The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  Even so he waited until the end, ignoring the curious glances from the students as they left the lecture theatre, before introducing himself to the professor.

  ‘I’m interested in some information about modern artists and collectors,’ he began.

  ‘The police have been interested in modern art ever since 1933,’ Kitt replied, not in an unfriendly way, but with a cautiously expectant look on his face. An exile, Stave thought to himself, only come back after 1945.

  ‘What do you know about Toni Weber?’

  ‘I know the name. But that's all.’

  ‘That's all. I thought you were an expert?’

  Kitt sighed and gave him the sort of look scholars reserved for complete idiots. The CID man was sorely tempted to arrest him on the spot. ‘Have you any idea how much is left of modern art? I mean in the students’ heads? Nothing. Worse than that: less than nothing. Totally false ideas, ideas that have been poisoned. What is left for them to refer to? Two thirds of the 60,000 volumes in the university library didn’t survive the bombing. The remaining third is no more than what the Nazis left. They were burning books a good ten years before the British and American aircraft. Anyone who wants to study modern art today, let alone carry out research into it, has to start from the beginning. You have to start with the masters: Munch, van Gogh, Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Dix, Kokoschka, I could name dozens. Only when we’ve managed all of those, which can take decades, can we turn our attention to lesser talents.’

  ‘And Weber is a lesser talent?’

  ‘Every tribe has a lot of Indians but only a few chiefs. There's no point doing research into the Indians if you know nothing about the chiefs.’

  Stave thought back to the murals in the black marketeer's house on the Baltic and wondered what Herr Professor Kitt would think of them. ‘Is there any way of finding out much about the collectors?’ he asked, already with little hope.

  ‘Even less.’

  ‘Dr Alfred Schramm?’

  ‘Ah,’ the scholar muttered, licking his lips as if Stave had just mentioned a fine meal. ‘A patron. A friend of the Warburg Institute.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Slightly. I was a scientific assistant at the institute when Schramm would call in occasionally. He furthered our work. In non-material ways. And...’ Kitt cleared his throat, ‘material ways also. At the time I wasn’t... established enough, to be noticed by Dr Schramm. And then I was out of Germany for several years.’

  ‘Do you have colleagues who could tell me more about Schramm?’

  ‘Several, but not in Hamburg. The staff of the Warburg Institute, or at least the more competent among them and those who were interested in the same sort of art as Schramm, all went abroad in 1933. Most of them today are teaching in Oxford or somewhere in America. In any case Schramm didn’t visit the institute that often and almost never came to the university. He had his people to do that.’

  ‘His people?’

  Kitt cleared his throat again. ‘Dr Schramm had some of his staff enrol as observers at the Philosophy faculty so they could learn about the history of art and related subjects. They were basically clerks and people like that.’ Kitt couldn’t manage to conceal his disdain. ‘But he trusted them. And he wanted them to advise him in matters of art. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to be surrounded in his bank with people who could only talk about credit balances but could have an intelligent conversation as well. One way or another there were always one or two gentlemen from the bank here in this lecture theatre where you and I are standing now. Not all the lecturers were pleased about it, but Dr Schramm was a patron so nobody said anything.’

  ‘Did they include Jews?’ Stave asked, suddenly thinking of something.

  For a long moment the professor looked at him as if he had just mentioned the name of an awkward relative. ‘Probably. There were always certain rumours about Dr Schramm's good relations with Jews. And a few of his workers stopped turning up at the university as early as the spring of 1933. That led to certain conclusions, I assume.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘They were just observers!’ Professor Kitt exclaimed, as if that solved everything.

  ‘Thank you,’ Stave mumbled, turning towards the door. Could the unknown corpse from the Reimershof, with the Jewish star on his clothing, have been one of Schramm's artistic-leaning staff? Someone who worked at the bank but was also sent by his boss to attend the university? Someone who from 1933 on was employed to watch over banned treasures in the Reimershof? But if so why wouldn’t Schramm say anything? Why did he deny everything? As he reached the door he turned and asked: ‘Is there a note somewhere of the names of the observers?’

  Kitt, who was carefully sorting through his briefcase, looked up in irritation: ‘The old student lists were reduced to ashes in one or another bombing raid.’

  Stave was walking down the steps outside the main entrance, with his bicycle across his shoulders, when he spotted Karl. He had hoped the occasion might arise. It had been the other reason that brought him to the university rather than just the idea of talking to an art historian. How many students were there here? Four thousand? Five thousand? It hadn’t been that unreasonable to hope to spot a familiar face. And as it happened, he had indeed been lucky.

  Karl looked at him in surprise. He was wearing a torn, dyed Wehrmacht overcoat to protect both himself and a notebook he was carrying against the rain. Stave gave him a brief rundown on his talk with Professor Kitt. Simultaneously his thoughts were racing. Karl was at the university. He didn’t dare ask what subjects he was studying.

  ‘And the bike?’ Karl asked. ‘Did you pick that up here?’

  ‘It was a good exchange.’ Stave told him how he had come by his new possession.

  ‘Excuse me,’ his son interrupted him, nodding to his companion. ‘May I introduce Manfred Loos, a fellow student.’

  Fellow student? Karl had signed on. Stave shook the gaunt young man's hand, though only after he had managed to adeptly transfer one of his crutches from his right hand to his left. Older than Karl, the chief inspector reckoned.

  ‘Manfred is a high-jumper.’

  Stave stared at the pair of them, not sure whether they were playing a wicked joke on him. Loos smiled. ‘Before the war I was in athletics,’ he explained. ‘A piece of shrapnel severed part of my lower leg in Russia in 1943. But I’ve been training and I can get up to 1.77 metres again now.’

  ‘That's just eighteen centimetres below the German record,’ Karl added.

  Stave realised his son was looking fitter too. His skin had some colour from the sun, his posture was better, his fingers were no longer stained yellow from nicotine. Maybe the two had got to know one another through sport? What did he really know of Karl? Even so he felt strangely light of heart. Even his perpetual fear that his own damaged foot made other people look at him seemed suddenly ridiculous. To jump 1.77 metres, with just one leg. The CID man asked how that was even possible.

  He plucked up his courage. ‘What are you studying?’ It might seem odd to Loos that even Karl's own father didn’t know what his son's subject was, but he didn’t care.

  ‘History and philosophy,’ Karl replied promptly and clearly proud.

  Stave realised his son had been waiting for the question. Recognised that he had been right to ask. It was as if he had passed a sort of test, opened a door to his son.

  ‘That's important,’ he said respectfully, if only because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘You can learn stuff from the old days and from thinkers in the past,’ Karl said. It was intended to sound casual, but Stave realised he was talking in earnest.

  Loos cleared his throat, took his crutches in both hands. ‘The lecture starts in five minutes.’

  Karl nodded. ‘An introduction to Buddhism.’

  Stave, still in an upbeat mood, was alarmed. ‘A sect?’ he asked in shock.

  The two kids laughed, but in a friendly way. ‘The Burmese monk Bhikkhu U. Thunanda
is visiting Hamburg, Father, a great Buddhist from Rangoon. He's on a world tour, to spread his thoughts. He's about to give a lecture about his teaching, the only speech he's going to make in Hamburg. I want to hear it, because I want to be a philosopher, not a Buddhist.’ He slapped him on the back encouragingly and bounded up the steps. Loos on his crutches followed him somewhat more slowly.

  Stave remained there, staring at the ox plough that in the meantime had divided the lawn into a ploughed field, at the Dammtor station beyond it, at the sky, at the low clouds. He couldn’t remember the last time his son had touched him in such a good-natured way.

  An unemployed director

  Stave almost felt as if he was on an outing, back before the war. He still had a bit of time so he rode out to Harvesthude, one of the quarters of the city that had been commandeered by the British: it had old nineteenth century houses, well-maintained streets. Calm. If it hadn’t been raining, the chief inspector might have been tempted to a racing spurt, but he mistrusted the solitary hard brake on his Gazelle-trademark bike. ‘Shitscrapers’ they had called brakes like that at school, because the rubber scraped the dirt from the tyres. Unfortunately nor did he trust the profile of the tyre which didn’t inspire the chief inspector to take any risks.

  The northerly tip of the Alster is shaped like a big ‘L’: the streets that ran directly along the bank were closed off to all but the British. Stave turned around and the bike took him in just a few minutes back to Esplanade 6: a huge reddish-grey lump of an administrative building amid the smart streets. The seat of the British civilian administration.

  The CID man felt a bit shabby and somehow ridiculous as he presented the British sentry on the door with his police ID in the one hand, while the other was gripping the handlebars of an old bicycle. But the young military policeman simply took a note of his name, lifted a heavy black telephone receiver and said a few words of English into it.

  A few minutes later MacDonald appeared. ‘You’re ready to launch a new Blitzkrieg,’ he exclaimed, when he caught sight of Stave's bike.

  The word alone was embarrassing to Stave, especially outside the British administration building. ‘Not exactly a bad exchange,’ he muttered.

  ‘I can’t keep up with that, old boy. We don’t have bikes in the army. Maybe I could sit on the basket as we cycle along the Alster? That would give the Nazi film director something to look at. Maybe it would give him an idea for a new film.’

  ‘A comedy, I imagine. I would prefer your Jeep.’

  ‘I thought as much. Do you want to leave the bike here?’

  ‘You’re a mind reader.’

  MacDonald exchanged a few words with the sentry and the young soldier wheeled the ‘Gazelle’ into the foyer, touching it the whole time only with his fingertips as if afraid he might catch some infectious disease.

  The lieutenant nodded towards a Jeep. ‘We could walk, of course, but on the one hand it's raining and on the other, better to make an impression.’

  ‘Provided we don’t get a flat tyre.’

  MacDonald turned the ignition and they set off at a moderate speed along the street, then turned left along the Alster. The water was grey, tossed with waves and raindrops like an unmade bed sheet.

  The lieutenant glanced at his passenger. ‘Do you know how I got permission to interview Harlan so quickly from my boss?’

  ‘There are film fans in the British supreme command, maybe?’

  ‘There are government ministers who would like to see this character hang. As far as they are concerned he's worse than many an SS man.’

  ‘So why haven’t they just picked him up? Just because his wife is Swedish?’

  The young Scotsman sighed. ‘There are too many fish swimming in the brown water,’ he explained. ‘We’re only catching the fattest. Or to be more precise, the sharks. The real mass murderers. Those who were at the top of the command tree. We’ll leave the rest to you Germans.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Stave grumbled. Veit Harlan had been Hitler's favourite movie director: adventure films, epics, big stars, the big wide world. Stave and Margarethe had even gone to see Münchhausen. He remembered how she had laughed, and even hours later went back over some of the scenes, on the way home, over supper. Even in bed.

  Then there was Süss the Jew, in the cinema, long after war had broken out. The sleazy Jew who had financially blackmailed the innocent blonde, raped her, driven her to suicide. Kristina Söderbaum. She had drowned herself so often in all these films that people had sarcastically nicknamed her the ‘Reichswaterbaby’. Very pretty, very pure, somewhat naïve. Stave wondered what Harlan must have been thinking when he filmed those scenes: his wife being raped by somebody else. At any rate it was a success. Goebbels put on special screenings for SS men and concentration camp guards, to fuel the hatred of Jews. For a while after it came out Stave's colleagues had talked about Süss the Jew over lunch, or a beer in the evening, and all the time with murderous hatred in their eyes. Stave kept quiet. He hadn’t seen the film but nor did he dare to argue with any of them.

  After 1945 Harlan had obviously ended up in front of the Main Denazification Committee. The experts who worked for it divided thousands of Hamburg citizens into categories: 1. War criminals. 2. Evil doers. 3. Lesser evil doers. 4. Members of the Nazi Party. 5. Innocent. After a few months Harlan was classified in Category 5. A clean bill of the first order.

  The chief inspector remembered the protests outside the court, the editorial in Zeit newspaper, demonstrations outside cinemas where Harlan and his wife sat among the audience. And now Hamburg Regional Court was pressing another charge against Harlan: ‘Crimes against Humanity’, based on the argument that Süss the Jew had instigated acts of violence. But the result of the case was as yet in doubt.

  MacDonald took the curve round the Rondel, a circular pond off the main body of the Alster surrounded by villas and lawns. It was a favourite for lovers who rented out rowing boats to come out here, mostly under the thick-leaved branches of the willows by the banks. Stave's colleagues in the Vice squad used to make jokes about it and would make a point of occasionally patrolling the area. In his young days Stave himself had made a romantic excursion out here with Margarethe, even if he had feared coming across a few gleeful colleagues.

  Scheffelstrasse was narrow but smart, with a view out over the Alster: old oak and beech trees with gnarled knots. So abandoned it made the roaring of wind and rain sound unnaturally loud. On the right was a small but elegant villa, two storeys with steep steps but unmissable because of the Swedish flag flapping heavily in the rain. MacDonald cut the engine and Stave inhaled the sweet smell of affluence: damp earth, roses, the almost sweet whiff of the warm water in the Alster. He thought of Karl who at the age of seventeen had been banished to the ice of Vorkuta in Siberia for two years, while men like Harlan didn’t even have to leave their villas for a day. He's just a witness in this case, he reminded himself, just a witness.

  Outside the heavy wooden door there were piles of letters and parcels with Swedish, British and American stamps. And also some wreaths with black trim.

  ‘It would seem we haven’t exactly chosen the best of times to visit,’ MacDonald whispered, pressing the bell.

  ‘Maybe it's Harlan who's died,’ the CID man replied.

  ‘Would that please you? Or annoy you because you’d have lost your chance to question him?’

  ‘Put it like this, I’d rather be questioning him on his deathbed.’

  The young lieutenant was about to reply when the door silently opened and a blonde woman stood in front of them, with sensuous lips, a heavenly nose, bright eyes: Kristin Söderbaum.

  Stave had been expecting a housekeeper or a maid, and stood gaping for a moment at the movie star, as if some creature from a fairy tale had just blown into his everyday life. MacDonald got a grip on himself faster and greeted her with a casual touch of his cap, introduced himself and his companion and nodded towards the packages and wreaths next to the door. ‘You have mail.’<
br />
  ‘Same as every day.’ The voice that Stave knew from her films. But somehow even softer. ‘I’ll clear it up.’

  ‘You’ve had bad news?’

  ‘No. The letters and parcels have all been sent by friends of my husband. Or sometimes from people who remember my movie roles. The wreaths are from people who’d like to see us dead. I don’t know what to do with them. We can’t exactly leave them sitting outside the door.’ Kristina Söderbaum sighed, glanced back at her two visitors and invited them in. She was looking rather more depressed than she had a few minutes ago.

  ‘We won’t stay long,’ MacDonald reassured her. Stave gave the lieutenant an inconspicuous nudge. It seemed the young British officer had fallen for the movie star.

  ‘We have a few questions for your husband,’ he said carefully.

  ‘I’m certain he’ll be able to give you satisfactory answers. We’ve had a lot of experience answering police questions.’

  A brightly lit room, with a table, chairs, pine-framed watercolours hanging on the walls. ‘We’re just guests here,’ Kristina Söderbaum explained. ‘The house belongs to Swedish friends. But they’re not here most of the time.’

  ‘Life isn’t that comfortable these days in Hamburg,’ MacDonald said in a friendly tone.

  The actress gave him an irritated glance, not certain if he was being sympathetic or sarcastic. ‘My husband will be here in a second. He's reading a story to our little one.’

  Stave vaguely remembered hearing that Harlan had had a second son. After the war. Life goes on. He felt his anger surging.

  A few minutes later the door opened and for the second time that day the chief inspector felt he was standing opposite a living legend. Veit Harlan was nearly fifty years old, chubby, with a bouffant of greying hair, but the goatee beard that had been so well known, and such a subject of jokes in the Nazi days, had been shaved off. His eyes were still clear and attentive behind his dark framed glasses. He was a man who filled every room he entered.