This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  I put some of it away, thank him and we are on our way. Joerg sets the pace. He surges ahead, and I have trouble keeping up. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’m shot after three espressos. The caffeine has wound me up and hollowed me out. I could use a nap around now, but the siesta is not The FGW.

  We make our first stop in the museum quarter at the Alte Pinakothek, one of the oldest picture galleries in Europe. On the massive front lawn of the museum, schoolchildren are playing unorganized soccer. The sight of at least ten separate matches delights Joerg, and me as well. His team is FC Nuremberg. He tells me he was a season ticket holder for several years, but the travel from Munich to Nuremberg, a distance of around 200 kilometres, became too much even for a fanatic like him. Joerg’s passion for the Bundesliga puts him in a different league from my cousins Markus and Andreas, who, when I was visitor in 1981, exhibited acute unease with any display of nationalism, especially within the arena of competitive team sports. Their disdain for the German national team, die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft, a team which I myself idolized (especially the player Pierre Littbarski) approached visceral. Markus and Andreas frowned upon on my Bundesliga fandom, and instead showed a quiet pride in the feats of athletes who played individual sports—for example, in later years, the tennis players Steffi Graf and Boris Becker, though Boris was a bit much. His game relied on a thunderous serve and brute force.

  “You see there.” Joerg points to indicate the mottled brickwork façade of the museum, a patchwork which delineates where Allied shelling blew out half of the original wall. “Boom!” His chagrin is raw. Joerg is pleased to act as my guide, but seems impatient and somewhat irritated with the landmarks of the past.

  Entering the south end of the English Gardens, he points to a monumental building partially concealed from view.

  Before elaborating about the building’s significance, he pantomimes: plucks index finger from his mouth, aims at the side of his head.

  Rolls his eyes, and pulls the trigger. Pow.

  “Hause der Kunst, do you know it?”

  I don’t know it.

  “It’s an example of Nazi architecture. The museum was built to showcase ‘true’ German works of art according to the National Socialists. Today it’s also a nightclub, a discotheque, which I think is much better.”

  Hause der Kunst was a hothouse of propaganda. The inaugural exhibit in 1937, called Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung: Great German Works of Art, was intended to stand in civilizing contrast to a concurrent and travelling exhibition of degenerate ‘un-German’ works of art. Here, for ‘un-German’, substitute ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ or ‘avant-garde’.

  “Roland had his own sculptures inside. Is this news? He must have been working there, during the war.”

  It is news, but not entirely surprising news. The Roland in question is Joerg’s grandfather. Roland Friederichsen is married to Melanie, Eva’s sister and Michael’s aunt. During my apprenticeship in Munich thirty years ago I had been shown photographs of a bronze bust Roland Friederichsen made to honour a eugenicist named Frobanius. What did I know then about eugenics? Less than I knew about working in bronze. Before the war, the story goes, the eugenicist Frobanius had measured the dimensions of Melanie’s cranium and designated it Aryan, meaning Eva’s sister Melanie could remain safely in Germany during the war despite her Mischling status. Eventually she would marry Roland Friederichsen.

  Meanwhile, the other half of the family, including Michael’s mother Eva and her siblings Hermann Hans and Irene, were considered to be hybrids, persons of mixed Jewish blood, according to the Nuremberg Laws. All of this is well-trod and suppressed family history, and neither Joerg nor I have much taste for discussing it now. Not him, a representative from The FGW half of the family; and not me, a representative from the Mischling side of the family, the side that left Germany just in time not to be swallowed by its own kind.

  We walk on, through the English Gardens, and towards a small bridge that crosses a tributary of the Isar. Immediately, a shiver grabs hold of my spine. I feel an actual tingling, which functions like an electronic meeting reminder, though this one is hardwired. I’m aware that it was likely here, in the English Gardens, that in August of 1957 Michael and his girlfriend of the time Janine Blum met with his father, Karl—his father then a stranger to Michael, if Janine’s memory captures it correctly—to have a picnic. Karl had carefully chosen his spot and brought along a blanket and a basket of strawberries, and even thought to bring sugar. It must have been a breathtaking meeting for Michael. Bittersweet. A moment of rare intimacy with his father, fraught with doubt and insecurity. Mixed feelings, shall we say.

  The park attracts tourists and locals alike, and I’m already familiar with it from previous visits to Munich. But no visitor can step into the same English Gardens twice, and what is amazing to witness this time around is the tag team of surfers in wet suits from around the world. They are standing in queue, taking turns, boarding a standing wave. And they’ve gathered a crowd.

  Joerg and I stop to watch. This is more like it, a display our generation can appreciate. I take video with my camera. It’s the most happening thing in München, this standing wave. A fluke of nature more alive than the House of Art.

  “And now you are making a book about Eva’s son.” Joerg states the fact, while we stand watching the surfers. It’s the fucking German way not to beat around the bush. “Your father knew him. Isn’t that right?”

  “They were cousins.”

  “What happened to Michael?”

  “He died of an overdose. He was an actor.”

  “Aha.”

  “He was in the movie The Great Escape.”

  “Can you show me?”

  My private War on Michael began thousands of miles from this European city park with a purchase at FUTURE SHOP, but now is not the time to tell Joerg about that adventure.1

  “I have the disc right here,” I tell him, and pat the side of my shoulder bag. “We can watch it tonight.”

  “Not tonight.”

  Tonight Germany take on Turkey in a European Championship Qualifying Match at Allianz Arena in north Munich.

  int. brain compartment—Flashback to FUTURE SHOP. I was living then in Northern Ontario, a twelve hour drive around the rim of Lake Superior from Michael’s Sault Ste. Marie. Excited, after I had found the 2-disc DVD collector’s set special edition of The Great Escape at Future Shop, I kneeled before the television to watch. Then, I did not have Karl Paryla’s letters from 1967, nor had I discovered Michael’s Tagebuch from 1949. I had not collected oral history. I had the odd photograph of him, and the likelihood of a trip to Germany to visit his grave (I did not know where it was) and the movie studios (I was clueless about the film history) was about as strong as my chances would be years later of wrangling James Garner into an interview to speak about his role in the movie, and, while at it, perhaps rummage around in foggy memory for his lost impressions of a German actor named Michael Paryla. This interview with James Garner, which presented itself in time as a very sensible direction for my research to take, easily could have been Skyped—then blogged about and hyped—but Nein, Garner’s manager had declined. Had said, No. The kind of ‘relationship’ I proposed was of no interest to his client. So yes, back then, the WoM had been a simple ground war, launched without a sensible exit strategy. I had not hired a celebrity wrangler to entice James Garner’s manager. All I had to go on was Michael’s sixty seconds in the movie.

  So I sat down in the TV chair and picked up the remote and spent the next week obsessively reviewing the evidence. Delusion: I could deduce a lot from sixty seconds of face time if I watched closely. This way I may learn EVERYTHING about Michael there is to know: more than Master Wikipedia keeps on tap, more than can be gained from the collective memory. I was convinced that I could deduce and create something more true from the experience of watching the movie than I ever could fr
om these pseudo-factual present tense set pieces that I manufacture, from memory, to stage the book in a more immediate manner.

  Conclusion: in any case, watching the film and recording my reactions, for a full week, a month, wouldn’t that be an interesting experiment? Yes. Yes, it would be. Real quality time. Face time with Michael. And it was. It was a very ‘interesting’ time. So intense that I had to back away from it. The results of that experiment have been saved under the provisionary title Stop Pause Play. Maybe that’s what I’ll call this book.

  Germany 2—Turkey 1. It helps that Mesut Özil, the best player on the pitch of Turkish heritage, plays for Merkel’s boys.

  The game takes us close to midnight. Afterwards Joerg connects the laptop to his sound system and treats me to some YouTube magic. Austrian hip hop is on the menu. White clowns in sweats at a pool shed party. Kabinenparty. Joerg turns up the volume and makes his big gangster moves, dancing black in the kitchen. He betrays a genuine sympathy for the music, which is quite good it’s that bad. We party late and drink a lot of beer, but there are no further questions about ‘my project’, no interest at all in watching The Great Escape. No Steve McQueen. No Elmer Bernstein. Austrian hip hop.

  The next day we drive to Haar, south-east of Munich, to visit Joerg’s mother Hannah. Hannah belongs to Michael’s cohort of the cousins. For decades, Joerg’s mother Hannah has dealt with having multiple sclerosis, and now she has been recently diagnosed with a type of blood cancer. In the parking lot of the long-term care hospital we meet Gerhardt, her husband. Joerg’s father. He shows us inside.

  I sit level with Hannah in a chair at the bedside. Gerhardt hovers at the far end of the room near the open window. Joerg takes the wall. Birdsong filters into the room from the outside gardens. From her supine position, Hannah asks about the health of my family and manages a weak smile when I respond that everyone is well, including my parents.

  “I met him.” Hannah says.

  “Do you remember his house, where it was in Munich?”

  “No.” She has no recollection. Again she smiles, more generously now. It is from Hannah that Joerg gets his red hair. She is light skinned, and freckled. Her eyes are kind. Hannah is a weaver. She makes tapestries, allegorical narratives spun in colored wool. Several of her artworks are hung in her temporary room here at the hospital. They have biblical themes for the most part.

  “That was a long time ago,” Gerhardt interjects. “He lived with a woman. Margaret, yes? And she died soon after him.”

  “That’s right.” I say. “Margaret. He lived with Margaret.” But really, that’s about it for knowledge about her. Margaret Jahnen. Swindling, magniloquent and yarn-spinning Margaret. Michael shared a house in Munich with Margaret. She had a teenage son when they met. Besides these facts not much is known about Michael’s Margaret.

  Eva demonized Margaret. But Eva’s sister Irene had the generosity of mind to request a fair trial. Michael’s aunt Irene is the only member of the family who sounds a forgiving note about Margaret. It was Irene who wrote to Eva on 30 January, 1967, the day she returned from attending Michael’s funeral in Waldfriedhof. My poor dear Eva. I went to the cemetery in your stead. How deeply the whole thing has affected me, I need not tell you. The last time Irene had spoken with him was on Christmas Eve.

  He was very tired and was here for only a day. He had been quite busy for some time and had finally made his way to the top. One can only speculate about how the incident happened. It was probably a combination of many unfortunate circumstances. He had apparently been complaining a lot about insomnia for some time; this was in addition to financial worries and friction with colleagues. On top of that, there was all his work and the insane theatre life—sorry, but I really find that he could not cope with that kind of life, neither physically or psychologically, and to mix alcohol and sleeping tablets is certainly dangerous for anyone. So, he probably didn’t feel much.

  Karl arranged for Michael’s body to be transferred to Munich, for burial, in his own grave. But I knew so few of the people who attended. I felt like a stranger, amidst the vast forest. Karl did not attend: he could not bring himself to do this. He called and told me to write to you. I wanted to wait until the funeral was over—for a long time, I just couldn’t believe it.

  Eva received the letter in January. I remember reading it for first time thirty years after the fact; remember how I was struck by its gentleness and sanity, and at the same time I pictured Eva in Sault Ste. Marie, alone in the kitchen, reading the letter which I held in my hands. The paper and envelope had a thick black border.

  What can I say to comfort you? I know that your sorrow is too great. Michi’s life is behind him—he had a good heart and that is probably what’s most important. He will not be forgotten, and we all will go the same route in the end. Es geht so schnell vorbei dieses Dasein. Life goes by so fast. Much too fast to gain even a slight understanding of what it actually is.

  There is a two month break, before Irene writes again from Munich.

  Meine liebe Eva! I received your letter dated April 6. I can definitely understand that you don’t feel like writing back and forth all the time. No one expects you to. I know how deep your pain is and how hard it is to have to bear it. But please don’t make the mistake of so harshly blaming exclusively Michi’s entourage here.

  Liebe Eva—Karl, Margaret and Jerry are pretty much strangers to me and I’ve never had anything other than a very casual connection with them through Michi. So I can really only talk about what I’ve seen and heard over the years—which is very little. In any case, Michi told me time and again that he got along wonderfully with Margaret, and once when I asked him—in the very beginning—what she was like, he said, “Ganz wie Eva! Ich habe meine Mutter geheiratet!”: “Just like Eva! I married my mother!” He was laughing at the time. I can still see and hear him; it was in Pasing, around 1959 or 1960.

  In any case Michi loved Margaret, and Margaret undoubtedly helped him a lot. He had something to do with choosing her, too—why do you blame only her for that?

  We all have our limits. We all move within our boundaries. We need to learn not to always expect or demand more from others than what they are capable of giving.

  I went to Michi’s grave last week. It’s decorated with spring flowers. You have to try to understand Margaret’s pain and stop blaming her—you will be more serene if you do. Life goes by so fast. It won’t be long before we can no longer right our wrongs. We shouldn’t always make new mistakes, but instead try to mend the old ones as best we can. We all act within our limits, but can show good faith in doing so.

  Liebe Eva, from the bottom of my heart, I wish you much quiet time to reflect and much strength, I kiss you fondly. Deine Irene.

  Once she wore light coloured blouses. Now black. Eva had not seen her sister Irene in a long while, not since she and Karl left Darmstadt for Vienna immediately following the Reichstag fire in 1935. Eva’s family in Germany didn’t know her now, anymore than they could fathom the desolation of Lake Superior in January. The windswept white of the lake, a barrenness the size of Bavaria. After the spring thaw she could drop Munich into the lake and not hear a thing more from her fair-minded sister.

  Gerhardt winces.

  “I met him just once.” He doesn’t want to partake in the story of Michael, I grasp that, but is far too entrenched in The FGW to refrain from stating his opinion. “It was in the lobby of the Münchner Kammerspiele. The late 1950s. I remember a handsome boy. But, I think, he was always unhappy because he could not be like his father.”

  Gerhardt is most likely remembering the 1959 Munich production of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, directed by Hans Schweikart, in which Michael played Cosimo de Medici opposite Friedrich Domin, who played Galileo. The set was designed by Caspar Neher, the man who designed the original set for The Threepenny Opera at Berlin’s Schiffbauerdamm Theatre in 1928.

  Michael, I wo
uld have said, could not have been more like his father. What a strange thing for Gerhardt to say. He was always unhappy because he could not be like his father. Michael went into acting because of his father, even returned to Germany to play in the same theatre houses where Karl made his name. He was not the success his father was. He didn’t have the reputation Karl Paryla made for himself. That’s what Gerhardt meant to say, I think.

  The comparison between father and son leaves Michael’s side of the equation wanting. Michael might have played Cosimo de Medici opposite Friedrich Domin in 1959 in Munich, but Karl already years before starred in the 1943 World Premier of Leben des Galilei in Zurich. And unbeknownst to Michael, his half–brother Stephan would later appear in the same play.

  What is it about The Life of Galileo that the Paryla clan revolve around it, like the earth around the sun, like sons around their father? Maybe it’s not just Galileo but Brecht who is pulling the strings. Eva likely crossed paths with Casper Neher in Breslau, when the touring production of The Threepenny Opera came to town. An interesting coincidence. But what does it all mean to Michael?

  Enough questions for a tourist day.

  After visiting with Hannah, we return to Munich, park the car, and descend to the S-Bahn at Rosenheimer-Platz, where we take it two stops to Marienplatz. We could have walked but we’re late for the Anti-Atomdemo. Large crowds are expected to take part in the protest against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s National nuclear energy policy. Merkel is angling to extend the term of several nuclear plants which are due to close. Eight plants in Bavaria will be effected. In reaction, forty thousand are forming a human chain ten kilometres in length between the offices of the atomic lobby.

  “Between the headquarters of E.ON Energy and those shits at Siemens and the CSU.” Joerg names the main players.