Niall Edworthy

Niall Edworthy, a former reporter with international wire agencies AFP and Reuters, has been writing and ghosting books for 25 years. Otto Eckhart’s Ordeal, his first work of fiction, was published in August 2020.

His books cover a range of subjects including military history, natural history, sport, biography and humour. He is currently working on a second novel, set in Syria and Iraq, and researching a sequel to Otto Eckhart’s Ordeal. He has lived in the Sussex Downs for twenty years.

Award Type
It is 1937 and an aimless young historian is tasked with an impossible assignment: find the Holy Grail and bring it back for the glory of Nazi Germany. Can Otto Eckhart defeat his inner demons, outfox Himmler’s SS and come of age as a man?
Otto Eckhart's Ordeal
My Submission

The letter instructed me to present myself at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, 8. I knew the grand old building well. It was in the heart of Berlin, home to the School of Industrial Arts and Crafts where my cousin Max had studied. But that was what? Seven, eight, nine years ago, another time, another world.

The day I returned, well, I remember it as if it all happened this morning, every detail. You don’t forget that day, the one that changes your life forever, when nothing again will be even remotely the same as the life you knew previously, when you end up wholly altered by the experiences that flow from it. Mine was the sixth of May, 1937 and oh God, what a naïve dolt I was. I didn’t even have the excuse of heedless youth on my side. I was almost thirty.

Father did warn me, in his gentle way. The letter was unheaded and unsigned – secrecy was paramount it said – but it was stamped with the official Reichsadler imperial eagle and swastika. When I showed it to him, his face and shoulders dropped. He tapped the envelope, put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Careful, son.’ Had mother warned me against it, it may have turned out differently. She was all for me making the trip to Berlin and getting a ‘proper’ job. But really, did I ever have a choice in it? Did any of us have the slightest control over our fates then? They were going to get us all in the end, one way or another. We were all of us being swept along by the surging torrent of events, and the moment to resist the flow had long since passed.

But I knew none of this that fresh Spring day. I was full of hope, twitchy for sure, but excited and curious by what lay in store. The mystery of it! In any event, I’m still here, looking over my shoulder but safe again, for the time being at least, ready to put it all down straight off the top of my head, no notes, no diary. I don’t need them. It’s all stamped on my mind as if with a branding iron. The way it all seems to be heading, my story will likely prove to be no more than a microscopic footnote in the history of the times, but you can make up your own mind about that.

Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse was no more than a five-minute walk from Anhalter Station. That much at least was the same. But the giant station clock read twenty-five to three and the meeting was not until four. I had taken the early train from Frankfurt. I was not going to risk being late, not with the letter’s promise of travel and adventure – and the hint of some Reichsmarks into the bargain. This was one opportunity I was not going to mess up.

Holy Hell, how I needed the money then. The ratcatcher’s dog back in Michelstadt had more in the bank than I did. I would have taken any job, anything to avoid joining the Reichswehr – the Wehrmacht, I beg your pardon – and anything to escape the tedium of provincial life and my mother’s ceaseless disappointment in me; anything to be carefree and on my travels again. Wandering Europe for five years, ducking my responsibilities, writing a book no one wanted to publish, I only had myself to blame for being penniless and as good as unemployable. I had been home for a month, written two dozen letters seeking work – research and minor academic posts mainly – but nothing doing, just plenty of polite replies wishing me well in my hunt.

So it had been with my manuscript as well. The drawer of my kneehole desk was full of courteous rejections from publishers, all along the lines of… ‘Dear Herr Eckhart, We were flattered to receive your manuscript of Parzifal, the Cathars and the Search for The Holy Grail, a most fascinating field of study of which you are evidently its master. Unfortunately, these are difficult times for books. After careful consideration we are sorry to inform you of our belief that your book will fail to appeal to a broad enough section of the reading public to justify itself in the marketplace…’

To be fair, it is a truly awful book, a re-hash of my university thesis padded out with even more nonsense about Nordic Gods, Teutonic Knights and the mystery of the chalice from which Jesus and his disciples was said to have drunk at the Last Supper. The annihilation of the Cathars in the thirteenth by the Church is terrible and fascinating certainly. If I only I had stuck to that!

Parzifal – no, I certainly wouldn’t buy it, but I had to justify my travels somehow and I liked the idea of being a published author. Most people don’t read books, they just like having them on their shelves to show how clever they are. I was gambling on some fool out there who might get behind it, throw me some Reichsmarks and sell into that growing market of Nordic myth cranks and fuming patriots. So mother was right about me, about my prospects. She had taken me to task again just the other night – before, that is, the arrival of the letter and all of a sudden I was her little Goldilocks again. I was ‘idle as a bed of potatoes’ she had thundered.

I have never quite understood that expression of hers and, emboldened by father’s shy smile, I dared to have a bit of sport with her, pointing out that from its unpromising beginnings as a small seed bud, the potato will grow into an impressive and useful form of life. I even held up a potato from my plate to prove my point. Father found it funny at least. Mother shot back, spittle flying: ‘But a potato needs the right conditions in which to flourish! Lying around in France and heaven knows wherever else, trying to write a daft book about Norse myths and French heretics is hardly the ideal growing conditions for a man. Damn your idleness and damn the French!’

Anyhow, there I was on the sixth of May, letter in my pocket, hope in my heart, standing on platform 4, buffeted by a torrent of passengers, steam pouring from beneath the train. I was holding onto my Fedora and staring up at the vast glass-and-iron arched roof of Anhalter Station, surely the grandest in the world, majestic as any palace or cathedral; my eyes slowly drawn down the platform to the great red and black swastika banners, fifty feet high and more, draped on the interior of the red-brick facade. Of course, I had seen these flags in Frankfurt and even in little Michelstadt – they were as plentiful as leaves on a tree – but nothing on this scale. Dumbfounded and, I must confess, a little impressed too. It’s hard not to feel some sort of thrill at the sight of them – the red and black, the colours of power, and the swastika, that mesmerising rune with its ancient promise of good fortune. I know about the power of symbols and you have to hand it to the National Socialists – they have chosen a mighty potent one in the hooked cross.

I went through Anhalter’s magnificent lobby into the square outside the station on Saarland Strasse (that’s what they are calling it now), straight into a man on a bicycle with a basket full of giant brezls, steaming lightly in the chill Spring air. I was famished, and with no more than a few Reichsmarks in my pocket to last me until I got home long after midnight, I bought two to see me through the day. My mother won’t speak to people who eat in public, and ordinarily I would never, but I was almost dizzy with hunger.

By the time I had descended the stairs, bought my 10-pfennig ticket and felt the warm rush of the oncoming S-Bahn train I was halfway through one of them. It was just two stops to the new station on the Unter den Linden, and I was chewing the last of it as I made my way up the steps back into the sunshine. My first thought on emerging into the great boulevard of Imperial Berlin was that I must have missed my stop. I looked to my left and there was the Brandenburg Gate just as it was meant to be. I looked to the right and there in the far distance was the Berliner Dom, resting place of a thousand Hohenzollerns, the pale green dome of the cathedral just visible on the skyline.

I turned around and there was the Hotel Bristol, one of Germany’s finest, just as it always was when Max and I used to take tea and watch the wealthy promenading along the avenue in all their finery. Whenever I had grown tired of my own studies in Heidelberg – which was quite often, because I was reading Medieval German literature – I used to jump on the train and meet him at the end of classes on the steps of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. We’d skip off to the cafés on the Linden and the jazz bars in Ku’damm, see and do things we’d never dream of telling our mothers about. You could watch naked dancers in the afternoon while enjoying tea and cake and, if you were really in luck, get to kiss a girl before nightfall. Imagine that in little Michelstadt!

This wasn’t the world I remembered. But yes, for sure, this was the Unter den Linden. All the lovely sweet-smelling lime trees from which the grand old street takes its name had vanished, replaced by a few weedy saplings no taller or more robust than me. What a plain thoroughfare it had become since my last visit seven years ago; grand still, yes of course, but sulking over its Spartan starkness, like a child after an overly severe haircut knowing it was going to take an age to grow out. The double carriageways had been widened but there was barely any traffic, just a few black cars and a couple of cream twin-deck buses. But no rustling foliage to soften the austere grandeur, no shade, no promenaders, no joy.

I pulled out my Murattis, fired up my first cigarette of the day and blew out my cheeks, looking up and down into a swaying forest of swastika flags and banners and a blur of uniforms. In my baggy double-breasted suit, scuffed brogues and floppy threadbare fedora, I was that guest who had not been informed the party was a fancy-dress affair. I had never seen so many different uniforms, dozens of them whichever way you looked; black ones of the SS, brown ones of the SA, field grey ones of the Wehrmacht, the green ones of the street police, swankier than Prussian generals…

The familiar white costume of the traffic policeman outside the Bristol, comic and Italian, was comfort of sorts, a throwback, waving his gloved hands and blowing his whistle at what traffic there was. But if I hadn’t known better, you’d have forgiven me for thinking that, in my time away, the country had fallen under foreign occupation.

A troop of SA, the Sturmabteilung, was milling around the news kiosk outside the S-Bahn entrance, reeking of beer, jostling and barging each other, a few of them tearing at brezls like dogs stripping meat from a bone, their mates queuing for the newspapers. I had heard a great deal about the ‘brown shirts’ while in France and I stared at them, engrossed, from beneath the lowered brim of my hat. The papers, especially the foreign titles, were full of headlines about the Spanish Civil War but the SA men were interested only in copies of Der Sturmer and the afternoon edition of Der Angriff, each one thrusting out his arm and Heil Hitler-ing the vendor before handing over their coins. The poor old man in the kiosk must have been exhausted, dutifully lifting his arm in response to each bark of his customers. Side on to the kiosk, I couldn’t see his face, just his bony hand shooting out every few moments, each time a little lower than the last.

Some of the SA men rolled up their papers like truncheons and slapped them in their palms, one with his chum in a headlock beating him with his. I had to assume this had become an everyday sight for Berliners, because no passer-by batted an eyelid, just kept walking eyes front.

You have to know this was all new and strange to me and I felt a sudden and acute awareness of my age, gawping and thinking: don’t they all look exactly the same, these big boy scouts? The short-cropped hair, the olive-brown brown shirts and caps, riding breeches flared at the side, the knee-high boots, shoulder cross-belts, the chests puffed out, faces glistening with beery sweat – from a only a short distance, all indistinguishable from one another, just a mass of roiling brown shirts. Ein volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer! – the slogan du jour. I had heard it endlessly on the wireless and seen it on all the posters. And there it was in the flesh right before me, a newsreel come to life.

The most drunk among them, and that was a notable achievement, strode my way, standing so close I felt and smelt his hot beery breath. When he began heiling everyone emerging up from the S-Bahn, I backed away a couple of steps. He span on a heel and, stabbing his arm and flat palm at me, I confess I felt intimidated and returned the gesture, my effort rather feeble, more of a muscle spasm.

I walked on head down through the brown shirts, crossing the Wilhelmstrasse, and made towards the Brandenburg Gate, returning the nod and smile from the porter in his big top hat, under the burgundy awning of the Hotel Adlon. I passed under the great arch of the Brandenburg Gate into the Tiergarten, a group of ten-year-old schoolboys on an excursion heiling each other and passers-by, laughing and shoving.

It was quite exhausting just to witness this new craze. I sat on a bench, the sun on my neck, facing the smoke-blackened, roofless shell of the Reichstag and lit a cigarette. A squirrel raced over and, up on its back legs, gave me a sinister eye, begging for the brezl sticking out of my suit pocket. I took out the letter from my inside pocket and read it again, looking for clues.

‘Sehr Geehrter Herr Eckhart, Your name has been passed to my department through the official channels. Our Darmstadt office informs me that you are now back in the Reich following your latest endeavours in the realm of historical research. I do hope the expedition, to the Cathar heartlands of Languedoc I understand, was both fruitful and enlightening.

On reading your work, with great interest and admiration I must add, I am persuaded that your knowledge and expertise could prove to be an invaluable asset to the Reich and, in particular, to a new institution established during the period of your absence. For reasons that will become clear at our meeting, the work and aims of this institution are best left undisclosed here lest they should fall into the wrong hands.

I have a foreign assignment in mind that may be of interest to you. Were an arrangement to be reached, satisfactory to both sides, you will of course be well remunerated for your important efforts. I thank you in advance for presenting yourself at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, 8 at 1600Uhr on Thursday, 6 May. Heil Hitler!

My expedition! If only they knew. My work! Were they confusing me with another Otto Eckhart? But then how did they know where I lived, that I had been abroad, that I had written a book? My knowledge and expertise! Invaluable asset! Thank heavens they hadn’t consulted mother or Professor Gebhardt at Heidelberg University. Foreign assignment! Well remunerated!

I can barely bring myself to admit to those feelings of exhilaration now. But I must remind you that I had only been back in Germany a very short while, that I didn’t have two pfennigs to rub together, I had no prospects but a life of idle provincial tedium ahead of me and I longed to be back on the road, a free spirit once more. You see it, don’t you? I do hope you will forgive me my naivety when you discover what was about to happen.

Comments

Deana Coddaire Tue, 27/07/2021 - 14:03

Fantastic foreshadowing of dark days ahead; clear, impactful storytelling and excellent character development.

Robin Cutler Sun, 29/08/2021 - 22:02

Made me wonder about the ordeal to come and the holy grail bit--reminded me or Indiana Jones.

Jordan Rosenfeld Sun, 29/08/2021 - 23:50

Your character has a great voice and the circumstances sound excellent. I would read more.

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