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But while this nonsense had been going on, events had been moving for the Potocznik family in another direction. Always an ingenious man, Herr Doktor von Potocznik had used his long spells of enforced leave to perfect a revolutionary new process for synthesis of ammonia. In the end he had managed to patent it and sell it to the CIVAG syndicate, who made it a condition of purchase that he should move to Germany to supervise the setting-up of the first process line. So in 1909 the family had sold up and moved to Ma
Thus young Potocznik had grown up in Germany. An outstanding pupil and talented poet, he had excelled at music, though his interests had turned towards theology and moral philosophy. He had also, about 1910, become involved with the Wandervogel, the curious movement among the idealistic German young which rejected the horsechair-stuffed values of the Wilhelmine Reich and instead set out in search of the authentic and the natural: birdsong in the forest, church bells in the Alpine valleys, rucksacks and lederhosen and guitars around campfires, ru
Potocznik had been due to enter Gottingen University in 1914 to study philosophy. But the war had got there first. Like millions of other German adolescents, he had rushed to the colours filled with a burning desire for self-sacrifice in this war, which (they believed) was not about territory or dynastic claims but about power and youth and the force of the spirit; a near-religious crusade to give Germany her rightful place in the world and break the shackles forged for her by the old nations. There had been official reservations about his nationality of course: he was still technically an Austrian subject. But he was eventually given permission to join the German Army, “pending an administrative decision.” He enlisted in the Academic Legion and was flung almost immediately, after the sketchiest of training, into the fighting at Ypres, given the task of storming the village of Langemarck. Eighteen thousand of them had set out across the water meadows that morning, singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as they advanced. Less than two thousand were to come back. “The Massacre of the I
He had spent the next six months in hospital in Germany, and had then been transferred to the specialist facial-injuries unit being set up by Professor Kirschbaum and his colleagues at Vie
“Of course,” he had said to me in the mess tent after supper, “it was a let-down not to be able to serve in the German Army, especially after I started getting interested in flying. Their air force is about five years ahead of ours in every respect. But quite frankly it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me now. We’re all fighting for the Greater German Reich, and wearing an Austrian cap badge signifies as little for me as wearing that of Bavaria or Saxony. Germany and Austria are being welded together now into a single billet of steel under the blows of the enemy, tempered in the forge of war into a weapon such as the world has not yet seen. True, I’d have more fun flying on the Western Front against the Britishers and the French. But there: I think we’ll have sport enough here on the South-West Front before long, once the Americans come into this war. And anyway, I’m glad in a way to be defending this region.”
“What, the Kustenland?”
“No, Carinthia, my home province: defending the southern marches of Germany against the Latins and Slavs. That was something I could never convince them of in north Germany: that we Germans who live on the frontiers of the Reich have a far keener awareness of what it means to be German than those who sit comfortably in Darmstadt and Ma
“You seem to have a very clear idea of what you are fighting for,” I remarked.
“I certainly have. But what are you fighting for, Prohaska, if I might ask?”
“Me? I can’t say that I’ve ever thought much about it. I just fight for the House of Austria because that’s my job and it’s what I swore on oath to do. Anyway, my time’s been so taken up thinking about how to do it these past two years that I’ve never wondered a great deal about why. I’m just a career naval officer; things like that are for the politicians to decide.”
“Precisely. That’s the trouble, if you’ll excuse my saying so: you professional officers always fight bravely, but sadly you lack any very deep appreciation of what this war is about. Probably I’d have been the same if I had grown up in this corpse-empire of ours and been through a cadet school. But as it was I saw the future in Germany—the factories, the cities, the laboratories. And I also had time to read a great deal when I was laid up in hospital: Nietzsche, Darwin, Treitschke, Bernhardi, the lot. It was then that I first fully understood why I was lying in bed with half my face missing; and I swore to dedicate my life to Greater Germany. Our German revolution is being created in this war. Nothing can stop it now—not even defeat—and it’ll turn the world upside-down before it’s finished.”
“You sound like a socialist to me.” He smiled, his mouth twisted to one side by his rebuilt jaw. I could see how sweet his smile would have been before his face was wrecked. His eyes were not those of a crazed fanatic but of a seer; a dreamer of dreams.
“Perhaps I am, my dear Prohaska. But a German socialist second and a German warrior first.” It may have been ill-natured of me, but I could not help interjecting at this point that some might consider “Svetozar von Potocznik” a pretty odd sort of name for a warrior of the Greater German Reich. But he had obviously been asked that question before. He laughed, and answered me with his usual calm earnestness. “We all have to have a name, Prohaska, and names are handed down in the male line except, I believe, in a few odd little countries in Africa. The ‘Svetozar’ bit is rather awful, I agree: my mother was greatly addicted to romantic novels when I was born and she thought that it went better with ‘Potocznik’ than ‘Willibald’ or ‘Englebert,’ which were my father’s choices. As to the ‘Potocznik,’ it doesn’t argue for any but the tiniest element of Slav blood. Tell me Prohaska, how long do you think people in Europe have been using surnames?”
“I really couldn’t say. Since the fifteenth century perhaps? Up in the Tyrol I believe they still give people names according to their occupation.”
“Good, the fifteenth century: say twenty generations ago to be on the safe side?” I nodded my assent. “Well then, I worked it out recently and that gives me a theoretical possibility of something over two million ancestors. Only one of those needed to have the name “Potocznik” to have passed it on to me. And anyway, there’s no certainty that he was a Slav: he could have been a German kidnapped in a border raid and taken into serfdom by the Croats. No, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that I am of purely Germanic stock.”