My German Brother
Page 16
The Academy Award-winning actor Emil Jannings, forty-five, doesn’t yet know that Goebbels is going to name him Artist of the State. Marlene Dietrich, twenty-seven, a small-time actress, already knows she is going to be Marlene Dietrich. Here in Potsdam, next door to Berlin, the UFA studios from the early twentieth century live on in the Filmpark Babelsberg. And in this wooden shed, the set from The Blue Angel cabaret has been rebuilt as it was in 1929. Emil Jannings, playing the teacher Rath, perhaps already knows he is going to ruin his life for Lola. Lola, in a suspender belt, crosses her Marlene Dietrich legs: Men cluster to me / Like moths around a flame / And if their wings burn / I know I’m not to blame / Love’s always been my game / Play it how I may … The waltz seeping out through the walls of the shed is well-suited to flirting, and perhaps Father and Anne fall in love without a thought about having a child. And Sergio Günther will work for years on end in the future state television studios, unaware that his story began in the shed next door. Of his mother he will recall a scent, and, according to Robinson, from time to time he will think about trying to contact his father, who is probably a journalist or a diplomat. But due to his busy life and the precarious, if not frowned upon, communications with the West, he will end up deciding it isn’t feasible. Just as to me the idea that I might one day find myself in the Filmpark Babelsberg, about to see an almost invented German brother, would have seemed absurd. Nevertheless, after making me wait an eternity, a smiling Robinson will come and find me in the shed, with those braces that, at a glance, remind me of Marlene Dietrich’s suspender belt. And my hand will shake slightly as he gives me a visitor’s ID to hang round my neck. As we make our way through a maze, Robinson will confess that he was afraid the archive employees wouldn’t be able to locate Sergio Günther. But soon we will be sitting in a small projection booth, facing a miniature cinema screen where the TV DRA symbol will flicker. And perhaps my eyes will mist over as they fix on the black-and-white image, on the opposite bank of the river, of my brother Sergio. It’s Mimmo, I will think out loud, and beside me Robinson will say: Huh? It will actually occur to me that Sergio Günther is Mimmo himself, at the age of thirty, exiled in East Berlin with a nebulous past and a false name. But as the camera closes in on Sergio, more and more I will see Father’s oblong face, bulbous nose and even his glasses. His way of pulling his lips back as he puffs on a cigarette and flicks away the butt will be Father’s. And I might be wildly mistaken, or are those my pursed lips I see when he begins to whistle a sad melody, a powerful, precise whistle that few can make as well as me. Then I will want to laugh at the way he walks, like Father and me, not unlike a penguin, to the sound of the Russian chords of an invisible orchestra. And I will feel pleasantly jealous when I see a girl in a full skirt run to meet him, the spitting image of Maria Helena as a young woman. In the end I will recognize from I don’t know where the song that he will sing to her on the banks of the Spree: They say / That somewhere / Maybe in Brazil / There is a happy man.
Sergio Günther, the son of Sergio Buarque de Holanda and Anne Ernst (or Anne Margrit Ernst, or Annemarie Ernst), was born in Berlin on 21 December 1930. In 1931 or 1932, his mother handed him over to the Secretariat for Childhood and Youth of the district of Tiergarten, Berlin. In 193?, Arthur Erich Willy Günther and his wife, Pauline Anna, adopted the boy, who was raised as Horst Günther. Around the age of twenty-two, Horst discovered the identity of his biological parents and chose to revert to his birth name, Sergio. He enlisted in the German Democratic Republic army in 194? and in the late 1950s got a job with the State Television, where his roles were many. He recorded an uncertain number of records, now out of circulation. He died of cancer on 12 September 1981.
Author’s Note
I discovered what became of my brother Sergio Günther thanks to the efforts of the historian João Klug and the museologist Dieter Lange. Their research in Berlin was based on the documents in this book, preserved by my mother, Maria Amelia Buarque de Holanda. I was put in touch with Klug and Lange by my editor, Luiz Schwarcz, and the historian Sidney Chalhoub.
In May 2013 I travelled to Berlin with my daughter Silvia Buarque, whose contribution was fundamental in the interviews with Sergio’s daughter, Kerstin Prügel, his granddaughter, Josepha Prügel, his ex-wife, Monika Knebel, and his friends Werner Reinhardt and Manfred Schmitz.
Chico Buarque
Illustration Credits
Here, here, here, here and here: Author’s personal archive. Reproduced by Jaime Acioli.
Here: DRA–Deutsches Rundfunk archiv. 17 Ausschnitte. Sergio Günther (1961–81). © Robert Lackenbach/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images.
ALSO BY CHICO BUARQUE
Benjamin
Turbulence
Budapest
Spilt Milk
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chico Buarque was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1944. A legendary singer and songwriter, he is also the author of the novels Spilt Milk and Budapest, as well as numerous plays and screenplays. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Alison Entrekin is an Australian literary translator working from Portuguese. Among her numerous translations are Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart and Chico Buarque’s Budapest. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Author’s Note
Illustration Credits
Also by Chico Buarque
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2014 by Chico Buarque
Translation copyright © 2018 by Alison Entrekin
All rights reserved
Originally published in Portuguese in 2014 by Companhia das Letras, Brazil, as O Irmão Alemão
English translation originally published in 2018 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Great Britain
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2018
Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits can be found at the back of the book.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71513-7
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