The old man and the new order

Alan Wall

THE KAISER'S LAST KISS by Alan Judd HatperCollins, £16.99, pp. 184, ISBN 00007124465 0 ne might call it the Gulliver effect. Lemuel in Brobdingnag is tiny and represents no threat, so he can see the vast creatures about him in all their grotesquerie, and with impunity. The same intimacy in regard to the high and mighty can be achieved by fiction. Those figures who have 'passed into history' gather a curious lustre from the process, even the monstrous creatures of the Third Reich, but fiction (using documentation astutely) can creep up close enough to scrape the lustre off again. Fame is defamiliarised into humanity, or its egregious deformation. This is one of the things Alan Judd achieves in this highly accomplished novel. So an SS officer gazes upon Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfiihrer, the man whom Hitler called the Ignatius Loyola of the Party, but what he sees is this:

In profile, his chin receded almost seamlessly into flaccid and wrinkled skin. His cap, with its prominent Death's Head badge, looked suddenly too big for him. Krebbs was unwillingly reminded of a boy in man's uniform.

Krebbs is the SS officer and his mission is to bring the watching eye of Nazism to Huis Doom, the country house in Holland to which Kaiser Wilhelm II was exiled after coming a disappointing second in the Great War.

The Nazis want to know what the old man thinks about the new regime in the fatherland. Not much, is the short answer. They look like a grubby lot from his vantage point in exile and genealogy. In fact he describes Adolf and his cronies as a 'bunch of shirted gansters'. Dangerous talk, even for an ex-Kaiser. He behaves regally, indeed imperiously, as might be expected from one of the last great crowns of Europe.

The book, without giving away its intricate and superbly crafted plot, has at its centre the figure of the old man. The Nazis want to make sure he can't be used for purposes inimical to the new Germany. Britain, it appears, might have an interest. Churchill appears to feel that the Kaiser could well regard with distaste that bunch of shirted gangsters who have claimed ownership rights over his patrimony. Old Willie is suddenly an object of interest to the great powers, and is evidently not averse to the attention.

He is portrayed as a splendid, if somewhat hollow, relic. His famously withered arm, and his manful overcoming of any disabilities it might have brought his way, play their part in the plot, as do his extraordinary collection of 300 military uniforms and his medals, not one of which (the young SS man can't help remarking to himself) he has any right to wear, never having led his people in battle. In fact, hie only ever hears the report of guns while slaughtering game, which he does with an unnerving gusto, keeping detailed records of all his annihilations, as his wife records:

Dear Willie, meanwhile, was detailing some of the 33,967 birds and other animals recorded in his game book during his first 25 years of shooting. His memory was formidable still — who else could remember by heart 9,643 pheasant, 54 capereaillie, 16,188 hare, 581 'unspecified beasts"?

Princess Hermine is a woman distinguished solely by her looks, which are now sadly entering the sere and yellow phase, throwing her back on the resources of her mind, which are extremely slender, even by the exiguous standards of the uniformed characters surrounding her. Devoted to her Willie and his ludicrous pretensions of returning to Germany to re-ascend the long-abandoned throne, she plots and connives with Himmler and others, to no purpose whatsoever.

teach you differences,' cries Kent to the wretched Oswald in King Lear, meaning that he will show the necessary gradations of social order to the little upstart. These gradations also feature prominently here. The Nazis are largely a

low-bred lot, a fact not lost on the Kaiser and his entourage. Judd delineates these social distinctions and their invisible ruptures with the subtlety and precision of Jane Austen gazing on the Hampshire gentry.

Yet the greatest achievement of the book is its portrayal of the variegated human quality of Nazism, and of the mentality of occupation. There is an understandable tendency to portray the psychology of Nazism as monolithic and homogeneous, as though the mind were always goose-stepping along with the boots of the soldiers. Here the young SS officer is gradually humanised, removed from the casting of type into believable individuality. For him, because of a personal encounter, the figure of the Jew ceases to be an abstract and homogeneous human quantity to be expelled or exterminated, and becomes enfleshed before his eyes, as he falls in love with Akki, the Dutch maid, who reveals to him her racial origins, so that her Jewishness becomes inseparable in his mind from her sexuality, which beguiles him to the point of obsession.

In a small compass, Judd manages to bring home the reality of the war with

remarkable vividness. Reichsfiihrer Himmler with his gold pince-nez and his mistress might seem almost parodic to begin with, but he ceases to be so once he starts to explain the evolving plans for dealing with the Jews. The beginnings of a scheme for extermination are admittedly still crude at this point, involving a dose of concentrated phenol injected directly into the heart. We have not yet reached Wannsee and Reinhard Heydrich, but we're certainly on the way. This casts a shadow over the Kaiser's innocence, for despite his fondness for England (he was after all Queen Victoria's grandson) he believes fervently that what he calls JudaEngland needs cleansing of both its Jews and its complacency.

History has had a bore-hole drilled in it here as we witness these Nazis in both their Brobdingnagian physical proportions and the Lilliputian dimensions of their spirits. We can even see the point of Churchill's wish to get old Kaiser Bill over to dear old Blighty as a propaganda coup.

Interestingly, the old man is also particularly keen on what he refers to as a Zollverein — or what he would now have to call, give or take a few Frenchmen, the EU. Mosley was an early proponent of this too, in his 1950s magazine The European, so it would appear to appeal to all devotees of Teutonic order, How the likes of ex-Young Liberal Peter Hain subsequently fell in line with such a transcontinental phalanx is anybody's guess.

If Alan Judd has any extraneous obsessions as a writer, he keeps them very much to himself. There is not a spare word here. If you start, you'll finish.