letters he has received in response to his pleas for help from official Germany, including the President, the Chancellor, the speaker of parliament, the provincial government of Baden-Wiirttem- berg and the mayor of Baden-Baden. In every case they expressed great sympathy for his plight and regretted that the law prevented them doing anything for him, though the mayor of Baden-Baden did send him two free tickets for the baths.

I suggested to Andor that his case shows the corrupting influence of the welfare state, which relieves people of the moral obligation to help their neighbours, but is itself prevented by its own rules from responding as humane impulse would dic- tate to individual cases. Andor conceded there might be something in this, but was already pressing three of his most trea- sured books into my hands as a gift. One is a polemic against Goethe by a German Journalist, Tilman Jens, accusing that genius of behaving with inhuman coldness towards many who had a right to expect help from him. The second, Der Deutsche Mann, by a Swiss woman, Corinne Pulver, draws a portrait of German men as quite astoundingly self-centred and materialistic. The third is incomparably the most inspir- ing: the last letters sent from prison by Count Helmuth James von Moltke before his execution by the Nazis in January 1945. My host drew my attention to a remark in Moltke's letter of farewell to his sons, born in 1937 and 1941: 'From my school- days onwards I have devoted my whole life to fighting against the spirit of narrowness, violence, arrogance, intolerance and abso- lute, merciless thoroughness that lies in the Germans, and that has found its expression in the National Socialist state. I have also done my utmost to see that this spirit, with its wicked consequences such as national- ism taken to excess, racial persecution, h-re- ligion, materialism, will be overcome.' That night I read Moltke's last letters to his wife, which for clarity, insight, Christian faith and courage have hardly been equalled.

It was noticeable how often Moltke's name came up in Andor's conversation. 'They're ashamed of it,' he said of the offi- cial Germans who have refused to assist him, 'so they don't make connections with people who would help me. They don't help. They want to forget. Real Germans, like Count Moltke, would help.'

HOlderlin, Schiller, Kleist: they, too, are real Germans. When one talks of other good Germans to Andor, he concedes that a third of modern Germans are good. One such was Dr Clara Bender, who tried to help Andor when he studied medicine at Heidelberg in the 1960s. The struggle to earn a living and at the same time to quali- fy as a doctor proved too much for him and he abandoned his studies. Instead he went on working for the American armed forces, who expressed satisfaction with him in such roles as cafeteria annexe supervisor.

Disappointed love lies at the heart of Andor's bitter anger with the Germans. Perhaps something similar was felt in Britain after the outbreak of war in 1914. Andor believed the Germans were a peo- ple of poets and thinkers, and found instead an enrichissez-vous mentality, cou- pled with a refusal, except under American pressure, to compensate anyone they had harmed. To him, the American decision to help the West Germans get back on their feet after 1945 through Marshall Aid was a psychological disaster, 'the same as if I punished a murderer by giving him a sack of money'. It is certainly true, in my limit- ed experience, that the East Germans, who suffered hard under Russian occupation, are more at ease with themselves than many West Germans, who suppress beneath a deluge of material about the Holocaust the question of what individual Germans did between 1933 and 1945.

The rest of Andor's flat was on the floor above. The room where he sleeps has a sofa made up with sheets, and is crammed with books, papers and medicines. The pic- tures include the head of Jesus from Leonardo da Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper. Andor gave me lunch, cooked in his tiny kitchen next door, and I left him to his afternoon rest.

'No, it doesn't stand for Harry Potter.' Outside the abbey at the bottom of his road stand two war memorials: one to the ten men from the Lichtental suburb of Baden-Baden who fell in the Franco-Prus- sian war of 1870-71 and one to the 212 who perished in the first world war. No memorial can be seen to those who fell during the second world war. I walked to the casino through a park beside a rushing stream, past busts of Brahms and Clara Schumann. Invalids and tourists prome- naded in the summer heat. Outside the casino a well-dressed Croatian woman was begging. Wealthy Germans, few of them relaxed enough to be elegant, were gather- ing for that night's opera.

When I returned at six in the evening, Andor looked at death's door. He had a severe pain in his chest. I said I would go, but he would not hear of it. 'It's not certain we can meet again. We must try to say everything. When the other goes, you have the feeling there was still something you wanted to say to him. I'm each day alone. There's no one else I can speak to in this way. The Germans feel insulted. They ask me why I don't leave, not how they can cre- ate a humane society.' As he lay on the sofa, Andor told me about his life before the war. He was living in Budapest, studying science but also writing poetry. Countess Ilona Karolyi was his patron. She invited him to stay for a month in the summer in her villa. 'I lived in poems, in gardens, in lit- erature and collecting minerals,' he said. 'I was in paradise. I was 100 per cent naive.'

'You're still a bit naive.'

'Yes, I'm a bit naive,' he agreed. 'I didn't let myself be besmirched by the whole thing. I didn't want to go into the army because I'm not a military type at all. I asked the countess if she could help me to avoid military service, but she said it was war and I would have to go. She lost everything. Her husband was impris- oned by the Russians and died. She went to Brazil and later on to England. The Red Cross traced her for me to Seaton in Devon. Think how I could have lived in Hungary without the war, helped by the countess. Through her influence my life would have taken quite another turn. What circles I would have moved in! But God did not want it. Through prosperity you cannot reach spiritual maturity. The spiritual life is sidelined. My hard fate has always strengthened me. I've never com- plained against God. He wants me to set my eyes on eternal things. In great need He has always sent me help.'

On Sunday morning I went to say good- bye to Andor. He suggested we go to the abbey church at the bottom of the hill and pray for a few minutes. Then I bought him a copy of the previous day's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — he is an avid reader of the German press — and boarded the bus for the station.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator.