White Lies

by Rudolph Bader

  “What happened to Manfred?”

  “He tried to cross the border, probably hoping to make it to his Angelika, but they caught him between barbed-wire fences somewhere near Creuzburg, just north of Eisenach. They shot him in his legs and arrested him. He was convicted for attempted Republikflucht, which was a very serious crime, and sent to Bautzen for a long sentence. In the first years, he could sometimes write a letter. All our mail was checked by the Stasi, of course.”

  “How long did he spend at Bautzen?”

  “He stopped writing to me in the late seventies. I didn’t know how he was getting on for many years. It was only after the collapse of the system, in 1989, that one of my neighbours, who had been an IM - that was the abbreviation given to those nearly 200,000 spies of the Stasi - and who regretted it afterwards, wanted to clear his bad conscience by telling me what he knew about my boy.”

  “What was it? Did he get out?”

  “Yes. He was released after 25 years, which was in 1987. Because the Stasi considered him a dangerous element, they deported him out of the country.”

  “So, he is in the West now?”

  “I don’t know. I never heard from him again. Henrietta said she could find out, but I haven’t had the courage yet.”

  We were silent for a while. Then I took her in my arms. I held her tight, and I could feel her heartbeat. Slowly, she began to weep. She wept in silence for several minutes, and I felt very close to her. In a way, it was good, just holding the dear woman tight with my arms around her shaking body.

  When we let go and sat back, she swept the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief and was going to apologize, but I told her there was no need. I said I felt honoured and privileged to have her confidence. She gave me another hug.

  Now, back at my hotel, I feel I have to do something for Anna, the woman who could almost be my mother. But how realistic is that? One thing that must be my next step is to find out more about Manfred, find out his whereabouts, not only for Anna but also for my own peace of mind. After all, he is probably my half-brother. I would love that.

  So, what can I do next? I think I will travel to Leipzig and find Henrietta. I’m sure Anna will give me her address. As far as I remember, she indicated that her cousin might know more.

  Thus, to Leipzig.

  Twenty-Two

  I dropped my bags in my room at the Ibis Hotel in Leipzig. I was impressed by this city. Everything was in a process of change and transition. Especially along the ring road lots of houses were being either pulled down or being refurbished. Across from my newly built hotel there was a hand-painted poster saying, “Leipzig retten - alte Bausubstanz erhalten!” So the people of the city were obviously divided between those who wanted to preserve the historic buildings, dilapidated as they may be, and those who were all for rebuilding.

  After a quick snack at the reception area of the hotel, I grabbed a free town map from the reception desk and looked for Yuri-Gagarin-Strasse. It was not very far; I decided to walk.

  When I rang the bell, there was no answer. So I went back to my hotel. I realized I should have called first.

  I spent the time reading through my report, trying to phone Henrietta Scholz from time to time.

  At last, about five o’clock in the afternoon, she answered the telephone. I introduced myself and explained how I came to contact her. Henrietta was very polite. When I mentioned Anna, she cried with joy.

  “Oh, how is dear Anna? I hope she’s all right.”

  “She is very well, thank you,” I replied.

  It took a lot of explaining. At last, Henrietta declared herself glad to be of assistance in my search. We arranged to meet the next morning at her flat.

  When I arrived there, she immediately opened the door and greeted me with a beaming smile. If I noted earlier on how beautiful Anna was, I now had to admit that her younger cousin was just as fine a woman. In a way, she looked very much alike, only a little younger and with dark hair. She must be in her early sixties, but there wasn’t a single grey hair on her head, and it was her natural colour. A very striking woman indeed!

  “So, you are the daughter of dear Anna’s first love?” she asked when we were sitting over our cups of tea in her nicely presented living-room.

  “Yes, I am. And I understand you can tell me more about my father’s fate in the War and afterwards.”

  “Well, I only met him once after the War. But tell me, what is it you’re trying to find out?”

  I told her I had reason to believe that my father had been a member of the SS and had possibly committed some awful crimes, which was hard to accept for me as his daughter. But if she could confirm that there was no alternative, I would just have to live with it. If, on the other hand, she could tell me that my information was wrong, I would be more than happy.

  Henrietta sighed. “I’m sorry, young woman. May I call you Nora? What you’ve heard is true. Manfred - your father, that is - was an active member of the Waffen-SS. Those were the hard-boiled Nazis with the black uniforms and the emblem with the dead skull on their peaked caps.”

  “I see.”

  “Anna and I are as sad as you are, you can believe me. Poor Anna has suffered a great deal. She loved him so much. And you probably know she bore him a child and called him Manfred, too.”

  “Did you tell my father when you met him so much later after the War?”

  “No, I couldn’t. Besides, all he was concerned about was his new identity. He even tried to lie to me. He insisted he’d always been called Dieter Wolff. I think he’d lost his mind, if you ask me. Nothing of what he was trying to make me believe made any sense. So sad!”

  I had to digest this before I could ask my next question.

  “What do you know of his son, Manfred the younger? Anna told me his story up to 1987 when he was released from Bautzen and deported out of the country.”

  “I don’t know everything, Nora. But quite by accident I met him again after the reunification. I didn’t tell Anna that I’d actually met him. It would have been too much for her. But I told her I’d heard from him.”

  “And how did that happen?” I wanted to know.

  “As I was saying, it was such a coincidence. I believe it was in ’92. I was shopping in town when, all of a sudden, I bumped into him in front of a shop. It only took me a split second to recognize him, and he also recognized me at once. We just stood there for what seemed like an eternity, looking at each other and trying to believe what we were seeing. I said ‘Manfred’ and he said ‘Henrietta’. And when we had recovered from our shock we went to have a cup of coffee together.”

  “Had he changed much?”

  “Of course, he was quite a bit older than the last time I had seen him, but he was his old self.” She looked at me. “Actually, if I’m honest, I have to admit you look a bit like him.”

  Then she told me what she had learnt from Manfred. He had spent a few years travelling after his release from the GDR before settling in a small town somewhere in Norway. He had now been contemplating to move back to Germany and wanted to test himself with the idea of returning to one of the Eastern Länder to live there. But as he explained, he found it too depressing. There were too many bad memories for him. He’d been to Gera and other places he used to know well, and he’d even driven to Bautzen, but he couldn’t find it in himself to forgive those who had made his life so miserable. He told her he was just going to see a few more places in Germany before his emigration to Canada. He had a friend who was about to buy an electric company in Vancouver and who was eager to take him on as an electrician and possibly as a partner later on.

  I asked her if young Manfred knew about me and my sister. After all, he might be our half-brother. She said yes, she had told him.

  “How did he react?”

  “He was overjoyed and wanted to know where he could
find you. But I couldn’t tell him. I knew that your father wanted to keep the two versions of his life apart. I don’t know if I was right. Perhaps I should have told him.”

  After this, we drifted off to other subjects. At the end of my two-hour visit, she invited me to have dinner with her and her husband on the following evening. I was happy to accept.

  When I found myself at her door again the next day, better dressed and with a bunch of flowers in my hand, I wondered what Henrietta’s husband would be like. We hadn’t talked about him, which I now realized was a social blunder. We had discussed such a lot about my family, my father, my life in England and about trivial things, and it had never entered my head to ask her about her life, her family, her husband. I decided to catch up and do better now.

  Friedrich Scholz was a very large man with a broad and winning smile. His voice was loud, and his friendly statements didn’t allow any contradiction. He was a head taller than his wife, who looked up to him with fondness. Even though it took me a while to get accustomed to his overbearing but extremely heart-warming manner, I was very glad to note that this was a very happy couple.

  “Call me Fritz,” he boomed, as he was shaking my hand with a firm grip.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, I’m Nora,” I replied and found my own voice sounded like the peeping of a small mouse in comparison to his.

  After the couple had stood there, facing me together and displaying their happiness, he took my arm and led me to the living-room.

  We had a very pleasant chat over a glass of white wine, which wasn’t so pleasant. They were very proud of the wine and explained that it came from the vineyard in the northernmost location in Europe, yes, even in the world, they said. It was called Saale-Unstrut and tasted like stale dishwater, but I was polite enough not to let them know. They were both so happy to have me as their guest.

  “You know,” Fritz said, “my darling Henry - I just call her Henry, she likes that - she’s told me about you. You must know she has the fondest memories of your brother Manfred. They more or less grew up together. But there it is, the poor chap had to do time at Bautzen, what a shame, but he’s been out for quite some time now. Yes, life can be very unfair, but there it is.”

  He rambled on while Henrietta slipped out to the kitchen to get the meal ready. I tried to listen to everything he was saying, but it turned out quite a challenge. He jumped from subject to subject - from the difference between the Wessies and the Ossies to the rise of unemployment, from the warm weather to the exchange rate with the US dollar - and he punctuated his speech with an occasional “there it is.”

  During the meal, we touched mostly general topics. My hosts wanted to know about my travel experience. They asked me what countries I had visited and what I had learnt about humanity in each country. They were particularly interested in Spain because they were saving up for a trip to that country. I could only give them very limited information. I had visited Spain about half a dozen times, but my destinations had usually been the culturally fascinating cities. I could tell them about Zaragoza, Salamanca, Toledo, Sevilla and other old cities full of cultural treasures, but such things didn’t interest them. What they were after were the beaches and the nightclubs of Mallorca and Ibiza, possibly also Torremolinos. “We want to meet the real people of Spain,” Fritz explained. I tried to tell them that the places they mentioned would allow them to experience other German and English tourists, but mostly of the less pleasant sort. However, Fritz was so convinced that those would be the right places to visit, it was no use arguing. I realized that I would appear arrogant if I insisted on conveying my views to them.

  So, I concentrated on the lovely food we were enjoying together and gently steered the conversation to less controversial topics. One such topic was the superiority of the Capitalist system over the Communist experience in the GDR. Another common topic was German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Henrietta drew my attention to a new book published by Niklas Frank. He was the son of one of the worst Nazi leaders, Hans Frank, the so-called slaughterer of Poland, who was hanged in Nuremberg in 1946. Niklas, a good journalist, is very active today. He has published a number of books and articles on the poorly managed process of De-Nazification after the War. Henrietta considers him a modern hero. He has shown us how many old Nazis got away with very few scratches to their social prestige, and many of them just slipped into posts of responsibility in the 1950s.

  “I tell you,” Fritz confirmed his wife’s report, “even now as we speak there are still many old Nazis who manage to live comfortably and who are respected by the communities in which they live. Most of them were never found out and only few of them had to appear in front of a Spruchkammer after the War. But there it is.”

  I didn’t know how to feel about such comments. If I was honest, I had to admit that my own father was one of them, an old Nazi who got off unscathed. My best strategy was to steer the conversation to more general perspectives. In the end, we agreed that the ideas of the Nazis could probably never be completely eradicated in Europe.

  As I was walking back to my hotel, I thought about everything that had been said during the evening.

  * * *

  I am an open-minded person, and I believe I am a critical observer of what’s going on in the world today. I am neither a clever philosopher nor a sharp politician. But I can clearly identify some of the dangers in today’s world. I’m not merely thinking of environmental problems now, but of social conflicts. With the new catchphrase of Globalisation, we are certainly deceiving ourselves. From what I have seen of this process so far is that it makes the rich even richer and the poor even poorer. Multinational businesses are internationalizing their profits, while the financial and social burdens are being debited to the national governments. The nations face increasing problems because they haven’t got enough money to fulfil their tasks, while the big international companies don’t pay taxes which would be needed for those national duties.

  What are the dangers for our future? I am afraid the system is increasingly drying out the middle classes in most Western countries. Only very few are getting very rich, while more and more middle-class families are falling into poverty. If we lose our middle classes, we’ll lose the most important pillars of our societies, the sections of society that defend law and order, the people who pay taxes and who are interested in social peace.

  Will such a development favour the rise of new Nazi systems? Is there a danger of a growing unease about the existing democratic systems, an unease which will allow new populists to rise and to lead the weak-minded and disappointed masses into new versions of Hitler’s dictatorship? Once a critical mass of the losing part of the people find out that they have been cheated all along, they will be an easy prey for a populist politician who will promise them to solve all their problems. The strategy for such a rat-catcher will simply be to create enough fear and anxiety in order to announce to the gullible people that he will have the solution and save them all from the existing - democratically elected - politicians if only they will elect him. Once that happens we will be back to square one, meaning a situation like the one in 1933. Is it possible that we may already have reached a stage that can be compared to the situation like 1914, before the First World War, when rampant nationalism led people to believe that the cause of their problems lay in another country and the only solution was to go to war against their neighbours in Europe? I will be watchful over the emerging developments in the next few years.

  * * *

  I travelled back to Gera, hoping to pick up a few more traces of my father’s family. For example, I was hoping that Anna might have more information. Also, I wondered whether I would be able to find the whereabouts of that awful fellow Wolfgang Löffel. If I could find him, I would silence him once and for all. I would make it clear to him that blackmail was a serious crime, and I would have the law on him if he ever tried to contact my father again.

 
At the Hotel am Galgenberg, a message was waiting for me. It was from Anna. “Dear Nora, I would so much like to see you once more before you return to England.”

  It was clear to me that Anna was the only source of information that was left to me. I didn’t trust Renate Erdinger or her mother to be of any further help, and really there wasn’t anyone else I could ask about members of my family or about the Löffel fellow.

  Just to make sure to exploit every possible angle, I paid a visit to the Thuringian archives in Erfurt. They had a list of all the War casualties. It was far from complete in its section on the civilian population, but it gave a complete account of all the members of the Wehrmacht that had either died or gone missing during the War. When I saw this list, I had to remember the numerous war memorials that we can find in every British town or village, and it made me wonder. What can be the significance of such lists or memorials? Are they meant to invest the dead with a particular sense? And if that was their purpose, the question remains if they really succeed in their purpose.

  The list of the missing soldiers contained my Uncle Thomas’s name. He had gone missing on board the Prinz Eugen, which was a Schwerer Kreuzer, off the coast of Norway on 23rd February 1942. The vessel had been hit by a torpedo fired by the British submarine Trident. So the British had killed my uncle.

  The list didn’t mention my father’s name. I spent another hour scanning the list, but I couldn’t find any names that rang a bell in my mind. This wasn’t surprising, since I didn’t know any of my father’s friends’ names. I didn’t even know any names apart from Anna Kleinschmidt and Wolfgang Löffel. Not very much, I had to admit to myself.