But he couldn’t win over his wife.
Brigitte Scholl’s husband could do what he liked; she acted as if she’d never expected anything else of him. When he first took up office as mayor, she had laid out suit, shirt and matching tie for him without a word. It was her only comment, her only way of showing recognition. On the cruise ship, Brigitte Scholl was usually already in bed when her husband was being fêted. She seldom drank more than a single glass of wine. The merrier and louder the others became, the more taciturn Brigitte Scholl was, until eventually she would withdraw to her cabin.
Twenty-five years ago, she had said yes in an East Berlin registry office. Ever since then, Heinrich Scholl had been trying to prove to her that she had made the right decision. But it was only ever the others around him who were impressed.
Dieter Bartha was, you might say, Ludwigsfelde’s first West German visitor. He was the deputy mayor of Paderborn, and Paderborn was one of the towns newly twinned with Ludwigsfelde. Bartha still remembers his first visit in July 1990, he says, because it was at a time when he was fighting to get the dilapidated old town hall in Paderborn replaced by a new one. ‘Then I arrived in Ludwigsfelde with my town clerk, and when we stood outside the Siberian shack where Scholl had his seat, I knew I could forget my new town hall.’
Scholl’s office had barred windows and a leaky roof; a gutter took the place of a urinal in the men’s toilets, and when the gas stove was lit in the winter, the air was blue. There were no computers; only old typewriters. The secretary was snappish; the many town hall employees, who did no one knew quite what, seemed wary. The hall of residence belonging to the car works, where the visitors from Paderborn were put up, resembled a barracks. ‘For breakfast there were bread roll halves,’ says Dieter Bartha. ‘They’d been pre-buttered too.’
The East was just as the West German had imagined it. Only Heinrich Scholl didn’t fit the picture. He wasn’t a bitter, pig-headed politician or ideologue; he was well dressed, open-minded and brimming with energy. He welcomed emissaries from West German companies and the state government, came up with suggestions about what route the motorway should take and decided the fate of many senior Stasi figures, army members and teachers.
Dieter Bartha had been treasurer of the financial committee of the German Association of Cities and Municipalities for a long time and got to know a great many mayors from the new federal states in the years following the collapse of the Wall—‘but never a fellow like Scholl,’ he says. Scholl was possessed by incredible fervour—visionary fervour, even. Every time Bartha came to Ludwigsfelde from Paderborn, something new had been completed. ‘Heinrich Scholl,’ he says, ‘was the best thing that could have happened to that town.’
Dieter Ertelt, Scholl’s deputy, has a photo of the old mayoral shack hanging in his kitchen, so fond are his memories of those times in the town hall with the man he had first met in the small church in Brandenburg. Scholl was in charge of the practical side of things: construction, investments, funding; Ertelt saw to formal matters: finances, budgets, schools, the administrative authority. ‘A good division of labour,’ Ertelt says. ‘We didn’t have a clue, but we made a good team. Heiner was very companionable, very friendly. There was no wheeling and dealing and eating out at the Italian restaurant in those days. It wasn’t about jobs; it was about changing things.’
Rainer Fischer came to Ludwigsfelde from Berlin at the beginning of the nineties. His first impression was: a dump, a dormitory town. ‘There was nothing but the motorway,’ he says. ‘The people all knew each other from the car works, all went about on bikes and didn’t have a good word to say about Berliners. On one house I saw a poster saying, “Fuck off, Berlin meatball!”’
Fischer was a bio-geneticist in Adlershof, Berlin, until he was officially instructed to scale down his own institute and lay off two hundred of the five hundred employees. When he had finished doing that, he was offered a post as managing director of a construction business. Ludwigsfelde was his first project—and his biggest. In Potsdamer Strasse alone, Fischer had four hundred council flats built; business parks for Mercedes, MTU and various logistics companies were to follow. Nationwide, sixty-four applicants entered the tender to build Volkswagen’s new logistics centre, but Ludwigsfelde’s bid was accepted. ‘Scholl brought in the investors,’ Fischer says. ‘His standard slogan was: “We’re the town that the Paris–Moscow motorway passes through.”’
Heinrich Scholl was a natural. He could negotiate with politicians just as well as with business people. He reduced the trade tax rate by half. He used up all the funding at his disposal for the reconstruction of the East—and often that of the neighbouring municipalities as well. Each year, millions of euros were set aside for the development of villages and towns in the East, but at the end of the year, there was always money over. Scholl took that money. If the federal state said it didn’t have the human resources to get the plan under way before the year was over, he offered to take on the construction planning and the management himself.
The town south of Berlin was soon regarded as an East German economic miracle, a symbol of the economic recovery of the new federal states. While the neighbouring municipalities withered, Ludwigsfelde flourished. Heinrich Scholl had the old Nazi shack torn down and a new glass town hall built; he had the motorway raised on stilts, the lanes widened, noise barriers put up. He invited the architecture enthusiast Prince Charles to his town, shook hands with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his successor Angela Merkel, and whenever the premier of Brandenburg was in want of good news from his needy state, he drove to Ludwigsfelde and inaugurated something new with Heinrich Scholl.
Three times Heinrich Scholl was voted mayor. When he took up office, he was forty-seven years old and his son was just moving out. When he stepped down, eighteen years later, he was in his sixties, with grandchildren. For a politician from the new federal states, his term of office was record-breakingly long.
There are several stories about fallen heroes of the German autumn of revolution, some of them bizarre. Ibrahim Böhme, the first leader of East Germany’s newly founded Social Democratic Party, was revealed after only a few months to have been a Stasi spy who had invented the bulk of his biography. Wolfgang Schnur of Democratic Awakening, the man who got Angela Merkel her first political office, was expelled from the party that he had founded himself because of his Stasi connections. He later insulted a judge, and was found guilty of delaying bankruptcy; and for a while he disappeared and was believed missing, until it was confirmed that he died early in 2016 in Vienna. Jochen Wolf, construction minister of Brandenburg, lost his post over a dishonest property deal and wound up in jail a few years later because he had tried to hire a contract killer to murder his wife. Others lost their jobs over corruption or sex scandals.
Heinrich Scholl was familiar with these stories and knew how easy it would be to fall into temptation and lose all that he had gone to such pains to build up. ‘Oh boy, what a lot I was offered,’ he says. ‘Envelopes with 35,000 Swiss francs and what have you.’ Scholl didn’t trip up. He resisted temptation or else legalised it. In his very first legislative term, the city council of Ludwigsfelde granted him certain exemptions as mayor—he was permitted to attend lunches and dinners paid for by business connections, for example, and even to accept invitations go on trips with them. This was one of the tips he had received from his colleagues from the West German twin towns. He was quick on the uptake for an East German, taking especial note of the pointers given to him over a glass of red wine of an evening. One of these was never to make a proposal to the city council until you were sure of having the majority on your side. The parties of Ludwigsfelde were usually in agreement anyway, but when it was looking close, Heinrich Scholl would sit down at the telephone and ring every last delegate until he was sure he had enough votes.
At some meetings, when a topic became the subject of controversial debate and Scholl sensed that the majority were turning against him, he would get up and leave the room, say
ing that he felt unwell. On occasion he would begin to cry. The man who hadn’t been able to shed a single tear at his father’s grave broke down and wept when the conservation league tried to prevent him from felling hundred-and-fifty-year-old pitch pines to build an access road. Everyone was against him: the minister, the conservationists—even his own head of construction sat there in silence. Heinrich Scholl’s tears helped. His opponents exchanged looks of stunned shock. One of them said: ‘Ach, Herr Scholl, don’t take it so personally.’ But of course he took it personally, Heinrich Scholl replied.
He had to win—to be better than the others. Even now.
Jutta Abromeit, a local reporter on the Märkische Allgemeine newspaper, once accompanied him to three different appointments in one day: an old-age-pensioners’ gathering in the morning, an opening ceremony at midday and a city council meeting in the evening. On each occasion, Heinrich Scholl raised the same topic, but he varied his approach, twisting his arguments, altering them so that they were perfectly tailored to the group in question. Anything contradictory he left out. He seemed to be one hundred per cent convinced of what he was saying every time, but at the third and final appointment, Jutta Abromeit says, he caught her eye and then turned quickly away. ‘He realised that I’d seen through him.’
Scholl, she says, could manipulate people, win them over to his side and implicate them in his arguments like key witnesses. ‘Isn’t that so, Frau Abromeit?’ he had kept asking. Mid-speech, in front of everyone else.
He managed to hold people captive and yet remain amazingly vague at the same time. In the local newsroom, he was renowned for starting sentences and not finishing them. ‘It was terribly hard to quote him in an article,’ Jutta Abromeit says. ‘I only ever had half-sentences on my notepad.’
There are countless pictures of Heinrich Scholl at this time: Scholl with SPD leader Hans-Jochen Vogel; Scholl with the premier of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe; Scholl with the landlady of the ‘Old Inn’; Scholl with the minister of social affairs, Regine Hildebrandt; Scholl with the head of Mercedes; Scholl with young people on a TV panel discussion; Scholl pulling a beer; Scholl in a digger; Scholl in a construction pit; Scholl with a group of apprentices; Scholl celebrating the town’s birthday; Scholl cutting the first sod for a new business park; Scholl at the new city archives; Scholl at a New Year’s reception; Scholl with the boxer Henry Maske; Scholl with a topless snake charmer; Scholl at the inauguration of a crèche; Scholl with the minister of sport and education, Steffen Reiche; Scholl with the minister of finance, Hans Eichel; Scholl laying the foundation stone for five town houses; Scholl at the opening of the six-lane motorway; Scholl with guests from Ludwigsfelde’s twin towns; Scholl playing football; Scholl at the firemen’s ball; Scholl on the jury of the Miss Ludwigsfelde competition. He was everywhere—down in a sewage drain and up on stage with the heir to the British throne.
The pictures bear witness to a fairy-tale ascent. In the early photos, his hair is short, his gaze boyish; he wears short-sleeved shirts—no tie, no jacket—and doesn’t know what to do with his arms. He is always shorter than everybody else; it looks as if he is crouching or sitting or playing football with giants. Bustle and laughter cover up his insecurity. Heinrich Scholl plays the clown. Sometimes his gestures seem practised, casual, and then suddenly he’ll be standing stripped to the waist next to Mardi Gras revellers or holding a toy pistol to his treasurer’s head. He is ever-present and never tired. In most of the photos you can see how proud he is at having got so far. At times, though, you can sense his fear of losing everything.
Brigitte Scholl now saw her husband more on billboards and up on stage than at home. Her son was grown-up and lived in the West. The two most important people in her life were starting all over again, while she stayed at home with her dead sister’s furniture and carried on running her beauty salon. There were new products and a new currency: the standard treatment had once cost twenty East German marks; in 1990, the price switched to twenty deutschmarks; later it would be twenty euros. Otherwise, not much changed.
Brigitte Scholl’s daily routine was largely dictated by the beauty salon and the dog. Every morning, between five and half past, she got up and took Ursus for a walk; at eight her first customer arrived; at twelve her lunch break began—and with it her daily walk in the woods; at two it was back to the salon until six o’clock. Then it was suppertime, and shortly before turning in, she would take the dog for a last walk round the block.
She still had a brown cocker spaniel, just like the one she had been given by a boyfriend back in the days when she was a young woman with half of Ludwigsfelde at her feet. When the first dog had died, she had bought a new one that looked just the same: brown wavy coat, floppy ears, a trusting look. Brigitte Scholl had lost her mother and her sister; her son had moved out, and her husband was never at home, but the dog was a fixture.
She clung to the things she knew—the things familiar to her. She had never liked leaving Ludwigsfelde and that didn’t change when the Wall came down. She made a few trips with her husband—to France, Italy, the south of England—but she felt most at ease at home, in her small, self-contained world: the house, the salon, the bathing spot. Ludwigsfelde was her haven; she felt safe there. And she didn’t have to leave town to get to know the new world. The new world came to her.
Helga Gerlich, the social democrat from Lichtenrade, met Brigitte Scholl in the summer of 1990. ‘After a party function, Heiner said: “You’re coming back with me for a change.”’ They drove to the house in Rathenau Strasse. Brigitte Scholl came to the door, asked them in, showed them round the house and apologised for her sister’s old furniture. Helga Gerlich says she liked the house far better than her own; everything was so tidy and well-kept. Some women, she says, are interior designers by nature. ‘Brigitte was one of them. Her star sign is orderly Virgo. That was in evidence all over the house.’
Helga Gerlich went back to Brigitte Scholl as a customer. Her salon prices were lower than in Berlin. ‘I said to her: “You must put your prices up, if you want to make a go of it.”’ Brigitte Scholl said: ‘Helga, I can’t take more money from my customers. They don’t have that much.’
Gerlich liked the dedicated mayor, who only a short while before had been building giraffe wagons in the circus, and she liked his modest wife. But above all, she admired their relationship, which seemed so much more egalitarian than her own. Heinrich Scholl might have been the most powerful man in town, but when his wife called him, he came running. Heiner laid the table, did the shopping, filled up the car, mowed the lawn and took the dog round the block. Without a word of protest. Even if he happened to be busy, he didn’t ask whether it couldn’t wait until later, but dropped everything to carry out his wife’s instructions. A dream! Brigitte Scholl could even ring her husband in the middle of an important meeting and dictate the shopping list to him over the phone without his complaining. In the evenings he would bring her flowers.
‘I always had the impression that Brigitte and Heiner understood each other without words,’ Helga Gerlich says. ‘They never argued—really, not ever. Brigitte once told me he was a good lover, very good even. I envied the Scholls their marriage and was always saying to my husband: “Look at Heiner.”’ Helga Gerlich was firmly convinced that the Scholls’ marriage was exemplary. A modern relationship, a model for the future.
Klaus Wowereit, too, enjoyed visiting Brigitte and Heinrich. He often took his mother along. She would lie on Gitti’s salon bed and let Gitti apply masks and give her neck massages and pedicures, while her son discussed the future of social democracy in the kitchen with Heiner Scholl. Wowereit was annoyed by the hierarchies and power games of the old men in his constituency. ‘I was on my way up the ladder and he was already thinking of chucking it all in,’ Heinrich Scholl says. Wowereit was often in Ludwigsfelde at that time, at the local SPD association or having dinner at Gitti and Heiner’s. He was trying to understand the problems in the East, to get to know the people there. If it got late
, he would stay the night in the spare room.
‘Heiner and Brigitte liked entertaining and everything was always prepared for us when we came,’ Helga Gerlich says. ‘Brigitte couldn’t help herself; she was a perfectionist.’ Once, they had celebrated New Year’s Eve together in the restaurant at Siethen and gone ice bathing on New Year’s morning. In summer, their new friends from West Berlin joined the Scholls for naturist swimming at the gravel pit. The big public bathing area was crowded, but the small private spot between the birches was as empty as ever, reserved for Gitti and her group of bathers. They spread out rugs, undressed, sunbathed, swam. Sometimes Wowereit went with them—Klaus, as they now knew him.
Brigitte Scholl moved with astonishing self-confidence in these new social circles: she held dinner parties, went the rounds at receptions, brought people together. Sometimes the district administrator was among the guests, sometimes an entrepreneur from Cologne or Switzerland. When she rang her friends, the first thing she’d tell them was which big shots she’d met lately and when Heiner could be seen on which talk show. She bought him suits and shirts and ties, and put together an outfit for him every morning.
Joachim Lehmann*, a former schoolmate of Brigitte Scholl, whom she had met again at a class reunion, now had regular invitations to parties at the Scholls’. Lehmann was a psychologist by profession, tall, bearded, eloquent—someone you could be seen with. Other people, however—old friends—were struck off the guest list. Brigitte Scholl had always surrounded herself with certain people only, but now that her husband was mayor, she became even choosier. Her girlfriends still received invitations, but Brigitte Scholl liked to dictate what they were to wear and how they were to behave. Gitti, the beauty queen of Ludwigsfelde, couldn’t bear it if eyebrows weren’t plucked or hair not properly set. Women who turned up without make-up were sat on a salon chair and painted until she was satisfied. Rainer Fischer, Scholl’s Berlin business friend, got to know Brigitte Scholl on a short trip to Zurich. Hardly had they arrived at the hotel when she looked Fischer’s wife up and down and took her off to her room ‘to show her how to make herself up properly’. His wife returned looking like a paint box, Fischer says.
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