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The Pink Triangle

CHARACTERS:
Helmut, a gay man once imprisoned by the Nazis, a pre-war screenwriter
Franz, an actor who lives with Helmut
Mark, an American screenwriter

TIME: Berlin, the late 1960s. The action takes place in the apartment of Helmut and Franz.

HELMUT: So you managed to find me after the war.

MARK: I'm no stranger to Germany. My father escaped Germany in the late 30s. He was a young playwright then, and introduced me to your work. My Uncle Karl who came from Weimar never made it in America, because he spent his life in mental torment.

FRANZ: Helmut found me after the war, too. But now I'm living in a physical hell.

HELMUT: When you wrote me from Los Angeles I recognized your father's last name. I am sorry to hear your father Werner has dies, and though he would have made a greater film director in Germany, at least he tried his best in America. Maybe what we do in life does have value, even though Franz here doesn't think so.

FRANZ: What does it matter, I'm a living death.

HELMUT: Franz has made death out of his living. The doctors can't find anything wrong with him.

MARK: I'm familiar with death wishes.

HELMUT: When I was your age, I only wanted to make movies for the German public. But my private life and my politics were a threat to the National Socialists, and they sent me to the camps.

FRANZ: What an irony. God sends this Jew from Los Angeles –

MARK: I'm a half-Jew, but it's my better half.

HELMUT: In Germany, if they suspected any part of you was Jewish –

FRANZ: Especially the best parts for us –

HELMUT: -- there would be an act of murder; the Nazis wanted me to work at pulling up the dead bodies before new ones arrived every day on the train. I was in several different camps, and I never knew from moment to moment what form of death would be my own.

FRANZ: How do you know what the doctors have told me? I'm a living corpse.

HELMUT: Helmut, I want you to give me the most moving parts of your story.

FRANZ: So this is St. Mark. Perhaps an angel did send Mark.

MARK: An angel and messenger are the same in my book. Believe me, I'm no angel.

FRANZ: Perhaps he's the angel of death form me.

HELMUT: Be still. I need a schnapps.

MARK: My father used to need schnapps when he wanted to hide something from me.

HELMUT: I feel sad about your Uncle Karl. He would have made a contribution too.

MARK: I used to visit him in an L.A. sanitarium on Sundays. He would look through his scrapbook. I took the one snapshot Karl had of you.

HELMUT: May I see it? This was taken in Weimar, 1937. Karl really knew how to use the camera.

FRANZ: Helmut found me, then a young actor, in front of the camera. He saw all of me that first time. I was ready to do anything for the famous Helmut Graef. And I've been in the same role ever since.

HELMUT: I've tried my best for Franz, and he knows it.

MARK: Tell me, were you born here in Berlin?

HELMUT: I always hated the word "legit," in life and in film. Maybe I was born bad.

MARK: Nothing's kosher.

HELMUT: My mother sang in red light district nightclubs. I always suspected my father was a Jew.

FRANZ: Everyone still suspects everyone else in Germany. I suspect the Americans are still naïve about us.

HELMUT: I went to kindergarten in Berlin. I first remember I fell in love with a boy named Karol. He was part Polish and wore a white sailor suit, and I dreamed about him. We continued all through gymnasium together, and we loved each other.

FRANZ: You old German romantic queen. Do you want Mark here to make a romantic melodrama reproduction out of you for Hollywood?

HELMUT: I want the truth to come out of it. Karol was deported in 1938, but I think he was murdered. He would have been one of Europe's greatest dramatic actors. After Karol's deportation, I knew the Nazis would get to me, though I took a job as a waiter in an underground club and slept in the back. I was always a Leftist, and what's more, I liked Heine, Schiller and Hoffmanstahl, and in Germany that was a greater crime. Once I thought I heard Mendelssohn on the radio in the club, and someone told me it was by Wagner.

FRANZ: Maybe you had a hearing problem even then.

HELMUT: No, the Nazis left me with one eardrum.

FRANZ: No one wants to know about me, even though I've lived with him for almost twenty years.

HELMUT: One day I was picked up by the Nazis and transported to somewhere in the East. I used to imagine I was dead, so every day was a miracle.

FRANZ: Your God is dead, but you don't even know when he died. Just like my father died somewhere on the Eastern front.

HELMUT: They put me in a black hole, and then sent me to Warsaw to remove dead bodies. Is this too much for you?

MARK: No, Helmut.

FRANZ: He looks like an angel, doesn't he, Helmut, even though he says he's not.

HELMUT: After several months' confinement and one on the work force, I swear I saw angels. But I couldn't entertain them, not knowing them.

FRANZ: Helmut reminds me of the pianist Liszt whom I was named for. He too led a "dissolute life," as the German dictionary piously calls it, and then became a priest who found God amidst his furious notes.

HELMUT: I used to hum Mozart and Liszt at the camps. Here is the pink triangle I wore.

FRANZ: It's worn out like Helmut himself.

HELMUT: I came back to an occupied Germany, still preoccupied with itself, never with its guilt, Then due to our familiar discipline, forgetfulness yet aggression, a new Germany, sparkling, prosperous, hiding the jacket from our reconstructed, clean houses. Our new hosts from America were amenable to our forgetfulness. In fact, they provided us with every alibi for our survival we had heard before the war; the evils of German Marxism, Russian Bolshevism, and so on.

FRANZ: Some people think those warnings were true.

HELMUT: We should always have a great Left resistance here. I've always had a fear of revanchism. Oh, you Americans helped us to forget the past, though we didn't need you in that regard. The old industrialists were back, the old hanging judges, civil servants, Nazi teachers and professors. And in the east, the Prussianism of the past proved amenable to the Russianism of the glorious future.

FRANZ: Perhaps Spengler was right, or the young Jung, or Nietzsche, whom I studied in the free university.

HELMUT: I like the new Left, but perhaps even they will not be honest. You know how Uncle Joe Stalin betrayed the Left, the gays, all the minorities of Europe. The Russians handed lists of the Left over to the Gestapo, and the Gestapo helped themselves to KGB lists. What irony that the Americans of the CIA supported the old Nazis for information which was often unreliable, and could be bought and sold to the highest Cold War bidder. In the East the Nazi flags were soon replaced with the red ones in the wink of an eye. Every politician betrayed another. It's as if the old demons have never left us. We Germans have no idealism, except for a rationale for survival.

FRANZ: Tell him about our rashness that we hide on our faces from the world.

HELMUT: Even our prosperity gave us a poverty of the spirit, the most crass people became the most powerful, and every time a playwright, poet or politician spoke his mind, he was drowned out by a newspaper scandal, and then a raid on the newspaper itself.

FRANZ: Germany lives between its economic enemas and political enemas. We're all anal compulsive here. Wee keep our movements to ourselves, and don't believe in the good Austrian doctor. We always want to be in the right hands. The trouble is when we get agitated, who will pull us right away from the seat of power?

HELMUT: He's such an actor, our Franz.

FRANZ: But I keep getting diarrhea of the mouth. It's not too pleasant living with me, is it, Helmut? Lately I've been getting a persistent depression. Depressions in Germany always mean trouble for the world.

MARK: Franz, what do you think of me?

FRANZ: A helpless, naïve, half-Jewish intellectual who likes our Talmudic commentaries, that believes in universalism, that we are all born good and can be educated and reformed. Hopefully not with all the liberal, middle-class Hollywood jargon we've seen and heard. You're in for a surprise soon in Germany.

MARK: You think I expect surprises? When I used to look at my Uncle Karl in the sanitarium, I knew what Germany is capable of, and every man.

FRANZ: All of us here have been branded by the world, and if you think fascists aren't still around, you are a fool. In every nation; war veterans, the perpetually unemployed, academians eager to have tenure and position, scientists eager for new discoveries to recondition man, businessmen quick to move up the corporate ladder, psychologists like their master Jung hoping to advance into Freudian chairs, petty government officials hopeful to move in higher circles, and of course, the perpetual anti-Semitic parasites living in their Lebestraum world, always waiting. Such is fascism here and everywhere.

MARK: My father says Europe will never recover its intellectual, musical or spiritual power it lost in the war.

HELMUT: They think the new Europe will change barbarians. Am I right, Franz?

FRANZ: Right on the money. Hitler said conscience is a Jewish invention. We have none here, or very little. We have the marks of the beast.

MARK: My father used to say, in one generation the world will want to deny what happened.

FRANZ: Already in the East they blame fascism on the industrialists and never the Communists who accepted Stalin's wishes to prevent an alliance of the Left against Hitler. Stalinists had the nerve to call the Social Democrats proto-fascists while they made a deal with Hitler. Stalin and Hitler deserved each other and were both National Socialists. And here in West Germany we can't face the fact that all sections of the population succumbed to fascism. Maybe fascism is in all of us, and it's really the human condition.

HELMUT: You see why I fell for Franz? How long can you stay with us?

MARK: Just for the interview today.

HELMUT: I was hoping you could stay longer.

MARK: My greatest hope was that you would find your diary and I could make a copy of it before I left Berlin.

HELMUT: I wrote you saying I could not find it.

FRANZ: I don't want Mark to leave. I think he is hiding something from us.

MARK: What do you want to know about me?

FRANZ: Why are you so fascinated with Helmut's personal life?

HELMUT: Franz has been drinking.

FRANZ: I don't want Mark to leave us. I've locked you in because I have the key to this apartment. You think your American passport will bail you out? I've confiscated it and will sell it to a Palestinian.

HELMUT: Don't mind Franz. He's just, as you Americans say, putting you on.

FRANZ: Helmut, I'm not putting you on when I tell you I had your diary, because what's between us is also personal, and I don't want anyone, not even an angel, to find out.

HELMUT: When I met Franz I wrote my memoirs. After you wrote to me, my diary disappeared.

FRANZ: Maybe I sold it. Maybe you can't trust me. Maybe my mind is shot. Mark, maybe your logic, your education, your belief in man, your awareness, your American idealism and your Jewish means of survival will save you. Maybe you think you can leave for Paris, for Amsterdam, Tel Aviv or London free of us. But Germany will haunt you.

MARK: Listen, when I'm on the train anywhere in the world at any time of day I think it's a miracle that I'm alive. Or when I see a baby I think of the thousands like me who died in the crematoria – because of my father, I'm still a German and a Jew down deep.

FRANZ: We can offer you more material if you stay with us.

MARK: I've seen enough here.

HELMUT: Isn't America becoming like our Weimar? It's not far removed.

MARK: America almost went fascist in the 30s; democracy saved us.

FRANZ: But nothing can save you here.

MARK: A generation ago, the Jews were locked in countries who wouldn't let them in or our. And you won't let me out? What do you want from me?

FRANZ: We've bared our souls to you.

MARK: I don't think you're after my soul.

FRANZ: We like you.

MARK: I don't think you like yourself, or what happened to Germany.

FRANZ: I studied history and philosophy after the war. My mother was Catholic. But I think the Catholic party of the 30s wanted to go back to the middle ages. The Protestants were more hypocritical. They claimed a belief in pacifism and patriotism at the same time. Some of the Socialists were even true to the anti-Semitism of Marx. The Communists obeyed the Stalin-Hitler line way before 1939.

MARK: I came here for a screenplay, not a history lesson.

FRANZ: You'll get both from me, after you give me your own history.

MARK: I guess I'm the same as you.

FRANZ: The same bloodline and blood libel exists everywhere.

HELMUT: Maybe to the end of time.

FRANZ: And Mark wants to be a man of his time.

MARK: I'm in pretty good company.

FRANZ: He thinks he'll send us some postcard one of these days from some city, Athens or Jerusalem or Manhattan. And he will tell us of his Academy Award for best screenplay.

HELMUT: I demand my diary, Franz, to give to Mark. It's my life.

FRANZ: Do you think we'll all come to blows over it?

HELMUT: That's what you like. But in front of Mark?

FRANZ: He's part of our company, isn't he?

MARK: Now I see why, when I'm in Manhattan, I always feel like I'm in Weimar.

FRANZ: If you stay over, you could sleep with me.

MARK: My father used to say "gay schloffen" to me, when he found out about my life.

FRANZ: You look nervous.

MARK: I didn't expect a simple visit.

FRANZ: You expected the story of a miracle, and you found me, who sucked his way, like any Hollywood actor, to the top.

MARK: It's not who you know, but who you blow?

HELMUT: And that's where I come into the picture.

FRANZ: I did need you, Helmut. I had no father. You are all I have. And I'm dying to tell your story.

HELMUT: Then find my diary and return Mark's passport. These are our identity papers.

FRANZ: At least both of you have an identity. What do I have?

HELMUT: You have me. You don't need anyone else.

FRANZ: That's what I always thought.

HELMUT: Now go and get that diary.

FRANZ: Yes, Daddy, I'll be the obedient slave and you'll be my master. And Mark can be my victim.

MARK: How Freudian.

(Franz goes to the bed, takes the diary out from under the mattress, and gives it to Mark.)

MARK: Thank you. I will send the original back.

FRANZ: Here's your identity papers. I wish you could come back to visit.

HELMUT: I want to give you my pink triangle. Bring it to America, or wherever you go.

FRANZ: I want him to have a present, since he doesn't want to make a play for me. Here's a snapshot of Marlene Dietrich my mother gave me. It came from one of the German nightclubs. She made the right choice in leaving.

MARK: Thank you for being yourselves with me.

(All three men hold hands.)

FRANZ: Are you satisfied with the material you've gotten for your screenplay? We have done our part for you. As Helmut says, "We are the movie."

(A screen lowers and we see a film of Mark entering the room.)

MARK: You've made it easy for me here.

(The curtain lowers. The film plays on. THE END)

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