This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  Curious. The Michael archives, Hamburg’s Jewish deportation Square, and the Curio-Haus are in close proximity. KZ stands for Konzentrationslager, meaning Concentration Camp. So the SS officers from the Neuengamme Concentration Camp were put on trial in the courtroom at the Curio-Haus, as were the Gestapo men involved in the murder of the 50 recaptured prisoners from Stalag Luft III. The plaque does not mention it but it was here that Paul Brickhill came to witness the trial proceedings. Meaning, more fearful symmetry. More tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night. Meaning I cannot put aside the idea that Michael’s fate is framed by his character in the movie, the Michael who kindly assists a band of Nazi assassins, the very specific strain who were tried here in a War Crimes Court in 1948 and afterwards hung at Hamelin Gaol. In 1967, twenty years enigmatically später, Michael died, alone in his apartment on Mühlendamm Strasse, in close proximity to the Curio-Haus, where his movie-mentors—i.e. the thugs who murdered 50 British bunny rabbits—were found guilty of War Crimes. Coincidence? The jury is out. For my money, it looks like Michael may have arrived in Hamburg, in late 1966, on the surface of things to play the light and dazzling Junker Bleichenwang and also the sorely forgotten Sempronius. When in actuality Michael was summoned to Hamburg. He was summoned to stand trial, and was found guilty, but—seriously—of what crime?

  Leaving the university neighbourhood, I cut across town to the Asklepios Klinik St Georg. From the botanical gardens, I walk south and cross the Kennedybrücke and continue along An der Alster, skirting the Aussenalster, the large artificial lake at the heart of Hamburg.

  I have been a bit of a blabbermouth, over the years, when it comes to Michael’s story, as you might imagine. It has gotten to the point where I have this little routine and I follow a script just as casually as I can, while listing specific dates of interest and facts, as though they were second nature. Once when I was at a party and started telling Michael’s story, taking the time to set the scene and invoking a number of themes like Germany, war, acting, exile, overdose, my highly-­educated captive speared his elusive martini olive and tossed out the name Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, and in no time had launched a counteroffensive involving the story of the actor Gustav Gründgens. No, my captive on this occasion was not The Filmfuehrer. He was a professor of Modern Languages. In his mind my Michael blended with Gustav Gründgens. In fact, I’m surprised Dr. Sigmund Giesing had not thought of Klaus Mann and Gründgens. So allow me the digression. Klaus Mann had a sehr complicated relationship with his Nobel Prize-winning father, Thomas, author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. In his diaries, Thomas Mann wrote heatedly of his infant son’s beauty. Raised in Munich, Klaus and sister Erika spent a theatrical childhood nestled like peas in an Oedipod. However short, any introduction to Klaus Mann is an invitation to explore the great family Mann traditions of incest, homosexuality, suicide, creative genius, and depression.

  Asklepios Klinik St Georg is a good thirty minute walk. Time enough to marry a few lines about Klaus Mann to a brief history of barbiturates, a detour which will get me where I want to be, finally, in regards to setting the scene of Michael’s last exit.

  Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto is about the rise of Hendrik Höfgen, an ambitious actor in Nazi Germany, who sells his soul to the party to further his career. Mephisto was first published in Amsterdam in 1936. The openly gay Mann, stripped of German citizenship, had been living in exile since 1934. Mann’s Mephisto is a roman-à-clef based on the life of Gustaf Gründgens, Klaus’ brother-in-law, with whom Klaus had a brief affair. Following? Here is where it gets confusing and makes the most sense to let Wikipedia do some of the legwork:

  In 1924, Klaus Mann, his sister Erika, Gründgens, and Pamela Wedekind had all worked together on a stage production of Mann’s Anja und Esther and had toured through Germany. Gründgens and Erika Mann got engaged while Klaus Mann similarly got engaged to Wedekind. The first two got married in 1926 but divorced in 1929 … Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director. While Mann never called Gründgens an adversary, he admitted “moved antipathy”. Although he attacked Gründgens in newspaper articles, Mann hesitated to use homosexuality as a theme in the novel and decided to use “negroid masochism” as the main character’s sexual preference.

  Mephisto’s protagonist Hendrik Höfgen is an alliterative allusion to Gustav Gründgens. Gründgens was best known for his interpretation of Mephistopheles in a 1956 production of Goethe’s Faust at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. The Schauspielhaus stands by the exit of the Hauptbahnhof, not far from the Hansaplatz and my hotel, and not too far from Michael’s former address on Mühlendamm Strasse.

  Gründgens is buried in Hamburg at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. He died in 1963 by an overdose of sleeping pills while travelling in the Philippines. Wikipediately, Gründgens’ last written words were: “I believe I have taken too many sleeping pills; I feel funny, let me sleep it off.”

  Klaus Mann died of an overdose of barbiturates, too. His suicide is uncontested. In Cannes, in 1949, a reclusive and depressed Mann had called for a wave of suicides among Europe’s intellectuals to protest the Cold War. After the Nazis, after years in exile, Klaus Mann had called it quits.

  The path to oblivion found in barbiturates and alcohol is well trodden. Michael’s death in Hamburg followed on the heels of a half-century of scientific research and development. Emil Fischer and Josef von Mering published their paper on Barbital, the first hypnotic, in 1903. Von Mering had recently returned from a trip to Verona, Italy, and Barbital was given its brand name ‘Veronal’, for the city’s glassy beauty. Veronal was manufactured by Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, the city where Michael’s father Karl Paryla earned the first engagement of his career with the Reinhardt Theatre, and where Michael’s parents settled into an apartment shortly after getting married in 1929.

  With Veronal, the barbiturate era had begun. Next born was Phenobarbital (Luminal) in 1919. Pentobarbitone (Nembutal) joined the family in 1923. Hexobarbitone (Evipan) in 1932 was one of the first short-acting agents. Thipentone (Pentothal) in 1934 is ultra-short acting. Barbiturates are classified according to their duration of action –long, intermediate, short and ultra-short—but the gratification offered by all these drugs is the same, oblivion. They endow sleep to insomniacs and for anyone in need relieve the intolerable anxiety of everyday living. But there’s a downside. Barbiturates are physiologically addicting and the abstinence syndrome can trigger life-threatening symptoms. The development of tolerance means that, over time of use, increased dosages are required to do the trick. With barbiturates there is not much difference between the dose required for sedation and the dose that can cause coma or the sleep of the dead. Barbiturates have what is called a narrow therapeutic index. Pair a propensity for tolerance with a narrow therapeutic index, and the real danger kicks in. Overdose deaths occur most often when barbiturates are paired with other depressants such as alcohol. Then accidental deaths follow the familiar pattern: they occur when a user takes one dose, falls asleep, and then awakes confused and unintentionally takes another pill. To err is human, we all know that; however, human error combined with a narrow therapeutic index turns out to be lethal.

  Michael had found a doctor who continued to prescribe him pills after his breakdown in Bremen. His father was sufficiently familiar with the ways of actors, and he was cynical of the ways of doctors. According to Karl, Michael had ‘unfortunately fallen under the supervision of a doctor whom I wouldn’t necessarily trust’. Doctors are treacherous, is the message. They are most helpful after death, as in the case of a pathologist like Dr. Franz.

  Asklepios Klinik St Georg. Here at last. The hospital is the oldest in Hamburg. There are several low-level buildings—yellow stucco, Georgian style—joined by modern abridgements. I wander through the car park searching for the emergency department entrance and notice a sign indicating the helicopter landing pad. Methods may have changed, but here Michael was rushe
d by ambulance the night of his January 1967 escape; here, inside one of these buildings, the attending physician Dr. Wuehl performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on an unresponsive Sempronius; here, in the pathology lab, in the basement no doubt, Dr. Franz located scars in Michael’s myocardium and noted other key findings; and here, months later, by invitation, Michael’s father came to ‘receive’ the autopsy report.

  I had a long talk with Professor Franz, and it turns out that Michi effectively was not healthy and that scars in his myocardium decisively contributed to his unfortunate passing. He also asked me about his childhood illnesses, among other things, whether he had had jaundice … In his opinion, the scars or damage in his myocardium could have stemmed from an infection following an operation to the tonsils. Aside from that, there were no other critical findings. … The report as you will see for yourself is thorough and well done.

  No other critical findings. In fact, the report disclosed that one of Michael’s testicles was smaller than the other. Dr. Franz had also discovered an active gland in the pituitary region, which, according to him, ‘should stop functioning after puberty and may signify a continuing infantilism’. Karl Paryla mentions neither finding in his letter to Eva. At the time they might have seemed irrelevant to Karl, comprising an insensitive and needless invasion of privacy. However as any properly trained pathologist will demonstrate, there are no limits to a person’s privacy during the post-mortem examination.

  In the same letter of April 1967, Karl writes: “Certainly, a grown man is no longer a child that one can raise.” It is a curious comment, and especially curious for Karl to make. Karl was absent for Michael’s childhood; he was not around to raise Michael into the grown man he infantilizes so many years later. Perhaps his tone reflects the fact that when Karl and Eva separated, Michael was no more than four years old. It’s maybe this four-year-old Michael that Karl keeps alive in his heart—and not the young man who returned to Germany to become a theatre actor. Conceivably, the mature Michael—grown and ‘no longer a child’—confronted Karl with an uncomfortable reality. By then Michael’s father had two sons by Hortense, his second wife, Nicholas and Stephan, both of whom would become actors. Whatever is at play, there is on Karl’s part the temptation, if not to infantilize, then to patronize. Even when he speaks of Margaret—Michael’s ‘life partner’—one gets the impression that Karl believed Michael was in need of a caretaker. Margaret is merely a proxy for Karl and Eva. We can’t blame her for our child’s death. She took great care of him.

  Asklepios Klinik St Georg was without a doubt a landmark I didn’t want to miss. But whatever ambition I had when I set out has turned maudlin in flesh. I’m faced with making a decision like the one Dr. Wuehl faced: when should one stop CPR? When do our futile efforts become macabre? When should I stop beating his chest? I might be hurting him. Doing unintentional damage. What comes to mind is I am flogging a dead horse. Yet Karl’s letters contained something else, a contrasting argument: 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. That’s why I am here. To follow the trail to the end. I remember this now as I walk through the hospital courtyard, finding no trace of him, no Michael, here, no ghost.

  Ahead, I see the street sign. Mühlendamm Strasse. I turn left and walk up from the corner of Hohenfelde. Without his address, I’m left to wander both sides of the street, links und rechts, Hansel and Gretel, warm and cold. Nothing special here, nothing to report. Brown brick four storey apartment buildings. After taking photographs, I decide it’s time to leave. I’ve documented the experience, if not felt much—if not had the authentic experience, whatever that possibly could be. I have to keep moving if I want to make my appointment with Fräulein Asche at the Thalia Theatre.

  Mühlendamm Strasse marks the boundary of an immigrant quarter, a rough warren of streets. I follow Steindamn, where family-owned shops stretch for blocks, in the direction of the Hauptbahnhof. Steindamn intersects with Mühlendamm and runs alongside the south limit of Asklepios Klinik St Georg. The Taiba Mosque is at 103 Steindamn. I stop at a fruit store to buy a single banana and a pack of Camels. Then I continue along the street. Everywhere, I notice, are families. Children play outside on the sidewalk while parents work the cash and teenage sons and daughters stock the shelves. The immigrant quarter extends four or five blocks. Then St Georg’s sex district comes alive, and Halal abuts peepshow. In the shadow of the Hauptbahnhof, the clash of civilizations is complete. The sex and drug trades have taken the street.

  1 Michael with method for brains goes above and beyond to great excess. Meanwhile, Herbert from Stuttgart—like a good Steinmetz—goes ‘only a bit’ beyond the conventional.

  2 This is very interesting to me, the sight of his name with a line in pencil drawn through it, his identity negated but not erased. It brings to mind immediately—uncannily—an artefact contained in the letter my grandfather (Michael’s uncle) composed in 1935, when he and my grandmother were for a while held up in Vienna, and looking to emigrate to the UK where he could practice, untroubled by the Nuremberg Laws, as a doctor. In a draft copy of his letter addressed to foreign hospital boards, unsure as to how to describe his present predicament, my grandfather, Herman Hans Steinmetz, stumbles over the sensitive issue of his Jewish background. One has a window into his mind: in order to avoid becoming a target, you process any request—internal or external—to define yourself through the wobbly mirror of ambivalence and indeterminacy. So my grandfather, stranded in Vienna, goes ahead and explains that he has worked as a medical assistant in Germany but was “dismissed from my hospital because of my Jewish origins I had not the Approbation.” The strike-through is his. Is this the psychological precursor, that which prompted the cancellation of Michael’s name on the cover of the Souffleurbuch? No—there is no logical, no rational connection—but then, instantly, upon sight of Michael Paryla, the two events are emotionally fused. Within my own thinking, that is. Is it really as magical as all that?

  The Author is Dead

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1989, on a night train to Berlin, the curtain split for an interrogation.

  ‘Passkontrolle.’ Your passport.

  A week earlier, I had been in Budapest. There, I had heard the first reports about the Wall coming down.

  Now, riding my Eurail Pass, I was headed for a party in the end zone of the Cold War. Except, the East German border police had not warmed to the Zeitgeist and would not let me go easily. Waking from an uneasy sleep, I handed my passport to this totalnightmarian, and waited on edge as he compared portrait to face, face to portrait.

  What was amiable about the Eastern Bloc was the Black Market. You could change your money on the street without documentation. True, often you got taken and were scammed and lost everything. So you traded in your roll of dollars for a wad of Yugoslav Dinars or toilet paper (same thing). Whenever that happened, it didn’t bother me too much. Losing money is a freedom. It counts for nothing compared to losing your sanity.

  I noted that the border guard seemed to be staring an inordinately long time at my passport. My daughter learned to make her letters before the age of three. My own handwriting is unwilling. I only came to possess a proper signature a decade or so ago. Signing my name was always suspect, a bit surreal. The sensation was intriguing but worrying. When I was an English Literature major, I read John Keats’ 1817 letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, and right away several things dovetailed in my mind:

  … and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

  After my trip to Berlin, I took clerical work in a hospital. In the medical library, I found a set of identity disorders that fit
perfectly my sense of a negated self. I don’t mean to imply I had it as good or bad as Shakespeare, not even close. To my dismay, I found in the list of signs and symptoms ‘evidence of the subject’s inconsistent handwriting’, and ‘subject’s want of a signature’.

  No identity constant, no constant identity = trouble. Straightaway, I could imagine that one of the effects or affects or defects is the deep sensation that you are a slipping or spinning variable in a mathematic equation which balances algebraic terms on either side of a flashing equals sign. Yes, and just like a first-year medical student who will self-diagnose a minimum of three terminal illnesses per rotation, I did the math and forced the connection and ultimately concluded that my sloppy hand and oft-experienced inability to cash a traveller’s cheque (Germany—1981, England, Germany—1989, Barbados—1995) due to the ‘want’ of a signature, as well my tendency to mumble, the inability to recall important personal information, and a dull conversational tone, that these things were … in some way … are proof … that the author is dead.

  Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts

  The day I learned to sign was an autumn day in Montréal. From the window of the library, I had a view of the McGill University campus, Michael’s alma mater, mine as well. I had moved up, from clerk to librarian, and one of my tasks was to help patients find information in laymen terms about neurological syndromes and disorders. ‘Informed decision-making’ was the mantra for a better tomorrow.

  On that glistening day, I was asked upstairs to witness the will of a terminally ill patient. I exited the elevator on the seventh by the nursing station. It was situated like a border house at a halfway point between the unit’s east and west wings. Encased in glass, a clerk was sitting at the desk. Her pen dangled like a whistle on a string around her neck. In behind her, the floor nurses were doing their charting seated at a long table. I noticed them, their repose in relief, a row in white like swans, pouring themselves into handwriting, mugs of coffee set at the elbow.