I had a black eye for some time afterwards. At first that embarrassed me a great deal, but then I realised that only now did I fit into my present surroundings. People didn’t notice my black eye; indeed, it made me inconspicuous. It was local colour, so to speak.
I was horrified, humiliated, repelled, and angry with the invisible enemies who might ultimately have been to blame for my situation. I told myself that I was not just anyone, as my aunt Sylvia had put it. I was a lady, I had taken my school-leaving certificate, and I belonged to the middle classes, if only to the less prosperous part of them.
I set myself an allotted task to be done daily, and called it work. I would make myself maintain a dignified manner of everyday speech in line with the class to which I really belonged. I decided to write my internal, imaginary diary in literary German some of the time, and the rest of the time I would also write it in the most vulgar and improper Berlin slang. I determined that sometimes I would think in hexameters and write in an old-fashioned German style, but I had to give that up. I couldn’t use the language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries correctly because I had no access to a single book of that period, which annoyed me very much.
2
When I was still lodging with the Jacobsohns in Schmidstrasse, I often used to feel fear and anxiety weighing heavily down on me when I awoke in the morning. That was the time of the deportations from Berlin, and I sensed nothing but unhappiness in the air. Now that I was living at Number 2 Am Oberbaum, however, I almost always woke in a good temper after a deep, refreshing sleep.
Burgers went to work very early. I got up when he did, but often went back to bed for another hour after he had left. If it was fine weather outside, I opened the window of our room later and did gymnastics, entirely naked. At first I didn’t notice that our window was directly opposite the stationmaster’s little office at the Stralauer Tor overhead railway station, so that he could see me from that vantage point. Once the elderly gentleman, who looked like a stationmaster from a picture book, greeted me from his office, smiling and waving to me with his signalling disc. I cheerfully waved back, but I remembered to pull the curtain over the window in future.
One morning in late spring I had a surprise visit from Trude Neuke. She brought me a tiny bunch of primroses. She had even managed to get them wrapped in the shop, although paper was in very short supply. Trude always set great store by conventions and proper behaviour. She unwrapped the flowers and gave them to me without any fuss, but with an elegant gesture. I was very pleased to see her, asked her in, and we sat on the plush-covered sofa in Burgers’s room. I put the flowers on the table in a glass.
After a little preliminary talk, Trude asked me cautiously whether I found the relationship with Burgers tolerable. I could give her a positive answer, saying that we had begun to get used to each other. My influence over him was increasing, and Frau Blase and Burgers often said that they felt they were looked after better than ever before.
Gerrit Burgers, aged twenty-five, in February 1946. (photo credit 5.1)
I had no particular trouble in adjusting to the Dutchman and his whims. For instance, just before Burgers came home in the evening I often poured some water over the floor and spread it around. That took about two minutes, but he was delighted. His countrymen, in particular his mother, as he emphasised, set great store by cleanliness, but he had never before met a housewife who washed the floor again in the evening. He was quite beside himself with delight.
The primroses that Trude had brought me lived for a long time. Often I just sat looking at them. Without knowing it, Trude had granted a great wish of mine. Despite all the less welcome aspects of my situation, I longed to lead something like a normal life.
However, there were still some terrible scenes between Burgers and me during the first six months at Am Oberbaum. For instance, when he discovered that Frau Blase was getting food out of me by blackmail, he reacted with a fit of rage. Every week I met Frau Koch, who always gave me a big black shopping bag full of food. When Frau Blase saw this, she wanted some of it, and gave me a second bag to take specially. I found this very disagreeable, particularly when I realised that Frau Koch was not simply dividing my rations in two but giving me some of her own sparse provisions, so that both bags would look as if they were half full.
Once I came back very late from one of these meetings. Burgers was home already, looked at the two bags, and saw me giving one of them to Frau Blase. As he had already put his slippers on, he didn’t even need to take a boot off in order to give me another black eye.
The next quarrel between us flared up because he was extremely keen for me to share everything he had. In itself that was very nice of him, but unfortunately he insisted on it fanatically. His favourite dish was the wartime bread that he moistened with ersatz coffee and sprinkled with a thick layer of sugar. When he wanted me to eat some I declined, repelled by it. That led to another violent scene.
But then I did succeed in explaining that tastes differ, and he mustn’t take it personally if I didn’t like his bread and sugar. However, I had no objection to the fact that he smoked like a chimney and wanted me to keep pace with him. I was a heavy smoker myself.
Our relationship therefore gradually became easier. I could almost always avert his fits of fury in time. And unlike Frau Blase, he never threatened to denounce me or put me out on the street.
I often told myself that the bargain we had struck was not a bad one. Burgers did well out of it, but so did I. If we lived to see liberation, we would be quits and I would end the relationship at once. I had plenty of practice, after all, in escape and evasion – in short, in jumping off church towers, as the clairvoyant had put it.
But a time came when I became more and more aware of another question: how was I ever to pay off the duty of gratitude that I owed to Hannchen Koch?
In the end I often ate the food that Luise Blase made me give her after all, because the old woman ate like a bird. She offered me a taste of this and that from her meals increasingly often. That meant that it became a habit for me to keep her company at her midday meal and have some hot food myself. We often sat together for hours.
Luise Blase still had good posture and had kept her figure. Her sparse, snow-white hair had a few blonde strands in it. She wore it in long braids pinned up into an impressive nest. Where her scalp showed through her hair it was ash-grey to black, but her complexion was pink and her hands well tended.
She always sat at a little folding table that, because of her eye trouble, she was constantly moving to a place where the sun wouldn’t dazzle her. This tiny item of furniture, light as a feather, was like an inseparable part of her. She spoke the kind of Berlin dialect, the accent of the metropolis, that had been usual before the First World War, and I liked to hear it. Frail as she was, and almost blind, she worked the whole story of her life into her conversations with me.
She had been born in 1865, the illegitimate daughter of a maidservant. Luise Schieke – that was her maiden name – was at first brought up by her grandparents, but they soon died. Then she was passed on in turn to an assortment of relations, all of whom found her a nuisance. Meanwhile, her mother had risen in the world to some extent, and had married a man from the lower middle class.
‘So now that she’d improved herself,’ Frau Blase said, ‘she had a proper apartment, she didn’t have to go out to work.’ And at last her mother took the girl in. When Luise was ten her half-sister Klara was born, followed ten years later by little Anna, the baby of the family.
Like her mother before her, Luise went to work as a maidservant, and had already left home when the last little girl was born. But she had very affectionate, almost maternal feelings for the child. Every few weeks, when her employers gave her a day off, she went to see her mother’s family, although she had a chilly reception there. Her half-sister Klara showed particular dislike for her.
Once, she had bought a little bag of sweets for Anna out of her tiny wages. As she was giving it to the
child, Klara struck the bag out of both their hands as hard as she could, then trampled on the sweets and told her little sister, ‘You know you’re not allowed to take anything from horrid godforsaken Luise!’ After that, Luise and Klara were deadly enemies for the rest of their lives.
For many years Luise Blase had worked as a parlour maid for a Jewish couple who lived in a grand apartment on the Kottbusser Ufer. The father of the family wanted his two sons to be brought up in spartan style so that they would be good businessmen. As for his wife, the mistress of the house, Frau Blase described her as the quintessence of the fat, rich, Jewish social upstart. She settled herself rather more broadly in her chair and imitated her employer’s screech of a voice. ‘That’s how the woman sat, stuffing herself with food,’ she told me. She still remembered exactly what subjects were discussed at length when there were visitors, for instance where to get replacements if the lid of a dish or one of the good porcelain cups was broken.
The lady who stuffed herself with food had a sister who was not in the least like her. She was slender, blonde and blue-eyed, always on the go, doing this or that about the house, very nice to the servants and inclined to physical movement and laughter the whole time. This sister was also rich, and gave large parties. On such occasions she sometimes borrowed Luise from her mistress.
Frau Blase still remembered the woman with affection. She was the only human being who had ever been nice to her. When she had been sent to help her mistress’s sister out, she was welcomed at the door with open arms and a beaming smile. ‘Ah, here’s our little Luise!’
Frau Blase described the dinners there down to the last pot-herbs for the soup. I had no difficulty in identifying the menus as kosher. The meal began with clear soup, then blue trout (so called because the poaching method made the skin look blue), followed by many other courses including delicious specialities. Large quantities of food were bought, so that the kitchen staff could eat the same as the invited guests. But that didn’t suit the servants. ‘Trout, no, never had that before,’ and they somehow didn’t fancy this and that, or would only try a little of it. As a result the cook had asked permission for them to cook themselves something different, said Frau Blase, a huge pan of potato soup. They had crackling on a lavish scale to go with it, and sat comfortably in the kitchen eating this thick soup, rich with fat from the crackling. They were promptly sick afterwards. And as the cook and another of the kitchen staff had to throw up at the same time, they bumped their heads painfully together over the kitchen sink. Old Frau Blase laughed until she cried at the memory; it was one of the funniest experiences in her life.
After Luise Schieke had worked as a parlour maid for a long time, she had to admit to herself that she was getting nowhere. Through the caretakers who lived in the building, and whose apartment was a centre of gossip for all the servants working there, she heard of a widower with two adolescent sons who was in urgent need of a wife. Old Frau Blase imitated, in the style of a caricature, the fine qualities that this good catch on the marriage market was supposed to have: he was a distinguished gentleman, well to do financially, dressed fabulously well, and so forth. In retrospect, her only comment on these advantages was a dry, ‘Humph!’ That said it all.
So Fräulein Luise arranged to meet this fine gentleman in the Hasenheide park. Soon afterwards she married him, and moved into his apartment at Number 2 Am Oberbaum, where she had now lived for thirty years.
Karl Blase was a clerk in a civil service office. He was a short-sighted man who wore pince-nez, much older than she was, pedantic, always finding fault, and generally repugnant. He was domineering, and treated his wife very badly. Frau Blase never knew why or when he would lash out at her. He insisted on having clean, well-ironed shirts, and she could certainly provide him with those. All the same, when she gave him a pile of freshly ironed laundry, he would put on his pince-nez to check that there were no little wrinkles or stains left anywhere. Once, Frau Blase lost her temper. She took a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer and handed it to him, so that he could inspect the shirts even more closely for himself. At that he beat her so hard that she couldn’t sit down for several days.
His two sons were about twelve and fourteen when Luise Blase became their stepmother. The younger was a lout who was always making trouble for her, and even in his teens the elder was on the way to becoming a criminal. Frau Blase lived in constant fear of that heartless youth, whose unusual name was Fridot. He must have done terrible things that as a rule she didn’t mention. But in some situations, for instance after a major reconciliation with Burgers when they had quarrelled, she would fall into a mellow and intimate mood, and say something about it. ‘Fridot once went for his father with a knife,’ she said on one such occasion, in a very different voice.
Money was always in short supply. One day, quite by chance, Frau Blase found out where her husband’s earnings went. She was standing at a tram stop near Nollendorfplatz, and suddenly she saw him on the other side of the street, red in the face as he staggered out of a betting shop.
Her two stepsons left home early. The children that Luise Blase herself brought into the world hardly knew their half-brothers. The elder, her son Gerhard, had already fallen at the front when I moved into Frau Blase’s apartment. I did know the younger, Kurt, because he regularly visited his mother. She had him very late in life; she was already around fifty when she noticed the baby’s movements, and had thought she was well into the menopause. Whether at first she was pleased or horrified by this pregnancy she didn’t say.
Even with two sons of her own, her role in the life of the family was a hard one. Her husband did pay for the rent and for gas, but he gave her hardly anything for the housekeeping. She took cleaning jobs to feed her family. Among other situations, she worked for years at a very good stationer’s, and in a fine perfumery in the west of Berlin.
It was there that she accumulated the treasures she had hoarded in the huge, magical cupboard that stood in the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom. Half of it was full from top to bottom with top-quality stationery, notebooks and exercise books of all kinds, and cartons full of notepaper. The other half contained cakes of the finest French soap, hair lotions and shampoos. She told me, unabashed, how these things had come into her possession. She had always been regarded as a hard-working, thorough cleaner, and also as absolutely reliable and honest. The last bit, however, was not true. Over many years she had appropriated something particularly expensive almost every time she went to work at the stationer’s shop or the perfumery.
In this old woman I recognised someone who, rejected by bourgeois society herself, took her revenge on it by breaking the law all her life whenever she could. Under the Weimar Republic she had even once hidden weapons in her home for a murderous group of paramilitaries.* ‘Those gentlemen were so nice, they gave bigger tips than I ever had from anyone else in my life,’ she was always telling me.
Her husband died in the middle of the 1920s in the bathhouse that he regularly visited to take what was called a Spanish bath, a kind of sauna. By the time a messenger arrived to tell Frau Blase that he had been found dead in a cubicle there, he was already in the morgue.
At first she had been frozen rigid with horror. A few hours later she began mourning the fact that she was now a widow. She was in torrents of tears until the first light of dawn, when she fell asleep at last – and woke with very different feelings. ‘Then it occurred to me: my God, he’s dead. I could have shed tears again, but what a change! I don’t expect you’ve ever known anything like it. I thought to myself, this can’t be true. Because all at once I realised: that bastard can’t beat me any more. I’m free.’ She rejoiced when it struck her that, while she would have less money coming in than before, because she couldn’t expect more than a tiny widow’s pension, there was no one to spend her money in the betting shop now. At last she would be able to live as she liked. And from that day on she brought up her sons on her own.
Sometimes Luise Blase’s eyes were r
ed-rimmed with weeping, and then I knew that she was mourning for her beloved son Gerhard. She often talked to me about him. Only after much vacillation, however, did she show me an especially sacred treasure: his journeyman’s piece made in the course of his training to work with stucco and gilding. It was a small wooden box thickly covered with stucco and decorated with very ornate roses, the whole thing finished with gold leaf even in the smallest cavities.
She also told me about Gerhard’s birthday parties in every last detail. I learned exactly what cakes were baked, how much beer Frau Blase had brought in, and what a gigantic pan full of bockwurst had been served up as the crowning glory of the birthday meal. Groping shakily about, she brought the pan out to show me, and she described the huge dish of potato salad that was served with the sausages down to the separate cubes of gherkin.
No such stories were ever told of Kurt. He had always been considered stupid by his clever elder brother Gerhard and Gerhard’s friends. He had left elementary school at fourteen, small, pale and still very childlike at the time. His mother had taken the boy to the Osram factory, a high-rise building close to the Oberbaum bridge. And it worked: Kurt was taken on as laboratory assistant to a Jewish physicist.
This man took a benevolent interest in the fatherless boy, who, while not very intelligent, was pleasant and well-behaved. He often patted his head and gave him presents at Easter, Christmas and for his birthday. In retrospect, Frau Blase still described the physicist as an angel, and was so moved that her voice rose to a squeak.
‘What happened to the man?’ I asked, with intentional naïvety. ‘Does he still work for Osram?’
‘No, that rich Jew didn’t like Germany one bit, although he rose so high in the world here and made his fortune. Coward that he was, he went off to America,’ she replied. Naturally, I made no comment.
Underground in Berlin Page 23