The Scholl Case

  There were certain things that Brigitte Scholl preferred not to leave to chance. She would take charge, giving her friends presents, making doctors’ appointments for customers and organising lifts to the practice. She bought concert and theatre tickets. Every book she read, every film she liked, she had to recommend. When she visited the vet and his wife with Ursus, she set about rehanging the pictures in their living room. There was often something pushy and overbearing about her solicitude; it was hard to escape it. This led to misunderstandings—and sometimes to the breaking-off of relations.

  The friendship between Heinrich Scholl and Hans Streck suffered a rift during Brigitte Scholl’s preparations for a belated party to celebrate the silver wedding. She had invited half the town and drawn up a tightly packed program: cocktail reception, lunch, dinner and a tour of the new Daimler works. It was to be a party that people would remember all their lives; everything had to be perfect. Including the guests’ outfits.

  The first phone call to the Strecks in North Rhine Westphalia came soon after the invitation. Brigitte Scholl wanted to know from Hans Streck’s wife what she was thinking of wearing.

  A dress, she said. What else?

  Brigitte Scholl explained that one dress wasn’t enough. The party was going to go on from morning until night; it would be in several stages. You didn’t wear the same to a cocktail reception as you wore to a dinner. And, of course, you couldn’t turn up to a tour of the Daimler works in your little black number.

  Hans Streck was Heinrich Scholl’s best school friend; he’d known Brigitte Scholl’s nagging for many years and he hated it. But this time it was worse. Brigitte Scholl rang daily with new instructions for his wife. She must remember to bring suitable shoes and jewellery—and a jacket in case it turned chilly. Again and again the phone rang. In the end his wife stopped picking it up and announced that she wasn’t going to attend the party for the world. Her husband didn’t even try to persuade her. He rang the Scholls to explain. Heinrich Scholl said he was sorry; Gitti hadn’t meant it that way. Brigitte Scholl did not apologise. Hans Streck and his wife stayed at home.

  By and large, Brigitte Scholl tended to focus her attention on women, but occasionally men too came under her scrutiny. A Swiss business partner of her husband was asked out of the blue whether he smoked; she’d noticed he had such yellow teeth. A local councillor was warmly advised to get the nape of his neck shaved. Her remarks were poison—small, well-measured injections, with which she could silence an entire table. Most of all, she liked to make a spectacle of her husband. If they had friends round and the men wanted to watch football, she would say that Heiner had to wash the car first. She’d get him to cut the hedge, and if she wasn’t satisfied with the result, she’d have the gardener in to redo it the next day. Customers overheard her ordering him to mow the lawn— ‘and that means now, not this evening.’

  Even the premier of Brandenburg got to witness the way the mayor’s wife treated her husband. Heinrich Scholl had given a speech at the Ludwigsfelde Cultural Centre and returned from the stage to the table where Manfred Stolpe, Rainer Speer and Matthias Platzeck were sitting—Brandenburg’s top squad. The audience was still applauding. A state secretary said, ‘Great, Heiner, terrific,’ and picked up a bottle of red wine to pour Scholl a glass. Brigitte Scholl covered his glass with her hand and said: ‘My husband has already had a glass.’ The secretary of state said that after his fantastic speech, Scholl deserved another one. Brigitte Scholl said she thought not: he’d said ‘er’ too often for that.

  Brigitte Scholl loved to humiliate her husband. People knew this. If Heinrich Scholl got to the bathing spot a bit late, his naturist friends would joke that he must have had to wash the floor first. Once he turned up at the local paper’s annual football match without any trainers. His wife had refused to let him leave before all the chores had been done, and he had slipped out of the house with no shoes on. Any greater domestic revolt than that was beyond Heinrich Scholl’s power.

  The Ludwigsfelde reporter Jutta Abromeit once witnessed the mayor attempting to resist his wife’s authority. Scholl had just planted a lime tree in front of the oldest restaurant in Ludwigsfelde and was standing together with a few guests over a beer. It was a warm summer’s day. Jutta Abromeit was talking to Heinrich Scholl when his wife appeared and announced: ‘We’re going home.’

  The mayor pretended he hadn’t heard and carried on talking to the journalist. He didn’t even turn round.

  His wife waited quite some time and then she left.

  At the beginning of his term of office, Brigitte Scholl often accompanied her husband to events and opening ceremonies. Later, she preferred to stay at home. She hated standing around at his side like a vase. The social democrats from West Berlin, whom she had liked, hardly showed up in Ludwigsfelde now anyway. Klaus Wowereit had become mayor of Berlin in 2001 and was busier than ever. Brigitte Scholl no longer told Helga Gerlich about her amazing sex life, but complained that she was often alone. When Heiner came home late, she said, he smelt of alcohol—she didn’t like that. If he didn’t return at all, she chased him up with phone calls. When her psychologist friend, Joachim Lehmann, had appointments with patients in Ludwigsfelde, she would insist he drop in afterwards ‘just for a minute’. Then she would prepare an enormous meal and play the hostess, just as she had once done with her schoolmates when she was still the beautiful, rich hairdressers’ daughter. Joachim Lehmann says he felt sorry for Brigitte Scholl.

  She rang her girlfriends every day, telling them what she was reading and what programs they mustn’t miss. She knew every new diet, every type of treatment, every doctor in the area, every new restaurant, every new shop and every joke. One of her jokes went like this: ‘What does a woman do with her arse in the morning?—She sends him to work.’ At this point, Brigitte Scholl would pause. Then she would say, ‘I’ve already sent mine off,’ and half kill herself laughing.

  Brigitte Scholl felt overshadowed by her husband’s increasing status and importance and fought to reassert herself. She needed a public platform of her own, a mission, and found it at the Ludwigsfelde Women’s House. Brigitte Scholl wanted to help there, but in such a way that it was noticed—and noticed all over town. She organised something completely new: an Advent market, with profits to go to the Women’s House.

  For weeks, Brigitte Scholl and her friend Heike collected old things to sell. It was a time when the people of Ludwigsfelde were revamping everything and keen to get rid of their old East German things. The first Advent market under the auspices of the mayor’s wife was held on the cinema forecourt. Brigitte Scholl welcomed her guests, her husband at her side. Then the two of them went from stall to stall like a royal couple, distributing smiles and good words. Brigitte Scholl walked half a pace in front of her husband; she was in command. After that, the Advent market took place every year—on the big square in front of the town hall, or in the cultural centre. A choir sang, Brandenburg artists sold their pictures and woodwork, and a local party leader dressed up as Father Christmas. Brigitte Scholl had found a new role for herself. She was now the town’s charity queen, a kind of Lady Di of Ludwigsfelde. She arranged to meet heads of companies, told them about the affliction of women who were abused by their husbands—and wouldn’t leave until cheques had been signed. In her salon was a little money box. Whenever her customers wanted to give her a tip, she would say: ‘No, thank you, but if you had a small donation for the Women’s House…’

  But there was no stopping Heinrich Scholl either. The people of Ludwigsfelde had taken to calling him Napoleon, because he was so short and so ambitious—the five-foot-four world conqueror. It wasn’t enough for him to be the mayor of a showpiece town. He knew he could do that. He needed new challenges. In the past, he had done gymnastics and rowed; now he ran and played football—and eventually he took up mountaineering.

  It was triggered by a remark made by his wife. They had gone to the Tyrol on a hiking holiday and were sitting outside a mountain hut in
the sun when a man came past on his way down from Mount Ortler, the highest mountain in South Tyrol. Brigitte Scholl asked him how old he was. Seventy, said the mountain climber. Brigitte Scholl said to her husband: ‘Heiner, did you hear that? The man’s already seventy and he’s been up Ortler. You wouldn’t dare do that.’

  Heinrich Scholl had a new goal.

  His climb began at six in the morning; at 10.30 he had reached the peak of Mount Ortler, and he got back to the hut that afternoon. Hardly had he returned from his holidays when he registered with the German Alpine Club. He went on week-long mountaineering courses, learnt climbing techniques, went jogging in the woods with sandbags in his rucksack and immediately booked another course for the following year. In his notes on his life, Heinrich Scholl dedicates twenty-three closely written pages to the subject of mountaineering. The sentence ‘I’m at the end of my strength’ crops up repeatedly, but it is invariably followed by the reward: ‘a terrific sunrise’. Twenty-three pages of endless torment and stunning sunrises.

  Heinrich Scholl’s most important companion in this phase of his life was his mountain guide, Wolfgang. When Heinrich Scholl had time off, he no longer went on holiday with his wife; he went mountain climbing with Wolfgang. When Wolfgang said, ‘Now you’re ready for Mont Blanc,’ Heinrich Scholl’s life had meaning again. When Wolfgang said, ‘We must keep going,’ he kept going.

  He often thought: It’s not possible, I can’t take any more. But it always was possible. And that was precisely what appealed to him about mountaineering: ‘The challenge to be self-assertive,’ he says. ‘It’s not just torture; you come close to death. You realise you’re not a weakling and you’re so proud of yourself.’

  Heinrich Scholl climbed Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua and Mont Blanc, and nearly made it up Everest. He climbed 7200 metres without an oxygen cylinder. Once his toenails froze off; once he was almost snowbound; once he thought he was going to die. But nothing was ever high enough for the man from Ludwigsfelde. There was a joke going around town in those days: ‘Why did Heinrich Scholl climb Kilimanjaro? —Because he wanted to be the tallest for once.’

  Steffen Reiche accompanied Heinrich Scholl up Kilimanjaro. The vicar and co-founder of the East German SPD was now minister of sport in Brandenburg and a marathon runner. Whenever the men saw each other at meetings, they would compare records. On one such occasion, Steffen Reiche had told Heinrich Scholl to let him know if he ever planned to tackle Kilimanjaro. A few months later, Scholl rang Reiche and said he was ready. He had already got a group together, but they could do with one more participant. Reiche agreed, but then let things slide a bit, ordered his visa too late and didn’t collect it from the post office in time.

  Heinrich Scholl was furious when Steffen Reiche rang him to say he was standing outside the post office, which had shut half an hour before. Reiche almost remembers Scholl’s fit of rage better than the climb up Kilimanjaro—that and the fact that Scholl ended up finding a solution. The branch manager of the post office was chair of the Ludwigsfelde handball club. Scholl rang the club and the man came to the post office, opened it up and dug out the letter containing Steffen Reiche’s visa.

  They flew to Nairobi via Amsterdam, drove to Kruger National Park and finally walked to the foot of the mountain. The climb took several days. In his notes, Heinrich Scholl recalls ‘the terribly steep volcanic cones’, ‘the view over the craters’, ‘the twenty-metre glacier face’ and, of course, ‘a terrific sunrise’. Steffen Reiche still recalls it. ‘I felt like a ninety-five-year-old being pushed out onto the balcony by his carer,’ he says. ‘We were told, two breaths, one step, but none of that was any help. My legs just couldn’t go any further.’

  When they reached the top at six in the morning, Heinrich Scholl took from his rucksack a small red-and-white flag bearing the coat of arms of Brandenburg. He stuck it in the sand and the two politicians had their photos taken by the mountain guide, each in turn and then together. But although it was Scholl who had carried the flag to the top of the highest mountain in Africa, only one of the photos made it into the Bild newspaper—that of the minister of sport, Steffen Reiche.

  Brigitte Scholl was now alone at home more than ever. Alone on holiday too. On one occasion she joined a tour group to Morocco; another time she tried to find someone to accompany her on a trip to Turkey. But no one had the time—or else no one could contemplate spending two weeks with Gitti. Luckily, she had her salon and the dog and a nice neighbour who put out the bins for her, drove her to the garden centre to buy plants and chauffeured her to doctors’ appointments in Berlin. In the evenings she watched TV or read novels with titles like Feathers in the Wind, Ways of Love or Flowers in the Rain. Her girlfriends asked her round, but Brigitte Scholl rarely went. She preferred to be hostess herself.

  One day, Brigitte Scholl found an anonymous letter in the post box informing her that her husband was having an affair with a town hall employee. She had already suspected something of the kind and wasn’t surprised, but she did feel profoundly humiliated. Pride and munificence were fundamental to Brigitte Scholl’s character, underpinning her status in town, her good standing. Nothing was more important to her than what people in town thought of her; she had learnt that from her mother. Now her reputation was ruined.

  The rumours were true: Heinrich Scholl says he was sixty when he fell in love for the first time in his life. Properly in love. He had married his wife because she was beautiful and wealthy and needed a father for her child. It had been a marriage of reason. His new relationship was far from reasonable. The woman was more than twenty years younger than Scholl; she had a child and a husband. Like Heinrich Scholl, she worked in the town hall. She was his employee; he was her boss.

  Now all he wanted was to be together with her. He thought she looked like the film star Julia Roberts—especially when she laughed. Sometimes he would wait in his car in a side street after work and they would go out to eat in a country pub, or else drive to a small house on the lake, to which Scholl had the keys from a friend.

  In the town hall, word spread fast, of course. Scholl was mayor. The deceived husband rang his office if his wife didn’t get home from work on time. She couldn’t cope with the pressure for long and put an end to the relationship.

  Brigitte Scholl reacted in her own way to her husband’s infidelity. She didn’t turn him out; that would only have damaged her reputation further. She went to Klotz Funeral Directors and bought herself an urn grave with a small marble slab, which was to bear her name. The grave was to be for her alone. Her son Frank was to give the eulogy at her funeral.

  Frank and her friend Inge in Anklam were the only ones to be let in on her plans. They had to promise Brigitte Scholl that her husband would never stand at her grave.

  Heinrich Scholl fell ill. Like his father before him, he’d had problems with his stomach all his life. His mother-in-law had given him ‘rolling cures’, and during his time at the car works he had sometimes been off sick for weeks on end. But it had never been as bad as after the break-up with his mistress. He had unbearable pains, had to leave meetings, was obliged to wear incontinence pads and was losing a lot of blood. A doctor diagnosed ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease whose causes are largely unknown. Genetic background can have an impact, but so can stress.

  Scholl ran from one doctor to the next and tried out various drugs. Nothing was any use. A professor in Berlin’s Westend Clinic told him: ‘We can’t put you to rights here, Herr Scholl. There’s nothing I can do.’ He prescribed a spell in a health resort on Lake Tegern, in southern Germany. Good walking there, the professor said—and a good therapist too.

  Heinrich Scholl had never had therapy. He envisaged a red couch with an analyst sitting at the head, like in a Hollywood film. The thought of lying on this couch and talking about his worries seemed ridiculous to him. But he had no choice; he was no longer able to go to work, he was losing more and more weight, and the doctor had told him that the inflammation could develop in
to cancer. The mayor of Ludwigsfelde turned his affairs over to his deputy and set off for Bavaria.

  His first therapy appointment was shortly after his arrival. There was a couch, just like in the movies, and an analyst. ‘She was about forty—good-looking,’ says Scholl. ‘I thought: “She’s far too young.”’

  He talked about his work as mayor—how he had brought the town forward over the past fifteen years, and how difficult it had been, how he had to fight every step of the way, on his own every time, especially with his most recent project, a twenty-million-euro thermal spa which was to replace the old public baths. His life was one long battle: Heinrich against the rest of the world. Scholl talked and talked, because he certainly could talk, but after a while the therapist asked: ‘Are you happily married, Herr Scholl?’

  He said: ‘I’m married, but I wouldn’t say happily.’

  The therapist asked why. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know. He’d been married to Gitti for forty years and sensed that something wasn’t right—that they were growing further and further apart, that he didn’t like being with her any longer and that she didn’t like being with him. But he had never thought about what the reasons might be.