Читать книгу Five Weeks at Humanitas - Manfred Jurgensen - Страница 10

Things fall into place, my father used to say. It seemed an evasive remark, an observation implying all will be well, revealing much about his temperament. Claus Jürgensen was not what you might call a decisive man of action. In fact, you could say he spent most of his energies trying hard to avoid confrontations of any kind. And he had the unnerving ability to disappear from time to time.

All was not well when sixty years after my birth I returned to the Flensburg Diaconate Hospital where I was delivered. I had been given permission to check the register of 1940 and immediately noticed that the documentation of my entry into the world had been tampered with. Listed in authoritative old-fashioned Gothic script, the child’s delivery was recorded as having occurred on 25 March, then crossed out and corrected in the same hand to 26 March. In a parallel column the time of birth was initially set down as 11.59 pm before that too was struck out and altered to 00.01 am. I remembered my mother and grandmother telling me I was in fact born on the very stroke of midnight. Confronting these bureaucratic adjustments to the beginning of my life, I did not know what to read into them. Was it in the name of administrative overzealousness or expediency, an obsession with accuracy or truth? Had it proved difficult to agree on the precise moment I was brought into the world? As if life were calibrated only by time!

As I left my place of birth I was in a joyful, pensive mood. It amused me to think hospital staff in 1940 had gone out of their way to avoid recording a birth at the stroke of midnight. Most likely they decided against all logic that twelve o’clock at night belonged neither to one day nor the other. If I was indeed born at precisely that time, it remained undocumented. I rather liked that. People know far too much about each other, only to draw wrong conclusions. My date of birth has forever remained classified information. It seemed midnight wasn’t a popular time either for mother and child or medical staff. I have to remember it was during the war. It seems strange that throughout my life I’ve never met anyone with whom I shared my ambivalent time of birth.

My grandmother, who coincidentally was also born on 26 March, referred to me as ‘the midnight child’. (I don’t know her precise time of birth, but that’s not surprising.) To distinguish me from my three-year-old brother Holger, I became Mother’s ‘war baby’. The name stuck. It was the one given by her before I was baptised.

Being a peacetime child was considered superior, comparable to the quality of pre-war goods. Ironically only Peacetime Holger would later join the new German army, and despite turning into a disciplinarian father, one of his teenage sons would commit murder. The year after I was born my deaf younger brother Claus arrived, and seven years later the family celebrated the birth of my sister Astrid — a remarkable record for a husband and wife living separate lives. Giving birth in Nazi Germany to three boys attracted public recognition. The Führer awarded the Nordic breeder the title of ‘German Mother’ and promptly sent her a signed copy of the New Testament. I was thereby sanctified as one of ‘Hitler’s children’. Much of what happened to me in childhood and adolescence I share with a particularly unfortunate generation referred to generically even now, not only outside Germany, as ‘Hitler’s children’. It is a curse I found difficult to bear long before I fell in love and spent eleven years with a woman who confided in me that she was brought into this world in the notorious Nazi breeding camp Lebensborn.

Don’t ask me to explain these things. My own subsequent enquiries into my family were met with evasive answers like ‘Those were special times’. During the war my parents occasionally met in health-resort hotels. By the time my father rejoined civilian life my childhood was over.

Wait a moment! Something makes me stop here. What is it? I listen for sounds. I thought I heard something. Did the intercom ring again? Standing in the middle of the room, I’m trying hard to concentrate. I must have made a mistake. All’s quiet. In fact, it’s eerily still. Not a noise anywhere. The whole of Humanitas is silent. Why should that unsettle me? I look around. There’s no one here. So who was I chattering with? Perhaps I wasn’t talking at all, merely thinking aloud. As Dr Fuessli, the University psychiatrist, warned me: ‘It’s all in the mind.’

Let me cut in here with a few factual remarks regarding my colleague’s place of birth. Who am I? Well, you may find this hard to believe, unless you accept that sometimes life throws up what might be called pointed coincidences, but my name is Manfred, too. Not really an unusual name for our generation. Like my colleague, I am a literary historian. Barely a year older, I grew up during the same post-war period. Although I don’t live in Australia, we’ve met in various countries, at conferences, congresses and during stints as visiting professors. Over the years we’ve come to know each other quite well. I consider the other Manfred my friend. When I heard about what had happened I immediately contacted the University of Basle and was referred to the ‘rest home’ or sanatorium of Humanitas. In a confidential interview its director, Dr Springer, explained to me that the newly arrived overseas patient had been asked to keep a kind of diary in which it was hoped he would record important events of his life as well as some more immediate thoughts about his present state of mind. She promised to provide me with copies of my friend’s self-portrayal, a document designed to form a vital part of the patient’s medical history. As yet I haven’t seen my colleague at Humanitas. In the judgment of Dr Springer it was far too early for that. She was adamant that in his present state, the patient could not under any circumstances be exposed to outside influence. She’d at first called it ‘interference’, but when I looked at her accusingly she settled for ‘influence’. I’m not sure what that means. I have no wish to interfere or influence. Manfred is completely unaware of my presence, and of course he knows nothing about my permission to read his papers. He probably hasn’t even started on them. But in time it may allow me to offer a few comments that might prove helpful to the doctors and anyone else who may end up reading these pages.

Where was I? Ah, yes, my friend’s colourful time and place of birth! If he has started his diary, I’m sure he’s talked about it. Like many European border towns, Flensburg had a colourful past. Although no longer as populous as during Manfred’s childhood, when the influx of war refugees from the East bolstered its inhabitants to over 100,000, it is still the largest provincial city of Schleswig. Throughout its history the ancient city of Flensburg frequently transformed itself from being Denmark’s southernmost port to Germany’s northernmost harbour.

Three historical events may serve as illustration: 1848 to 1850 marks the so-called First German-Danish War, fought over Denmark’s intention to integrate Schleswig and Holstein into the Danish nation state; in 1864 the Second German-Danish War resulted in Denmark’s surrender of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria; in 1920 a plebiscite determined North Schleswig’s annexation to Denmark. Flensburg was immediately affected by these conflicts and changes. As a result its population always included either a strong Danish or German minority. The miracle was that whilst at certain times this sponsored a dualistic culture, it never led to a divided city. I believe that Denmark’s conciliatory foreign policy did much to foster this.

Flensburgers have a reputation for being quirky, cheerful and quick-witted. Many speak a jaunty, sassy Low German dialect characterised by an almost Anglo-Saxon irony and self-deprecation. The reference to Anglo-Saxon isn’t coincidental, for the province of Angeln south of Flensburg marks the Angles’ place of origin, the Angles being the North German tribe who settled in England in the fifth century. Which, by the way, means the English county of East Anglia clearly is a misnomer, as its geographical location is west of the original Anglia. Most daily conflicts in the town of Flensburg are resolved by exchanges of witty and disarming local expressions. Some local jokes may be a bit crude, yet their tenor can only be described as flirtatious and pacifying. As we’re both philologists, I’ve often suggested my colleague should write a study on the verbal culture of his place of birth. It might inspire others to adopt a similar resolution of divided loyalties.

Sorry about the intrusion. I merely wanted to put my friend’s thoughts and feelings into a biographical context. After all, it seems that’s what the staff of Humanitas is asking him to do: write a profile, a CV that might add up to his life story. Wasn’t it Disraeli who said: ‘Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’. I only hope the psychotherapists are familiar with this and if so, bear in mind the second part of the quotation.

On 26 March 1940 Adolf Hitler decided to invade Denmark and Norway in a Blitzkrieg he called ‘ Weserübung’. Average day temperatures in Flensburg were around 3° Celsius. A fortnight later German troops entered my place of birth and occupied Denmark without a declaration of war. The day before I was born, Easter Monday, the British Navy intercepted the Turkish passenger ship Satarya carrying 2000 Jews on its way to Palestine. On Easter Sunday 5000 Lithuanian Jews were settled in British colonies. These dates and events are verifiable historical incidents, but if coincidences can sometimes speak a symbolic sign language of their own, they functioned as powerful portents for my future life.

I’m reluctant to write this down. Anything you write can be held against you. I don’t trust shrinks as readers of literature, least of all memoirs. If Freud was right and childhood enlightens, perhaps even predetermines the lives of men, I prefer to remember mine on my own. Discretion is the ultimate luxury of trust. However, as I’m supposed to record (reveal, chronicle, list?) even the earliest events of my life (‘for my own good’!), I’ll do what I’m told and scribble it down on the expensive Humanitas stationery. It might keep my captors happy.

The child born on, before or after 26 March was of course blissfully unaware of history and the world. He didn’t know yet that his life would turn out to be different from that of other children, but he was aware that his birth was not so much a delivery as a rejection. The baby already felt a physical repulsion for the woman who’d carried him. He didn’t know he’d have two mothers, at least three fathers, two countries and at least one more sister than the girl who was born seven years after him and promptly referred to in the family, with its usual precision and sensitivity, as the ‘afterthought’.

The midnight war child is given a wet nurse named Marie. Although she’s a stranger, I immediately recognise her body in creature-like knowledge as part of me, or rather as a natural provider of my needs. We love each other so much, and when she later has a child of her own, she gives it my name. In truth, I don’t remember much of the earliest period of my life, except for one thing: my first memory, the overwhelming feeling that I’d come to the wrong place. No doubt the Swiss shrinks would read a fundamental existential angst into that certainty. You can see why I’m keeping certain things to myself. As far as I know, I was neither psychic nor retarded as a baby.

I’ve been told that after the birth of my younger brother Claus my mother suffered a mental breakdown. Shocked family members pitied her for the way she treated the baby. It wasn’t clear whether he was born deaf or had lost his hearing as a result of an illness. Throughout the remaining war years she sang to the toddler or spoke to him demonstratively in public, as if it were some kind of theatrical performance. People would point at them and make disparaging remarks. The young imitated my mother behind her back. It was not until much later I understood why she behaved in such an over-the-top embarrassing manner. To be born deaf was quite literally a fatal flaw in Nazi Germany and, despite the strong historical Danish minority, most of Flensburg’s inhabitants were at that time German. What made my mother’s situation even more precarious was that her own father, a small businessman running the local branch of a national tobacco franchise, was a prominent local Nazi group leader. I don’t really know the exact level and nature of his membership in the party. He once told me he had been, or still was and would forever remain, a so-called Ortsgruppenführer. The official title was in fact Ortsgruppenleiter, but my grandfather who was known to indulge in self-aggrandisement couldn’t resist the suffix führer, if only to declare his loyalty to the Überführer, Adolf Hitler. I think it more likely he was in fact a so-called Block — or Zellenleiter, not quite as significant in the hierarchy of evil, but bad enough. From our conversations over games of chess I know he believed he had risen well above that lowly station and had truly become one of the Führer’s Führers.

Allow me to cut in here once more. Humanitas kindly allowed me to read what my friend has written, but I was not supposed to alter the original text. In fact I’ve read my colleague’s submissions only shortly before you have. Nonetheless I managed to get in touch with Flensburg’s municipal archives in the hope of clarifying details of his grandfather’s Nazi past. Frankly, I was worried about the ambivalence of my friend’s description and a possible threat of defamation from his own family. However, I was informed by the archive that ‘it holds no documentation of local Nazi party membership. The reason for this was the late British occupation of the area (10 May 1945) which allowed enough time for any compromising documents to be destroyed.’

However, the Landesarchiv (state archives) of Schleswig-Holstein obtained records from Flensburg’s Entnazifizierungshauptausschuss (Central Commission of Denazification) verifying that Otto Bluschke joined the NSDAP very early, i.e. on 1 May 1933, and in his own words was appointed Zellenleiter in 1941-42. How much further he advanced during the war could not be established.

I’ve always considered the concept of original sin not only deeply offensive but also morally reprehensible. To condemn all mankind to absolute evil seems to me a violation of human nature. I do not see it as a religious dogma but a sin of theology. Nothing good would ever come of humanity if its genesis were evil. Yet despite my indignation I was presented with more and more evidence that much of my own origin was iniquitous. The discovery of my grandfather’s commitment to the Nazi Party all but destroyed my idealistic humanism. Going through the sixty pages of his denazification file I grew bitter. Already Otto Bluschke had achieved something my writing and teaching won’t equal: his deeds had outlasted his life. As I read about his selfless dedication to Hitler’s party I could hear Shakespeare declare in Julius Caesar: ‘The evil that men do lives after them’. Often when faced with critical challenges I’m inundated by literary quotations. It’s the déformation professionelle of my occupation . I remain a man of letters in most aspects of my life.

There are others who know how to handle revelations of Nazi members in one’s family rather more soberly. I can’t. I have since learned almost all German friends and colleagues of my generation have parents or close relatives who were tainted by committed Nazis. In the light of such discovery the notion of collective guilt assumes a rather more convincing validity. More importantly, it drives home the reality of evil. I live with the stark truth that I come from a people harbouring vice, sin and villainy. It was four decades after my grandfather’s passionate commitment to Hitler’s party that Peacetime Holger’s son of the third generation committed murder, killing a friend’s mother.

Ironically, harbouring a criminal past in the family is not unusual among Australians either. In fact, in some circles such heritage is now considered chic. It may be true that many of the felons sent to the British convict colony to serve penal servitude were little more than petty thieves. But there were also others who had committed more serious offences. In any case, my homeland of choice, the proud democracy of contemporary Australia, undeniably shares its origin with criminals. It has now become apparent that in the late 1940s and during the 1950s our Department of Immigration frequently failed to identify Nazis escaping justice for their wartime atrocities in Europe. Some of them are only now discovered, fifty years later. The organised massacre of Aborigines constitutes an attempted genocide of equal brutality to the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews and other persecuted groups during 1939 to 1945, albeit on a smaller scale. I’m not trying to draw parallels (there is no relativity of evil), except admit to the bitter irony that I did not escape my place of birth for a place of innocence. It seems evil has played its part in the creation of most nations on earth. The brutality and inhumanity of man appears to have no boundaries.

In Germany the bureaucracy of evil extended beyond the end of Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’. When after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 the operations of its secret service (Stasi) were exposed they revealed essentially the same structure as its forerunner, the Gestapo. Ranking and responsibilities of the Communist state security service were not unlike those of Nazi office holders ( Zellenleiter, Blockleiter, Ortsgruppenleiter, P.G.s, Kreisleiter, Gauleiter, Reichsleiter and der Führer). Some former Stasi officers hold important positions in Germany today. Perhaps I should add that many prominent East German writers were also implicated in the totalitarian control of the people.

To protect the Aryan purity of the German race, under official Nazi rules children born with major irreversible mental or physical defects were to be euthanased. My mother’s ‘insane’ denials of her younger son’s deafness was designed to save his life. I felt deeply ashamed when I discovered the real reason for her mad behaviour during the war. Her psychogenic conditioning had serious consequences: during the 1950s a number of nervous breakdowns forced her to spend time in a mental home.

It had never occurred to me that a mother would have to protect her child against her own father. ‘Dysfunctional’ was not a term invented yet by trendy sociologists, so let me say it loud and clear: I was born into a time and place, a country and a people where evil and crime were rife. My family proved no exception. Its strong Danish connection did not protect it from the murderous regime of the Nazis. My aunt Gertrud, a concert pianist and strong supporter of the Danes, was sent to a concentration camp for performing Mendelssohn in public. Home provided little shelter for adults or children. When I was old enough to attend St Mary’s on Sundays, nothing made as much sense to me at that time as being told about original sin.

The first few years of my life remain shrouded in a haze of mist. While Mother was crazy with fear over her deaf son, my wet nurse Marie continued to look after me. When she left us I became a motherless child.

Like me, my deaf brother Claus had a difficult childhood, albeit for different reasons. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t hear; it seems the tension surrounding his very existence had affected his health in other ways. His main problem was that he could not keep his food down. My grandfather called him a ‘ruminant’. When I asked him what that meant he explained Claus was a ‘rehasher’. I loved my brother from the very beginning, sensing the precariousness of his life. He was a beautiful child, clearly the most attractive of us all. Dark-haired and brown-eyed, he looked like a gypsy. Despite his handicap he later grew into an athletic build and excelled in sport. We’ve remained good friends to this day. He’s retired now and lives with his deaf wife Sigrid in a neat terrace outside Hamburg. They have two adult children: Stefan, an IT specialist, has no hearing problem, and his younger sister Cathrin, a psychologist, wears a hearing aid. Both have ‘healthy children’ of their own.

I spent much of my childhood with Claus, mainly around the harbour. We spoke a sign language that is now no longer in use, but whatever its shortcomings it was articulate enough to express our love for each other. I remember my brother placing his hands on the piano to feel the vibrations when I played. In a way, that was how we communicated in sign language. It also became a kind of secret code in which we could say things that others, including my mother, wouldn’t understand. My older brother Holger and my younger sister Astrid also used sign language with Claus, but their range and knowledge of the code was limited. In family mythology my mother had an alibi to prove her son could not be deaf: the infant reacted to air-raid sirens.

Saturdays or Sundays, Claus and I would watch a game of football. As teenagers we both joined the local club Flensburg 08. I was thrilled to see how gifted my brother was as a player. School separated us. He had to attend a boarding school for the deaf in Schleswig and came home over weekends. I’ve only been to Schleswig twice in my life: once to visit my brother Holger in hospital — he’d injured himself as a soldier of the new ‘bourgeois’ German army, as it called itself — and on another more upsetting occasion to attend a Christmas celebration at Claus’ school. I have never been so distressed as when I listened to a group of deaf boys reciting Silent Night in the auditorium. Was I the only one in the audience (my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t come) mindful of the fact that not only nights were silent for them? The sounds they made were like an open audio-wound, a croaky and sobbing cry. I felt heartbroken over the weeping appeal of those boys who were celebrating just like us. Their performance has remained the most memorable Christmas of my life. For it was a festivity for them, as it was for those of us who had come to join them.

The wonderful thing about my brother Claus is that to the best of my knowledge he did not have to suffer the ignominies of so many other challenged men and women in society. After some deliberation over which profession to choose — my brother had strong artistic leanings, especially as a draughtsman — he joined a large publishing company as a graphic artist. One of his tasks was to retouch the outlines of mainly female celebrities on popular magazine covers. He enlarged or reduced the size of breasts, albeit only on commercial graphic and photographic reproductions. I understand he found it an inspiring and well-paid job. Socially too Claus had few problems. He may not have been able to hear the music, but that didn’t prevent him from being an excellent dancer. I believe in the end his partners didn’t even have to tell him what kind of dance it was. It took him a couple of seconds to recognise the movements of others and follow their lead. Now in his late sixties, he’s still a very handsome sporty man who spends a lot of his time travelling.

In 1992 we spent Christmas and New Year with Claus and his wife in Brisbane and Sydney. They both took an immediate liking to Australia. Christmas Eve festivities at Brisbane’s Southbank included a long procession of parents and children accompanied by live camels, sheep and other animals. Our visitors were delighted. Again and again they commented on the friendliness of the Australian people. It was a Christmas very unlike the one so long ago in the Schleswig School for the Deaf; my deaf relatives were fully integrated and made welcome in a foreign land. We watched as they met deaf Australians. Foolishly we had assumed they would speak the same language. Only then did we learn about Auslan, the sign language preferred by the Australian deaf community. One example of the different interpretation of codes was the sign for bagpipe: for the visitors it signified chicken. On New Year’s Eve they ran into a large group of Australian deaf at the Moreton Bay island of Tangalooma where we went to participate in feeding the dolphins. It was a joy to watch the ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’ communicate with such obvious sympathy and exuberance. I’m not at all certain Australia’s so-called multicultural society has as yet achieved similar social harmony and warmth.

I think it might be appropriate to briefly interrupt my friend’s narrative and insert a short paragraph from a newspaper article of 15 July 1945. It reads: ‘The US military government in Germany has announced in Frankfurt that since Germany’s unconditional surrender on 7 and 8 May more than 70 000 former officials of the Nazi regime have been arrested in the US occupation zone and sent to various internment camps. The following persons are subject to automatic arrest: members of the SS, SD and Gestapo, further Ortsgruppenführer (local Nazi group leaders) and higher party officials, former burgomasters, Kreis and district leaders of the NSDAP as well as senior public servants and officers of the Armed Forces.’

I offer no commentary except to say that this piece of historical information might assist in assessment of the role my friend’s grandfather may have played in Manfred’s life. I can’t believe he’ll keep quiet about it.

Who is this guy interrupting our talk? Or am I imagining it? Are the shrinks right — am I beginning to hear voices? Oh, it’s the intercom again! I thought I was promised peace and quiet. What’s the matter with this contraption? There goes the buzzer again!

‘Hello? This is room forty. I’m the new arrival. Hello!’ Is this some kind of psychological experiment, a challenge to my nerves or just plain bloody rude? I should have hung up immediately. Or better still, not answered at all. What are they trying to do to me in this allegedly humane institute?

Oh, I see! This time it was the door!

‘Yes?’ What could an attractive young woman want from me? If this is what Humanitas nurses look like, I may have to reconsider my response to staff. She doesn’t even wear a uniform, but a rather elegant knee-length yellow dress. My God! A yellow dress and her black hair! She’s a stunner!

‘Good evening, Professor! I’m Geraldine Stearn. Would you like me to accompany you to dinner? It’s being served right now. I thought perhaps you might enjoy company on your first night.’

Is this a trick, a trap to make me say or do something I don’t want to? Fancy using a beautiful woman to lure me into a false sense of security! It may not be the most ethical way of forcing a patient to reveal himself, but there’s no denying what’s-her-name really is striking.

‘There’s no need to wear a jacket,’ she informs me with an unnerving smile. ‘Just take your key. I’ll wait at the door.’ She actually steps back at bit to indicate she’s ready to go. Suddenly I hear myself say: ‘I won’t be a minute’, as I turn round and fetch the card that opens the door to my suite. Out in the corridor the young woman beckons to me good-naturedly as she leads the way. What makes me think she might actually take my hand?

Trying to say something, I offer a rather foolish and self-righteous comment. ‘I thought you’d know the rooms don’t actually have keys. They must have found it easier to control inmates with security cards.’

As we approach the lift she asks: ‘How do you like your suite? It has a wonderful view over the park.’

I’m trying to remember her name. In the lift we stand close to each other, and I can see a small ornamental nametag near her left breast. ‘Ms G. Stearn’, it reads, as if no further establishment of identity were necessary. I inhale the tangy scent of her perfume.

Slightly aroused, I remember her last question and say, ‘The view’s great.’ Ms Stearn’s response is another wry smile.

We reach the downstairs lobby from where she leads me to the restaurant. It’s located in the left wing of the ground floor. Decorated in Mediterranean style, many tables look out to colourful flowerbeds and an ornamental fountain featuring an ancient sculpture I don’t recognise. ‘It’s our Eros statue,’ my hostess or chaperone casually informs me after we’ve been seated. What precisely is Ms Stearn’s position, I wonder. ‘Not quite the size of the one at London’s Piccadilly Circus,’ she adds apologetically.

I don’t know why that remark irritates me and even less what makes me say: ‘That’s true. When I was still at high school I once met a beautiful girl there on a school trip. She was from Cardiff and had the most wonderful name. Aniquita. Because we thought we’d fallen in love I later visited her family in Wales. She considered herself engaged after that. But I never saw her again.’ Suddenly I feel my face redden. Here I am suspecting my hostess — if that’s what she is — of trying to make me say things the doctors might find useful in their treatment, blathering a load of nonsense about my misspent youth! My quick glance to check Ms Stearn’s reaction remains unsuccessful. She’s busy studying the menu. Or pretending to. My drivel is met with tactful or scornful silence. She probably thinks I’m a ladies’ man boasting, or worse, chatting her up!

For a moment we’re both silent. Suddenly I too begin to show an intense interest in the menu. Better concentrate on the Italian dishes.

She’s decided and turns to me. ‘You can trust this place,’ she tries to assure me, but in fact I’m only startled. So she really is someone sent to soften me up! ‘Especially if you like to eat Italian.’

How little it takes to turn me into a fool! Is that part of the alleged illness I’m suffering? But perhaps gorgeous Ms Stearn is just covering up her real role at Humanitas. After ordering our meals she says: ‘As this is your first night, how about sharing a bottle of Australian wine? It’s on the house.’ Her voice, along with her body language, oozes confidence. There’s no doubt, she’s in control here. I’m hovering between suspicion and impatience with myself. What if she’s really just trying to be friendly? It takes more than a bottle of wine to put me off my guard. This time we make prolonged eye contact. She looks at me as if she has nothing to hide. ‘Why not?’ I hear myself say. Then both of us burst out laughing as if in relief.

‘You’re Australian, aren’t you?’ Ms Stearn responds. It’s not a question but the statement of someone who knows what she’s talking about. I suddenly realise everything she’s said to me so far was in the same confident tone. By contrast, whatever I’m saying sounds evasive and hesitant, even to me.

‘Yes, but I wasn’t born there.’ I’m tempted to add that home is not always where one is born, but decide against it. The shrinks would have a field day.

‘I gathered that. When did you settle there?’ Again, her question seems to be purely social, expressing a friendly interest in the newcomer. Why, then, do I project more into it, suspect that she may be gathering information about me in a casual social encounter? I decide to remain cautious.

‘A long time ago.’ Our conversation is beginning to assume the character of a game of chess. What does she really want to know? Irritated by her irony, I decide to turn aggressive, employing my rooks on both flanks, as it were, in an attempt to tear open the opponent’s defences. ‘Is this talk part of the Institute’s biotherapy?’ I ask bluntly.

The question amuses Ms Stearn more than my refusal to let her know the exact date of my arrival in Australia. Her laughter is positively joyous, sparkling with exuberance. She’s clearly enjoying herself. ‘You mean the request to write down parts of your life experience?’ She chuckles. ‘I like the word you’ve given it! Don’t you know that’s an entirely voluntary exercise, a standard option doctor and patient may in consultation choose to take up or not. In any case, you’d hardly have had time to write something yet. You’ve only just arrived!’ Before I can say anything the wine arrives. She gives me an almost conspiratorial smirk. Despite the earlier tension I must admit I’m beginning to enjoy Ms Stearn’s company, even if she’s clearly determined to remain in control.

She raises her glass with obvious relish. ‘Your health!’ In reply I lift mine. Her joyfulness is contagious.

‘What a strange book you wrote all those years ago, Professor!’ she says. ‘ The Fictional I! I enjoyed reading it, even if I didn’t agree with a lot of what you were saying. I mean, if we think of ourselves as fiction, what then becomes of reality?’ To my relief this time she doesn’t laugh. ‘You haven’t changed your mind about that, by any chance? As I say, you wrote all that a long time ago.’ ‘No, I haven’t,’ I assure her. ‘To me, what people call reality is the ultimate fiction.’

So she’s done her homework. Not that it’s difficult to gather that kind of information from the Internet. It’s time for my knights. ‘But isn’t that the kind of thing Humanitas believes in?’ I ask innocently. ‘You’re right, I haven’t written much yet. But why have I been asked write about my life, even if it’s only an option? Or is that merely what you’d call occupational therapy, to give patients something to do while they’re here?’

She looks at me thoughtfully. But instead of responding to my purely tactical move she says: ‘Professor of literature! Isn’t that a strange title — a bit like professor of love?’

What brought that on? Before I can ask her, the food arrives. The waiters’ timing seems amazingly coordinated to my hostess’s control of our dialogue.

We continue to ask questions and not receive replies, or at least not the kind of answers we’re hoping for. It’s a staccato kind of conversation, abrupt but not without a certain compulsive rhythm. Or, if I can stick to the chess analogy, a game of more than one front — but isn’t that the true nature of chess? It may be all about the King, but only because he’s a captive, unable to move more than one step forward or back. It’s the Queen’s game really. Ms Stearn is in charge of all possible moves. I’m tempted to add, seeing she brought it up, that literature and love also operate on more than one front. But I have no desire to get into a discussion about that.

‘Why Australia?’ she asks.

‘It was as far away as I could get,’ I say. She’s clearly convinced it’s another attempt to be evasive. In fact, it’s the most precise answer I can give. If there’s any dodging, it’s my refusal to go into details.

‘How did your parents react to your leaving?’ She allows me to finish chewing my veal.

‘It was because of them I left.’ At this point she just raises an eyebrow, rather self-consciously, I believe, a gesture I daresay she’s practised in front of the mirror. All women seem to possess certain body expressions consciously or unconsciously designed to turn into signals, a kind of sign language conveying surprise, amusement, admiration or contempt. With Ms Stearn I have no doubt they’re well rehearsed. I think it’s time to counter her inquisitiveness with a few questions of my own.

Over coffee I ask her about the nature of the position she’s holding at Humanitas. This time it’s she who isn’t answering, at least not openly and directly. When she refers to herself as a hostess I’m tempted to upset her with subtle references to high-class brothels. Strangely, despite all this sparring and parrying I find the dinner with her quite pleasant. It’s possible we actually like each other. Our playful encounter may in fact be no more than a diversion – from what?

Later, alone in room forty, I realise I would have liked to tell Ms Stearn at least some of the things that brought me here. Did she sense that? I don’t know why we consider birth the beginning of our lives and start talking about that first up. It is of course biologically. But the really important turning points in one’s life are, I think, certain events that helped us become what we are and therefore determined the future. Like most people I have lots of childhood memories, but many of them tend to become mythologised. It’s what family life does to us. Stories are told over and over again, and each time they become more and more eccentric, grotesque or amazing. They take on a life of their own, so much so that the person talked about can no longer recognise himself in what they say about him. Or her.

Truth is, this isn’t the first time I’ve suffered a so-called nervous breakdown and the doctors don’t know what to do about it. That’s because they didn’t and still don’t know what really happened. Now, lying safely in this luxurious and comfortable bed, I can ‘talk’ about things without using words. There’s darkness and silence around me, but in images as clear as daylight I see again what happened when I was a boy of thirteen. It’s a language I never speak in when I’m with others. Maybe the childhood years I spent sharing my deaf brother’s sign language have conditioned me to retain those sights, the scenes of fear and loathing that have remained with me all my life. As on so many other nights the images come like an old black-and-white film from the 1950s, invade my head, keep me awake, return to curse and haunt me with one aim: to deny who I have become and why as a result of these images I have to suffer periodic breakdowns. There are pictures and reflections that won’t go away. I know they contain the answer doctors, friends and lovers, but also those who tried to destroy me, wanted to hear. In desperate self-defence I have for years managed to create anti-images to rescue myself from deadly evil, the way antibodies attack and destroy lethal substances in the blood. But my images don’t last as long as the resilient, murderous vision that has stayed with me for as long as I’ve lived.

Once, in a lecture on literary imagination, I made use of Joseph Conrad’s statement in A Personal Record: ‘Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life’. I don’t think I could still talk about that with the same confidence as I did then.

Running away is not what most people think. It may be desperate but it’s not cowardly. What’s horrible and painful is that when the pictures conjure up their nightmare I don’t know that I ever managed to escape, in the end. Whenever I relive the images in the cellar and cheap, dirty hotels there’s no flight, no getaway. And the men encouraged by my mother still look exactly the same as they did in 1953.

Next morning I wake up as always with a need for redemption. Is my hostility to being sent here for a cure the painful knowledge that once some humans have fallen apart they can’t be put back together again? I’m like a broken piece of china superficially repaired with glue, but if the vase has once been of any value it has now lost its worth forever.

Yet I have experienced reparation if not salvation in my life, for which I am deeply grateful. Australia saved me from a life of squalor and misery. Escaping to Melbourne after completing the school-leaving exam was my path to freedom. It was a complicated escape, difficult to arrange. I had in fact planned to return to America where I’d spent a year as an exchange student when I was sixteen. Having passed the US College Board Aptitude Test, I assumed all I had to do was enrol at a university. But when the enrolment form required my parents’ signature acknowledging they would cover medical expenses in case of their son’s illness or other emergencies, they refused to do so.

The year before I completed grammar school had been a particularly difficult time. For five years my mother had forced me to become her housekeeper after my older brother had left home, while Claus was attending his boarding school for the deaf in Schleswig and my afterthought sister played in the backyard and on the street. I was given a tiny attic four floors above our apartment. A window looked out over the roofs of the old part of town and in the distance I could see the harbour. I didn’t mind being separated from the rest of the family. We were hardly ever together, and three rooms of the spacious apartment were still occupied by refugees. The problem with the attic was rising damp. I’d covered the walls with what I considered to be avant-garde patterned wallpaper (black with white Picasso-like designs), but it didn’t take long before it began to hang limp. If being sent to the loft was meant to be one more punishment, I didn’t mind. After I had sung in La Bohème at Flensburg’s Civic Theatre the attic retained its artistic ambience despite the drooping wallpaper. On clear winter nights the snowy roofs below lit up under the pale glow of a full moon. I would sit at the window for hours listening to jazz on BFN and Danish radio stations, cooking up plans of escape.

School was a kind of getaway, at least for a few hours, a break into regimented normality. But as a teenager I remained the domestic prisoner of my mother. If anything, her hatred of me deepened. Throughout my childhood and adolescence she never expressed any affection towards me, either verbal or physical. I’d long ago given up trying to find out what it was that made me so repellent to her. I only knew it was prompted by a deep-seated aversion she would not or could not reveal. When I finally discovered what it was I lived far away from her. I’m grateful for that because I don’t know how we could have faced each other. As so often, life took care of things impossible to handle before the time was right. But the non-relationship I had with my mother haunted me long after she died.

I saw my father at night. My parents lived what could be called a parallel existence under the cover of marriage. I never saw them touching, let alone being loving to each other. Neither my mother nor my father ever embraced or kissed me. First I thought that was the Nordic way. In Northern Europe people didn’t hug and kiss each other so much. Mediterranean people were considered unhygienic because they constantly touched each other. But I saw how my mother showed real affection to her other sons and daughter. My self-esteem sank lower and lower until I began to suffer from chronic depression, a condition diagnosed by my mother as adolescent obstinacy. Apart from school I was isolated from social contact and any form of personal intimacy.

There was something else. A couple of salesmen visiting my mother’s chemist shop requested her son’s company, usually in seedy hotel rooms. Another man visited him in his attic and afterwards rewarded him with opera tickets. During the warmer months someone else took him to St Mary’s Woods or the cemetery. When it was over he was told to pass on his regards to his mother.

Why did he never defend himself? When his mother hit him in the face with heavy cooking spoons and other utensils, marking his face for weeks, people began to ask questions. Why did he never hit back?

I can’t answer that. All I know is I planned to escape. It would take time and have to remain a secret. Should my intentions become known, they’d be thwarted as before.

Six months before the end of my last school year things came to a head. I was to undergo a medical examination for military service. One of the members of the Recruiting Board was my father. His eldest son had already been declared able-bodied and served in the engineer troops of the new German army. As my younger brother could not be considered fit for service it was important I should pass the exam ‘with flying colours’. Anything else would be a humiliation for my father, a point he made to me one night when I was washing up in the kitchen. I followed his implied order and not only passed, but volunteered for an extended three-year term in the air force. The immediate consequence was heartfelt congratulations all round. Colleagues on the Recruiting Board shook my father’s hand, and I was patted on my back as I left. What I remember most is the painful moment when I had to appear stark naked in front of my father. It wasn’t just that I was ashamed. It was more that I couldn’t help wondering what the man who didn’t show affection and never touched his child may have felt at that moment.

It reminded me of another unsettling confrontation I’d had many years earlier. Having been classified as undernourished and suffering from anaemia, I was asked to attend my hometown’s Public Health Office. At barely fourteen and in the light of my experience with men, I was apprehensive to go there alone for a medical examination conducted by strangers. My fear was alleviated somewhat when a receptionist informed me a Dr Jürgensen was going to look at me. At that time the prospect of being examined by my absent father seemed funny. Nevertheless, it was a nervous kind of amusement. As a result of my medical test with his namesake, it was recommended I be sent for six weeks to a sanatorium on the North Frisian island of Amrum where I would be nursed back to health. I remember the doctor saying something about the stimulating climate of the North Sea. I did go there and spent two and a half months in a beautiful place called Wittdun (literally ‘white dunes’). I owed the partial recovery of my health to Flensburg’s Public Health doctor with whom I shared my name. (A couple of years later I read in the local paper of a certain doctor who had practised with the public health service under a false name. A Dr Fritz Sawade had been exposed as the medical officer of a notorious Nazi concentration camp. His real name was Professor Dr. Werner Heyde, a mass murderer and standard-bearer of the SS, in charge of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ program. His trial took place in 1962 in Frankfurt, where the Chief State Prosecutor accused Heyde/Sawade of having murdered ‘at least 100,000 victims’. On 14 February 1964 the Flensburger Tageblatt reported the man who would have ‘euthanased’ my deaf brother had committed suicide in his prison cell.)

That day at the Recruiting Board with my father was a farce. I had no intention of actually serving. My escape plan was by no means secure, but serving in the German air force wasn’t part of it.

Then everything happened at once. I studied hard, anxious to do well in the final exams. At the same time business at the chemist shop took a nosedive and my parents began to fight each other openly. I continued doing the daily chores, shopping, preparing tea, cleaning the apartment. Too many of the salesmen who visited the chemist shop wanted to see me. I took refuge in the home of my favourite teacher, Dr Petersen. He’d joined our school as subject master in German and History during my final two years at Grammar. The entire class thought him the most charismatic teacher we’d ever had. Dr Petersen’s colleagues felt the same, albeit some with barely hidden resentment. I loved and idealised him because he restored my faith in people who really cared for others. He was not only a gifted teacher; Dr Petersen was a trusted advisor, a father figure and a friend who took a genuine interest in me. He sensed that something was troubling me and was anxious to discover what it was. He wasn’t prying; he wanted to help me and needed to know. I trusted him, but something made me hold back. I had spent a lot of time in his home where we talked literature, history and a range of other subjects we were both interested in. He made me forget he was my teacher. More and more I thought of him as a fatherly friend. I remember watching him build a playground for his intellectually-handicapped child. As he assembled the various parts, it seemed a picture of how he wanted to put me back together again. I was deeply moved by his caring temperament.

Dr Petersen must have learned something about my situation at home. I was stunned when he made formal attempts to adopt me. (It wasn’t the first time someone was prepared to take me into his home and become my legal guardian. Many years earlier a refugee couple, the Tormanns, had made an attempt to rescue me. Foolishly I didn’t agree to move to their flat in a new apartment near the beach of Ostseebad. I was afraid of Herr Tormann because he had only one arm and was a bailiff. He was in fact the most kind-hearted person I knew, but to me he was a constant reminder of the war and I didn’t like his profession. To levy a distress upon some poor debtor seemed merciless and cruel, no matter how kind the man who carried out the duty. Perhaps Herr Tormann sensed my reservation because once he told me in his calm and quiet voice, as if to appease himself or his profession, that the whole of Germany was ‘in pawn’. He didn’t realise his comment only helped increase my fear and alienation.) If Dr Petersen had adopted me he might have turned into a carer of two disturbed boys. What kind of a literary playground would he have constructed for me?

My love for my teacher knew no bounds, and Dr Petersen made little attempt to hide that I had become his favourite student. Yet despite his spectacular success as a teacher there was a mysterious aura of ambiguity or ill repute about him. Most of us put it down to envy. Only very rarely did we see in class glimpses of something slightly disturbing. One instant was when he threw his heavy briefcase across the room for no apparent reason, missing my friend Kalle by a fraction. Other moments of concern were when our history teacher seemed to freeze in the middle of a sentence. Once he looked out of the window and proclaimed the world was made of glass. We interpreted these occurrences as part of Dr Petersen’s idiosyncratic teaching method, his peculiar sense of humour even. We were all quite certain he was deeply committed to his class and cared for individual students as if they were his own flesh and blood.

On one occasion he informed us he’d been the national champion in boxing. We expected another original teaching analogy of our master in unusual didactics. He’d won the final bout in Berlin by knockout after having been hammered by his opponent in earlier rounds. At this stage we all thought we knew where he was going. But then, after a dramatically prolonged moment of silence, Dr Petersen looked at his class and declared: ‘I was a Nazi.’ Having outed himself, his big bodily frame froze. We sat in silence, devastated and strangely hurt. Only Hannelore, sitting in the front row, began to sob. I was waiting for the bell to ring. This confessional showdown had to end! Our respected teacher, the star of Grammar, had knocked himself out. Our collective disappointment was in urgent need of consolation. We all remained silent. We continued to be stunned, unable to respond. Why weren’t we told we could leave the classroom? None of us knew what to do. Then Dr Petersen spoke again. This time he took off his glasses and adopted a terrifying grimace. ‘I’m also a nutcase, an idiot, crazy, mad, kaputt.’ I felt goosebumps on my back as I instinctively called out: ‘No!’ Eerily, there was no other response from the class. We all kept sitting there, unable to move. ‘I shouldn’t be allowed to teach.’ Was that Dr Petersen’s voice? It sounded so different it couldn’t have been him. ‘Well,’ the crazy voice continued, ‘I wasn’t allowed to teach.’ He stared at us almost triumphantly, then froze again. When at last the bell rang Dr Petersen suddenly stormed out of the classroom as if chased by the devil himself. He’d said, ‘I was a Nazi.’ I wondered whether a Nazi could ever cease being one. Could Hitler have become a normal, average, decent member of society?

Years later, in Melbourne, I received a long letter from my former teacher. He was now working in a small private boarding school at Timmendorf near the Baltic Sea. The letter consisted mainly of quotations from the Bible, many of them underlined in red, and complaints about the behaviour of students in the dormitory. An old classmate had already informed me that some time ago Dr Petersen’s wife had filed for divorce. Only a short while ago my cousin Ingrid, who had graduated from Flensburg’s Danish grammar school, then passed her German Abit-ur (school-leaving examination) at Goethe Grammar, wrote she too had been taught by the charismatic history teacher whom she had come to admire greatly. It appears Dr Petersen was passed around several of my hometown’s secondary schools.

My own problems caught up with me in my final year at Old Grammar. One day I collapsed in my attic. When I was found the next day, the local doctor was called. A week later I was sent on a rest cure to a sanatorium in the small Saxon town of Bevensen.

The clinic, run by a motherly woman in her fifties who had lost her own son during the war, made every effort to make it appear as if it were not institutionalised. Located in a picturesque landscape, surrounded by cornfields and small woods, part of the treatment was to let nature take its course. Mens sana in corpore sano. I went for early morning runs through the woods, ate a hearty breakfast and presented myself to a group of doctors an hour later. After lunch patients were asked to take a two-hour nap followed by snacks in the dining room and ‘constitutional strolls’ through the park and gardens. Some were allowed to visit the neighbouring village of Medingen during the afternoon. I remember the sanatorium as a very pleasant, caring place that allowed its residents maximum freedom. After my first medical I was given ‘the tower’, located in a quiet and peaceful part of the main building, as my habitation. Completely overgrown with thick ivy and featuring two high windows, it offered magnificent views across the countryside.

My time at the clinic was perhaps too quiet, with too much leisure to think. It seemed I was responding well to the personal program of recovery designed by the doctors. I was well enough to make jokes about my room, referring to it as ‘my Holderlin tower’, an allusion to the great German poet who during his madness spent years in a turreted building in Tubingen. I don’t know what made me climb out of the window so high above the ground, especially as I suffer from vertigo. Somehow I found myself hanging from the window-sill almost twenty metres above ground. I fell down a considerable distance. The drop would almost certainly have been fatal had I not instinctively clung to the sturdy stems of overgrown ivy on the way down. It would have been a rather literary, poetic death. Medical opinion remained divided. Apparently my admission documents included reports on the domestic situation back home. After lengthy deliberation it was decided to keep me a bit longer for observation. After a couple of weeks I managed to convince the staff it was time to leave, if only because final school examinations were coming up.

I would have liked to stay longer at Bevensen, but school was more important. My mental condition was no longer considered serious, and on a sunny spring morning I took the train back to Flensburg. The thing about madness — let’s call it that, everybody else does — is that it’s tricky, quite literally. Take my grandfather Marius, for instance. He came from the Danish island of Alsen and settled in South Schleswig. In Flensburg he bought a big property at the turn of the century made up of three separate building sections. The front building included a large shopfront with a couple of apartments on top. Here Marius set up our family chemist shop, which turned into a successful business almost immediately. In line with the political situation at the time he called it The Imperial Eagle. The trouble was that the rear buildings could only be described as dilapidated. That was why my grandfather had purchased the property at a very low price. No local investor was prepared to bear the cost of repair and restoration.

Marius’ seemingly foolish investment caused a general shaking of heads. When, half a year later, excavators and other heavy machinery entered the passageway to the property, people openly referred to ‘the crazy Danish guy’. My grandfather began to be mocked by almost everyone. ‘You looking for gold?’ they asked him disparagingly. ‘Have you a mining licence?’ That last comment wasn’t far off the mark. Unperturbed, Marius treated all of them with polite indulgence. The citizens of Flensburg were stunned when my grandfather became the owner of an immensely profitable mine of sodium chloride. At the height of his empire he owned several ships providing virtually the entire Scandinavian fishing fleet with precious salt, the vital sprinkle preserving the catch.

Admittedly, towards the end of his life the same man used to walk around the city of my birth with a hand grenade in his coat pocket. It took a while before local restaurants discovered he would not be separated from the weapon when he entered their premises to join members of his family for a five-course meal. I never knew my grandfather, but can’t help thinking that carrying a small bomb to defend oneself in the company of family might sometimes not be such a bad idea.

So much for the perils of recognising madness and the risks of madness itself. Not the least diagnostic uncertainty is the trickery of language. Like madness it can prove misleading. A life of fiction, for instance, is not the same as a fictional life.

It’s my third day at Humanitas, and I have my first formal appointment. I was given a brief medical on my arrival, but this I’m told will be the introductory session of what they call psychological profiling. The idea that complete strangers seriously believe they can discover who I am just because they are psychiatrists, strikes me as absurd. Who do they think they are? On the other hand, I sense that with complete cooperation my stay at this clinic may well be shortened. So it’s important I give the impression of being responsive and assisting the doctors in their probe.

At ten I’m taken to what is euphemistically identified as the Interview Room. Well, they’d hardly call it the Inquisition Chamber. The front door carries an ominous sign: STRICTLY NO ENTRANCE. CONFERENCE IN PROCESS. I read it and decide to make light of it. This patient will pretend to be cooperative while trying his hardest to protect his mind and soul: Strictly no entrance. As we enter I’m confronted with a group of white-coated people behind a large table, looking not unlike the Last Supper. My inner voice tells me: keep up the gallows humour. You’ve nothing to fear other than being made the victim of grotesque misunderstandings. Perhaps all I have to do is reverse our roles and try to save the doctors from their misguided and ineffectual profession.

Members of the interviewing committee rise as one as I approach, then sit down again. A lady sitting in the centre, taking Christ’s position as it were, welcomes me on behalf of her colleagues. ‘Good morning, Professor! We’re glad you could make it.’ Is she joking? ‘Do have a seat, please. Let me introduce to you members of the panel: on my far right, Professor Odermatt’ — an elderly Swiss lady wearing heavy horn-rimmed glasses gives me a fixed stare — ‘next to her Dr McAllister’ — a middle-aged man sporting a shock of blond hair quickly rises and sits down again — ‘at my immediate right our resident research fellow from Cambridge, Dr Enright’ — the man thus addressed gives me a good-natured wave — ‘to my far left, Dr Cohen’ — a grumpy-looking guy of uncertain age gives me a long hard stare — ‘the lady sitting next to him, Dr Leutenegger’ — with her youthful beauty she looks as though she’s made a mistake and come to the wrong hearing; her smile seems almost bashful — ‘then we have Dr Widmer,’ the lady continues with what seems to me a hint of distaste, ‘and next to me Dr Fuessli’ — a mature gentleman with a distinguished face despatches a broad grin and welcomes me with ‘ Grueziwol, Herr Juergensen‘ (it’s only then that I recognise him as a colleague at the University of Basle).

‘And I am Dr Springer,’ the woman finally concludes, ‘the chairperson of the profiling committee.’ She speaks to me in a voice of authoritative charm designed to convey that she and her Board members mean well, but will not tolerate any nonsense from me. I recognise the mixture of encouragement and intimidation. Acknowledging Dr Springer’s tone, I hear myself say: ‘I know I’m in good hands.’

How’s that for a bit of ingratiating? The experts exchange ironic glances. I think I’ve just indicated something like ‘don’t do me any harm. Leave me as I am, harmless.’ Do shrinks realise when patients are toying with them? Dr Springer ignores both my verbal and non-verbal plea. ‘We hope you’re comfortable at Humanitas, Professor. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to make your stay with us restful and agreeable.’ After a short breather she adds, ‘Not all of us will be present at every sitting, but we’re all anxious to contribute to your speedy recovery.’ She offers me a forced smile.

Her brief speech doesn’t call for a response. It’s a statement of fact that must not be challenged. To confirm my relaxed state I cross my arms and legs. In reality I’m nothing short of terrified. Eight international experts of thought and reason examining someone who’s lost his mind — isn’t that a bit like using a steam hammer to crack a nut? What’s even more frightening is that I’m beginning to wonder how serious my condition must be to attract such a group of distinguished shrinks. If it should really turn out to be a grave matter, would I ever be released from this luxurious prison?

‘We’ve left some stationery in your room, Professor, in the hope you may be able to assist us by telling us something about your life.’ Before I can say anything, she continues: ‘Of course we don’t expect you to have written enough yet to pass on to us, but do try to write at least a few pages when you feel the time is right. It would be best to think of your notes as stories you might want to tell someone, apart from us. Perhaps you might like to write them just for yourself.’

At this stage I do interrupt, gently and respectfully. ‘How can I do that when you’re going to read them?’

Dr McAllister cuts in briefly. Leaning forward, waves of hair break across his forehead. ‘Just tell it how it is. The story never lies.’

The elderly lady introduced as Professor Odermatt gives me a benevolent smile and says: ‘You’re a man of imagination with a special love and knowledge of books. Why don’t you assume you’re an author and we the readers? Don’t all writers really write for themselves?’

I have no desire to ruminate on first semester literary seminar discussions and simply nod. But when I notice it’s not enough to satisfy the Board I quickly add: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ My inner voice rewards me with a reminder: ‘Quite so! Always appear cooperative!’

Dr Springer listens indulgently before addressing the meeting again. ‘As I say, Professor, it’s up to you whether you want to cooperate with those who are trying to help you.’ Her smile has turned positively deadly, reminding me I have to remain on my guard. I try to convey a deferential bow while assuring her: ‘But of course I will,’ then foolishly add: ‘That’s what I’m here for.’ My acquiescence is met with patronising acknowledgment. ‘Well now, if that’s settled,’ she continues, ‘perhaps we can pass on to the agenda.’ It’s a reminder as much to her colleagues as to me. Any hint of a smile is gone. This is a woman in charge, I realise, used to calling the shots. I’m sure in her earlier days she wore power suits and shoulder pads. But those times are gone. By now women are used to holding authoritative positions in most walks of life, even in a sanatorium for the mentally challenged. Seeing how much she’s enjoying being the alpha female, I decide to call her Bold Miriam.

She addresses me in a tone of curious inclusive role-playing, as if to prompt everyone present of the task ahead. ‘You see, Professor,’ she begins again, ‘we thought we might go through your medical history with you. You may be able to help us in our endeavour to find the right treatment for your condition.’ As she speaks the other members of the Board open manila folders and start rummaging about in piles of paper. Who provided them with that much information about my life? I remember an older colleague in my own department expressing surprise and irritation over having been Googled by his students. ‘Is there no privacy any more?’ he objected. I told him that not to be on the Internet was like being without a shadow. Now I must admit I understand his anger. I don’t appreciate someone prying into a person’s private life any more than my colleague, but accept the loss of social intimacy as part of the world we live in. Most of the time we don’t even know we’re being monitored by CCT, computers and a host of other technological devices.

My thoughts are interrupted by Bold Miriam’s imperious voice. ‘Now, what about those fainting spells you appear to have suffered for some time? Can you tell us what has brought them on? Did they occur as a result of overwork, too much stress, that sort of thing? Or were there other circumstances you believe may have contributed?’

I suppose it’s a fair question, but leading into an area I don’t want to go. Not because I have something to hide; it’s rather that despite its assurances I don’t believe this panel of so-called experts is going to be of any help. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Springer, I’m afraid I have no idea.’

She’s not easily discouraged. ‘You haven’t been diagnosed as an epileptic, have you?’ she persists.

‘Never,’ I reply truthfully.

‘What you experienced,’ Dr McAllister cuts in, ‘is a disorder of the nervous system causing loss of consciousness.’ I like the look of the hairy guy but can’t resist a terse response that comes across as more disdainful than it’s meant. ‘I know the symptoms of epilepsy, Doctor.’ I give him a belated smile. His colleagues give Dr McAllister a supercilious look.

Dr Fuessli attempts a rescue. Turning pages in his folder, he comments: ‘Of course you do. Your father’s a doctor, isn’t he?’ I could have been out of the woods had I just kept my mouth shut. But instinctively I reply: ‘Yes, one of them is.’

It’s enough to light up the entire Board. My examiners exchange long meaningful looks then scribble down notes in their folios. I appear to have confirmed their worst fears, yet at the same time provided them with a triumphant breakthrough. That’s how it is with psychiatrists: the more serious or extreme a patient’s condition the greater their excitement. They’ve stumbled on a ‘case’ disturbing and astounding enough to warrant further research. A full-length study or article in The Psychiatric Journal of America beckons, with promises of prestige, promotion and prominence. Excitement is written all over their faces. I must not disappoint them.

Dr Springer tries hard to conceal her exhilaration. She resumes control of the interview. ‘Let me get this straight, Professor. Are you saying you have more than one father?’ I’m pleased to provide her with the answer she’s hoping for.

Calmly I reply: ‘Not counting what you might call father figures, I have three.’ It seems I’ve dropped a bombshell.

Is it a coincidence or could there be a curious kind of plot taking place? I don’t want to become paranoid, but now that I’ve been ordered to give an account of my life — allegedly to restore me to full mental health (as though knowing or remembering one’s life can really guarantee emotional and spiritual wellbeing) — I keep getting letters from people I haven’t seen for half a century: schoolfriends, former lovers and members of what I like to call the Danish side of my family.

A male cousin who sees himself as a kind of official family historian writes to me about Otto Bluschke, my fascist maternal grandfather, born in the Silesian forest near the Polish border, far away from the northern German-Danish town of Flensburg. Despite the fact that he embarrassed at least one part of the family by becoming a passionate Nazi, my grandfather in fact looked, in the words of my cousin, ‘rather Jewish and employed gestures attributed to Jews’. I must confess I have no idea what these ‘gestures’ might be, but my cousin informed me that whenever someone pointed this out to Ortsgruppenführer Bluschke, he replied: ‘My family comes from Silesia, where my father was a senior forester. Have you ever come across a Jewish forester?’

Perhaps it was a need for over-compensation that made him run around town dressed in the brownshirt uniform of the Sturm Abteilung. My grandfather, who was bald and not very tall, looked more like Benito Mussolini. Like his beloved Führer he had a German shepherd dog. Otto Bluschke’s purebred hound was called Janko, Hitler’s was known as Blondie. Everybody in the family knew a black cloud hung over the relationship between Grandfather Bluschke and my father Claus Jürgensen, but no one was prepared to reveal the reason. At one stage my grandmother intimated it had something to do with money lost during the currency reform, but that turned out to be untrue. I assumed it had something to do with my grandfather’s passionate belief in Nazism and Hitler, but only discovered the real reason from my father in Caracas, many years later. I’ll come back to it. The strange and unsettling thing is that when my grandfather was subjected to post-war denazification my anti-fascist father wrote him a reference of ‘good conduct’. Did he provide that ideological reference in lieu of some other debt? The problem of Nazism is that its web is almost impossible to penetrate.

My grandfather’s background seems to fit the peculiar tribal culture of many Germans. Clearly the forest still holds an almost sacred position in contemporary German consciousness. Various Teutonic tribes derived their identity from large areas of trees and undergrowth. Caesar’s attempt to invade Germania failed largely because its natives were able to fight the Roman troops in the forests. One of their weapons was pouring hot pitch and sulphur onto the invaders from ancient oaks and other trees. Ironically, having been defeated by such primitive but effective weapons, the Romans stayed west of the Rhine and were unable to civilise the barbaric tribes in their dark forests. This limited influence is reflected in the German language. Just one example: while the old tribes lived in houses without protective windows, near the Rhine where the Romans had a military and cultural presence, fenestrae were introduced — or Fenster, the word modern German has retained. Forests had saved the ancient Germanic tribes, but they were also responsible for Germany’s long lasting inferior cultural development. The historic battle of Teutoburg Forest ( Teutoburger Wald) in 9 AD in which Arminius annihilated the Romans meant the defeat of Roman civilisation on German soil. Once again it was a forest that asserted and defined German identity. In honour of this tradition South Germans to this day have a penchant for wearing variations of the green forester’s Tracht; Bavarian lederhosen also relate back to the dark forest days of tribal life and warfare. It seems my Silesian grandfather’s obsession with uniform and our town’s idyllic forest Marienhölzung expressed a deep-seated, almost instinctive sense of origin and belonging. Every Sunday Otto Bluschke went for a ritualistic walk through the woods of his adopted hometown. Only a few decades ago Germany’s notoriously backward culture of popular music featured a bestseller called ‘A Walk through the Black Forest’. I’m not sure Germans have yet fully emerged from their primeval dark forests.

These revealing snippets of my family’s history may be profoundly disturbing, but I can’t help wondering how and why I’m being provided with them right now while in custody at a psychiatric clinic. How has Humanitas managed to get in touch with my cousin?

My memory of Otto Bluschke has mellowed into that of a pathetic little man who was seeking recognition by joining the brutal forces of fascism. Like most Germans at the time, he was no leader, rather an inept cowardly follower. When told to write about my life I must admit I began looking for parallels, good and bad. It seems noteworthy that while I crossed continents to travel as far away from the town of my birth as possible, my maternal grandfather moved from the southernmost eastern part of Germany to its northernmost city. Does that mean we have something in common? Unlike me, however, he stayed within the ‘Fatherland’. As the third son of a forester, he would have been paid off, rather than succeed to an estate. Trying to build a career in business, he first went to Breslau (Wroclaw), then to Berlin and Hamburg. It was in the Northern Hanseatic city that he met and married my grandmother, an attractive young woman orphaned by the city’s devastating cholera epidemic. When Otto was invited to run a branch office of a large tobacco company in Flensburg, my grandparents moved to the German-Danish border town. Both my mother and my uncle were born there. Today Otto and Lina Bluschke share a peaceful grave in the New Cemetery of Flensburg.

Perhaps the development of my mother’s father, first into a Prussian nationalist then a ‘master race’ German Nazi, can be ‘explained’ historically. His own ambivalent origin — there was more than a hint of Polish and Gypsy influence in the Bluschke Silesian family background — may have led him to overcompensate for his perceived lack of ‘pure Aryan’ appearance, especially in the big cities and cultural centres of Breslau, Berlin and Hamburg. It appears Otto Bluschke had an overwhelming need to belong. Travelling in search of a profession from the far south-eastern forests to Germany’s northernmost fishing port, ironically he moved from one controversial border area to another. It could be said that over generations my family quite literally led a borderline existence. Could it be that the widely discredited literary historian, anthropologist and folklorist Josef Nadler was right in at least one of his controversial nationalist and racist assertions, namely that human culture and political consciousness are shaped by native environment? If many of his writings had not prepared the ground for Germany’s emerging National Socialism, such an observation would perhaps have been accepted as almost self-evident.

Otto Bluschke’s commitment to an Aryan Nazi Germany cost his children dearly. During the Second World War his son Bodo was captured in Russia and spent many years in a Siberian prison camp. On his return home I remember that as a child I simply could not understand how the skeleton in front of me could still be walking. The term ‘dead man walking’ wasn’t yet coined. My mother, Bodo’s sister, had kissed her husband goodbye: the great catch and dashingly good-looking young man she’d married joined the International Red Cross to rescue the wounded and dying on the battlefield. He disappeared for over a decade, during which my mother ran Marius Jürgensen’s old chemist shop The Imperial Eagle in the heart of town while raising her three boys. I have already mentioned that she was awarded the title of ‘German Mother’ and received a New Testament signed by Adolf Hitler. In the final years of the war she came close to starvation.

The Bluschkes at least didn’t seem to suffer greatly while others, including members of their own family, were struggling to survive. In one of his letters my cousin remembers how, for Christmas 1944, their festive fare consisted of bouillon with two eggs, a potato fritter and apple sauce. The following day my grandparents enquired how their relatives had spent the festive season. After listening to an enthusiastic report of what my aunt, uncle and cousins considered a special wartime treat, my grandmother condescendingly replied: ‘How wonderful for you! We’ve had roast goose as always. Otto is such a good provider. With his position in the party he has little trouble organising these things, you know. We are truly blessed.’ The exchange gives some indication of the most painful border separating the family in good times and bad. There would not have been too many citizens of Flensburg enjoying goose shortly before the end of Hitler’s war.

We lived in a street called Castle Wall, high above the centre of the city with a glorious view across the harbour. My grandparents’ dwelling was located nearby at Castle’s Rest, and the primary school I attended from 1946 was in Castle Road. The curious thing was that no castle was to be seen anywhere. As so often in Europe, streets and monuments paid homage to times long gone by. Flensburg’s medieval Duburg castle, an ancient building of Viking origin restored in 1409 by Queen Margarethe of the Nordic Union, had in fact all but disappeared in 1719. It only survives in an entire network of streets bearing witness to its historical glory: Shield Bearer Street, Tiltyard, Tourney Square, Knights Street, Castle Square, Duburg Street, Horsemen’s Stable (the latter serving as the location of the local brothel). As always, what’s left of the past is language. One can only guess what effect verbal aggrandisement may have had on the local population.

In 1945, for reasons unknown to me, my mother and her children moved from Castle Wall to a hilly street closer to the heart of town. Its name was odd and controversial for historical reasons of a different kind: Toosbuystrasse. Only much later did I detect another thinly veiled portent reflecting the nature of our new home. Toosbuy was not only the name of a Flensburg burgomaster. It also had a very interesting etymology: the meaning of ‘büy’, corresponding to ‘by’ as in ‘by-law’, is ‘community’; the prefix ‘toos’ the ‘Angelish’ equivalent of ‘two’. Hence people who choose to live in Toosbuystrasse should by rights be proud to identify themselves with their city’s two different communities — the German and the Danish, or more precisely, the German majority and the Danish South Schleswig minority, corresponding to the Danish majority and the German minority across the border in North Schleswig, the country Hitler invaded the year I was born. The importance of such bilingual, bicultural relations was severely tested when Germany lost the war and Flensburg was occupied by British and Norwegian troops.

The concept of Toos-Büy wasn’t confined to etymological subtleties. It began to reflect the tense conflict raging in many local families, including my own. The cobblestone road leading from elevated Castle Square down to the low ground of the harbour featured beautiful turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Diagonally across from our new home was a Danish cultural centre called Ansgar (after the missionary Archbishop of Bremen [801-865] known as the ‘Apostle of the North’). Once a year, on the first of May, the Danes of Flensburg celebrated their cultural identity with a march through the city. On that occasion many Toosbuy locals displayed the Danebrog (Danish flag) in support of the march of their fellow countrymen. My mother had planted rows of tall vetch in our balcony flower boxes. On the day of Danish celebration she crowded them with dozens of German Schleswig-Holstein paper-flags. Two communities living in one street wasn’t quite the same as sharing one border. In the post-war years all kinds of new borders were drawn, and most of them proved too close for comfort.

It seems shame and defeat don’t necessarily lead to wisdom and contrition. Once Otto Bluschke had been ‘de-nazified’ he defiantly continued to wear his old mustard-coloured uniform in his home. ‘Now with a vengeance!’ my grandfather shouted at no one in particular. In the minds of some people reality and history are moveable feasts. While dressed in his favourite uniform my grandfather issued domestic orders. One of them was his demand that I should part my hair ‘like an officer’. In the afternoons and early evenings he ruled over a game of chess with one of his grandsons, either Claus or myself. Still clad in his outfit of ‘the glory years’ and smoking a Havana, he invariably suffered inglorious defeats at the hands of his unmilitary and generally unstable grandchildren. In my grandfather’s eyes all but Peacetime Holger were degenerates. Upon yet another defeat Otto Bluschke would frequently overturn the chessboard in a gesture of defiance. He really displayed all the hallmarks of a Nazi German general. My lasting memory of him became his peacock entrance one morning after he’d spent at least half an hour in the bathroom. Triumphantly he wore a ‘moustache band’ or gauze net that fastened comfortably around the waxed moustache so as to retain its shape during sleep. The contraption reached from the upper lip to the ears. It looked to me as if my grandfather was wearing a bra across his face.

Relocating to the new inner city address took my family to a large apartment that, despite its accommodating appearance, was to become a place of degradation and horror for me.

A number of events stand out from the mist of early childhood memories. One was my first attempt to run away from home when I was four years old. I made it down to the harbour and managed to hide in a deserted warehouse for over a day before I was discovered by a couple of unemployed dockers who took me to the police. They found me lying under dirty canvas covered in coaldust, tar and oil, with a tiny cracked valise by my side. Having eaten my provisions, an apple and a slice of dry bread, the night before, I had become increasingly weak and frightened in the damp, dark storehouse. After sobbing inconsolably I finally succumbed to sleep, overcome with dread and faintness. When the police asked me why I had run away and where I thought I was going I answered them quietly with one word: ‘Home.’ It didn’t work. I was brought back to a place where I didn’t want to be, where it became increasingly clear I wasn’t wanted. What others called my home wasn’t home. It was one of many early experiences discovering the unreliability of words.

Another memorable incident of those early years occurred in 1945 when Flensburg was inundated with refugees from the East. Germany was in the final throes of losing the war it had so arrogantly craved. Locals as well as those who had come to the Reich’s northernmost city on the run from the Russians were suffering terrible hardship. Food was so scarce people seized horse-drawn vehicles and even slaughtered the animals in the street. In spring public parks were raided for elderberries and rose hips; during summer and autumn a ragged band of the malnourished collected mushrooms, blackberries, raspberries, beechnuts and chestnuts in the surrounding woods. A new desperate kind of equality had come into force: the fear of starving did not discriminate. Stealing food even from children was soon a daily occurrence.

The town’s once popular local recreation area, St Mary’s Woods, turned into a no-go zone, as remnants of the army and deserters were on the lookout for each other. Learning to forage by myself at a very early age, I took to sneaking out of the house and going to St Mary’s Woods on my own. The small forest to the west of town held the promise of freedom and a threat of danger I found irresistible. The fear of the unknown added to my excitement. I took to the woods, as it were, in the full knowledge of where I was going. For all the perils, I knew I was out of reach of those closest to me who preferred not to acknowledge me, yet would not allow me to get away. At St Mary’s I felt released. I could breathe, laugh and talk, even if it was only to myself. Out here in the company of trees I was not beaten, screamed at or made to do things I didn’t want to do. My grandfather told me there’d been deer and stags here before the war, but now they’d disappeared, hunted for food. I became intoxicated by the aromatic smell of the trees and bushes, the chirping birds and the wind murmuring in the treetops. Longingly I watched squirrels race up and down trunks jumping from branch to branch at dizzy heights. Freedom! All my senses had come home. At St Mary’s no one would torment me for at least a couple of hours.

It wasn’t easy collecting raspberries. The best always seemed to be shielded by very large thorns. No matter how careful I was I invariably scratched my arms and hands. I ignored the pain as I licked the blood while eating the seductive fruit. On my torn skin the red of the berries mingled with the red of my blood. Swallowing them together was a strange feeling. I tongued my own blood as if it were part of nature. The woods and my body had become one. I lay on the ground listening to falling fir cones, the rustle of leaves, a nearby creek and the tapping of woodpeckers — a mixture of noises that sounded as if the wood were breathing. How peaceful the world could be without war, refugees and hunger!

But I hadn’t just come here to escape and feed myself. I was trying to gather enough berries and mushrooms for a family meal. I knew my mother cycled to surrounding villages trying to barter medical supplies for meat, potatoes and eggs. Usually the results of her trips were disappointing. With the end of the war and the arrival of more and more starving refugees, every man, woman and child prowled the countryside, foraging for food. Like many other children I was determined to play my part in supporting the family. It felt good knowing I could combine getting away from home with the search for urgently needed provisions. Coming back with a basket full of mushrooms and berries made me at least momentarily welcome. Claus, my younger brother, was staying with his grandparents while pre-war Holger remained in the apartment, making sure our two subtenant refugee families didn’t help themselves to edibles or valuable heirlooms. A week after the first refugees were forcibly billeted with us they stole my mother’s Brussels lace wedding dress. It reappeared months later around Neptune Fountain, one of many black markets that sprang up during those immediate post-war years.

That day at St Mary’s all the bramble bushes had been raided, with not a single blackberry in sight. Walking deeper into the woods I found myself in parts I’d never been before. To my delight I found clusters of small dark berries everywhere. A couple of large bushes had grown together, forming a thorny barrier against intruders. The shrubs carried so much fruit I was convinced we’d be able to live on my find for a week if only I could reach them. Glistening enticingly in the sun, the ripe succulent berries made my mouth water. What a discovery! I wondered why no one else had come here and picked them. Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the ground, anxious to avoid the thorny tentacles extending in all directions. As I came closer I was confronted with two unforgettable spectacles. Half the shining blackberries that from the distance looked so irresistible were in fact eaten up and covered in maggots. A much more frightening sight was the body of a dead soldier covered in flies and worms. He must have been dead for some time; like the berries, part of his face was already eaten away. A busy procession of grubs emerged from the collar of his uniform. The sweet smell of decay mingled with the spicy aroma of the blackberries and the rotting odour of the forest undergrowth.

Surrounded by thorns I couldn’t get up and run away. Overcome by nausea, I vomited. There was no relief. I still couldn’t escape. It was as if I’d been nailed to the place. I couldn’t avert my sight from the soldier’s corpse. Someone must have taken his boots and socks: his feet, covered in insects and worms, had taken on the appearance of decaying tree roots. Even without its swastikas I recognised the German uniform. The dead soldier no longer wore the Nazi belt proclaiming ‘ Gott mit uns‘. Perhaps somebody else had taken that too. How many wars have invoked God as the ultimate proof of righteousness!

I remembered having been warned of soldiers and deserters hiding in St Mary’s. That’s why I’d been told not to go there. But my hunger and the promise of food overruled these instructions. If I should run into a soldier, I thought I’d simply tell him I wasn’t his enemy because the war was over. Surely that would be enough. But the soldier I’d run into couldn’t talk any more. He was dead. He hadn’t been killed on the battlefield, but hiding in Flensburg’s woods, waiting for the war to end. Slowly I crawled back through the thorns, away from him, my lips tasting the bitter tears running down my face.

When I came home I found my mother had managed to forage a couple of turnips, half a dozen eggs and a handful of potatoes. Together they would also last us a week, and they were real, not a story like my blackberries. On the way back from St Mary’s I’d managed to collect a few flat mushrooms, a meagre harvest but enough to explain my absence on her return. I didn’t want to tell my mother and brothers about the dead soldier. They probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Whenever I tried to tell stories about soldiers and refugees, pre-war Holger would call out: ‘Lies! All lies!’

Strangely, despite the horrific experience of discovering the dead soldier, St Mary’s Woods remained the scene of many of my childhood fantasies. Unlike my deaf brother Claus, I had no natural talent for drawing. But in my loneliness I invented a place in the woods and sketched it as best I could in one of Peacetime Holger’s exercise books. I called my made-up forest settlement ‘Pilzburg’, a town of mushrooms. It wasn’t hard to draw their characteristic stems and domed caps. I designed rows of mushroom houses in streets and market squares. The centre of Pilzburg was a big, fat agaric mushroom with its prominent red-and-white roof. It was the post office where everyone went: ants and snails, birds and stars. They left letters and messages, most of them asking for the whereabouts of their relatives, for they were all refugees from another part of the woods. I could not give them different dimensions; birds and foxes, squirrels and caterpillars shared the same size. The population of Pilzburg was made up of what I was able to draw well enough to be recognisable. Admittedly, the birds were basically no more than sweeping ticks, the foxes turned out to look like curious sea creatures, my squirrels were indistinguishable from the tree branches on which they were sitting and the caterpillars could have been mistaken for crocodiles. Against that, the stars I drew really looked like stars — I didn’t yet know about the Star of David — and the sun and the moon always bore smiling faces. I also captured clouds quite well, even if for some reason I always turned them into rowing boats. The ruler of Pilzburg was a magnificent barn owl that kept an eye on everything going on in the community from an old silver fir. Of all the mushrooms, trees and animals I drew, the owl I named Doctor Uhu turned out best — by far. There was a reason for that. I had traced it with a very sharp pencil through parchment paper from a book about native animals. I was extremely proud of my achievement; Dr Uhu was meant to be like a God.

I escaped to Pilzburg whenever I was frightened. Perhaps it helped me suppress my early confrontation with death. Yet it wasn’t always peaceful there. I remember once drawing a large flock of birds attacking a flat mushroom. I drew so many black-winged low-flying aircraft it ended up like a huge thick dark blot. When my grandmother got hold of the picture she asked me why I had drawn so many flies. She knew I was disappointed and tried to comfort me. ‘It’s all in the eye of the beholder,’ she consoled me.

Members of the Board have read what they call the first instalment of my ‘self-analysis’. I still refer to it as life — or bio-fiction. It seems most of the doctors are not happy with what I submitted. Bold Miriam continues to preside over the meeting, not so much chairwoman as presiding judge. This time they take me to a large committee room on the top floor of the building. In my mind I have no doubt I am facing a court of law.

It is early afternoon. Outside the sun is shining. Even with all windows shut I can hear the distant noise of traffic from the street below leading to the German border. Briefly I think I can hear birds singing, but perhaps that is an illusion. None of the group members I face wear white coats. The group consists of five men and three women. On this occasion Dr Miriam Springer calls on the expertise of an older lady who has the unnerving habit of eyeballing me as if I were already a condemned man. Looking like a wax figure, she doesn’t appear to move her head once. Her presence lends the hearing an eerie atmosphere no amount of smiles and encouraging gestures from the others can eliminate.

Bold Miriam opens proceedings with one of her predictably condescending remarks. ‘Good afternoon, Professor. We’re pleased to see you’ve settled in rather nicely. Thank you for the first submission of’ — with gleeful irony she hesitates as she looks across to the other members of the committee — ‘what would you call the pages you allowed us to read, Professor?’

Caught unawares, I instinctively reply: ‘An imposition.’ My answer prompts forbearing laughter among some of the panellists. After an indulgent pause Dr Springer takes a deep breath and resumes her questioning. ‘We’ve read your text very carefully and with much enjoyment,’ she begins again. ‘However, we would like to ask you for a couple of clarifications because, frankly, we’re not quite sure whether we’ve understood correctly some of the things you’ve written. I’m sure you’ll agree we need to exclude the possibility of any errors and doubts.’ She gives me an indulgent look. ‘After all, it’s your life we’re talking about.’

Indulgence has changed into expectancy. I have no objections to clarifying anything not fully understood. Bold Miriam uses the royal ‘we’ to demonstrate she is speaking for the entire group. ‘For instance, Professor, what did you mean when you said you had two mothers, two or possibly three fathers, and why did you say you were given another sister in November 1987? Wasn’t that a time when your father had already died? Or should I say one of your fathers? You must admit it gets terribly confusing. Unless you mean some of these things metaphorically I think you’ll agree a lot of assertions about your family relations simply don’t add up.’

My response is immediate. ‘No, I didn’t mean it metaphorically,’ I reply, ‘unless you think all life is figurative. I also have two wives, two professions, two religions, two languages, two genders and two sisters. I was under the impression you wanted me to write down the truth.’

What I say causes a minor uproar among the professionals working for Humanitas. My words are met with amused disbelief and barely suppressed irritation. It seems what unsettles them most is my reference to two genders.

Dr Springer leans forward in her chair. ‘My dear Professor, we do appreciate embellishment can be an effective didactic tool, but for a speedy recovery your credibility will be of utmost importance. We have to be able to rely on the information you provide. Naturally, from time to time we’re making the necessary adjustments to statements made under duress or in the search for less painful euphemisms. But facts are facts. We realise you’ve been under considerable strain lately, but if you want us to help you get over your present’ — she hesitates for a moment before she finds the word she is looking for — ‘predicament, you need to tell us what is commonly referred to as the truth.’

I fail to be impressed either by the messy language or the curious logic of what she is saying. ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ is the only comment I offer.

At this stage I feel I have to intervene once more on behalf of my friend, to clarify and explain what’s been said. Whilst it is true that during his lectures he was in the habit of enhancing, or perhaps I should say enriching so-called facts or points of argument, he never did so without integrity. It was rather that his range of reality reached further than most people’s.

Ican verify that the man Humanitas has accepted as its patient does in fact have a very complicated family background. He wasn’t lying or boasting. On the contrary. That situation goes to the very heart of his life, not only of his present condition. But it’s not for me to go into details about these circumstances, at least not now. It’s best to wait until my friend has had his say about these matters. For there’s little doubt in my mind that before long his captors (I confess to sharing his assessment of the clinicians trying to rescue him from himself) will demand further biographical details from their victim. I believe this alleged sufferer from a mental illness is quite capable of speaking for himself. The least I can do is listen to him first, which is what I earnestly advise the committee to do.

The older lady with the unnerving stare compliments me on my Swiss-German, yet continues to speak in a very slow, deliberate manner as if she were talking to a retard. Her words are invariably accompanied by a weary smile signalling it’s all of no use. I have the feeling she doesn’t believe anything I’m saying or writing, but that may be the reason she considers me an interesting case. As I listen to her she slowly transforms into a tortoise.

‘You know, of course, the childhood woods you’re telling us about,’ she begins, ‘are a well-trodden locale, Professor. It’s here that most infantile experiences take place, only to be recollected in adult life.’ Then she stops in her tracks. A new thought seems to have entered her head. ‘Or are we dealing here with an unwitting transfer of fairytale lore? You are a literary man, are you not? What do you think?’ Are tortoises capable of a gesture of triumphant apology? Momentarily her melancholy smile becomes jubilant. She’s convinced her contribution to the inquiry has led the committee onto something. As an afterthought she gives me a wistful reprimand. ‘Don’t believe you’re out of the woods yet!’ She shakes her head, and her unnerving stare is intensified by a wicked grin.

As in a game of tennis the spectators’ heads turn back in my direction. ‘I’m not only a literary man,’ I inform the tortoise, ‘I am a book.’ Disappointed and exasperated, the panel collectively groans aloud.

Dr Springer takes off her glasses to signal she’s beginning to run out of patience. She is barely able to suppress her annoyance. ‘Well, yes, we’re all aware of that opinion. Rest assured we’ll get to it. May we return to the woods?’ I don’t know whether Bold Miriam’s call is intended to be equivocal, so I shrug it off.

Dr McAllister turns to me politely. ‘May I ask why you went to — what was the name again? — St Mary’s Wood after you’d been warned of the dangers?’

That seems a reasonable question. ‘It was dangerous everywhere,’ I reply respectfully. ‘Home too was a war zone. I found it easier to hide in the forest.’

‘I see. But primarily you went there to gather food, is that right?’

The answer is easy. ‘Food for the family, a bit of freedom for me.’

All at once everybody has more questions for me. Dr Enright, the youthful research fellow from Cambridge, who so far has been conspicuous by his silence, asks leave to speak. ‘Good afternoon, Professor,’ he begins rather formally. ‘Perhaps you remember, I’m a resident neurologist. I wonder whether we could go back to what you wrote about your mother and deaf brother. You say she subsequently spent some time in a mental home, but didn’t you tell us she was only protecting her son? In other words, she was perfectly normal. Why then was she sent to a psychiatric clinic, I wonder? That must have been some time after the war.’

‘I can’t tell you that. I’m not very good at family logic. Perhaps because having to protect your child from your own father is the sort of thing that can send you to a loony bin.’ My answer turns out more smug and aggressive than intended. I must admit the thought of being examined by a neurologist conjures up all sorts of horror treatments in me. As if to verify my disquiet Dr Enright’s immaculate manners, even the politeness of his voice, take on sinister overtones. He pretends to be unperturbed by my answer. With impeccable demeanour he continues to probe deeper. ‘So I assume there’s been no other mental illness in your family?’

Despite the transparency of his motivation the neurologist is clearly not aware what kind of a tricky question he has put to me. I’m hardly going to betray Marius, the father of one of my fathers, long dead and gone. There’s no doubt in my mind about the mental and political prowess of the grandfather on my mother’s side, but my paternal grandfather is a different case altogether. ‘No, Dr Enright,’ I reply, trying hard to sound as accommodating as my fashionable interrogator. Then I add: ‘Not in my opinion.’

The last member of Bold Miriam’s interviewing cohorts to question me is someone who appears to have joined the panel only today. I can’t remember him from the previous session. Why wasn’t he introduced to me? He’s a man of indistinct age who might be gay. Not because of what he asks, although if I’m right in my assumption the inference of his request for clarification may not escape the other interrogators.

‘I’d like to come back to an earlier statement, if I may,’ he begins. ‘If the notes are correct, how are we to understand your claim or inference to belong to two genders?’ While the others respond to his question with visible unease, the examiner devours me with his eyes. Familiar with the look, the tone of his voice, the gestures and the movements, I decide not to offer an explanation. Instead, I suddenly hear myself shout: ‘ I want to see my wife! ‘

At first the only response I get is an exchange of meaningful looks among members of the panel. But then Dr Springer informs me officiously: ‘At admission we protect all our patients with a kind of embargo. For several weeks at least, depending on the nature of the illness and the progress of our treatment, we try to keep all outside influence from them. Which means you will not receive visits, phone calls or any other form of communication for a while. Let me assure you there’s nothing sinister in our precaution. We just want to make sure our patients aren’t exposed to potentially harmful influence from anyone. You need to rest and find yourself first. Trust me, you will see your wife in due course. In the meantime try to be patient.’

‘In due course’ — when is that? I’ve become their prisoner!

I think I’d better cut in here with a plea to leave my friend’s assumed bisexuality for later. Right now we’re dealing with his childhood, not any sexual preference in adulthood.

I’m not suggesting he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Let Freud assert whatever he likes. After all, he was a psychoanalyst. What I’m asserting is that sex isn’t a part of childhood, at least not consciously. As I see myself as a provider of facts and reminder of broader circumstances, I can inform the panel of only one curious incident during their patient’s early boyhood years. Shortly after he was born his mother received an overseas parcel containing pink baby clothes and toys for a little girl. Mysteriously, it was posted in Caracas without the name of the sender, puzzling the family because as far as they knew they had no relatives in Venezuela. After initial bafflement and wonder the matter was soon made light of, put down to an amusing case of mistaken identity. In due course, once Germany had conquered Venezuela, Ortsgruppenführer Otto Bluschke suggested, with a rare sense of humour, that the identity of the secret sender would surely be revealed. If need be, he’d have the culprit shot. Meanwhile the strange event made the rounds among family and friends, providing much hilarity and questioning. Of course the child itself was and later remained blissfully unaware of the confusion his birth had caused. His mother, almost immediately pregnant again, kept an embarrassed silence on the subject, refusing to respond to playful taunts and teases.

All of which demonstrates that the infant’s gender may have been misjudged by some unknown person in Venezuela and thereby become the subject of some unfortunate or amusing confusion at home. What remained puzzling was the identity of the sender and the reason for assuming the boy was a girl. Who could have provided such misinformation to a complete stranger in a faraway land, and why? The facts are unequivocal: my friend was born male.

This may be an opportune moment to warn against distortions and fallacies spread and endlessly reiterated by anecdotal family mythology. We all know such amusing misrepresentations are prevalent among one’s own flesh and blood. They may be entertaining, but the mere repetition of such stories does not make them true. I feel part of my responsibility is to guard the reader and protect my friend against potentially damaging inaccuracies brought about by no more than a desire to tell a joke.

On another related matter, I can testify that in 1945 Flensburg’s St Mary’s Wood was indeed dangerous territory, long before the Norwegian and British military came to occupy the city. Sensing the imminent end of the war, all kinds of dubious characters sought refuge in the woodland along the border. The five-year-old boy may not have been aware of these desperadoes, but he certainly knew St Mary’s was anything but a peaceful suburban forest. One of those hiding in the woods near the harbour was a man given the name of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ by the Allies, a notorious traitor broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Hamburg throughout the war. His real name was William Joyce. An American and a German citizen, he was born in Brooklyn in 1908 and executed in Britain in 1946. Joyce was an upper middle-class member of the British Union of Fascists. The British gave him the name ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ while suffering his increasingly mad ravings over a period of six years. It was near St Mary’s Wood that the infamous Lord Haw-Haw was finally captured on 29 May 1945. Like many others in the woods, he was on the run. But the infamous broadcaster of ‘Germany Calling’ had nowhere to go.

William Joyce’s biographer, Mary Kenny, reports that Goebbels’ instructions were to take Lord Haw-Haw and his wife ‘from the Flensburg border area to Denmark’. On her own travel to my colleague’s city of birth, Mary Kenny wrongly calls ‘Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein’ a ‘Hanseatic city on the Baltic, only a few kilometres from the Danish border’ from where she visits ‘a seaside resort called Wassersleben beyond Flensburg, virtually straddling the border with Denmark.’ I know that during the early years of his life my friend used to go swimming at this very place. ‘Within this village,’ writes Mary Kenny, ‘is a hamlet called Kupfermuhle — Coppermill. It is most picturesque, looking out on the calm, tideless Baltic Sea, and surrounded by wooded copses of tall birch, silver beech and green pines.’

Today, the landscape is much as it was during the final days of the Second World War. William and Margaret Joyce, living as Wilhelm and Margaret Hansen, resided at Christiangang, a ‘little cluster of artisans’ dwellings’ that looked like ‘Hansel and Gretel cottage houses’. By a ‘strange synchronicity of fate’ it was a German Jew, a refugee in England, who delivered Lord Haw-Haw to justice. Horst Pinschewer, who was now Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry, in the company of Captain Alexander Adrian Lickorish, ran into William Joyce while collecting pieces of firewood in the beech wood on 28 May 1945. When Lord Haw-Haw reached for his false passport, Perry shot Joyce through the hip. The elusive traitor was arrested and his trial commenced at the Old Bailey on 17 September 1945. He was hanged on 3 January 1946. It took a Pinschewer and Lickorish to bring Lord Haw-Haw to justice. The names of the participants may suggest a clownish circus act, but Joyce’s treachery proved no laughing matter.

I can’t help finding it remarkable how personal histories not infrequently unfold in the context of monumental historical events. On 23 May 1945, Hitler’s successor Karl Dönitz was arrested by British troops at the Military Naval Academy in Flensburg-Murwik, a harbour suburb not far from where the cold and hungry Manfred used to play with other children. Hitler had appointed Donitz on 28 April as his successor, bestowing upon him the title of President of the German Reich, a Reich that had by then ceased to exist. His government ‘ruled over’ Germany’s defeat for twenty-three days. It formally ended on Flensburg’s harbour. With a coincidental touch of irony the British ordered Donitz to the passenger liner Patria where he was officially declared a prisoner of war. So the ‘thousand-year German Reich’ surrendered to the Allied Forces. It had lasted barely twelve years, seven years longer than my young friend’s age at that time.

I should add that during the months of April and May 1945 several other prominent Nazis tried to use Flensburg as a hiding place, among them the notorious ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, who was executed in 1946 at Nuremberg, and arch-fiend Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, organiser of the Gestapo’s terrorising, concentration camps and mass murder of Jews. Rosenberg was given refuge by Dr Muntsche, a well-known local Nazi who lived near St Mary’s Woods. This little forest became a veritable centre of desperate scenarios during the final weeks and months of Hitler’s regime. My friend’s own childhood experiences correspond to events on a larger historical scale. Dr Muntsche put a plaster cast on Rosenberg, classified him as severely wounded and ordered an ambulance to drive him to the small Angeln town of Kappeln on the Schlei, where he was placed in a temporary hospital and relieved of his plaster cast. A British intelligence officer who had suffered a car accident was placed in the same sickroom. He recognised Rosenberg’s face and had him arrested.

Himmler came to Flensburg hoping for Karl Donitz’s support to hide in the Naval Academy at Murwik. Ironically my friend was to spend time as member of a boys’ choir here. What Himmler didn’t know was that General Montgomery had passed on photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the chief negotiator of German capitulation, Admiral von Friedeburg. He in turn presented them to his superior, the Admiral of the Fleet, Karl Donitz. It appears Donitz, the last official German Head of State, was aware of the existence of concentration camps but had never seen one. Confronted with the gruesome evidence, he threw Himmler out of the Academy. Himmler then tried unsuccessfully to hide in the Waldschule, the primary school near St Mary’s my friend attended as a first-grader. Then he broke into a fire-brigade training school in the nearby suburb of Harrislee and donned the uniform of a fire chief. Thus provided with a disguise, he managed to escape to Hamburg, where his love of uniform made him change from fire chief to lowly sergeant. He moved on to Bremervorde, where refugees were arriving from the East. (Among them was a child called Angelika, destined to become my friend’s future lover.) From there he planned to take a train to Luneburg in Lower Saxony. By now Himmler was getting increasingly confident, especially since the British Army had classified him as a harmless POW. At the station he went to the toilet just before the train left, and there two secret service agents recognised him. Realising the game was up, the Nazi fugitive bit open his standard issue cyanide capsule. Sic transit gloria mundi.

An official publication by the Flensburg City Council ( Long Shadows, 2000) claims ‘in no other German city did so many initiators, responsible leaders, high-ranking executives and willing executors of the murderous Nazi regime go into hiding as in Flensburg and its environs. Not the least among them was the notorious Auschwitz-Kommandant Rudolf Hoss. According to Long Shadows ‘a veritable net of helpers assisted Hoss to disappear in Flensburg’. On 11 March 1946 he was discovered in a small village outside Flensburg, Gottrupel, and arrested by the Military Police. In June 1946 Hoss was extradited to Poland, condemned to death and executed. Manfred’s credentials as belonging to the generation of ‘Hitler’s Children’ could hardly have been more trenchant.

It is remarkable how even at its earliest stage someone’s life can be interwoven with final desperate movements of historical significance. I’m not suggesting the child Manfred could have been aware of them, but his claim to have been born into a net of evil seems the more valid. He discovered most of these things during his adolescence, many from his aunt, uncle and cousins of the anti-Nazi section of his family. It took Flensburg some time to reveal many of these events, even longer to come to terms with them. The town’s Lord Mayor at the end of the war, a certain ‘Dr Dr Kracht’ who during his term wore either SA or SS uniform, was removed from office by the British and taken to a POW camp. The distinguished doctor identifying himself with two degrees was released for good behaviour, having promised loyalty to a new German democracy and was promptly appointed Ministerialrat (Principal) in the post-war state government of Schleswig-Holstein. I believe it was above all a lack of credibility that prompted my friend to leave the country. Many of his teachers had been Nazis who taught nationalistic distortions of German history, denied the Holocaust and spoke of ‘victor’s justice and law’. Yet they’d all been officially ‘de-nazified’.

Just one more ‘generic’ comment regarding the situation in Flensburg immediately before and after the end of the war. In the throes of imminent defeat Dr and Mrs Goebbels weren’t the only parents relating to their offspring in unnatural ways. Some killed their children by delivering them to local Nazi authorities. While everyone knew the war was already lost, young boys were hastily executed for acts of defeatism.

A reliable eyewitness, Ursula von Kardoff, noted in her diary that near war’s end cities were ‘in a strange mood — a mixture of apathy and pleasure seeking. Strangers copulated in darkened streets, even in hospitals.’ Another diarist, Anthony Beevor, noted that ‘an erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embrace. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’ It was in that kind of environment that my friend’s childhood unfolded. Many mothers lived as if there were no tomorrow. Children held no promise of a brighter future; their immediate challenge was another mouth to feed. Self-abandonment was the order of the day. Inhabitants of Flensburg, including its ever increasing influx of desperate refugees, may not have participated in this moral decay with quite as much ferocity as men and women in the larger cities, yet even in this provincial border town excesses were widespread and extended to child molestation. It created a post-war society where extraordinary breaches of morality and decency continued to be committed behind closed doors, often with the full knowledge of relatives and neighbours.

By the 1950s there was a deceptive atmosphere of normality. The unspoken motto was: ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ Immorality and depravity continued long after the war. Nazism, Hitler and the lost war were brushed under the table. Germans did what they do best: they put their shoulders to the wheel and forgot. Hardly anyone felt responsibility or guilt. It was the survivors of the war who felt hard done by. In such a climate, the so-called ‘economic miracle’ seemed to reinforce moral corruption.

Once an entire people had succumbed to evil, the aftermath of wickedness lasted a very long time. I don’t know whether my friend will be brave enough to include in his report to Humanitas a description of the horrific abuse he continued tosuffer even when to all outward appearance the defeated and divided people of Germany seemed about to regain a portion of social propriety.