The Way I See It: A Memoir

The Way I See It

JÜRGEN SCHADEBERG

The Way I See It

A MEMOIR

PICADOR AFRICA

I dedicate this book to the memory of the late Henry Nxumalo – a great and courageous journalist with whom I was privileged to work.

While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this book, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions. Any slights of people or organisations are unintentional and should not be construed as deliberate.

First published in 2017 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands

Johannesburg, 2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-529-4

EBOOK ISBN 978-1-77010-530-0

Text and photographs © 2017 Jürgen Schadeberg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Editing by Alison Lowry

Proofreading by Russell Martin

Cover design by publicide

Front cover photograph of Jürgen Schadeberg (Hamburg, 1948) by Helmut Prignitz

All photographs are supplied courtesy of Jürgen Schadeberg

CONTENTS

Germany 1941–1950

1 Slow Descent into Hell

2 Surviving the Apocalypse

3 Amidst the Ashes

4 Hamburg

South Africa in Black and White

5 ‘Europeans Only’

6 Killer’s Shebeen

7 Looking for Work

8 Photographing the Boers

The Drum Beat

9 Working with Africans

10 Going to the Ball

11 ‘Mr Drum’

12 ANC Conference 1951

13 Under New Management

14 ‘We Need More Chicks!’

15 Pumpy Naidoo and the Crimson League

16 Bethal

17 Ritual Murder and a Derby in Basutoland

18 Arrested with Dolly

19 Day of Unity

20 The ‘Tot’ System and a Gracious Hostess

21 Killer Tales

22 Too Many Martinis

23 Theatrical Interlude, a Road Trip, and Back to Sophiatown

24 A New Editor and a Catfight

25 Going to Church with Bloke

26 Spies, Lies and Literature

27 Cucumber Sandwiches

South Africa in White and Black

28 New Focus, New Directions

29 Winds of Change, White Journos and the Camel Border Patrol

30 Social Engagements and the Sunday Papers

31 Positives and Negatives

Europe

32 London – Berlin – London

33 Andalusia

Africa in Full Colour

34 Prayers at Sunset – From Senegal to Mali

35 Nescafé, Condensed Milk and Tinned Sardines

36 ‘Welcome to Ghana’

37 Birthday in Cameroon, Beer in Bangui

38 War and Peace – Zaire, Rwanda, Kenya

United Kingdom, United States, South Africa

39 Meeting Claudia and a Wintry Workshop

40 ‘It’s a Bit of a Shambles’ – The Drum Archive

41 Books, Films, Music

42 Robben Island and a New Era

EPILOGUE

RECENT AND SELECTED PORTFOLIO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Germany 1941–1950

Air raid shelter, 1942

1

SLOW DESCENT INTO HELL

I was ten years old in early 1941 and living with my mother in a small ground-floor apartment attached to a shop on the Kurfürstendamm, one of the most fashionable parts of central Berlin. This was a wide boulevard full of expensive restaurants, luxury shops and nightclubs within an area that was vibrant and alive with artists, actors and writers. It was also where military personnel in their finest dress uniform came to promenade with their girlfriends.

In 1941 Germany was at the height of its power. The Blitzkrieg of 1940 had been a great success and, for many Germans, Hitler could do no wrong. However, most Berliners had no love for the Nazis and considered Hitler to be little more than a pretentious and dangerous upstart. Naturally cynical, and more sophisticated than most Germans, Berliners had traditionally sympathised more with communism and socialism than the national socialism of the Nazis. The city was no power base for Hitler and, in private, many Berliners opposed Hitler’s regime. Needless to say, any overt opposition was impossible and would have been brutally crushed instantly.

The reality of war had barely touched Berlin in 1941. Although there had been a few air raids, these had caused very little damage and were dismissed by most people as merely inconvenient. People still went to work as normal and the schools continued, as though there was no war. The streets were full of people shopping and in some restaurants fine wines and wonderful food were still served as usual by white-gloved waiters. The theatres did good business, the cinemas were full, and the trains and trams ran, as always, on time.

Certainly, the war had changed little in my life and my mother remained magnificently unconcerned. A striking woman, she enjoyed parties and socialising with her many friends; nights were spent working as an actress in the theatre, where she played small parts. She would be the maid who comes on stage bringing a visiting card on a silver plate to the lead actor. She also worked, when she could, in movies – minor roles, like a telephonist, for example. She took her calling seriously and was always posing for photographs. She also dressed glamorously, as would be expected of a potential star. Her name was Rosemarie but most of her friends called her Rosie.

We may have lived on the Ku’damm but our apartment was modest. It was attached to a driving school, the connecting door to which was permanently locked. In the main room there was a desk near the window which faced the Hinterhof, or backyard. The desk was covered with a glass plate and above it hung a birdcage, which was the home of Peter, our white budgie, who, when the window was closed, was free to fly around the room. My mother had very long red-painted fingernails and she used to tap-tap with two fingers walking along the glass plate on the desk. This was a signal for Peter to follow. He would puff up his feathers and walk stealthily, stretching out his legs in a parody of a goosestep, high, up and down. ‘Come, sweetie Peterle,’ my mother would whisper, making sucking noises with her lips. Sometimes Peter would fly onto my mother’s shoulder and they would kiss each other.

We had a telephone in our flat and my mother spent many hours on it talking to her friends, particularly to her friend Anita. I didn’t consciously listen when they were chatting, as I was usually buried in a book, but occasional words registered, such as ‘erotics’ and ‘men’. These words seemed to be of great interest to my mother and now and then, when I was present, she would drop her voice to a conspiratorial whisper so that I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Sometimes Anita came to visit. She invariably looked unhappy and depressed, and when she talked her eyes kept half closing. My mother, who was interested in the occult, would often settle down with her at a table, where they would sit facing each other. My mother would then produce a pack of cards and lay them out dramatically, one by one, face up, on the table.

‘I can see there’s a dark woman,’ my mother said on one such occasion, while Anita watched her, mesmerised. ‘She’s dangerous and treacherous. You must look out.’

‘I know her – you’re right!’ Anita said, getting agitated. My mother calmed her down and picked up another card. When she turned it over, it was the jack of hearts.

‘There’s a letter coming to you from an admirer. He will visit you soon,’ she said, which made Anita smile again. I turned back to my reading.

I was a great reader and devoted to books. If I had any free time I would be deep in a book. I can remember my delight at discovering Tolstoy and disappearing into his stories. That way I could shut out the world around me, especially the daily raving of one man on the radio, whom everyone called ‘the Leader’. I didn’t understand what he was on about but his voice was menacing and horrible. He was clearly a very angry man and he frightened me.

On my birthday a friend of my mother’s came to visit. He was very tall and wore a uniform. I think he was some sort of officer in the army. His name was Klaus and he brought us lots of presents from Paris – silk stockings and perfume for my mother and a pair of roller-skates and chocolate for me. The roller-skates were very modern. They had a platform with two leather bands to fit onto your shoe and two big wheels covered with rubber on each side in front and a small wheel at the back. I was very happy with the present. They weren’t as noisy as my iron four-wheelers.

Klaus also brought a small, fat bottle with a long neck with some fancy French writing on it, and he and my mother sat on the sofa-bed drinking out of small glasses. The bed didn’t look like a bed during the day but more like a couch. It had a red cover and lots of colourful cushions.

‘Jürgen, how about trying out the roller-skates? I’ll help you put them on,’ Klaus said. ‘It’s still light outside. I’ll give you one mark and you can go and get yourself an ice cream.’

Of course I was only too pleased to disappear and I left Klaus and my mother alone.

Actually, I had stopped calling my mother ‘Mother’ a few weeks prior to Klaus’s visit, after she and I had gone to see a recent acquaintance of hers. She had met this man on a train when returning from one of her many trips into the country. As we entered his large office in the factory where he worked, I noticed that he wore a fine suit. He had a thin moustache, the sort you saw on Hollywood actors.

‘Hello, Rosie!’ he said, rising up from behind a very large desk. ‘How wonderful to see you! And who is this young man?’

‘Oh,’ my mother hesitated, ‘this is my little brother, Jürgen.’

I thought I hadn’t heard her correctly, but when I looked across at her, her expression didn’t change.

‘So, how old are you, Jürgen?’ the man asked me. Before I could answer, he walked over to a shelf and picked up a large box. He placed it on his desk and smiled. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

In front of me was the biggest box of assorted chocolates I had ever seen. Well, I stayed in the man’s office for what felt like many hours, while he took my mother on a tour of the factory. Naturally, I sampled as many of the chocolates as I could, making myself very sick in the process.

From that day on I called my mother Rosie, like everyone else. Some weeks later, I came across her birth certificate and noticed that she had changed her date of birth, rather clumsily, from 1905 to 1915. I didn’t think this was very convincing. Since I was born in 1931, I worked out, if she had been born in 1915 she would have been only sixteen years old when I was born. All her other official papers gave her date of birth as 1915. Nevertheless, the man seemed to believe that I was her brother.

The Nazi regime controlled every aspect of life. A few days after my tenth birthday, I and my classmates all received an envelope to take home to our parents. It contained an official command that I was to report to the Jungvolk as a recruit, called a ‘Pimpf", in two weeks’ time, on a Sunday, at the school playground. All boys between ten and fourteen years old, the one-page letter said, had to join the youth organisation. We had to report to it every weekend. There was a lot about the duty of all boys to the Leader, the people and the country. This was to be the beginning of our compulsory service to the Fatherland. Also in the letter was a list of compulsory uniform items: short black trousers, one hand-width above the knee, grey socks, brown shirt, belt, shoulder strap and so on. My mother clearly wasn’t very happy about this but she didn’t say anything directly to me.

Wearing my new uniform, the following Sunday I duly walked to the school playground where 20 or so boys, all in uniform, were there, some of them from my class. We stood around for a while, greeting each other, all of us feeling rather anxious. Suddenly an older boy, who must have been about thirteen, stood up on the steps of the school entrance and blew sharply on a whistle. He waved at us to come closer. Then he clicked his heels together, stood to attention, lifted his right arm to shoulder height and shouted, in a somewhat squeaky voice: ‘Heil Hitler! I am your Hauptjungzugführer.’

He then proceeded to give us a long speech about our duty as the Jungvolk and about the sports tests we would have to go through, like running and the high jump and long jump. He spoke about us being the future of Germany. He said we would have to become soldiers and that we belonged to the Führer. He talked about blood and honour, which was a bewildering concept to most of us ten-year-olds. We were then made to line up and taught how to stand to attention and move simultaneously as a group. We had to turn right, turn left and march and stop together. Left-right, left-right, left we went, swinging our arms in time. This went on the whole afternoon. When I finally got home I was exhausted. The following Sunday we marched to the forest where we played war games, with one group hiding from another and so on, which, actually, was quite a lot of fun.

After a few weeks of marching and chasing each other in the forest, one day we found ourselves in a cellar. This was a long room with bright, white-painted walls. In it was a long table with benches on both sides, where we were instructed to sit. On the walls were posters with lots of swastikas and slogans on them. At the head of the table sat the Jungzugführer. Once we had settled down he gave us another long lecture, this one about the life of Adolf Hitler, which we were supposed to learn and memorise. He told us that the Leader had declared war against the Soviet Union because the Jewish Bolshevik rulers in Moscow wanted to set all of Germany aflame. After further tedious speeches about the primitive life of the barbarian Soviets, we were taught to sing marching songs, none of which I could remember except the first line of one of them: ‘On the lake swim corpses with their stomachs sliced open, in the throats stick knives so that the blood sprays into the sky.’ Because I was unable to remember the songs, I was instructed to write them down.

When I came home that evening, my mother had my Aunt Doris round for coffee. Doris was a very large lady, who bellowed out her words. When she roared with laughter, everything in the flat would shake.

‘How was your day in the forest?’ my mother asked me.

‘We didn’t go to the forest,’ I replied. ‘We had to sing.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ my mother said, looking excitedly at Aunt Doris. ‘I always wanted him to take singing lessons. You see this Jungvolk is doing something worthwhile after all with our children.’

My aunt looked suspicious. ‘What did you sing?’ she asked me. ‘Why don’t you sing for us?’

‘No, I don’t like the songs,’ I said reluctantly, adding, ‘I don’t remember them.’

‘Come on now, let’s have it,’ my aunt said.

So I half sang and half quietly spoke out the two lines about the corpses in the lake and the knives and throats. There was a long silence. Then my aunt turned to my mother. ‘I told you!’ she said indignantly. ‘These people are evil!’ And then, turning back to me, ‘You don’t have to go there again – ever!’

I remember being very happy at this pronouncement and going to my room, where I took off my uniform and went back to reading my book: one of Tolstoy’s stories. My room wasn’t much of a room actually; it wasn’t much bigger than my bed. This was because it had been divided into two, with a bathroom and toilet in one half, separated by a thin wooden wall, which was not very soundproof, with the door from my room leading into the kitchen. It did provide me with some privacy, however, and gave me the solitude to concentrate upon my latest book.

About a week later I was told that my grandmother was coming to Berlin and that she would be staying at my aunt’s place. So, one afternoon, my mother and I took the tram down the Ku’damm and I was dropped in front of the apartment building where my aunt lived. My mother was hurrying to get to a rehearsal and she rushed off before seeing my grandmother. My mother did not get on with Grete, my grandmother, something I only found out much later on.

A young man opened the door. This was my cousin Peter, who must have been about 20 or so. He always looked very neat and superior and he made me feel inadequate. Looking down at me from above, he said, ‘Ah, there’s little Jürgen, to see his grandmother.’

My aunt had a large apartment and in the living room there was a tall birdcage. In it perched an old grey parrot. Whenever anyone came into the room he always said ‘Good morning’ in a squeaky voice. He could also sing a song, ‘I had a comrade, you can’t find a better one’, which was an old military song about a soldier who had been killed in the war. I think Peter must have taught him. Peter was passionate about the military, something that greatly distressed my aunt. I said good morning to the bird and followed Peter out onto the balcony, where my aunt and grandmother were sitting having their kaffeeklatsch.

It was a sunny autumn afternoon and the low sun shone through the yellow leaves of the birch and chestnut trees, the light playing against the wall of the balcony. It was an idyllic scene. Everything glimmered and sparkled, with the balcony wall covered with colourful daisies that grew from horizontal hanging flower-pots. I sat down next to my grandmother. She asked me a lot of questions about my mother and how we lived and whether I had enough to eat. She said that she was going to take me shopping and buy me clothes. She also asked if I would like to come and stay with her in Thuringia over the summer holidays, but I didn’t like the idea of this because my mother had told me that life with Granny was very difficult. While I was busy consuming numerous poppyseed cakes (my favourite), I overheard her complaining to my aunt about her health. ‘It’s my colon,’ she said. ‘I don’t have enough red blood cells. My liver isn’t working any more and I have to eat minced, fresh, raw liver every day. Every day I have stomachache.’

Just then Peter came onto the balcony. ‘I have to go to my meeting,’ he announced. ‘Jürgen – I will take you home. Come.’

Peter had a brand-new Volkswagen. He was very boastful about it. We had to thank our Leader, he told me. Our Leader was going to give all Germans a car. ‘We’ll all have Volkswagens!’ he shouted in a self-satisfied tone as he stopped in front of our apartment. Before I could get out, he held me back and said: ‘You are the future of our Germanic race and you must listen to our Leader.’

I was glad to get home. I thought Peter was mad and I felt sorry for my aunt. However, soon I was reading an interesting book called From Double Eagle to Red Flag, which I had found in the local library. The author was the Cossack General Krasnov and it was about the Russian Civil War. For the next few weeks I became deeply involved with the history of the Russian Revolution. At the time I wasn’t aware that since the twenties many of the Berlin communists had ended up in concentration camps, had disappeared or had been murdered by the Nazis.

One morning there was a loud banging at our door and, when I opened it, I saw before me a policeman and, next to him, the Hauptjungzugführer, in his full uniform.

‘Why have you not called in for duty?’ the Hauptjungzugführer shouted.

The policeman, who looked horrified by the Hauptjungzugführer shouting at me, interrupted him and said in a kindly voice, ‘We want to speak to your parents.’

‘My mother’s not at home at the moment,’ I said.

The youth leader put his hands on his belt. ‘You’re in big trouble!’ he told me.

I opened the door wider and asked them to come inside and we all stood in our kitchen.

‘You must report for duty or I’ll have to take you to the station,’ the policeman said.

‘I’ve been very ill. I haven’t got enough red blood cells,’ I said, remembering my grandmother’s complaint and hoping that this explanation would quieten them down.

‘You need to bring us a doctor’s letter,’ said the youth leader, looking somewhat puzzled. ‘Meanwhile, I will expect to see you next Sunday. We have to train for the big parade.’

‘Get your mother to call me at the police station,’ the policeman added. ‘It’s important that she does so.’

I conveyed the message and the next day my mother phoned the police station. She was told that she was responsible for her son doing his duty for the Fatherland. This was the law and she had to obey it, like everyone else. My mother told me she thought it was absurd for a ten-year-old to be expected to do his duty for the Fatherland but said I had better play along with these confused people.

On Sunday, once again wearing my uniform, I arrived at the school playground and joined my group. We had to march up and down, turning right, turning left, and then marching in twos and threes and fours, all the time singing. This time, before we were discharged, we had to stand to attention and raise our right arms and sing the German national anthem, followed by the ‘Horst Wessel’ song. This was a long song and soon my right arm began to droop, so I had to support it with my left.

The following Sunday we had to march to a large building where there was a shooting range. We were each given an air rifle and instructed to shoot at targets. To my surprise, the group leader rushed up to me, smiling, with the target card in his hands. ‘Bullseye every time!’ he shouted, showing me my card, which had all my six shots in the centre. ‘Come on. Do it again. I’ll put up another target card,’ he said. So I shot again, with much the same result. The other boys congratulated me and called the instructor, who was a Hitler Youth leader and much older than us. After examining my target cards, he announced: ‘We must have him at our next tournament.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘You’d make a good sniper. You must join the special unit.’ Everyone looked at me with admiration. The instructor looked at our group leader. ‘Bring him back on Wednesday,’ he said.

Now I’m in real trouble, I thought. How am I going to get out of this? The very last thing I wanted to do was any military service. I hated all the shouting, marching and wearing a uniform.

There was a small cinema on my route home from school and often I would go and see a film there in the afternoon. This cinema, like many others, showed the newsreel after the main feature, so that you could leave after the feature film if you wanted to. This suited me fine because I never liked watching the newsreels, with their endless marching and shooting and the Leader constantly shouting. Some of the feature films I saw were very funny. Once I even fell off my chair, I was laughing so much. I loved Laurel and Hardy (in German we called them ‘Fat and Stupid’) and I adored Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush. In his silly way, despite looking clumsy and hopeless, Chaplin always somehow made good and overcame all opposition, however outnumbered he was. In the passage to our flat there was a big full-length mirror. I used to practise Buster Keaton’s expressionless, deadpan face in front of it, which I trained myself to hold for five minutes. I also tried to copy Chaplin’s gawky walk and Stan Laurel’s bewildered look. I thought maybe I should become a clown when I was older.

In any event, the day after my shooting calamity, I phoned my aunt. I told her I didn’t want to be in the sniper unit and asked her what to do. She replied, ‘What did you have for breakfast last Sunday?’

‘I don’t think I had any breakfast last Sunday,’ I said.

‘You see, my boy, you were too worked up and intense,’ she explained. ‘This is what you do. Before you go on Wednesday morning you must have a very big breakfast. Four boiled eggs, lots of bread and butter and jam, and drink lots of hot milk. Put some chocolate with the milk. That will fix you up and you will be very sleepy. Good luck.’

My mother couldn’t believe what she saw on Wednesday morning as I stuffed myself with food. To be on the safe side, I had six eggs and half a loaf of bread and I ended up so stuffed that I could hardly put my uniform on. When I arrived together with our group leader at the shooting range, a number of much older boys were already there, shooting at targets. They were all in Hitler Youth uniforms. I switched on my Buster Keaton face, which was not too difficult because I was beginning to feel sick with all that food in my stomach. The instructor saw me and made his way over. ‘There is our sharpshooter,’ he said, dragging me by the arm across to the range. ‘Come. Show them how to shoot!’ He spoke loudly so that everyone could hear.

Well, they all made space for me and I put myself in a shooting position, although I felt very uncomfortable from my over-full stomach. Someone put a new card in the box. There was total silence. I waited as long as I could and then pressed the trigger, again and again, six times. With a deliberate, erect stride, the instructor walked to the target, looked at it, and took the card out of the box. He stood with his back to us, not moving. No one made a sound. Then he turned round. He was furious. ‘This must be a mistake,’ he said, looking straight into my eyes as he advanced towards me.

I was scared to death. I switched to Laurel’s bewildered look.

The instructor tore up the card and shouted at one of the boys. ‘Put in another card!’ Then he bent over and put his face close to mine. ‘You had better get it right this time,’ he said.

By now I was trembling and my stomach was grumbling but I shot again and scored one bullseye. The other five shots were on the card but they were not nearly good enough to make a fuss about. So, after being humiliated and shouted at, I got home a happy boy. I was not going to be in the sharpshooter unit after all.

Later that year I found my new hero in Karl May’s book Winnetou, the chief of the Mescalero Apache. Winnetou and the white man, Old Shatterhand, became blood brothers during the American fights between the invading whites and the inhabitants of the American Wild West. It was a story about rights and peace, honour and comradeship, and its philosophy had a profound effect on me. In American films the Indians always lost and were portrayed as being devious and deceitful. This made me feel very depressed – you can’t always believe what you see in the cinema.

I may have been only ten years old but I was fully aware of the nervousness of those around me whenever the Leader was mentioned. Meanwhile, the grip of the Nazi regime seemed to be getting more oppressive all the time. There were stricter regulations about what people could or could not do. I noticed that my mother and her friends often spoke in hushed voices when discussing the state of the country.

On the fourth floor of our building lived the Schultzes – Frau Schultze and her husband. Most afternoons and nights Frau Schultze worked as an usherette at the Universum Cinema down the Ku’damm, but once a week she would come and fetch our washing and clean our flat. I had great fun with her on the days she came to us. She was easily startled and sometimes I’d surprise her by jumping up from behind the sofa and enjoy seeing her run away squealing with shock, although she would often return shrieking with laughter. She knew all the popular romantic films by heart and sometimes she managed to smuggle me into the cinema, which also showed some American cowboy films.

It was my job to climb the stairs up to the fourth floor to collect our washing and here I would sometimes find Herr Schultze playing the accordion. I liked Herr Schultze, although he never said much. In the mornings I’d see him going off to work with an old attaché case under his arm, but at night, when we had to go down into the air raid shelter, which was a reinforced part of the cellar in our building, he would keep us entertained with all the latest songs. Everybody sang along to his music. The people of the Hinterhof would all sit together in the small space, which had a crate of beer in the corner. I drank my first bottle of beer in this cellar. It made me tipsy and I started to perform like Charlie Chaplin and everybody laughed.

By 1942 the air raids increased and they also became more intense. When the anti-aircraft fire got closer and louder we could hear the bombs whistling – sharp, high-pitched and shrill. I got to know that when they made that noise the bombs were far away, and that a short, ear-piercing screech meant they were closer, perhaps overhead. Then everything would shake. Once there was a deafeningly loud crash and the lights went out. We sat in darkness while the noise of the bombs continued to get louder and louder. Herr Schultze lit a candle and when I saw all the frightened faces around me I began to feel alarmed. What would happen if we were all buried under the building? However, after a short while, the noise slowly receded and finally the sirens sounded the all-clear.

I still went almost every Sunday to the Jungvolk, where we had to do gymnastics and, of course, the endless marching. I consistently mixed up my left and right when marching and became a nuisance to the group, who wanted to be the top group at the great march in front of the Nazi leaders that was about to take place. On the big day I took the washing up to Frau Schultze on the fourth floor, having deliberately put my uniform brown shirts and all my grey socks in the pile of dirty laundry. This meant that when I arrived at the meeting for the grand parade I was wearing red socks and a colourful blouse of my mother’s. All hell broke loose. The boys laughed and the Jungzugführer nearly had a fit. They called the Hauptjungzugführer, who shouted at me until he got red in the face. With my Buster Keaton face on, I jabbered away about my washing and how everything was dirty. My punishment was that I was not allowed to march in front of the leaders. I didn’t go back for some weeks and in the end persuaded my aunt to write a letter saying that I had to go and stay with my grandparents in Thuringia because I wasn’t well.

Later, during the summer holidays, I did go and stay with my grandparents. They lived in Mühlhausen, a small town dating back to the Middle Ages, some 300 kilometres south-west of Berlin. It had a defensive wall built right around it, with look-out towers and gates to protect the centre, and narrow cobblestoned streets lined with small fourteenth-century houses with tiny doors and windows. In the basement of the town hall there was a torture chamber with some macabre machines in it, such as a wooden stretcher that pulled people apart, and coffins with sharp spikes. I remember wondering why this small town, with its numerous lavish cathedral-like churches, needed a torture chamber.

My grandparents – Gretchen and Heinrich – lived on the edge of the town in an apartment above a bakery. It seemed to be quite large but I never got to explore it because most of the doors inside the flat were kept locked. My grandmother kept the keys on a belt around her waist. We mainly lived in the kitchen, where we cooked on a big fire stove. It was here that we ate our meals and where we socialised during the day. There was a small piece of linoleum just inside the door that led off the street. This was where you left your shoes and put on your slippers. In the kitchen, by the door, there was a water tap and a round metal sink and beneath the sink a bucket in which my grandfather and I had to pee; my grandmother used the toilet that was on the staircase outside the flat. I was given the job of emptying the bucket, which I did once a day. Next to the kitchen was the bedroom. In it were two large beds with very thick feather covers, one on either side of the window. My grandmother slept in one bed and I had to sleep with my grandfather in the other, which was not very comfortable, especially as my grandfather was a very noisy sleeper and snored heavily.

Mühlhausen was situated in a valley and I remember some heavy night-time thunderstorms, with flashes of lightning and huge claps of thunder. During these storms I would see my grandmother walking up and down with a lighted candle in her hand, passing from the bedroom into the kitchen and back again. In her long white nightdress, with her white hair gleaming over her face in the flashing light, she looked like a ghost. As she paced, she would be moaning and mumbling: ‘Dear God! Dear God! We’re being punished. Forgive us our sins, dear God, my Father, Holy Father …’ My grandfather remained oblivious to my grandmother’s distress and slept on, snoring and farting his way through the storm. These nights felt like scenes from a Frankenstein movie I had seen at the Universum Cinema.

Everything in the flat was locked up, even the kitchen cupboard where my grandmother kept packets of cigarettes, cigars and packets of tobacco. My grandfather loved to smoke and he made up his own mixture of tobacco, which he kept in a tin box. He used rosebuds mixed with pipe tobacco, as well as leaves collected from the forest. These he dried, neatly laid out on a newspaper on the floor in a corner of the bedroom. On special days, like Sundays, my grandmother would give him a couple of cigars. He always complained that the cigars had been locked up too long and so had dried up. Then came the usual argument. ‘Why do you have to lock up my cigars?’ he would say to my grandmother. ‘They’ve been there for years.’

‘You’re too greedy,’ she would reply, pointing skywards with her index finger. ‘It’s a sin to be greedy.’

On Sundays my grandmother made us go to church, although she didn’t attend services herself. My grandfather had to put on his best suit, shirt and tie and I had to wear my best outfit. The church was at the other end of the town and it took the two of us over half an hour walking along the old city wall to get there. By the time we eventually arrived the service had usually already started. We’d look inside and note who was preaching, so that we could tell my grandmother later on. Then we went to the nearest pub where Heinrich had a beer and a smoke and I had a non-alcoholic malt beer. We would walk back in time for lunch, satisfied that Gretchen wouldn’t know that we had not attended the service – she was always kept informed by our devoutly Catholic neighbours as to who was preaching.

Lunch was usually a pea stew with pork knuckles, which Heinrich had prepared the day before, as he did all the cooking. During and after lunch I had to sit still on my little bench in the kitchen and try not to make my clothes dirty while Gretchen got ready to go out. When we were all ready, we left and slowly, at a pace set by my grandmother, walked for about an hour to go and see my aunt and cousins at their family’s restaurant, which was attached to the town’s slaughter-house. Every now and then during the walk, we had to stop because we met a person Gretchen knew. With tears in her eyes, she would whine and moan about her colon, her red blood cells (of which she had too few) and her liver, and tell the acquaintance what the doctor had to say about it all.

The restaurant belonged to my Aunt Irmgard’s mother. Irmgard was married to my mother’s brother Josef and they had three children. These were my cousins – Wolfgang, who was ten, Erfried, who was nine, and young Karin, who was four. Wolfgang was wild and crazy. One day when the beer wagon came to make a delivery and men in leather aprons came out to unload the barrels and roll them into the basement, Wolfgang unhooked the horses from the carriage. The wagon was pulled by two huge cart-horses and Wolfgang jumped up on one of them and went galloping down the street, shouting and laughing, with the other horse following behind. I thought he had gone bonkers. There was a big commotion, with Irmgard and her mother and the two beer delivery men in their leather aprons running down the road trying to catch them. When they finally caught Wolfgang and led him into the restaurant, he burst into loud crying and bawling, tears running down his cheeks. As soon as my aunt let him loose, however, he ran down the passage between the tables to the door, turned around and waved his arms about, laughing and jeering, mocking everybody, before disappearing through the door. This sort of performance took place every Sunday. Wolfgang was always up to something bizarre.

One day I was helping my grandmother do the washing. I sat on the floor in the pantry with an enamel dish in front of me, rubbing wet soap into our socks and underwear, while Gretchen stood over me giving me instructions. The pantry was quite big, with rows of jam jars and bottles of fruit juices on shelves and a number of salamis and a ham hanging in the corner, which looked rather old and dried up. I tried to persuade Gretchen to show me what was behind one of her locked doors and eventually, reluctantly, she agreed. ‘But you mustn’t touch anything,’ she said. I stood close behind her as she unlocked the first door. ‘Stay on the newspapers,’ she instructed.

It was a big room, with curtains at the windows. In it was a large cupboard with long inlaid mirrors, a settee, and a dining table covered with a lace tablecloth. There were lots of porcelain figures everywhere, some candle-holders, and a glass cupboard full of patterned plates and glasses. On the floor leading to another door, with windows, sheets of newspaper had been laid down and I followed Gretchen, walking on them carefully. Gretchen opened the cupboard doors and I saw rows of suits on hangers and a fur coat, from which a strong smell of moth-balls exuded. ‘These are Grandpa’s suits and this is my fur coat,’ Gretchen said proudly.

I walked up to the next door and looked through the window to see a summer room with windows all around, furnished with bamboo tables and chairs, including a rocking chair. Laid out on the table was a porcelain tea-set with cups and plates and little forks and spoons. I was about to try the handle when my grandmother stopped me. ‘No, stop! Nobody goes into my summer room!’ she said. ‘And stay on the newspapers. I don’t want to have to polish the floor again.’

‘Why don’t we use these rooms?’ I asked.

‘They will only get dirty,’ she said.

She hesitated and then began going through the keys on her belt. She picked one out and opened the other door. I couldn’t believe it. On the other side was an almost empty room. Here, too, there were newspapers spread out all over the floor, although where they all came from I’ll never know, because my grandparents never seemed to read or buy newspapers. Actually, there were no books in the house either, except the Bible, which I never saw them read. On one side of the room I saw hundreds of eggs laid in rows along the floor, each egg with a date on it; and on the other side were rows of apples. The one piece of furniture in the room was a wooden chest in the corner.

‘What’s in there?’ I asked.

Gretchen walked across to the chest and I bent over her shoulder to see what was in it. ‘One day all this will be yours,’ she said.

Inside the chest I saw piles and piles of Deutsche mark notes, in high denominations, hundreds of millions’, perhaps even billions’, worth. The chest was full to the top. I had heard about the economic crash of the twenties, when you bought a loaf of bread for a million marks, but I had never imagined so many banknotes really existed.

‘This is worth nothing,’ I said.

‘It will be. One day it will be,’ Gretchen replied.

Heinrich was a postman. I think he must have been a postman general because he wore a smart blue uniform with a cap on his head and on each collar of his jacket was a square of velvet with four little gold stars, which made him look very important. However, when he came back from work, he would change into his old post office uniform jacket. Often Heinrich would take me to the nearby forest to collect wild strawberries. One sunny day, on the way there, we passed through some cornfields and crossed a small stream that was so clear you could see little fish swimming about in it. We walked up a path along the bank. There were apple trees on either side and Heinrich picked some apples and we sat down on a bench that looked out on the valley on one side and the forest on the other. There was a large stone next to the bench with some writing engraved on it. It was overgrown with moss. I asked Heinrich about it and he told me that some well-known person had shot himself here on the bench. He was about to tell me the story when I interrupted him. I asked him about the long scar he had on his left cheek. I had always wondered about his scar and imagined there must have been some romantic story behind it, about swordfighting perhaps.

‘Well,’ Heinrich said, ‘in 1915 I was in the infantry, fighting on the front line in France. One night I was sent out on patrol with two other men to see what the French were up to. That night it was very dark and we were walking through deep grass and bushes as we approached what we had been told was a deserted French village. Suddenly we heard voices and one of my men stumbled on a slope, causing a lot of noise. There was a shot and then all hell broke loose, with shooting coming from everywhere. I was knocked over by a bullet that hit me in the face – it was that bullet that caused the scar you can see now – and the two men standing behind me fell down dead. This was a terrible time. I was on the ground and lying beside me were my two dead comrades. I whispered to them but they said nothing and it became obvious that they were dead. There was nothing much I could do and so I stayed where I was, not moving, for what seemed like ages. After a while, I heard whispering voices, then someone struck a match and I saw a flicker of light nearby and smelt the aroma of some strong tobacco. Whoever it was, they must have been very close to me. Any moment the French could find me. I thought I can’t stay here and do nothing, so I stood up and shouted, Vive la France! Now you won’t believe it, but as soon as I said Vive la France!, all around me I heard shouts of Vive la France! from the French soldiers. Well, I just walked away and found my way back to my unit. So that’s how I got the scar.’

I still remember the glint in my grandfather’s eyes as he told me of his lucky escape. I thought of the unbelievable story of Baron Munchausen, who tells of jumping on a cannonball as it left the fired gun to inspect the enemy’s position … and then jumping over to another cannonball which came from the enemy’s guns and returning to report to his generals.

After sitting there a while, Heinrich and I got up off the bench and walked into the forest. The forest was dense, but before you got into it there was a wide fire-break with tall grass and blackberry bushes and wild strawberries. Heinrich reached into his old attaché case and pulled out an empty milk bottle. He handed it to me and said, ‘Fill it up.’ The strawberries were very small but they tasted much better than the big ones we got in the shops. Another time when we went walking together we disturbed a boar, which ran away through the deep underbrush into the forest. We filled up our bottles and went back home.

When Heinrich returned from his weekly inspection tour, which meant visiting village post offices in the district, he always brought back presents he had received from the local farmers, such