He was in his mid-forties.
Brigitte Scholl continued to live in Ludwigsfelde as before. She worked in the beauty salon, went for walks with the dog, saw her girlfriends. Only once did she visit her husband at the circus. It was during a guest performance in Dresden. Heinrich Scholl had reserved special seats for his wife in the VIP lounge and bought fresh flowers for the circus caravan. But the world of the circus was alien to Brigitte Scholl and she found her husband changed beyond recognition. He seemed to feel at ease among these vagabonds, investing his skills in highwaymen and wild beasts. For the giraffes, he built a wagon tall enough to allow the long-necked animals to stand in transit; for the polar bears, he designed a new open-air enclosure and a pool. When his boss was away on holiday, he had all the tents and wagons resprayed—with black and white stripes like the circus zebras.
The head of Berolina was thrilled with his technical manager. Heinrich Scholl was soon promoted to the executive board of East Germany’s state circus and now had an office in their Berlin headquarters on Friedrichstrasse. He was popular and highly regarded; he was doing well. Once again he had followed a story-book trajectory. And once again he put an end to it.
He handed in his notice out of the blue. He says he made the decision one afternoon on Schöneweide Station. The station was too full for him; he realised that he no longer wanted to commute from Ludwigsfelde to Berlin every day. A spur-of-the-moment end to an adventure, and in Schöneweide, of all places, an utterly unremarkable suburb where nothing ever happened.
Scholl cleared out his circus caravan, took down his pictures and put them back in the cellar.
It was 1989. Scholl soon found new work. The town council of Ludwigsfelde was looking for a technical engineer for the municipal sports facilities: the public baths, the forest swimming pool, the sports grounds, the gyms. They were in a pitiful state, but the town’s technical director, Scholl’s boss, didn’t seem to give a damn. He sat in the town hall reading Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of the governing Socialist Unity Party, and regarded any criticism of his work as a betrayal of the grand socialist idea. Word had it he was unfireable. Heinrich Scholl avoided him as best he could. He set up a small office for himself at the public baths, mowed the lawn, had the showers fixed and the forest swimming pool and the sauna overhauled.
By now he was used to carving a niche for himself within society: in his own house, in among his deceased sister-in-law’s West German furniture; at the naturist bathing spot between the birches; in his lamp workshop; in the circus caravan. But the niches were getting tighter. Scholl was no longer in Berlin negotiating with Swedes about a showpiece project for the biggest car works in East Germany; he was negotiating with a bored official about doing up a sauna in a small town.
The country was on its last legs.
The night the Wall fell, Heinrich Scholl was in Josef Hospital in Potsdam. He had injured himself playing football and saw the images of that night on the television set above his hospital bed. He saw Günter Schabowski, a high-ranking party official, babbling something about a new travelling law; he saw his newly brave fellow-countrymen driving around West Berlin in their Trabants and falling sobbing into each other’s arms; he saw helpless border guards. The man in the bed next to him was asleep—he remembers that; he would have liked someone to talk to, he says.
Three days later his son picked him up from hospital and drove him home, where time seemed to have stood still. There had been no Monday demonstrations and no peace services in Ludwigsfelde. The working-class town had no tradition of resistance—not under Hitler and not later either. Scholl’s neighbours went to the works; his wife was busy with her customers and wasn’t much interested in queuing for Jacobs coffee in West Berlin—she could get that in Intershop in Teltow.
Heinrich Scholl got his son to drive him into Berlin and watched the queue at the border crossing at Oberbaum Bridge from the car. He was still on crutches and unable to mingle with his excited fellow-countrymen, but he didn’t feel the need anyway. He was not euphoric; he was pensive. ‘I knew the West from visiting my aunt, my mother and my sister-in-law,’ he says. ‘I wondered how on earth you were supposed to put all that together.’
Heinrich Scholl’s attitude had always been one of cool detachment, but some didn’t notice until now. His friend Dieter Fahle describes taking Scholl along to a dissenters’ meeting in Gethsemane Church in Prenzlauer Berg—an area that was home to East Berlin’s intellectuals, bohemians and activists—shortly before the Wall came down. It was September 1989, and the Monday demonstrations had just begun—non-violent demonstrations which were held at St Nicholas’ church in Leipzig and would soon spread all over the country. More and more East German citizens were escaping to West Germany through Hungary each day, and the country was on the point of collapse. Everyone was wondering what was the worst that could happen—how dangerous resistance was, whether the military would get involved, whether there would be violence against demonstrators: shots fired, fatalities, war.
Dieter Fahle had just returned from a trip to Austria with his judo team and had read in the papers there that the Soviet army had incurred heavy losses in the war in Afghanistan. He concluded that Moscow’s tanks would not be rolling into East Berlin. It was a somewhat complicated story—the judo team, the Austrian trip, Afghanistan, the Soviet army—but Dieter Fahle liked to draw big conclusions about global politics from minor news items. ‘The Russians have shot all their rotten powder in Afghanistan!’ he yelled at the civil rights activists. There was a discussion; everyone talked at once. At some point, Dieter Fahle looked around for Heinrich Scholl, who had been standing next to him just a moment before. Heinrich Scholl was gone.
Scholl says now that he can’t stand such situations. When other people are brimming over with emotions, he feels nothing but a certain unease and the urge to withdraw. The first time he noticed this was at his father’s funeral. Just a boy, he had stood among his relatives in the wooded cemetery of Ludwigsfelde. Everyone was crying; he couldn’t. He tried to imagine this man, who had been so sick in the end that he hadn’t even made it down the stairs to yell at him and beat him, now lying motionless over there in the coffin. Heinrich Scholl felt nothing: no grief, no pity, no pain—not even anger. He stood among all the weeping, black-clad people like a stranger.
Later too, when his mother left him by himself in Ludwigsfelde to move to West Berlin with Gerhard, he wasn’t sad, disappointed or angry. He was merely surprised. He had firmly believed that she needed him—that by dint of his capability and his hard work, he had made himself indispensable. And then she upped and left to begin a new life without him. He couldn’t make it add up. It made no sense to him.
It was the same when his mother died, in 1977. He had been told she was in a coma, and had gone to West Berlin to see her one last time. He had fought tooth and nail to get a ten-day entrance visa from the authorities, but only a day after he arrived, his mother was dead. He still had nine days left and decided to take the opportunity to visit Gitti’s sister in Cologne.
Ursula sent him a plane ticket. He can still recount the details of this trip many years later: ‘I get temporary ID at Tegel airport, spend seven days in Frechen, lovely house and nice husband, they show me around, specially nice trip to Bad Neuenahr, vineyards, terrific wine on old wine estate, flowers everywhere.’ Not a word of grief, anger, hate or any other emotion.
Not long afterwards, he went once more to West Berlin. He organised his mother’s cremation and the transportation of her ashes to Ludwigsfelde, and when he’d got everything done, he flew again to Gitti’s sister in Cologne. This time he was taken to Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Coblenz and Frankfurt.
Heinrich Scholl is a practical person, good at assessing things and analysing them. This quality had been of use to him many times in the course of his life, but never so much as in those autumn days of 1989. While his fellow-countrymen were still reeling with delight and marching through the streets shouting, ‘We a
re one people,’ Heinrich Scholl put up his sore leg, watched the news, took note of what was going on around him and wondered what it might mean for him.
It was at this time that he met the West Berliner Klaus Wowereit.
They met in Mahlow, a small border town in Brandenburg and for decades the conduit through which the West Berliners’ rubbish was channelled. This border crossing too was now open. You could walk from Mahlow to Lichtenrade and from Lichtenrade to Mahlow. The East Berliners went to collect their ‘welcome money’ in the West—a one-off payment of 100 marks that every East German was entitled to when visiting West Germany, the equivalent of about two months’ rent in the East, and worth queuing for. The West Berliners went on Sunday-afternoon walks in the woods of Brandenburg.
Klaus Wowereit was in his mid-thirties, the youngest town councillor in all Berlin and pretty fed up with the administrative routine and the hierarchies in his party, the social democratic SPD. ‘Everything had to work like a ring binder,’ Wowereit writes in his autobiography. ‘Click it open, file in, click it shut and there’s an end to it. No surprises, for goodness’ sake—nothing complicated that might confuse things.’ The fall of the Berlin Wall had electrified him.
Klaus Wowereit lived in a completely different world from Heinrich Scholl, but he was in a similar position. He was stuck in a system. One November day in 1989 they came face to face: the tall, rangy Wowereit and the short, lively Scholl. They introduced themselves: ‘I’m Klaus,’ ‘I’m Heiner.’ Wowereit said he wanted to build up the SPD in Brandenburg with bright new people. Heinrich Scholl said he was looking for a new mission.
He told the man from the West his story. How he’d negotiated with the Swedes and fled the car works, how he’d made lamps, built fireplaces, travelled the country with a circus and played ping pong with animal tamers, how he was now in charge of the public baths in Ludwigsfelde while his boss sat in the town hall reading Neues Deutschland. It wasn’t a bad story. Scholl sounded like the hero of a picaresque novel.
Klaus Wowereit later became governing mayor of Berlin—and an icon of the gay rights movement, after coming out in the middle of the electoral campaign with the famous words: ‘I’m gay and that’s a good thing.’ Today he prefers not to talk about Heinrich Scholl any more, but in his autobiography he writes about the exciting times back then, remarking at one point: ‘The engineer Heinrich Scholl from Ludwigsfelde made a great impression.’
Helga Gerlich, a midwife by profession, campaigned alongside Wowereit for the SPD at that time. At the weekend, they would drive to Brandenburg with trestle tables, thermos flasks and trays of cake. ‘We wanted to entice people,’ Helga Gerlich explains. She says all the East Germans knew was the SED—the former governing communist party—and the party bloc. ‘Social democracy was alien to them. Of course, they thought parties and elections were a scam.’
Heinrich Scholl was different from most people in the East, Helga Gerlich says—not broken, not stooped. ‘He was nice and friendly and really not at all like an East German,’ her husband says. ‘I always wondered why people from the East couldn’t look you in the eyes. Heiner could. He held himself straight.’
Heinrich Scholl says it was Wowereit who put him on the right track. At their first meeting in Mahlow, he told Scholl that men like him were going to be in demand; he should take the initiative in Brandenburg and do something, make something happen, take up an office, become district administrator or mayor—now was the perfect time. Heinrich Scholl remembers asking: ‘How?’ And he remembers Wowereit telling him that the only way of getting anywhere in the West was through party structures.
One Sunday morning, a few days later, Heinrich Scholl got in his Wartburg and drove to Christinendorf, a village in Brandenburg with a few old farmsteads, a church with a crooked steeple and a young vicar. The vicar was called Steffen Reiche. He wore the full beard of a civil rights activist, gave political sermons and had not long since helped to found social democracy in East Germany—by establishing a branch of the SPD.
Reiche provided the party structure Klaus Wowereit had been talking about.
The church was full, and the audience looked like the one in Gethsemane Church—long-haired young men and women, dressed in knitted sweaters and parkas. Heinrich Scholl didn’t fit in; he was much older than the others, wore a pale trench coat and propped himself up on his crutch. The vicar thought the Stasi had sent along their last man; people sitting nearby eyed him with suspicion. Scholl paid no attention; he took a seat on the aisle and listened to the sermon. When it was over and everybody left, he remained seated. Another man across the aisle from him also remained seated. He was the same age as Scholl and, with his moustache and crew-cut, just as much out of place. When this man walked up to the altar in search of the vicar, who had just vanished behind it, Heinrich Scholl hobbled after him.
Dieter Ertelt, the man from the other side of the aisle, was also from Ludwigsfelde, worked in the car factory, as Scholl had, and, like him, had had trouble with the state and wanted to be involved in the changes taking place in his country. He didn’t know Heinrich Scholl. Here, in the church in Christinendorf, he set eyes on him for the first time.
Reiche told the two men to join the SPD, to set up a local branch of the party in Ludwigsfelde, enlist members and take part in the official ‘round-table talks’ being held around the country to discuss East Germany’s future. That was about the extent of his advice, he says. He had stumbled into politics just as unprepared as Scholl and Ertelt—only a little earlier.
A few days later, Heinrich Scholl, Dieter Ertelt, Ertelt’s wife and five other people from Ludwigsfelde set up the town’s first local Social Democratic association since the Second World War. Heinrich Scholl, who had the best handwriting, drew up the deed. A few weeks later, the two men were sitting together at a round-table discussion and after a few months, they were both in the town hall. Heinrich Scholl became mayor; Dieter Ertelt was his deputy.
A photo from this time shows two middle-aged men wearing shirts open at the collar and leather bomber jackets with shoulder pads. Scholl is holding a piece of paper in his hand and reading from it, while Ertelt, his head on one side, is earnestly looking on. They look as if they’re practising playing politicians.
Looking at the picture, you get a sense of what it must be like to slip into a new life overnight. It was happening all over East Germany at the time. Mayors and ministers and factory managers and editors-in-chief had to clear their desks from one day to the next to make room for people who seemed reliable enough to take up a new office in a new society. It was an historic chance, but it was also an experiment and no one could say how it would turn out—what the newfound power, the sudden success, the unexpected limelight might do to people who had never learnt to deal with it.
Dieter Fahle, Scholl’s school friend, was on the round table in Zossen along with Heinrich Scholl. ‘Scholli had the whole thing sussed from the beginning,’ he says. ‘Once, as we were driving home together, I said to him: “We’ll be well out of all this before long anyhow.” He said: “Not me, I’m going to stay.”’
Heinrich Scholl was now mayor, the most important person in Ludwigsfelde, but he sometimes wasn’t sure if that was really cause for joy. Sixty years had gone by since his parents had moved here, but the town was still the dump that his mother had so loathed. The munitions factory had given way to the car works; Adolf Hitler Strasse and Heinrich Himmler Strasse had been renamed after communists Ernst Thälmann and Wilhelm Pieck. The town hall was in a barracks where SS guards had once kept a watch on forced labourers; the motorway split the town down the middle, and the two records boasted by Ludwigsfelde were not necessarily something to be proud of: it had the largest single home-ownership district in East Germany and a bar which sold more beer than any other in the country. Its name was ‘Sanssouci’, but no one ever called it anything but ‘the dive’.
The first summer after the Wall came down, the weekend trippers, glad to be able to get out of town at l
ast, flocked across from West Berlin to the sewage farms of Brandenburg and spread out their picnic rugs. The old East German products were disappearing from the stores: in living rooms, black-and-white TVs were being swapped for colour sets; out on the streets, Trabants were being swapped for VWs; you came across the old car bodies at the roadside. The car works continued to produce its trucks, but nobody wanted to buy them any more, and everyone was anxiously wondering where things went from here. Young people were packing their suitcases and making off for the West in droves.
Frank left too. He was in his mid-twenties, an engineer by profession like his father. His mother, who had never left Ludwigsfelde for more than two weeks at a stretch, turned him out of the house in her friendly but resolute manner to ensure, as she put it, that he didn’t end up having to ‘put the lights out’, like the last one to leave when everyone else has gone. Heinrich Scholl drove his son in the Wartburg Tourist to a refugee home in Hanover. The day he became mayor, Frank was camping in a gym among Eastern European refugees.
In all the excitement, Brigitte and Heinrich Scholl nearly forgot their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Silver wedding! At some point, long before the collapse of the Wall, the Scholls had signed up for a cruise to Cuba. Now the voucher was in their letter box: three weeks on the Arkona, East Germany’s biggest cruise ship. They set sail in February 1990—a voyage across the ocean to the last socialist island, on board the last socialist ship. There were no longer any security checks. The officers, who had up until then had to make sure that no one jumped ship off the Azores to swim to the capitalist shore, were now serving piña coladas. The mood among the passengers was exuberant. Heinrich Scholl felt better than he had ever felt in his life.
When an English interpreter was wanted for a tour of the Azores, Heinrich Scholl stood at the front of the bus and translated for the other East Germans what the tour guide had to say about the islands’ history, climate and volcanic eruptions. Scholl, who had learnt English at an adult education centre, didn’t understand everything, but he talked and talked and let his fellow passengers toast him afterwards at the bar. Every evening, a competition of some kind was organised on the ship. Heinrich Scholl designed the best menu, managed the most hip bends, the most push-ups, the most pull-ups and won the prize for the best Mardi Gras costume. He won everything—every competition.
The Scholl Case Page 6