White Lies

  I had high hopes about my visit to Frankfurt.

  Eighteen

  I found a relatively decent hotel in the Gallus area. The district owed its name to one of the old watchtowers of the city that had remained unscathed in the terrible bombings by the Allies in the 1940s, the so-called Galluswarte. The word Gallus itself was misleading. When I first read it on my city map I thought it referred to the medieval Irish monk, Saint Gallus, who had founded the Swiss monastery of St Gallen which had later become a substantial city in the east of the country, near Lake Constance. But later, when I asked one of the historians that I consulted at the university I learnt that “Gallus” was a distortion of the German word Galgen which means “gallows”. So the Galluswarte marked the site where the city’s executions had taken place. I wondered if that was the place where the young poet Goethe had witnessed the execution of a young woman who had murdered her own baby, a traumatic experience which later led to the character of Margarethe in his Faust, the great play about the legendary Doctor Faustus, probably based on Marlowe’s play.

  During my period in Frankfurt I came to like this district. I liked to walk along Mainzer Landstrasse as far as Griesheim or to the public baths at Rebstock Park. The street was lined with mostly second-hand car dealers, office buildings and petrol stations. The Ausländerbehörde, the alien citizens’ registration office, was also to be found in Mainzer Landstrasse. I read that the district had once contained a Nazi concentration camp on the site of an old factory, the Alderwerke. The site had later been used to host the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials between 1963 and 1965.

  My first port of call was the chamber of commerce. It took me quite some time and effort to find a person who could help me. I wanted to know which American company my father had been working for just after the war.

  “There were no American companies in this city right after the war,” the man explained. “The only American employer during the summer of 1945 was the U. S. Army. It’s more than likely that your father got a job with them if he could speak English. You see, they desperately needed German translators and interpreters to get things going in their administration, and there was a shortage of such linguists.”

  I asked him if there had been any other employers that were hiring educated men later in 1945. The man replied that the only other potential employer for my father would have been Hoechst, the old Farbwerke, a company that was just beginning to establish its new direction and identity after the war, throwing off its former Nazi connection and later developing into a large manufacturer of chemical and pharmaceutical products as well as fertilizer. The result was that I called at the HR department of Hoechst, which was situated in a western suburb of the same name, only spelt differently, Höchst.

  It took me a great deal of patience and persuasion before I could speak to the man who had access to the list of former employees. They had kept that list on paper in a drawer and only digitalized it last year, “for the sake of the records,” as the man remarked.

  It turned out that they’d had a certain Dieter Wolff in their employ, but only on a temporary basis. Immediately after the war they had been looking for men who were proficient enough in English to deal with some of their correspondence with international business partners. “You know, practically overnight English had replaced French and become the most important language in international business,” the man added. “So we needed those translators immediately.” He went on to explain that they hadn’t been allowed by the Americans to employ people on a permanent basis before they’d been vetted in view of their Nazi connections. From their records it appeared that Dieter Wolff had come to Hoechst from the American Forces, where he’d been employed first, from September 1945 to January 1946. But he only stayed a few months before he left. The man said the records didn’t show where he’d gone from there. But I knew.

  Interesting as the information from Hoechst was, it didn’t really reveal any new aspects of my father’s history.

  I stayed on in Frankfurt for a few more days, hoping to find out where Dad had lived. He must have lived in that city, which must have been a ruin at the time. Where could he have stayed between his escape from the Russian Zone until his hasty departure for Switzerland?

  His second escape - if indeed it was another escape - from Frankfurt to Switzerland puzzled me. Wasn’t he safe in Frankfurt? And from what I remembered, based on the information I’d gathered in Bern, the Swiss were quite strict. Why would they have accepted him as a war refugee, not being a Jew and coming from Frankfurt? I thought about that puzzle a long time, and my thoughts often returned to it. It was my constant companion for several weeks in the course of my research expedition in Germany. I never found a full explanation that appeared satisfactory. I just had to live with this open question.

  As I was wandering through Frankfurt, in search of clues about my father’s stay in this big city half a century before, I sometimes sat down in one of their cafés. One afternoon I was sitting at a table in a café in what they call the Fressgass, which translates as “Food Alley”, “Gobbling Alley” or something like that. The street is really called Grosse Bockenheimer Strasse, and it is an upmarket shopping street with restaurants and fine food shops between Opernplatz and Börsenstrasse, but everyone calls it Fressgass. It was a place where you could meet everybody. It helped my mood to sit there and do nothing but stare ahead of me, sometimes watching people in their shopping activities, sometimes observing couples and wondering how they might be getting on with each other.

  “Verzeihen Sie bitte, ist dieser Stuhl noch frei?” It was the voice of a friendly face popping up from my left.

  I allowed the young man to take the other chair from my table. He thanked me, carried it to a table behind my back and sat down with some people there. I only turned round once, just to see what kind of person he was. That was when our eyes locked for a split second. I faced in my direction again and tried not to think of the young man behind my back. I made every effort to concentrate on an elderly couple at another table just a short distance away. I forced my mind to get involved with what they were talking about and what their situation could possibly be. The man wore a blue suit with a light blue shirt and a flowery tie while the woman’s dress looked a little shabby in comparison. Were they a married couple? Hardly. Their discussion was quiet and quite relaxed, but there seemed to be some sort of disappointment. At least the man’s face betrayed that.

  It was no use. I had to listen to what the people at the table behind me were saying. Although - or because - I couldn’t see them I found it much more exciting to listen to them, rather than guessing at the problem between the two elderly people at the other table.

  It was extremely annoying that I couldn’t understand most of their lively conversation. But to my surprise, I found that I was satisfied when I just heard the voice of the man who had asked for the chair. His voice had that exciting timbre that you can sometimes get from good actors. I had to think of Alan Rickman. I admitted to myself that such a voice could be very sexy.

  When the group behind began to break up, saying their good-byes, I had still not come to the point where I would normally question my own behaviour in order to know why I’d been doing that. In other words, I was still uncertain why I had been eavesdropping and was therefore caught unawares when the young man addressed me as he was replacing the chair on my left.

  He asked me if I was on my own. I didn’t take offence at the question, which I would have considered a bit forward in other circumstances. On the contrary, I was overjoyed when the man sat down on the chair he’d just brought back and introduced himself. His name was Christian.

  * * *

  More than one week has elapsed since my last entry. The fact is that I simply didn’t feel like writing down anymore of my observations. I didn’t have the energy, and for over a week I haven’t been in the mood.

  The reason was Christian.

&nb
sp; Now I don’t want to go into any details of what happened between this charming and wonderful man and me. I cannot know who will read this diary; that is, if anybody will ever read it. Not that I have to be ashamed of anything. Nothing really happened. Nothing that George could find objectionable.

  Nothing? Well, almost nothing.

  And yet, what happened in my mind, with my feelings and my secret desires, what made those days in Frankfurt so special and so unforgettable... all that, plus the secret knowledge of what could have happened and the confidence that I had been strong enough not to let it happen... all that has given me a new lease of life. I now know that I’m not an old woman yet.

  I am satisfied. I am strong.

  All that is history. I will never see him again. But I’ll be carrying his memory in my heart to the end of my days.

  I could easily tear out this page, but I won’t. Whoever might read these lines at some indefinite point in the future will allow me to be a real human being, a real woman.

  * * *

  I drove from Frankfurt to Gera. In his job for Hoechst - and probably for the American Forces before - my father had given the Thuringian town of Gera as his place of birth. Indeed, I’d heard him mention that place before. That was obviously where I might stand the best chance of finding out more about his life as a young man. Christian, who knew a lot about German bureaucracy, had advised me to go to the town archives in Gera and the Thuringian archives in Erfurt, where records were kept as far as they still existed after the War.

  The last time I had travelled through the German Democratic Republic had been nearly twenty years ago, as a student of German, on my way between Hamburg and Berlin, via Hannover. At that time, I hadn’t been allowed to leave the motorway, the so-called Interzonen-Autobahn, the transit road between West Germany and West Berlin. What I had seen in the course of my passage had been extremely depressing, a country that got stuck in the 1930s and had never arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. Nobody found out, but on one of my transit trips I had left the Autobahn somewhere near Magdeburg, just to have a look. I was very lucky. I wasn’t stopped by the Volkspolizei. What I can best remember was the smell of burnt brown coal and two-stroke exhaust fumes.

  Now, with the corrupt system gone and East Germany being part of the Federal Republic, the whole place presented itself as a strange mixture. On one hand, there were still lots of things that reminded one of the GDR, such as the cobblestones in streets, dirty grey houses or the still considerable number of Trabant cars. On the other hand, there was so much that was new. The Autobahn itself - formerly a bumpy array of concrete slabs with wide gaps in-between - was now a great deal more elegant and smooth than in the West, six lanes all the way through and relatively little traffic. Everywhere around the old decrepit towns there emerged new building sites, especially for new industrial estates. I didn’t wonder where the sudden money had come from. Christian had told me how the Federal Government - formerly from Bonn, more recently from Berlin - was pumping billions and billions of deutschmarks into building projects in the East. If this is going on, who knows? East Germany might one day have an industry and an infrastructure which would be a lot more modern than what the West would be able to maintain, given the enormous financial burden of building up the East. True, Helmut Kohl had promised that the reunification wouldn’t cost the people a single deutschmark. But who believed him? I certainly couldn’t.

  On my way, I left the motorway at Weimar and at Jena. I did my tourist thing, particularly in Weimar, where I visited Goethe’s house and admired the places that Goethe and Schiller had haunted together. I thoroughly enjoyed my dip into Classical German literature, and I found it a pity I didn’t have the time to attend a performance at the German National Theatre. I was sad to leave Weimar behind to continue my journey and my mission.

  I could have visited Erfurt first, but I thought I wanted to start at Dad’s roots. So I went to Gera first. When I arrived, I checked into a modest hotel, which was called Hotel am Galgenberg. It was within walking distance of the town centre, and it was cheap but clean.

  Thinking of my strategy, I started from the main problem that I was facing. It was my father’s name. He himself had told me he’d changed his name at the end of the war, but he’d never told me his original name. So where was I to start my search? I couldn’t just walk into the town archives and tell them I was looking for a man whose name I didn’t know, could I? I decided to go for a walk around town, just to clear my mind. Also, I had a feeling that I might be lucky and detect some clue or other that could give me an idea. It was a lovely day, and I found it very refreshing to walk down the street to the big intersection, then left towards the town centre.

  As I was getting into the densely built-up part of the town centre I noticed the old tram tracks in the cobbled streets and wondered how long this town would take to upgrade these. In one stretch, the town still looked exactly as it must have looked through those forty-one years of Communist dictatorship.

  The people gave a very happy impression. Everyone seemed to be busy but cheerful. However, some older people still wore that standard sour expression I used to find on the faces of the people in all Socialist states, the expression which meant something between resignation and hopelessness. Interestingly enough, I found that the older people who still had that expression were also wearing shabbier clothes than the younger generation with their cheerful and confident faces.

  I bought a town map of Gera and began to study it over a cup of coffee in a pleasant little café which was most certainly a business that had only sprung up after the Wiedervereinigung. It was very stylish and must have meant a big investment for its owner, given the fact that almost everybody in this town must have started with almost no assets right after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Except perhaps those that had been members of the Party before and therefore privileged or those that had come over from the West to take advantage of the lack of business experience among those in the East. I had read quite a lot about the growing unease between the Wessies and the Ossies, the people from old Western Germany and those from the former GDR. Sharp businessmen from Hamburg or Frankfurt had come over to the East to take over some of those rotten businesses that found it hard to cope with the new Capitalist order. Some were honest and really managed to save old VEBs (Volkseigene Betriebe) and give them a new lease for the future, but others - and those were probably in the majority, it was to be feared - were real sharks. They took out what assets they could and then let the companies go bankrupt or gave them a completely new structure, a process which was really illegal but in many cases, went unnoticed by the authorities and was generally referred to by the new German verb “abwickeln”, which translates as “wind down” or “phase out”. It was a euphemism for a criminal procedure that left thousands of people in the East unemployed.

  I thought about my search. What were my next steps? Yes, I had to find out my father’s original name. In the hotel I had consulted the telephone directory for Gera, but there were no entries under “Wolff”, which was no surprise. What strategy could I follow to find out the name?

  What facts or nearly established facts did I have?

  My father’s family had lived in this town before the War. My grandfather had owned a delicatessen shop in the town centre. The family had lived in a house somewhere on a hill. My grandmother died in the 1930s, my grandfather probably after the War. My father had had one brother who was two years older. I remembered Dad referring to him as Thomas, but he hardly told me anything else about him, except that he was conscripted into the German Navy at the beginning of the War. Dad obviously didn’t know if his father and brother had survived the War or not.

  It was clear to me that I couldn’t walk into the town archives on the basis of such scarce information. I had to find out more by other means.

  Perhaps I should talk to people, elderly people who might still remember my
grandfather’s delicatessen shop. That seemed my best bet.

  I stowed my map in my handbag and strolled through the streets in the town centre. In the market square, which was simply named Markt, I sat down on a bench. There was an elderly woman who was feeding some pigeons. I watched her for a while, studying her face. At first, I had the impression that she was very old, with all those wrinkles down her cheeks and her sunken eyes, but the longer I watched her throwing her breadcrumbs and cooing to the birds the younger she appeared to me. It was one of those rare moments in life where one realizes how subjective and fleeting certain impressions of other humans can be.

  The woman noticed me. She smiled. She had an extremely charming smile despite a hint of earnestness behind her façade. I liked her immediately.

  “Do you often come here to feed the birds?” I asked.

  “Whenever I feel like it,” she smiled. “It relaxes me.”

  “But only in fine weather?”

  “Well, mostly. But in winter this square has its particular attraction, so I sometimes come in spite of the cold.”

  We were silent for a few minutes. She continued feeding the pigeons until her paper bag was empty. Then she sat down beside me.

  “Sie sind nicht von hier,” she remarked. “Where are you from? You have a strange accent.”

  I told her I was English, leaving out my American roots. This surprised her, and she said my German was very good. Then she asked me if I was here as a tourist. I explained to her that I was looking for the history of my father’s family who had lived here before the War.

  “What was their name?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” I replied. “My father changed his name at the end of the War.”

  “Were your people Jewish?”

  “No. At least, not that I know of. My grandfather had a delicatessen shop in the town centre.”