Stained Glass Read Free Page B

ambiguous results of so heroic an effort. The Americans saw a Europe largely enslaved by Allied victory—and unconcerned about Germany. No, never count on allies beyond a certain point, he said: only Germans can reshape their own destiny. Only Germans can come, would come, to the aid of their brothers in the East. Faced with such resolve, the Russians would necessarily yield; even as, eventually, the Nazis had yielded.
    Always the questions were practical, always he gave the same answer: How, in the absence of armed help from the West, could he effect the liberation of East Germany? Always he answered: by spiritual mobilization.
    Did he mean the satyagraha preached by Gandhi?
    Spiritual mobilization, Axel said, means the mobilization of all one’s strength. Foremost is the will to live as free men. Any means appropriate to the realization of that end are licit—from peaceful resistance to ultimate weaponry.
    Would he be more explicit?
    In due course, he would say, and his smile was without smugness, without affectation, though he would then fasten or unfasten (his only mannerism) the two bottom buttons of his rusty-green tweed jacket, a perfect cut on his tall frame, and his light-brown hair would respond sluggishly as he shook his head to the right, his lightly chiseled, sensitive features, and sad eyes, struggling in coordination with his thoughts to frame the answer in a way so many of his followers sought.
    All in good time, he answered, as if to say: Allow me to trouble myself, on your behalf, on these technical matters. I shall not let you down.
    When he rose at his alma mater to announce that if the Occupation Forces would not deliver an ultimatum to the Russians to reopen the road to Berlin, the German people should do so, he was suddenly a conspicuous figure on the European scene, a man not yet thirty years old. Until then no national notice of him had been taken, only here and there a character piece in a local newspaper about the aristocratic curio who dreamed of irredentism and talked as if he would smash the Red Army with the might of his left fist, trained at the gymnasium at Heidelberg. These efforts at caricature failed when undertaken by reporters who went to hear him talk. They could no longer bring off conventional ideological denigration. (“Count Wintergrin seems to have forgotten the horrors of war …”) But after Heidelberg, all the major papers in Europe suddenly began to take notice of Axel Wintergrin and his—his what? they asked themselves. Here was someone who, biologically, could have been the grandson of Adenauer, the de facto leader of the country (with his Christian Democratic Union, serving as chancellor under the authority of the joint occupation command). And when direct elections came in November 1952, Adenauer would surely win—with the Social Democrats under Erich Ollenhauer taking perhaps one-third of the seats. Germany’s future would be a generation’s oscillation of power between these two parties, the analysts joined in predicting. There was no room for the so-called “Reunification “Party of this Wintergrin. Why so much fuss over a quixotic Heidelberg Manifesto? Why had groups in every major city in Germany suddenly invited the young count to address them: elated veterans’ organizations, cynical student associations, inquisitive business associations, wary labor unions—even, here and there, always discreetly, organizations of civil servants … why the fascination with him?
    The disciplined left, and of course the papers in East Germany, had the ready answer. Wintergrin was this season’s Hitler!
    In late December of 1949 Neues Deutschland ran a large feature section triumphantly announcing that a search in Sweden revealed that there was no record that Axel Wintergrin had been detained in a Swedish concentration camp. The article suggested he had feigned opposition to Hitler for the sole purpose of sparing himself the