by Leo Maxim
They talk about politics, about the country they live in. Wolf tells her how terrible he finds this GDR, how uncomfortable he feels, how much he hates having these old men speaking on his behalf. Anne says she’s in the Party. Then Wolf stops, lets go of her hand and falls silent. “Everything couldn’t have been right all at once,” he said later. It’s the start of a long love and a long argument. With my parents, the two things always went together.
Anne talks about her father Gerhard, the Communist who fought the Nazis in France. She paints the picture of a tender hero who loves his Party and his daughter. Wolf talks about his father Werner, the little Nazi who became a little Stalinist. A man he doesn’t know much about, a man he fell out with. Wolf says he wished he could find a new father back then. He likes the tender hero Anne tells him about.
Before Wolf is invited to Anne’s parents for the first time, they ask Anne if the new boyfriend is in the Party as well. When Anne says he isn’t, her father’s face darkens, and her mother advises her not to take it too seriously each time she falls in love. Wolf says today that it was all quite clear already, before he even saw her parents. Anne says that’s overstating the case.
At any rate she’s got a birthday, and there’s a dinner at her parents’ place in Friedrichshagen. Anne barely slept the night before, because she’d been summoned for a Socialist auxiliary unit on the railway, along with some other students. A set of frozen points had to be cleared of snow. But in fact all they did was stand around, because there weren’t enough shovels. Anne thinks it’s stupid that she has to join units like that as a student. Gerhard is annoyed. He says: “If there’s a problem in Socialism, everyone has to help.” His voice is unusually harsh. Anne doesn’t understand why he reacts like that. They defend themselves, one word generates another. Wolf looks on in silence and wonders whether this is really the man Anne has said so many good things about. Eventually Gerhard says, looking at Anne, “When it comes to the crunch, you’re on the other side of the barricade.”
I heard that sentence often later on, mostly from Wolf, who quoted it time and again as proof that it was Gerhard’s fault if the family never really came together. When we were doing the French Revolution in school, my history book had a picture of a barricade in the streets of Paris. I imagined my parents on one side and my grandparents on the other. I didn’t know which side I was supposed to be on. I just wanted everyone to make sure we were a real family. Without a barricade.
Anne grabs her clothes, takes a fat blanket and moves into Wolf’s shop-apartment. For a while her mother tries to talk her out of her new love. She says Wolf is a wayward artist, not someone you can depend on. And he isn’t intelligent enough for her, either. It’s only when her parents discover that Anne’s pregnant that they give up the fight. The marriage takes place at Prenzlauer Berg register office. In the wedding photograph Anne wears a short floral dress, her belly swelling slightly beneath it. She has her hair up and looks like a girl. Wolf wears a dark suit and grins into the camera. Gerhard stands beside him wearing a serious expression.
The wedding is celebrated at Anne’s parents’ summer house. A French friend of the family grills marinated meat, there are roasted snails, baguettes, olives and claret. The guests speak French and English, they wear expensive suits and make jokes about the GDR. Wolf is impressed by the party. He’s never been to a barbecue before. He doesn’t know you can eat snails. He sees his first pepper mill, takes out the peppercorns and then doesn’t know what to do with them. The others laugh, he blushes. Anne introduces him to her parents’ friends, writers or journalists who lived in exile in France, America, Mexico or Shanghai during the Nazi era. Wolf listens to their stories about fighting, fleeing and suffering. They are people unlike any he’s ever met before. Heroes, survivors from the big wide world who have found their new home in the little GDR. Because they aren’t persecuted here, because they are safe here. Their stories are so different from those of his family. It’s all so strange. Wolf wonders if he can ever belong among these people, this family, this woman he’s just married. Gerhard raises a glass to him without looking at him. They drink to a happy marriage and a long life.
2
Secrets
I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS brilliant that Anne came from the West. It gave her something special, and it gave me something special too. As a child, I sometimes cleared out her handbag and looked at all its contents. On her ID card it said: born on 25.2.1947 in Düsseldorf. Anne explained that the city was in the Rhineland and quite rich. I knew Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul lived in Düsseldorf. They drove a white Ford estate car, and once gave us a Carrera Bahn, a Scalextric set, which I still think was great of them. I never understood how Anne could have been so silly as to move to the East. I knew there were people who went to the West. But I’d never heard of anyone doing it the other way around. Anne said I should be glad because I wouldn’t even have existed if she’d stayed in Düsseldorf. That sounded logical enough.
While she’s still living in Düsseldorf, Anne sometimes stands at the window with her great-grandmother Bertha, watching the people in the street. Bertha divides the passers-by into orderly and disorderly. You can tell the disorderly ones because they swing their arms when they walk.
Anne’s family live in a huge, grand apartment on Jürgensplatz, which was assigned to Gerhard when he got back from France. As recognition of his combat in the French Resistance, Gerhard had been promoted to lieutenant in the French Army, and in Germany an officer of the victorious forces has a right to a suitable apartment. The people who had lived in the flat before were a Nazi family who had been interned by the British. Anne’s parents took over the furniture, because they didn’t have anything themselves. It must have been strange living with the enemy’s furniture, but they probably had other concerns at the time. There are photographs of Anne as a child, lying on a brown bearskin. Gerhard calls the skin “our Aryan bear”. He is working as a journalist with the Communist newspaper Freiheit, where Anne’s mother is also employed as a secretary. At the weekend Anne goes to the swimming pool with Gerhard. She throws a comb into the water and he brings it back like a trained seal. In the evening before they go to bed Gerhard sings old partisan songs or plays the accordion. He can tell stories and and draw pictures for them at the same time. As far as Anne’s concerned he’s the most brilliant father in the whole world.
Gerhard and Nora, 1948
One day Gerhard is gone. Anne’s mother says he had to go and work in another city and will be back soon. Time without Gerhard is boring, because her mother can’t play the accordion and doesn’t much feel like telling stories. A few weeks later, in February 1952, Anne and her mother go on a skiing holiday in Oberhof in the Thuringian Forest. They stay in the “Ernst Thälmann” Party holiday home and wait for Gerhard, who turns up a few days later. They celebrate Anne’s fourth birthday together. The same evening there’s a conversation between the parents. Gerhard says they’re not going to go back to Düsseldorf because there’s a danger that he might be arrested there. From now on they will live in East Berlin, the comrades had already got everything ready. Anne’s mother asks no questions. She’s used to there being things she’d rather not know. A driver takes the family to Berlin in a black Wolga. They drive to a house in Pregelstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. There’s a flat there that’s already been fully furnished, and a few things have already arrived from Düsseldorf. They are given passports with new names. They are now called Oswald. Two comrades tell them it’s very important to forget their old names as quickly as possible. A few months later, Anne’s grandmother visits from Düsseldorf. She tells Anne it’s entirely normal to get a new name when you move to a new town. Anne thinks that’s perfectly reasonable.
In the family, the explanation for the hasty move to Berlin was always that Gerhard was persecuted as a Communist in the West, and therefore preferred to help build up the GDR rather than be pushed around by reactionaries. I only discovered the true reason for the flight to the East after the GDR
had already collapsed. When my father’s secrets could no longer be kept.
In Berlin there’s a playground in front of the house, and lots of children who meet in the afternoon and move around the area without their parents. For Anne this is all new and exciting, and she’s soon forgotten Düsseldorf. In the neighbourhood there’s a Pioneer troop where they do crafts and sing. Her parents tell her that they now live in a country where everyone’s free and equal, where the good people are in charge and where her Papi doesn’t have to be frightened any more. Two years later they move to Friedrichshagen and all of a sudden they’re called Leo again. Her parents say she mustn’t tell anyone that they were once called Oswald, so that the bad people can’t find them. Anne has a favourite children’s book, Oswald the Monkey, that she no longer dares to read. In Friedrichshagen her parents tell their new neighbours that they’ve come straight from Düsseldorf. On one occasion the owner of the house meets Anne on the stairs and asks how come she’s got such a strong Berlin accent. Anne freezes with fear and says, “That’s how they talk in Düsseldorf as well.”
Two years later Anne takes the train to Düsseldorf with her mother and two sisters. It’s their last visit to their family in the West. On the border at Helmstedt the compartment door is pulled open and a fat man in uniform asks to see their papers. He flicks through a black book and asks Anne’s mother her husband’s first name. To Anne’s great amazement, her mother refuses to give out any information at all. The man becomes angry and asks again and again. Eventually his eye drifts towards Anne. She is sliding uneasily back and forth on her seat, her lips pressed together. She’s worried that she might divulge her father’s secret name if she opened her mouth even slightly. The seconds under the quizzical eye of the uniformed man seem long and unbearable. In the end the West German border guard furiously closes the compartment door and goes.
All these secrets, the worry that the bad people might come and get her beloved father after all, must have left a deep mark on Anne. Long before she can understand what’s happening around her, the Cold War has slipped into her little world and made her a comrade. For Anne the world is divided into two camps from the outset. There are the good people, including her father most of all, and there are the others, the ones you fear and fight against. As her father did, as her father’s friends did, as everyone who feels a spark of decency must do. For a long time Anne thinks the GDR is full of such courageous fighters, until she understands that she and her parents belong to a tiny minority. To a minority that took power in the GDR, and who nonetheless feel strange in this Germany from which they were once banished.
In Friedrichshagen there’s a tall, white-haired man in the neighbourhood who has an English hunting dog which the children are sometimes allowed to stroke. Anne is even allowed to take the dog out on a lead. The old man has serious conversations with her, and once he invites Anne to his house. Anne must have been ten or eleven at the time, and she feels very flattered. There is hot chocolate and biscuits, and all of a sudden the man starts talking about a night when lots of houses in Berlin were on fire. The man is very worked up, and tells her how sorry he was “that your department stores were on fire”. Anne is baffled, she doesn’t know what the man is talking about. His hands wave in the air, copying the flight of the burning bales of material. Anne imagines she can see the fire of that night blazing in his eyes. She contradicts him, saying that her parents never owned any department stores. Ah, the man replies, of course you all had department stores. He also talks about a girl who lived in his house and looked very like Anne. He says he was so sorry that she “went away”.
Anne goes home rather confused, and tells her parents about her strange encounter. They get worked up too and explain that the man was talking about Kristallnacht. “Because we’re Jews, he obviously thinks we owned department stores as well,” Gerhard says. Anne doesn’t know what it means to be a Jew. She just knows that Gerhard had to leave Germany when he was still a child. She feels a strange anxiety, a sense of helplessness, of strangeness.
Downstairs in their building live the Holzmanns, who her parents say are Jews. Herr Holzmann had been in Auschwitz, and had lost his family there. Later he had married again and had a son called Benjamin, the same age as Anne. One day the Holzmanns ring the doorbell, bringing matzos. They wish the family good health and a happy Pesach. Anne’s parents are visibly unhappy about this visit, which Anne doesn’t understand because the Holzmanns are nice people and even brought something nice to eat. Anne asks what Pesach is, and her mother tells her that’s the name the Jews give to their Easter festival. It’s clear that they themselves don’t want to be Jews.
Gerhard once told me he fought as a Communist in the war, and not as a Jew. I think being Jewish for him means not being able to defend yourself, being a victim. He once told me how he fled the advancing German troops in July 1942 in France, and hid for a while in a Jewish children’s home based in a castle near Limoges. One day French police came to the home and wanted to take all the children away. Gerhard had locked himself in a room in a tower and watched from above as the children were hunted. Some of them tried to escape, but were caught by the police, loaded onto trucks and taken to Drancy internment camp. When Gerhard told me about this experience, he was much moved. Perhaps it was then that he made his decision not to be caught as easily as that, but to fight for his convictions. He found it honourable to die as a Communist, but being chased as a Jew struck him as possibly undignified.
As a child Anne knows hardly anything about what her family suffered during the Nazi years because they were Jews. She doesn’t know the experiences of her mother, who only escaped deportation in the Rhineland by the skin of her teeth. She knows her grandfather died in Auschwitz, but has no idea why. She only gradually discovered her father’s story. He only ever tells her the adventurous anecdotes from which he emerged victorious. How they blew up the tracks on which the German reinforcements were due to arrive, how they sat around the campfire and sang dirty songs, how he shot an SS man who had been chasing him in a forest. She’s glad her father is such a jolly hero. Most of the other heroes she hears about at school are serious, old men. Gerhard keeps the sad and painful stories to himself. Once Anne comes into the bathroom just as he’s brushing his teeth. She notices that Gerhard has no incisors in his upper jaw. When she asks him about it, he quickly puts in his bridge, laughs and asks what teeth he has missing. Then Anne knows she’s asked a forbidden question, and that there are things he’d rather not talk about.
Most of all, Anne really wants to be like all the other children. But it’s not as easy as that. Again and again she comes up against the realization that she’s different. Because she’s the only one in her class who doesn’t take part in religious-studies classes, because no one else has a father who gives political lectures at school, because from the start she’s been the group leader of her Pioneer organization. Anne is so filled with the feeling of representing the right cause that she even corrects the teacher when one of his statements doesn’t seem quite partisan enough. Some of her fellow pupils avoid her, she’s the “Red”, the eager one.
When Anne is thirteen, she moves with her parents to Geneva. Gerhard has been appointed UN correspondent with the East German news agency ADN, and because the comrades in Berlin think it’s unsuitable for East German children to attend a Swiss school, Anne is taught at home by her mother. Anne learns French in the street, and later, when she goes to the Soviet Embassy school, Russian as well. At the weekend they go to the mountains or swim in Lake Geneva. For Anne it’s an exciting, carefree time. The only strange thing is that the people in the West aren’t nearly as bad as she’d thought. The working class aren’t exploited, either, they’re rich. The janitor who sometimes fixes things in their flat drives a bigger car than her father.
After a year Anne has to go back to the GDR because the Soviet Embassy school only goes up to year seven. Her parents and two younger sisters stay in Geneva. In fact Anne is supposed to go to a home for East
German diplomats’ children, but her parents think it’s better to leave her in Friedrichshagen, in a familiar environment. Frau Schenk, an old woman from the neighbourhood, moves into her parents’ flat and takes care of Anne. Now life isn’t as exciting as it was, and Anne often feels lonely, but she accepts it all because it’s the only way. Only today does she wonder how her parents managed to leave her on her own for two years just because the Party had decided that East German children can’t go to a Western school.
The best thing about this time is the holidays, because she’s allowed to fly to Geneva on her own. She sits right at the front in the first row on the plane, and the stewardesses stuff her full of Swissair chocolate. Once she has to change in Prague. The GDR ambassador to Czechoslovakia, a friend of her father’s, collected her from the gangway and helped her pass the time in the transit lounge. On one flight she sits next to a young Cuban, with whom she immediately falls in love.
When the Wall is built in August 1961, Anne is in Geneva on her summer holidays, and isn’t really aware of it. Her parents think it’s a good thing that there’s a proper border now. A protecting rampart to keep the bad people out of the country. It’s only when she comes home after the holidays that Anne notices what’s happened. Her fellow pupils, who aren’t allowed to go to the West any more, confront her in the classroom, demanding to know why she of all people should still be allowed to travel. It’s a kind of tribunal. She feels the hostility of the others, their rage. One of them shouts that the GDR is a prison, a lousy dictatorship in which only Red officials thrive. She stands alone in front of the furious crowd, supposed to defend something that she herself barely understands. She is the fourteen-year-old ambassador for a state that is busy saving its own skin.