He didn’t study, although Olga would have liked it if he had studied alongside her. Whenever he read anything, he soon grew impatient, feeling that the plot could get to the dénouement, the idea to the point more quickly. His tutor had spoken of Nietzsche, the death of God, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence, and Herbert hoped Nietzsche would provide him with answers. Wasn’t God dead for him too? Didn’t he too wish to surpass himself? Wasn’t he, too, familiar with the recurring cycle of country life?

  But he soon found Nietzsche exhausting as well, and it was enough for him to pick up one or two turns of phrase and drop them into his conversation. He talked about the two castes, a higher and a lower, without which there could be no culture; about the strength and beauty of pure races; about the fruitfulness of solitude; about the chosen man, the noble man, and the Übermensch, who grows into greatness and at the same time in depth and terribleness. He decided that he would become an Übermensch, that he would not stop or rest, that he would make Germany great and become great with Germany, even if it required him to be cruel to himself and to others.

  These great words rang hollow to Olga. But Herbert’s cheeks were glowing and his eyes shone, and she couldn’t help looking at him with love.

  They didn’t sleep with each other all year. No one would have held it against the son of the lord of the manor if he’d had a dalliance with a village girl, and the villagers would have overlooked any dalliances their daughters had with him. But Herbert wasn’t the son of the lord of the manor to Olga, and she wasn’t a village girl to him. Nor was their relationship like that of a son and a daughter of the manor or like two children of a middle-class background. They had found each other in the space between the classes and didn’t feel bound by their conventions. They were alone in the spring and summer at the edge of the forest and in winter in the patron’s box; they could have slept with each other, and decided not to. They took their time.

  They kissed and cuddled, discovered each other, warmed themselves on each other, and couldn’t take their hands off each other, until Olga would extricate herself from their embrace because she wanted to study. If Herbert had not restrained himself, if he had come, he would turn away, relieved, spent, and resentful, and would leap to his feet to run off or, in winter, to storm off on his skis.

  10

  On New Year’s Eve the biggest party in the district was held at the Schröder estate. Even neighbors from the old aristocracy came, and Herbert’s father wore his Iron Cross and revived his hopes of joining the nobility. They were celebrating not only the start of the new year, but also the successes of the old: the Civil Code, the initiation of telegraph traffic between Germany and America, the Blue Riband awarded to the MS Deutschland, the raising of the German flag in the new colony of Samoa, and the fact that no Chinese would dare even to look askance at a German ever again. Germany was finally taking its rightful place in the world.

  At midnight there was a spectacular fireworks display; a pyrotechnician from Königsberg fired off red and white aerial bombs, rockets and fountains against the black sky, and a few blue ones too, because Britain and France were to be honored as well. Hadn’t the World Exhibition in Paris shown that the young century promised a great future for all the European powers? Herbert’s father had speculated successfully with chemical and electricity shares and could afford the extravagant fireworks.

  Herbert had wanted to invite Olga, but Viktoria had persuaded her parents that Olga’s presence would damage her standing with the young people from the old aristocracy. Herbert responded by announcing that he would not attend the party either, and stood firm in the face of Viktoria’s tears, his mother’s pleas, and his father’s orders, until Olga persuaded him not to provoke his parents unnecessarily. What if they were to forbid him to meet her?

  However, the whole village came to the estate for the fireworks, and the people didn’t stay on the drive and the court in front of the house; they came around the side of the house to the big terrace where the guests stood looking out over the park, in which the water fountain sparkled as the rockets and aerial bombs rose up into the sky. At first the villagers kept their distance from the guests; then, in their enthusiasm at the marvelous illuminations, they pressed farther and farther forward until they were standing beside and among them. The guests pretended not to notice, and Herbert’s parents pretended not to see Herbert and Olga standing side by side, holding hands and whispering, “Happy New Year!”

  It was a happy new year. Olga passed the entrance exam to the state teacher-training college in Posen. She passed with distinction and was awarded a free place in the student dormitory. Herbert was proud of Olga, jealous of the importance that studying and knowledge had for her, and discontented when he thought how independent she had become—independent of family, of other people’s opinions, of him. She may have been right when she said they could never marry, but he didn’t want to accept the reason why, and all he could think was that she didn’t need him. Only when he joined the Guards regiment, after barely managing to pass his exams, was he able to forget his jealousy and malaise and be as proud of himself as he was of Olga.

  He sent her a tinted photograph of himself in a blue jacket with red collar and cuffs, white trousers, and a red and blue hat with a little black peak, almost like the caps students wore. He also sent her a photograph of himself in field gray with a golden spiked helmet. She thought he looked good whatever he wore: just tall enough not to be a small man, sturdy and powerful, his angular face cheerful and determined. She loved his eyes: blue and clear, as if free of doubt, but sometimes also with a lost, yearning look that aroused her tender feelings.

  The photographs arrived accompanied by a fountain pen. It was black, with “F. Soennecken” engraved on the barrel, which, once the nib was unscrewed, was filled with a pipette. How beautifully it wrote! The upward stroke was thin and the downward stroke thick; even when Olga had corrected something or crossed it out, it still looked good, and she soon stopped making final copies of her letters to Herbert and simply sent them off. He had bought her the fountain pen, as he had promised, from his first pay packet.

  She sent him a photograph too. She was wearing a wide black skirt and a white tunic with red piping; her neck and arms were bare. It was reform movement clothing, which Olga had sewn herself. Her hair was in a loose bun, and she wasn’t wearing makeup, just a little powder, because her face grew red and blotchy when she was excited. She looked proud—perhaps she was proud, because she was different from the other young girls and had more than just men and fashion in her head.

  11

  After two years of training, she qualified as a teacher and took up her first position in the autumn—at her old school. Neither she nor the local school board was happy about this, but smallpox had broken out in the village where she was supposed to go, and her old teacher had died suddenly. At least Olga didn’t have to live with her grandmother: she moved into the teacher’s apartment in the schoolhouse.

  She missed Herbert. The school, the church, the houses, the paths, the forest—all were full of memories. Some were of sad occasions: corporal punishment by her grandmother, humiliation by the village children, futile petitions to pastor and teacher to recommend her to the girls’ secondary school. Memories of happy times with Herbert and Viktoria had been spoiled by Viktoria’s hurtful withdrawal. The hours she and Herbert had spent together on the edge of the forest, at the hunting lodge, and in the patron’s box remained good memories—and for this very reason Olga missed Herbert terribly.

  Since they had parted ways, she to teacher-training college, he to the Guards regiment, they had hardly seen each other. Occasionally he had passed through Posen on the way home and had waited for her outside the training college; a few times the father of a friend, a fellow student, had invited the two young women on a trip to Berlin and had dropped her off outside Herbert’s barracks. Neither of them ever knew when they might manage to be in the same place; their meetings had been impromptu, their embraces hasty, their assurances of love anxious.

  In October, Herbert came back to the estate for three weeks. He had volunteered for the colonial force in German South West Africa and was on leave until they were due to depart. Olga was teaching; she wanted to do her work especially well in the beginning, to prepare everything, go over everything, and help the pupils as she herself had not been helped. She wanted to find a pupil she could get into the girls’ secondary school, one to whom she could give the necessary encouragement and for whom she could secure a free place.

  But for those three weeks none of this mattered. What mattered was when, where, for how long, and how safely she and Herbert could see each other. For the first two weeks they met outside, beneath a mild autumn sun; during the last week they met at Olga’s apartment. They made sure they weren’t seen when he crept up to her door and she let him in. At the same time, they were too happy really to worry about whether they were talked about in the village.

  They had courted and waited for each other for three years; sleeping together now was a fulfillment that those who satisfy their desires immediately simply cannot know. The fear of pregnancy is also something that can scarcely be imagined by those who know how to prevent it. But after such a long separation, Herbert and Olga were so happy to have each other again, to not have to suppress anything anymore, not have to hold anything back, that they didn’t waste a moment on fear. For Olga, these weeks were like a dance in which they whirled around each other, then stood quietly, intertwined.

  She did not approve of Herbert’s volunteering for the colonial force. She accepted that soldiers fought, and possibly died, for the fatherland. But Africa wasn’t the fatherland. What business did he have there? What had the Herero people ever done to him?

  But when the ship set off from Hamburg, she stood on the Petersen quay, shouted and waved goodbye, joined in the three cheers for the Kaiser and the singing of the national anthem, and heard the steam sirens and whistles of ships big and small sounding the farewell and drowning everything out for minutes on end. Then the noise stopped, silence fell, and when the port and city sounds returned, the ship had vanished from Olga’s sight and her hand was clutching the balled-up kerchief she had intended to wave.

  12

  During Herbert’s years in German South West Africa, Olga was transferred, at Viktoria’s instigation. Viktoria didn’t think Olga was good enough for Herbert; she wanted to separate the two of them and schemed persistently, with her parents, her friends’ parents, and the pastor, to do so. When Olga realized and tried to speak to Viktoria, Viktoria refused. Through the father of a friend, a senior government official in the provincial administration, she finally succeeded in getting Olga transferred to East Prussia—the end of the world.

  The village lay north of Tilsit. The one road that ran through it was unpaved, dusty when the sun shone, muddy when it rained. In the middle it broadened out into a village green, where the church stood. The houses that lined the road were single-story and dirty, and the schoolhouse, with the teacher’s apartment and garden at the back, was equally shabby.

  Olga was in sole charge of all the age groups. The schoolhouse had one room for the small children and one for the bigger ones, and the children were well behaved, and Olga was able to teach in one room without worrying about discipline in the other. Most of the children lacked any passion for learning, and Olga was satisfied if she could teach them reading, writing, and arithmetic and sing “Now All the Woods Are Sleeping” with them, using it to explain the paths of the sun and moon, the stars, the changing seasons, enjoyment of work, and respect for death. Anecdotes about Frederick the Great, “Old Fritz,” were also part of the curriculum, and because Old Fritz had deemed it nonsense that all the woods were sleeping but that whoever wanted to sing it should do so, she could also use this one song to teach the children about tolerance. Sometimes there was a boy Olga wanted to encourage and send to high school or a girl she wanted to get into the girls’ secondary school in Tilsit, and sometimes she succeeded in overcoming the parents’ resistance, persuading the pastor to act as their advocate, and gaining a free place for the child.

  Poor and wretched as it all was, Olga was glad to be far away from her old village and old school and away from the scheming Viktoria. She tended to the garden, practiced with the church choir she had started on Tuesdays, played the organ in church on Sundays, was active in the union of woman teachers, and occasionally traveled to Tilsit to see a concert or performance. She made friends with a family in the neighboring village and took a particular interest in Eik, the youngest of the many children on their farm.

  In the local newspaper she followed intently the colonial force’s war against the Herero and the debates about it in the Reichstag. The bourgeois political parties believed in a colonial future for Germany as long as the natives were treated decently and in a Christian manner. The Social Democrats rejected colonies, believing they were immoral and uneconomical and ruined the character of the people posted there. Attitudes toward the war against the Herero varied accordingly, and the cruelties reported in the press were judged to be either individual misdemeanors or an inevitable characteristic of colonial politics. Olga agreed with the Social Democrats, but she didn’t want to imagine an inevitably cruel Herbert and hoped that the nightmare would soon be over.

  She wrote long letters to Herbert, and waited for his. When this love that, year in, year out, brought her and Herbert together only for a few hours or days became too hard for her to bear, she thought of the many people for whom separation was the rule and togetherness the exception: soldiers and sailors, explorers, commercial travelers, Poles working in Germany, and Germans working in England. Their wives saw no more of their husbands than she of Herbert. She told herself that, in love, two people aren’t simply available to each other; they are a gift, and can be a gift to the other in a letter too. Herbert’s letters were often more journalistic, more boastful than she would have wished, but for that very reason they were a gift that made her happy. It was what he was like.

  13

  Herbert wrote about his voyage to German South West Africa, about his first encounter with black children who cheerfully dived for the coins he threw for them in the harbor of Monrovia, about the water fight with buckets that the soldiers had on the equator, about their arrival in Swakopmund and the sight of sand, nothing but sand, stretching off into the distance. He had jumped into a dancing boat, been ferried through the breaking waves, and was at last back on dry land; for a long time the ground refused to keep still beneath his feet, which had grown accustomed to being at sea.

  Right from the very first day, Herbert loved the desert. The sand dunes lay to the south, looming up and falling away steeply to the sea, majestic and at the same time, with their soft curves, a picture of sensual beauty. A broad plain of sand and stones extended to the east; the sand, some reddish, some grayish, was interspersed with dark lichen, pale, thin grass, and occasional little bushy knolls like large mounds of Venus. Herbert loved the concurrence of monotony and diversity, the small variations in stone and sand and vegetation, the winding valleys and hollows, and the small, strangely formed mountains that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And the desert was always vast and empty. Herbert had had no idea that this world of hot sand, burning sun, and shimmering air existed. There was no end to its magnificence, even if he rode for days.

  When the company reached a train station, where they waited for equipment and supplies, Herbert was delighted by the narrow-gauge railway and rode along for part of the way: painfully slow going up the hill, as fast as an express train on the way down. Sometimes he saw blacks, dark figures in front of their huts, women with short, curly hair and thick lips, or fleeting figures that ran away from the company and could not be found by the patrol that set off in pursuit.

  One evening, Herbert was sent out on patrol to establish the source of a fiery glow. He saw that the savanna was burning: grass and bushes were aflame, spitting cones of fire beneath dark-red clouds of smoke. Afterward, he searched for the camp and couldn’t find it. When his horse could go no farther, he knew he would have to wait for morning and sleep on the savanna.

  He heard the wail of jackals; it sounded like the howling of dogs or the whining of children. They were looking for prey, scented him, and drew closer and closer until he was surrounded by their lament, and it overwhelmed him with such dread that his heart almost stopped. He grabbed his gun, sat up, and stared into the night, filled with fear of the jackals he could hear, the leopards he knew were there, and the Herero he was fighting. But he saw nothing: no jackals, no leopards, no Herero. All he saw was the darkness of the night, as impenetrable as if a blanket had been spread over him, and he didn’t know whether his fear was of what was out there or of something within himself.

  But instead of describing his fears to Olga, he tried to impress her.

  Do you know what we’re doing for all of you here in German South West Africa? I read in a newspaper that if we didn’t conquer these blacks, it would be a waste to spend any more money on our campaign and the best thing would be to sell the sandpit to Britain. Do you think the same? My response is that the government should not act any differently, unless it wants to betray the mission of all white people and damage our fatherland. We would be losing a paradise!

  And Herbert enthused to Olga about the climate, which was better for tuberculosis patients than the climate at home; about the wells that could be dug, the varieties of tobacco, cotton, and cactus that could be cultivated, the forests that could be planted, the mines that could be opened, and the factories that could be built. In order to do this, the Germans had to govern: