you arrange for me to get in?’
‘Let’s drive over together after office hours. Shall I pick you up at three-thirty?’
Frau Buchendorff and I took the back roads to Heidelberg. It was Friday, people were home early from work and getting their homes, yards, gardens, cars, and even the pavements ready for the weekend ahead. Autumn was in the air. I could feel my rheumatism coming on and would have preferred to have the top up, but I didn’t want to appear old and kept quiet. In Wieblingen I thought about the railway bridge on the way to Eppelheim. I’d go there in the next few days. Now, with Frau Buchendorff, the detour hardly seemed appropriate.
‘That’s the way to Eppelheim,’ she said, pointing past the small church to the right. ‘I have the feeling I should take a look at the spot, but I can’t do it yet.’
She left the car in the parking lot at Kornmarkt. ‘I called ahead. Peter shared the apartment with a friend who works at Darmstadt Technical University. I do have a key but didn’t want just to turn up.’
She didn’t notice I knew the way to Mischkey’s apartment. I didn’t try to play dumb. No one answered our ring and Frau Buchendorff opened the front door. The lobby contained cool air from the cellar: ‘The cellar goes down two levels into the hillside.’ The floor was made of heavy slabs of sandstone. Bicycles were propped against the wall decorated with Delft tiles. The letterboxes had all been broken into at some point. Only a faint light trickled through the stained-glass windows onto the worn stairs.
‘How old is the house?’ I asked as we climbed to the third floor.
‘A couple of hundred years. Peter loved it. He had lived here since he was a student.’
Mischkey’s part of the apartment consisted of two large interlinking rooms. ‘You needn’t stay here, Frau Buchendorff, while I’m looking around. We can meet afterwards in a cafe.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll manage. Do you know what you’re looking for?’
‘Hmm.’ I was getting my bearings. The front room was the study with a large table at the window, a piano and shelves against the remaining walls. In the shelves files and stacks of computer printouts. Through the window I could see the rooftops of the old town and Heiligenberg. In the second room was a bed with a patchwork quilt, three armchairs from the era of the kidney-shaped table, one of the aforementioned tables, a wardrobe, television, and a stereo system. From the window I looked left up to the castle and right to the advertising column I’d stood behind weeks ago.
‘He didn’t have a computer?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘No. He had all sorts of private stuff on the RCC system.’
I turned to the shelves. The books were about mathematics, computing, electronics, and artificial intelligence, films and music. Next to them an absolutely beautiful edition of Green
RCW honoured the oldest fisherman on the Rhine. While he was out fishing yesterday on the river, Rudi Basler, who had turned ninety-five years old, was surprised by a delegation from the RCW headed by General Director Dr H. C. Korten: ‘I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity of congratulating the grand old man of Rhine- fishing personally. Ninety-five years old and still as fresh as a fish in the Rhine.’ Our photo captures the moment in which General Director H. C. Korten shares the happiness of the celebrated man and presents him with a gift hamper…
The picture had a clear shot of the gift hamper in the foreground; it was the same one I’d received. Then I found a copy of a short newspaper article from May 1970.
Scientists as forced labourers in the RCW? The Institute for Contemporary History has picked up a hot potato. The most recent monograph from the Quarterly of Contemporary History deals with the forced labour of Jewish scientists in German industry from 1940 to 1945. According to this, renowned Jewish chemists among others worked in degrading conditions on the development of chemical war materials. The press officer of the RCW pointed to a planned commemorative publication for their 1972 centenary in which one contribution will deal with the firm’s history under National Socialism, including the ‘tragic incidents’.
Why had this been of interest to Mischkey?
‘Could you come here for a moment?’ I asked Frau Buchendorff, who was sitting in the armchair in the other room, staring out of the window. I showed her the newspaper article and asked her what she made of it.
‘Yes, recently Peter had started asking for information on this or that about the RCW. He never had before. Regarding the matter of the Jewish scientists I even had to copy the article from our commemorative publication.’
‘And where this interest stemmed from he didn’t say?’
‘No, nor did I push him to tell me anything because talking was often so difficult towards the end.’
I found the copy of the commemorative publication in the file entitled ‘Reference Chart Webs’. It was next to the computer printouts. The R, the C, and the W had caught my eye as I was casting a resigned farewell glance at the shelves. The file was full of newspaper and other articles, some correspondence, a few brochures and computer printouts. So far as I could see, all the material was linked to the RCW. ‘I can take the file with me, can’t I?’
Frau Buchendorff nodded. We left the apartment.
On the homeward journey on the motorway the roof was closed. I sat with the file on my knees and felt like a schoolboy.
Suddenly Frau Buchendorff asked me, ‘You were a public prosecutor, Herr Self, weren’t you? Why did you actually stop?’
I took a cigarette from the packet and lit it. When the pause grew too long I said, ‘I’ll answer your question, I just need a moment.’ We overtook a truck with a yellow tarpaulin, ‘Fairwell’ on it in red letters. A great name for a removal firm. A motorbike droned past us.
‘At the end of the war I was no longer wanted. I’d been a convinced National Socialist, an active party member, and a tough prosecutor who’d also argued for, and won, the death penalty. There were some spectacular trials. I had faith in the cause and saw myself as a soldier on the legal front. I could no longer be utilized on the other front following my wound at the start of the war.’ The worst was over. Why hadn’t I simply told Frau Buchendorff the sanitized version? ‘After nineteen fortyfive I first worked on my in-laws’ farm, then in a coal merchant’s, and then slowly started doing private investigations. For me, my work as a public prosecutor didn’t have a future. I could only see myself as the National Socialist I’d been, and certainly couldn’t be again. I’d lost my faith. You probably can’t imagine how anyone could believe at all in National Socialism. But you’ve grown up with knowledge that we, after nineteen forty-five, only got piece by piece. It was bad with my wife, who was a beautiful blonde Nazi and stayed that way till she became a nice, round Economic Miracle German.’ I didn’t want to say any more about my marriage. ‘Around the time of the Monetary Reform they started to draft incriminated colleagues back in. I could have returned to the judiciary then, too. But I saw what the efforts to get reinstated, and the reinstatement itself, did to my colleagues. Instead of feeling guilt they only had a sense that they’d been done an injustice when they were expelled and that this reinstatement was a kind of reparation. That disgusted me.’
‘That sounds closer to aesthetics than morality.’
‘It’s hard to tell the difference any more.’
‘Can’t you imagine anything beautiful that’s immoral?’
‘I see what you mean, Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will and so on. But since I’ve grown older I just don’t find the choreography of the masses, the bombastic architecture of Speer and his epigones, and the atomic blast brighter than a thousand suns beautiful any more.’
We had stopped by my door and it was approaching seven. I’d have liked to invite Frau Buchendorff to the Kleiner Rosengarten. But I didn’t dare.
‘Frau Buchendorff, would you care to dine with me in the Kleiner Rosengarten?’
‘That’s nice of you, many thanks, but I won’t.’
