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I also raised my eyes to heaven and laughed, and at the same time I could not repress a gesture of wonder and horror. From the ceiling where once had been painted the “Triumph of Venus,” a fresco by some eighteenth-century Italian pupil of the great Venetian masters, now hung a mauve-coloured wistaria arbour wrought with the precision and realism of that florid style that began with the “modernists” of 1900 and passed through the decorative schools of Vienna and Munich and finally achieved its extreme and highest expression in the official style of the Third Reich. Horrible to say, that wistaria arbour looked real. The slim trunks climbed up the walls like snakes bending and entwining their long twisted tendrils above our heads. The sinuous branches, hung with leaves and clusters of flowers about which fluttered tiny birds, fat multi-coloured butterflies and huge hairy bluebottles, made a lattice-work across a blue sky as clean and smooth as the sky in a cupola painted by Fortuny. My eyes glided slowly down the trunks of the wistaria and descended from branch to branch along the walls until it rested on the rich furniture stiffly and symmetrically ranged along the walls. It was dark, massive Dutch furniture over which hung on the walls blue Delft dishes showing landscapes and seascapes, and red souvenir dishes of the Dutch East India Company depicting pagodas and sea birds. Over a tall, solemn *‘Old Bavaria” cupboard hung a few Flemish-school still-lifes portraying huge silver trays laden with fish and fruit, and dining tables buried beneath a wonderful variety of game that was being sniffed at bysetters, pointers and hunting dogs. The curtains on the large windows were typical Saxon provincial—made of an ugly light rayon with a birds-and-flowers design. Schmeling's eyes met mine and he smiled. I was surprised that a prize fighter, with his hard narrow forehead, a gentle brute, could appreciate the grotesque and horrible in that wistaria arbour, that furniture, those pictures, those curtains, that drawing room where nothing was left of what used to be the pride of the Belvedere with its Viennese stuccos, Italian frescoes, French furniture and huge Venetian hanging lights. Only the shape of the doors and windows, and the architectural proportions testified to its former harmonyand seventeenth-century grace.
Frau Brigitte Frank, who for some time, had been following my wandering glances and my lingering, surprised eyes, no doubt imagined that I was struck with admiration for so much art and leaned toward me to say with a proud smile that she herself had supervised the work of the German decorators—as a matter of fact, she used the grand word “artists” instead of “decorators”—who were responsible for that wonderful transformation of the old Belvedere. The wistaria arbour, of which she seemed particularly proud, was the work of a distinguished Berlin woman artist; but she made it clear that the original idea of that arbour was her own. For political reasons, she had first thought of having recourse to the brush of some Polish painter, but then she had given up that idea. “It must be conceded,” she said, “that the Poles lack the religious sense of art that is a German heritage.”