The Scholl Case

by Anja Reich-Osang

  He attended a computer course at night school, busied himself with his projects for the spa operator, met friends for lunch and began work on a book—an erotic tale. The therapist at Lake Tegern had given him the idea. Heinrich Scholl had told her about the woman in the town hall—how happy he’d been with her and how hard the separation had hit him. ‘Write it down,’ the therapist said. ‘Let it all out.’ She had letters or diary entries in mind, but Heinrich Scholl wanted to share his happiness and his great love with others and turned the therapist’s assignment into a new project: a book.

  When he had written a few pages, he sent them to a former journalist who runs a small self-publishing company. The publisher is an elderly woman with short hair and a gentle whispery voice, who has herself something of a therapist about her. It is generally old people who come to her, wanting to write down their life stories for their children and grandchildren before they die. Scholl, however, a former mayor who wanted to write about his affair, had what was almost a proper idea for a book. ‘This woman was the love of his life and he simply never got over it,’ says the publisher. ‘People who write autobiographies do it for the moments in their lives that meant most to them.’

  Heinrich Scholl described how he got to know the woman from the town hall, how he kept walking past her office and leaving her little messages, went out to eat with her, accompanied her to the cinema, or met her at a friend’s house. He was very keen on detail, but to be on the safe side, he transposed the action to a business firm and changed the names. Most of it, however, was taken from real life. The publisher embellished the story with lyrical descriptions, quotations from authors and actors, and long dialogues between the main character and a wine-merchant friend. At one point the main character asks the wine merchant whether he’s ever contemplated divorce. He replies: ‘Divorce, never; murder, yes.’

  The publisher wanted the book to be more than a mere report of Heinrich Scholl’s experiences; she wanted a proper novel. But Scholl reversed almost all her changes and in the end the final draft scarcely differed from the first. There is no doubt that it bore Heinrich Scholl’s signature.

  Heinrich Scholl knows no shame and no nuance, and he loves sex scenes. The erotic passages read like assembly instructions for model aeroplanes or IKEA furniture. ‘With my right hand I tried to reach her pudenda,’ he writes at one point. ‘Alas, in vain; my arm was too short.’ Heinrich Scholl was more gifted as a technologist than as a writer, but writing not only helped him get over the woman from the town hall; it also filled the seemingly endless days of his retirement. Even the symptoms of his illness gradually vanished. The therapist from the sanatorium seemed to have been right: he needed to write everything down and he needed some time out—that was all.

  ‘I am healthy,’ he crows in his notes. ‘Meet new people, go a lot to the theatre, opera, cinema. Also have a lot more time for old friends and for enjoyable evenings and conversations. I take up jogging again and go to a gym with a swimming pool in Zehlendorf. Gitti is in charge of the weekends, as usual. I work through my lists, have time to play handball or football, or to go and see friends or to a concert with her. She has become more tolerant.’

  In passing, he mentions that a visit or two to a brothel are part of his new life. ‘I satisfy my further human needs,’ Heinrich Scholl writes, ‘in Słubice or sometimes in Artemis. I find it the least complicated way to come by a little affection without entering into dependencies.’ Later he scores out ‘human’ and replaces it with ‘male’: ‘male needs’ is the expression he wanted.

  Słubice is a Polish border town, Artemis a high-class brothel on Kurfürstendamm. The Polish option was cheaper and Heinrich Scholl preferred it. Word had got about that the new customer had been mayor in Brandenburg. On his first visit there, his Polish counterpart had welcomed him in person and told the brothel manager: ‘The best you’ve got.’

  Heinrich Scholl makes his visits to Słubice sound like a celebration of German–Polish friendship. The building is very beautiful: ‘like a Mediterranean country estate,’ he writes. At the front there is a big wooden carriage entrance, where you can drive your car in. A woman approached him with a smile and led him to a room. ‘First I talked to the lady a bit—there again, I’m different from other men. Afterwards you lie there for a while and have a drink and talk. We often went out to eat in a restaurant together. It developed into a wonderful relationship.’ If there were such a thing as a visitors’ book in a brothel, it might read something like that.

  On his next visits, Heinrich Scholl brought coffee for the Polish sex worker and chewing gum for her children. He was playing the West German uncle. ‘Whenever I wanted a nice relaxing end to the day, I’d send her a text message, and if she was free, I’d drive over. I was rewarded for my efforts with a great deal of affection. And once I’d left, the story was over. There were no letters, no demands, no “when are you going to ring again?” We can give so much pleasure with so little effort.’

  When Heinrich Scholl didn’t drive to Poland, he spent his evenings in a club for singles in Steglitz. A beer cost one euro. ‘Cheaper than in the supermarket,’ says Scholl. There was drinking and dancing. The highlight of the evening was a kind of speed dating, and the rules were always the same. The women sat on one side of the table, the men on the other. They had five minutes to ask each other questions: ‘What do you do for a living? Do you have children? What are your hobbies?’ Then someone called out ‘Change!’, the men moved along a chair to the next woman, and it all started over again. At the end, the participants filled in a questionnaire and awarded each other points. The couples with the most points arranged to go on a date.

  With his impressive career, his wide range of hobbies and his mountaineering exploits, Heinrich Scholl had excellent prospects with the women of Steglitz. He got to know a Russian woman with two small children and went out to eat with her a few times. But more often than not, he ended up with women his own age who wanted to mother him, introduce him to the family and do his laundry. They reminded him of his wife.

  He envied his friend Rainer. Rainer was his age and, like him, had been married to the same woman for decades. But for some time he had also had a Thai girlfriend twenty years younger. The two women knew about each other. It was an open ménage à trois. For almost twenty years, Fischer’s wife had had an incurable brain tumour. Her husband nursed her round the clock so that she didn’t have to go into a home. His young girlfriend helped him. She had a separate flat, but the three of them spent a lot of time with one another and went on holiday together.

  At a birthday party Rainer Fischer attended with his girlfriend, Heinrich Scholl asked him whether she didn’t have a friend. Not long afterwards, Fischer said: ‘Scholli, I’ve got something for you.’

  Heinrich Scholl first met Nantana Piamsuk* on a winter’s day in 2009. She was ten years younger than Fischer’s girlfriend, slim with long black hair. The four of them had arranged to have lunch together in Hamlet, a restaurant in Berlin’s Charlottenburg. Scholl was the last to arrive and says he nearly lost his nerve and walked out again. ‘I get to the restaurant and the three of them are sitting there. Two incredibly pretty little things and Rainer. When I saw my friend alongside them I thought: “You look that old too! Don’t kid yourself, Scholl.”’

  She was called Nantana, but introduced herself as Nani, because that was what her friends called her. Nantana asked whether she could call him Henry; she couldn’t pronounce Heinrich. So Heinrich and Nantana became Henry and Nani. She preferred speaking English to German, she said. Luckily, Heinrich Scholl had attended those English classes at the East German adult education centre. What Heinrich Scholl didn’t notice was that the beautiful Thai woman preferred not to speak at all.

  After lunch, they went for a walk by Lake Schlachten. It was chilly; the women were soon cold. They went into another restaurant. The men put back a lot of red wine; the women drank little.

  ‘It was very enjoyable,’ Heinrich Scholl recalls. ‘We co
uld talk to each other about anything.’

  ‘He talked and laughed a lot,’ says Nantana Piamsuk, ‘but it wasn’t so funny for me. I didn’t laugh. Thais and Germans are different.’

  Nantana Piamsuk was twenty-two years old and came from a village in the Mekong region in the east of Thailand. She had two brothers and was the only daughter in the family. A few years before, she had met a south German businessman in Thailand. He promised her a wonderful life, she married him and they moved to Germany together, where they lived in his parents’ house. After a few weeks, however, she wanted to get away. She had hoped to do a training course in Germany, find a job and earn some money. Her husband wanted her to stay at home, cook, clean and sleep with him. After eight months, she packed a few belongings and escaped to Berlin.

  Andreas Herrmann runs an organisation in Berlin that takes care of Thai women in Germany. It’s always the same story, he says: the women have false expectations—and so do the men. ‘A holiday in Thailand is one thing; living together is something else again.’ The relationships often break down after a few weeks, a result of communication problems and cultural differences. The divorce rate of German–Thai couples is 84 per cent.

  Nantana first came to Herrmann’s organisation in 2007. She needed a resident’s permit. Her marriage wasn’t recognised by the German authorities, because she had lived with her husband for less than two years. The organisation helped her. When Heinrich Scholl came along two years later, he took care of the rest. Nantana introduced him to others as ‘the mayor’. Sometimes she would talk of her ‘German grandad’.

  The Thai organisation is on the ground floor of a building in Wedding, formerly one of the poorest parts of Berlin, now starting to become rather fashionable. It was on a six-lane road where trucks hurtle along and planes coming into Tegel airport fly so low you want to duck. But it’s cosy nevertheless; the rooms are hung with brightly coloured Thai lamps and in the front garden there’s a pergola covered in vines, where barbecues are held in the summer.

  Nantana sometimes visited and stayed for an hour while her mayor waited outside in the car. On one occasion, Andreas Herrmann invited Nantana to bring him in. Scholl came in and introduced himself. ‘I can’t say he was unlikeable,’ Herrmann says. ‘He asked a lot of questions and inquired about Nantana’s problems.’

  Heinrich Scholl’s new girlfriend had a great many problems: outstanding hospital bills, outstanding rent, gambling debts. Heinrich Scholl paid the lot: her debts, the rent for her flat, a new kitchen, a new corner sofa, a new TV, her mobile phone bills, clothes, handbags, sunglasses, jewellery. Nantana had little money, but high standards. The bags had to be Gucci or Louis Vuitton; the ring that Scholl bought her cost seven hundred euros; the sunglasses four hundred. She had cosmetic surgery to have her eyelids lifted: the mayor paid for that too. In return, she spent time with him, went out to eat with him and slept with him.

  For Nantana, the relationship was a deal. For Heinrich Scholl, it was love. He was in his mid-sixties, but this woman made him feel younger than he had ever felt before. She was not just beautiful; he also found her pleasantly uncomplicated. Unlike the woman from the town hall, she had no moral qualms, and her demands were more exotic and more charming than those made by his wife. Gitti wanted him to trim the hedge and put out the dustbins; Nani wanted him to shave his pubic hair and buy her expensive presents. Gitti made him feel like a caretaker; Nani made him feel like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.

  Friends and acquaintances warned him that she was only exploiting him, but he ignored them.

  ‘After the evening on Lake Schlachten, she gave me her phone number, and you don’t do that unless you’re interested,’ he says. ‘I had that confirmed by a lady friend.’ What he calls the ‘bed phase’ began five or six weeks later. Nani had thought his flat was fantastic and been improbably nice to him—and sensitive. ‘She told me that if she’d got to know someone like me earlier, she’d have had a better picture of German men. She was glad I was so clean, liked the way I had a shower twice a day, did sport, took care of myself and used aftershave. It didn’t bother her that I was married.’

  Heinrich Scholl was now leading a double life. The weekdays he spent in Berlin with his Thai mistress, but every Friday evening he made his way to Ludwigsfelde, where he handed Gitti his bag of dirty laundry and worked through her list of chores. He was there when she needed him: when their son visited, when her traditional Christmas brunch in Potsdam came round, or some other important event they had to attend as a couple. She insisted on that.

  He wanted to be left in peace, and she wanted to show everyone that her world was still intact. That was their arrangement—a ceasefire after forty-six years of marriage.

  Friends noticed that Heinrich Scholl was better balanced and more relaxed since moving to Berlin. He raved about his new life and liked asking people round to his flat. The psychologist Joachim Lehmann, spa operator Heinz Steinhart, and even his old acquaintance from early reunification days, Dieter Bartha, were taken to Berlin, where Scholl showed them round his flat as if it were a palace, opening the doors to all the rooms—even to the bathroom, where there was often a black lace bra hanging on the washing line. Like a trophy.

  Brigitte Scholl was not allowed in the flat. Heinrich Scholl told his wife he lived life there on his own terms. Sometimes she asked him what he got up to in Berlin. He would reply that he preferred not to talk about it. She didn’t persist.

  That was the deal. Thus far.

  This time it wasn’t a letter but a phone call—a man’s voice informing Brigitte Scholl that her husband was betraying her. As before, she’d had her suspicions, and the next time he came home, she confronted him. Heinrich Scholl immediately admitted everything. He said she knew better than anyone how much he needed the affection she’d been denying him for years. He wasn’t an old man, after all.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Gitti. And walked away, leaving him standing there.

  It was the same as ever. They didn’t shout at each other or slam doors or throw glasses at the walls. When Gitti was sick of her husband, she went to bed. If he didn’t work his way through her lists, there was no supper. But these methods no longer got her very far. Her husband had stopped caring whether or not she made supper. He came home to Ludwigsfelde when he felt like it and could drive back to his flat in Berlin at any time, back to his mistress. Brigitte Scholl had lost control. She was powerless.

  Never in her life had she felt so helpless, and the worst of it was that no one could be allowed to notice anything. She confided only in her closest friend, Inge, who lived far removed from Ludwigsfelde. The two women spoke on the phone every morning, and Brigitte Scholl told Inge what she had found out. It was not good news. Not only was her husband’s girlfriend thirty years younger than her; she was also a beautician by trade—at least, that’s what her husband told her. She probably had her eye on the salon, Brigitte Scholl said to her friend, and announced that, to be on the safe side, she was going to have the house in Ludwigsfelde transferred to her son. The self-confident, energetic Gitti often cried on the phone now and spoke of no longer wanting to live.

  Every morning Inge Karther rang Ludwigsfelde to make sure that Gitti hadn’t done away with herself. ‘She didn’t want to carry on,’ Inge says. ‘She didn’t want anything any more, didn’t even like leaving the house on her own. She grumbled about Heiner and cursed him, but the next moment she wanted him back. She kept saying you couldn’t just throw away all those years.’

  Brigitte Scholl asked her friend to ring her husband to tell him what a good wife she was and what a lovely family they had. Inge didn’t want to—it was awkward—but she had no choice. The next time Heinrich Scholl was home, Gitti rang Inge. ‘Hang on a second, I’ll give you Heiner,’ she said, and passed the phone to her husband. Her loyal friend in Anklam told Heinrich Scholl that she thought he was treating Gitti shabbily. ‘I told him he had no balls. He should have left her five or ten years before, rather than waiting until we we
re old and nobody wanted us any more.’

  Brigitte Scholl’s friend Karin Singer was persuaded to drive with her to Berlin to suss out her husband. She still didn’t know where he lived. The friends set off, two sixty-five-year-old lady detectives. They soon found the address, but Heinrich Scholl’s car was nowhere to be seen; he obviously wasn’t in. Karin wanted to leave again immediately, but Gitti had already got out of the car. They walked once round the building, noting that there was no back garden. Apart from that, they saw nothing and nobody. Karin says she was glad when they finally drove off again.

  Karin Singer and Inge Karther were part of the small circle of women whom Gitti confided in. Apart from them, the only person she told of her husband’s relationship was Helga Gerlich, the social democrat from Lichtenrade. ‘Brigitte Scholl rang me up and told me tearfully that Heiner had a girlfriend, because she wasn’t enough for him. This woman gave him what she didn’t give him. And I said right out: “You must chuck the bloke out! Leave him!”’

  That was the advice Brigitte Scholl received from all three friends. It was clear that her marriage was over, that she and her husband no longer had anything in common. But Brigitte Scholl wouldn’t leave him for the world. ‘She always had this hope that he’d come back. Because he always did come when she needed him,’ says Inge Karther. ‘They went to see friends together. He turned up punctually and even provided the flowers. She always said to him: “If you hurt me, that’s just the way it is, but for other people, we’re a couple.”’

  Brigitte Scholl grew thin; dark rings appeared beneath her eyes. When she opened her salon in the morning, you could tell she’d been crying; it was visible even beneath her make-up. Her customers sensed that something wasn’t right, but they seldom inquired; they knew Brigitte Scholl didn’t like talking about her worries. One woman, however, risked it—an old woman Brigitte knew from her mother’s hair salon.