SKINS BENEATH THE SKIN

TODAY, AS IN years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great: He was going on twelve, though he still loved sitting in his mother’s lap, when such and such began and ended. But can something that had a beginning and an end be pinpointed with such precision? In my case it can.

My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war broke out in several places at once. It began with an unmistakable bang – the broadsiding of a ship and the approach of dive-bombers over the Neufahrwasser dock area, which lay opposite the Polish military base at Westerplatte, and, farther off, the carefully aimed shots of two armoured reconnaissance cars during the battle for the Polish Post Office in the Old Town of Danzig – and was heralded closer to home by our radio – a Volksempfänger, ‘people’s receiver’ – which stood on the sideboard in the living room. Thus the end of my childhood was proclaimed with words of iron in a ground-floor flat of a three-storey building on Labesweg, in Langfuhr.

Even the time of day sticks in my mind. From then on, the airport of the Free State near the Baltic Chocolate factory handled more than just civilian planes. From the skylight in the roof of our building we could see smoke mounting duskily over the Free Port each time there was a new attack and a light wind from the north-west.

But the moment I try to remember that distant artillery fire from the Schleswig-Holstein, which had been retired from active duty after the Battle of Jutland and could no longer be used as anything but a training ship for cadets, and the layered sounds of the Stukas or Stutzkampfflugzeug, ‘dive-bombers’ – so called because high above the combat zone they would tip to one side, then lunge down on their target, releasing their bombs at the last moment – I am faced with a question: Why go back to my childhood and its clear and immutable end date, when everything that happened to me between milk teeth and permanent ones – my first day at school, scraped knees, marbles, the earliest secrets of the confessional and later agonies of faith – all merged in the jumble of jottings that has since been associated with a person who, no sooner had he been put down on paper, refused to grow and shattered all manner of glass with his song, kept two wooden sticks at the ready, and thanks to a tin drum made a name for himself that thereafter existed in quotable form between book covers and claims immortality in heaven knows how many languages?

Because this as well as that deserves to be part of the record. Because something flagrantly significant could be missing. Because certain things at certain times fell into the well before the lid went on: the holes I left uncovered until later, growth I could not halt, the linguistic give-and-take I had with lost objects. And let this, too, be said: because I want to have the last word.

MEMORY LIKES TO play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph: The tarpaper roof of the shed behind our building shimmered in the July heat and in the still air smelled of malt lozenges …

The washable collar of my primary school teacher, Fräulein Spollenhauer, was made of celluloid and was so tight it put creases in her neck …

The propeller-shaped bows in the hair of the girls on the Zoppot Promenade when the police band played its snappy melodies …

My first Boletus edulis …

When we were excused from school because of the heat …

When my tonsils flared up again …

When I swallowed my questions …

The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth. What happened before and after the end of my childhood knocks at the door with facts and went worse than wished for and demands to be told now this way, now that, and leads to tall tales.

WHEN WAR BROKE out to a spell of glorious late-summer weather in Danzig and environs, and the Westerplatte’s Polish defenders capitulated after seven days of resistance, I, that is, the boy I apparently was, gathered up a handful of bomb-and shell-splinters near the Neufahrwasser dock, which was easily accessible by tram via Saspe and Brösen, and traded them, at a time when the war seemed to exist only in radio bulletins, for stamps, coloured picture cards from cigarette packets, books both dog-eared and hot off the press – including Sven Hedin’s Voyage Through the Gobi Desert – and heaven knows what else.

An imprecise memory sometimes comes a matchstick’s length closer to the truth, albeit along crooked paths.

It is mostly objects that my memory rubs against, my knees bump into, or that leave a repellent aftertaste: the tile stove … the frame used for beating carpets behind the house … the toilet on the half-landing … the suitcase in the attic … a piece of amber the size of a dove’s egg …

If you can still feel your mother’s hair-clips or your father’s handkerchief knotted at four corners in the summer heat or recall the exchange value of various jagged grenade-and bomb-splinters, you will know stories – if only as entertainment – that are closer to reality than life itself.

THE PICTURE CARDS I so eagerly collected in my boyhood and youth were obtained with coupons that came in the packs out of which my mother tapped her cigarettes after closing the shop. ‘Ciggies’, she called the accessories to her modest vice, and celebrated the nightly ritual with a glass of Cointreau. If the mood was upon her, she could make smoke rings hover.

The pictures I lusted after were colour reproductions of European masterpieces. From them I learned early on to mispronounce the names of Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Caravaggio. The naked back of a reclining woman gazing into a mirror held up by a winged boy has been inextricably coupled in my mind since childhood with the name of Velázquez. What left the deepest imprint on me in Jan van Eyck’s Singing Angels was the profile of the hindmost angel: what I would have given to have curly hair like him or like Albrecht Dürer. Of the Dürer self-portrait hanging in the Prado in Madrid one might ask: Why did the master paint himself wearing gloves? Why are the strange cap and right lower sleeve so conspicuously striped? What makes him so self-assured? And why did he write his age – he was all of twenty-six – under the window ledge?

Today I know that a cigarette-picture service in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld supplied these magnificent reproductions for the coupons as well as square albums, which had to be ordered separately. Now that I have reclaimed all three albums, thanks to my Lübeck gallery that maintains a second-hand bookshop on Königstrasse, I can confirm that the number of copies of the Renaissance volume, published in 1938, ran to at least 450,000.

Turning page after page, I see myself at the living-room table, pasting in the pictures. This time it is the late Gothic as represented by the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch: the saint in a group of very human-looking beasts. It is almost a ritual, the glue squirting out of the yellow Uhu tube …

Many collectors, hopelessly gone on art, probably took to smoking immoderately. I, however, took advantage of all the smokers who had no use for their coupons. I accumulated, traded, and pasted in more and more pictures, relating to them initially as a child would, but later with increasing sensitivity: Parmigianino’s lanky Madonna, whose head budding on a long neck towers above the pillars that soared heavenward in the background, aroused the twelve-year-old to rub himself ardently, angel-like, against her right knee.

I lived through pictures, and because the son was so set on a complete collection, the mother in addition to the takings from her moderate consumption – she was a devoted smoker of flat, gold-tipped Egyptian cigarettes – slipped him a number of coupons contributed by one or another customer who couldn’t care less about art. Sometimes the grocer father would bring the much-coveted coupons home from his business trips. My cabinetmaker grandfather’s apprentices, diligent smokers all, also subscribed to my cause. The albums, full of blank spaces surrounded by explanatory texts, must have been Christmas or birthday presents.

I guarded all three as a single treasure: the blue album, which contained Gothic and early Renaissance art; the red album, which regaled me with the high Renaissance; and the golden yellow one, in which I was still trying to piece together the Baroque. I was distressed by the blanks calling for Rubens and van Dyck. I lacked reinforcements. Once the war began, the coupon boom died down. Civilian smokers turned into soldiers who puffed on their Junos and R6s far from home. One of my most reliable suppliers, a coachman at the local brewery, was killed during the battle for Modlin Fortress.

Then other series started competing: animals, flowers, glossies of German history, and the powdered faces of popular movie stars.

Besides, early in the war every household began to receive ration cards, and these included special slips for the consumption of tobacco products. However, as I had managed to secure a basic education in art history with the help of the Reemtsma cigarette company in pre-war times, the officially ordained shortage did not affect me inordinately. I could fill in the gaps by and by. I was, for example, able to trade Raphael’s Dresden Madonna, of which I had a duplicate, for Caravaggio’s Cupid, a deal that did not pay off fully until later.

EVEN AS A ten-year-old I was able to tell Hans Baldung, called Grien, from Matthias Grünewald; Frans Hals from Rembrandt; and Filippo Lippi from Cimabue – all at first glance.

Who painted the Madonna in the rose bower? Or the Madonna with the blue mantle and apple and Child? Quizzed by the mother, who covered the title and painter’s name with two fingers, the son answered without missing a beat.

In these domestic guessing games and in school too I was an A student – at least in art. From my first year at the gymnasium I was utterly hopeless when it came to mathematics, chemistry, and physics. I was perfectly good at doing sums in my head but had trouble making equations with two unknowns come out right on paper. Until my second year I could compensate with As and Bs in German, English, history, and geography, and even my much-praised sketches and watercolours, whether done from nature or my imagination, seemed to help, but third-year Latin tipped the balance, and I had to repeat the whole year along with my fellow dunces. That upset me less than it did my parents: from early on I had prepared escape routes leading into the blue yonder.

Nowadays, a grandfather’s confession that at school he was partly lazy, partly unambitious, but in the end an out-and-out dunce is not much comfort to grandchildren suffering from low marks or inept teachers. They groan as if they have pedagogical boulders hung round their necks, as if school were a penal colony, as if the demands of the classroom sour their sweetest dreams. Well, playground anxiety never troubled my sleep.

WHEN I WAS a child – before I donned the red school cap, before I started collecting cigarette cards – I would go down to one of the beaches along Danzig Bay as soon as summer with its endless promise came, and mould the wet sand into the high towers and walls of a citadel which I peopled with fantastical characters. Over and over the sea buried the structure, its towering turrets collapsing noiselessly. And yet again wet sand ran through my fingers.

‘Kleckerburg’ is the title of a long poem I wrote in the mid-sixties, in other words, when the forty-year-old father of three sons and a daughter seemed to have settled into a bourgeois existence. Like the hero of his first novel, its author had made a name for himself by trapping his dual self between the covers of a book and taking it thus tamed to market.

The poem is about my background and the sounds of the Baltic. ‘Born in Kleckerburg, west of,’ it begins, then poses questions: ‘Born when? And where? Why?’ In a verbal torrent it evokes loss and memory, lost and found in sentence fragments: ‘The gulls are not gulls but.’

At the end of the poem, which stakes out my territory between the Holy Ghost and Hitler’s photograph, conjuring the beginning of the war with shell-splinters and muzzle-flashes, childhood peters out. Only the Baltic keeps going, in German, in Polish: ‘Blubb, pifff, pshsh …’

THE WAR WAS in its infancy when a cousin of my mother, Uncle Franz, a postman who took part in the defence of the Polish Post Office on the Heveliusplatz, was summarily executed by the Germans – along with nearly all the survivors of that brief battle. The military judge who pronounced, justified, and signed the death sentence went on pronouncing and signing sentences in Schleswig-Holstein long after the war, unscathed. A common story during Chancellor Adenauer’s interminable term of office.

Later I adapted the skirmish over the Polish Post Office to my narrative prose style, changing the personnel and inserting a chatty description of the fall of a house of cards. My family was much less chatty. Our suddenly absent uncle, much beloved above and beyond or despite his politics and a frequent guest, along with his children, Irmgard, Grego, Magda, and little Kasimir for Sunday coffee and cake or an afternoon round of skat with my parents, was no longer mentioned. His name was passed over in silence, as if he had never existed, as if everything connected with him and his family were unspeakable.

This Kashubian side of the family – my mother’s side – with its cosy parlour babble, seemed to have been swallowed up. By whom?

Nor did I, even though my childhood had ended with the onset of the war, ask any insistent questions.

Or was it because I was no longer a child that I dared not ask?

Is it only children who, as in fairy tales, ask the right questions?

Can it have been the fear of an answer that would turn my world upside down that made me hold my tongue?

A demeaning disgrace it is to find such a blot on the sixth or seventh skin of that garden-variety, readily available, memory-boosting onion. So I write about the disgrace, and the shame limping in its wake. Rarely used words wielded in the service of belated compensation as my now lenient, now stringent eyes remain focused on a boy still in shorts, snooping into hidden affairs, yet failing to ask ‘Why?’

And as I clumsily interrogate and thereby clearly overtax the twelve-year-old, I weigh each step I take in this fast-fading present, hear myself breathing, hear myself coughing, and live my way, as cheerfully as possible, towards death.

FRANZ KRAUSE, MY executed uncle, left a wife and four children, who ranged in age from somewhat older to three years younger than me. I was no longer allowed to play with them. They had to vacate their Old Town apartment on the Brabank – it had come with the job – and move to the country between Zuckau and Ramkau, where the widow had a cottage and piece of land. And there, in hilly Kashubia, the postman’s children live to this day, plagued by the usual ailments of age. They have different memories: they missed their father, while mine was too present.

This employee of the Polish Post Office was an anxious, timid family man, not made for a hero’s death, whose name appears on a bronze memorial plaque as Franciszek Krauze, and as such has entered eternity.

WHEN AFTER MUCH effort I was issued a visa for Poland in March of ’58 and travelled from Paris via Warsaw to Gdańsk, a city still emerging from rubble, to seek out the former Danzig, I poked behind the façades of the ruins and along Brösen Beach, moved on to the reading room of the Municipal Library, the grounds of the still-standing Pestalozzi School, and the living rooms-cum-kitchens of two surviving Polish Post Office clerks, and then, having gathered a modicum of raw material for the novel, I went to see the surviving relatives in the countryside. I was greeted at the door of their cottage by the executed postman’s mother, with the irrefutable: ‘Ginterchen! My, how you’ve grown!’

We had become so foreign, so alien to each other, that at first I had to assuage her doubts by producing my passport, but then she took me to see her potato field, which today lies underneath the cement runway of Gdańsk Airport.

BY THE SUMMER of the following year, the war had grown into a world war, and during our holidays at the Baltic beaches we gymnasium students would not only rehash local events but carry on about happenings beyond our borders. We were entirely taken up with the Wehrmacht’s occupation of Norway, though well into June the news bulletins were trumpeting the French campaign as a blitzkrieg and celebrating the surrender of our hereditary enemy. Rotterdam, Antwerp, Dunkirk, Paris, the Atlantic coast … each new conquest was a geography lesson: blow after blow, victory after victory.

And yet all our pre-and post-swim admiration went to ‘the heroes of Narvik’. We may have been lazing in the family bathing area, but the fjords under siege ‘up in Norway’ were where we longed to be. Here we were smeared with Nivea cream; there, we could have been covered with glory.

Thanks to the setbacks dealt the English, our never-ending hero-worship was directed at the navy, and several of us, myself included, dreamed of enlisting, if only the war lasted another three or four years, preferably in the submarine corps. Sitting there in our bathing suits, we would hold contests to see who could name the greatest number of military feats, beginning with Weddigen’s U9 submarine triumphs in World War I, then Lieutenant-Commander Prien sinking the Royal Oak, and always coming back to the ‘hard-fought victory’ at Narvik.

One day, one of our gang – his name was Wolfgang Heinrichs, an acknowledged ballad singer who would even venture an opera aria upon request, but who had a maimed left hand that made him unfit for the navy and therefore an object of our sympathy – said plainly, ‘You must be crazy, all of you!’

Then he counted off on the fingers of his unmaimed hand how many of our destroyers had been sunk or badly damaged at Narvik. The five fingers on that hand did not suffice.

He went into almost professional detail, pointing out that one of the 1,800-ton ships – he called it by name – had had to be grounded. He knew all the particulars of the battle, even the weaponry on England’s Warspite and its speed in knots. True, we too, seaport children that we were, could rattle off the specifications of our own and foreign vessels: the tonnage, the size of the crew, the number of torpedo tubes, the year of launching, but we were surprised at how well informed he was about Narvik, because his knowledge went far beyond what had come through to us from the Wehrmacht’s daily radio bulletins.

‘You haven’t a clue about what really went on up there in the north. There were heavy losses! Damned heavy!’

Surprised or not, we simply accepted what he said. Nobody asked Wolfgang Heinrichs where he had got his amazing information. I certainly didn’t.

FIFTY YEARS LATER, when traces of what at the time was called ‘German unity’, for want of a better term, began to appear, my wife, Ute, and I visited her native island, Hiddensee. Just off the East German coast, it lies between the Baltic and a shallow bay and is less endangered by stormy tides than by the tourist trade.

There are no cars on Hiddensee, so we took a long hike over the heath to the town of Neuendorf, where we visited a childhood friend of my wife’s, Martin Gruhn, who, years after a daring rowboat escape to Sweden from the German Democratic Republic, had decided to return to the Workers’ and Peasants’ State and retire there. He did not look the part of an adventurer: he was too domestic, too settled.

Over coffee and cake we chatted about this and that: his career as a manager in the West, the many trips to India, Australia, and elsewhere he made on behalf of Krupp. He told us about his failed attempt to enter the world of joint East-West business ventures and about the only joy remaining to him, trap-fishing in local waters.

Then the obviously satisfied returnee changed the subject abruptly: he had a friend who lived in Vitte, another of the three villages on the island, who absolutely insisted that he had shared a school bench with me in Danzig. Heinrichs was his name, Wolfgang Heinrichs.

Pursuing the matter, I learned that yes, his left hand was maimed and yes, he had a good voice, ‘though he seldom puts it to use any more’.

For a while Ute and he switched exclusively to island matters, spinning yarns in which the living and the dead went on in their Low German dialect. Martin Gruhn, who had realized his boyhood dream and seen the world, proudly showed us the masks, colourful rugs, and carved fetishes on the walls. We had one last schnapps.

ON OUR WAY across the heath Ute and I searched for the house behind the dunes where Heinrichs lived with his wife. The door was opened by a giant of a man, breathing heavily. The only thing about him I recognized was his maimed hand. After a short hesitation, the school friends embraced and were somewhat moved.

We sat on the veranda, determined to be cheerful, and later all four of us went to a restaurant, for fish: crisply fried flounder. No, he had no desire any more to sing ‘Erlkönig’, but it was not long before we got to his beach talk of the summer of ’40, still a mystery to me after all the intervening years.

‘How did you know more than we did?’ I wanted to hear. ‘How did you know what we, as you put it, hadn’t a clue about? Where did you get the precise number of sunken and badly damaged destroyers at Narvik? And everything else you knew? For instance, that after a few bull’s-eyes and with two torpedoes – all fired from shore – an outdated Norwegian coastal artillery unit sank the heavy cruiser Blücher in the Oslo Fjord?’

Heinrichs’s otherwise impassive face showed the hint of a smile as he spoke. He had been roundly beaten by his father when he went home and mocked our ignorance. After all, his braggadocio could have had consequences. There were plenty of informers, not the least among schoolchildren. His father had listened regularly to British radio, and he had passed his knowledge on to his son under a strict vow of silence.

‘Right,’ Heinrichs said, his father had been a true anti-Fascist, not one of your after-the-fact, self-proclaimed variety. He said this as though he, the son, felt the need to run himself down as after the fact and self-proclaimed.

And then I heard a tale of woe that, like a muffled wail, had completely passed me by – me, his school friend – because I did not ask, because here, too, I had failed to ask questions. Not even after Wolfgang Heinrichs suddenly disappeared from school, our venerable Conradinum.

Shortly after the summer holidays, maybe even while the last grains of beach sand were trickling out of our hair, our friend was either missing or was not, and nobody was willing to query the meaning of that casually tossed ‘vanished without trace’, and I again failed to utter, swallowed the word why.

Only now, after all those years, did I learn what had happened. During the Free State period Heinrichs’s father had been a member of the German Social Democratic Party and later a Social Democrat member of Parliament, and had opposed the Nazi Party bigwigs Rauschning and Greiser and the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours camaraderie that led to the alliance between the German Nationals and the Nazis in the municipal senate. He was kept under observation until early autumn of 1940, when the Gestapo arrested him. He was sent to the concentration camp that was set up near the Frisches Haff just after Danzig was annexed to the Reich. It was named after a neighbouring fishing village, Sutthof, and could be reached by taking the narrow-gauge railway from the Werder Station in town, then the ferry that crossed the Vistula at Schiewenhorst. It was a two-hour trip.

Not long after Wolfgang’s father was arrested, his mother committed suicide, and Wolfgang and his sister were sent to their grandmother in the country, far enough away to have been forgotten by their schoolmates. Their father was eventually released from the camp to serve in a penal battalion whose job it was to clear the mines at the Russian front. The Ascension Commando was what this squad was ironically nicknamed, but despite its high mortality rate it gave him the chance to go over to the Russians.

When the Second Soviet Army marched into the smouldering heap of rubble that was Danzig in March 1945, my schoolmate’s father marched in with the victors. He searched for and found his children, and when the war was over he took them out of Poland in a protected transport reserved for German anti-Fascists and chose the port of Stralsund, in the Soviet-occupied zone, as the future home for what remained of his family.

There he was made head of the Landtag, the local parliamentary body, and as his political convictions had not been affected by the brainwashing to which he had been subjected in the concentration camp, he immediately founded a local Social Democratic association. But despite its popularity it fell on hard times after the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were forcibly amalgamated into the United Socialist Party. Heinrichs’s father refused to be brought into line from above and was harassed and threatened with arrest. An allusion was even made to the recently repopulated Buchenwald as a possible destination.

He died several years later, embittered at having been shunted aside by his comrades. His son, however, was able to complete his studies in Rostock, together with his school friend Martin Gruhn, and soon made a name for himself in the field of economics. After his rowboat escape Gruhn pursued his study of economics first in Lund and then with Karl Schiller in Hamburg, while Heinrichs made a career for himself in the all-powerful Party, serving through every regime shift, including the one from Ulbricht to Honecker. He had been rewarded in his old age with the post of director of the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, a position so prominent that no sooner had the Wall come down and the dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants ceased to exist than the West German victors, the new masters of history, had had him ‘evaluated’ – that is, reduced to a cipher.

Such had been the fate of many who were accused of falsifying their biographies and who always knew what in their actual biographies needed to be false.

By the time we visited Heinrichs in Vitte he was seriously ill. His wife gave us to understand that there was reason for concern: he complained of a tightness in his chest and had trouble breathing. Yet he still found occasional employment as a tax consultant in Stralsund and was, she assured us, getting good at finding loopholes in the system.

Wolfgang Heinrichs, a man laid low by German circumstances, died of a pulmonary embolism several months after our visit. He was a school friend, I had shared my youth with him – he sang ‘Die Uhr’ by Carl Loewe at a graduation ceremony and knew more about the navy than the rest of us put together – and he remained in my mind because I had been content to know nothing or to believe false information, because I had used my status as a child to play dumb and accepted his disappearance without a murmur, and once more dodged the word why, so that now, as I peel the onion, my silence pounds in my ears.

GRANTED, THE PAIN could be worse. But laments such as If only I’d had a strong father like Wolfgang Heinrichs and not one who, when only thirty-six and when the pressure to do so in the Free State of Danzig was not yet particularly great, joined the Nazi Party are cheap and likely to trigger the kind of laughter the cynic in me laughs whenever I hear things like If only we had … If only we were …

But I hadn’t, I wasn’t. My uncle was gone for good; my school friend had vanished. Yet the boy whose life I feel the need to trace was all too plainly present when atrocious deeds were being done. Nearly a year before the war began. Violence in broad daylight.

When shortly after my eleventh birthday synagogues in Danzig and elsewhere were set aflame and Jewish merchants’ shop windows shattered, I took no part, yet I was very much a curious spectator; I watched as the small Langfuhr synagogue on Michaelisweg, not far from my school, the venerable Conradinum, was plundered, pillaged, and set on fire by a horde of SA men. And the witness of this extremely clamorous operation, which the municipal police – perhaps because the fire was so long in kindling – simply stood by and observed, was, at most, surprised.

Nothing more. No matter how zealously I rummage through the foliage of my memory, I can find nothing in my favour. My childhood years seem to have been completely untroubled by doubt. No, I was a pushover, always game for everything that the times, which called themselves – exhilaratedly and exhilaratingly – modern, had to offer.

There was a great deal, and it was tempting. On the radio and the screen the boxer Max Schmeling was triumphant. Representatives of the Winter Charity Fund circulated with tin boxes in front of Sternfeld’s department store shouting, ‘No one shall starve! No one shall freeze!’ German racing drivers like Bernd Rosemeyer in his Mercedes Silver Arrow were the fastest. People gaped at the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg shimmering over the city or on picture postcards. The newsreels showed our Condor Legion helping to free Spain from the Red menace with the most up-to-date weapons. We re-enacted Alcázar on the playground. Only a few months earlier we had thrilled to the Olympic Games, medal by medal, and later we had a marvel of a runner in Rudolf Harbig. The Third Reich glittered in the newsreel spotlight.

During the final years of the Free State – I was ten at the time – the boy bearing my name voluntarily joined the Jungvolk, an organization that fed into the Hitler Youth. We were called Pimpfe, ‘tykes’, or – a term borrowed from the scouting movement – Wölflinge, ‘cubs’. At the top of my Christmas wish list for the year was the Jungvolk’s official uniform: cap, scarf, belt, and shoulder strap. True, I don’t recall being particularly thrilled at the idea of carrying a flag at rallies or aspiring to the braiding that went with the rank of group leader, but I did my part unquestioningly, even when the endless singing and drumming bored me to tears.

The uniform wasn’t the only thing that made the group attractive. The wishful thought of its slogan, Youth Must Be Led by Youth! was backed up by promises of overnight hikes and other outdoor activities in the woods along the beach, of campfires among the erratic blocks dragged together to form a Germanic tribal meeting ground, a Thingstätte, in the hilly countryside south of the city, of midsummer night celebrations under starry skies and hymns to the dawn in clearings facing east. We sang as if our songs could make the Reich bigger and bigger.

My unit leader, a working-class boy from Neuschottland, was barely two years older than I was, and a great guy who could tell a joke and walk on his hands. I admired him, laughed when he laughed, and trotted after him obediently.

I was lured away from the stifling petit-bourgeois atmosphere of familial obligations, away from my father, from the over-the-counter gossip of the customers, the confines of the two-room flat where the only space I could call my own was the low niche under the sill of the right-hand living-room window. Its shelves were piled high with books and my cigarette picture-card albums. It was also where I kept the modelling clay that I turned into my first figurines, my Pelikan drawing pad, a set of twelve watercolours, a rather lackadaisical stamp collection, a pile of miscellaneous junk, and my secret notebooks.

Few things do I see so clearly in retrospect as that niche under the windowsill, my refuge for years. (My sister, Waltraut, who was three years younger, was allotted the niche under the left-hand window.)

Which leads me to something that can be said in my favour, namely, that I was not only a Pimpf in uniform who did his best to march in step while singing, ‘Our Fluttering Flag Drives Us On’, I was also a house mouse who guarded his niche treasures jealously. Even in formation I was a loner, though I took care not to stand out; I was a schemer whose mind was forever elsewhere.

Besides, the move from primary to secondary school had made me a Conradiner. I was allowed to wear the traditional red student cap decorated with a golden C and felt entitled to be snooty: I was a student at an elite institution, even if my parents had to pay for the privilege in instalments with money they had put away with great difficulty. How much was involved I don’t know: it was a monthly burden almost never alluded to in the son’s presence.

THE GROCERY SHOP, which adjoined a narrow hallway leading to the door to our apartment and which my mother, Helene Grass, managed single-handedly and with a keen business sense – my father, Wilhelm (Willy to everybody), dressed the shop window, dealt with the wholesalers, and penned the price tags – had a success rate of middling to poor. During the Free State period, when the currency was the gulden rather than the mark, customs restrictions made trade unpredictable. There was competition on every street corner. For permission to sell milk, cream, butter, and cheese in addition to groceries, we had to sacrifice the half of the kitchen that faced the street, which left only a windowless cubbyhole for the stove and icebox. The grocery chain Kaisers Kaffee siphoned off more and more business. The sales representatives would not deliver goods to our store unless all our bills were paid up, and too many of our customers bought on credit. The wives of customs officers, civil servants, and policemen were especially prone to adding new purchases to an old bill. They griped, they pinched pennies, they demanded discounts. Every Saturday after closing the shop, my parents would look at each other and say, ‘Once more we’ve barely broken even.’

It should therefore have been clear that my mother could not afford to give me a weekly allowance. But after endless laments on my part – everyone else in my class jangled a more or less ample supply of pocket money – she pushed over to me a well-worn ledger containing rows and rows of the debts of customers who paid on credit – ‘on tick’, as she put it. I open it up.

I see a neatly penned list of names, addresses, and amounts of money owed, occasionally going down but more often going up, accurate to the last penny. It is the record of a businesswoman with every reason to worry about her business, as well as a mirror of the general economic situation at a time of growing unemployment.

‘The sales reps will be coming on Monday morning and they’ll want to see cash,’ she always told me. All the same she never made either me, or later, my sister feel that the school fees she had to fork out every month put us under any special obligation to her. She never said, Look at the sacrifice I’m making for you. Show your appreciation.

She, who had little patience with cautious child-raising methods that took long-term consequences into account – when an argument between my sister and me got a bit too loud, she would say, ‘Just a second’ to her customer, run out of the shop to wherever we were, and instead of asking ‘Who started it?’ would simply slap both of us without a word, return immediately to the shop, and serve the customer as cordially as you please – she, who was so gentle and warm-hearted, so easily moved to tears, who called everything she thought beautiful ‘genuinely romantic’, she, the most concerned of all mothers, pushed the ledger over to me and offered to give me in cash – in guldens and pfennigs – five per cent of the debts I collected if I was willing to make time – in the afternoon or whenever I was free from the (in her eyes) idiotic Jungvolk meetings – to visit the defaulting debtors, and armed with nothing but a saucy tongue (which I was not lacking!) and a notebook full of neat figures urge them most compellingly if not to settle their debts outright at least to pay them off in instalments. She gave me just one specific piece of advice: ‘Friday is payday. Friday evening is the best time to collect.’

And so at the age of ten or eleven I became a resourceful and, when all was said and done, successful debt collector. I was not to be bought off by an apple or cheap sweets. I came up with words capable of melting hardened debtors’ hearts. Even the most pious, the most unctuous excuses sailed past my ears. I was not deterred by threats. I would stick my foot in the door when I felt it was about to be slammed. I was particularly aggressive on Fridays, making reference to pay packets, but not even Sundays were sacred for me. And on holidays, great and small, I was at it all day long.

I soon recovered such significant amounts that my mother felt impelled, now for ethical reasons, to reduce her son’s extravagant percentage from five to three. I accepted the cut begrudgingly. Her response: ‘You were getting too big for your britches.’

In the end I was better off financially than many of my classmates, even those who lived in high-roofed Uphagenweg or Steffensweg private houses with colonnaded doorways and balconies and terraces and servants’ entrances and whose fathers were doctors and lawyers and grain merchants and even factory and shipowners. My earnings piled up in an empty tobacco tin hidden in my window niche. I spent it on a supply of sketching pads and on books, including several volumes of Brehm’s Lives of Animals. The film addict in me could now afford to visit the most out-of-the-way Old Town film palaces, even the Roxi in the Oliva Castle Gardens, return tram ticket included. He missed not one offering there.

During those Free State days a Fox Movietone newsreel ran before every documentary and feature film. I enjoyed watching Charlie Chaplin eat his shoe, laces and all, in The Gold Rush; I laughed at Laurel and Hardy; I was fascinated by Harry Piel. As for Shirley Temple, I found her silly and only moderately cute. Fortunately I also had the funds to see Buster Keaton, whose funny scenes made me sad and sad scenes made me laugh.

Was it in February, for her birthday, or was it for Mother’s Day? In any case, I wanted to give my mother something special, something from abroad, some time before the beginning of the Second World War. I remember standing in front of the shop windows, contemplating the possibilities, luxuriating in the agony of choice, vacillating between an oval crystal bowl in Sternfeld’s department store and an electric iron.

In the end I decided on the beautifully designed Siemens appliance, whose exorbitant price the mother sternly extracted from her son, though she avoided revealing it to the rest of the family as if it were one of the seven deadly sins. No, not even the father, who knew he had reason to be proud of his competent son, was told the source of my sudden fortune. After each use, the iron disappeared into the sideboard.

I REAPED ANOTHER reward from my career as a debt collector, though I did not cash in on it till decades later and then it came in the form of prose.

I would go up and down stairs in apartment buildings where smells varied from floor to floor: on one the smell of simmering cabbage would be overwhelmed by the stink of laundry soaking; on the next a cat smell or a nappy smell would force its way through. Behind each door lurked a special rankness: a sour must or the reek of burning hair, because the mistress of the house had just been styling her locks with the curling iron. There was the odour of elderly ladies – mothballs and Uralt Lavender cologne – and the schnapps breath of the retired widower.

I learned by smelling, hearing, seeing, and by experiencing: the poverty and anxieties of large working-class families, the arrogance and fury of civil servants who cursed in stilted High German and refused to pay their bills as a matter of principle, the need of lonely women for a kitchen-table chat, the ominous silence and fierce quarrels among neighbours.

I collected it all in my internal savings account: fathers sober and fathers drunk, beating their children, mothers screaming at the top of their lungs, close-mouthed or stuttering children, whooping cough, permanent cough, sighs, curses, tears of all sizes, dog-and-canary love, people hatred, the prodigal son who has not yet returned, tales of the proletariat and tales of the petite bourgeoisie, the former in Low German larded with Polish expletives, the latter in clipped bureaucratese and shortened to arm’s length, some generated by infidelity, and others – about the strength of the spirit and the frailty of the flesh – that I did not recognize as stories until later.

That and much more – not only the blows I was dealt as I made my rounds – got stowed away in me, a stockpile for times when the professional storyteller was short of material, at a loss for words. All I had to do then was let time run backwards, sniff the smells, sort the stenches, trudge up and down the stairs, ring the doorbells or knock on the doors, mostly on Friday evenings.

It may even be that this early contact with Free State currency, pfennigs as well as guldens, and then, starting in 1939, with the Reichsmark and its much-coveted silver five-mark coins – that is, my early initiation into the financial world – made it easy for me to trade unscrupulously in black-market commodities like flints and razor blades after the war, and then later on as an author negotiate doggedly with hard-of-hearing publishers. So I have ample reason to be grateful to my mother for my early lessons in the businesslike handling of money even if they were based on debt collecting. And when my sons Franz and Raoul coerced me into drawing them a verbal self-portrait in the early seventies while I was working on From the Diary of a Snail, I came up with the lapidary ‘I was very well badly brought up’. Among other things, I was referring to my career as a debt collector.

I have forgotten to mention the bouts of tonsillitis that even after my childhood ended not only kept me out of school for days but also interfered with my money-mad professional life. The convalescent boy was fed egg yolk mixed with sugar by his mother at his bedside.