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The Good German

CHARACTERS:
Lubich, a Jewish Socialist who emigrated from Weimar in the late 30s.
Helmut, a German playwright who also emigrated in the late 30s
Anna, Helmut's wife, a German Jew who emigrated with her husband

LUBICH: We've been coming here for years.

HELMUT: Forty years—or is it fifty?

LUBICH: A good German café.

HELMUT: Still you and I, Lubich, poor disillusioned Socialist.

LUBICH: Whom you supported. I've tried to be true to Marx.

HELMUT: The false messiah.

LUBICH: German made the marks her prophets earned.

HELMUT: Inflation made Hitler possible. Remember, the Nazis never got a majority of the popular vote.

LUBICH: Until they seized power. Remember, Helmut, that torchlight parade when Hitler rode by and we saw that old woman eating the stone where Hitler's motorcade passed by? I knew when Hitler blamed the Communists for the Reichstag fire he would be another Nero, burning Rome. Remember Weimar, the place of Goethe, where we all grew up, would become the site of Buchenwald.

HELMUT: I can't forget. I guess you and I will always be German refugees.

LUBICH: Why haven't you gone back to Germany?

HELMUT: Because it would be too painful. Weimar, even in the late 20s, with all its decadent poverty, was still a wonderfully artistic time for us. When I think of the Nazis, it's too much for me. And of course, I had just married a Jewish woman. I had no choice but to leave. My plays would have been burnt up along with my conscience, then my wife and I. When Stalin prevented the Left from fighting Hitler, I knew it was our end of Weimar. The Jews believed in democracy and fairness to the end.

LUBICH: Trotsky was a prophet, too. He predicted what would happen to us.

HELMUT: Marx, your false messiah, and Trotsky, your prophet. And what was Lenin, your God?

LUBICH: I can't deny it. I think I wanted to forget I was a Jew.

HELMUT: But history and God won't let you, Lubich.

LUBICH: As a boy I heard the Internationale when I walked with my father in Berlin, and I thought all of mankind would be one, and there could be no more wars or massacres or pogroms. But I soon saw the kind of socialism the German marks bought.

HELMUT: We never adjusted here in America; you, I, nor Anna. Yet you kept up your politics even here.

LUBICH: I paid my dues here in America with McCarthy and all. America almost came close to fascism in the thirties when the German agents put up Lindbergh for President, who together with Father Coughlin and the Ku Klux Klan types almost took over.

HELMUT: Lubich, "almost" doesn't count in politics, you know that.

LUBICH: Here is Anna. She is still beautiful.

HELMUT: And you still love her.

LUBICH: More than admire her, Helmut.

HELMUT: She has kept me sane. Anna reminds me of a true prophet in the Bible.

ANNA: Lubich, still arguing about the 1933 election? Or is it the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939?

LUBICH: The only interesting thing to me are the relations between the Germans and the Jews.

ANNA: You're a masochist.

HELMUT: I used to think the Germans were the Assyrians and the Jews were led into captivity. And, at the risk of blasphemy, I swear Lubich is a Christ figure.

LUBICH: Better than his betrayer. As a boy I was beaten up in Munich during Christmastime, and called a Christ-killer. And I just went to Munich to see the lights. My father warned me, but I did not believe him. I wanted to be one of the moderns, but I took after Marx, a descendant of rabbis.

HELMUT: So you opened up the Left door.

LUBICH: Where else could I go? You weren't much different from me, in that respect.

HELMUT: How come, Lubich, you never married

LUBICH: In front of Anna you say this? You know I was committed to my politics.

ANNA: There's more to it. But keep your sex secrets to yourself.

LUBICH: What secrets?

HELMUT: I'm not your psychiatrist.

ANNA: Leave Lubich alone.

LUBICH: That's the trouble. Everyone has left me alone.

HELMUT: You've asked me why I don't go back to Germany. How come you never went to Israel to start over?

LUBICH: In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. I recall it in Hebrew from my bar mitzvah days: "Brashit barah elohim et hashamayim v'et haoretz."

HELMUT: I really thought you'd go to Israel in the forties when you were so unhappy.

ANNA: When hasn't Lubich been unhappy?

HELMUT: Even when he had you in love with him.

ANNA: Don't be ridiculous, Helmut! I've been faithful.

HELMUT: Only God knows.

ANNA: I've been having those nightmares about my sister again.

HELMUT: Take those pills the good doctor gave us.

ANNA: We should have waited for her. Now I don't have a family. We could never have children.

HELMUT: Whose fault is that? So, my family's living, but I never want to see them again.

LUBICH: I have no one except you two who will come to my funeral. All those speeches I gave, what happened to their listeners? Helmut, you think I sold out, don't you?

HELMUT: You had to. Socialism failed, and it failed you.

ANNA: Leave Lubich be!

HELMUT: You're always implying that I pick on Lubich.

ANNA: I've hurt Lubich, too.

HELMUT: How, Anna?

LUBICH: Yes, Anna, how?

ANNA: Lubich can tell us.

LUBICH: Anna has been in a depression. I don't want to hurt her anymore.

ANNA: Speak up, Lubich, I can't hear you.

LUBICH: You need to help Anna. She helps us. The trouble with me was, I was too late. That's always been my problem – in life and in love. I was caught as a tiny historical footnote.

HELMUT: You're just another human error of politics and race – that is Socialism.

LUBICH: You're always so clean and clear, like the sky today.

ANNA: I heard a different forecast.

LUBICH: I was a tiny voice. No one will hear from me. I'm dying.

HELMUT: We all are.

ANNA: We've all been dead since we left Weimar. Then we went to Vienna. And we helped bring my therapist to New York. But my own sister I left back in Germany. And I still feel suicidal.

LUBICH: I wonder what kept me from doing it – even back home, when I saw the writing on the wall.

HELMUT: Curiosity with life – your own, and your politics'.

LUBICH: And cowardice.

HELMUT: You had the fear of your god.

LUBICH: Anna is right. After 1939, I knew politics was a dead issue for me.

HELMUT: So why did you become so active in the Left here in America?

LUBICH: It was like being a rabbi. What else could I do to keep me going?

HELMUT: But you believed!

LUBICH: Like you, Helmut, are a Christian.

ANNA: He is. He saved people before it was too late. He idd more for people than you, Lubich, with all your speeches. Forgive me.

LUBICH: I can't forgive myself, let alone you. Yes, I have a death sentence over me. I may not live out the month.

ANNA: Shut up, Lubich!

HELMUT: Let him speak.

ANNA: I can't live without him. All right, Helmut, I admired him too, even though you were more handsome and witty. And I knew he loved me too. But when he was beaten up in gymnasium class for his politics, you rescued him. Don't you see, Helmut, you're our messiah? Not that I made the wrong choice in marrying you. But I had more pity for Lubich.

HELMUT: Because he was victimized?

ANNA: Helmut, you were more of a mensch. But I admired the once revolutionary. He had ideals. But Helmut, you had humanity. And so for personal reasons I married you. It wasn't just to save my skin, Helmut.

HELMUT: I loved you, Anna, with an everlasting love – a Biblical love.

ANNA: I know. Even if I was baptized ten generations back, I could not even take communion with you. We both would have been murdered. Helmut, in a way it's sad to see you lose your faith and become cynical after we were in America.

HELMUT: America has always been a comedy act for me, after Germany in our 30s. It could never be serious here. So I became philosophical – I hope it was not cynical. It's fatal to a writer, perhaps, and to those who approved of me. that's why I had writer's block for so many years. I felt so deadly despondent, I buried my talent God gave me. And now I don't want to think. I let you two think for me. Maybe Hitlerism was only an aberration. But it has ruined me and Germany.

ANNA: Lubich, you're white!

LUBICH: I don't have much time.

ANNA: Lubich, please don't die. Helmut, ask God to let Lubich live.

HELMUT: Take one of these pills, here, with water.

LUBICH: For what? What do I have to live for? Who will listen to me? I've been a loser to history. You saw the wall go up and down. And they'll find other demons in the wall.

HELMUT: The Nazis put the Jews behind a wall, and in slavery, which they called their security. We all need a wall, so we can hide our arrogance and pride, and others behind it. Until we repent, there will always be walls in Germany.

LUBICH: Always the Christian, down deep.

HELMUT: My mother was a believer. But my family eventually accepted the inevitable – Hitler. Except for my mother. She would put me on her knee as a child, and read to me from the bible.

ANNA: You can still be a child, my Helmut. He thinks I'm someone in the people of the Book.

HELMUT: Yes, when I first met you Anna, that's what I felt.

ANNA: You were never realistic, but at least you were more decent and tolerant and less bitter than Lubich at the time.

HELMUT: He had more to be bitter about. Lubich had to leave like you, and I loved you and him.

ANNA: At one time I thought you loved Lubich more.

HELMUT: Before all the world, with all his politics, craziness, and red flags, yes.

ANNA: And I couldn't get into your world.

HELMUT: You were a part of it.

ANNA: I was apart from it. But I knew there was something deep between you.

LUBICH: I loved you, Anna and Helmut.

HELMUT: I was jealous of you, Lubich, because we both wanted to sacrifice for you. You could have broken up our marriage easily.

LUBICH: I didn't want to.

HELMUT: He had both of us to love. Why should he have to? Even though we could not admit it to ourselves, that he was closer to us than a borther.

ANNA: I allowed him my person. Perhaps I wanted a baby from him.

HELMUT: How do you know it was my fault?

LUBICH: I wanted a brother. I missed my brother Walter.

HELMUT: I had a brother, too.

ANNA: Lubich can't love anyone, though he tried to be intimate, he would end up hating himself, which meant to me at that time that he really only loved himself.

LUBICH: I had feelings for both of you, and when I expressed it, I worried you would tell each other about me.

HELMUT: We never spoke of it together.

LUBICH: So I gave my love to political concerns.

ANNA: Don't blame your life on your asexual politics.

HELMUT: I never betrayed you to my wife. I just betrayed my wife.

ANNA: You didn't betray your wife or your country. You were the only good German I knew.

HELMUT: And what was Lubich?

ANNA: Lubich was Lubich, an unhappy man.

LUBICH: I betrayed both of you, but you never betrayed me. I wanted a family back then. I lost everything. And soon I will be only a peculiarity.

HELMUT: You're not our collective unconscious, Lubich. You're our friend.

LUBICH: I'm no friend of mankind, womankind, no kind. Maybe that is why I'm being punished. Is that it, Helmut?

HELMUT: You're asking me?

ANNA: I remember the last speech you gave in the Weimar Gymnasium.

LUBICH: Where have all my speeches brought me, or gotten Germany? I am part of the wall, too.

HELMUT: Maybe we should all go to the Wailing Wall.

LUBICH: It won't help me.

HELMUT: Nothing will help you, Lubich.

ANNA: I tried to help.

LUBICH: Forget your martyrdom, both of you.

HELMUT: Maybe that's what we've all tried to be.

LUBICH: All my ideals – they have come to a bitter end, like me.

ANNA: If you die, I'll be next – I swear to you, Lubich. (She turns to Helmut.) I've been faithful.

HELMUT: No, let's be honest. None of us have been faithful to what we believed or to each other.

ANNA: You were, Helmut.

HELMUT: Was I? I ran away, when I could have stayed and fought back.

ANNA: You're a child, Helmut. You knew it was too late after 1933 for any of us. The best thing for all of us was to get out, as quickly as possible. It was they who betrayed Germany, and us, and the whole world, through the thugs they put in to rule.

HELMUT: Everything is betrayal.

ANNA: But you helped people get out. I was the one who let my sister stay. I live with it every day.

LUBICH: I survived, but did I help anyone?

HELMUT: I loved you, though to Anna I tried to be faithful.

ANNA: I didn't know you and Lubich were as close as we are.

LUBICH: I'm filled with self-hatred.

HELMUT: That's pride, Lubich. My mother told me that the nations which blessed the Jews would be blessed, and the ones that cursed the Jews would be cursed.

LUBICH: Always living in a Bible world, thinking that we had a David and Jonathan affair.

ANNA: I always felt guilty when I had sex. The doctor said I was borderline. I'm glad I never had children.

HELMUT: Anna, please forgive me.

ANNA: I wanted to be a good wife. I know you tried to help me by sending me to therapy with Reich.

HELMUT: I'm sorry if it didn't help. I guess we know which Reich survived. Lubich, wake up.

ANNA: Feel his pulse.

HELMUT: He's not moving.

ANNA: We can't bury him.

HELMUT: His kind won't rise again.

ANNA: Do you think your kind will?

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