The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  The chief inspector didn’t know what to do. He forced himself to take long, slow breaths as he watched the other man. Schramm stood there on the edge, almost totally immobile for ages. Eventually he lifted up his right hand and dropped the upper half of the black head into the abyss. For a second, two seconds maybe, the fragment of the artwork fell downwards. A dark speck in the sky. Then it exploded on a narrow strip of land between the church and another ruin. Just like a bomb, Stave thought, except that he was too high above it to hear a sound.

  And then he finally realised what had driven Schramm up here.

  The chief inspector took a step forward. ‘Don’t do it!’ he called out.

  Schramm spun around, so shocked that in the action of turning he almost tumbled into the abyss. The walking stick in his left hand was trembling. Stave dropped the brick in his hand. ‘Don’t do it,’ he repeated, more gently this time. He took a step forward.

  ‘Stay right where you are. I’ve had enough of you and your likes.’

  ‘This is not an interrogation,’ the CID man went on. ‘Nothing's going to happen to you. Let's go back down the stairs, and then we can talk. If you want to.’

  Schramm gave a bitter laugh. ‘You want to get me to talk? You already know my story. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It's a coincidence,’ the chief inspector told him. ‘I just want to close the case. All done and dusted. Honest. I just came to take a last look at the scene. And then you turned up.’

  ‘I thought I’d seen a movement somewhere before I went into the Reimershof.’

  ‘Why were you there?’

  Schramm nodded towards the ground. ‘I wanted to see if I could find any more pieces of art.’

  ‘They were all yours. Your collection.’

  ‘Collection?’ Schramm gave another bitter laugh. ‘More like a refuge, set up by an idiot. From 1933 onwards I bought up all the pieces those barbarians had stolen, all the ones I could. There were few enough, and I didn’t get anything spectacular most of the time. The Nazi gentlemen sold those abroad. But I could get my hands on some of the lesser-known pieces. Like that male head. I hid them away. Hoping for better times to come.’

  ‘In your villa.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘The family photo on the wall was a giveaway.’

  The banker looked at him, confused, then nodded in resignation. ‘You always make some mistakes. It's a good job you weren’t Gestapo. Your colleagues’ visits forced me to hide my works of art elsewhere. In the Reimershof.’ He shook his head. ‘What an idiot. Not one slate on the roof of my house was even scratched throughout all those years. And take a look at the office building.’ He nodded downwards again, wobbling a bit once more. It occurred to Stave that the man had to be exhausted.

  ‘It was clear to me from the start that the link between the works of art and myself would come out before too long,’ Schramm continued.

  ‘I could never have proved it though. Just as there are other crimes I can never prove.’ The chief inspector nodded towards the walking stick in the hand of the man facing him. In the meantime he had taken another step forward. ‘You used that to kill Rolf Rosenthal. In the summer of 1943. Your employee. Your right-hand man. A Jew you had protected for years at great danger to yourself. I’ve been asking myself, why you did it.’

  ‘I ask myself the same question, and have done ever since.’ The banker rubbed his eyes with his right hand. But he had forgotten about his monocle. All of a sudden the little round piece of glass flew away from his face, a flicker of light in the air, and then it was gone. Stave used the distraction to take another step forward.

  ‘It had never occurred to me that in a moment of panic you can wipe out a life. Or even two.’ Schramm's face was grey now, the voice used to giving orders suddenly sounded tired. ‘I didn’t lie to you. I had rented the rooms in the Reimershof a lot earlier, in order to carry out certain discreet bits of business. Bits of business that wouldn’t have pleased our local Gauleiters and certainly not the gentlemen in Berlin. From the middle of 1939 onwards, I also began hiding my art objects there.’

  ‘Including the bronze of Anni Mewes.’

  ‘The finest piece in my whole refuge. I had actually seen Mewes on stage once, when she was still young.’ He laughed wistfully. ‘I kept the artworks on a shelf, hidden behind files. Only the Mewes was kept in view in front of them. I just couldn’t bear to let this young woman's face be consigned to darkness. Sentimental.’ The banker fell silent for a while. Stave prayed the wind fluttering the man's dark and now dirty overcoat out over the abyss behind him would die down. ‘Then from September 1941 I let Herr Rosenthal hide in the offices.’

  ‘In September 1941?’

  Schramm stared at him, his eyes flashing with rage. ‘Where were you when the Jews still living in the Reich had to wear a yellow star?’

  Stave said nothing.

  ‘From that time on, many Jews were carted off to concentration camps,’ the banker said in an expressionless voice. ‘It was an autumn night in 1941 when Herr Rosenthal came hammering on my door. He had fled his apartment and was in a panic. So was I, as you can imagine. I didn’t dare let him stay in my house. What if the Gestapo had discovered him there? Just before dawn we went from my villa to the Reimershof. And that's where Herr Rosenthal...’ he searched for the right phrase, ‘made himself at home.’

  ‘He went into hiding?’

  ‘You could put it like that. I brought him food, clothes, newspapers. Not that he enjoyed reading the headlines.’

  ‘Who knew about this?’

  ‘Nobody. Herr Rosenthal's relatives had no idea, because I never dared get in touch with his family. I was afraid of the Gestapo. I’m sure you can understand that. None of my co-workers had a clue – you could never be sure there wasn’t an informer among them. The cleaning lady glanced in the rooms once a week, but she always came at the same time, and Herr Rosenthal hid in the heating cellar each time. I would look into the Reimershof from time to time. Nobody paid attention because I’d had an office there for ages.’

  ‘So why did Rosenthal have to die?’

  Schramm closed his eyes a moment. Too short a time for Stave to intervene. ‘Because I lost my head. On the first night raid in June 1943, incendiary bombs fell on the Reimershof. The attic caught fire and it spread to the upper storeys. The building was damaged but nothing like as badly as it looks today. I rushed there the following morning. One of my two office rooms was gone, and the artworks with it. Buried somewhere under tonnes of rubble. The other room was half destroyed, ripped open like a cardboard box. Herr Rosenthal was in there, cowering, half crazy with fear, having had to spend the night in the building effectively powerless. There was no shelter. Imagine it: all alone in a huge building, bombs falling, fires breaking out all over the place. His nerves were shot.’

  ‘Did he attack you?’

  ‘Not with his fists.’ Schramm closed his eyes at the memory. He was swaying. Stave dared come a few centimetres closer to him. ‘He jumped at me the minute he saw me. “You’ve got to get me out of here, Herr Director,” he was screaming. Really loud, like he always did. I became frightened. What if someone heard us? And in any case I had nowhere to hide Rosenthal. I didn’t even know how I could get him out of the Reimershof without being seen. In the wake of the attacks the city was full of police, firemen, air raid wardens, homeless. I couldn’t have just walked out with a Jew.’

  Stave remembered the chaos after the bombing raids. The fires, the survivors wandering through smoking ruins as if drugged, the unexploded bombs, the looters, the vile stench of burned flesh and sewers blown open.

  ‘I tried to calm him down. But it was as if he just wasn’t listening to me. And then, all of a sudden, it was as if he had suddenly become somebody different. That frightened me a lot more. Rosenthal, who had normally always been quite restrained, suddenly dashed across the devastated office, despite his club foot, and pulled a packet of headed paper out of a d
esk drawer. The paper was singed but the letterhead was still clearly legible: my name, my address. Rosenthal was screaming: “I’ll report you. I’ll write to the Gestapo and tell them you’re hoarding degenerate art unless you find me a hiding place somewhere, right now!” He’d gone crazy with fear. Blind, effectively. Sadly I didn’t keep a cool head. All of a sudden I was in as big a panic as he was. If he really did report me, the Gestapo would break my bones, I thought. I wanted to make Rosenthal see reason, wanted him at the very least to stop running around screaming in the ruins, with all those people out on the street, just a few metres away. And I lifted my walking stick and hit him. Just once. I really just wanted to shut him up. Wanted to bring him to his senses. Like giving a slap in the face to a hysterical person, you know what I mean.’

  ‘But it wasn’t just a slap in the face.’

  ‘I heard the bone break,’ Schramm admitted. ‘The minute I hit him I regretted it. Rosenthal rolled his eyes and fell over backwards, as if he’d been struck by lightning. All of a sudden there was blood everywhere. His legs began shaking uncontrollably, his shoes kicking over the heavy old office chair. And then his feet were suddenly still, terribly still. I ran out, horrified at what I had done.’

  ‘Did you come back?’ Stave was so close now that he could have reached out and grabbed him. But he didn’t dare raise his arm. What if Schramm jumped the minute he grabbed him and pulled him over with him? He had nothing to hold on to.

  ‘The following night there was yet another bombing raid. When I ventured down to the Reimershof again, the whole interior was destroyed. There wasn’t a trace of my office, of my artworks — or of Rosenthal. Everything had been buried under the rubble. I went back home and tried to forget the whole business. By and by, it came to seem as if it had all been a nightmare, unreal. It couldn’t have been me who had done it. It simply hadn’t happened. It's amazing what a human being can suppress if he just works hard enough and long enough at it.’

  ‘But then I appear at your house and show you a photo with the bronze bust.’

  ‘That's when it all came back. The memory. And the fear of being found out. Then you started rummaging around in that old business. When you left I only had to make a couple of calls to find out Rosenthal's body had also been found in the Reimershof. And that of all people, it was Dönnecke who was investigating the case.’

  ‘But he never came to see you. In fact he didn’t investigate the case at all. He was every bit as scared of you as you were of him.’

  ‘But you weren’t scared of me at all. Gradually I came to understand that nobody in Homicide was interested in the corpse; not one of them even came to interview me. But by then it was too late. All the memories had come back. As did the shame over what I had done.’

  ‘I was on your tail. But I could never have proved anything against you.’

  ‘And you still can’t. This is hardly an interrogation. You have no proof of any of what I’ve just told you.’

  Stave thought feverishly for a few seconds, wondered if he should try to bluff, but in the end decided to tell the truth. ‘That's true,’ he admitted. ‘I have not a shred of evidence against you.’

  Schramm smiled a smile of weak triumph. ‘Even the Gestapo boys never managed to pin me down,’ he whispered. ‘But you can’t fool your own conscience. In the end you never escape your memories. Ever since your visit I’ve thought of Rosenthal again and again. In my dreams I still hear his pleas from back then in the ruin. I have him on my conscience, and I can’t persuade myself otherwise. So I have to face the consequences.’

  The chief inspector looked desperately around for something to hold on to. Nothing. ‘I admit that if you jump I won’t be able to arrest you,’ he said. He wanted to sound beseeching but his words sounded hollow. Then he reached out with his right hand and grabbed Schramm's coat. ‘If you jump now, you’ll pull me over with you.’

  The banker gave him an angry look. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Let go of me. Whether I jump now or end up hanging from the gallows is all the same to you. You’ve solved your case. And I will have my peace at last.’

  Stave's thoughts raced. Dönnecke. The Gestapo agent in the café. The Nazi mayor sitting at the restaurant table. Not one of them had ever had a bad dream. So many dead. So few punished. ‘You’re one of the good ones,’ he blurted out. ‘You turned the Gestapo away. You protected Jews. You saved works of art. The Nazis couldn’t hurt you. Do you really want to let them win?’

  Schramm gave him a tired look, and said, ‘I really couldn’t care less.’

  And Stave let go of him.

  The chief inspector took two steps backwards. Sweat was running down his brow. His heart was pounding like that of a boxer after a fight. ‘I’m going back down,’ he said, his voice no more than a croak. ‘And the minute I’m back down there, I shall forget every word I heard up here. The Reimershof. The bronze bust. Rolf Rosenthal. None of them exist any more as far as I’m concerned.’

  Then banker looked incredulously at him. ‘You really are trying every trick in the book,’ he whispered.

  Stave shook his head. ‘I’m being serious. That was no murder back there among the bombs that night in 1943; it was just a second of frightened madness. A tragic mistake. Nobody can do anything about it now. And you’ve already been punished enough without having a judge pass sentence on you.’ He moved backwards to the first step on the staircase, then turned one last time and said: ‘And in any case, I don’t work for Homicide any more.’

  With that Stave began walking down. Step by step. Fearing that at any second he would hear a shrill scream followed by a terrible dull thud. Another step. And another. He was shivering with damp, cold, vertigo. One more step.

  When he had gone down two floors the chief inspector heard a noise. He stopped, held his breath, listened. The scraping sound of a walking stick on stone. The grating of brick dust underfoot. Heavy steps on the staircase, somewhere above him.

  Then Stave hurried down the ruined tower. All of a sudden he was no longer afraid of the chasm beneath him.

  Afterword

  No single event from the prehistory of the Federal Republic has become such a powerful myth as the issue of the new currency. Even so, that rainy day in the early summer of the year 1948, on which all West Germans were allowed to collect their 40DM pro capita money, was also a day of loss and disappointment – and crime. The five- and ten-pfennig misprints which attracted the attention of MacDonald and Stave, did actually exist. Several days before the twentieth of June they were discovered being sold by employees of Hamburg's Landeszentralbank who had grabbed them out of the shredding drum supposed to destroy them. (The sale of toxic torpedo oil as cooking oil also took place.) For dramatic reasons I moved the place where they were sold to the black market which operated on Goldbekplatz. In reality they were sold on the Kiez, officially known as the Reeperbahn, in the St Pauli district. Kurt Flasch, the bank employee and Stave's neighbour, is a wholly fictional character.

  On the other hand the speech given by Mayor Max Brauer is 100 per cent authentic, as are the conditions referred to for the exchange of Reichsmarks into Deutschmarks.

  The massive building of the Landeszentralbank is still there today next to the city hall, and gets a lot of visitors, mostly from patrons of the arts, as it is today the Bucerius Art Forum. And if you stand on the square outside the city hall and look up you will still see on the building's gable five massive stone figures, a crest and the word ‘Reichsbank’.

  The history of those works of art created under the Weimar Republic, then condemned by the National Socialists as ‘degenerate’ but kept as props for movies, has been adapted for this crime thriller. At least fifteen expressionist objects from the twenties have indeed been discovered in building works, covered in earth, damaged or battered. The discovery was not, however, made in Hamburg but in Berlin, and then not until 2010.

  The Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe displayed these works in 2012, with a nod to one local element. Th
e bronze bust of the actress Anni Mewes was not created by my fictional artist Toni Weber (whose name — if not his biography — I borrowed from an amateur painter represented along with others at a 1947 exhibition in the C&A department store), but between 1917 and 1921 by Edwin Scharff, an artist who would spend the last ten years of his life working in Hamburg.

  The propaganda film in which many of these items confiscated by the NS propaganda ministry and then ‘loaned out’ as props was entitled Venus in Court. The director Veit Harlan turned out many influential films for the NS regime, but not this one. It was actually Hans H. Zerlett who was responsible for the script and direction. Harlan, however, did indeed live in the circumstances described on the banks of the Alster along with his Swedish wife Kristina Söderbaum, and defended himself as described here, both in court and in public, against accusations he was a propagandist for National Socialism.

  The story of the art collector-banker Dr Schramm and the tragic events he was involved in during the bombings of 1943, however, has no historical basis.

  Unfortunately, there is a historical basis for the mild punishments or even lack of punishment dished out to leading National Socialist activists, even in the immediate post-war years: Hamburg's Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, who was politically and in other ways responsible for the Neugamme concentration camp, spent some time in various internment and detention centres up until the beginning of the 1950s, but never for very long. From the mid-fifties onwards he lived as a respected citizen and partner in both an insurance company and chemical factory in Hamburg. The Nazi mayor Carl Vincent Krogmann escaped with not more than a brief spell of internment, and later worked without problem in trade and industry. The case against Captain Rudolf Petersen, who had sailors shot even after the unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime, brought in this novel by Public Prosecutor Ehrlich, genuinely did take place: he was acquitted.