A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  Now in the house, Bernie’s memorabilia was gone and in its place were racks of Andrea’s clothes, walls of books, an assortment of tongue-in-cheek kitsch and Royal Family china. The Reichsflagge had been replaced with the British Union flag. In a strange twist of irony, Andrea celebrated the enemy who had bombed her house and helped bring down her father’s heroes.

  Andrea was also a product of the war in a more literal sense. Hidden in the undergrowth below the castle, Lisbeth was unaware of Bernie watching her. He soon found an occasion to introduce himself. Then war separated them – Bernie flung north to Scandinavian waters, Lisbeth to work as a radio operator in Buxtehude.

  Finally, in 1944, Bernie and Lisbeth were able to marry in a double wedding with Lisbeth’s sister. It was the end of the winter and the war was slowly grinding to a halt – although they didn’t know it yet. The guests had no money for wedding gifts and instead the pairs were offered flowers picked from gardens.

  At the end of the war, Bernie was captured and detained in a P.O.W. camp near Hamburg. His British captors were kind and lenient, he made a point of telling me, plying the German prisoners with cigarettes and other treats. One day, Bernie, dressed in civvies, just walked out of the camp with a friend. He swam across the River Elbe and made his way to Buxtehude to pick up Lisbeth. Reunited, they started the long journey back to Blankenheim. It would have been a daunting journey at any time, but at the end of the war it was practically impossible. Germany lay in ruins, its public transport in disarray. Bernie and Lisbeth hitched lifts where they could, borrowed bicycles and simply walked large stretches of the journey.

  I thought of the journeys that people continue to make because of war. It is as if humankind is unable – or unwilling – to learn the lessons of history. The Syrian refugees were in the news again. The boats that crossed the Mediterranean were landing with increasing frequency. There were pictures of travel-worn men, a baby or small child with a hand slung over their fathers’ fluorescent-orange life jackets; older siblings clinging to their mothers’ skirts. It was as if they feared the sea could still engulf them as they staggered up the beach.

  But the story of migration was not just one of war and separation, but of love and determination – or pure curiosity, like mine: Asher stumbling through the windswept snow of the Dutch polders; Lisbeth and Bernie trying to find their way home through the ruins of post-war Germany; the small dark Chilean Enrique, who’d abandoned his country, oceans away, to set up home in a strange, northern land with his tall, blonde Monika.

  Here in the present, as I wandered from house to garden, I could still feel Bernie and Lisbeth’s presence – although they were long gone. Here I was, returning to their house decades later and everything had changed. A woman governed the country and Germany was opening its doors to a flood of refugees. The Willkommenskultur was still strong. I couldn’t know it yet, but as Jamie and I continued on to Istanbul the mood would turn sour and the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), would take hold. Europe would swing to the right again and xenophobia would once more rear its scowling head. Later, I would wonder what Bernie and Lisbeth would have thought about the turn their country had taken.

  *

  6. Hitler’s Birdsong

  ‘Would you like to visit Vogelsang?’ Monika asked.

  ‘Vogelsang?’

  I was curious. During my time with Andrea’s parents, Bernie had rolled his Volkswagen out of the garage to take Lisbeth and me out into the Eifel. We’d explored most of the area over that summer, but I could not recall Vogelsang. The name had a seductive ring to it: Vogelsang – birdsong. I imagined a tranquil place set in nature.

  ‘It’s in the Eifel National Park,’ Monika said, confirming my thoughts.

  I frowned. I had definitely visited the national park before. I remembered Bernie halting the Volkswagen above the Obersee, Rur and Urft reservoirs. We’d watching sailing dinghies on the sunlit water. Bernie had talked about the national park, the black storks and the wildcats, but he’d never mentioned Vogelsang.

  Later it would transpire why: Vogelsang had been out of bounds to the public for decades – the twelve-acre complex of buildings, which included a castle and training centre, was abandoned by the Nazis after their defeat and taken over by the occupying Allied soldiers. It was only in 2006, after the Belgian forces had vacated the area, that Vogelsang was handed back to the German government. They struggled to know what to do with the sprawling monstrosity, a site littered with Nazi symbolism depicted in mural, stone relief and statue – along with a life-sized torchbearer who’d had his balls shot off by the Belgian troops.

  The idea for the Vogelsang training college was first given an airing in a rousing Berlin speech by Hitler in 1933, when he called for the creation of education centres fit for the future leaders of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. These centres would train the brightest, toughest and the strongest young men of the Third Reich – a sort of military finishing school for the Nazi elite. The qualification process would be rigorous: entrants would have to prove their Aryan purity, pass a stringent fitness test and have a track record of party activity and military service.

  Hitler and his cronies were not afraid to think big. Their puffed-up plans were as ostentatious and crude as they were grandiose. Greek and Roman neoclassical styles were thrown up side-by-side with a more modern utilitarian look at Vogelsang, all sprinkled liberally with symbols of Christianity and German legend. It was an architectural mish-mash that was as pompous and ridiculous as its Nazi pseudo-religious cod philosophy.

  The four-lane road leading up to the complex heralded its overblown proportions, as did the wide entrance gate adorned with two great columns (added at Hitler’s behest after his 1937 visit). They were decorated with stone reliefs of horsemen: a medieval knight brandishing a sword and the modern torchbearer.

  The first building to be erected was Ordensburg – a medieval-style castle with an adjoining forty-eight-metre high water tower. Inside, a large brick swastika was laid out on the floor (the offensive symbol hastily covered up by a sports mat when the Belgians arrived). The castle, requiring the labour of 1,500 workmen, took two years to complete.

  But this was just the beginning. The Nazis didn’t see any reason to rein in those dreams. Several other projects were planned on the site: a massive library they named the Haus des Wissens, or ‘House of Knowledge’; a Kraft durch Freude hotel, or ‘Strength Through Joy’ hotel – a Butlin’s-style holiday for the working classes, where Nazi indoctrination was combined with good old-fashioned fun; and the biggest sports facility in Europe.

  However, the outbreak of World War Two put paid to some of the more ambitious plans. The sports facility was completed, but the Nazis only got as far as building the foundation walls for the House of Knowledge, while the Kraft durch Freude hotel never came to fruition. The Gemeinschaftshaus, or Community Hall, and the Adlerhof, or Eagle’s Yard, were completed along with the tower, and east and west wing. Ten Kameradschafthäuser, each housing fifty cadets (or comrades) were also built along with four Hundertschafthäuser holding another hundred each. And, of course, a ‘House of Female Employees’ had to be added for them to look after all the carefully vetted young men.

  In 1936, the first 500 cadets arrived. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and muscle-bound – or at least that was the vision. There would be no shirking, and a demanding schedule filled the day:

  6am, early morning exercise

  7am, muster

  8–10am, project groups

  10am–12pm, lectures in the large auditorium

  all afternoon, sport

  7–8.30pm, more project groups

  10pm, rest

  Lectures focused on ‘race science’, geopolitics (including the development of Lebensraum, creating more space for Germans in the east) and pilot training.

  The elitist military school experiment was short-lived, however. By 1939, the young men had been sent home – or to war – and Vogelsang
was handed over to the Deutsche Wehrmacht, the German Army.

  I sat in the dimness of the auditorium contemplating all this. It felt like I’d been caught in a time warp: the padded walls and ceiling, the torch-flame uplighters and the dark wood – they all had the stamp of Nazi design. Outside, I tried to shake off the feeling of claustrophobia. Standing on the events stage, the apron-shaped Thingplatz, we looked out over the wooded hillside to the reservoirs in the valley below, pools of light catching the sun as it broke through the clouds. It was a place of great natural beauty and brutal ugliness: The Beauty and the Beast of the Eifel.

  I thought of my father driving to Eire to buy butter, swapping the giveaway labels of his contraband with something less incriminating to sell in his father’s grocery store, and his nights in the blacked-out streets of Belfast, searching through rubble. I thought of my mother selling shoes bought with precious ration cards, having to fight off nothing worse than over-eager homesick American GIs on her local train. I thought about Bernie scrubbing his ships’ decks on the Baltic Sea, and Lisbeth with her headphones, busy working as a radio operator in Buxtehude, far from home.

  And I thought of another friend whose father had been carted off by the Nazis to be executed.

  My parents, and Andrea’s, had been let off lightly in comparison – but they were all victims of a runaway nationalism. Churchill had called for a united Europe in the rubble of a post-war Germany, but now a new tide of nationalism was quietly rippling through Europe in the twenty-first century. I suddenly felt cold on the Thingplatz as the sun slipped behind the clouds again.

  Afterwards, we drove down to the bottom of the hill to look at the Nazi swimming pool. Marcella and I pressed our noses against the glass, and watched a solitary woman swim lengths under the larger-than-life fresco of three muscular and naked blond men frolicking through the waves. It was a surreal moment, and yearning for normality, we found the car again and drove down to the tourist town of Gemund to stuff ourselves with Italian ice cream.

  *

  Thinking back, there was silence at Vogelsang – or had I misremembered? In my memory, there had been no birdsong, just a stillness and emptiness inside the complex of stone-hewn buildings.

  *

  7. Romance and Death on the Middle Rhine

  We’d spent three days in the Eifel recovering from wind and rain. My skin had softened to indoor living and my bottom had lost its ache from long hours on the saddle. I no longer felt I was bouncing oddly as I walked (as I had done when I’d dismounted from my bike after five days of cycling). Monika had plied Jamie, skinny as he was tall, with jumbo packs of salt-and-vinegar crisps, as if he were a camel that could carry the surplus in the bump of his tummy along the rest of the Rhine.

  We’d drunk our fill of German wine and sat for hours around the kitchen table chatting and singing silly songs. Marcella had regaled us with the Trololo song, the lyrics nothing more than a series of meaningless sounds that bounced along, and the night descended into raucous scout songs and intoxicating silliness.

  Henri had serviced our bikes; making sure the tyres were well pumped up, checking the brakes and oiling the chains. There was nothing left to detain us. In the morning, we packed the panniers and Henri loaded the bikes onto the trailer again.

  Henri and Monika offered to take us to Bad Godesberg, south of Bonn, which sliced off around twenty-three miles of our Rhine journey. I was disappointed to be missing out the small section of the Rhine between Cologne and Bonn but didn’t want to inconvenience this generous family. On the banks of the Rhine, Henri unloaded the bikes and Monika pushed a packed lunch into my hand. The couple waved us off as we wobbled down the path. Our mood was muddled, but we were happy to be on the road once more.

  It was a Sunday morning. The sky was clear and the air still and there was a spring-like warmth in the atmosphere we hadn’t experienced since Dordrecht. I felt my body and brain come to life in the open. There was something about the stale, draft-less air of indoor living that was soporific. Like my father, I preferred to be outside.

  ‘Want to go for a walk?’ he would often ask after tea.

  We’d slip out of the house and pass our neighbour, Manfred Cousins, always there, leaning over his driveway pillar while chewing on a piece of grass. We’d continue on down the lane to the old farmhouse, scrambling over the gate to pass my favourite climbing tree, the one in which I’d learned to test my weight on its branches. We’d reach the stream – my place to build dams and gather frogspawn in jam jars – and the hummock where I’d lit fires and cooked crab apples with my brothers. On the other side of the river, my father and I would pick primroses from the ditch banks in spring – and in autumn, blackberries and rosehips from the surrounding hedges. In the season, we’d drop down to a nearby field to gather mushrooms for supper. Sometimes we’d loop round to Manfred Cousins’ field, where I’d played on his abandoned dumper truck with friends, running up and down its dumper to make it rise and fall. My father and I would skirt the border of the field to the place I built secret dens in thickets. On rare winter days, when the ground was covered in snow, we’d crunch over the hardened earth, the Mourne Mountains shining pale in the sunlight. Then spring again and the cuckoo.

  Now, as I cycled along, I was listening out for the cuckoo as my father had done, but the only sound was that of families and couples by the river on roller skates, scooters, bikes and on foot. We weaved through the crowds until the way ahead lay clear, then picked up speed, pedalling through sprinkled settlements and out into open countryside. At Bad Breisig we cycled into a tree-lined promenade with chairs spilling out onto the street from half-timbered hotels. I slammed on the brakes beside a terrace café overhanging the Rhine. It was mid-morning after all, and who could resist coffee and cake in such an inviting location? Little piers dotted the waterside and tankers and pleasure boats floated by.

  From Bad Breisig, vineyards sloped down to the valley floor, and monasteries and castles appeared on the skyline above the Rhine: Schloss Brohleck, Burgruine Hammerstein, Burg Nahmedy, Schloss Marienburg, Stadtburg Andernach and Schloss Neuwied. It was as if every town and settlement had its own ancient castle or fortress – or at least a romantic ruin. After the harsh industrial towns and cities of the Lower Rhine, with their cranes and concrete docks, it felt as if we had pedalled into a Grimm’s tale.

  But just as we were lulled by the bucolic scenes of folklore, the path fell into step beside a busy carriageway, pushing us up on to an embankment between road and railway line. An inter-city train thundered past and into a tunnel, almost causing me to fall of my bike. Beside us, signs in bold colours and angry capitals protested the weight of railway traffic. ‘BAN GOODS TRAINS AT NIGHT!’ one sign shouted. ‘TRAIN NOISE DAMAGES HEALTH!’ ‘THE TRAINS ARE SLEEP ROBBERS!’

  I remembered taking the train from Basel to Cologne decades earlier, enjoying the same picture-postcard views of the Rhine from a carriage window, as I did now from my bike. It wasn’t hard to understand the locals’ resentment as train frequency and speeds increased, and carriers were increasingly using rail rather than the river. Sleep deprivation doesn’t bring out the best in anyone.

  *

  Around midday we found ourselves approaching the Deutsches Eck of Koblenz, the ‘German Corner’ – where the Mosel river meets the Rhine. On the other side of the bank, we could see an impressive statue of Wilhelm I, resplendent on his horse. The path forced us along the banks of the Mosel to the west for a few minutes until we came to a bridge that took us into the old town and returned us to the Rhine. We went to have a closer look at the German king and found an inscription beneath the statue: Never will the Empire be destroyed as long as you are faithful and true.

  In a truly ironic strike, an American artillery shell had badly damaged the statue in 1945 and it was not until German reunification in 1990 that the statue was reconstructed and reinstated in all its glory, now a symbol of the newly reunified Germany. Next to it, three sections of Berlin Wall sat side by side,
commemorating the victims of the divided post-war Germany.

  When I travelled on a train from Switzerland along the Rhine in 1990, just after the fall of the Wall, an East German student, sitting opposite me, had described her life under Communist rule. She’d explained how limited her freedom had been under the Socialist Unity Party: everything decided on her behalf, from holiday destinations to university – even the subjects she took. And now she was travelling through West Germany, a place that had been once part of her country and was close in every sense, yet had been out of bounds just a few months previously.

  The student sat at the window with the wide eyes of a child. When we reached the Lorelei, she’d jumped up with excitement, and I had peered with her from the carriage window at the cliff on the opposite bank of the river, wondering why a lump of rock would cause such delirium – not understanding the student’s bumbling explanation, nor appreciating how dizzying her freedom felt; not grasping that she could now see a part of her past that had, not so long ago, been reduced to story and fairy-tale.

  Jamie and I reached the Lorelei after a night in Boppard. We locked up our bikes outside the guesthouse opposite the rock and ordered our morning coffee from a disgruntled waitress. Across the river, the pinnacle of slate rose up from the bend of the Rhine. On the train, it had gone by in a grey-brown blur; now I could take in its scale and magnitude.

  Written on the gable of the guesthouse were the words of Heinrich Heine’s poem, Die Lorelei:

  Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten,

  dass ich so traurig bin.

  Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten;

  Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn:

  (‘I don’t know why I am so sad about this ancient tale; but I just can’t get it out of my mind.’)

  I knew the words well, for a German friend and I had sung them in Derbyshire pubs accompanied by guitar and accordion. Greta and I were hopeless, often missing our opening and descending into immature giggles. Our guitarist would start again, nodding more emphatically to indicate when we should join in and off we’d go, singing the sad ballad in German with doleful voices. The song suited Greta well with her sad eyes and voice that held a hint of pain.