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Two days after the end of the Olympic Games, the commandant of the Olympic Village, Baron Werner von und zu Gilsa, invites his fellow members of the organizing committee to the Berlin Guards’ casino. The colonel wants to take stock of the Olympics over a meal and a glass of wine and express his gratitude to everyone who made the event happen. His predecessor Wolfgang Fürstner doesn’t show up. While the others are celebrating, Fürstner dons his best uniform, replete with medals, and marches through the Olympic Village toward the lake in the woods. By the sauna building, he draws his pistol, puts the barrel to his forehead and pulls the trigger.
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On the evening of 10 November 1936, Yvonne Fürstner gets a visit from two gentlemen named Scherer and Franke. They’re neither friends nor acquaintances, nor customers from the Sherbini Bar. In fact, Yvonne can’t recall seeing them ever before in her life. But here they are at the door to her apartment, demanding to be let in. Scherer and Franke are customs officials. “Search warrant,” one of them says, and hands Yvonne an official notification, while the other one gets down to work. The two men don’t go about their job gently. They fish through her closets and drawers, look behind her books and peer underneath her bed. In the course of their search, the officials find some cash, various bank statements and several personal letters. That’s enough for them. Two days later, Fürstner is arrested and taken into investigative custody at Moabit prison. She’s accused of money smuggling. The officials suspect that with the help of her sister, who lives in England, Fürstner has transferred considerable sums abroad to hide them from the German tax authorities. The papers found in her apartment are cause for “considerable suspicion,” Scherer writes in his report, although no convincing evidence is ever located. Fürstner is released on 19 December.
The game of cat and mouse continues. In the summer of 1937, Fürstner tells the authorities that she has married the Egyptian diplomat Aziz de Nasr and is now living with him in the quiet Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde. “Your husband isn’t registered there,” Scherer objects. “And the Foreign Ministry has no knowledge of a trade attaché named de Nasr at the Egyptian embassy.” How could they? The purported trade attaché is none other than Fürstner’s 23-year-old admirer from the Sherbini Bar, who is still living as a lodger with Frau Oppenheim. The marriage, if indeed there ever was one, is for appearances only. Perhaps Fürstner thinks that she’ll be safe from the Nazis if they think she’s the wife of an Egyptian diplomat. It’s unclear whether she is still seeing Mustafa El Sherbini at this juncture.
The bar on Uhlandstrasse exists until 1938, after which there’s no trace of Sherbini and Fürstner. In March 1941, Sherbini’s name appears in a book of wanted persons in Germany, but he seems to have already left the country. Fürstner also succeeds in fleeing Germany, but destiny isn’t on her side. Exactly ten years after the Berlin Games, in August 1946, Yvonne de Nasr dies in Cairo. She is only 45 years old. After the war, Mustafa El Sherbini also settles in Cairo, opening a hotel there. Later he moves to London, where he dies in 1975. Herb Flemming, the Sherbini Bar’s great attraction, stays on for a year in Berlin before returning to the United States in 1937. After the war, Flemming resumes performing in Europe. In 1969, when he revisits Berlin, he can’t recognize Uhlandstrasse. There’s not a brick left in place at the location where he played the hottest of jazz thirty years earlier. Flemming dies in New York in 1976.
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Carla and George de Vries return to the United States after their European trip. The excitement about Carla’s “kiss attack” soon dies down, but in November 1936, Mrs. de Vries is once again back in the public eye, thanks to a drama in front of a high-rise building in Los Angeles. A deranged woman has climbed out of an upper-story window onto the ledge and is threatening to jump. The police arrive, but officers find it difficult to communicate with the woman, who speaks a mishmash of German and English. Her name is Emma Neumann. She comes from a German family and is confined to a suburban mental asylum from which she has escaped. Carla, who happens to be passing by, sees the commotion, pushes her way through the crowd of gawkers and gets involved. She speaks a little German, she tells a police officer. Maybe she can talk the woman out of jumping. The officer in charge assents—he doesn’t know what else to do. Carla climbs out of the window and begins talking to Neumann. On the street below, hundreds of people are staring up at the spectacle. The police begin to spread rescue nets. Doctors and paramedics are at the scene. Unfortunately we don’t know what Carla says to the unhappy woman. Perhaps she tells her about the trip to Europe she just took with her husband, George, and what the two of them had experienced in Berlin. In any case, at some point Emma Neumann nods her head. Carla climbs back inside the building, extends her hand and pulls the would-be suicide from the ledge. Carla is a heroine, and the newspapers go berserk. The woman who kissed Hitler has saved some crazy lady’s life. Carla de Vries outlives her husband by thirty-five years, passing away in June 1985 in California.
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Reich Cultural Administrator and Reich Director of Film Hans Hinkel is one of the many former Nazis who never have to answer for their crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany. Hinkel is, however, interned at the end of the Second World War, and in 1947 he is extradited to Poland and convicted of looting Polish cultural treasures. After serving five years in prison, he returns to Germany in 1952. He dies in Göttingen in 1960.
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The fate of Ahmed Mustafa Dissouki is largely unclear. What we know is that he runs the Ciro Bar until the spring of 1939, although the establishment has long been on the decline. Dissouki stops paying his bills and social insurance contributions for his employees and keeps racking up fresh debts. At some point, he loses track of his finances, and with insolvency looming, legal action is taken against him. In July 1939, he is scheduled to be deported to Egypt. But suddenly, Heinrich Himmler intervenes and countermands the deportation order. We don’t know why. The Foreign Ministry files on the case are destroyed in the Second World War.
The next trace of Dissouki comes in October 1941, when Himmler issues a prohibition upon him residing in Germany. Nonetheless, three years later he is still in Berlin. In September 1944, he’s taken into investigative custody for a couple of weeks in Moabit prison. The last we see of him is in April 1945. “He approached me on Adolf-Hitler-Platz with a lady on his arm,” Hubert von Meyerinck will later recall. “I wanted to say hello, but he waved me off fearfully.”
Dissouki’s lover Clara von Gontard is visiting relatives in the United States with her husband and daughter when the Second World War begins in 1939. The Gontards stay in St. Louis, where Paul von Gontard dies in December 1941. Bernhard Berghaus, on the other hand, remains in Germany and continues to do brisk business with the Nazis. Exploiting his excellent connections, he succeeds in transferring a large portion of his wealth to his parents-in-law in Switzerland. After the war, the family villa in the Tiergarten district is restored to Clara von Gontard. She dies in 1959, and four years later her heirs sell the mansion to the city of Berlin. The Villa Gontard, once the revolving-door playground of the rich and beautiful, is now home to the general directorship of Berlin’s state museums.
The Ciro Bar survives the war and experiences a miniature renaissance in the 1950s. Today, there is still an establishment by the name of Ciro at Rankestrasse 31–32—a lap-dance bar.
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Elisabeth L.’s family is taken from the camp in Marzahn to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then deported to the so-called gypsy camp at Auschwitz in 1943. Of the approximately 22,600 people imprisoned there, more than 19,000 die. Elisabeth herself survives the Third Reich.
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In mid-July 1945, Heinz Zellermayer opens the Restaurant Zellermayer in the provisionally repaired remains of the bombed-out Hotel am Steinplatz. It’s the beginning of a uniq
ue career that over the years will see Zellermayer become Berlin’s leading restaurateur. He goes down in city history in June 1949 when he convinces the American military commander in Berlin, Frank L. Howley, to revoke mandatory closing hours for bars and restaurants at the next meeting of the Allied Control Council. From now on, people in Berlin can enjoy themselves throughout the night. In 1950, Heinz’s brother Achim opens the Volle Pulle Bar on the ground floor of the family hotel. The smoky place soon becomes a favorite haunt of postwar West German intellectuals. Their sister, Ilse, fulfils her lifelong dream of studying singing. However, she becomes famous running an agency for opera performers that represents none other than the great Luciano Pavarotti.
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Mildred and Arvid Harnack are arrested in September 1942 and accused of being members of the anti-Nazi resistance organization Rote Kapelle. The Reich War Court wastes no time in sentencing Arvid to death for high treason that December. Mildred receives a six-year term of imprisonment, but Hitler refuses to approve the sentence. He orders a new trial, which concludes in mid-January 1943 with a death sentence. Arvid is hanged in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison on 22 December 1942. Mildred is put to death there by guillotine on 16 February 1943. Shortly before the blade is dropped at 6:57 on that Tuesday evening, Mildred’s last words are recorded as: “And I loved Germany so very much.”
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Jesse Owens, the undisputed hero of the Berlin Olympics, hangs up his running shoes upon returning to the United States. The 23-year-old athlete simply doesn’t earn enough money from sport to feed his family. He’s also disappointed at the reception he’s given in America. In September, his achievements are honored with a parade in New York, but because of his skin color he’s forced to use the service elevator to get to the ceremonial banquet at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. “Hitler didn’t snub me,” Owens once famously says. “It was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”
Owens opens up a dry cleaner’s and appears at vaudeville shows and nightclubs. That earns him a tidy little income, which he unfortunately squanders on the stock market. Three years after the Olympic Games, the hero of Berlin is bankrupt. Owens tries to exploit his reputation as the fastest man in the world by racing against motorcycles, greyhounds and horses at country fairs. That’s not a long-term solution to his problems. He only begins to receive the appreciation he deserves in the 1950s. In the summer of 1964, he visits West Berlin and returns to the Olympic Stadium to appear in a documentary film. He dies of lung cancer in March 1980. By that point, his friend and competitor Luz Long has been dead for thirty-seven years. Having been drafted into the Wehrmacht, Long is killed in battle in Sicily in July 1943.
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Miraculously, Victor Klemperer survives both the Third Reich and the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. Two years after the end of the Second World War, he takes his revenge on his persecutors. In his book The Language of the Third Reich, Klemperer details how National Socialism degraded the German language into a “lingua tertii imperii.” In the 1950s, he is involved in the reconstruction of East Germany. He dies in 1960 in Dresden. His diaries are published posthumously in 1995 and become a worldwide literary sensation.
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André François-Poncet stays in Berlin for two years before being made French ambassador to Italy. In 1940, he returns to France and becomes an adviser to the collaborationist Vichy government. In late August 1943, after the German occupation of France, he is arrested by the Gestapo and interned along with two dozen other prominent French personalities as “guests of honor of the Reich government” at Itter Castle in Austria and the Ifer Hotel in western Germany. Even years later, François-Poncet remains outraged at the privations he was forced to endure, recalling, “I had to eat stews!” In August 1949, he is named French High Commissioner in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany. He holds that office until 1955. François-Poncet dies in January 1978 in Paris.
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Otto Horcher continues to make good money servicing the needs of Hermann Göring. As the gastronomic rearguard of the Wehrmacht, Horcher takes over restaurants in Vienna (Zu den drei Husaren) and Paris (Maxim’s). But as the course of the war turns against Germany in early 1943, Joseph Goebbels increasingly trains his animosity on Horcher. After the battle of Stalingrad, the propaganda minister wants to shut down all of Berlin’s gourmet eateries. The conflict with Horcher’s regular Göring is inevitable, and a nasty feud breaks out, in which Goebbels enlists Hitler on his side. One night, when SA men smash his restaurant windows, Otto Horcher acknowledges that the tide is turning against him. Göring provides the restaurateur with the necessary papers and an entire Reichsbahn train to transport his restaurant: the kitchen appliances, stoves, tables, chairs, porcelain, silverware and the famous poultry presses. Horcher leaves nothing behind in Berlin. He’s off to Madrid. As unbelievable as it may sound, while Europe is engulfed in flames, Horcher has his gourmet restaurant carted all the way across the Continent. By mid-November 1943, he celebrates his reopening in the Spanish capital. Today the restaurant is still family-owned and considered one of the top gourmet addresses in Madrid.
The site in Berlin where André François-Poncet used to savor the canard à la rouennaise is now occupied by an ugly postwar building. On the ground floor there’s a kebab shop.
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In January 1937, six months after his night of drunken excess ended so badly, the master bricklayer Erich Arendt learns his fate from the judge. The Reich Ministry of Justice has decided not to prosecute him for violating “Paragraph 2 of the Law against Perfidious Attacks on the State and Party in conjunction with an act of treason, as well as insulting the Führer and the Reich Chancellor.” The Berlin court does, however, decide that there is enough evidence to convict him on another charge. Still, Arendt is a lucky man. The verdict reads: “The defendant is sentenced to six weeks in prison for violating the Law on Title, Medals and Honors of 15 May 1934 and is responsible for bearing all costs. The sentence is deemed to have already been served thanks to the time the defendant has spent in investigative custody.”
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As he announced to his friend Heinz Ledig, Thomas Wolfe takes a trip with Thea Voelcker to the village of Alpbach near Kufstein in Tyrol, where they take a room at a small inn. During the day, Wolfe works on a manuscript. At night he visits the local restaurant with Voelcker. The first few days are enjoyable, but then he starts to feel increasingly uneasy. Voelcker’s melancholy disposition, the smallness of their room and the rural environs get on his nerves. “He was irritated and disappointed,” Ledig will recall. “Although not in so many words, he let me know that he had abandoned his blond traveling companion up in the mountains and left.”
In early September, Wolfe returns to Berlin via Munich. As though he suspects that he will never see the city that is so close to his heart ever again, he plunges into its nightlife, visiting the Scala and the Delphi Palast, having dinner at Schlichter and drinking at Aenne Maenz’s place. But he is suddenly no longer enjoying the capital. He’s feeling restless, and makes plans to head to Paris and then back to the United States. On his last evening in Berlin, he meets up with Ledig. “We kept drinking and drinking, and he picked a fight with me on the street so that I parted from him in drunken anger,” Ledig will recall. “This time I didn’t shed any tears. Our farewell seemed just as absurd as everything going on around me. Some sort of creeping poison had destroyed our friendship. I stumbled into bed, dead tired, and slept until the middle of the next day. That afternoon in the office, I found a note from him: ‘Never mind our trouble. Love to both of you. Tom.’ ”
By the time Ledig discovers the note, Wolfe is already sitting on a train that will take him via Aachen to France. It’s Tuesday, 8 September 1936. Wolfe shares his compartment with four others, including a woman, a fellow Ameri
can and a little man who’s visibly nervous. The train journey is long and tedious, so Tom and his fellow countryman go to the dining car for an extended lunch. When they return to the compartment, he begins conversing with the others. Wolfe is American, is that right? asks the small man. Would he mind doing him a favor? Wolfe agrees. The train will soon be arriving in Aachen, the small man tells him, which is near the border. The passengers will be checked—there are strict rules against taking more than 10 reichsmarks (25 dollars) out of the country. He has some cash…The man doesn’t finish his sentence, showing the coins in his hand. Wolfe understands immediately and takes the money from him. When they’re safely across the border, Wolfe will return the coins.
When they arrive at Aachen, German border police get on the train and proceed from compartment to compartment. Wolfe takes the opportunity to stretch his legs. When he returns to his seat, there’s a big commotion, and he sees the police leading the small man away. What’s the matter? Wolfe asks the woman in his compartment. The man seems to have had a larger sum of money on him, she whispers, and that’s not allowed. Plus, he’s apparently a Jew. Wolfe looks at his fellow passengers with querying eyes. It’s his own fault, the woman says, gradually working herself into an anti-Semitic rage. Everyone knows that exporting larger sums of money is forbidden. “But the ten marks!…” the woman jeers. “Since he had all this other money, why, in God’s name, did he give ten marks to you? It was so stupid! There was no reason for it!”
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