I insisted on the autopsy report because I couldn’t shake the feeling that Michi’s health at the end had something to do with his breakdown. I haven’t given up on investigating the situation and will continue to look into it when I work in Hamburg for a few weeks next season. I will above all raise the decided objections of your doctor of confidence.2 And also I will once again try to ascertain who, if anybody, Michael was with the night he died. Establishing full clarity about all the unsettled details of his death has no value whatsoever for our poor boy, and yet it is a part of his short life, and we owe it to him to follow every trail to the end.
I fully understand that this is constantly on your mind, but I hope that you don’t get any mistaken ideas. Everything I discover I will report to you. I didn’t know that Antoine was so sick, and ask you to give him my kindest regards. It is a chaotic, horrible world that we are growing old into, and it is important to be surrounded by people who still make life seem meaningful.
In fourteen days I will be in Vienna again. Please do write to me about everything that troubles you about Michi’s fate.
I send my deepest regards to you both, and embrace you. Karl.
There were no more letters.
1 It’s unclear what ‘sending her child away’ means in the context. Karl is possibly referring to the time Jerry spent visiting with Eva in Canada. Or had Margaret dispatched her son elsewhere; perhaps dismissed him from Michael and Margaret’s home? This business of trips and money regarding Jerry remains obscure.
2 No record as to what these objections were.
Cousins And Kunst
I REMEMBER MARIENPLATZ. I came here in the summer of 1981, when I was fifteen, to apprentice with my uncle Michael Friederichsen. He is a Kunstler, an artist who works his alchemy on silver, wood, stained glass, and bronze. At six foot three, Herr Friederichsen was large, a trembling hillside of emotion and eccentricity. Besides making jewelry and sculpture, he designed public fountains and playgrounds, even church interiors. His English was poor to non-existent, his laugh infectious.
When I arrived at the house that first morning, having made my way from the Heimstetten S-Bahn stop, I was wearing my John Lennon RIP T-shirt. I never took it off that summer. Herr Friederichsen glanced at the bespectacled Beatle, and shook his head, whimsically.
“Andy-boy, Ja Ja. Da ist Andy-boy.”
I let my pack slide off my back.
“Isn’t it?” He did not really question it, but had a way of speaking.
I reached out my hand.
Thereafter, I was his. Herr Friederichsen would not release me for a good month. He peered down at my shoes, inspected my jeans and shirt while turning me this way and that way—I felt lightweight and modest, a facile thing swayed by force of his mountainous bulk. We were doing a formal dance. And then he started to whimper, and the idling tremor culminated in girlish giggles and squeals broken only by a fragment of that phrase “Andy-boy, Ja, Ja. Das ist.” Herr Friederichsen was a sight who made a spectacle of anyone in his grip.
The final laugh: “Ka-na-a-disch. Ja, Ja. Er ist Kanadier.” He appealed to his wife, Mehtild, and present children, the twins, Markus and Andreas, who were seated at an outdoor table. The twins were partially obscured behind white geysers of cigarette smoke. “Come on now, isn’t it? Kanadisch.”
Sure. Canadian. Full stop and applause. House down. I’m hilarious because my grandparents fled this country in ‘35.
“Genau,” the calm Mehtild eventually rescued me. “You are our guest. Stay with us as long as it is best. Yes. This is right?” The declarative sing-song of her English was both unsettling and comforting.
“Prima.” Herr Friederichsen would always give his blessing this way. Prima.
Herr Friederichsen alone did not smoke. Soon I would take up the habit; the twins Markus and Andreas, two years my senior, would get me into the game—toss juggling apples and bean bags while nursing a Marlboro; setting fire to newspaper boxes on street corners; swimming in the local quarry. They were natural at nudity and delinquency, the twins were, very agile naturists. I was easily influenced.
“Ja. Ja.” He started up again, shaking his head in large disbelief. “Das ist Andy-boy.”
I spent a month learning at the big man’s elbow, making my copper bowl, a bronze candle holder, a silver cross—Herr Friederichsen showing me how it is done. Impatient, I would force my work, and rush the process, while he whistled a popular tune. Often it was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, which played on American Forces Network Europe.
In my spare time, when I was not apprenticing to become a Künstler in the family way, I hung out with my cousins, and on weekends we would take Herr Meyer, a life-sized doll—half-scarecrow, half-mannikin—for a ride on the S-Bahn. Herr Meyer slouched in his seat without our support and, having arrived at our destination, we’d inquire of him, “What’s wrong with you, Herr Meyer? Come now. Have you beans in your ears?” He would be carried through the underground and up the escalator, where, gradually, Meyer would emerge with us into sunlight and that grand public city square, Marienplatz.
Ah, Marienplatz. Herr Meyer was our prop. We lunched with him and brought him shopping for second-hand clothes. One afternoon, we waited at the Heimstetten S-Bahn station for the train. Suddenly Markus or Andreas—it doesn’t matter which—lifted Herr Meyer off the bench and launched him headfirst onto the tracks. We ran like hell, and likely never made it to the square that day.
That same summer in Munich I met another cousin, Stephanie. Cousin Stephanie was a surprise—her name, which I fancied from the beginning; the strong cigarettes, the green necklace, her cropped hair, and the cobra neck. Stephanie was confident, disinterested, responsibly detached and unique: she was European. Visiting from France, where she lived, she snickered when I spoke my Québec French, and grimaced at my T-shirt’s decorative sparkles. John Lennon in his oval spectacles was trapped under a coating of plastic that made my stomach bead with sweat. Stephanie was unimpressed. I felt that heavily—her disdain for kitsch—and yet, however forbidden and arrogant the fruit which had fallen from the family tree, I was attracted. Stephanie: absently pinching the strap of her brassiere and letting the white elastic snap, staccato against her skin. Stephanie: pouting as she mixed her mother-tongue French with a smudge of German and polished off an ice cream on … Marienplatz.
Cousins. I am idling today at a table in an Internet café near Marienplatz, thinking about cousins—Michael Friederichsen and Michael Paryla and my father Nicolas are cousins—and making connections between past and present, when I—der kanadische Schriftsteller Andrew Steinmetz—receive an email from Sandra Asche of the Thalia Theatre. Fräulein Asche writes from Hamburg, where, “Deep in the basement of the theatre, I found the answer to your question. In Hamburg, he stayed on Mühlendamm Strasse.”
Interesting. Mühlendamm Strasse is in the St Georg district of Hamburg, and not in St Pauli, the neighbourhood Karl Paryla describes as Michael’s in his letter to Eva dated January 20, 1967. But maybe forty years ago St Pauli and St Georg were the same or almost the same thing; perhaps like cousins. I reply to Fräulein Asche that I am coming by train to Hamburg in several days to visit the city’s theatre archives which are held at Hamburg University. Click. Fräulein Asche has offered to give me a tour of Thalia Theatre, where at the time of his death Michael was performing two plays in repertory, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Shaw’s The Apple Cart. Click. I don’t have his Hamburg address—not yet, and maybe never—but things are falling together nicely. I’ve not been in Germany two days and already the email from Fräulein Asche and the name of his street unearthed from the depths of the old Thalia Theatre. What other shred of Michaelmania is to be found in the basement of that theatre, I wonder? Lennon once bragged he was born in Liverpool, but grew up in Hamburg. What ghosts haunt the stage and back-corridor dressing rooms and mirrors? I’ll go have an unsentimental lo
ok at the place. I’ll snoop around Mühlendamm Strasse and the St Georg Hospital, where Michael was transported by ambulance on the evening of his emphatic escape.
Ultimately, I’d like to find out if it was an accident. Why knowing should matter is not obvious. The truth is maybe secondary to the necessity to know. When the case of Michael is discussed among family, typically we rely on a number of phrases. ‘Michael died from an overdose’—we always say this, but always pause before adding—‘It was an accident.’ Sometimes a variation: ‘He was drinking and taking sleeping pills’—pause—‘Most probably it was an accident’. Eva had her ideas, which she kept mostly to herself, divulging instead anger. Karl had doubts. Was it an accident? I’m not implying that I expect to dig up the truth—that’s not realistic, probably not possible—though, like POW escape stories, the labyrinthine search for truth provides a convenient narrative vector. It gives my quest a theatrical core. And true enough, as I travel, by the day I feel more and more implicated, as though something important is happening of which I am equal parts witness and creator. Before setting out, I took acting lessons. Just a couple. They’ll come in handy later, I feel.
For as long as I can remember, I knew two things about him. Michael had acted in a famous war movie and he’d died young. It was all that I knew, this was the sum of my knowledge about him, but it was enough for the mind to play with for years. Discrete facts—war movie; died young—but I inferred causality. He died young because he had appeared in that movie. Now that was something for the unconscious to turn over and over without a care in the world for proof.
Eventually I found out the movie’s name, but for many years I had only a slippery hold on what his role was. Growing up in the 1970s, I had no easy access to viewing the movie unless it was broadcast on television. I had read a fair amount of Second World War history, and I did watch my share of war movies on TV. The Great Escape was not one of them. I saw it for the first time in my late teens. Already I had learned that Michael appears in the train scene. That he plays a German. But after watching the movie, I really couldn’t be bothered with him. He wasn’t a star by a long shot, and I was too immature to appreciate that Being Not McQueen made Michael someone just as interesting to follow on screen, and off. I had yet to learn that just possibly every ordinary human life is heroic, and the fact that most ordinary lives are forgotten makes them that much more heroic.
After Eva moved to Québec in the late seventies, closer to my home, I overheard somewhere that Michael had in fact died of an overdose. Eva didn’t talk much about Michael. She kept mum about him. He was a taboo subject. I must had heard ‘overdose’ from a different source. My parents probably. Only when Eva moved away years later, and years after that when I went to see her in London, Ontario, to record her oral history, did I become acutely aware of Michael. His absence at her death made me recognize that his death was the tragedy of her life.
To me, overdose could only mean suicide, and the idea that someone in my family had committed suicide was enthralling. I romanticized his death, for a while anyway, just as I had for a time romanticized two of my great uncles, my grandmother’s brothers Abelard and Hrolf, who’d fought in the Third Reich. All romance ended when I learned a dark secret about Hrolf Kramm. It was Eva who told me about that.
This visit to Munich I am staying near Rosenheimer Platz with my ‘cousin’ Joerg Hahn. Herr Friederichsen, Joerg’s uncle and my former mentor, is on vacation in Turkey. Shame. Herr Friederichsen was one of a handful in attendance at Michael’s funeral in 1967. I would have liked to have taken him on the road when I go to visit Michael’s grave in the south of Munich, an event I’m keeping for last.
Joerg reminds me a lot of his uncle. Large, barrel-chested, inflammatory, histrionic for sure, but gentle and kind and jovial too. His sparse ginger beard crowns an oft-raised chin, lending him a somewhat gallant air. Joerg works at NBC Universal’s German subsidiary of The History Channel. He tells me it’s his first ‘real’ job, after studying political science at university. A curious choice, since best I can tell Joerg is a self-hating German, the real thing. But perhaps The History Channel is perfect motivation and gets him out of bed early.
After two days, I have surmised that the only thing that Joerg likes (loves fanatically) about Germany is German soccer. Everything is permeated with “The fucking German way we do things here.” The fucking German way (The FGW) is a daily complaint, the caption to the scowl Joerg wears when reading the morning newspaper, a ritual which can be relied on for the discovery of yet another example of national imbecility. Today, it was Chancellor Merkel’s plans to expand the national nuclear energy program. More generally, The FGW refers to the culture and social customs. The tasteless fruit of an oppressive past. An entrenched, sycophantic regard for titles and status. The childlike awe of rules and regulations supported by punctuality, efficiency, rigidity, cleanliness, arrogance, persistence, responsibility.
Today, a tourist day for me, Joerg has offered to show me around his office and then the university quarter and the Kunstareal. I check my watch. I have another forty minutes to waste at the Internet café. We’re not meeting until after lunch. Where would I be in a situation like this without Das Google? Likely line-dancing, maybe with the American war veterans inside the Hofbräuhaus, which is not far from Marienplatz. If Herr Meyer were around to accompany me I’d consider a side-trip. It’s probably best that Meyer has moved on. I had better stay on topic, and make use of my time, which means investigating the reception of the movie inside Germany. Something I’ve always wondered about.
The German premiere of Gesprengte Ketten was 29 August, 1963. Only two months earlier U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivered his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, before a half a million people, on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg. The Cold War was in full swing. Gesprengte Ketten. This is how the parents of the kittens working the box office at Baviaria filmstadt might have known it. Black hoodie and spiky displayed no interest in the movie, and no consciousness of the reception it had received in its own day. They just didn’t care about it. But I wonder how it might have resonated with the previous generation. In 1963 the Berlin Wall was under construction and many ‘second cousins’ in Stalag Luft East wanted to escape. Officially known in the East as Der Antifaschistische Schutzwall: The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, the barrier underwent constant evolution in design from the wire fence model of ‘61 to the concrete model of ‘75, finally adopting high-tech guard towers and electronic kill traps as more sophisticated means of entrapment became the rage. While it’s true that the Anti-Fast-Exit Shit Wall was intended to protect the population in the Eastern Bloc from dispiriting fascist elements in the West (elements which would hinder the creation of a communist utopia), the partitioned elements in the East were magnetically drawn to the Berliner Mauer, as though the citizens of the GDR were prisoners in their own country, and their own state an enemy of the people. How do you like that? Five thousand defected during the years of the Wall, and around two hundred citizens were killed trying to escape. Turns out Stalag East Germany bred serial escapists.
In the USA, the movie was a box office success upon release, and yet the Oscar nod came for best editing. Lawrence of Arabia was the big winner that year. To Kill a Mockingbird was one of five strong nominees for Best Picture. At the Golden Globes, The Great Escape faired better. It was nominated but did not win in the best motion picture category. The movie was seen by critics as overly long and too focused on the mechanics of the escape at the expense of character development. And there are no women! In the UK it was castigated for historical inaccuracies. The movie focuses on a group of mostly American POWs, but no American was part of the actual escape.
Enough. Research is commendable, but while I am sitting around I could also snag selfies and update my blog, promote an online presence. From the café I might tweet #Michaelparyla. Instead, I order a third espresso, having decided what is best for me: to sit out the incons
equential pageant and pass on the production of the stuff overweened dreams are made of. Frankly what many agents and publishers call self-promotion feels like a demotion. Feels like a ruse. I’ve got no followers, obviously. Neither has Michael, and he doesn’t care. His IMDb STARmeter ranking is abysmal. I should remain strong and act more like him, and not care: I don’t but I do, whereas he really doesn’t care. No ambiguity about it. Michael’s in no position to ponder book sales. Now, if the boy snagged selfies and blogged or tweeted from the grave, he might catch a wandering eye. #Michaelsgreatescape. That’d be a different story. His Twitter account could put us in a different category.
Die Deutsche Film-und Medienbewertung Wiesbaden (FBW: not to be confused with The FGW) was formed in 1951 and is Germany’s foremost film institution. On the FBW web site, Gesprengte Ketten gets a yellow star and the recommendation Prädikat Wertvoll. Michael was in Munich at the time of the release, but there is no record of his impression of the film then, or ever. If he sometimes dreamed of a fast-track career path, then his part in the movie, opposite the American and British stars, must have felt like just the ticket. But it wasn’t to be.
What about the German audience of today? Black hoodie and spiky. What would they make of Gesprengte Ketten? That’s an online mystery tour for another day.
After a short tour of the building, we land in the stockroom near the reception area, where Joerg plays Santa Klaus and showers his cousin with NBC Universal paraphernalia—pen flashlights, mugs, lanyards.
“For the kids,” he says. When I look on absently at the flimsy loot, he stresses, “For your children.”
This Great Escape Page 7