by Eric Dupont
“When the Bergs came to Charlottenburg in 1934—yes, that’s right—they came from Königsberg and the father was indeed with KdF. Magda’s mother was rather bourgeois. Let’s just say Berlin wasn’t her cup of tea. Too common for her. On that, she and I agreed, but that was as far as it went. The Bergs had two girls. The one you know and a younger daughter who must have been six or seven in 1934. What I heard—again from Ludwig—is that Elisabeth was handicapped. What was wrong with her? I don’t know. She couldn’t really speak. No, I never saw her. From what Ludwig told me, she must have had Down’s syndrome. She lived with her parents at the beginning; they had someone to help with her at home. Then Elisabeth was committed. In 1936, I believe. Her mother didn’t want to, but her father’s mind was made up. Barely three years later, a letter arrived from the institution. Elisabeth had died from the flu. The doctors hadn’t been able to help her. Needless to say, she’d probably been gassed like the other handicapped people in the Third Reich, but the fewer questions you asked, the quicker you climbed the ranks. That was true for KdF too. You find me heartless? Perhaps. But wait till you hear the rest!
“Frau Berg never really got over it, and I’m only assuming she knew how her daughter died. Let’s just say there was a particularly nasty strain of the flu going around German institutions in 1939. When Magda was sent back to Königsberg, it was largely because her mother was losing her mind over what had happened to Elisabeth. She wanted to know. She sent letters along the lines of “Where’s my child?,” as did others who knew the flu was nothing more than a lie. But in a world in which everything is a lie, there are no liars. Do you follow? It’s the same for God and money. In order for it to work, everyone or almost everyone has to believe. And it works. For a while.
“When her husband told her to shut up once and for all, Frau Berg locked herself away in her room. She killed herself during an air raid in 1943. I’ll never forget the sight. There was no debris in Schillerstraße, only broken windows and, in the middle of the street, Frau Berg’s body lying in a pool of blood, right where I’d played Ständchen. She’d jumped, like Tosca. A little more scotch? I can hear your soul positively melting away. Poor Kapriel. Buck up, pull yourself together!
“I’m guessing you have a brother or sister. Otherwise you wouldn’t be fighting back tears. The rest of it—the singing lessons, the friendship, the cross—Magda told you the truth about all of it. But perhaps not the whole truth. How can I tell? It’s simple. First, you don’t look like someone one tells the whole truth to. You’re too handsome. What’s that? You still don’t know. The good-looking ones are always fed lies. The others—the ugly ducklings, the just-okays, the five-out-of-tens—they get the truth, the raw truth. The uglier you are, the more people give you the straight goods. How come? Search me. It’s as though beauty attracts lies. Do you think people tell Claudia Schiffer the truth? No, they tell her what they think she wants to hear. Perhaps people are trying to hide their ugliness from you, trying to be loved by the good-looking people of this world.
“At the start, when they first met, people thought, I mean my parents thought, things would turn out differently. They would end up getting married, that was for sure. I didn’t say a thing. You know, Kapriel, I can remember the day Ludwig was born. There were five of us, growing up. Ludwig was my only brother. Three girls came after him. They’re all dead. One from diphtheria in 1945, Maria three years ago, here in Bavaria, from cancer, and another was killed in an Allied air raid. It’s pretty, all this snow. It must remind you of Canada. Are you going home for Christmas? No? Ah. It must be beautiful in the forest. Zzzz . . . Oh! I’m sorry! Where was I? Oh! Yes! My little Ludwig. Ten years my junior. Small from the moment he was born. Fragile. Ethereal. I knew the moment he walked. He took me for his mommy. A slight, blond angel. Too delicate to survive in a world of brutes. As a young teenager, Ludwig was suddenly very expressive. He was funny. Everything Magda told you—his jokes, his scrapes, his pranks—it’s all true. He liked to pretend he was that lesbian singer from Berlin. Wait, what was her name again? Waldorf! No! Claire Waldoff!
“Ha! We had such fun on the piano!
“I don’t know what Ludwig saw in Magda. Or rather, I know only too well. She was just masculine enough to win his confidence. That’s what he liked about her. And she sought the same ambiguity in him. If you stood in front of the pair of them, it was like looking at four different sexes. It was hard to say which of the two was more feminine, which was more masculine. Together, they expressed every possibility. Only Magda was right for Ludwig and vice versa. Magda quickly became all he ever thought about. We’d only ever see him at meals. He’d tell Father he was off to the Hitler Youth, only to come by my place to spend more time with Magda. I think they must have been in love in a way, the absolute love of teenagers, you know, a love that soars high above the pleasures of the flesh. A kind of union of the soul, but in an inexplicable and almost miraculous way, a physical union too.
“In 1939, Ludwig came to me with an advertisement he’d found in the newspaper. A new singing teacher at Alexanderplatz. He was so excited. After a first free lesson, he persuaded Magda to give the man a try. I found the whole thing rather strange, Ludwig going all the way to Alexanderplatz for singing lessons, but well . . . I went with them to put my mind at ease. The gentleman was very jovial, very methodical, very convinced of his own methods. Always joking. I went along to make sure my little brother hadn’t fallen into the clutches of a madman. I wanted to at least be sure before I got married.
“I understood everything when I saw how Ludwig looked at Herr Küchenmeister. ‘He says I should call him Peter,’ he said on the S-Bahn on the way home. Magda was livid. Küchenmeister had been a little hard on her, it’s true, but all music teachers are hard. They have to be. Their profession requires it. Magda was a jealous woman, you know. She must still be. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear she flies into jealous rages with you.
“And then it happened. One day, Magda came ’round looking for Ludwig. I told her he was at his singing lesson with Küchenmeister. She saw red. ‘Well, he never mentioned it to me!’ And she stormed off in a temper. I knew it would end badly, I can tell you that right now.
“She rushed over to Küchenmeister’s apartment and barged in without knocking. The poor fool didn’t lock the door when he was with his students. She went into the studio to find Ludwig sitting on Küchenmeister’s lap. The three stood there, stiff as pillars of salt.
“The next day, the Kriminalpolizei knocked at my parents’ door. Father opened it. They took Ludwig away. He was nineteen, Kapriel. They didn’t want to say why they’d come for him. Mama was frightened to death. Our sisters were huddled in the corner, crying. I tried to find Magda, but she was nowhere to be found. No one answered at her house. When I managed to track down Herr Berg, he would barely speak to me. ‘Magda has left for Königsberg.’ That’s all we managed to find out. She didn’t write, didn’t send news, didn’t call. Nothing. The last time I saw Magda Berg was when she knocked on my door in 1939 looking for Ludwig. She’d turned him over to the police. No doubt about it. And during the trial, we learned that Ludwig and Küchenmeister had been ‘caught in the act.’ Who by, if not her?
“Things went downhill very quickly for my little brother after that. We didn’t know where they had him locked up. My parents were terrified, given everything else going on in the city: when someone disappeared, it was usually for good. I went to the Kriminalpolizei four days after his arrest. I asked them what a poor angel of only nineteen, as frail and slight as a little bird, could possibly have done that was so terrible. Of course, the pleas of a big sister didn’t have any effect on them. The trial was held shortly after that. Ludwig and his music teacher weren’t tried at the same time. Küchenmeister was sent straight to Sachsenhausen, yes, the concentration camp. His was a repeat offence: he’d already been sentenced two years earlier for homosexuality under Paragraph 175. Ludwig was given two years in a correction center, which meant that he,
too, was shipped off to Sachsenhausen, like Küchenmeister. From that moment, my parents lost virtually all interest in him. To be honest, I’ll never know if they were simply frightened or if they agreed that Ludwig deserved to be sent to a concentration camp for being a homosexual. I don’t think they thought about it too hard. Did you know that the Nazis created a kind of official agency? The Reich Central Office for the Combatting of Homosexuality and Abortion. Both were considered highly illegal and fought against by the same body. I was able to see Ludwig at the trial; then he disappeared. Six months into his sentence, he sent me a letter from Sachsenhausen. He said he was allowed a visit; he begged me to come. I didn’t mention it to my husband.
“He’d lost weight. He was no longer the same boy. He was broken, how else can I put it? I don’t know what might have gone on in the camp. What he told me, when he eventually got out in 1941, was that he had sung there. Küchenmeister wasn’t released at the same time. I don’t know if they were really in love. Ludwig once told me an interesting anecdote. Homosexuals in Sachsenhausen were kept under strict surveillance by the SS and kept apart from the other prisoners. Anyone and everyone was free to hit them, beat them senseless, humiliate them, and worse. Some died from the beatings. Apparently some of the men would sing to summon the strength to get through their grueling work days. They sang, as Ludwig put it, rubbing their voices together to pleasure each other. Do you understand what he means? No? Me neither, but that’s what they did, apparently. There were doctors in the camps, real doctors, people who would otherwise have been delivering babies or treating colds, who suggested the homosexual prisoners be castrated in exchange for their release. They were convinced that castration would cure them of their abnormal desires. Isn’t that horrible? But it worked, just imagine: some of the prisoners agreed to be castrated in order to survive. Put yourself in their place: anyone sent to a camp knew they had only the slightest chance of ever leaving it alive. So they left their balls behind; they’d caused them nothing but trouble anyway.
“When he got out, my parents didn’t want him to live at home. They were too ashamed. He should have been called up but he got caught a second time by the police, this time by a plainclothes officer he’d approached in the subway. I still saw him, but only rarely. His last letter dates back to May 1942. After that, he probably fell prey to the guards at Sachsenhausen. No one got out. Not anyone wearing a pink triangle anyway. They didn’t last long, as a rule. In July 1942, it seems most of them were beaten to death by the guards. Your eyes look like they’re about to pop out of your head, dear. Did you notice that you and Berta have the same color eyes? It’s funny. Speak of the devil . . . What does she want this time?”
(Michel, I didn’t catch everything since they spoke in Bavarian dialect. Berta wanted to know if I’d be staying for something to eat, I think. I don’t know what Terese Bleibtreu replied. I’m not sure.)
“So, my dear Kapriel, now you see why I probably wouldn’t be the best surprise for Magda’s birthday. I tried to stand up for my brother, but what could a thirty-year-old woman do against the Nazi judicial system? If you can even speak of justice . . . You’d do the same if you had a little brother, wouldn’t you? If you knew that he was being held by madmen, that his life was at risk, you’d help him, wouldn’t you? You’re big and strong. They might even listen to you. But Magda’s little sister and my little brother couldn’t be saved. I’d ask you to say hello to Magda for me, but I’d much rather you didn’t mention your visit. There’s no point bringing it up with her. But there is one thing you can do for me. It was me who gave Ludwig the little gold cross, the same one Magda was given in exchange for one of Magda Goebbels’s earrings. Is that story true? I think so, yes. She was more than capable of such a thing. The cross belonged to my brother. I find it a shame that Magda still has it. If she still has it. You never know what that heathen might have swapped it for by now. The Bergs weren’t religious at all, you see. She told you? Anyway. If ever you could get your hands on the cross without the long arm of the law getting in the way . . . Ludwig’s initials and date of birth are engraved on the back. December 13, 1920. He would have turned seventy-nine next week. But I’m asking too much . . . No, forget all about it. What’s lost is lost. I’d ask you to stay for the evening, but you said you had a train to catch. You’ll be able to find your own way back, won’t you?”
She stopped talking, walked me to the door that looked out over a spacious patio and down onto the lake. Beside the door, a little painting above a piano immediately captured my attention. It showed the death of the virgin, the entombment of Mary. I couldn’t believe it. It was much smaller than the one in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Twelve inches by eighteen, I’d say, perhaps a little bigger. I smiled and stared at it for a second or two.
“It’s a reproduction. The original disappeared at the end of the war, they say. Local legend has it the original was itself a copy of a piece from the Vatican Pinacoteca. The villagers say all kinds of things. Some even say it was an American who took it. Go figure.”
“I saw the same picture in a museum in Berlin.”
“Do you have an interest in religious art?”
“No, not really. But I have a brother in Rome and he mentioned the painting.”
“A brother? How lucky you are to still have a brother. I can’t say the same.”
It was much colder outside. Only her head poked out through the half-open door.
“I hope I haven’t let you down too badly,” she said.
“No, I’ll just have to rethink my calculations, that’s all.”
“Calculations? You? No, no more calculations, young man. I can tell you, the craziest calculations are what you call illusions and I can tell by your eyes that calculus is not your forte.”
“Illusions?”
“Yes, illusions. We’re all stripped of them in the end. That’s what’s just happened to you.”
“I wish I understood what you mean.”
“You’d like to understand lots of things, I’m sure, but like I said earlier, you’re not the sharpest tool in the box.”
“I didn’t come here to cause you any harm, Terese. Now you’re just being insulting.”
“You’re an easy target. It can’t be the first time.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“The truth is, I’m being unfair. You’re not stupid, just naive. An easy target for Magda.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You take everything at face value. You must constantly be taken aback, let down by life’s little illusions. Your neighbor in East Berlin tells you about her childhood and you take her story as the gospel truth. A woman writes to you from a village in Bavaria, says her name is Terese Bleibtreu, and you come down to meet her, convinced it must be her. If you weren’t such a danger to yourself, I’d almost find you sweet.”
“If you say you’re Terese Bleibtreu, I’ve no choice but to believe you. And I was the one who contacted you. I don’t see who you could be other than Terese Bleibtreu. Even the woman who let me in knows you by that name. Are you forgetting that?”
“Stop it. You’re making me giddy you’re so fragile right now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Bring me back my brother’s cross and I’ll explain what I mean. Have a safe trip home, Kapriel.”
As I walked back to the gate, a crow again shouted something in Bavarian. I turned around. She was upstairs already, her face at the window. It reminded me of the old woman’s silhouette in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Berta was calling after her chihuahua in the villa’s garden. It had started to snow.
“Would you like me to give you a ride to the station? If you hurry, you’ll catch the next train to Munich. Otherwise you might have to wait a while.”
I got into her Volkswagen and we drove off. I tried to strike up a conversation. All I got out of her was that she was born in Villa Waldberta on January 1, 1946, back when her mother worked for the owners and the house was a refugee cam
p.
“That’s why I’m called Berta.”
“What if you’d been a boy?”
“My mother says she’d have called me Ludwig. That’s Louis in French, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s the same name as Ludwig. Was your father called Ludwig?”
“Seems so. Here comes your train.”
I ran to get on the train. German trains are alarmingly punctual. I’d have liked to chat a little longer with Berta, for her to explain to me how and why Terese had become so nasty. So that she could tell me a little more about her father as well, but the train cut short the conversation about her father Ludwig. I was, you’ll understand, a little stunned. I hadn’t expected our meeting to go like that at all. As I keep telling you, in this country you have to be ready for anything.
I didn’t speak or read or write or think on the way back to Munich. But my eyes were open the whole way. At Westkreuz, we passed by neat and tidy Schrebergärten that made me think of Magda this summer. S-Bahn stations paraded by like the names of so many concentration camps. At the hotel bar where I’d left my bag, the owner found me a little grumpy. Since I was in no rush, I asked him what he knew about how homosexuals were treated in the Third Reich.
“Ach! It was hardly the gayest of times.”
Who says the Germans have no sense of humor? He disappeared off into the kitchen. At the Deutsche Eiche bar—which really couldn’t be nicer—a guy our age had heard us talking and chimed in. I think he must have been trying to chat me up.
“Homosexuals under the Nazis? It was simple: they were sent to camps. To Dachau, near here, and to Sachsenhausen, further north. Most of those who were caught and sent to camps didn’t survive, as a rule. They were beaten to death. The luckier ones—pardon my cynicism—were castrated in return for being allowed out. Some agreed to it. But most died from mistreatment. And after the war, those who’d survived kept their heads down since it was still illegal. Are you in Munich for long? Are you French?”