With their rebellion, the blacks are trying to seize the government for themselves. They must not be allowed to succeed. We will triumph for their benefit, and for ours. They are people who are still at the bottom level of civilization and lack our highest and best attributes, such as diligence, gratitude, pity, or indeed any ideals at all. Even if they were outwardly to educate themselves, their souls would not keep up. Were they to triumph, it would be a terrible setback for civilization.

  He wrote about patrols, skirmishes, and pursuits in which he bravely led the way, and about the jubilation when a telegram from the Kaiser praised the officers and troops.

  14

  It was with particular pride that Herbert recounted the Battle of Waterberg. On August 10, 1904, German troops closed ranks in a loose circle around the Herero camp and behind the mountain. They advanced during the night and attacked on the morning of August 11.

  Herbert’s company advanced against the Herero from the south, not up the mountain but over flat terrain. They immediately came under fire, and took cover behind bushes and in hollows, shot, jumped up, stormed ahead, cheering, took cover again, returned fire again, dashed farther forward in short bursts, crouched over, no cheering this time, then formed a line with the other soldiers and waited. These were the first hours of the battle. When the machine guns and artillery arrived, they continued to advance under their protection, until the resistance and counterattacks by the Herero forced the company to seek cover again behind bushes and in hollows.

  Whenever it seemed that the Herero would have to yield and flee, the singing and clapping of their women swelled to a crescendo, and the Herero would turn the tide, stopping the company’s advance or even driving them back. The Germans’ aim was to take the Herero’s water source, but they did not succeed that morning or that afternoon. It was only in the evening that they were able to deploy their machine guns and artillery so intensively that the Herero had to abandon it.

  At last the water was ours. Darkness began to fall. Suddenly the tethered balloon the general used for signaling caught fire, broke loose, and floated slowly up into the evening sky like a great torch.

  Herbert shot, stormed, and fought alongside his comrades, yet he hardly saw a single Herero. He saw his comrades fight and fall. What he saw of the Herero was an occasional head of black hair or the agile leaps with which they dashed from one hiding place to another. Once he saw a Herero sitting in the upper branches of a tree get hit, somersault through the air, and fall to the ground, and once he saw black bodies and the termite mound behind which they were sheltering get ripped to pieces by a shell and whirled into the air. On every advance he saw fallen Herero, just as on every retreat he saw fallen Germans. But as opponents in the fight, the Herero remained phantoms.

  If only we could have seen the black devils better! Their voices sounded so close. Yet they were so hard to see and get our hands on.

  After taking the water source, the Germans were too weakened to fight on, and the Herero fled eastward with their cattle. The next day, the Germans took up the pursuit, Herbert among them. Along the road they passed wounded and dying men, elders, and children who couldn’t keep up and were dying of hunger and thirst, just like the cattle that cried out in their own thirst and hunger. Many calves, sheep, and goats had their throats cut and the blood sucked out. There wasn’t enough water for the fleeing Herero. There was none for the pursuing Germans either, who had to turn back.

  Herbert never had any real contact with the Herero. During the battle, the machine guns kept them at a distance. After the battle, rifles were enough to keep them at a distance and deny them access to the water sources at the edge of the sandy desert into which they had fled and where, in the end, they died in their thousands of hunger and thirst.

  Then Herbert contracted typhoid fever and was bedbound for a long time. When he recovered, he was put on guard duty before riding out again on patrols, skirmishes, and pursuits. When he had time off, he hunted guinea fowl, bustards and doves, rock rabbits and genets, springbok and porcupine, gibbons and hyenas, jackals and leopards. He celebrated two Christmases with his fellow soldiers. They cut glittering stars out of tin cans, decorated a camel thorn for their Christmas tree, and sang “Silent Night.” It was a pleasant time.

  Sometimes Herbert had to guard captive Herero. He wondered whether they could be forced and trained to work, or whether it was better to replace them with machinery. The closest he had gotten to them, the closest he had come to empathizing with them, was when he had seen them suffering and dying during the pursuit after the Battle of Waterberg. But they had perished with their cattle and like cattle; they had been lying on the ground, and he had been on horseback.

  15

  When Olga saw Herbert again after his return from German South West Africa, she was so happy that she didn’t question him on the atrocities she had read about. Soon, though, she didn’t want to hear any more about battles, skirmishes, patrols or pursuits either. Nor did she want to hear anything about the endless expanse of the country, the shimmering hot air, mirages and rainbows, the fiery glow and the clouds of smoke from the savanna fires. Nor about what they were going to dig, plant and cultivate, drill and build. “Those are fantasies! What about now?”

  She wanted to know whether the blacks were beautiful, the men and the women, how they lived and on what, what they thought of the Germans, what their hopes were for the future. What he had liked over there and what had disgusted him, whether he could imagine living there; what had stayed with him from those two years.

  They sat on the bank beside the Neman River. Olga had prepared a picnic, Herbert had rented a carriage, and they had driven for an hour, first from the village to the river and then alongside the river until they found a secluded spot. They spread out a blanket, ate potato salad with meatballs, drank red wine, and talked a lot, because they couldn’t yet ask the things they wanted to ask. One reads and hears these things—were you with a Negress over there? You must have been lonely—have you found someone here? Have your parents found you a wife? What will happen with us now?

  They also talked to chase away the melancholy of the day. It was misty, the sun a blurred disk of light behind a thin cover of cloud, the green of the meadows and the blue of the Neman dulled. It was quiet, no boat chugging past, no gaggling geese, no distant voices. The horse pulled up and chewed the grass; sometimes it snorted, and sometimes the river gurgled.

  Olga wasn’t satisfied with the information Herbert offered. The women with their broad buttocks weren’t attractive to Germans; the Herero lived primitively; they hated the Germans, but knew that the Germans were their fate and their future. What had disgusted him over there: the diseases—typhoid fever and malaria, yellow fever and meningitis. What he had liked—she might not want to hear it anymore, but it happened to be true—was that great expanse of land.

  “Look at all this!” Now Olga wanted precision. “Isn’t this an expanse without end? Fields and forests as far as the eye can see. The land’s not flat, but the eye passes easily over the gentle hills. Only as far as the horizon, but they have a horizon over there as well.”

  “To the left of the hill there’s a village; there’s another behind the hill, the spire over there is the top of a church tower, and if we travel half an hour downstream we can already see the Queen Louise Bridge. There are people everywhere.”

  “Because of the people there’s no—”

  “Yes, because of the people there’s no expanse without end here.”

  “What have you got against people? Without them, there’s nothing.”

  “I don’t have anything against people. But they don’t have to be everywhere. I can’t explain it to you any better.”

  Herbert was annoyed, whether by her question or by his inability to explain himself better, he didn’t know. He felt cornered.

  Olga liked it when there was something Herbert couldn’t understand, couldn’t explain, couldn’t express. He was strong, refused to be intimidated, and didn’t give in, and that was the kind of man she wanted. At the same time, she didn’t just want to look up to her man; she liked to have an advantage over him in some ways. But he didn’t need to know that, and he certainly didn’t need to get annoyed about it.

  “When I used to see you running, I always felt you could run on endlessly. That’s what you are to me: an expanse without end.” She laid her head on his shoulder. “Do you still run?”

  “Not over there. Here, when I was in Berlin, I used to get up at five o’clock and go running in the Tiergarten. Apart from me, there would just be a few riders around.” He put his arms around her and pulled her down with him so that they lay facing each other, eye to eye.

  “In these two years I haven’t been with any other woman, white or black. I . . . sometimes when I was alone . . . I wasn’t often alone . . . and then I only ever thought of you. I want you. And I’m going to speak to my parents.”

  16

  He stayed a week. They couldn’t live together, either in the village or in the hotel in Tilsit, but it was summer, and the holidays, and there were the fields and the forest. “Ours is a field-and-forest love,” they laughed.

  On the last day, they visited the family Olga had become friends with in the neighboring village. The farm was small, like all farms north of the Neman. The children were playing between the house and the barns, the rooster strutting, the chickens scratching, the pigs and piglets running around, and the dog and cats lying in the sun. Sanne, the farmer’s wife, and Olga greeted each other warmly, and the children were friendly; only Herbert was self-conscious. He had learned to deal with the servants and maids on the estate in an affable, condescending way, but he was unsure of himself with the farmer’s wife and children, who were unassuming but not submissive.

  Olga tried to draw Herbert into her games with Eik. The little boy was two years old, blond, strong, and sturdy; he had as much fun building a tower of wooden blocks with Olga as he did knocking it down. Again and again they built it, and again and again they knocked it down. Herbert didn’t feel like sitting on the ground and joining in; he stood and watched, and pondered Olga’s remark, “This is how I imagine you when you were little!”

  He couldn’t imagine what he was like when he was little. The only memory he had of his childhood was of the hobbyhorse he had found in his parents’ bedroom before he was given it for his third birthday. Much as he later loved riding, he couldn’t run with the hobbyhorse and so couldn’t warm to it. Now he couldn’t warm to the impoverished farmyard, the chaos of children and animals, and Olga’s game with the small, noisy, dirty boy. Luckily, the farmer arrived in the evening and listened patiently to Herbert’s fantasies about German South West Africa.

  On the ride home in the twilight, Herbert asked what it was she liked about these people, and Olga replied that these were her people. He shook his head, but didn’t ask anything else. They sat beside each other, resentful and silent, until Olga’s village came into view. Then she took the reins from his hands, clicked her tongue, urging the horse from a walk to a gallop, and steered it onto a path that led across the fields to the forest. Herbert was amazed and enchanted. Olga drove the carriage, jolting and shaking, over the rough terrain; there was a defiant determination in her face, and her hair was blowing in the wind. He didn’t know her like this: so beautiful, so strange.

  They made love until morning, when he had to go to the hotel in Tilsit and catch the train. She walked home across the fields.

  He came back a few weeks later. He had spoken to his parents, and they had threatened to disinherit him if he married Olga. Viktoria had met an officer from an old, impoverished aristocratic family who would marry her, take on the estate, and run the business. They had also found a wife for Herbert, an orphan, heiress to a sugar factory. His mother regarded her as someone who would bear him many children, his father as someone who, with Herbert, would turn their sugar factories, hers and his, into a sugar empire. There were arguments and raised voices and tears. In the end, Herbert simply left. An aunt had bequeathed him some money—not a lot, and not enough to marry Olga and start a family, but it would last him a few years. After that it wouldn’t be much longer, Herbert knew, before he did something great; he just didn’t yet know what it would be.

  As with his parents, he neither promised nor refused Olga anything, and Olga didn’t press him or complain. It was still summer. The holidays were over, but there was time enough for Olga and Herbert’s field-and-forest love. Except that he wasn’t fully present. He believed Olga was full of reproaches that she just wasn’t expressing. He was angry with her about it, and angry with himself. He didn’t want to give in to his parents, and he couldn’t break with them. He didn’t know what to do. Here too, after a few days, he simply left.

  17

  He left for Argentina. Another long sea voyage, not with other soldiers this time, but with Germans who wanted to emigrate, or who had emigrated and had been back to visit the homeland: the pastor of the German parish in Buenos Aires, businessmen from the Baden Aniline and Soda Factory who planned to travel across the Andes from Argentina to Chile, researchers from a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, idlers with a penchant for travel and adventure.

  Herbert didn’t stay in Buenos Aires. He took the boat up the Paraná, a river the likes of which he had never seen. He had to admit to himself that the Argentine Paraná might even surpass the German Rhine; it was certainly its equal. Floating forests of orange and willow trees; long, narrow channels that kept seeming to come to an end, then suddenly flowed out into wide, smooth expanses of water; riverbanks devoid of dwellings and full of mysteries; sometimes the screams of monkeys and birds, sometimes profound silence.

  In Rosario, Herbert took the train to Córdoba, sat in an empty carriage, and, glancing to the right and left, looked out over an endless plain. The stations were deserted; the train stopped and went on, with no voices to be heard. Time and again they passed the corpses of horses and cows lying beside the tracks; the birds squatting on them, tearing at the flesh, didn’t even turn their heads. The few trees were stunted and disheveled; the wind drove cold and keen across the plain and down the train and into Herbert’s face until his teeth chattered.

  In Córdoba he bought a horse and provisions and set off for Tucumán. Along the way he overtook long processions of wagons, with high wheels and round roofs, laden with grain and pulled by six oxen. He encountered herds of wild horses; they stormed up to him at a gallop, accompanied him, then dashed off at a gallop again. The villages were small and poor, just a few houses with red facades and white crenellations. The whiteness of endless, dried-out salt lakes dazzled his eyes, and when the wind arose, fine red sand penetrated his clothes, his pores, his eyes and ears and mouth. In the evenings Herbert would make a fire and cook whatever he had been able to buy in a village or on a farm: a chicken, meat, potatoes. The weather grew warmer. One day he no longer saw just the same, unchanging plain. A chain of high mountains materialized in the mist on the horizon, bluish with white peaks: the Andes.

  He had stopped to rest when he was bitten in the leg by a snake. In the hope of finding a doctor or barber surgeon in the next village, he flung himself onto his horse but soon fell, unable to go on. Hours later—perhaps even days had passed—he came to his senses surrounded by women and children, earth-colored, with slanting eyes and prominent cheekbones: Indians. There was a cut on his leg where the snake had bitten him, not sewn up but firmly bandaged, not inflamed. Herbert unpicked the seam of his jacket, gave the Indians the gold coins he had hidden there for emergencies, bowed, and rode on. They stared at him intently and followed him with their eyes, slowly turning their heads.

  One week later he reached Tucumán. He caught a fever, and by the time he recovered, he had run out of time and money, and had to turn back without reaching the Andes. In any case, what he loved was the plain, the sky arching from horizon to horizon, the unimpeded view that lost itself in the distance. He would have liked to have experienced the snows of the Andes.

  Instead, he experienced the snows of Karelia. This was his next journey into solitude, immediately after his return from Argentina, on horseback again, this time with a dog. He’d planned just to spend a few weeks in summer roaming the countryside, experience the white nights, shoot a bear. But then he couldn’t tear himself away from the gold of the sun that colored the fog in the morning, the water of the lakes and rivers in the evening, and the edges of the sky at night; from the white birch trees and sparse forests; from the swans that rose majestically out of the water, ran across it, launched themselves into the air, and landed with equal majesty; from the elk, thickset, powerful, solitary creatures like himself. He lived on fish and mushrooms and berries and reconciled himself to the cloud of mosquitoes that accompanied him from morning till night. In September, the colors changed; the birch leaves glowed yellow, the leaves on the bilberry bushes red; the pine trees gleamed green between them, and the myriad lichen white.

  Winter descended earlier than usual. The Karelians had sensed it and warned Herbert. He took the view of Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor”—we Germans fear God and nothing else in the world—and headed off again. When the first snow fell, Herbert found shelter in a hut. But he couldn’t stay; he risked being snowed in and cut off. And so he set out, battled through the snow, and arrived a week later at the posthouse where they had warned him and, in the meantime, assumed that he was lost. They thought he must have given up, in the snow and the cold. But he had not given up. After Karelia, he believed he could do anything. All he had to do was not give up.

  18

  More journeys followed: to Brazil, the Kola Peninsula, Siberia, and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Usually he was away for several months; in Siberia, it was almost a year. Between journeys he visited his parents, who wanted to keep all the options open: Viktoria’s marriage to the officer, Herbert’s marriage to the heiress. But they lost control of the situation. Viktoria met a young factory owner from the Rhineland who was interested in her but not in the estate, and the heiress was ambitious and independent enough to manage her affairs successfully without Herbert. Herbert hoped that, if the heiress got tired of waiting and Viktoria were married and living in the Rhineland, his parents would transfer the estate to him and Olga after all. But they didn’t give up; they pressured and threatened him. Then he would escape his blustering father and weeping mother and go to Berlin, or to Olga.