Andreas Maier

The Room

1

My uncle J’s room is on the first floor, overlooking Uhlandstrasse, directly opposite the bathroom that he probably wasn’t even allowed to use. During most of the time I spent there with my grandmother when I was a child, he would be sleeping, and then the whole house would stink. If he was out, which meant lugging packages around in Frankfurt, the smell would linger on regardless. The house essentially reeked of J’s silage-like stench for years. It started back when I was eight or nine years old, because he still washed himself relatively often before that. Even today, my nostrils remind me of J whenever I go down into the cellar, his territory, at the Uhlandstrasse house. They built a bathroom down there especially for him, with a shower cubicle and toilet. The cellar was where he led his subsurface existence as a pretend craftsman. J had grown up surrounded by craftsmen, in a family of stonemasons. The business had around thirty employees and was based in Friedberg, three kilometres away. Uncle J spent a lot of time there as an adolescent, there was hammering and sawing and cutting and sanding, and immense cranes scattered all over the place, and technicians keeping the machines in good working order, laborers welding and milling, a blacksmith making the tools and ensuring everything was dimensionally correct — and my uncle, fascinated by it all, began to see himself as a craftsman too and set up a workshop in the Uhlandstrasse cellar, though it was nothing more than a fantasy workshop really, a make-believe workshop. There are still boxes of screws hanging on the walls, and various tools lying around, even though most of them were cleared away twenty years ago after he moved out (J had to leave the house after the death of his mother, my grandmother, with whom he lived until the end of her life, by which time he was over sixty years old). There is still a bench clamp down there, and I remember how — back when J was still alive and still living in the Uhlandstrasse house and his mother was still there and the world was still in order for him, after a fashion, and not yet damaged or even completely destroyed — he used to clamp screws in it, select one of the many iron files with great care, check and adjust the position of the screw in the clamp according to some particular idea or craftsman’s system that he had dreamt up, then begin to file, while I, the child, could never resist asking why he was doing it, or in other words for what purpose he was filing the screw, if that was what he happened to be doing. J would then explain to me, in a despairing kind of rage, the roles of all the instruments he was using at that moment (“The bench clamp is for clamping screws — look, this is how you open it, and this is how you close it.”), but he never answered my actual questions — they didn’t seem to even exist for him. He noticed that something wasn’t quite right, though, and that enraged him. Over time, he grasped the fact that I didn’t buy his screw-filing story. There he stood, my uncle J, over forty years old back then, alongside me in the cellar, his territory, the workshop in which he was able to be what he never was and had never been allowed to become, and the child kept asking questions, and Uncle J just kept filing away with ever-increasing rage until eventually he collapsed into cursing, followed by complete and utter silence.

I remember how I always used to get the creeps when I went down into the cellar, knowing that, at least in part, it was my uncle’s realm. The laundry room was down there too, and a room for drying the washing, as well as the wine cellar, and J’s workshop was right next to the drying room, which meant you had to walk through the workshop (which strictly speaking was a room of around six or seven square metres), in order to get to the cool chamber where the wine was kept. This meant that the workshop was a publicly accessible space, unlike J’s bedroom on the first floor. Most of my encounters with J took place in the workshop. He rarely spent any time in the living room back then, at least not when someone else was also in my grandmother’s house. The workshop was his hobby, maybe even his life’s purpose — aside from the women, about whom everything I know is based on speculation. Speculation and, to be fair, a few pretty obvious clues. I have to admit that, to start with, I genuinely believed J was a craftsman, a wrought iron specialist. Perhaps, initially, I thought he was working on something in the cellar that was connected to the masonry business. Even later, once I had realised that J was purely and simply working ‘independently’ down there, I still assumed that he was actually making and creating something, or at the very least repairing something. There used to be small generators and engines and switches lying around too, and the mere fact that they were lying around made me think that J knew what they all were and how to put them to use. In reality, though, he would just take these things with him when they were thrown out by the company, take them to pieces at home, then stare vacantly at the remains without understanding them in the slightest — for when it came down to it, even if it wasn’t always apparent at first glance, Uncle J was an idiot.

He wasn’t even doing what obscure dilettante artists do, taking different materials and parts and leftover things intended for entirely different uses and making them into collages or strange apparatus or mobiles which, although functionless, represent an achievement for their creators, due to their size, the number of parts they consist of or their fantastical form. No, back then I soon came to believe — and am still firmly convinced to this day — that for J the workshop served one purpose only: to belong to the world upstairs, and in particular to the world of the masonry business three kilometres away. According to my mother, my uncle J was never accepted by his father, my grandfather, whatever the word ‘accepted’ might mean when used in reference to my uncle.

After all, in my case it went far beyond not accepting my uncle J; instead, with the way he looked and behaved, he was the epitome of horror to me when I was a child. And even though I eventually realised that my uncle was someone who still had one foot in paradise, it’s difficult for me to imagine how I ever managed to spend an entire half-hour in the cellar with him. Presumably I had to go down there whenever my grandmother went to do her shopping at Schade & Füllgrabe or to meet a friend. I can still remember how uneasy I used to feel there. Even though I would be hoping against hope that I could go back upstairs again soon, time and time again I would watch J’s filing and drilling and sanding, feel bewildered, and end up questioning him (it didn’t even occur to me to give it a rest). As a result, J would get increasingly wound up — all the while making strange hissing sounds and shaking a spanner or wrench about in his hand as if he wanted to beat first some inanimate object and then me — until eventually my grandmother would come down and rescue me.

The fact that it was unusual for a bathroom to have been installed in the cellar for my uncle didn’t even occur to me back then. As far as I was concerned, that place, the Uhlandstrasse house, didn’t have a history but had simply been there forever (after all, I thought I had been there forever too). And because it had been there forever, it didn’t need explanation, any more than the sun or gravity need explanation. In the first years of my life, too few changes took place to prompt me towards the idea that the world, particularly where human beings were concerned, was subject to constant change. I had no idea of how it changed from generation to generation. My existence back then was eternal, and every day was eternal too, because everything was already established. A question like “Why is there an entire bathroom in the cellar, with a shower, bath, and toilet?” would never have even entered my mind. In fact, the first time the bathroom provoked any kind of surprise in me was when I went back down to the cellar for the first time in over twenty years. The way it looked! It was a relatively bright, completely tiled basement room with a drain in the middle of the floor, a little window at head height, and no decoration or embellishment of any kind — it immediately made me think of a Gestapo cellar, or at least of something in an Aki Kauriskmäki film. When I was a child of three or four years of age, neither Gestapo cellars nor Aki Kauriskmäki films existed; there was just this total, unchangeable, irrevocable world in which everything was fixed apart from me, for I was able to move through it as I wished (or rather how I was supposed to), and even though this world only really consisted of two houses — my parent’s house and the house in Uhlandstrasse, which I myself would move into much later, in 1999, once everyone was dead — it was still the most universal world imaginable. And I barely expanded this world as my life went on, only adding the Wetterau as a concept, and that’s how it remained, from my uncle’s room over the cellar and everything else, to the Wetterau, my home. All the other towns and cities I’ve lived in, even Rome, are now part of the world which is the Wetterau.

To my way of thinking, my uncle wasn’t into boys; otherwise I’m sure he would have done something with me in the cellar. But then again, much like a child himself, maybe he was just too in awe of his mother, the mother who unquestioningly looked after — or tolerated — him well into her old age. Maybe it was this deep sense of awe for her that made him hold back from everything. But at some point he must have realised that sowing his wild oats with women would at least have been more normal than doing it with anyone else (or in other words, more socially acceptable and thus not subject to shame and punishment). Maybe that’s how women ended up becoming the focus of his attention, even though actually imagining it still baffles all of us. Is that why his bedroom door was always locked? I mean ‘locked’ in a metaphorical sense; maybe he never locked the door and instead relied on the fact that someone like me would never set foot in his hellhole, even if the door wasn’t locked. He probably had an unspoken agreement with Grandmother, his mother, that she wouldn’t snoop around in there, so that she wouldn’t risk finding what she didn’t want to find or knowing what she didn’t want to know. All I know is that the cleaning ladies had difficulties with him (that’s another one of those words: difficulties); he would approach them from behind while they were bending over, they said, always from behind, and even Aunt Lenchen had encounters of this kind with him, despite being ten years older and over seventy by the end. Even in later years, he would go up behind her and grab her around the bosom, following his inner nature as defined by God, even though it didn’t fit the context of either his life or Aunt Lenchen’s — they weren’t in the wild, after all. And that’s why, of course, there was an uproar whenever J complied with his inner nature and grabbed Aunt Lenchen around the bosom from behind, as if it belonged to him and he had the right to do so.

I never set foot in J’s bedroom. I doubt Aunt Lenchen ever did either. I presume that even J’s mother rarely set foot in there and only in genuine emergencies, perhaps because not even she was protected by the aforementioned awe that he held for her. He wouldn’t let anything touch his mother, but that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped him from touching her breasts. And so for her it was like having this billy goat as a son, still living under the same roof even though he was getting on in years himself, a billy goat who, although only on occasion, would jump around and onto people. His room was a kind of primal dark room in my consciousness. Even though I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house as a child, especially after the death of my great-grandmother Else, who took care of me in the first few years of my life, I can’t picture J’s room at all. I don’t know where the bed was, though there must have been one, and I don’t have a clue what else could have been in there. I simply can’t picture it. Venturing in there during the years of the stench would have been hell. I would have died of disgust. But I wasn’t scared of the room: given that setting foot in there was completely inconceivable, its existence, so to speak, fell completely under the threshold of my perception. It was there, and yet at the same time it wasn’t. Since J spent most of his time sleeping, it must have almost always been pitch black in there. Today, it’s my study. I’ve always written novels in there, but until now it had never occurred to me to write about my mentally-impaired-at-birth uncle J. About him and his room. About the house and the street. And about my family. And our gravestones. And the Wetterau, which is the whole world. The Wetterau, which for most people is named after an Autobahn service station, the A5 Wetterau service station, which is now being transformed into a bypass. When it comes to down to it, the Wetterau is a bypass with a service station attached. When I say that, people laugh. And yet it was once my home. My home, a road. And now I’m writing a bypass while they bulldoze my home into oblivion outside, and I’m starting with my uncle in his room. This is the beginning that everything else stems from. The room, the house, the place, the street, the towns, my life, the family, the Wetterau and everything else beyond it. My uncle, the only human being without guilt I have ever known. On his way into the real world, but with one foot still in paradise.

It wasn’t obvious straight away that my uncle had a disability (he had been delivered by forceps). He could speak without any difficulty, for example. Admittedly only in simple sentences, but then that could be said of everyone in the Wetterau. There were certain topics which always prompted him to speak up. J was constantly telling stories about the forest, about Forsthaus Winterstein, the gamekeeper’s lodge, and about the hunters. He could list all the deer antlers hanging on the walls in Jagdhaus Ossenheim, the hunting lodge. He knew his stuff, how stags were called according to the number of points on their antlers. J always wore a camouflage hunting parka too. Another thing he used to talk very enthusiastically about was the radio. Whenever something was being broadcast from a big city in Europe, he would stand there in front of the old box radio (a Telefunken), twiddle the tuning knob and pretend to be some technical pioneer, because my uncle remained a child throughout his whole life and was wildly enthusiastic about technical things — an enthusiasm which I held only at the very beginning of my life, and never to the same extent. At Christmas he would tune into Deutschlandfunk for the broadcast of the ringing of the bells of St. Stephen’s Dome in Vienna. Even as late as 1980, my uncle was standing in front of the radio listening to the bells of St. Stephen’s, like others had once stood in front of the television, over ten years before, for the moon landing. He would then call out in a reverent fashion, and as if we should all pay attention, The bells of St. Stephen’s Dome! We all humoured him by listening, but only ever for a few seconds. My uncle also liked standing in front of building sites and watching the machines and the workers. He never struck up a conversation with them, even though he would have loved to do so, to talk shop, as if he knew his stuff. He’d often seen these kinds of conversations on the premises of the family business: two or three workers standing around together and communicating entirely in vocabulary that was specific to the work or the machines or some technical process. To belong in this way was his life’s longing. Apparently he had been allowed to do a few odd jobs there when he was a boy, or so I hear. Filing, I assume, or running errands. I’ve been told that my grandfather even let him deliver pay packets. And yet allegedly, although I’m not sure at what point in time this was, my grandfather also beat him with a leather belt. My grandfather Wilhelm, the artistic man with the leather belt. That was always the first thing people said about my grandfather Wilhelm: Such an artistic man! He, the last artistic person in our family (he played the piano and studied architecture) and then I came along; I was seen as artistic too. Yes, that’s how they imagine artistic people to be — individuals like me or my grandfather (whom I never knew). Maybe the leather belt is even part of that for them, part of being artistic. My uncle wasn’t artistic, even though he loved folk music programmes very much, particularly Heino. Heino was someone who made my uncle happy, almost as happy as the dear Lord makes others. J’s eyes would light up when he listened to Heino, and his face would relax. My uncle spent most of the time with an expression of resentment on his face; after all, most of the time he was in a bad mood or about to have one of the choleric episodes which we children were so fond of provoking, despite the fact that they never ended well for us. But when he was standing in front of building sites or listening to Heino or watching folk music programmes, of which there weren’t many at the time, he was spellbound, in another world, just like when he was walking through the forest in his little hunting jacket. He would walk in this spellbound, alert way through the forest, like I did later. Uncle J is the only other person in our family who was able to identify different birds, that’s something we have in common. Maybe he wanted to belong there too: not to the wild animals, but to those who hunted them and knew them and were allowed to shoot them, unlike him. He was never allowed to hunt. Maybe J went to the forest in order to have some peace and quiet, from himself and from the probably eternally unwashed contents of his trousers, because in later years, as I already mentioned, he never showered, and always quickly contaminated everything with his stench. Although when I think about it now, what I was always told can’t be right. J must have washed now and again, even in later years, but not when he came back from his job at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, nor when he had slept in after his night shifts and came into the kitchen or living room, nor when he drove Oma to see us in Friedberg in his Nazi-brown VW. But he must have washed after that, before he went into the forest and then to the inn (or even when he just went straight to the inn).

2

This is how I imagine a day in the life of my uncle J: At around half four in the morning, he sets off in his camouflaged parka, with a hat in winter and in summer without, walking the eight minutes to the nearby Bad Nauheim train station, where there were still two counter clerks and the trains ran exactly on time. Coffee was drunk from porcelain cups and the kiosk wasn’t yet openly accessible, which meant you could only look at the porno mags if you asked the kiosk assistant for them. So no standing around shamefaced in the corner as they do nowadays, looking at the selection of bust and butt magazines like Anal and The Neighbour’s Wife, and even cock mags now too, because the sexes have gotten all mixed up, even in train station kiosks, despite the fact that everything tends to reach them last. Nowadays you have to know exactly what you want, whereas back then someone like my uncle still had a relatively narrow selection, albeit one that didn’t seem in the slightest bit narrow to him. Men would have confused him. Maybe it would be different today. But he died at just the right time, in that sense. In his day, there were still relatively clear divisions. For the most part, people lived ordered lives in which they went to work and listened to Heino or had a thirst-quenching beer at the inn or standing in front of the fridge at home, and the other thing was secret and only took place — if it took place at all — at the kiosk, where they would go twice a week, and the magazines cost money, after all, and then they had to be hidden away. Back then, those magazines were the means of escaping from oneself, from one’s inner, God-given nature — people would look at the pictures and live with them and from them, then return, unscathed, to the refuge of society and working life. There were still morals; everything else was pushed aside into a corner. Today, everything would have been too much for my uncle.

It’s possible that he had a good business relationship with the kiosk at the Bad Nauheim train station. He smoked a lot, R6s, and he would have bought them there for sure. Maybe the kiosk owner used to open up as early as half four because of the night shift and early shift workers. But maybe it wasn’t like that at all; maybe Uncle J just sat there with his little leather bag, reputable and washed amongst his colleagues, finally part of it, somebody, a commuter on his way to work, someone with stories to tell, stories about his work, about his superiors, his colleagues, stories about particularly heavy packages or particularly interesting deliveries or unusual happenings. Or maybe they were all in cahoots, talking about the women. Perhaps they had already realised, with utter clarity, what and who my uncle was, and they let him buy all kinds of things for them, paid for out of his pay check. And he bought them and paid for them in order to belong and feel accepted by his colleagues, at half past four in the morning in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau.

My uncle was a great frequenter of inns, and whenever he went someone or other would suss him out. My uncle, mentally impaired at birth, was constantly boasting about his existence, or rather about his Boll existence, his existence as a Boll. He sat there in the inns and told stories about his father, the big company boss with a chauffeur and a dog. Of course he didn’t mention the fact that his father hit him, or rather used to hit him, with a leather belt. When he was talking about his father, a bad word never passed his lips. J probably thought everything that happened was normal, just part of the entirely normal, natural way of the world. He would talk about the company, the employees, the pay checks; he probably even told people where the cash was kept, the best way to get to the company premises and so on. But it would never have occurred to anyone in Friedberg or Bad Nauheim to break into the premises by the Usa; instead they would just have gotten to the money through my uncle, who for my family had always been an open sore, financially speaking, the Bolls’ open wound. And even though he was only ever giving away his own pay check, the family still didn’t want to see it wasted like that. They definitely would have preferred it if he hadn’t frequented the inns quite so much.

From time to time, he ran into Gerd Bornträger at the station in the mornings. I imagine that they met in the Köpi, a Königspilsner inn in Bad Nauheim. Bornträger was, of course, completely drunk when he made my uncle’s acquaintance and immediately managed to get a few beers out of him, followed by a few schnapps to wash them down. That’s how my uncle always met people. The drunks in our bars in the Wetterau are always trying to drink with you, beer and schnapps, with the aim of eventually losing count of the rounds or acting as though they’ve forgotten to bring their money along; heaven forbid they succeed. If they do, you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll follow you all the way to your front door, and even go inside with you if you’re not careful. But that wasn’t necessary with J in the Köpi, because he would get so completely sozzled that he didn’t even notice he was paying for someone else’s beers yet again. The truth was, he was always paying for someone else. Sometimes everyone in the bar would latch on to him, and when that happened he could easily end up paying for ten rounds in one go. That was only in the small inns of course, where almost everyone would be sitting around on benches and there were no more than eight to ten people to a round. That’s why they always used to try to lure him into those inns. But even though he may have been part of things there, I don’t think he was totally comfortable with it. If he was, he wouldn’t have kept going to Forsthaus Winterstein with all the hunters, who were more respectable. The landlady there would never have allowed my uncle to be taken advantage of like that. And it was always the place he spoke the most enthusiastically about. The Winterstein lodge and the Winterstein mountain were his favourite places, apart from his dark room at home or the establishments in Frankfurt which, although the only plausible explanation, are admittedly based on mere speculation.

Bornträger sometimes took the same train into Frankfurt for the early shift, because he worked at the Hauptbahnhof too, or at least that’s what he claimed. But my uncle never once saw him there during the day, not in the station and definitely not at the post depot, where J himself worked. (And he never saw him on the journey home either.) Another man who used to take the train regularly was Rudi Weber, whose father had worked as a stonemason in the quarry with my grandfather, J’s father. Weber worked the early shift at a firm in Frankfurt’s Gallus district. He was known as Rudi Junior, the son of stonemason Weber. He always greeted J politely, and sometimes the two of them would talk about their fathers. When J spoke about his father, the big company boss, it was with pride, a sense of belonging to something. Everything he said about his father and the company was communicated in a tone of the utmost seriousness. He would go into raptures when a piece of new machinery was ordered, describing it as the newest and biggest and best of its kind, of course. My uncle always thought in superlatives. Everything had to be re-thought into a superlative, including all the machines on the company premises. The other son, Rudi Junior, in his late thirties at the time just like my uncle, would then listen politely while Bornträger made fun of J (perhaps in much the same way as I did in the cellar, when J was sawing and filing) and winked at Rudi, in an attempt to get him to gang up on my uncle. I presume that Weber never reacted to this.

Bornträger: Hey, J, you know that new milling machine you told us about last week? How much did you say it cost, again? And what kind of machine is it anyway? What’s it called? Tell us something about it, won’t you?!

J lifts his hand in a ponderous manner, squints and says: Oh-hoh! That machine, that machine is the best there is (Oh-hoh! — that was his way of expressing excitement). It’s a new invention, by a really famous manufacturer. A really famous make — I even used it myself.

B: What did you do with it?

J: I know the machine inside and out. I know every manoeuvre.

B: What, you mean your father let you loose on it? I don’t believe that for a second, ha-ha-ha, you can’t even insert a dowel pin. Craftsman my ass, ha-ha-ha! You don’t even know what it’s called, this machine!

It’s not hard to imagine Bornträger giving Weber an encouraging slap on the thigh as he says this, and yet the latter would never react, only stare over at the window with a strained expression. He felt sorry for J. Bornträger, on the other hand, had perhaps realised that my uncle was one of the happiest people in the world — completely unaware that he was being mocked, he would just gaze up like a dog being presented with a bone. That’s why Bornträger would mischeviously question my uncle in great detail about the things that excited him, the things he thought he understood (like machines, for example), but about which, in reality, he knew nothing at all. J would then offer up completely meaningless explanations that were always about the Biggest and Best and Newest of things, a kind of Wetterau Genius Language for trained engineers, admittedly devoid of any meaning but nonetheless containing some general terms that he had overheard. My uncle knew and could say words like hoisting crane, milling machine and disk sander, but when he uttered them he sounded as clueless as an inexperienced teenage boy talking about women. A language of longing in Engineer Speak. I can picture the sadness and helplessness in my uncle’s brown-black eyes when, in an attempt to satisfy Bornträger, he escalates to superlatives; Bornträger would continue to pull my uncle’s leg regardless. J often used to have this sad and helpless air about him in the cellar too, but I’ve always been convinced that he was never aware of this helplessness and sadness, that it didn’t even exist for him. Perhaps in much the same way as he was sometimes in pain but completely unaware of it — J was completely analgic from birth. In some ways, this had been helpful to him during his life: as a boy he had been pummelled day after day by children who went on to become respectable Bad Nauheim citizens and are still seen as such. But back then they would kick my uncle in the side as he lay on the ground, which in their view was where he belonged. Due to his scrawny legs and big ears, his lank hair and crazed expression, my uncle cut a conspicuous figure. This, along with the fact that he liked to ask questions and tag along with anyone and everyone, meant that he became easy prey, shuttling back and forth between his father, who loathed him, and his schoolmates, who would drag him along by his jug-like ears, stretching them all the more. Yet today his peers sit in the Bad Nauheim church and spend Christmas and Easter with their families, knowing all the while that they could stand by my uncle’s grave and confess to God: Yes, I kicked him too.

I have never found out whether Bornträger had been in school with J back then. After his first few years there, they bundled J off to a special school in the Rhineland, a long way away, with the aim of keeping him alive and as unscathed as possible. A Wetterau boy who they had to take out of the Wetterau for years on end so he could make it through and survive the Wetterau, yet he didn’t survive it, just like none of us will survive it. Back then, my uncle sat in the train staring out at a landscape that was still his landscape. Those were his fields out there, his Winterstein. There were no cars driving between Friedberg and Bad Nauheim before five in the morning, and the word bypass didn’t yet officially exist; in those days, the dictionary listed bypath directly after bygone. That was back when we still spoke dialect, before anyone else understood us. My uncle’s language doesn’t even exist now. He used to speak it on the train, be teased in it by Bornträger. All of this is no more than forty years ago. My uncle always travelled along the same route. Bad Nauheim, past Schwalheim, then over the Rosenthal viaduct, the so-called ‘twenty-four halls’ near which I grew up and which provided the backdrop for my childhood, like the famous railway bridge on the poster for Once Upon a Time in America did for the kids in the movie. Some of the stones used to construct the Rosenthal viaduct came from our quarry, my mother told me, although I have no way of verifying that. But she should know, because she ran the business for seven years; from 1967, the year when I was born, to when it was liquidated in 1974 and the last-remaining workers left the premises.

On his journey into Frankfurt, my uncle regularly travelled past the premises of the family business in Friedberg, so close that he could practically have spat on my father’s head, although he would never have done such a thing, given how in awe of his father he was. That was my uncle; he felt longing for some things and awe for others. In later years he saw my family home there, where the apple orchard used to be. He could see everything from up there in the train: the business getting smaller and smaller, more and more sections of it being cut away, the present becoming the past and not the future everyone had hoped for. Looking back, it had always been in decline. The business had blossomed during the Weimar Republic, and even the Third Reich had been bearable — from a Boll perspective at least. Apart from the fact that dead soldiers didn’t get individual gravestones. A dead Friedberg soldier never brought us much profit. If his mother died, on the other hand, that was good business. All the Marie Baumanns and Sophie Breitenfelders got individual gravestones. But those dead soldiers, after they had been sent off to war, were stowed away in just the same way they had been during the war itself — still living then but doomed to die — barracked, piled up and lined up, except that the communal barrack roof later became a communal memorial plate, the soldiers awaiting their communal resurrection in eternal camaraderie in the cemetery of Friedberg in the Wetterau.

We Await the Second Coming

But then everything fell to ruin, and globalisation took care of the rest. Now people here are buried beneath stones that come from around the world. Wetterau residents now lay to rest beneath imported gravestones. It started with stones from the Far East. Our cemetery was globalised before the term globalised even existed, and we became Friedberg’s first victims of globalisation, just twenty-eight years after the last war. Travelling through Friedberg by train, my uncle passed by the Hanauer Hof too, a brewery inn next to the cemetery where almost all of us now lie. The Hanauer Hof is where we drank to the dead after they were buried, usually with a schnapps and several pints of cider to chase it down. Although my uncle didn’t just go to the Hanauer Hof for the wakes, of course. And we went there for his too, after my uncle’s burial. Until the seventies there was a big factory behind the Hanauer Hof; it smelled of iron and electricity and an early phase of industrialisation, and its machinery was visible to passersby, all of it standing around in the open and unguarded on the land and spilling over into the town, and people like my uncle would stand there in awe in front of this machinery, gazing with the goggled eyes of child-like excitement. Today there are five supermarkets there, and Friedberg people no longer stand there in awe, staring with child-like excitement, but instead rush around between them comparing prices like lunatics. A senior-citizen Schnitzel-hunt between Tegut and Aldi and Norma, with a hardware store in between, although even that’s gone now.

Then my uncle reaches the fields of Bruchenbrücken — when Hessian TV started to travel the provinces for the AIDA series, shining the spotlight on the everyday life of local villages, this was one of the first locations they filmed — and then on to Ober-Wöllstadt, Nieder-Wöllstadt, Okarben, Großkarben, Dortelweil. Any kid around here can list the names on this route like others can the 1974 national football team. Bad Vilbel, Bonames, the station which has since lost its name and is now called Frankfurter Berg, and further and further on to Frankfurt, which by that time had already expanded and swallowed Ginnheim and Rödelheim and Eschersheim and everything else, before finally, after twenty-seven minutes, my uncle J gets out in Frankfurt. Because that was back then, when the trains still ran to schedule. Back then, the era of the great ‘still’.

The train station was pretty run down at the end of the sixties and early seventies; for there wasn’t yet much emphasis on cleanliness in public spaces in general. Paradise used to surround the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, a paradise much like the one on the internet today. Except that there wasn’t yet online access to one’s bank account back then. So my uncle could only ever have been fleeced of the contents of his wallet, which wouldn’t even have included an EC-card, for they didn’t yet exist. Back then, if you didn’t pay in cash you paid by cheque, but I’m sure my uncle didn’t own any cheques. Presumably he didn’t even have his own bank account. And if he did, then I imagine he wouldn’t have had access to it. He was our family’s never-healing wound, from which everything was intent on seeping out.Especially at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, where you could still go to real women and not just to the women on the screens in the booths like today, although admittedly they’re cheaper (and today there’s a brothel restriction zone around the station). But then again I don’t know anything about what my uncle did there in Frankfurt, I can only surmise. And it’s only just gone five in the morning, so presumably he hasn’t even had his first beer of the day yet. There in Frankfurt he’s alone, no longer amongst the family or the people of Bad Nauheim, where everyone knew everyone and everything was seen by everyone. In Frankfurt, people didn’t see you as a Wetterauer. That’s why people from the Wetterau liked going there. Frankfurt had everything you could dream of, whereas in Bad Nauheim there was just the train station kiosk and not a video to be seen. Even in the eighties, shortly before commercial television was introduced, Mercedes-Benz drivers would pull up alongside me at night and ask where they could go to watch a movie in Friedberg in the Wetterau, and whether I might like to come along. Then, after looking me up and down, they would ask whether, if I did go with them, the movie was absolutely necessary. Back then, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I always seemed to be a feasible alternative for men who wanted to find women. To them, the transition was clearly a negligible and easy one. Rather a sixteen-year-old Wetterau boy than a forty-year-old Wetterau woman, and certainly better to have one in the hand than one on the screen. But presumably they couldn’t find a film showing anywhere in the Wetterau and would drive on to Frankfurt after all, where there was everything, all around the clock, and where no one knew them. There were rows and rows of old buildings around the Hauptbahnhof, all of which had five or six stories, so it always involved climbing a lot of stairs, and this stair-climbing ultimately became the accepted term for the whole thing, a pars pro toto for the escape to paradise around Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. A trip to Frankfurt was always referred to by us as ‘climbing the stairs’. And when I say ‘us’, I mean the Wetterauers, not me — I was still too young back then. Most of the time, the ones chasing after me were men. But there were also a number of blonde women who were no longer that young — and in fact quite old and therefore fake blonde — who definitely wanted to have something in the hand and not on the screen. I was expected to provide what they wanted. And it was completely normal and inconceivable that it would be any other way. Such figures of longing, and I fell beneath them.

Even though J had a disability ID and was classified as such at the pension office, he still went to work at the post depot; he was pressured into it, although comparatively late in his life — otherwise he would have just stayed at home or spent all his time in the inns, with the women or with a beer, or just the latter, and so now he was contributing to the family income, if only trivially, and the payout he could expect from his pension was increasing. My uncle was, like everyone else, a regular expense in the family’s financial housekeeping. And he had cost them money from the very beginning but hadn’t brought any in for a long time. They had let things go on like that for three decades, but with the arrival of my father — a revenue officer and then lawyer — the modern age was ushered into the Boll family, meaning that they started to think in terms of social security and pension contributions. And so Uncle J was now a postal employee; maybe he even thought he was a postal officer, looking at himself in the mirror with all the more pride, despite not having the uniform he would surely have loved to have. His work consisted of lugging parcels around, and afterwards his colleagues showered, but not him. He went back home unwashed. But for now we’re still at the start of his shift. I guess they didn’t even have work overalls in the postal depot back then, just their own personal laundry items which they would then carry home in sacks to wash, while my uncle carried his home on his body. Presumably he spent the whole time muttering while he was lugging parcels around in the depot, because that was what he always did when he was supposed to be doing something. He accepted every task with a servile bow, only to immediately lapse into muttering and hissing. He did it around us at home too, especially on those occasions when he had been looking forward to doing something else instead. When he arrived home, the first thing he always did was go to the fridge. He would open the cupboard above the fridge where the Henninger beer tankards were kept, take one out, open the fridge, take a beer out, open the bottle and pour. (Our entire family lived off the Henninger workers’ brew; we were supplied with four crates of it a week.) Still standing by the fridge, he would drink down half a tankard, accompanied by a sound of pleasure that sounded more repulsive than anything else in the world. By that point, my mother’s calls would normally start up. J, she would cry, fetch a few bottles of beer up from the cellar for dinner will you! And bring up some water too! If she was standing in the kitchen, he would bow and run off, his face taut with anger. But if she was calling out from the dining room, where perhaps she was setting the table and therefore unable to see her brother as he stood there in the kitchen by the cupboard with the beer tankards, then his face would twist into an expression of sheer hatred. Sometimes I saw it by accident. He would indignantly repeat my mother’s words under his breath. J, do this, J do that, he would hiss, building up into sentences like: I’m always the one who has to fetch the beer from the cellar, I’m always the one who has to get the water from the cellar, I’m always having to do this, always having to do that! He could certainly say I, my uncle, that was for sure. Those hissed I-filled sentences would accompany him all the way down to the cellar, and if he happened to pass by me on his way down (which would only have happened back when I was a kid — because later I would flee to the cemetery or some other place, in order to get some fresh air and take some deep breaths until he was gone again), then he would simply keep hissing, looking at me out of the corner of his eye like an animal that knew it was being hunted, or like a dog that had just been caught in the act, whatever that act might be. I always dreaded these encounters. Sometimes, though, I would be standing in the utility room and hear him hissing away from down the corridor. He would climb down the steps into the cellar as he hissed, before coming back up a minute later to unload his cargo in the kitchen. Then he would pick up the half-empty beer tankard and hiss into it until the hissing transitioned into drinking, only to be interrupted again by my mother: J, there are four new crates of beer out in the garage, bring them down into the cellar while you’re at it won’t you! Looking back now, it seems to me that J was constantly being asked to either get something from the cellar or take something down to the cellar. He never actually went up to my mother, his sister, and said to her face: I’m always the one who has to go down to the cellar! But he would hiss it, and in her presence too. He didn’t think anyone could understand him when he was hissing like that, but we always did. And so he moved through the house like a permanent threat, even though he was always very peaceable with everyone, apart from us kids, and even though it never came to the ultimate explosion of violence we were expecting each and every day. I assume he was much the same when he was making his way around the postal depot at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, and I’m sure they were constantly giving him jobs to do just like my mother did, and that he would carry them out amidst his muttering, because he didn’t have any other choice, for only the complete eradication of everyone around him would have freed him from it all, and that was something he preferred not to risk.

Most of the time he would wear these greyish-brown polo-shirts, sometimes with yellow stitching; pale, fusty colours which for me are now inextricably linked to his silage-like stench — even today, when I see items of clothing in these colours, most of which tend to be worn by older people, I can still smell my uncle. He would start to sweat into his shirt as he tackled the first few packages of the day, and even today I can’t begin to imagine how the smell must have developed there at the postal depot during the course of the day, because it had to have been even worse than it was at home with us. After all, he only came home once he was done lugging the parcels around, once the smell had already started to subside.

As long as he lived, Uncle J never once told us anything about his work colleagues at the Frankfurt post depot, so I don’t know whether he had any acquaintances there. Perhaps at that time it was mostly Italians, Turks or Tunisians working there anyway, because Germany was still welcoming migrant workers with open arms then, at the end of the sixties. Given that I don’t know anything for sure, I can only imagine how he might have made some friends there, against the odds, how he might have been able to say certain sentences to some person or another, supposedly of an expert nature and exclusively consisting of superlatives as per usual, and maybe they even had their first beer of the day together, let’s say after an hour, at around six in the morning, the first beer, the first fraternisation, the first communal sit down of the day, their gazes fixed on the mountain of parcels they had to distribute, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Italians, the Germans and my uncle J from the Wetterau, all there so that these parcels could reach their recipients, in Oldenburg, in Münster, in Wölfersheim. I’m sure that kind of work leads the person doing it to think they’re the central hub of the whole world, that nothing would function without them, because someone who leads and facilitates the transportation of goods also facilitates civilisation itself, or, as they would have said at the postal depot: The packages simply have to reach their destination. You might say, then, that my uncle was serving as the central hub and distribution centre of the entire world, which must have been important to him, and maybe he really did walk around the depot with a certain sense of pride, that is until he received his next order, which would be followed by the next hiss (it’s always me), and then the next beer.

People still used to drink at work back then, whereas today drinking has completely disappeared from the workplace. In actual fact there’s been a drinking ban for ages, since back before there was even a smoking ban; it’s just that the drinking ban was never publicised. When I was a kid, every bin man was guzzling from first thing in the morning, the postmen were pretty much always drunk, the city workers already stank of beer by the time they started their shift, and the couriers at the trade associations drank schnapps, in addition to the beer, between trips. Even in 1984, when I started working for Oberhessischen Energy, everyone was boozing away a mere hour after we clocked on. Except they didn’t see it as boozing, more a hearty kind of breakfast. Beer was a source of nourishment; it made you stronger, that’s what they thought. Even my mother was fond of these hearty breakfasts in the mornings; when the cleaning woman came (an immigrant from Serbia, still known as Yugoslavia back then), they would clean for a while and then have breakfast together, something my mother had probably been looking forward to the whole week long. There they would sit in our kitchen at ten in the morning, while my father was off in Frankfurt earning the family’s keep at the Henninger brewery, and they would heave the Henninger bottles onto the table and pour Slivowitz down their necks. There would be paprika sausage to go with it, along with pickled onions and the like, and after half an hour they would have these happy, red faces that stayed with them for the rest of the day. Until just recently, that kind of thing was completely normal in our country. Once upon a time, this country drank. Now, any bin man would be fired on the spot if he had already imbibed three litres of beer by nine in the morning. In repeats of Firma Hesselbach, a TV series from the early 1960s, back in my uncle’s day, they’re all drinking beer whenever they want, even first thing in the morning. And the people were red and happy, and it was their life, and sometimes they even died at home in their own beds, something which my uncle J didn’t experience. He died in hospital, on the second day. He didn’t suffer long, they told us, and ever since then my family has been convinced that they killed him there in the hospital, which isn’t improbable. My grandmother spent a lifetime caring for him, he spent several years vegetating in an apartment with his later girlfriend Rosl, and then he got to the hospital and was quickly disposed of. He must have spent a fair bit of time wired up in there, after which he supposedly died all of a sudden and the doctors claimed not to have noticed straight away. To be on the safe side they plugged him in one more time, gave him another burst of electricity, then probably just turned it up and left the room, leaving him to dance and thrash around alone, or that’s how it looked afterwards in any case.

But he has no idea of what is to come back then, as he drinks the fifth and sixth and maybe even seventh beer of his working morning in Frankfurt am Main. After all, what idea did anyone have of the future, the future they thought was directly ahead of them or perhaps even already there? It hadn’t been that long since the war and the uniforms of the brownshirts, the colour of which wasn’t dissimilar to the polo shirts worn by my hunting fanatic of an uncle, and even J’s car was that Nazi-brown colour, and now here they were sitting with the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards on a bench in the train station, drinking beer and smoking in an atmosphere of workplace collegiality. They unpack their lunch boxes, like the ones I used to be sent off to school with in the beginning. I still remember my uncle’s lunch boxes, I can picture them very clearly, including what my grandmother used to pack in there for him each evening, because of course she wouldn’t get up at three in the morning when he had an early shift, J had to get himself up then, get himself dressed and off to the station. She would put sausage sandwiches in there for him, tucked into a corner of the lunchbox according to a very specific spatial principle, and in the remaining space there would be an egg, a gherkin or an onion, all garnished with a serviette. When I was at school, I used to be given packed lunches too; going off to school or work was like embarking on a journey, you had to be well-prepared, you couldn’t have an energy slump in the midst of it all, you had to have something with you to keep your strength up, and since it wasn’t possible to buy things on the go back then, people always took everything with them. You couldn’t get take-away coffee anywhere, everyone used thermos flasks instead. There would be one in every bag, and my uncle J had one of these flasks too, filled with milky coffee. A land of thermos flasks. A little piece of home with you at all times.

My uncle took his coffee with sugar. He would add five teaspoons of sugar to an average cup of ground coffee (I always watched, aghast); so if you add it up, he must have shoveled around twenty-five to thirty teaspoons of refined sugar into every thermos. My uncle didn’t live a healthy life, that’s for sure, but then again it wasn’t really the fashion to live healthily back then — you could pretty much choose the way you would die, and usually it was the way you had lived. He smoked almost constantly, consumed vast amounts of sugar, and probably drank around four to five litres of beer a day. But he went to the forest too, he loved the forest air just as much as the air at the inn, and would go on long walks. He loved driving his car, the car he was allowed to have just like he was allowed to have a driving license, neither of which would have been permitted today. My uncle and his car, they were inseparable. He drove it into the Usa once, the river here, while his mother was next to him in the passenger seat. The car had to be hauled out of the Usa afterwards, and J stood by and watched. It was a VW Type 3 Variant, and it smelled like my uncle. Presented with the choice of either walking the three kilometres from the Uhlandstrasse house to my parents’ place in Friedberg (or vice versa) or getting into J’s car, I would have chosen to walk every time. Looking back now, it seems like everything about him was brown, everything Nazi-coloured, and yet they hadn’t even let him into the Hitler Youth, nor had he been a Luftwaffe assistant, and his only social interaction as a child and teenager had consisted of getting beaten up. He may have been fourteen by the time the war came to an end, but he was still an idiot, and would continue being one for the rest of his life, something which was already clear to everyone else. What’s more, my uncle J was one of those people who tend to idolise the very people who torment them. They develop an intense attachment to their torturers and tag along at their heels. My mother says that she and her brother were constantly having to escort my uncle, the oldest of all of them, whenever they could. But it wasn’t always possible, and if there was no other member of the Boll family around, he was told to walk home, or to wherever one of his siblings was, as quickly as he could. That was what they tried to drum into him. But presumably he always dawdled around instead, and day after day he would end up getting beaten as a result. His must have been a very bloody childhood, and he looked set to begin a bloody adolescence until they sent him off to the Rhineland, where he had some peace and even met Konrad Adenauer, whose rose garden he walked past every morning during what were probably his most idyllic years, my uncle in the Rhineland, the mentally-impaired Wetterau boy, the poor thing, and the Chancellor said hello to him politely, with no idea of who he was saying hello to.

My uncle was also fond of stopping to stare at the window display of Waffensteinökel in Friedberg. Waffensteinökel, on Friedberg’s Kaiserstrasse, was where the greyish-brown or yellowy-brown polo shirts would be put on display, very popular with hunters in the post-war years, through the seventies, and even today. They were a kind of camouflage colour, fit for use anywhere from the German forests to the African desert. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was probably another of my uncle’s heroes. The hunting and mountain climbing and those German war films were probably his real home, a time when everyone was great and he, in hindsight, still had a future ahead of him and could maybe even dream of a high-ranking position in the army or his own tank in Russia. The handguns at Waffensteinökel held a particular appeal for my uncle. He would study the different makes — he knew their specifications, or at least he thought he did — and get that Heino gleam in his eyes, and for a moment there in front of the window display at Waffensteinökel, it was like he was under a spell, perhaps like the state of rapture others experience when they hear Hölderlin’s poetry, because of the sheer beauty of the sound and depth of the words. Or like when a Russian reads Pushkin. He would go into a similar state, standing there in front of Waffensteinökel. Hitler and his Reich; he hadn’t been part of it, hadn’t been allowed access to it, and this turned into a longing that lasted his whole life, poorly assuaged by the hunting, the Bad Nauheim forest, the birds and the colour brown. After all, back then they had the tank and military magazines alongside the smutty ones, even if they didn’t yet have high-resolution photographs with a price tag and glossy finish to match. It was a longing, and it was a life, and it was the truth, like everything. My uncle, the animal, as many thought back then. My uncle, the creature of longing, as I think now.

We kids were always trying to provoke his rage, and he regularly lashed out at us to varying degrees. Whenever my parents were off in Austria or Italy searching for the holiday home they wanted to buy, he and my grandmother would come to stay with us. I say ‘come to stay’ even though he wasn’t actually allowed to sleep there with us and had to go back to the Uhlandstrasse house for that, but he was around a lot nonetheless, and sometimes even by himself. One time he was watching TV, a mountain climbing film starring Luis Trenker. He loved mountain climbing films and Heimat films in general, he never watched American films… although I only realised that later. When others were being transported to the streets of San Francisco, he was still in the hunting lodges of Silberwald, still watching films in which a quarter of the total length consisted of stags running up and down spectacular mountain meadows, the footage already aged and yellowed.

I remember my brother calling out to me once, saying that J was watching another one of his mountain climbing films. We knew that J always went into that entranced state when he was watching a Luis Trenker mountain climbing film, his ‘Hölderlin State’ via other means. He thought he knew his stuff when it came to mountain climbing, superlatively, and mountain rescue too, for the mountain rescuers were his heroes. My uncle sat there alone in the living room, gazing fixedly at the Luis Trenker film, hunched forwards into an almost military position of attention, ready for action, as if he too were part of the mountain rescue effort, sitting in the mountain rescue hut at base camp at that very moment, perhaps drinking a robust, hearty Schnapps with his mountain rescue colleagues, all of them with their gazes fixed on the mountain, and in front of him on the living room table was a glass tankard of Henninger with the bottle next to it, half empty. We spied on our spellbound uncle and his alpine ecstasy through the crack in the door for a while, already giggling away (as far as I know he never even saw the mountains in his Rhineland or Wetterau worlds, apart from the Vordertaunus that is), then my brother, twelve years old at the time, would creep into the living room in anticipation of what was about to unfold. In all seriousness and with a straight face, my brother then asked J what he was watching. J explained the film to him, his eyes gleaming. He was a die-hard fan of Luis Trenker. Luis Trenker may have been Italian, but he was from the South Tirol, so for my uncle that practically made him German. Not like someone who might have worked at the post depot with him, not like those dark-haired Spaniards or Italians, even though Luis Trenker did in actual fact have dark hair (so did my uncle, as it happens). Luis Trenker, always alone on the mountain, in stormy weather, in hail, alone in the forest, yet just five minutes later running over the yellow-tinged meadows with the belling stags, and his mother always waiting at home (J had a mother too), and somewhere the girl in the dirndl dress would be waiting too (J didn’t have one of those, even though his later bed-fellow was called Rosl, a name which might as well have been plucked straight from one of those old black-and-white Heimat films). And by then the mountain rescue team was on its way, and Uncle J explained to my brother who, how and where, and precisely in which meadow and for what purpose on which mountain ridge they were on their way, and that they had encountered stormy weather… and that in this stormy weather they couldn’t even bivouac — he said the word bivouac with particular emphasis, stretching out his index finger and wagging it back and forth emphatically. On the screen was a film set, an artificial rock face with snowdrifts in front of it, and the same shot of the valley kept being repeated again and again. Whenever the rock face was shown in close-up, my uncle would cry out, Look! the rock face, a really dangerous rock face, perhaps the most dangerous and most difficult one in existence. Once the mountain rescue team came into the shot, climbing the rock face in their attempt to rescue whomever was stranded in the storm, unable to even bivouac, and once night had fallen in the studio and the floodlights had been turned down, Uncle J’s gaze would start to gleam and an ever increasing tension would seize his body. Then I came into the room too, sitting down without a word as far as possible from J. He stared at the screen, his gaze fixed on the important happenings on the mountain. The happenings were Uncle J’s happenings too, as he sat there in our living room. My parents were away, so my grandmother and J had been appointed to look after us. It must have been at a time when he didn’t stink as much as he did later, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to handle being there in the living room with him. Nor, I imagine, in the house in general. His mother must have forced him to carry out his bodily ablutions; presumably he had gone muttering and hissing down to the shower in his realm, the cellar. A team of five! J called out. On the mountain, the team of five, without the ability to bivouac, and behind them the speedy rescue party, mobile and agile, the mountain rescue team. The team of five was shown on the rock face, while someone from above blew down something that was supposed to look like snow. We found all of this hilarious, even though it wasn’t supposed to be. There they were, the despairing faces, and then the mountain rescue team, making their way further up and up. These were real mountaineers! Why, asked my brother, don’t they go in by helicopter? Why doesn’t the mountain rescue team rescue by helicopter? The film was set in the fifties or sixties, after all, and back then they were already conducting helicopter rescues, my brother knew that much. In a storm like this incredibly dangerous storm, it would be too dangerous for the mountain rescue team to fly so close to the rock face, said my uncle, dreaming himself into every syllable of his sentence as he said it. In Friedberg in the Wetterau, people could say things like that, he could say words like those as he sat there in front of the television, captured by its spell: storm… incredibly dangerous… rock face… mountain rescue… And so he sat there in the Wetterau, talking about the mountain, blissfully happy. Why is it too dangerous? asked my brother. It’s a rock face, said my uncle in his expert tone of voice, a really steep rock face, and with the strong wind (see, look how the snowflakes are swirling around!), you can’t steer the helicopter in those conditions, he said, as if he knew all about it. And then another sentence burst out of him, that the mountain rescue team were the real heroes of the modern era. Even his poetry leaned towards the superlative. They were great men, the mountain rescuers, and my uncle understood them, sitting there in front of our television and gazing into it, awestruck by the mountain and its rescue team. My uncle always wanted to, always had to belong, even here. And he walked into a trap with this longing to belong, as if things could be the same for him as they (perhaps) were for others (the mountain rescuers?). He is probably longing to be on the mountain at this very moment, as he sits there in our living room. Not in the five-man team, but following quickly on their heels, scrambling along in a technically perfect and self-sacrificial manner, heroically grand and oblivious to everyone around him, self-sacrificial like the Wehrmacht had been, for they had only failed in Russia because of the winter, after all — unfortunately they hadn’t had a mountain rescue team — and my uncle could talk about them too, about the JU-52 aviators who had fearlessly fetched the soldiers from the cauldron right in the nick of time. He loved twists like that, he lived and radiated them: total self-sacrifice, right until the very last moment. I’m sure he had fantasies of being an aviator hero, a heroic captain, a tank hero, and Rommel for sure, just like he fantasised about being a stonemason and idolised the crane driver on the company grounds almost as much as he did at the Friedberg policemen — who wore uniforms and had weapons, after all — and as much as the hunters up in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim, where J went all the time. Why are the mountain rescuers the heroes of the modern era? asked my brother, and any person other than my uncle, a man brought into the world by the forceps of fate, would have realised at that moment just what this would lead to after a mere few minutes, namely in him going into a rage and pursuing us to the furthest reaches of the garden fence to beat us for having cheated him out of his film and his mountain rescue. But my uncle, not suspecting a thing, answered just like he always did, with the innocence of a child, without any suspicion. The mountain rescuers are heroes because they rescue people who have fallen victim to a mountain emergency, putting themselves (at this point his voice would become hushed and solemn) in mortal peril. My brother: So the mountain rescuers have to go onto the mountain because some people are stuck there? My uncle: They go and get them, putting themselves in mortal peril. (All the while he was talking, he would stare intently at the screen and the events unfolding on it.) My brother: So if the mountain rescuers are putting themselves in danger because others are putting themselves in danger for no reason at all, why don’t they just forbid them from putting themselves in danger in the first place? My uncle hesitated and wrinkled his forehead. My brother: If people would just ban this crappy mountain climbing business, then there wouldn’t be any need for mountain rescuers, it’s just stupid. Why do people climb mountains anyway, and who pays for the mountain rescue? It’s really dumb, no one needs to do that kind of thing. Already beaten by this point, my uncle could only exclaim: You have no idea! You don’t know a thing about mountain rescue! And he was about to receive the finishing blow. My uncle had stumbled into a severe storm on his mountain, and I too joined in the effort to bring him down. Aha, we asked, but what do you know about mountain rescue? For that matter, what do you know about mountain climbing in general? Or even just about mountains? All you know is the Winterstein. We emphasised the you just like he did his I whenever he had to go down to the cellar to fetch something. (The Winterstein is right on our doorstep, three hundred metres above the level of the town, and it’s a gentle ascent, so there’s no need for mountain rescue; there’s just an inn and a military road built for the tanks.) In short, merciless as we were, we dragged our uncle away from his rock face and back to the reality of his own existence, we robbed him of everything, even the mountain rescue, because we had long since realised what our uncle was and because the concoction of choleric temperament and enthusiasm, when it exploded, for us was no less spectacular than the annual New Year’s fireworks, although to be honest we didn’t even like those anymore and found them boring in comparison. My uncle stood there in the living room, lifting his hand in a threatening fashion, as if about to deliver someone a blow to the ear, red all over, trembling and looking at us with equal quantities of aggression and helplessness, the poor man, and it was our fault, and I had joined in again. J would never have done such a thing back when he was a child, he would never have tormented someone like that. And now that he was an adult, not even we children took him seriously; we didn’t even take him seriously as someone entrusted with looking after us. His adulthood was perhaps the only thing he had left after surviving the Wetterau and the return from his emigration to the Rhineland, but we didn’t even let him have that, and yet I was only seven years old. My brother was already active in a political youth group back then, something connected to the first political party he joined, maybe he was even a junior member already, and he could already debate well at twelve years of age, he had his rhetoric, even though he probably couldn’t actually defeat anyone yet, but when it came to annihilating my uncle he was already perfectly capable (and so was I). We tore him to pieces during his Luis Trenker films just like my grandfather tore the roast duck to pieces at Christmas, and it was just as festive an occasion for us, an expert tearing-to-pieces of the uncle. We were able to do it in all kinds of contexts, for it was easy to see how the dynamite he was made of could easily be ignited. If he was standing out in the garden with us, talking superlatively about the garden which his brother-in-law had just put in, even then my brother would find something to pick on, so to speak, using his words to rob my uncle of his superlative garden. Back then, I wondered whether that might be what people learned to do in the Party. It only occurred to me later that my uncle may have loved our garden just as much as I did, or indeed that he may have loved any of the same things that I did, from the robins and the nightingales to the badger and the women or maybe even all people, in so far as they came into question. That he too, to put it simply, had a life and had been put into this life by God, like everything, from the badger to the mountain rescue to the barrier that stopped him from leaping on his own mother. But by the time it occurred to me it was too late, as is usually the case, and he died soon after. Shortly before his death he was, I believe, legally incapacitated by my family, to safeguard his portion of the inheritance and out of their fear that he might marry Rosl. In the end, he gave what he had to his passion. Rosl spent the last year of her life compulsively buying pots and pans, and these too needed to be paid for and dealt with by us after her death, an apartment full of pots and pans, ordered in catalogues from all over Germany, another passion, and one which remained unquenchable until her last breath. Rosl died in bed next to my uncle, side by side with him. Death came at four in the morning, the doctors said. My uncle hadn’t even realised. He noticed only at around eight, when, clueless as ever, he called his sister: Rosl is dead.

But we’re not at that point of the story yet. J is still in Frankfurt, at the post depot, somewhere between his twelfth and fifteenth beer. There can be no doubt that he would have carried out his work properly. J always hated whatever he was ordered to do, but his respect for his employers was almost as great as the respect he had for his mother. He never escaped it. He was always filled with respect. He had this ability to impose a kind of Wehrmacht system onto everything. Or maybe it was a hunting system. But you could just as easily look at it the other way around, that perhaps he was looking for something resembling his mother in the things around him, something just as great and unbreachable, and perhaps he found it in the Wehrmacht (as well as in the mountain and its rescue operations, movie mothers and dirndl-clad women), or in Rommel, or the tank in Russia he may have dreamed of in much the same way as someone might dream of a Porsche Cabriolet nowadays. In the end — is it acceptable to say that? — my uncle’s concept of happiness, which was still tied up with the collective after all, with people and the people, to the very last moment and in mortal peril, was the opposite of hedonism, it was a desire for sacrifice, the kind that children have and which otherwise is perhaps only found in the BDSM scene, where everyone has their longings, to put it mildly, and if my uncle had ended up amongst them, then who knows what might have happened; by the end they might have had him by the scruff of his neck and taken full control of his bank account. After all, people only ever wanted one thing from him: his money.

Maybe he was enjoying the summer light that would stream through the glass of the Hauptbahnhof in July, in August and at midday in September, or at least I hope he was, drinking his umpteenth beer, no longer keeping track and without any chance of being rescued from everything, but maybe without any sense of despair, as he wouldn’t have felt it in any case, just as he didn’t feel pain. Nor is it improbable that they were already on a break and heading into the red light district around the station, dreaming away amongst everything on display in God’s paradise, the thing they had been created for, here in Frankfurt am Main, regardless of where they were from. There are two possibilities; either they were all sitting on a bench together, beers in hand, cigarettes clasped between their fingers, engaged in respectable conversations and dialogues of decorum and conformity, even or perhaps specifically amongst and with the foreign workers, who had their pride too, even at the post depot, even though they probably had never wanted to be there, just as they presumably had never wanted to go to Germany, but that was how it had all turned out nonetheless. The Spaniards and Italians talked about their families and so did my uncle, although he predominantly talked about the great family business and the great father, the company boss (thirty employees! except J wasn’t one of them). Or, the other possibility was that they already had plans, had already taken the next step, fully acknowledging their insatiable lust for life, which seemed to be re-born each and every day, and that they had only one thought on their minds: to head straight for the Kaiserstrasse and get rid of it in whatever way possible, no matter whether it was in front of the screen or with something in the hand. You can picture them like that, too: the bell rings to announce their break and they’re off at once, hands already hovering by their trouser buttons. And so they were always close to happiness when they were in Frankfurt, and only recovered once they were back home with their families and children, the ones they were doing all of this for, the ones they were earning money for every day in the package distribution department of the postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.

My uncle wasn’t allowed to drive a fork-lift truck at the depot, despite the fact that he had a driving license. The fork-lift driver was a natural authority, and J didn’t have this natural authority; after all, when it came to his awe for the mountain rescue team, he couldn’t even cope with us, my brother and me. J stood there in awe in front of the fork-lift while it was stationary, he stood there in awe while it was in use, while someone else was allowed to use it, staring at all the maneuvers and steering and lifting techniques in detail, as if he could learn something by such detailed study, but he never learned anything, his studying of things was just as pointless as the unscrewing of the circuits and dynamos in the cellar: once he stopped, everything would just lie around in incomprehensible parts, never to be put back together again. His longing to get closer to things just dismantled everything instead. Whatever he held in his hands fell apart. If J had ever been alone with the forklift truck in the package hall and there hadn’t been a soul around within a one kilometre radius, I don’t believe he would even have sat down on it, even just to try it. If he had, he would have been incapable of starting it, let alone driving it or operating the forklift; but it wouldn’t have come to that anyway, for at most he would have walked around it with the utmost of awe, placing his hand on the bodywork, gazing with interest at the buttons and handles, and then he would have just waited until somebody came. He was always waiting. His life consisted of waiting. If no one was around it was like he was switched off, except in the cellar, except in the forest, except in the inn (although there was always someone there) and except in paradise (there was someone there, too, or at least in theory).

He always told his mother when he was heading out, every single day. She always knew when he went out, when he arrived back, how long he was out. She didn’t even have to ask him to check in and out with her, for the two of them still had the exact same relationship as they had before he went to the Rhineland, back when he was supposed to seek the protection of his younger siblings and yet, most of the time, just dawdled around instead. This unconditional, compulsory attachment to his mother raged in his soul like something metaphysical, and it was utterly unbreachable: I always found it touching that, as a person, he wasn’t completely locked inside himself, but instead fully opened up to another. For the duration of his whole life, that made him so innocent. A human being without any concept of sin. (Even if, like I said, he could sometimes look as guilty as a dog caught in the act.) He was, after all, never at fault. It was as if the forceps had immediately taken the forbidden fruit from his mouth — You won’t have it, not you! as God’s first words when he was born. J had the same relationship with everything and everyone: he went down without a fight. With his mother, perhaps at the train station kiosk in the mornings, perhaps at the postal depot in Frankfurt with his workmates, either by acting in a completely proper manner with them, which is possible, or by being utterly lewd, which is equally possible.

People still smoked back then. It was the golden era of the filter cigarette in Germany. They probably smoked like chimneys at the post depot. They had cigarettes in their mouths when they were lugging packages around, cigarettes in their mouths when they were filling in forms, cigarettes in their mouths when they were on a break. All of them had yellow fingers. I remember my uncle’s yellow fingers very clearly; they were the first yellow fingers I ever saw in my life. That came along with the silage-like stench: the stench of cigarettes. The filter cigarette was a medium of communication — that was what had made it so successful. Because people by themselves weren’t enough; there had to be something else, and that something was the filter cigarette. It broke the ice. It was a dry schnapps. At the height of his smoking, my uncle went through three packets a day, like many people did back then. It was the filter that made mass cigarette smoking possible. It made everything so simple. Part of the image of day-to-day life in Germany was the country engulfed in a cloud of smoke. To this day, I still believe that every one of these filter cigarettes prevented someone somewhere from becoming depressed. Hence the swaying sensation that kicks in with the first drag. There’s always something there with you, it rescues you. My uncle, rescued. He was never alone at the post depot in Frankfurt; he always had his cigarettes and could light one up at any time. And how he coughed! A long, raw cough that became wet at the end, almost slimy. You could hear the phlegm churning around in his throat, and his eyes would stick out in this strange way, as if they wanted to burst out of him. As if, just once, they wanted to take a look at him, the uncle, from the outside, instead of always looking out of him from the inside. He smoked far too much, everyone knew that, but he was still comparatively young and didn’t have any pains; he didn’t know what pain was, remember. For him, pain was a foreign word. He had a blind spot where pain was concerned, one might say, he couldn’t see it in the slightest. In later years, my uncle almost lost his legs, never even having felt the complete blockage in his blood vessels. It was diagnosed by chance, entirely by accident. Just like he was once diagnosed with a ruptured appendix by chance, after he fell down the stairs and was taken off to the doctor. Neither of those afflictions, the fall nor the rupture, caused him any pain. Hotplates didn’t hurt him either; it was only the smell of burning that made him realise what he had just done for the umpteenth time. Even the beatings at school didn’t cause him any actual pain, only injuries. He bled, he was peppered with blue flecks, and they loved kicking him in the side when he was down on the ground, but none of it caused any pain. It didn’t even make him sad. The only thing that made him sad was that it made the others sad — his siblings, his mother — when he bled or burnt himself. For his family had already realised that there was much more at stake here than merely protecting him from getting beaten. It was a question of survival.

He wouldn’t even have noticed if his schoolmates had killed him, nor would they. They could have easily killed him by accident, for he had no pain threshold to reach its limit before things went too far. They listened out to see whether he screamed or groaned, even just briefly, so they could gauge how hard they were hitting and kicking. But my uncle didn’t scream or groan. If any beatings took place after his time in the Rhineland, nothing has ever been mentioned about it in the family. I imagine he probably pulled through his time at the postal depot in Frankfurt without such problems too.

And now the last workplace beer has been drunk, probably with a cocked arm and a sigh of pleasure, and it’s getting on for two in the afternoon, and Uncle J clocks off from his shift in the proper manner and has three quarters of an hour to spare before the train to Bad Nauheim, before the rest of his day begins, to be filled with all kinds of wonderful things that he’s probably already imagining to himself. The Frauenwald forest with its wildlife and deer stands and Forsthaus Winterstein. His digestive system has probably already processed the beer, for it was only sustenance after all, they were working hard hauling the packages around. Maybe there’s just a hint of intoxication now, a light shroud over everything. And so into the last three quarters of an hour and maybe off to the train station forecourt, one last cigarette with his workmates while staring off into nothingness or into the distance like the Marlboro man (depending on how you interpret the Marlboro man’s gaze). It made them feel secure, their depression lifted. Then my uncle sets off, heading across Kaiserstrasse to Theaterplatz once more. I always picture him walking there, the aged child. Hunched over slightly, his shoulders raised, or rather his head sunk down between them, hands in his pockets, wearing a kind of chapka in winter but with artificial padding instead of fur — it seems to me that he always wore the same thing throughout his entire life. Most of the time you would see him from behind, not the front, while he stood before things like shop windows, construction site machinery or trams, while he stared through windowpanes at displays or the instruments of coveted automobiles, always the latest and newest. The admiration always moved in one direction only, through and out of his eyes. If a Harley-Davidson drove past, he would admire it (despite the fact that it was American). If a Porsche drove past, he would admire it. He was allowed to have his VW Variant, at least. It was another sanctuary of his. He had this Driving-It-Into-The-Garage ceremony: the automobile would stay in the courtyard and wouldn’t be driven into the garage right away, for my uncle liked to prolong the anticipation and make the whole thing more intense. First he would go into the house, first he would drink another beer, all the while turning over the imminent, important act in his mind: that the automobile still needed to be driven into the garage, for the evening, for the night, because the automobile had to go into the garage. As if it were his little moon rocket, or his very own tank in Russia (you have to look after such things, they need to go into the garage at night, even nowadays, just like a child needs to go to bed). Who knows, perhaps J would have liked to have put a uniform on for Driving-It-Into-The-Garage, one specially made for the occasion. In any case, he felt ennobled by the act, and would always announce it so that everyone in the house knew: The Variant was about to be driven into the garage. And once it was in there, the world was in order. The day could continue and the celebration had been celebrated.

There were significantly more varieties of automobiles being driven around in Frankfurt than in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau, especially at the end of the sixties. Many models didn’t even make it out to the countryside at all, and around the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof where J worked, the cars were always the biggest and most expensive and swankiest, for obvious reasons, which meant that my uncle could stare his eyes clean out of his head and admire them to his heart’s content. He would stop in his tracks and stare at the limousines as they drove past, right up until the objects of his desire had disappeared around the corner or into the distance and were no longer visible. Besides the Catholic religion he had been raised in, my uncle was also a devotee of the Faster-Higher-Further religion, which was almost universal at the time. It applied to automobiles and weapons and space rockets, and of course to buildings too, particularly building sites, because buildings that were in the process of being built were even more fascinating than those that were already there. He discussed building construction in much the same tone as others would talk about a pregnancy. Look how fast it’s growing! And how hard they’re all working! And look at the equipment they have! And how many floors there will be! I mean, try to imagine for a moment the austerity of the era in which my uncle lived in Frankfurt. There was nothing there then, nothing but the Henninger Tower — although that did have a revolving restaurant. Then, later, there was the TV tower, but other than that Frankfurt was almost completely flat. The high rise buildings came much later, and J was still around to see some of them. He was still around to see the Messeturm too. He certainly spent lots of time there, and so close to the train station! Just a ten minute walk and you could be standing at the construction site of a building which you knew would later be the tallest in the whole of Europe. My uncle, standing there at the perimeter fence, knew it too. Not a big building, not just any old building, but the biggest. The immense excavation work, the scaffolding, the foundations, everything just a hole at first (full of foreign workers, but with a German foreman), everyone in their place, everyone knowing what they had to do, from early in the morning on the construction site of Europe’s highest tower, which for now is still only a hole. Off towards the back stands the foreman, his blueprints unrolled, gesturing here and there with his outstretched arm, standing like a general, perhaps much like Uncle J’s father in the family business, or like Rommel in the desert. Then the foundations are laid (a thousand bars peeping out of the concrete, everything to plan), and then it goes quicker and quicker, floor by floor, and my uncle has to visit more and more frequently, so as not to miss anything — everything is important and of great significance, then you can say that you were there, at the biggest, most important construction site in Europe, you can tell people about it at home, in the Wetterau, in Forsthaus Winterstein. And by now the tower can be seen from a distance, although it’s just a stump, and the foreman is still standing up there with his blueprints and pointing here and there (my uncle can’t see him anymore, but he imagines the foreman, nothing would work without him after all). And then you can see the tower from the train, on the journey from the Wetterau to Frankfurt am Main, already half the height it will eventually be, but my uncle is a pensioner by then and no longer travelling into Frankfurt but staying at home instead, no longer allowed to smoke because of his legs (now only drinking beer), but if you were to drive the now run-down Variant towards the Forsthaus you would be able to see the Messeturm even from the Wetterau. Sometimes my uncle stops and gets out, standing there in front of his Variant in his snug winter coat, hands in his pockets. There it is in the distance, really tiny, the tallest building in Europe. The Messeturm, and my uncle there too! Albeit only looking at it from the Wetterau. It’s almost impossible to imagine a happier life. And yet, just a few years later, the tower was no longer the tallest building in Europe. But my uncle probably didn’t pick up on that, and if he were standing there today, en route to the Forsthaus, and staring over towards Frankfurt, he would probably get disorientated, unable to tell all the towers apart, the Hessian San Gimignano beyond the expansive fields of the Wetterau, lying there in the distance, small and almost quaint. It’s too much to contemplate how he would have reacted if he had lived to see the bypass, the whole of Wetterau a building site, one big excavation zone; as they demolished his home around him — and perhaps that would have made him love it even more — he could have stood wherever he wanted and he would still have been on a building site. A home not just with a forest and birds and hunting lodges but with a huge building site to go and stand on too, with lots of workers and heavy machinery at every turn. He once brought my mother this wooden plaque as a present, a slice of tree trunk with an inscription written on it using a wire-nib burner (it actually looked really brutal, the kind of burn-mark that’s left behind after you brand a pig; you hear the hiss, and then you’re branded and can never be rid of it again):

Dehaam is dehaam!

That’s our local dialect for: Home is home. If only my Uncle had lived long enough: first to see the building site, and then to drive in the Variant over the new bypass, straight from Nieder-Mörlen to Wöllstadt. He would have been one of the first to drive along the new road on the very first day of its opening, or perhaps the day afterwards (out of respect — he was of a lower rank, after all). But he couldn’t have done, really, for in his final years, after Grandmother’s death, he didn’t even have the car anymore. The Variant ended up in the scrap yard.

The Variant had been half of his life, and even today I can’t picture my uncle without it. I’m still utterly convinced, just as I was back then, that the VW Variant made my uncle J a happy man. To this day, the two are inextricably linked in my mind, the man who was filled with longing and the car that was laden with longing, and whenever I see an old Variant (there are still a few of them around), I think of J, and whenever I think of J, the Variant always comes to mind. A mental association that will last an eternity. He always sat hunched forwards, his head close to the windscreen, in summer and in winter, regardless of the visibility conditions, whether it was foggy or the sky was clear. He sat hunched forwards in the Variant, just like he was always hunched forwards. His head would appear strangely large when you looked in through the wound-down side window, or when he looked out (the window had to be open, otherwise he would have suffocated). That car was smoked in for a whole quarter of a century. Old fixtures, getting older year by year. The gear stick would be impossible to imagine today. It was a long, scrawny metal spoke with a knob so small it was as if it had been designed for a child’s hand, and it jutted out into the car’s interior at an angle. The little crank with a rubber grip that was used to wind down the window and even the padding on the inside door, which was some kind of man-made fibre — all of it always stank of J and his life. The upholstery was clean, but it still managed to be sticky. It was grey, just like the whole of my uncle’s existence, grey with a touch of off-brown. My uncle’s ears and eyebrows seemed to echo the shape of the Variant (the car had aerodynamic fenders, as aerodynamic as they could have been back then), as if my uncle had been constructed (by the Volkswagen factory itself) for the sole purpose of sitting in the Variant. When I was a kid that’s how it was; it was impossible to imagine a Variant without my uncle in it, the two were identical, and if I heard that my grandmother and uncle were coming over, it meant that the Variant was coming, and my uncle in the driver’s seat. By then it was already an unbelievably archaic tin can, but my uncle treated it with care, at the behest of the rest of the family, so it lasted almost his whole life. After all, it was the only car he had. The Variant was washed once a week, and driven ceremoniously to the car wash from the seventies onwards, but J was capable of grumbling even about that errand, and as time went on he would neglect it more and more, until my father, his brother-in-law, would speak up. Look at the state of that car, he would say, you’re perfectly capable of driving it into the forest and to the inn, but not capable of cleaning it. Without that car, getting to Forsthaus Winterstein would not have been so easy for my uncle. It had a tendency to snort when you started it up, and afterwards, while it was running, the snort would turn into a deep, insubstantial roar. The car looked bizarrely small too, or at least that’s how it seems in retrospect. Sometimes I see the same model in the window display of Feigenspan, the Bad Nauheim toy shop. There it is in the display, the Nazi-brown Variant shrunk down to six or seven centimetres and packed into a little plastic box (without the accompanying aromas). Nestled in amongst fifty other miniature models, but still — without a hint of doubt — my uncle’s automobile. Perhaps nowadays my mother occasionally stands in front of the window display at Fiegenspan, in itself a sign of times long gone, sees the Variant, and for a moment her family and all its repercussions come back to her.

But let’s go back, my uncle is still young, there isn’t yet a Messeturm, Frankfurt is still close to the ground and the planning phase for the B3a only ten years old (by the end it will be forty), and my uncle has just finished his working day in Frankfurt and is setting off from the Hauptbahnhof towards Theaterplatz, between the rows of old buildings he has no interest in. His longing was never backwards-looking, or only insofar as, by all accounts, the past was greater than the present. He stood in front of the window displays of electronics shops in the same way he stood in front of pictures of women — the same attentive gaze, the same close study. After all, none of the Wetterau people could see him here. And now he’s being spoken to by a woman who is standing on some steps, and behind her is a door, beyond which — as my uncle suspects or already knows — paradise lies. She calls my uncle my boy, probably hitting the nail on the head, because that’s what he looks like at this moment. What to do? If he gets home late, he’ll have to lie. He’ll have to say that he had a particularly hard and heavy load of packages, or that the train was delayed. But he’s not good at lying — everyone knows straight away when he’s doing it, so he always gets angry when he tells a lie, because even in the very moment when he tries to do it, everyone already knows it’s a lie. And so the dear Lord took even the burden of lying from his shoulders. A human being who didn’t succeed in telling one single lie; perhaps he never lied even when he was a child and lacked the practice as a result. He was always so proud and happy whenever his mother was proud and happy on his account; there were no chasms of any kind in his mind, apart from the beatings his father gave him, and even on the three kilometre walk that he had to walk every day when his father was still alive, from Bad Nauheim to the family business in Friedberg and back, because his father wouldn’t take him along in the car, he still felt like the son of the big company boss, even though he was on the countryside paths amongst the balsam and geraniums and chicory and not amongst the stones and the machines. It was easy to lash out at him, and as a result it took him a long time to lose his belief in the order of things. His secrets started only later, the same ones that probably led him through the Kaiserstrasse district towards Theaterplatz. How to choose? Here, paradise. There, at home, the law. The woman on the steps is around forty-five years old and J knows her, any time you pass by she’s sure to be standing there; the window panes are painted red so no one can see in, and in the doorway there’s a yellowed poster with a woman on it — you can see everything, everything you are supposed to see and want to see. The yellowed tinge of the poster is very similar to that of Silberwald hunting films with their belling stags. In the sixties, even the present had a yellowed tinge. As did the territories of his longing, Heimat and nature films and the Kaiserstrasse district. Nowadays, my uncle would spend the whole night watching porn ads, which are nature programmes too, in their own way, but they didn’t exist back then; back then there were only the old newsreel theatres at the train stations, which had become seedy and run-down, a whole world just for him (and the Wetterauers). The woman on the step is looking at him keenly now. Her gaze moves up and down (Does she know J?). They’re almost business partners now. She’s taking him seriously. This is the kind of customer to be taken seriously, says her expression (which she intends for him to see). He wants to be served properly, and has a right to be. The customer has the say because the customer pays. My uncle stands there and stares down at the ground, but perhaps the switch has already been flipped, automatic processes are underway. Go in now and do everything at once, he’s hardly able to wait a moment longer, in there and on top and out of him, he can picture it clearly, his eyes bulging again as if they want to get out of him too, and the woman says, There you go, my boy, as my uncle J heads for the steps where the woman is and to the door behind her, behind which a labyrinth of stairs and floors and rooms will open up, the pre-war walk-up, the Frankfurt architecture of happiness from a bygone era. (Today, they’re refurbished apartments for families and lawyers.) Now he has lost track of time, forgotten about the train he needs to catch back to the Wetterau, he didn’t even make it to Theaterplatz, and he’s already taking his next step over to the building, it’s probably obvious that he’s heading towards there, maybe the woman too has noticed that a deal is being closed, almost; just one more gesture, one more signal and he’ll be a customer, and then the rest of the pleasure will come of its own accord. Maybe she just said there you go, my boy to be on the safe side, as a last act of persuasion, presenting him with the facts as if the closure of the deal was already a reality, as if he were already inside. An empty expression lingers on my uncle’s face, perhaps the very last recollection of home and the law before the great Nothingness turns into paradise for a brief moment and fifty marks. Then my uncle sees that there’s another doorway five metres further on. Another woman is standing in it and looking; she hasn’t yet seen him, but he could just as easily go in there. He knows this woman too, for she also stands there most of the time. She’s a little younger, with a husky voice. Smiles and looks him up and down just like the other woman did. It’s likely that no one noticed he was about to walk over to the steps, so that means he can go another five metres further on, another five metres without breaking any laws, everything is still fine, a world which is completely normal, presentable, in order. But now he is almost right in front of the other woman. She raises her eyebrows and laughs, for my uncle is running along the pavement like a little boy, hands in his pockets, not even daring to look up. Don’t turn around now; just go in quickly, even if the sixty-year-old mother is waiting at home with the meatballs which he has forgotten for the moment. Is he inside now? J? No, he stands around and sees yet another house fifteen metres further on. Lots of men are filing in and out. The place is well-known — J often hears about it at work. Fifteen metres is almost a world, a life. Behind him, on the roof of the immense train station, the big clock hangs there, watching him. He still has time to go back, to the Wetterau, without any problems. It’s almost as though the clock is calling him. He is torn, back and forth, between two worlds. On the one hand, I can’t imagine my uncle walking even a hundred metres into the neighbourhood around the station without immediately being drawn to his destiny, but on the other, I can’t imagine him casting off the obedience to the law that the forceps and the dear Lord — or rather the attending doctor — gave him, for that would require imagining my uncle as someone who consists of two contradictory parts. But that was probably precisely how it was. And even if his life only ever consisted of one part at any one time, in actual fact it still consisted of two — for one was always there to suppress the other. In my uncle, therefore, you could alternately see either the triumph of nature over the law or the triumph of the law over nature. In reality, though, he was positioned between the two, and presumably at the complete mercy of both, and that’s why the former Frankfurt Kaiserstrasse district offered the best opportunity to get to the heart of the matter. Germany, the land of secrets. My uncle, the man of secrets.

But this time he hesitates in the street, until someone smacks him on the shoulder from behind, a work colleague with the remains of an onion sandwich in his hand, a man who’s on his way to somewhere that is home, the sandwich in one hand and a cigarette in the other, the sandwich from his wife at home, the cigarette from Marlboro. A brief exchange of words, a glance back at the clock, and the switch is flipped once more. Uncle J’s nature jumps back to the other side, and J the Wetterau man paces swiftly back to the train station. Everything is good and in order, the world is still in one piece. And so it should be, for nothing has happened. He journeys home cheerful and in good spirits, happy that everything — including him — has its place in the system. A presentable existence at all times — anything to the contrary just isn’t possible, because of his mother… and also because of his reverence for his father, in memoriam. Even the sister, who is managing the stonemasonry business and everything else now, even she deserves a reputable older brother who contributes to the family income, at the postal depot in Frankfurt, practically a civil servant, the position which was arranged for him by the lawyer. Does J realise that he has just been tempted? Or is he already accustomed to temptation, to temptation and fulfillment, like a cigarette that’s within reach and ready at any moment? No one will know; after all, no one was there. Not even me. My uncle in Frankfurt, alone, wandering around. But now he’s safe and rescued and heading back to the station, returning from the working day, clocking off for a well-earned rest, home to greet his mother and then head off into the forest, almost like a fairytale. Or perhaps he didn’t run into his work colleague after all, nor stand in front of the other house, nor in front of the second woman, but instead followed the first and is now her boy, inside now, about to be treated in a business-like way, because as soon as he crosses the threshold to paradise everything immediately becomes functional and formal, like a doctor’s surgery, except with completely different furnishings and completely different colours. Here, red dominates, mixed with a lush green, the colours just as exaggeratedly sensual as they were intentionally sterile at the doctor’s back then; the first doctor’s surgeries I went to were mostly white, like a waiting room for heaven. Uncle J is being handed around now, for even though he is technically a customer who pays and has the say, he’s not the Master of Proceedings anymore, partly because, throughout his entire life, he was always completely incapable of making the kind of impression that demands respect from people. He was incapable of exuding any sense of dominance; instead, it was always the exact opposite. Everyone always did what they wanted with him, even here, even if it may have been what he wanted anyway. It was inevitable, really, that a man who could be destroyed even by my brother and me, even if it was a matter of mountain rescue in the TV room in the Wetterau, would be passed around in that Frankfurt building like in a hospital, shuffled from one pointless examination to the next, the most important thing being that they get money out of him. He must have been entirely deflated by the time he got to the waiting room. For, even here, he suddenly found himself back in the context of authority, like at home, like on the grounds of the stonemasonry business, like in the postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. He didn’t have a say anywhere. Take a seat in the waiting room, they say at the doctor’s, take a seat over there, they say in Kaiserstrasse, on the chair over there! Because they instantly recognised just how hopeless a human being he was, and knew that they could treat him however they wanted, that he was harmless and unlikely to react in any way. A loser. He will never say, I want her and her; they’ll show him the last piece of trash they have and he should consider himself lucky that he can even get anything for his money. And pecunia non olet, not even his. In fact, the only thing about him that doesn’t stink is his money. So they sit my uncle down on a bench or chair or at the bar, and maybe they’ll forget about him for a while, because he won’t do anything about it, he’ll just wait. He waits as though he’s standing around again. Anyone (man or woman) who passes by, he stares at fawningly, trying to see if they’re looking at him, if they’ve noticed him. But they haven’t. Maybe it’s winter and he has his chapka in his hand. What would happen if he ran into someone he knew now? I imagine he would be very friendly, acting as if he had simply run into the acquaintance in question on the street in Bad Nauheim. Without any sense of shame, probably. The way I envisage it, this whole process was merely technical for my uncle, in the broadest sense of the word. He probably only felt shame around his mother and his family. If he had run into someone while he was waiting there, hat in hand, he wouldn’t have taken it to be the catalyst for the beginning of a sleazy familiarity. He would have said, Grüß dich, Wolfgang, or Grüß dich, Kallheinz, and promptly told them the latest news from Forsthaus Winterstein, or about his latest walk in the forest, where perhaps he had yet again seen the biggest stag he had ever encountered in his life, presumably the biggest stag in the whole of the Usatal, for that matter. They wouldn’t even have mentioned the women, whom all of this ultimately revolved around (although, did it really?), and of course Wolfgang or Kallheinz would have gotten their turns more quickly than my uncle, who by now has already missed the first train and is still waiting. Now he buys an expensive beer, twelve marks, because that’s what he’s supposed to do. Even when the ladies of the establishment continue to walk past him — nude, business-like and always attending to someone else — he still searches for a crumb of attention, not looking offended, just a little sad, with puppy dog eyes. He doesn’t even look at their breasts and backsides, he doesn’t look them up and down, he’s not dominant enough to do that, not even here. After all, you need a certain degree of confidence to do that. No, he is subordinated here, just like at home. Although at least he can smoke. Then a call resounds out. Hey, you! As I imagine it, my uncle looks up.

3

Sometimes I think that, at least in certain respects, J had no powers of recollection. He remembered some things, of course. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to learn anything. He passed his driving test, though it was very different back then. In the cellar, he knew which screwdriver to pick up for which screw (even if nothing constructive followed from this, only the sham which I already mentioned). And of course he spoke often and at length about what he had experienced the day before in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim or in the Goldenen Fass or Schillerlinde — in other words, about who had been there and what they had said. But it seems to me that, in certain spheres of my uncle’s experience, his ‘memory’ was completely suppressed. Especially when something bad happened to him. Like when we tormented him in the TV room, working him up into a frenzy (this was a word I always heard used in connection with my uncle. You’ve worked him up into a frenzy again, Grandmother would say.), and he would lose control and run after us, intent on lashing out. But once the frenzy was extinguished, it wasn’t just that it seemed like it had never happened — he was as gullible around us as he had been in the beginning. He would trust us again, make the same mistakes, and so it would start all over again, as if the last time had never existed. I imagine it was the same with his father and the leather belt, and that must be one of the reasons why Uncle J, throughout his whole life, never had a bad word to say about his father. He beat J and despised him, or so I’ve been told, but in the moment that the beating took place, it was as if it hadn’t, as if it hadn’t been registered, and nothing would remain but a sneaking fear, a certain caution forevermore. For J, this was probably just respect. At school, things must have been particularly bad. He was as thin as a line of pencil, his legs barely had any shape, his arms were like sticks and the damaged head perched on top of his body was much too big, yet he would stand with gullibility and devotion next to people who had been kicking him the day before, as if their lives were at stake, whereas in actual fact it was his. He always latched on to his oppressors, unfortunately — they had power over him, and he was full of respect for any form of power, in awe of it; power was natural authority, and to subordinate oneself to it was as a matter of order, discipline, a way of fulfilling one’s role, as a lower-ranking member of society, as it were, a position he always assumed. The schoolyard was a Wehrmacht system in miniature. Oh how he worshipped and idolised them, authority figures! This loyalty only made his schoolmates lash out more, of course. Here was someone who willingly offered himself up as a victim, every day, and the more they beat and kicked him, the more loyal he became. This was new to them. It was too much. And so they had no choice but to keep beating him. Perhaps they didn’t do it consciously, perhaps they just couldn’t resist this oh-so-weak character, perhaps his weakness spurred them on. Their beatings were almost automatic. He would be there again the next day, after all, trotting along behind them like a dog. Perhaps they could have been used as case studies, for research into what it means to torment living things (my uncle, in this context, but it could just as easily have been a worm) and to take pleasure in doing so. But at least he had his siblings. His sister, in particular, could become a real termagant when it came to exacting revenge for her older brother, and would indulge in beatings and kickings of her own, something which won her a great deal of respect at school (later, she took over his inheritance, authorised by a notary with the agreement of my father). As far as J’s schoolmates were concerned, it of course meant that they would then seek their revenge on him as soon as she was gone. The next day, they would beat him twice as hard. But he forgot about even that quickly. Eventually, he was carted off to the Rhineland in an attempt to save him from his peers. After the beatings, it was always as if someone had reset a part of his being to its original state, before guilt or violence, when there were just the forceps and his mother, the two primordial motifs in his life. Whether he was hitting us in a frenzy or being beaten by his father or the Bad Nauheimers decades before, not feeling anything except the ongoing humiliation, immediately afterwards he would once again be like a child in whose world nothing bad had yet happened. When I was a teenager, I always imagined that was how someone on a killing spree would be: feeling like everything is normal immediately after the act, or rather forgetting everything instantaneously, innocent as a new-born baby, except now there’s a mountain of corpses in the background that they can’t quite understand. In my uncle’s case, the mountain of corpses would have been us, the family, and perhaps the whole of Bad Nauheim, maybe even all of the Wetterau if he had possessed an adequate weapon. And afterwards he would stand there in front of the mountain of corpses, waiting once again, waiting for someone to tell him what happens next. Admittedly, my uncle was one of the very few people without a natural tendency towards sadism. The urge to torture people for entertainment and pleasure — I just didn’t get that vibe from him. If Pupil X was lying on the ground and there was an opportunity, amidst all the commotion, to give him a final kick in the side without any chance of being called to account, then J wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have had any inclination to do so, it would have seemed just as foreign to him as a Wagner opera or a complicated arithmetic problem. It simply wasn’t something that fit into his world. It was far preferable to be saving someone on a mountain. Or on the high seas. Or his comrades in Russia (the comrade could get into the tank with him and J would reach his lines safely and bravely; then rapport, praise and high accolades, even medals). Nor can I imagine him dissecting insects or songbirds for fun, or, as was the rage in our neighbourhood back then, throwing guinea pigs against the wall to see what happened… a veritable sport amongst children in the early 1970s, when guinea pigs were in fashion. Almost all the guinea pigs in my neighbourhood had death sentences, that is if there were children in the families that owned them. But there always were — children were the only reason why anyone ever bought guinea pigs in the first place. If the parents went out for dinner, to the first Italian restaurant in Friedberg or the first Yugoslavian place or perhaps even just to the Schillerlinde or the Goldenen Fass, then back at home the guinea pigs would be flying against the wall. You couldn’t tell what had happened by looking at them afterwards, they were just dead. The parents took the sudden expiration of the guinea pigs to be a kind of natural, spontaneous death, as if the guinea pig had a limited shelf-life, one attributable to the breed. As if they had to be constantly prepared for its inevitable death, on standby to buy a new one. Almost every time I went to the house of one of my neighbours or fellow pupils, there would be a new guinea pig. In other houses, rabbits perished instead. A neighbour’s son would pick them up by the tail (maybe even by the hind legs, I can’t remember exactly), swing them around through the air and fling them against the garage wall. Blood tended to flow with this method, for the wall was roughly plastered, and while he was swinging it around, the rabbit would collide with the plaster, whether this was intentional or not. Afterwards, they would simply wash the wall down. And that’s without even mentioning the dozens of pet birds which were swept away by the children in my neighbourhood; in other words, by human beings. There seemed to be a kind of generational treaty between the parents and the children, as if the point of having pets was so that children could practice something they would need to do later as adults. It was a massacre, like in the civil war, or perhaps a kind of substitute for it, as if violence was an inevitable component of being human, which they maybe believed even if they didn’t say it. No, my uncle only ever got aggressive and lashed out when he was reacting to something; it had to be preceded by some external stimulant. It was predominantly during the second half of his life that he had a tendency to lash out when he was tormented too much, but by then it was only us tormenting him, us kids, for the Bad Nauheimers were no longer laying into him. And in just the same way as he swiftly erased the beatings from his memory, both those he received and those he distributed, he also forgot with equal swiftness, I imagine, everything he did which contravened the law. For this reason, I never picture my uncle as someone who spent lengthy minutes of his life plagued by a guilty conscience, regardless of what he may have done. It was his nature that had made him that way. Of course he knew about rules and moral codes, like the codes of decorum that he always linked with his mother; in other words, that one should always be orderly and respectable and not bring any shame upon the family. But because he was so helpless, he inevitably foundered, again and again. Admittedly he did it in his own way, not in the normal way, because my uncle was nothing like normal people, whether you see the thing with the forceps as good fortune or misfortune. Others always sought allies in their dirty dealings and made an outlet for themselves by becoming smutty. My uncle wasn’t one for smutty fraternisation, not even at the inn. I don’t think that kind of thing even existed in his world. And if it did, it would only have been yet another way of trying to belong. He couldn’t tell jokes either. In actual fact, the only thing he could ever talk about was his enthusiasm for things. And that’s why I see my uncle as someone who, as he heads home from Frankfurt, has been reset to zero and is looking forward to the forest and the beer that will follow it, an orderly daily routine, the way it’s supposed to be, and his mother should know because then she’ll be content and reassured. Now he stands there like a child, in the train which arrived and departed punctually, a child completely at ease, knowing that he’s done everything right with regard to his closest care-giver, the one he’s eternally connected to, his mother; J here in the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, she in the kitchen in Bad Nauheim, and yet no further away from each other than a duckling from its mother on the expansive Bad Nauheim pond, constantly within hearing range. The ducks don’t need to see each other, because they can call out. In this way, a duckling is constantly under supervision and feels secure and protected by its mother, and that’s how it was with my uncle too — his mother was always present in his mind, and he wanted to always be proper and decent before her. Even though he may have often done the exact opposite. From what I know of him, this was his only happiness, his only true happiness, right up until his mother’s death: obeying her, a woman who wanted nothing more from him than that he stay respectable and not put anyone to shame and, above all, look after himself. Presumably, she would have preferred to never let him out of the house, out of fear for what might happen to him. Because, of course, she knew him very well, it’s just that not everything was spoken aloud. Some things never were, not until the death of all concerned, and the fact that they took these things with them to the grave unsaid, this was probably the only choice they had.

Things must have been different with his father. After coming back from the Rhineland, J had to help out in the business, under his father’s supervision, a man who allegedly viewed him with disapproval. After completing his tasks, J would set off to walk the three kilometres home to neighbouring Bad Nauheim, taking the same path I have often taken during the last ten years in remembrance of him (or as his revenant), past the Kühlen Grund and then through the floodplain along the Usa, our river, right along to the allotment gardens in Nauheim. If someone wanted to take this route today, they wouldn’t be able to, because the main artery of the bypass runs there now. My uncle used to walk there (back when this there still existed) to get home, the home that my grandfather was driving towards in his car at the exact same time. I don’t know what model car he had, for it was long before my day. Back then, after the Rhineland, my uncle got taller and taller, seventeen or eighteen years old by then, but his legs were still so thin, as if they could barely hold him up and were about to snap. His ears jutted out from his head, as if they wanted to escape, in the same way his eyes did. And so he would walk his daily kilometres through the Wetterau countryside, across the meadows and the fields that the farmers had sewn, gradually becoming accustomed to it; he must have gotten his enthusiasm for nature from somewhere, after all, or had he simply been born with it? Perhaps it was his father’s alleged (I don’t know for sure, after all, I just heard about it) hate for him that led him to the Usa, the Wetterau and the forest, and from there perhaps to Heino and German music and Luis Trenker, mountain rescue, the Wehrmacht, heroic pilots and heroic generals and the great old days in general (which no one spoke of anymore by that point, something which J was only ever able to accept without really understanding). And because there were times in his younger days when he was excluded, presumably he found peace out there from many things, and ultimately from himself. In this respect, his father had even more of an influence on him than his mother, for his father gave him a world, the daily three kilometres, and with it perhaps the whole of the Wetterau right up to Forsthaus Winterstein, which J would escape to, just as I would later escape to the cemetery whenever J came to our house in Friedberg and I could no longer breathe, and as a result I spent every weekend learning the inscriptions on the gravestones off by heart. J’s mother, on the other hand, was always just the home and the law. And yet if there had only ever been her, he wouldn’t have had anything to flee from. Three kilometres, my uncle alone with himself every day, at seventeen, eighteen years of age, and maybe he saw his first kingfisher there, maybe it was where everything started for him, and in the inns he was allowed to drink beer, which he probably wasn’t allowed to do at the family business, on the crane, in the halls, in the driver’s cabins, and so in the inns he could still somehow be one of the Boll stonemasons. During these three kilometres (there was an inn along the route, Zum Kühlen Grund), he got to know the flowers and animals as well as the beer and the inn, perhaps as practically one and the same from the very beginning (he always preferred going to inns that you needed to go through a forest to reach). Later on, hunting became the sum of them both. A hunter goes into the forest, then to the forest inn. Perhaps the best possible combination for my uncle. Perhaps the best things in the world, hunting and the forest inn.

4

J still has the whole afternoon in front of him, not to mention the evening. He’s just reached Bad Vilbel. The Wetterau is already gleaming in the distance, perhaps it’s a sunny day. The Nidda to the left, people out for a stroll, none of them have anything to do and they are already walking along the riverbank by three o’clock in the afternoon. Sometimes, J sees a brown hare. When he does, he almost jumps out of his seat, wishing he had his binoculars with him, but they’re too big to bring along. Old-fashioned binoculars, like the ones made for hunters or the military, worn-out and already stinking of my uncle (they’re in the cupboard in Uhlandstrasse today, and even now they still stink of him). You can see kingfishers there too. Even though the train is a good fifteen metres away from the Nidda, it’s possible to spot a kingfisher flying along the river bank without any trouble. Perhaps my uncle is standing by the window and waiting for the brown hare or kingfisher to appear. Perhaps it’s the year of the moon landing, when he had recently returned to the Wetterau, his home. I was two years old at the time. Germany in 1969, a country before the traffic system collapsed for the first time. A country without bypass roads. Every now and again, a horse and cart still winds its way down the country road. A few years later, there will only be cars.

It wouldn’t be long before they had little else in mind than driving cars, even on the moon. The seventh man on the moon was a motorist. First they just wanted to get to the moon, full-stop, but almost as soon as they were there, they wanted to drive an automobile too, and it didn’t take them long before they brought one with them. If they really wanted to bring something from Earth, they could have brought a cross, or a small church, collapsible like their automobile or lunar rover, they could have brought a Madonna figurine or relic, or at least the branch of some tree. But instead they brought cameras, golf clubs and cars. That’s what they were like.

People never know what to do when they arrive somewhere, whether that somewhere is at home or on the moon. It’s always the same with humans; whenever they go to a place, they need to bring something with them, so they can cope. There were only twelve of them up there, remember, and yet they still couldn’t cope. By the third or fourth moon landing they needed a car, whereas the first time they had been happy just to step outside at all. In the beginning they were still on foot, like my great-grandmother Else in Wetterau, who walked from Friedberg to Nieder-Mörlen day after day, seven kilometres there and seven kilometres back. In the beginning it was a step for mankind, and just three years later (which was already the end of moon exploration, they didn’t go back after that) it was a thirty-five kilometre sightseeing tour with a golf programme attached. They had to—wanted to — play golf even up there (or down there, depending on how you look at it). These are the pictures that mankind marveled at: two white figures in the bleakest wasteland you could imagine. So much so that it could even have been a film studio somewhere (one without enough sand to build a proper mountain). Two lonely human beings in the middle of Somewhere, reliant upon a makeshift device, a kind of stopgap in order to bridge the great loneliness until Being-Back-At-Home (although what was home to them?). All the Apollo rockets were discarded straight afterwards, that was part of it. They launch, then become waste. That’s how human beings think, that’s the way they build things. They feel bad about the birds in the Gospels because they don’t live like the birds in the Gospels, and perhaps this guilt leads them to emulate the birds, desiring flight, and in doing so they alienate themselves from the birds in the Gospels even further; that’s how everything always goes with us, in circles and downhill. And yet every day has its own burden, its own struggle. Downwards, that’s the direction we always go, even when we’re going up to the moon. Human beings in the most desolate of all wastelands, and us worshipping it on TV. If my uncle had had a space suit on, if he’d been on the moon, for him it might even have been superior to a successful mission with his tank division in the Russian campaign. I say might, because I’m not totally sure. My uncle sat in front of the TV for every moon landing, and so did I. I had just turned five and still remember it now; that although the whole moon exploration thing had only just started, they were already saying it was over. For me, the last so-called mission (a word which, as a child, I was more familiar with in a religious context), the launch probably my fourth already, was a routine matter. Meanwhile, my brother built model versions of the lunar rovers and the Apollo rockets, all of which could be assembled and disassembled in stages and had detachable land buggies, towering a metre high in his bedroom. The launch on TV, then the reports about the flight’s status, and everyone was bored by the third or fourth landing, and no one wanted to watch anymore, no one understood why it was still being reported on nonstop. I was only five, and even I was bored — although, of course, only because everyone else was bored. And it was the same on the moon too. So they had to get a lunar buggy up there quick, in order to be able to cope, and on Earth too they soon needed something completely different to the moon and the people on it. The moon landing business didn’t last long. A decade spent striving for it, just three years actually doing it, and then everyone was bored already, and even my uncle was back to finding the old Luis Trenker mountain rescue films more exciting than the moon landing transmissions and their expert panel discussions on ARD and ZDF. Even he was switching over. Even the 1960s crime series Stahlnetz, summa summarum, held out longer than the Apollo sequels. The moon, interestingly, wasn’t presented in a romantic way in any of the transmissions, if I remember correctly (despite — as people always said — all the lovers beneath it), because the Earth was suddenly being cast romantically instead, because people were seeing it for the first time. They saw the Earth for the first time, and everyone thought it would change everything, that it would change them, the onlookers, and that it would change the world (because they were looking at it), but of course it didn’t change a single thing. After all, it was only photography. It was only media. In 1969, people (we) saw the Earth from a distance for the first time, and everyone was astounded and said it was progress and suddenly thought the world was beautiful, much in the same way as they thought Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. The Earth was suddenly telegenic, it could suddenly be photographed; the magazines wanted it, a motif at last, the Earth as a motif, and so blue, and so white, and so beautiful. My mentally-impaired-at-birth uncle J wasn’t like that. He saw the pictures of the blue Earth as progress and nothing more, not confusing it with the German forests and suchlike, more interested in the model of camera that had been used to photograph the Earth from space than he was in the Earth itself. For others, it suddenly possessed the beauty of a swan. But J didn’t get his appreciation for nature from the TV, even though he did watch nature programmes. For my uncle, the Apollo rockets were a kind of Super VW Variant, and the idea that all of this could have had anything to do with birdsong and fields and meadows (as it seemed later for the disciples of the Apollo-created concept of the blue planet) hadn’t occurred to him, nor would he have understood it if it had. There was no TV in Forsthaus Winterstein at the time of the moon landings. The stags and the hares and the foxes didn’t have a clue about any of it anyway.

My uncle is arriving back in the Wetterau now. As always when you have just passed Bad Vilbel and are heading through Dortelweil, there’s this feeling that everything has suddenly gotten a little lighter, the skies a touch more blue. This is the Wetterau Blue, suddenly there to greet you (but only the Wetterauers can see it, and it takes years, I think — I grew up there, remember). Arrival in the Wetterau. A motorway with a bypass attached. And in summer it will be twice as bright, because of the rapeseed, and then it will be the corn, growing in the fields and becoming more and more yellow, even golden by the end. Shortly before summer draws to an end, Wetterau becomes this intensely yellow landscape with an intensely blue sky above it, and remember that the towns weren’t that big back then — even Friedberg was only half as big when they were driving around on the moon, something that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, merely imagined: Up there, at this very moment, they’re driving around in a buggy, then they’ll leave it there and fly off again, discarding the entire rocket, then fly forevermore through the universe and further and further away from the Earth and the Wetterau, which can’t be seen on any of the photos of the blue planet, they would need to be much closer for that. It’s only at the foothills of Taunus that it starts to become green again, where the forest begins, my uncle’s heartland. It’s now the brightest moment of the day outside, the tractors are being driven across the field, and of course my uncle only has eyes for them. He sees a particularly big tractor with three farmers standing around it (another one is in the process of driving a trailer away), but now the train has passed the field already, so my uncle has to crane his neck to be able to keep the big agricultural engine in his sights, and before long it’s gone. Scale models of these engines used to be in all the toy stores, for practice, a Fendt, a John Deere. You could play at being a Wetterau farmer with these toys at any time, even once the days when there was a chance you would actually have become a Wetterau farmer were long gone. You could use the little toy combine harvester (although for a child it seems huge, as big as a house) to mow over the grass in your front garden and imagine that the corn was shooting out of the duct at the top, straight down into the trailer. There would be a model trailer in the front garden too. And a tractor. Perhaps with a plough fixed onto the back, which in actual fact is pretty pointless because the tractor is supposed to drive the trailer onto the field to fetch the corn, not pick it, but when you’re a child you always want to do everything at the same time, so all the technology has to be attached to one and the same tractor if possible, making it into a Super Tractor, and preferably including the immense Weed Extermination Spraying Machine too. Sometimes they could even fly, these tractors. Before model aeroplanes reached the Wetterau on a mass scale, model tractors had to serve for flying purposes, at times even with the trailer attached, and the spraying machine too (which is ten or twelve metres wide, and even wider still as a toy model — the spraying machine alone practically looks like an aeroplane in its own right). And of course there are a growing number of little matchbox cars alongside these in the front garden, because driving was getting more important, even for children, and would soon replace everything else, in the Wetterau and beyond, long before the first bypass came. Even toy guns (“Bang bang, you’re dead!”) would be left lying around once model cars arrived. Soon everyone was driving, even in make-believe. In my childhood, before there was a bypass, Wetterau kids would sit around at home practicing for the future with model car racing tracks with double loops, to see who was quicker; we were already competing on the streets even in our own bedrooms, and today they’re all driving for real, and in a few weeks it will be finished, the bypass. But for now it’s still 1969, and my uncle is on the train. A small plane is flying up above, possibly en route from the former airfield in Ockstadt. That was another one of my uncle’s favourite places, the airfield with its viewing platform and adjoining beer hut, once the gliding club had moved from Ockstadt to the edge of the Bad Nauheim forest behind Johannisberg. You can run around between the covered and uncovered aeroplanes for as long as you want there, you can even touch them. The only thing my uncle can’t do is fly them, but at least he can admire the people who do. Or the way they drink a beer afterwards and tell their stories. There are lots of gliders in Bad Nauheim, from all over the region. There’s this special process whereby they get pulled up by a machine, connected to a cord that is then decoupled, and my uncle can happily watch it for hours on end, a manoeuvre in the air, collaborative, practiced to perfection. You stand or sit and wait for both engines to start, your concentration intensifying, sheer suspense once both of them are in the air, and then comes the moment when the cord is released, and the excitement gets released too, for everything has gone to plan, and the glider glides away to who knows where, maybe to the Palatinate, maybe to Thüringen or even to France. Power gliders don’t do this manoeuvre with the two planes, they ascend on their own steam instead, which isn’t really as interesting, but then again they have engines of their own and are practically aeroplanes anyway. J admires them because they have propellers, almost like a Messerschmidt from the war, or a Focke-Wulf. And so the little aeroplane flies towards my uncle and greets him, my uncle in the train from Frankfurt to Bad Nauheim. Has he ever flown in his life? I doubt it. He probably wasn’t granted that particular joy. I don’t know if he ever even saw the airport in Frankfurt, but if he did it would have been a big day for him, without a doubt. His mother never travelled by plane. Where would she have flown to? The only journeys she ever made in her life were to Freiberg, to see her sister and Aunt Lenchen. And she always went by train, without J. So it’s likely that my uncle never got to see the airport. But maybe he did, maybe they trekked back and forth out of pity because he was so desperate to go to the airport’s viewing platform, where you could see the jets taking off and landing and driving around, the big planes, the biggest of all. So there they stand on the viewing platform, a Boll day out with the son-in-law and the entire family in tow, as was the norm back then, and J was happy and buying postcards of the aeroplanes as a reminder of their wonderful day — look, the Boeing 737! In actual fact, it’s impossible to imagine that my uncle wasn’t aware of the existence of these planes. (The Boeing 747 didn’t exist back then. It wasn’t introduced until 1969, immediately becoming the favourite of all scale-model-enthusiast kids, and of humanity in general.)

And now the small aeroplane is gone too, and the train is approaching Karben, and Wöllstadt, and making its way on and on with my uncle in it, my uncle who won’t go to the airport today, nor see the big airliners, nor watch the transmission of the current moon landing flight, but he’s looking forward to what’s to come regardless, his time-off and the forest and the beer, and perhaps to eating something hearty later on, after his early dinner at home with his mother. Supper at the inn to round off the day. In Wöllstadt, a police car with its blue lights flashing drives past the window of the train (which is rolling slowly over a level crossing). My uncle observes all of this very closely, noting that everything has its importance and its function and is the way it is supposed to be: the train tracks, the signal at the crossing, the police car, he observes it all and pays attention to everything, in much the same way as others might gaze at a model railway, where everything has its particular significance, where everything you see is part of a plan and is the way it is supposed to be and always stays in order. Two trains could collide head-on there and no one would die. This is how my uncle travels through the Wetterau, as if it was his very own model railway world, and he doesn’t even need the model because for him the original itself is a model, and the same goes for the police car and its flashing blue lights. It’s one of those details that there is a great deal of effort behind — it doesn’t have to be there after all, the police car (with the flashing lights as a special feature), but it is, as if it had been especially selected from a catalogue (Fleischmann? Märklin?). And my uncle says to himself that it’s a very good thing it’s there, driving along outside right now. As if it was doing it just to please him. A world which is complete. With many details to be marveled at, all of them lovingly prepared, just like the way my uncle files his screws in the cellar, lovingly, with great care. Even the pistols in the policemen’s holsters (with small plates showing the brand name and exact cartridges to boot), and the holsters themselves are interesting details, worthy of observation and close study. J would have loved to have a holster like that, even just the holster by itself. He would have practically been a policeman with that holster. Perhaps that’s how it was: perhaps, for my uncle, being in the world was like standing in front of a big model railway. He must have spent most of his time living in an idyll. My uncle’s idyll, the kind that could only have existed in his forceps head. A few years later, my brother made a big model railway down in our basement, almost the whole of the Wetterau to scale. My uncle, on the other hand, stood before reality like a child even as an adult. As soon as he saw a police car with the flashing blue lights on, he would get all worked up. For him, the police must have represented a display of splendour, like the army, like the Wehrmacht, like the military parades he watched with such excitement on TV, where everything was about uniform and parade dress, cavalry and tank displays and the like, the monopoly of flashing lights. It probably didn’t even occur to my uncle to question where they were on their way to, the policemen there in Wöllstadt, because the only important thing was that they were driving and that they were policemen and that they had turned on the flashing lights, and this in itself made the world good and wonderful. My uncle, as I picture it (and I can’t picture it any other way, for I later experienced this with him many times), sees the police, and all is well with the world.

He’s arriving in Friedberg now. Passes over the big tunnel, the sugar refinery, the Hanauer Hof, he sees the Adolfsturm, the castle, the hill the castle is perched on, the old houses lining the railway embankment (where the new Friedberg car park is now, and even that has aged considerably in the last twenty years), and as the train curves around the bend, he sees the Karl Boll stonemasonry and is close enough to spit on his father’s head once again. If his father were still alive, that is, but he died in ’67, two years before the inauguration of the Boeing 747, when the much-longed for future became the present and people were finally able to get to wherever they wanted to go. The Boeing 747 was mankind’s dream. By then my grandfather, his father, was already beneath one of his own gravestones. No one from the family was left to engrave his name, because he was the last of the Boll stonemasons, so his name was engraved by the last-remaining workers instead.

My grandfather never lived to see the Boeing 747, and yet he still lived. He lived a whole life without the Boeing 747.

Now J’s sister is down there leading the business, so J could have spat on her head from up there too, although he would never have done so. After everything his sister had done for him! Now she is married and has three children and a lawyer husband and, as a result, even more authority than before. Now they are building their big house down there; J can see it, the foundations are being laid, the concrete is being poured, the apple trees are already gone and so are the stalls, no more chickens, no more having to slaughter the chickens yourself. Soon there will be a flower garden, the husband will subscribe to My Garden magazine and drive his company car out of the garage (which hasn’t yet been built) every morning and back into it every evening. The rest of the day will be spent in Frankfurt, where he spends every day. Besides which, since the death of the stonemason, he has been keeping everything in order for the whole family, including their entire estate. J has to get used to this now, the fact that there is another person commanding respect, the brother-in-law. He’s the boss now really. But by now the company grounds are out of sight and the train is making its way across fields again, and from the left-hand side window you can see far across the land all the way to Ockstadt (Are the cherries ripe, or is it already autumn?) and to the Taunus, to Rosbach, all small still, this is before the sudden increase in population. They are still closer to the war and the past than they are to us, to the future. Only twenty-four years have passed since that era, the time that would never come again, because suddenly no one wanted it. A lot of things still look like they did back then, though. Until recently, even the business looked almost the same as it did back then. Only when his sister gets married does the future begin in earnest (in just five years’ time the business won’t even exist anymore, and today there are rows of white houses with red-tiled roofs there, like in the model railway catalogue, and now almost all of the Wetterau looks like that). But Ockstadt is still small in the distance for now, and Rosbach can hardly be made out, and in between there are fields or a few trees, and far beyond, although you’d have to lean out of the train window to see, the pig pasture with the apple trees would come into view, in the middle of the landscape between Friedberg and Ockstadt, shiny red apples which the Ockstadt residents will shake down when September draws to an end. Or perhaps it’s spring, and the apple trees are just beginning to bloom white and pink. And now my uncle’s train arrives, punctual to the minute, in the spa town of Bad Nauheim, which once played host to the Tsar and Einstein and Empress Sissi, and where my uncle was practically Elvis Presley’s next-door neighbour for many years, just two houses down, and Heino was here too, and now the rest of my uncle’s day begins. A long evening off after his early afternoon finish.

5

J arrives in a town which is in gentle decline. The Tsar came here once and disembarked in the same train station, and they built his very own Tsar spa for him which no one else was allowed to enter (although today it’s a sightseeing destination). Unfortunately, just a few years later the Tsar was dead, shot in Russia. Even today, people in Bad Nauheim talk about him as if they knew him personally, as if they had been next-door neighbours, like my uncle and Elvis Presley. They talk of how the Tsar’s son would ride through the spa gardens on his bicycle, dressed completely in white… how the Tsar and his family would be driven along the promenade in their regal carriage… such a nice, friendly man, although you couldn’t get anywhere near him, he was a Tsar after all, always flanked by bodyguards… And which cafés did he go to? Did he go to Mirwald (Was it already there back then?), did he go to Café Müller on Aliceplatz (Weren’t there pictures of him on the wall there?), or did he stay away from cafés? Did he drink cider? Perhaps he had an official taster drink the cider first, or one of his bodyguards, in order to make sure it wasn’t an attack on the bodily integrity of the Tsar… And then they would subject the bodyguard to close inspection, observing what happened, what the cider did to him. No adverse effects yet? Then quickly pour another glass (half a pint) down him. Keep watching! There he sits, the bodyguard, the Russian, in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau (it had already been a spa town for over half a century by then), perhaps on a chair or just a wooden stool, or maybe he had to stand and pay attention to what was happening inside him, because he doesn’t know what it is, after all, this cider, maybe a Bad Nauheim resident concocted it in order to kill them all, the entire Tsar family, and maybe all the Bad Nauheimers have made a pact and are acting as if they always drink this cider, whereas in actual fact it’s poison. And now he’s jumping up to his feet, the bodyguard, his hand already at the waistband of his trousers, and running away, where are the water closets here? He runs off, so quickly. And the Tsar will be advised to never drink cider in his life. But just a few years later he’s dead anyway, and in Bad Nauheim they mourn him; it was only just recently that he was walking around here, after all, through the gardens. The poor Tsar. No one knew him. Everyone speaks of him. A public figure. What would Bad Nauheim be without its public figures? Like the depressive Sissi, who no one was allowed to photograph — she was so old by then that she had forbidden all photography. She lived in Burgallee, on the spot where today there’s a four-storey concrete building. So there my uncle stands at the train station where the Tsar once stood, looking out across the courtyard and its two mineral springs to the Johannisberg, just like the Tsar once did. The right-hand side of the Johannisberg is adjoined by the Frauenwald forest, where my uncle loves going. The Winterstein rises up to the left — maybe the broadcasting tower was already on it in ’69. Whenever my uncle turns on the TV, it fascinates him to know that the picture is being broadcast from the Winterstein. He even enjoys the service interruptions, because that’s when the test picture appears, and he can imagine them starting to work away up there in an industrious and expert manner so that service can be duly restored to the broadcasting area. But there is one thing on the Winterstein that is even more important than this, even more important than the telecommunicative, expert, uninterrupted supply of programmes from ARD and ZDF to the entire broadcasting area from afternoon to late evening, and that is Forsthaus Winterstein, half way up the mountain and not visible from down here at the station. In winter, the only thing you can see from here in the courtyard is spray and steam, because both the springs are hot ones. One rises up to a greater height than the other. Without these two springs (Does my uncle know this?), nothing would have become of Bad Nauheim, without them Empress Sissi would never have come, without them Einstein would never have taken part in congresses here, without the two springs the Tsar would never have come to Bad Nauheim with his family, nor would Hans Albers, the American army would never have built the radio station here, Bad Nauheim would never have been occupied by them, for that matter, and Elvis Presley would never have stumbled out of the train, roaring drunk, three kilometres away in Friedberg before taking up residence first in a hotel suite in Bad Nauheim, then in an apartment directly opposite my uncle’s bedroom. Bad Nauheim would have just been Nauheim, without the ‘Bad’ prefix, which it could only possess as a spa town. And yet all of them would have lived their lives regardless, somehow, they would still have come into the world and departed it again, and if Bad Nauheim hadn’t been a spa town back then, perhaps those forceps would never have been placed on my uncle’s head. His world would have been a different one. Now, at the end of the ’60s, hardly anyone famous ever comes here anymore. Most of the guests walk around in casual grey-beige tones. In my uncle’s day, Bad Nauheim’s public image was defined by spa guests with health insurance. The spa guests sit around on benches, sometimes for half the day even — Bad Nauheim is littered with benches. Sitting down is the primary occupation of the spa guest. Even the courtyard is constructed like one great big seat; you can sit there in the shade of the art nouveau arcade and watch the fountains as they fount. Walk over to the mineral springs, get a glass of fizzy water (Not too much! Measure it precisely! Otherwise you might fall over!), then sit down in the spa water enclosure and either just lounge around or listen to the spa orchestra as they play Hungarian melodies, like they did in the Tsar’s day, except now with an electronic bass and a smaller ensemble. Maybe there are even percussion instruments. But only played with a wire brush, so as not to be too loud. Just a gentle background beat, music you can doze off to. If only the water didn’t taste so horrible. But that’s all part of the spa experience. And to make up for it, you get to go to the Deutsche Haus in the evening and drink cider. A cider and a shot of Wacholder juniper gin for sure, then another shot with the innkeeper, and finally another shot to toast the beautiful town of Bad Nauheim. Every evening is free of supervision or treatments, and you regularly drink yourself under the table. But before that, as a spa guest, you take one more trip to the graduation tower. There, you meet your spa neighbours or your new spa best friend or a new spa guest. Settle down in front of the graduation tower and take a deep breath. The air is saline. Two hours a day, preferably more. And anyone who has ticked everything off their to-do list feels all the more calm and content for it as they make their way to the local dance establishment or to have a cider or — if they’re not in a sociable mood — back to one of the many spa bed and breakfasts, like the one where my grandmother, Uncle J’s mother, used to work back in the early days, for her mother had one named Pension Augusta right in front of the spa gardens, and the Tsar used to drive past whenever he was heading off in his carriage. Or perhaps the guests might go into the common room and watch TV. Is there another moon landing today? And so my uncle stands there in the train station of the town which, at that time, is occupied and owned by an army of sandal-wearing spa guests. They socialise even at the station, heading there to fetch cigarettes or perhaps a magazine, because by late in the evening most of them will be alone, their wives in Düsseldorf or Nuremberg or Moers, but there’s room service in almost every B&B, and they quickly catch on to the fact that they have to keep things (in other words, life) a secret even there, for none of them have a dark room like my uncle’s. They come to Bad Nauheim, and soon they are longing for life again, from the magazines to their new spa best friends and dance establishments, regardless of in what order.

Having exuded a noticeable smell for hours now, my uncle heads off on his eight-minute journey home with a certain sense of importance. He feels this sense of importance because he has been to work, a completely normal working day, he earns his money just like everyone else and is practically a civil servant, he could almost wear a uniform, and if he were to go to the postal depot in Bad Nauheim he would feel like he’s amongst colleagues, and would long to talk shop with them (which, admittedly, the postal workers in Bad Nauheim would never have understood, not realising that he worked in a postal depot too). And also because, for today, he has earned what is about to come, in other words his evening off, in an orderly and exemplary and proper fashion. And his mother will be content (He wasn’t in the Kaiserstrasse district, after all! Or maybe he was, but just very briefly, in and out in a matter of moments, and no one knows about that anyway, even he has already forgotten about it, as if it never happened. And did it really?). Isn’t that how his father came back from work too? Proud, that’s the way to come home from work, with your head held high. The day’s work is done. Just like the mountain rescue team coming home from the mountain. And now he’s heading home. They’re expecting him. He who works has someone waiting for him at home. He strides towards Uhlandstrasse, all manner of things on his mind, imagining his life to be successful and normal and exemplary and, just like every day as he makes his way home from his shift, enamoured by the fact that he’s making his way home from his shift. All the way from Frankfurt, where thousands stream past him on a daily basis, unoccupied, and yet he has his job and his function. Everything needs to work properly, and it does. Everything in its place, including him. The time back before the family sent him to Frankfurt, that’s long forgotten now. Uncle J, an individual with a function and purpose, just like anyone else. That’s what I imagine him to be thinking as he strides home.

My uncle opens the front door in Uhlandstrasse like a family man returning from the workplace. The man is in the house. The only one now, for the big company boss, Wilhelm Boll, has been dead for two years. This is how J comes home. As if everything, at least once, could have been good and proper for him: He, the man in the house, and later he’ll get the Variant out of the garage (preferably at least half an hour before he needs it, because then it will be ready), and then he’ll drive to Forsthaus Winterstein to sit with the men, drink beer and listen to their stories, as if he were part of it all.

As if, just the once, everything could have been good and proper.

Except, unfortunately, there wasn’t just the matter of the forceps; there was the small matter of other people too.

His brother-in-law is there. With J’s younger sister, his wife. His brother-in-law, the lawyer. His brother-in-law has been there a lot recently, since J’s father died. They’re everywhere now, and already have three children (of which I am one). It wasn’t that long ago that none of them were there, and now they’re suddenly there and part of everything. It wasn’t that long ago that it was just the sister, and now there are five. They’ve multiplied by five. They are a family in their own right now. At a specific point in the family tree, a new family sprouted out, and they are now the proper family. Because suddenly, in the blink of an eye, there are hardly any Bolls left. J’s grandfather Karl died two years ago, followed just a few months later by his father, Wilhelm, which makes it two Bolls less. And now his sister has a different name. Which, in a way, makes it three less. So now the only ones who remain are his mother and younger brother. For the first time in his life, J starts to get an idea of what the future means. Before, everything was essentially always the same: there was the family, the father Wilhelm, the grandfather Karl, the house, the room and the business, where his father had always been the boss and his grandfather the senior boss. And he was always there and amongst it all, sometimes in the house in Bad Nauheim, sometimes in the business. After all, he’s only been going to Frankfurt since his father died and his brother-in-law started having the final say, his brother-in-law and his sister. The brother-in-law procured the job in Frankfurt for him almost as soon as his father died. At long last, even J had to have a respectable role somewhere. And with his brother-in-law’s extensive contacts, one was found. His father would never have managed to do that. Finding work in Frankfurt — before the brother-in-law, the family’s horizons hadn’t stretched far enough for that kind of thing. Almost as soon as the brother-in-law came on to the scene, everything changed. In fact, there’s so much to organise that he’s there almost every day now. Documents to be read, files to be opened, letters to be read. Things have to be kept in order, with the family estate too, because someone has to do it after all. His sister is managing the gravestone business now, she’s the boss. And the brother-in-law takes care of everything else. They’re already building a house. There’s never been anyone like him in the family before. Where would they be without the brother-in-law? And now that J has finished his working day and come home, the brother-in-law is here, and J goes automatically into a kind of bowed-head posture, like he always does when he sees his brother-in-law. Much like he did when his father addressed him. Every time J sees his brother-in-law, he expects to receive an order. For ever since the brother-in-law has been part of the family, there’s always something to do. The father and the grandfather have to be replaced, and the brother-in-law is delegating their tasks. He has a business-like air about him most of the time, because he always has something in mind: the next task. After all, he has to lead the whole family now. It came about in a natural way and developed as such: he is now the head of the family, albeit tacitly. And, technically speaking, he doesn’t order people to do things. It’s just that he’s always right, with everything he says and delegates, for he sees things clearly and knows how things need to be done. Life consists of tasks (not of Forsthaus Winterstein), particularly when you have a family of five and another family to maintain, namely that of his mother-in-law. If that’s the case, you must have the next goal in mind at all times. There’s no other way! And what a family he comes from! J has seen the building in Frankfurt, the Financial Governing Authority building, and it’s one of the biggest and most modern buildings he ever saw in his life. He has never seen anything like it, the immense hallways and stairways leading every which way, like a kind of centre of the world where everything is regulated and in order and kept in motion and where everything works, because everyone is in their place and everyone knows it. And somewhere in the middle of this immense building sits the boss of all it all, the Chief Finance President. The first president J has ever met. The Chief Finance President first came to the Wetterau and Bad Nauheim ten years ago, at the end of the fifties, all the way to the Uhlandstrasse residence, in order to support his son’s courtship of the daughter of the Karl Boll stonemasonry family. A tall man with a company car. The car had four standards, the like of which no one in the Uhlandstrasse house had ever seen before. The Chief Finance President (my grandfather on my father’s side) worked closely with the American military administration. I still remember the photos, from a time when J, in his late twenties, must have felt like he had died and gone to heaven, for they pictured him side by side with high-ranking US military men who were dripping with medals, in Bad Nauheim and in the midst of the homeland which was now part of the big wide world, and they had given back the house in Uhlandstrasse — it had been seized, and the family had only been able to move back from Friedberg into the restored, restituted house a few years before. There he sits, J, a scrawny sight with his huge ears and black-as-night eyebrows, the same greasy side parting that he always had as a child, and now he’s a child once more amongst all the Americans, and in awe and permitted to be part of it. All of a sudden this Chief Finance President has opened up their world in a way they could never have imagined possible, and while just moments ago they were still occupied and expelled, now they are sitting cosily around the table with the highest-ranking members of the regional American military administration, under whose supervision the whole country — and everything for that matter — was re-built. Some of them are even carrying weapons. They drive up in Jeeps, they have bodyguards. Real-life, genuine bodyguards clad in bulletproof vests. Bodyguards at the front door of Uhlandstrasse 18! The centre of the world. Or perhaps it’s the Chief Finance President’s birthday and they all go to Frankfurt am Main, the sister, the little brother, the mother and the father, and sit in a huge auditorium, and then there are even more, even higher-ranking American military personnel, and my uncle amongst them all. The photographs are stowed away in the bookcase in the living room at Uhlandstrasse, neatly pasted into albums and solemnly labeled—with General Smith, Grillparzerstrasse, 25.4.59; with General Miller, High Commander of so and so, garden at Grillparzerstrasse, 18. May 1959—with white chalk handwriting against black or dark brown mounting paper. My uncle is pictured in many of them. It was an important time. Usually, as I already mentioned, he never liked Americans.

Now the brother-in-law is standing in the hallway, the sister carrying me in her arms. And my uncle comes in and sees us right away. His sister greets him in a friendly manner, but she doesn’t have much time and needs to tend to me; perhaps I need to be taken somewhere, to a check-up, perhaps I have a tooth coming through that needs to be looked at. Or she needs to go shopping for something and has me with her. And now, today of all days, J’s mother needs to go to the hairdresser because of some engagement she has that afternoon. And she has to go shopping too. Or perhaps she has to tend to something at the cemetery in Friedberg. Flowers need to be fetched from Blumensiebert, and the watering can needs to be taken, to water the flowers around the grave, for they didn’t make it there yesterday, nor the day before yesterday, nor the day before that (after all, with the business and three children, they have a lot on their hands), and so J is the only one who can do it today, as his mother has to go to the hairdresser’s and his sister really needs to get back to work or go to the dentist and so on.

So the brother-in-law says: J, pop over to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, could you, take the flowers to the cemetery and tend to the grave, and pick up your sister from work, and then you can give your mother a lift to the hairdresser, she has an appointment at half past five. It’s not like you have anything else to do, and you’ve got the whole afternoon free. Sometimes, J makes the mistake of mumbling that he was in fact planning to go to Forsthaus Winterstein. But you go to Forsthaus Winterstein often enough, you can’t go every day, and if you really have to then you can go later. Do you really have to go there so often? the brother-in-law asks, a question which not even J’s own father had asked. The brother-in-law has no interest whatsoever in Forsthaus Winterstein and such things. He wouldn’t have time for it anyway and is about to head off again now, and already the little scene in the hallway is being wound up, the brother-in-law and sister leave, and J stands there with his back hunched. His eyebrows pull together into a frown, his eyes narrow into slits, and out of his mouth escapes the well-known hiss, so filled with hate it’s as though he’s about to pick up the nearest knife and run from the house to kill, massacre and painstakingly slaughter everyone in the Wetterau, cutting them all up into equally sized pieces. Now he goes to his mother, my grandmother, who as usual is in the kitchen preparing some food, perhaps pot roast for the weekend or coffee for J, or maybe she’s preserving or bottling something. As long as no one else overhears, he can complain to his mother (my grandmother). He really wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein, he says, the hunters have been there all week, and he’d been looking forward to it so much, since the weekend even, and he hadn’t been able to go to Forsthaus Winterstein the day before either, because he had to wash the car and pick up his sister from the beautician, and there was always something he had to do when he wanted to go to Winterstein, and he was always the one who had to do it, because he was always the one that had to do everything. I could explode with anger, he says, stamping on the floor. I heard him say that many times, and remember thinking that there was a strange contradiction between the degree of his anger and the eloquence of the phrase: I could explode with anger. And he always meant it, I believe, in a completely literal sense. The brother-in-law comes and says what’s going to happen, he always comes and says what’s going to happen, but I’ve been looking forward to this all week, and I already said yesterday and the day before yesterday that I wanted to go to Forsthaus Winterstein today, that I really wanted to. His mother calms him down by saying that he can just go to Forsthaus Winterstein two hours later than planned, and that he can stay later to make up for it, so it isn’t that bad after all. At that moment, J realises that it isn’t that bad after all, and that in all likelihood he wouldn’t have set off until around six or half six anyway (he wanted to go to Frauenwald first, just briefly, for a quick jaunt around the ski meadows, maybe see a hare or even a deer, which he could then transform into the ‘umpteenth’ stag). J sits down, lets his apron-clad mother pour him a coffee and place a slice of Madeira cake in front of him, then says, waving the fork around and looking at her like a philosopher who has just had some great insight: If I pick Ursel up at five, then I can be up at Frauenwald around quarter past six and on the Winterstein by half seven, eight at the latest. Excellent, so that’s all sorted then, says his mother, you’ll have a good two hours in the Forsthaus. Then I can stay there at least two hours, says J. Enthusiastic and cheerful all of a sudden, he says that he hadn’t wanted to stay longer than that anyway, because tomorrow he needs to get up at three to go to Frankfurt. In that case, says his mother (my grandmother, and I’m not there because I’m in my mother’s arms in the company car that belongs to my father, on the way to the dentist in Frankfurt and perhaps to the business too and to the building site of the house, and I can’t even talk yet, I haven’t even uttered a single sentence in my life by this point, and yet it’s impossible to imagine any of this happening in any other way), then in that case you should have a lie down now, and in an hour’s time drive to Friedberg to Blumensiebert, go to the cemetery, then pick up Ursel, take her home, then pick me up and drop me off at the hairdresser. After all, Ursel has done so much for you, and her husband does so much for us, we should be happy, because where would we be without Ursel’s husband, now that all the men are dead? And J drinks his coffee and eats the Madeira cake and has forgotten about everything already (just a moment ago he was a patriarch, and now he’s J. Boll again).

J stirs a spoonful of refined sugar into his coffee with condensed milk, which is a very similar colour to his shirts and his Variant, then stirs in a second spoonful, as heaped as he can make it, carefully guiding the spoon from the sugar bowl to the coffee cup, then a third, and to finish off another two, until the coffee is transformed into a kind of syrup, like it always is when Uncle J drinks it. His mother is standing at the stove. She was always in an apron back then, just like all the female inhabitants of the Wetterau. Only when Elvis was there did she briefly lay the apron aside, but afterwards she put it back on, and there it stayed until the ‘90s. Most of her aprons had an intricate pattern, often a flowery one and mostly blue, grey and lilac, so stains from the housework didn’t show up. But the aprons were washed every day anyway. My mother, too, had an extensive selection of aprons at her disposal. She would wear one even when she popped over to see a neighbour. Each morning, a gathering of apron-clad women would assemble in the streets, each in front of their own front door or at the neighbour’s garden gate, soon huddling into little groups of three or four. There would be one of these groups every twenty metres or so. My grandmother always wore an apron in the house in Uhlandstrasse, just as Aunt Lenchen always wore an apron when she came from Friedberg to help out in the house, and Däschinger the seamstress wore an apron, and the cleaning lady wore an apron, and this apron-clad army would make its way through the house, ensuring discipline and order. They didn’t leave a single spot untouched, tending to every last nook and cranny, as well as to my uncle’s stench. The upper arms protruding from their aprons were always bare and, on the older women, fat and fleshy. Whenever I saw them I was always reminded of the joints of meat on display at Blum’s Butchers, or of the loaves of bread at the bakery, except that the latter were fresh, in contrast to the arms, which were already in a state of decomposition and had orange-peel skin. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s arms were so thin that she could barely lift the pans in the kitchen anymore, and yet she would still wear aprons, albeit three sizes smaller. But right now she is standing there at the stove, still comparatively healthy and lively, and Uncle J is solemnly telling her stories about his working day. A shipment arrived from Chile. He says the word with a sense of awe, as if it were something very important. Chiii — le! Emphasising the i. The word an exclamation of excitement in itself. The big wide world, and my uncle there and part of it all, a central hub even. Or maybe it was from Lisbon, which he murmurs in awe. A package from Liiiis-bon direct to Friedberg-Ockstadt. What could it be? Something from Lisbon, a city that everyone knows, to Ockstadt in Kirschendorf, a place that only we Wetterauers know! What could it be? It must be something, says my grandmother, it has to be something. Yes, says my uncle thoughtfully, waving his spoon around and staring out of the window at the street. There are no cars out there, because the traffic jams are yet to come, and the literary quarter where the house is located is still peaceful; hardly anyone ever drives through. And so they talk, and later, after the third cup of milky coffee and therefore the fifteenth spoonful of sugar, J climbs up the stairs and into his room, the first door on the left. As soon as he’s in there (the shutters in his room are closed), the door closes.

Uncle J, in his room.

6

They always told me he was sleeping. Whenever I came to to the Uhlandstrasse house, I was told to keep the noise down because Uncle J had worked the late shift (or the early shift, as the case may be). That was my presence in this house as a child: I would be dropped off by my mother, handed over to my grandmother, and there was always this third person there, but one who never made an appearance: my uncle J. He was there, and yet he wasn’t. I spent hours in that house, still freshly ventilated back then, constantly filled with the fear that, at some point, my horrendous uncle would come down the stairs. Then I would have to sit with him in the kitchen, and my grandmother would end up going to Schade & Füllgrabe, and I would have to go down to the cellar with my uncle. He always appeared out of nowhere, and then my existence for the next few hours was completely different to how it had been in the hours before. When my uncle wasn’t there, I was free to move through the Uhlandstrasse house as I pleased. It was my favourite place and I would look forward to being dropped off there; I could be alone, my siblings weren’t there, I liked the rooms, I liked the kitchen, I could roam around for hours on end looking at all the objects, which always seemed important, especially the photographs of the old, long-since-deceased Bolls. There were a great number of them on the bureau. An unknown man in uniform in front of an unknown landscape, perhaps in Russia, or perhaps at home in the Reich, you couldn’t tell from the landscape, and the man in the uniform was deceased too. Or the picture of the young girl with thick blonde pigtails, staring vivaciously into the camera and considerably older in the picture than I was at the time. Throughout my entire childhood, I could never really believe that this little girl was one and the same person as the Aunt Lenchen I knew. Her husband was one of the first to die in the war, on the second day of the conflict, the 2nd of September, a day after my birthday and yet twenty-eight years before my birth, for I was born on the first of that month, the same day the War began. Aunt Lenchen’s photo (not in the Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, but in a white blouse, a portrait from the chest up) was something from another world, a world they had all sealed off, each in their own way, disposing of all the regalia of the time. The abbreviation BDM was never even uttered when I was a child. Just that one photo was allowed to remain, the man in uniform, the dead man. I’m sure that they must have explained to me back then who he was, but either I never understood or was never able to remember, perhaps because I never read his name on one of our gravestones. Even my grandfather Wilhelm, J’s father, was a complete stranger to me, looming out of an ancient past in black-and-white, even though he had been dead only as long as I had been alive. We could almost have reached our hands out towards one another. We could almost have looked into each other’s eyes, we, the artistic ones. My grandfather has always been dead for the same number of years I have been alive. I presume that the man in the Wehrmacht uniform was Aunt Lenchen’s husband, but I’ll never find out because the photo doesn’t exist anymore, like almost all the photos on the bureau and the cabinet and my grandmother’s little glass table (next to the desk). When I was four or five years old I would run through my grandmother’s house, alone and happy, never realising that I was moving through a house that was predominantly defined by the dead. After all, my grandmother, as I realised much later, became a widow only when I was born. To me it seemed as though the present was separated from the past in the photos by at least a thousand years, as if by some displacement of time that was comprehensible only in a mythical sense. The house was populated by these little black-and-white photographic spectres, which to me had just as great a presence in the rooms downstairs as their actual inhabitants, those who had the rights to the house and its rooms and everything in them. And everything was always quiet; the only thing I ever heard in this house was the cooing of the pigeons and the low-pitched clang of the bells from the Bad Nauheim Dankeskirche, the first music I ever knew. It would be another thirty years before the noise-reducing double-glazing was installed. Looking back, I realise now that the house used to be a museum to me, with my grandmother as the museum’s custodian. Until her death, nothing changed in the living room, nor in the dining room, and my grandfather’s bureau in particular was never touched, just continually dusted and cleaned and polished, either by my grandmother in her apron or by Aunt Lenchen in her apron (presumably she dusted the effigy of her own youth, too) or by one of the various cleaning ladies, still German in the beginning and also apron-clad, but from the eighties onwards predominantly Yugoslavian and no longer apron-clad. After my grandmother’s death, everything was cleared out at once, everything disappeared, even the furniture was removed. It wasn’t until seven years after my grandmother’s death that I began the reconstruction work. Where had all the things been taken to? The tiny, bronze-cast Viking ship that kept me entertained throughout my entire childhood? The black stone shelf (made from diabaso, like our gravestones) above the heater in the living room alcove. Three objects used to stand on it, all of which were equally important to me; it was a cosmos, headed up by a Viking ship that’s no longer there. The ship is there only in my mind now, still immense like a real Viking ship; the sofa upholstery was the North Sea across which it sailed. Next to the ship, a metal elephant with a hollow stomach that you could peer into when you turned it around; the ship and the elephant had always belonged together. The third object was a bowl made of light-green stone, which I also used to play with on the sofa. When I was little, everything had to have its place and order, these objects had been where they were for as long as I could remember, and every time I came to the house they were where they were supposed to be. Like with my uncle, but on a miniature scale. He always needed things to be in order too, just like I did when I was four or five. And his equivalent of my Viking ship, the ship of my childhood, was the Wehrmacht tank and the mountain rescue, and unlike me he stayed that way for his whole life, as it wasn’t long before I was no longer interested in the moon landings, nor the Carrera racetracks with their remote control and speedometers. But these three objects are still a world in themselves, and all of them are gone and no longer in their place and no longer in order, just like my uncle is gone too. And now, here in his room, I have to try to put everything back in its place using my own words.

Almost as soon as my grandmother died, the house took on a new function. Nothing remained, only the house itself. When I stepped inside it for the first time again seven years later, in 1999, I was shocked. To be honest, shocked almost to death. Ever since that day, this house has defined my life. This house, this place, the street, the Wetterau, and above all the room I am writing this in now. And I was a child and ran through the house and fell in love with it, with this hybrid of death and life, a house which, even back then, predominantly consisted of memories of those who had once lived in it. The house in Uhlandstrasse had been there before my parents came, before the house in Mühlweg. It was as though it had been transported from another world into the present. A house of silence, not a house of life. I ran though the house, up the stairs, to the bookcase where I was always reading the travel stories from my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest volumes. I was a day-dreamer when I was a child; my uncle wasn’t the only one. He dreamed of mountain rescue, while I dreamed of the big wide world in the Reader’s Digest volumes. As long as everything was in order and intact, everything was okay. I ran upstairs, selected a volume and settled down with it on the sofa (it was around the time when my grandmother started giving me brandy chocolates and egg liquor, when I was five or six). I lived freely in this house and was happy in this bottomless melancholy (at home, I couldn’t bear to even be in the same room as one of my siblings anymore), but then the door opened upstairs, my uncle came out of his room and everything changed.

But for now, in this day in the life of my uncle J, I’m still only two years old and not even present. As he comes out of his room, Uncle J is in an indecisive mood. Ahead of him lie the errands he will carry out with reluctance, as well as the activities he is looking forward to. In these circumstances he tended to be like a simmering volcano, one that could temporarily cool down then heat up again depending on how things were going. For example, he would come downstairs and solemnly set about the task of driving the Variant out of the garage, for the errand of picking up Ursel. He’s in a good mood. The car, the world, everything is in order. A life. Then his mother reminds him that he hasn’t yet taken a shower. The volcano begins to simmer (his eyes narrow again, barely visible under his eyebrows now, a change which can happen from one second to the next). A dispute arises, one that ends with a compromise: He will shower after he’s driven the Variant out of the garage. In the absence of a uniform, J pulls on his jacket, and he would have liked to ceremoniously take the car key down from his own, specially-made key shelf, but the key was merely on the key chain attached to his trouser pocket, so this particular ceremony had to be omitted. J opens the door, closes it firmly, looks around. The driveway, the garage, the gate to the yard, everything is still in its place. Before opening the garage, he walks over to the gate, because the gate needs to be opened first, for some reason. By the time he opens it, the volcano has been entirely extinguished and only joy remains, but then his mother opens the kitchen window and asks why he opened the gate, because he’s not leaving yet, after all. I know, says J, but I want to drive the car out. Her: But you don’t need to open the gate to do that. J slouches over, starting to grumble now, gesturing with his hands as if he was in the process of beating someone to death, and shuts the gate again. His bad mood lingers until he reaches the garage door. It’s not a particularly big garage, but it is extraordinarily long, with enough room for two cars to be parked one behind the other. There has only ever been one parked in there, though, for Uncle J didn’t get the Variant until after his father’s death. In the moment when J puts the key into the lock of the wooden garage door, he transforms once again. He is opening up his kingdom. Only moments ago, the Variant was standing in a darkness that was alleviated only by the small side windows that face the garden. Alone since yesterday, but now suddenly surrounded by light, it stares, parked backwards in the garage, with its SA coloured bonnet and circular lights, out at the driveway and Uhlandstrasse. My uncle could get in now and start the engine. But instead he prefers to light up a quick cigarette first. And to walk around the Variant and look at the garden tools towards the back of the garage. He sees all of this as his realm, even though it exists only by the grace of others, his sister’s new family. J would never have gotten the car at all if it hadn’t been for his brother-in-law. The car wasn’t bought specifically for him, but rather for my grandmother’s house-keeping errands, making J into the family servant and chauffeur, although as far as I’m aware he never realised that. The garage, the car, he regarded it all as his own, and yet in essence he led a life of service, remunerated not with money but the car. But because he didn’t realise this, it didn’t detract from his happiness. Nor did he realise why he was never allowed to just go straight to the Forsthaus, but instead always had to do this or that first. The real purpose of the Variant was J’s errand-running, not to get him to Forsthaus Winterstein — I believe he would have walked there if he really had to, even though it would have taken him three hours there and back. His father may not have driven him from the masonry to Bad Nauheim all those year ago, but now at least he was able to drive himself to Forsthaus Winterstein, albeit at a price.

The garden tools at the back of the garage, the scythe, the garden shears, everything polished to perfection by an expert shear polisher, the best shear polisher far and wide. And the lawnmower was the newest model on the market. Everything of the best quality. Even the Variant was almost new, or so they had told him (after all, they knew what he was like). He hadn’t chosen the colour himself, but no one could have picked a better one for him. It was as if they had been made for each other, two kindred spirits. Uncle J and his Variant VW Type 3. The Variant model was even used by firemen. Not by the police though, unfortunately. But it was still a vehicle used for official purposes. Whenever a fire service Variant drove past my uncle in his Variant, he would get this serious and official expression on his face, an expression of official duty. He, too, was on duty. That made him and his car almost the same as the fire service Variant with the fireman in it. Swiftly on the scene! After admiring the garden tools as if it were the first time he had ever seen them, running his finger over this or that blade (which, as someone who couldn’t feel pain, he had been strictly forbidden from doing by his mother; but he only ever ran his fingers over them lightly — he couldn’t feel a thing, including how sharp they were, so he obeyed the law and just touched them gently), he opens the car door and gets in. Like others get into a space rocket or a Messerschmidt. And now he’s inside. Time to check all the instruments! All the instruments are still there. The speedometer is there. The tachometer is there. The gear stick, everything in its place. Don’t touch the steering wheel just yet! Check the rear-view mirror. Are the doors properly closed? Doors are closed! Check the clock too, synchronize with the time on his wristwatch. Time all fine, synchronisation complete. Everything in order and faultless and ready to start, all the safety precautions completed and verified and passed. Gearstick in neutral, engage the clutch, ignition. IGNITION! It’s almost like a countdown. The Variant clears its throat, emitting a rhythmic noise which sounds like a phlegm-filled cough, then starts to vibrate, chokes, oscillates and begins to cough once more, huskily this time, then splutters into a state of readiness and runs at last. Ignition successful. Uncle J grabs the steering wheel of his VW Variant. A pilot. After glancing at each of the mirrors, he rolls the Variant forward over the threshold of the garage, in preparation for the rest of the day, the front of the bonnet outside now, my uncle passing the doorframe, level with the steps, another two metres, then he stops, releases the clutch and pulls up the handbrake. The Variant is now in the driveway. It has travelled a distance of five metres. There’s nothing J enjoys more than the sound of the engine, the sound of his life (later, at the end of his life, his cough sounded just like the car engine). My uncle now presumably does what I so often saw him do later, something avid motorcyclists or people with cabriolets do. In other words, he gets out and lets the engine run for a while. He paces around the car, gazing at it, then walks behind it and closes the garage door in a ponderous and official manner. The car door, meanwhile, is still open. There he stands, connected in a mysterious, almost mythical way with the Variant, J here at the garage door, and over there, five metres away, the car with the engine running. It’s running because of him. Waiting for him. It belongs to him. His engine. And oh — how she runs! Waiting to see what will happen next. She will wait there for him until he gets back in. His engine, practically a living thing. And he stands a short distance away, feeling… no, much more than an avid motorist, he was an absolutely smitten one. They belong together, completely, despite being momentarily separated, him here and the Variant there. The engine running just for him, until he turns it off. Which he will do, in just a moment. But not just yet. First, for example, he lifts up the windscreen wipers and inspects them closely. And the hubcaps: Are they positioned correctly and securely? He circles the car one more time. Then he gets back in, sits up straight, adjusts the neck of his polo shirt, looks over at the neighbour who is looking over at him, and turns the engine off. It’s in the driveway now, fully prepared for everything that is to come, and from now until the time when he actually sets off, he can rest assured that she is outside, ready and waiting, everything in order and perfect, everything as it should be.

My uncle comes back into the house as if from some momentous life experience, hesitates in the hallway for a moment, then heads briskly down into the cellar. He will work there for a little while. There are important things he wants to do down there, today of all days, even though he doesn’t have much time. This has only just occurred to him. The pilot in his workshop. Something needs to be tweaked. The finishing touches applied. But you still haven’t washed, says his mother. A nervous twitch in my uncle’s face as lava begins to flow into his temper once more. The dispute is heating up. Yet my grandmother would never come out and say that he’s dirty, that he stinks. When she approaches the topic of washing with my uncle, she depicts bodily ablutions as a mere act of common decency, without going into the details. Even today, I don’t know whether my uncle actually knew that he smelled. You can’t go to the cemetery if you haven’t washed yet, she would say. Or: You have to have a wash before you pick Ursel up! But when it came to why he should have washed before doing those things, perhaps he didn’t know. Go and have a wash, why don’t you, it’ll make you feel all fresh and new. My uncle had no choice but to give in, mumble in agreement and head off to perform his bodily ablutions without fully comprehending them. I can still remember how, in later years, my grandmother, whenever J was out of the house, would go down into the cellar and quickly and efficiently gather together his dirty washing into a neat package, which she would then immediately stuff into the washing machine, turn it on, and in the same breath open all the windows. But for now, in the year of the moon landing, the bathroom in the cellar doesn’t even exist yet (the brother-in-law will commission it to be built in the years to come), so only the small workshop is there, constructed from remnants and trash from the great Karl Boll masonry business in Friedberg in the Wetterau, at Mühlweg 12. And so J goes up to the first floor instead. Whether he took a shower in the bathroom or just had a quick wash in the sink in his dark room, I don’t know. But I do know that he comes down again after a short while, clean for the time being, hair neatly combed, wearing a new greyish-brown polo shirt and no less presentable than when he was a young man, back when he bore a certain resemblance to the young Glenn Gould. He is full of vigour now, in good spirits and looking forward to Forsthaus Winterstein, even though first he has to reluctantly listen to his mother repeat his instructions. Blumensiebert, cemetery, Ursel, shopping, hairdresser. She explains once more in which order it would be best he complete the errands in, and he just mumbles ja, ja in agreement.

And now he is by the garden fence again, opening the gate, climbing into the Variant, and as he drives out he sees his mother still standing at the kitchen window, waving goodbye to him. He waves back. Waving was always part of it for the two of them. Something to take along en route. Taking the wave along with him for the whole time he’s away. As if the waving could be seen at a great distance (this, after all, was the whole reason waving was invented in the first place). And so the connection between the two of them remains, just like that between the duck and her young on the Bad Nauheim pond.

Now he veers left onto Eleonorenring. He is completely alone now. After a hundred metres come the traffic lights, with two cars waiting, then three. Three cars wait at the light for permission to drive on, with people inside them, all looking at the red light and waiting. Everything has its process and its order; you just need to learn what it is. Earn the right. A complicated system. Now the light jumps to red and yellow. The three cars know that they will soon be able to continue. My uncle has learned everything precisely — he knows he has to wait until the yellow light joins the red one, and then it will change to green, and then he can drive on, having prepared to do so while the light was yellow. The yellow light is the waiting light: You can go soon, it says. It’s friendly, informal, everything on a first-name basis. Things always are when it comes to traffic. In your mind you’re on a first-name basis not just with the traffic lights but with the other drivers around you, too, and you’ll definitely be on a first-name basis if another driver runs into your car. If you want to drive to Friedberg, like my uncle does now, a right turn, then you have to flip the indicator upwards, because that means you want to turn right. Left is down, right is up. Advanced mathematics. My uncle is a highly-trained automobile pilot, driving in accordance with the lights and stepping on a pedal here and a pedal there and looking forwards and backwards, driving the two kilometre long stretch to Friedberg all on his own, to the left and right of which there are nothing but fields and from where you can see all of the Wetterau. In this, the year of the moon landing, there’s nothing between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg but the railway line, just countryside. There’s only one bus-stop between the two places, with a small shelter. But no one ever waits there. If someone was standing there, that would mean they had come from Schwalheim, that they had walked through the tunnel beneath the railway line and were on their way to Friedberg. But no one does it. No one makes use of the bus service (for the duration of my entire life, almost no one will stand there, no one ever wants to walk on foot from Schwalheim to the bus stop and onwards; everyone prefers to stay at home or to go by car, once they eventually had one that is). Up above, the sky with its multitude of colours and cloud formations, blue, yellow, grey or red, the Taunus to the right and corn and rapeseed in between, a few apple trees, a cat here and there, a deer here and there, a car here and there, lonely in the dusk with its lights switched on or approaching between the harvested fields in the shimmering late summer heat, like my uncle for example, although by now he has already reached Friedberg, having fetched the flowers from Blumensiebert as instructed and now parking up on the street in front of the cemetery. The cemetery didn’t have its own car park back then.

My uncle opens the gate to the cemetery and walks officiously along the outside wall to the place where we lie to rest. He puts the flowers down, goes to the water tap, takes a watering can, fills it, comes back to the grave and waters the plants, mumbling it’s always me all the while. There are flowers and hedges all around him; roses, lavender or tulips depending on the time of year. Lilies on the more luxuriant graves, predominantly the graves along the wall of the cemetery, the graves of dignitaries, which are tended to with more financial outlay than the others. Miniature temples, stelae, female statues of mourning with laurel wreaths in their hands, letting them hang downwards, one arm resting on the grave in a grief-stricken pose. These figures are, as my uncle notices, young and pretty, but unfortunately made from metal, so you can’t really… But perhaps just the once? Has he never touched them? They can’t be grabbed by the crotch, as the dress is made of metal, but it should be possible to place a hand on the bottom, because the iron garment falls softly there, clinging — it’s from the era of the dress reform movement, after all. Everything is there, and just as rounded as in real life, you can feel it. My uncle and Art Nouveau in the cemetery in Friedberg in the Wetterau. You can hear a chiffchaff in the trees, and a finch too, and pigeons. Nature and death all around him. Sometimes there will be a tree full of kinglets. My uncle once stood there, and now I sometimes stand there today, as his revenant. The kinglets from back then are dead too, but they’re still there, just like us. The kinglets are still there in the trees, albeit different ones, and below there is still a Boll, even if it’s just me and no longer the uncle. Everything is there, but no longer there. And now I’m laying it to rest with my words. Roses and lilies on the gravestone once more. And irises, depending on the time of year. Can my uncle smell them, the roses, the lilies and the irises? Will he run into Kallheinz (So, back home again already?)? He stands before the gravestone and reads the names. Melchior Boll, Ida Boll, August Boll, Karl Boll, Wilhelm Boll. There is only room for one more name on the gravestone, J notices now. Perhaps he notices it every time but forgets it again immediately afterwards; because assuming that the proper order is kept to, the last place belongs to his mother. Then it will say: Auguste Boll. His sister now has her own family and a completely different grave. His younger brother will soon have a family too. And he, J, where will he go? With his mother and the others? But his name won’t fit on the gravestone. Somewhere completely different, in the corner with the individual graves, the ones that are always so small, perhaps just with a wooden cross? And so Uncle J waters his family’s grave. He stands there grumbling, thinking bad thoughts or none at all, walks over to the tap another two times; it doesn’t occur to him to arrange the flowers or to take away the bunch of carnations that is now two weeks old. After all, he wasn’t instructed to do that. And the plastic vase, fallen over on the left hand side of the grave, prompts no reaction from him. He doesn’t notice it, for his task is to water the flowers. Silence. All around him, at an appropriate distance, the old Wetterau residents tend to the graves of their relatives, always turning up in pairs and struggling to lean down towards the Earth and the graves. Most moving slowly, some arguing as they go. Grave-tending is as much a part of being a pensioner as housekeeping, and both can lead to minor disagreements.

He: Where’s the watering can now?

She: By the stream.

He: But we were just by the stream.

She: So why didn’t you bring it?

He: I was carrying the flowers.

She: Fine, so why didn’t you say something!

Et cetera.

You can’t actually hear their words, but you can see them gesticulating. It’s almost as though the cemetery is transforming, on the quiet, into a living room from the Kernstadt or Barbara neighbourhoods (the cemetery lies between the two). They are dressed for housework, too. Today’s task: Tend to the grave. The women usually wear their aprons. As the men bend over, the seats of their trousers always look so vast, their knees angled away from one another, will they ever make it back up? The women keep their knees together and stretch their behinds up towards the sky, almost as though, right at the very end, they are once again the flowers they may have been fifty years ago. A flower that wants to see the sky. Growing up towards the sky once more. And, at that very moment, they are cultivating their dead. Every day, the Friedberg Cemetery Association gathers in the Friedberg cemetery to cultivate the Friedberg graves, both privately and in pairs, and immediately after they will sit in their allotments by the Usa with a bottle of beer. That’s the afternoon outing: first to the cemetery, then to the allotment, and in the evening perhaps a trip to the Mann in die Dunkel or the Schillerlinde or the Hanauer Hof or the Goldenen Fass or the Licher Eck on Kaiserstrasse. That’s how almost every life drew to its end back then, as I remember, and today they still stand around in pairs in the cemetery (while I am always alone), except now it’s the descendants of the ones who used to come. My uncle doesn’t notice them; he has his errand to attend to. He’s just emptying the third watering can. Everything is quiet and still, the only sound coming from the birds and the trickling water. Herr Boll, someone says. J looks around and sees Rudi Weber and his sister approaching. The sister was the one who spoke.

Hello there, Rudi, says J. Good afternoon, he says to the sister.

Rudi Weber: So, are you tending your family’s grave?

I am, yes, says J.

Aye, says Rudi, we’ve neglected ours for the last two weeks. And if you don’t tend to it for two weeks, everything looks so bad you might as well start from scratch.

Well, yes, says J matter-of-factly.

So how are you, Herr Boll? asks the sister.

Yes, good, says J.

And your mother?

Good, thank you, says J.

And your sister?

Well, yes, good, says J.

I admire your sister, the way she’s managed everything so well. Just imagine, Rudi, she’s heading up the business now, the masonry.

Yes, I know, says Rudi Weber.

She: How many children does she have now?

J: Three.

She: And now they’re building on the land, I saw.

J: Well, yes.

She: What does her husband do again?

Rudi Weber: He’s a lawyer.

J confirms this: A lawyer, from a distinguished family of civil servants. A very distinguished Frankfurt family. The father-in-law is a governor in Frankfurt.

She: A governor?

J: Yes, Governor… governor… of everything. A really big building, the Financial Governing Authority. Perhaps the biggest administration building in the whole of Hessen!

She: And he goes and marries a woman from Friedberg, imagine that.

Yes, says J.

She: And will you be going to the inn today?

He still hopes to, says J, to Forsthaus Winterstein, the hunters have been there all week, hunting on the Winterstein, a big hunt, a whole troop of hunters. He wanted to go yesterday, he says, and he wanted to go the day before that. In fact, he’s been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for days now.

Right then, we won’t hold you up, says Rudi. Or is there something we can help you with?

And while Weber’s sister starts up again about J’s sister, who, as she says, used to be such a pretty girl when they were at school, with this intensely black hair, but back then there was this other girl too, and she used to wonder what would become of her, but then she got sent off to boarding school, if her memory served her correctly. Where was it again… in the Rhineland? In Bensheim, J corrects her… so while the conversation picks up again in such a manner, Rudi Weber peruses the state of the Boll family grave, trims a few branches back with his shears, removes the withered and worn carnations, tucks the vase of flowers behind the gravestone, tidies the shrubbery and returns the fallen plastic vase to the neighbouring grave. Rudi Weber has an eye for order, and ideally he would have liked to sweep the gravestone too, but unfortunately he doesn’t have a broom to hand, so he resolves to return later (he needs to come back to the cemetery anyway because his sister forgot the pansies) and give the Boll grave a sweep, just this once, because if J is at the cemetery today then that means J’s sister will be coming by in the next week for sure, and Blumensiebert himself rarely comes to the cemetery, for sweeping graves isn’t really Blumensiebert’s strong point, as Weber knows from experience. And if his sister sees the family grave in such a state, she won’t be happy for sure. Rudi Weber has always regarded J. Boll to be one of those people who don’t have things easy, for one reason or another, and who need a helping hand here and there in order to get along in life. It’s not his fault, after all. He often thinks that, considering his disability, J is doing pretty well. He’s even able to help the family out a little bit, and besides, it’s not like you need to point out to him what a complete idiot he is, a complete idiot with a driving license (and a Variant). So they stand there at the grave for another two, three minutes and gaze silently at the gravestone, the names, and the quotation engraved on it.

Awaiting the Resurrection

Then they part ways, and while J heads towards the stream to secure the watering can with a bicycle lock, Weber shrugs his shoulders, as if wanting to apologise to his sister, and gestures behind J’s back (tapping his finger on his temple), in order to demonstrate in the clear and proper manner that of course he knows J is an idiot, and that this is the reason why he behaves the way he does towards him. And while the sister comments that J’s family should really have enough money to tend to the grave themselves — especially the new husband, if he comes from such a distinguished background — and that for this reason there was really no need to clean up after them, the two siblings disappear into the afternoon sunlight amongst the linden and chestnut trees, the roses and the black marble gravestones from our stonemasonry…

7

Now J drives along the following route: from the cemetery, fifty metres along Schmidtstrasse, turning right into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse, then right again after a hundred metres into Untere Liebfrauenstrasse, where, after another hundred metres, Mühlweg and our property can be found. First the apple trees, then the spot where the stables were, which is now the foundation pit (where I grew up), then the business, one building after the other, glazed in part, everything behind a big black wall with white joints. In the centre, the administrative building, an old mill, the Falk mill. A mill without a wheel, for the river that used to flow through here has long since been diverted and now bypasses its old river bed, and our company grounds too. Wetterau people always had to avoid things, always and above all themselves. In front of the mill is the big entrance gate, through which the workers bustle in and out and the transporters drive in and out, although not as frequently as in Wilhelm Boll’s day, for business is no longer booming in the year of the moon landing. As always, my uncle would have loved to drive the Variant through the main gate (just like his father always used to drive his own car through it), but the Variant always just gets in the way on the company grounds, so he resists and parks it out on the street. He stands on the pavement for a while, looking at the foundation pit of my parents’ house. The biggest house in the whole of the Barbara neighbourhood. A house of Uncle J superlatives. He believes that to be the case even though there’s nothing to see yet (but it ends up being so big that, in fact, I did grow up in an Uncle J superlativism). The workers are working, in part — they’re all drinking beer right now — and J’s sister is standing with them and matter-of-factly giving them the necessary and proper instructions, almost like a foreman. How does she know how to do that? Then J strolls into the main building and is greeted by everyone in a respectful and friendly manner. They all know that he’s the son of the late boss, and they all treat him with respect. J used to come here years ago, too, as a young man, back when the majority of them hadn’t yet realised that he was an idiot. For the staff, the boss’s family was effectively one and the same thing as the boss himself, even though some of them were quick to realise that the boss wasn’t on good terms with his son, and that, on top of this, the son was unusual (a way to avoid saying that he wasn’t entirely normal). They tried to include him in things a bit, explaining the machines to him, sometimes pressing a tool into his hand, sometimes letting him ride along in a truck across the yard or allowing him to watch when they were welding (with a welding mask over his face). But all of that was a long time ago. Today, J was no longer a child, or even a young man, and they didn’t let him ride in the truck anymore… Today, J was on the same management level as the sister in their eyes, even though they all knew by now what he was. To offend him would have meant offending the whole company. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to do such a thing.

And so my uncle steps onto the company grounds in the second year after the death of his father, my grandfather, and the whole world is surprisingly in order. He is almost a boss. The brother of the director. He goes into the mill to Frau Smoke, the secretary, and waits for his sister. Here too, he is treated with respect. Frau Smoke says: Herr Boll, can I get you a coffee? My uncle isn’t used to being treated like this. Two factors needed to align for this to happen: first, that Wilhelm Boll is now dead, and second, that J is now dropping by the company premises in Mühlweg on a regular basis again, because the Variant has been put at his disposal and he always has errands to run with it, including the ones for his sister. The authority that Wilhelm Boll once had in the company has been passed down to his successors, first and foremost to the sister of course, who is now in charge of things, but also to J and the younger brother, who likewise has recently been greeted on the premises as if he’s management. Frau Smoke brings my uncle a coffee, lights up a cigarette for herself, and my uncle lights up a cigarette too. The cigarettes are in a small wooden box on the table and, officially speaking, are part of the office equipment and therefore appear in the bookkeeping. My uncle sits there and waits, in an old room, timber all around him, linoleum floors and filing cabinets, painted grey and made of steel, with roller shutters. The mill is several centuries old and now being used as an office. It must have already been ancient even back then, and it wouldn’t hold out for much longer — five years later the company itself didn’t exist anymore, and another few years after that not even the mill was there. Maybe I’m there in the office too, already back from the dentist and handed over into Frau Smoke’s care temporarily. I remember Frau Smoke (who was always smoking, that’s what killed her in the end) just as vividly as the office itself. I always enjoyed the time I spent with Frau Smoke. I liked going to the company full-stop as a child, back when I was five or six, whenever I wasn’t with my great-grandmother Else, the mother of J’s father, or in Uhlandstrasse with my grandmother. I couldn’t handle being around my siblings at home, after all, whereas at the company I would mostly be left to my own devices. Often, while Frau Smoke was smoking, I would sit on a chair and look at all the accounting books and the typewriter and the ballpoint pens and pencils and sharpeners and rubbers and the sponge that was used to moisten stamps — that ancient type of office that doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, it looked like Firma Hesselbach from TV. Sitting in Frau Smoke’s office meant sitting in a cloud of smoke, and if I did indeed happen to be present that day, the one I’m describing and inventing here, the day in the life of my uncle back when I was two, then I would have been sitting in double or triple the quantity of smoke, because both Frau Smoke and my uncle were smoking, and if one of the workers came in, then he would of course join in and smoke too. The office was small, stuffed with things, everything more or less askew, and the roof of the building was bowing in and would soon collapse, and perhaps even as a child it already seemed to me as though we were sitting in our own past. Did they dream of the future in that office? Were they eagerly awaiting the newest technical innovations there too? From the moon landing onwards, the word computer kept being mentioned, despite the fact that, to date, they hadn’t yet encountered even the first calculator. Frau Smoke was the Mistress of the Filing Cabinets. They were still writing everything with carbon paper back then, the filing cabinets smelt of tobacco, Frau Smoke ate wurst sandwiches from greaseproof paper and from time to time an onion, and she would make her cigarettes vanish into an ashtray, the lid of which would open at the push of a button, then pivot around before closing again. Nothing in that office was electrical except the light and the fridge, which was there for the beer of course. There was always a crate of beer in the cellar of the mill, as supplies. This building, which had not dated in four hundred years, would age quickly in the years following the moon landing, and then soon fall apart. But for now it still housed the office of the Karl Boll stonemasonry and was in the middle of its lifespan. Karl Boll, J’s grandfather and my great-grandfather, who had led the company since 1930, had died only recently. J’s father and grandfather both died in the same summer, at the end of which I arrived, the last member of the new family. My grandfather had been sitting in the mill as senior partner only a short while ago, smoking his cigars in active retirement, and now he was a photograph, hanging where he had once sat and smoked, adorned with the black mourning ribbon of Summer ’67. The letters of his name on the gravestone were still white and fresh. There he sits in the photo of the company’s centenary celebrations, already a geriatric and a dignitary. For me, the office that Frau Smoke worked in is the oldest piece of the world that I know. Without realising it, I lived in a completely different era there. In that office, I lived in an era which pre-dated the war I had never heard of, I lived in the era of the Weimar Republic and the era of the German Empire too, despite the fact that Frau Smoke was already driving to work in an Audi 100. Every day, she drove the seven kilometres to the office from Nieder-Mörlen, the same distance that my great-grandmother Else used to walk on foot to visit her relatives. Today, if Frau Smoke were still alive (which, as I already mentioned, is not the case), she would take the bypass. Frau Smoke, with her deep, smoker’s voice.

His fingers yellow and brown, my uncle sits there in his grey-brown shirt, smoking and staring out to the street, at his Nazi-brown Variant, while Frau Smoke coughs. By the seventies, she will be coughing more and more, and soon after that she will be dead. Now his sister comes. She still needs to go to the butcher’s and then to Edeka. If I am there, she probably tells me I need to stay a little longer and that my great-grandmother will pick me up later (whether I’m old enough to understand what she’s saying to me, I don’t know). So I stay there in the cloud of smoke with Frau Smoke, who is just lighting up a new cigarette, and my uncle and my mother rush off, for she needs to be back home soon to look after my siblings, the evening meal needs to be prepared and so on and so forth. My mother strides across the company grounds, being bid a polite farewell by everyone and acknowledging them with an embarrassed smile, because until recently she could never have imagined suddenly being the head of such a big company. She is probably wearing a light, brightly-coloured coat, and I imagine a neck scarf too, the coat around knee-length, her hair combed back softly. She is thirty-four years old. She walks quickly over the street, heading left towards Blum’s Butchers on the corner, and my uncle gets into the car and drives after her.

Blum’s Butchers is on the ground floor of a small residential building with three steps leading up to it. My uncle stops the car so that Ursel can ‘hop’ right in when she’s finished. Tiled walls, the space itself empty apart from a small counter on the right hand side, and behind it the meat and sausages hang over the grinding machine. Through the big window pane, my uncle sees young Frau Blum and Ursel engaged in sales talk. The young Frau Blum picks up the Cervelat sausage, then the beer sausage, three hundred grams of cold cuts perhaps, and packs everything into greaseproof paper. My mother in her coat — she rushed into the butcher’s like a buffet of wind — and the young Frau Blum in an apron, as always. Now the mince. Half pork, half beef. We always have meatballs on Saturdays, and perhaps today is Friday, so that means she’s procuring them for the next day. After she pays, they carry on talking. Now they’re laughing even, silent behind the windowpane as my mother puts her big purse back in her handbag, which she then tucks under her arm in order to be able to pick up the package of meat with both hands. She stands there for a while longer with the package of meat in her hands, there are still things to talk about, so why did my uncle have to rush so much? Maybe she’ll stay there for another half hour, and then old Frau Blum will end up coming down in her apron too, or Frau Siebert from Blumensiebert or Frau Jakumeit, and they’ll discuss neighbourly matters until there is nothing left to be said, talking into the evening and into the night while my uncle sits in the Variant, and inside the butcher’s everyone is laughing and cheerful and happy, and he can’t go to Forsthaus Winterstein, so he takes out a machine gun, gets out of the car, shoots, kills and massacres everyone in the butcher’s and then runs onto the street and shoots the passers-by and ideally everyone on Mühlweg too, until there’s a mountain of five hundred corpses lying there, and then he gets into his Variant and drives to Forsthaus Winterstein and orders a beer in the orderly and proper manner and at least one Doppelkorn maize schnapps. But neither Frau Siebert nor Frau Jakumeit nor old Frau Blum come, and my mother has already left the shop by now, holding on tightly to the rail that runs along the three steps and looking carefully down at the ground, step by step, for she is wearing heels and it would be easy to trip. There is still a smile on her face. Now Ursel ‘hops’ into the car and continues with the conversation she started in Blum’s. Oh, that Frau Blum, she says. Her brother has a moped now, and the dachshund is always running after him. He only needs the moped for driving to the inn, though. And the dachshund is always running along behind him, just like Pluto whenever Grandpa Karl goes to the Goldenen Fass, oh, turn off here for a moment so we can go to Edeka. My uncle turns into Gebrüder-Lang-Strasse. Wait here for a moment, she says, I won’t be long. At which she disappears into Edeka. She’s always in a hurry, but she always gets held up, and of course she has to converse with lots of people around here, for everyone knows her now, the director of the stonemasonry in the Barbara neighbourhood. A place of long-standing tradition. As he waits, my uncle grips the steering wheel as if he’s still driving and stares through the windscreen of the Variant from beneath his charcoal-black eyebrows, perhaps at that moment fifteen-year-old Elke Schuster is walking by, wearing a very short skirt or maybe even a miniskirt, in keeping with the fashion of the time, and she has breasts too. Everything goes empty and silent in my uncle’s mind and his eyes protrude from his head at a considerable distance. But perhaps fifteen-year-old Elke Schuster is not walking past at that moment after all, and instead my uncle is just staring into space with both hands on the steering wheel — what else is he supposed to do? After a few minutes, my mother comes out of Edeka with a shopping bag and enthuses about the increased selection, you can buy almost anything at Edeka now, you don’t need to go anywhere else. Before you had to go to Kissler on Kaiserstrasse or into the old town to Mörler bakery, she says, but the bread counter in Edeka is so good now that I can always get what I need, so now we can drive straight to Nauheim. Have you been to the cemetery? Yes, says J. She: Did you water the flowers? Yes, says J. Good, she says, then I don’t need to do it. God, is it that late already? Mother still needs to go to the hairdresser. Oh, wait a moment, drive back into town again, could you, I need to pick up the bedding from the launderette, it won’t take a moment.

So my uncle drives up to the railway embankment and from there into the town, to Kaiserstrasse. The traffic becomes heavier by the time they reach the church, it’s the end of the working day and people are flocking to Kaiserstrasse, there’s time now, the work having been done, and the errands need to be run by six, for after that everything will be closed. It seems like the whole of Friedberg is heading to Kaiserstrasse in their automobiles, or at least that’s how it seems to the Friedbergers who are currently driving to Kaiserstrasse in their automobiles. J has to stop by the time he reaches the church — the cars are queuing thirty metres from the crossing, something which is unheard of, there are eight or ten cars ahead of him! He’s never experienced this before. Where have they all come from, are they all Friedbergers? His sister, who is in a hurry, is probably asking herself the same thing. My uncle has been wanting to go to Forsthaus Winterstein for hours, but his sister is peeved too and sees it as a form of personal insult that, at this very moment, all of Friedberg wants to go to Kaiserstrasse for whatever reason, and yet all she wants to do is pick up the bedding she dropped off the day before yesterday. Please ensure they really are ready for the day after tomorrow, she had said in the launderette, and the woman replied, The day after tomorrow for sure. The former Miss Boll, now the manager of a company, has perfected the art of asserting herself. You have to, after all. Otherwise you perish. Even in the launderette, or perhaps specifically in the launderette. By the day after tomorrow, even though my mother didn’t need the bedding until the following week. The launderette woman, for her part, had the bedding ready an hour after it was dropped off.

They’re by the church, the Church of Our Dear Lady, but they can’t go any further; ahead of them are automobiles from 1969 and behind them the church with its rust-red, partly blackened weathered bricks, Gothic arches, pinnacles and crockets from the Middle Ages. They sit there in the traffic and can’t go any further, but why? This is completely new to them. To my mother, being held up at the church for even thirty seconds while trying to reach Kaiserstrasse by car is unheard of. Ahead of them, perhaps, is Herr Berger. Herr Berger works for the company, so why is he already away from work and in town? Next to Herr Berger (who is driving) is Frau Berger. Ursel, the manager, sees Herr Berger, but why does he have to have a car, why is he driving on Kaiserstrasse now, of all times? For that matter, why does everyone always seem to be on their way to somewhere recently and always in your way? And everyone gives each other these aggressive, almost hateful, looks. From one car to the next they glare at each other with hatred, as if the other person didn’t belong here, and why can’t they just stay at home? After an almost unbearable thirty seconds, the traffic starts to move again, and all the people in all the cars are asking themselves how things are supposed to go on from here, now that they can’t even drive to Kaiserstrasse anymore because suddenly everyone is driving to Kaiserstrasse. It clearly isn’t even possible to drive into town anymore.

And now they finally turn into Kaiserstrasse, and cars from all kinds of places are driving all around them, for whoever wants to drive from Usingen to Frankfurt drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Bad Nauheim to Wöllstadt drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Rödgen to Dorheim drives through Friedberg — unless, that is, they drive through Schwalheim — and whoever wants to drive from Butzbach to Bad Vilbel drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Ober-Mörlen to Jagdhaus Ossenheim drives through Friedberg, whoever wants to drive from Florstadt to Forsthaus Winterstein drives through Friedberg, and all the sugar cane transporters drive through Friedberg. In short, the whole of the Wetterau has been driving through Friedberg of late, and when they do, they always drive along Kaiserstrasse. It’s impossible to drive along Kaiserstrasse now, they all say, the people who are driving along it right at this moment, and they have no clue that this is only the beginning, for it’s only 1969. My uncle is just passing the Bindernagel bookshop now. Old Herr Doktor Herrmann, the owner of the Bindernagel bookshop, is standing in front of the door beneath the building’s slated facade, looking at the traffic and wondering what will become of it all. As my uncle drives past in his Variant, Herr Usinger comes out of the Bindernagel bookshop too, and my mother says, There’s Herr Usinger, but J doesn’t know Herr Usinger, nor anything about him. Friedberg’s poet. Widely renowned. Laden with prizes. Herr Usinger lives in the castle. Herr Usinger has a veritable stack of books under his arm. Large horn-rimmed spectacles and snow-white hair. At home in his little timber-framed house in the castle, he writes poems about cosmic connections. Jupiter, Saturn, galaxies and energetic, cosmic universal rays. He is also the vice president of a renowned academy. Calculated almost from this very day, he has another thirteen years to live. The poet of cosmic poems stands there, in the year of the moon landing, in the doorway of the Bindernagel bookshop in Friedberg in the Wetterau next to old Doktor Herrmann and looks at the traffic, and perhaps this really is the day when the Friedbergers who are on Kaiserstrasse notice the traffic for the first time. Suddenly it’s there, the traffic, whereas yesterday it wasn’t, previously not having existed in the Friedbergers’ world, lying beneath the threshold of perception, and now suddenly it’s there, and everyone stops and stares silently for a moment, even old Herr Rausch and young Herr Rausch from the Schillerlinde come out to stand in front of the inn door to look at the traffic (while inside they are sitting with their ciders, all having come on foot). At that moment, Herr Schifbenger comes out of Café Schifbenger to join them, present at this historic moment too, and says to the young Rausch: Erwin, what’s going on here, where have all of these automobiles come from? Indeed, all the local tradesmen and shop keepers, and in particular the residents of Kaiserstrasse, come to their front doors or windows and look at the traffic and say to themselves, Now we really have traffic, and yet just a moment ago there was just the empty, centuries-old Kaiserstrasse. Even the Dunkel landlord comes out of his inn and looks at the traffic with an awestruck expression. At that moment, all the people in Friedberg on the Kaiserstrasse are saying to themselves, Something’s there! It’s there now. And it might never go away again. At that moment, Herr Usinger is composing a few lines of poetry in his head about the traffic incident, thinking of words like planetoid and satellites, atomism and protons. Herr Herrmann, on the other hand, is asking himself how the businesses on Kaiserstrasse will manage to survive if everyone who used to be on foot or riding their bicycle or catching the train is suddenly driving instead. Moments ago there was merely a street, and now, suddenly and all at once and from one day to the next, it’s obvious to all concerned that this is no longer just a street frequented by locals, but one with actual traffic. What kind of traffic is this anyway? my mother is asking herself in the Variant, even though she studied political economics and should have known very well that the car would soon be everywhere in our country and thereafter a German export all over the world, like the blessing of the Lord forevermore and to the final amen. But either she didn’t know or didn’t want to know, just like all the others who didn’t know either, gazing in amazement at the Kaiserstrasse as if a moon rocket had just landed in front of them and little men in white spacesuits were about to step out and stare at them, the Wetterauers, through their mirrored visors. And for the first time, due to logical steps which are few in number but very general, a thought begins to establish itself in their minds, collectively and unexpectedly and independently from one another, one which all the inhabitants and all the traders on Kaiserstrasse in Friedberg in the Wetterau have at exactly the same moment. Even old Herr Doktor Herrmann thinks it, as does old Herr Rausch, and Herr Lenhardt thinks it too as he comes out of the second Friedberg book shop, the Scriba bookshop, wrinkling his brow, as do Herr Schifbenger and Dunkelwirt and everyone in their cars, including my mother on the passenger seat of my uncle J’s Variant. All of a sudden, as if they had pre-planned it, they realise that something has to done. There needs to be something like a bypass. And so on this day, for the first time, the word bypass appears in their minds simultaneously. Just like the clouds in the Wetterau blue, they suddenly see the word before them as if it were written in the skies. They all stagger a step backwards and gaze at a specific point in the skies, as if by command, hundreds of them along the whole length of the Kaiserstrasse, perhaps the point where they suppose the dear Lord to be, as if he had just revealed something to them. Perhaps, for just a moment, he has even revealed himself. A moment of truth, and suddenly they can see. At this moment, all the Wetterauers on the Kaiserstrasse stop in their tracks, staring mesmerized at a non-existent point in the Wetterau sky.

A few seconds later my uncle drives on, and the curious build-up of traffic that was hitherto unknown dissipates again, all the cars jolting forwards and streaming north and south and into smaller side streets too, and after just a few seconds there’s nothing left of what there was moments before. Instead, like there always used to be, there is just one automobile on the Kaiserstrasse, or even two here and there, But what happened just now? they ask themselves on the Kaiserstrasse in bewilderment. Hmm, mumbles the Dunkel landlord, giving the Kaiserstrasse one last thoughtful glance before going back in to pull pints. As he does so, he wonders whether he should tell the Dunkel guests on the other side of the bar about what he just experienced, but at the same moment realises that he lacks the words to do so, and that in any case it can’t be told, because he himself can’t even grasp what just happened, and what’s more, he doesn’t even know for sure if anything did, in fact, happen. Old Herr Doktor Herrmann bids farewell to Usinger the poet, propping his hands against his sides, a little more hunched now and with two new wrinkles next to his nose that he didn’t have before, then goes back into his bookshop at exactly the same time as Herr Lenhardt steps into his shop fifty metres away. The two Rausch men go back into the Linde, where three schnitzels are waiting in the dumbwaiter — to be brought to the table by old Herr Rausch, while Erwin, the son, folds serviettes. Herr Schifbenger goes off to drink a coffee in his competitor’s establishment. Gradually, all the Friedbergers disappear back into their houses and behind their windows, and my uncle is already on his way back to Bad Nauheim with my mother and the Variant, the Kaiserstrasse is quiet again, undisturbed and peaceful like it always used to be. The only one left is Usinger the poet, who can be seen disappearing through the gate of the great castle in his old tail coat with the stack of books under his arm, as if he came from a completely different era and had just been painted into the scene by Carl Spitzweg under the title: The Cosmological Poet Disappears into his Castle.

8

J heads straight for Bad Nauheim, dropping my mother off at her then-apartment. After that, he drives directly to Uhlandstrasse, hurriedly eats the early dinner that is waiting there for him, and takes his mother to the hairdresser’s. Then he drives quickly to Schade & Füllgrabe and buys a vast quantity of preserving sugar which he brings back to Uhlandstrasse, where, or so it seems to him, there’s a veritable warehouse of fruit waiting to be preserved in the cellar. The more his mother preserves, the more fruit there seems to be. The majority of it comes from the company grounds. Pears, plums, squash, and above all apples. And now all of a sudden it’s six in the evening and everything has been done, and my uncle, having almost given up all hope (and having unleashed a thousand blood baths in his mind) sets off at last from Uhlandstrasse to Forsthaus Winterstein.

First he drives through the town, and after just a few metres he sees the sign for an inn, perhaps one that he, the Boll-heir, hasn’t shown himself in for a while. He could pop in, parking the car in a prestigious manner first, then appear in the doorway so that everyone will look up, recognise him at once and be pleased. A guest of his standing! But then he sees the sign for another inn, and then a third, for there are inns and bars everywhere in Bad Nauheim because of the numerous spa guests. So my uncle decides to drive up to the forest after all; he wants to be amongst the robins, which start to sing shortly before dusk. As dusk falls, the wild animals begin to venture out of their dens. He can walk along the forest path in sturdy shoes with a forest-appropriate jacket, almost like the hunters. This makes J feel orderly and proper. So it turns out he does have a uniform after all, a forest uniform. He always has the cumbersome old binoculars with him when he comes here. There in the forest it’s as though his eyes were protruding for sheer joy, and then the old binoculars protruding in turn. My uncle was one of those people who manage to effortlessly lure squirrels to eat from their bare hands; he must have had some kind of special technique. To start with I was astounded, because never in a million years would I have thought that he could manage such a feat, instead believing that the only result of him laying a nut in his flat, outstretched palm would be that all the squirrels flee from him in shock and create a no-go zone, so to speak, of at least fifty metres around him, all the squirrels in the Bad Nauheim forest and the spa parklands, and all the wildlife in Wetterau for that matter. But they came to my uncle willingly, despite the fact that he looked so awful, with his lower jaw jutting out and, as the years passed, increasingly hunch-backed as he stood there waiting for the squirrels.

He drives up the main road and veers off through the narrow lanes of the old town, and if we can agree on the fact that it’s the beginning of autumn in the year of the moon landing on this day in the life of my uncle J, then he encounters a trailer in front of him in Keltergasse and can’t get past it. The trailer is full of apples, and it’s in the process of being backed in to the courtyard. On the tractor sits a man, a boy stands alongside it, and in front there is a woman guiding the driver backwards. Careful, calls the man. J knows him, of course, his name is Karl Maiwald, the boy is his son Martin, and the woman is Karl’s wife Christine. J stops the car and gets out to watch them bring the trailer into the yard, they still need to make it around the corner. The Maiwald family has a daughter too, called Julia, but she is nowhere to be seen. Before they are even a third of the way around the corner, the rear plank of the trailer swings open and some of the apples fall out. Maiwald brakes, pulls on the handbrake and slowly climbs down from the tractor. Then he leans against the trailer and asks who the last person to secure the hatch was. Your son, calls the wife. Meanwhile, some of the apples start to roll down Keltergasse, directly towards my uncle. The apples, calls J, and he begins to pick some of them up. But not many of them roll down the street, most stay in the yard. Julia Maiwald appears briefly at the yard gate, then immediately disappears again. A laugh and a drawn-out exclamation of ay-ay-ay rings out from the courtyard.

J goes up to Maiwald and says, Here, the apples.

So Martin secured the load, says Maiwald, throwing the apples from J’s hand back onto the trailer.

J now sees that around a third of the load is lying on the ground by the gate, that Julia Maiwald is standing behind the load and that Gerd Bornträger is there in the Maiwald’s yard too, sitting on a bench with an empty jerry can in his hand.

Hey there J, calls Bornträger, it looks like everyone’s gathering around the apples again!

The apple-pressing has been taking place in the Maiwald’s yard for some days now, and Bornträger, who happens to live in the old town, has come to fetch some cider. During the apple-pressing season, the Maiwald’s yard becomes a mecca for the whole neighbourhood, and even in the Apollo year the people come with their bottles and jerry cans, just like always. While Bornträger remains seated (putting his jerry can down next to him on the ground), Christine fetches some baskets and Martin the pitchfork. They shovel the apples into the baskets, then empty the baskets into the now-secured trailer. Julia picks them by hand, apple by apple, and Bornträger watches her (as does J).

If you want sweet ones, says Maiwald to J (seeming not to notice that J is staring at his daughter), then we pressed yesterday. Not today, today we were picking.

No, says J, explaining that he’s on his way to Forsthaus Winterstein and just happened to pass by, that he wants to go to the Forsthaus because the hunt was there this week, a really big hunt up in the forest, all the way to Mörlen, the biggest hunt there’s been in a long time.

And while the Maiwald family occupies itself with the apples which are lying around on the ground, green and yellow and predominantly red, the guests in the courtyard look on. Julia is on her knees now and picking apples up from under the trailer, one hand on the ground to support herself and the other collecting, a basket next to her. So now J is standing there in the yard, the Maiwald yard, and he’s sure to be transfixed by the tractor or at least the apple press at the back of the yard, which is ready for action but won’t be used today, and for sure he would have loved to find out how the press works and how it’s operated and which pump gets used to pump down into the cellar and so on and so on, but now Julia is on her knees collecting apples, and everything around J sinks into nothingness, a blackness against which just one thing stands out in sharp relief: Julia on her knees, harvesting apples.

How old are you now anyway? asks Bornträger, standing up from the bench.

Fifteen, Julia calls out.

Fifteen, repeats Bornträger, leaning against the wall of the barn which is just behind the bench.

Julia’s fifteen now, that’s right, says Maiwald, and in two weeks’ time she’ll be sixteen. Her birthday always comes just after the apples.

Just after the apples, repeats Bornträger as he watches Julia beneath the trailer, her deft movements no longer child-like, already very much those of a young woman.

Julia, says Maiwald, is our apple girl.

Apple girl, repeats Bornträger. J stands behind Julia, his eyes sticking out of his head.

And now she stands up again and smiles. She smiles at him or Bornträger, or simply smiles out into the world, and my uncle falls into a transfixed state, one which can only pass when Julia disappears from the scene. But she clearly has no plans to do so. She lifts the basket from the ground, J standing next to her, and looks straight at him, or perhaps she looks straight though him. And now she scrambles around the trailer again and around my uncle’s feet, to pick up one or two more of the scattered apples, and all the while my uncle watches her as if he was alone in the world. Bornträger, over by the barn wall, licks his lips. The apples are all back in the trailer now, so it can be driven on. Maiwald climbs up onto the tractor and moves it off the road, driving the trailer into the yard and over to the press. The apples will be pressed tomorrow. Then Maiwald releases the trailer and drives the tractor out of the yard, to park it. His wife Christine has gone into the house now to wash her hands. Martin has gone too. Now only my uncle, Bornträger and Julia remain in the yard. She stands by the trailer and looks at the apples.

Those are very fine apples, says Bornträger, watching Julia. Were they all harvested today?

Yes, all of them, says Julia.

Then every one of the apples was held by you or your family?

Yes, every last one, says Julia.

Julia, her mother calls from inside, come in and wash your hands.

Yes, Mother, says Julia.

But now Bornträger has moved closer and is standing next to Julia by the trailer.

So you were picking apples for a really long time today, he says, do you enjoy it?

I don’t know, says Julia.

Can I touch them some time?

Julia nods hesitantly.

Will you give me an apple?

Julia nods again, still hesitant.

Come and wash your hands now, Julia, her mother calls.

Yes, in a moment, says Julia.

Look, they’re such beautiful apples, says Bornträger as he grabs them, one eye on the yard to see if Maiwald is coming back.

Julia stares straight ahead, into one of the corners of the yard. J stands there and marvels once more at what other people are capable of. Perhaps, in a moment, Bornträger will ask him if he wants to touch the apples too, in which case J would probably do it, with both hands, or perhaps they would suddenly leap on the girl and ravage her from top to bottom in the matter of a mere second, but now her mother is calling for the third time, Come in right this minute!

I should go in, says Julia, gazing into the aforementioned corner of the yard, then quietly directs the retort idiot at Bornträger and goes in to wash her hands.

Now Maiwald comes back into the yard, and Bornträger sits there happy and content, and perhaps with a certain degree of excitement, on the bench next to the jerry can; nothing has happened, everything is fine, and Maiwald talks for a while longer with Bornträger and my uncle about the time of year, the weather, the apples, the harvest, and in the end Bornträger takes three litres of yesterday’s sweet cider with him, and my uncle gets back into his Variant, and Christine Maiwald stands with her husband in the courtyard and says, Those repellent beasts, they only come because of Julia, but it’s not like we can lock her away inside.

Maiwald: Ay, ay, I guess she’s just at that age.

9

My uncle drives to Frauenwald. The sun is still in the sky, just visible over the Johannisberg. Besides me, my uncle was the only person in the family who would go up to the Johannisberg to watch the sun rise from time to time. Sure, nowadays the Bad Nauheimers trek up to the mountain in their droves on New Years’ Eve to drink and stand around in their ski jackets as if they were on the slopes, despite the fact that there is never any snow on New Years’ (but it could, it could snow!), they drive their all-terrain vehicles all the way up onto the Johannisberg first, then if the upper part of the Johannisberg is already full of parked cars, they drive to the half-way point, parking in the middle of the forest road, and finally they drive to the foot of the Johannisberg, because it’s the only place they can still park, while the last ones drive home because they can’t find a parking space anywhere, then drive their all-terrain vehicles (purchased as though they have to trek across deserts and moors in the Wetterau) into the garage and head back to the Johannisberg on foot, reaching it just five minutes later and still in time for midnight, with a child clasped in one hand and a large bag containing fireworks and sparkling wine in the other. But on a normal morning, during a normal sunrise, I have hardly ever seen a Bad Nauheimer up there, and even my father would have said thank you for the invitation but that he had more important matters to attend to. Sunrises only fit into the lives of people like my father — if at all — when they set off on holiday to Italy at half past three in the morning in order to beat the early morning traffic in Frankfurt, and after that in Nuremberg. But my uncle would linger up there while the sun rose just like I do. We, the two good-for-nothings in the family, he a shift worker, I merely in despair and always walking, deeply distressed, between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg.

At first everything is black; then a blackish-blue brightening announces itself, a slow process. Later, you get the impression that it’s becoming properly blue and light, that the day has already begun even if the sunrise is yet to come, but that’s not the case, your eyes have simply become accustomed to the dark. Sometimes the light is restricted by a wall of cloud, making the rest appear completely black and the small amount of blue even brighter. Then, very quickly, the red comes, flowing into everything, into the forefront of the sky as you gaze out from the Johannisberg at the whole landscape, at the whole of the Wetterau spread out in front of you. And then, as if everything was vibrating with anticipation, as if this morning landscape was trembling, the sun suddenly appears, and now the Wetterau lies there golden and red and still sleeping, and you stand there in the cold of the morning, rubbing your hands, having forgotten that you’ve been staring at one fixed point for over half an hour, the point where you were waiting for the sun to appear. This is sunrise from the Johannisberg. Then the first lights come on, the first aeroplanes appear, then comes the rush of workers and employees, and you climb down from the Johannisberg with a sunrise that no one can ever take away from you, not for the rest of your life.

But right now, with J on his way and Julia forgotten, the sun is going down and the skies are turning red for the evening. Autumn foliage is all around, coming towards my uncle and colouring the paths and boughs alongside and above, making it feel like walking through a room filled with autumn. He has entered the forest now, leaving the automobile behind him in August-Viktoria-Strasse. To the left, a meadow with scattered fruit trees which no one has harvested yet, they gleam red and want to tell him something, and he seems to understand it too. Things always talked to him, the woodland creatures and the plants, as if he belonged more to them than he did to us, the human beings. The apples, what did they talk to him about? How did their language sound? Did they talk to him about the time, about the year, about how the summer was, how the sun shone down on each apple in the most personal of ways, as if it existed for that apple alone? Later, he will be able to talk about the wonderful apples in Forsthaus Winterstein, making them superlative, the reddest that have ever hung in this meadow, the best and ripest and sweetest, even though perhaps he doesn’t even taste one, for he’s in a bit of a hurry and wants to get to the Forsthaus. But first, a walk through the forest. To his right, on a branch, sits a red-breasted robin. It sits there and looks at him and doesn’t fly away. It just stares at him, and he at the robin. They seem to know each other. As if it wasn’t just that the robin was a natural part of the forest and this day for my uncle, but that my uncle was an unquestionable part of the forest for the robin too. Maybe it can hear him. Maybe my uncle said something in the robin’s language. Not that he has learned the language or anything like that — he just knows it. Perhaps he just utters a slight sound, and the robin knows exactly what he’s saying, what he wants, where he’s standing and how he’s feeling at that moment. It starts to sing as he walks past, and the further away he moves, the further away the birdsong sounds, and my uncle knows that a robin always sounds as though it’s far away, even when it’s nearby. And after just a few metres it really does sound as though it’s a long distance away. No bird sounds as lonely as the robin. My uncle doesn’t remark on that to himself, at least not in words, but he takes notice of it. He doesn’t even think about the robin at all, to be precise, but I need to now, in order to give my uncle a language I can understand; otherwise he wouldn’t be there at all, just dead and forgotten except for his gravestone and the two numbers on it. In reality, everything in my uncle is wordless. In reality, he speaks a completely different language, a language before words, one which is always between things, but mostly we don’t know what they are because we’re always talking and are therefore too loud for the things. Now, in the forest, my uncle is in constant conversation with everything, and to him this conversation is a kind of Being-at-Home. Everyone understands him there, and he understands the forest, there’s no pretence, nothing is kept secret, and everything is allowed to be the way it is. Nothing is hidden there, for once, not even where he is concerned. And so he walks past the oaks and beeches, up the hillside, his hands in his coat pockets, not smoking. He never smoked in the forest. It never occurred to him to smoke there, not even once. The cross-country ski trails come into view on the right hand side, and he strides out of the forest, knowing that the two hares are about to come by. My uncle stands there on the skiing meadow (back then, it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone to build a golf course there), and after less than thirty seconds the two hares really do come rushing past, looking at him, getting closer, eyeing him in a very critical manner, as is their nature, then hopping up the slope of the meadow. He stares after them for a long while, the sloped meadow cuts a long swathe through the forest, then the ground fog draws in, just a light veil, and shades of darkness begin to fall. Only the foliage seems to have managed to imprison the light, shining brightly. All along the edge of the forest, a multitude of colours blaze. The evening falls over the forest trail, and soon so will the night. My uncle walks up to Else-Ruh (Else, like his grandmother), then heads further on to Augusten-Ruhe (Auguste, like his mother), and now J is in the Frauenwald and walks another circuit there, maybe he might see a deer, maybe a marten, or on the edge of the forest, next to the houses there, a short-tailed weasel. My uncle always saw something in the forest where others see nothing. Yet he never saw things among people, it was always everyone else that did.

And as the forest slowly seals itself off into dusk and darkness, my uncle exits it again, a small, lone forest wanderer, or that’s how I picture him amongst the huge trees, almost lost in the scene, a person alone at the edge of the forest, alone under the skies, alone with himself, and yet perhaps in this very moment connected by and with everything and parted and separated from things like never before. And the automobile is waiting down below; he heads there and drives off, over the Johannisberg and over to the forest sports ground, where the first team is training. Most of them come here by car now.

My uncle drives higher and higher up into the forest and is then released from it, under open skies now, driving across the countryside with the Taunus before him, darker and darker, the Autobahn alongside, the cars all with their lights on, rushing through the scene like tiny glow-worms. If J had been born just a few years earlier, he would have been able to come here as a child to marvel at the construction of the Autobahn. It would have been the biggest building site he had ever seen in his life, and certainly the longest. He could have seen an entire army of machinery making its way through the Wetterau, slowly lumbering through the landscape and leaving a multi-lane Reich Autobahn in its wake, along which people have been able to drive ever since, always straight ahead and internationally connected from Sicily to Oslo, maybe even to Helsinki. Today it’s called the Federal Autobahn. Back then, the Wetterauers stood at the edge of it and thought, Now we are at the centre of the world, and everyone celebrated, and the newspapers celebrated too. A new world. Wherever they built these Autobahns, everyone always suddenly thought they were at the centre of the world, just because the whole world was driving past them. Yet when it came down to it, the whole world was driving past everyone else too. But in every district, each new slip road was celebrated as though the world had finally taken notice of this particular corner of the world, as if, like Sleeping Beauty, it had finally been awoken from its deep slumber. And anyone who had a car drove past Bad Nauheim on the Autobahn on the very first day, to try it out just the once, and then came off it again a few kilometers further on at Friedberg, able to say from that day forward that they too had driven along the Autobahn. In essence, the Wetterau is just an Autobahn with a service station attached. Now my uncle sees the construction site for the service station, towards the back of the scene, where the glow worms are hurtling up and down as if they’ve suddenly gone mad and all they want is to strive forwards as quickly as they can and arrive somewhere. In much the same way as my uncle sees the packages at the central postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as always having come from the big wide world, like Barcelona perhaps, or Appenzell, here he sees the cars as having come especially for him, from Amsterdam or perhaps Milan or even from Rome, where the Pope lives, the descendent of Christ, for whose birth the bells of St. Stephen’s in Vienna ring when my uncle sits in front of the radio to listen to them. Inside every glow worm was an entire world. And so J feels safe and calm and like he belongs and is connected to the whole world, the world he is able to be part of, and that is all because of Route 5 of the Federal Autobahn.

Now my uncle is on his way up to the Winterstein. The Variant is struggling noticeably. The path goes straight uphill and is tarmacked. Half-way along, a light comes towards him, a vehicle, and suddenly an American is standing before him on the side of the road in full uniform, shining a light into his face and shouting, Stop! The American, like all Americans in the Wetterau, has a chalk-white face that’s visible even at night. He seems agitated and frantic, coming up alongside the car and making gestures which my uncle takes to mean that he should pull over to the side of the road. My uncle pulls over and stops the car. Now there are suddenly another two Americans there too, who seem to have come out of the forest. One is smoking, and all three have American soldier’s helmets on and seem occupied with something. Now an off-road vehicle comes driving past, but without taking any notice of the three soldiers. One of the Americans is speaking into a walkie-talkie. My uncle gets out of his car.

Hey you, calls one of the Americans.

I, says my uncle. He can’t actually speak English.

Yes you, calls the American, grimacing as if disgusted that a German would have to turn up here at this precise moment.

As my uncle has not mastered English, with the exception of words like I or you and yes and no (essential tools for understanding the occupying forces), he is of course unable to follow what the American is about to say to him. The American waves his machine gun in my uncle’s direction, with the result that J chooses to stay close by the Variant. And now, softly and from afar, a noise that my uncle is familiar with resounds out. All four of them, the three Americans and my German uncle, look up the road. A light shines down the road from above, the noise gets louder, a second light becomes visible behind the first, and they come rolling down one after the other, almost too wide for the road. It’s not implausible that my uncle knows the tank models and is able to identify them, just like the birds in the forest and the meadow, or at the very least he would have claimed that he knew them, but perhaps he doesn’t know them after all and is just overwhelmed by excitement. They get bigger and bigger and louder and louder, shining their headlights on each other, turning into the forest path one after the other. My uncle can see the first one clearly now, its immense gun pointing straight ahead as if the gunman wanted to shoot the way clear and perhaps even sweep the Variant from the road, and an American is looking out from the top and has a helmet on and is allowed to drive the tank and maybe has full responsibility for it, controlling everything and with everything under control and his chalk-white face looking important and officious and stern all at the same time. Even though the tanks are already very close in the darkness, they keep getting bigger and bigger, and then they glide past my uncle on the Winterstein forest path, immense, raucous metal mountains, and no one can hear themselves think anymore, and the Americans can’t make out each others’ words, so a rapprochement is out of the question. The tanks and the Americans staring out of them roll heedlessly past the group of people by the Variant, each of the Americans with his gaze fixed as straight ahead as the tank he is on, or so it seems to my uncle, as if they had grown up together and belonged together always, and it would be impossible to think of them any other way, and yet my uncle, back when they had military shows on the Friedberg fairground, wasn’t even allowed into the little German armoured reconnaissance tank, because he was no longer a child and in any case had the appearance of someone you preferably wouldn’t want to put anywhere. My uncle had never been in a tank. He lived without it; it was only the longing that endured forever, something he was only ever able to dream of. The Winterstein, which during his lifetime was not just the Forsthaus and the TV tower but also the tank road of the Americans, who had come to the country twenty-four years ago but remained ever-young while the Wetterauers got older and older. Occupied Wetterau. My uncle didn’t like Americans. But he did like their tanks. They continue to roll past him, and my uncle stares with his eyes protruding from his head again, longing to have an expert discussion with the soldiers (soldiers in uniform, and there in the forest on a tank exercise to boot, the very highest level of Being) about the tanks and their construction and all their details and technical data, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible due to the language barrier between him, the occupied Wetterauer, and his occupiers. And also because of the awful noise that is currently engulfing the forest road as my uncle stands there next to his Variant. Has he ever been this close to the tanks before? He can almost reach out and touch them; they’re not moving quickly. And now the convoy has passed, an off-road vehicle bringing up the rear, and even the three soldiers on foot are moving away from the scene of the incident. My uncle stands alone in the beam of light that’s coming from his Variant. The tarmacked street has been transformed into a wasteland of sludge and mud clumps and is barely passable. During these years, the Americans would turn up with their tanks every few days, making half of the Winterstein impassable, and in the Wetterau Zeitung they would quarrel about why it was always the Germans who had to clear it all up afterwards. Or, to be more precise, the Wetterauers. They didn’t just quarrel in the newspaper, but in Jagdhaus Ossenheim too, in the Goldenen Fass, in Hanauer Hof, in the Licher-Eck (if indeed it existed back then), in the Alter Schmiede, in the Schillerlinde, in the Dunkel, in the Deutsche Haus, in the Krone, and last but not least and above all in Forsthaus Winterstein. Because if you go to Forsthaus Winterstein on a day like this, you’ll need to wash your car straight after. The mud and the slime is spread out on the road all the way to Ockstadt and down to the Friedberg barracks. Some of the metre-long clumps of earth held on for a while, riding the tanks all the way to Friedberg before splatting down on the street and — in doing so — dirtying the whole of the district capital so that everyone always knew: These are the Americans, and you are occupied. And then the Friedbergers would stand before the clods of mud on their road, become inflamed by rage and have to go for a quick beer, and ideally a schnapps too, in order to cope. Exactly how many glasses of beer and how many schnapps were drunk as a result of the dirtying of the little German town of Friedberg in the Wetterau by the occupying powers of the United States of America, no one knows: Bad Nauheim, where the Americans lived, always remained clean, and Friedberg was always soiled. By now, the rumble of the tanks has become quieter, almost non-existent. My uncle gets into his car and struggles to drive over the mud left by the tanks’ tracks; the wheels spin here and there, and within seconds everything is clinging onto the undercarriage, making the Variant heavy and then heavier. But now there are only a few hundred metres to the tank ramp, and from then on the road is in an orderly condition, because the tanks don’t drive there, or at least they’re not allowed to, and the Americans aren’t allowed to set foot in the Forsthaus either (it’s ‘off-limits’). The Winterstein is divided into two, back in ’69 there was the civilian German zone and the American exclusion zone, fenced off and equipped with signs including words like:

Immediate Use of Firearms!

In German, mind you, so that it could be understood.

Sofortiger Schußwaffengebrauch!

Sometimes, you would see the Americans on the road at night. But then again, to me, with their white faces they always seemed devoid of light. At night, these faces had a tendency to gleam. You could see them from afar, and you were best advised to let the occupying forces have the right of way, for beatings were commonplace, while at the same time the white-faced Americans would meet with the German Fräuleins, as the soldiers called them, in the back-rooms of local bars for communal getting-to-know-you sessions. Even at home, on the old company premises, my entire youth was lived in the constant presence of American soldiers, sometimes the whole terrace was full of them. None of these Americans ever saw the inside of our bars, not the Dunkel, not the Schillerlinde, nor the Lascaux, where I spent my youth, a cellar tavern in which even we became lightless figures, running around like rats and slowly grasping something about the world that we were never to forget.

Over at the edge of the meadow, Forsthaus Winterstein comes into view. The windows of the main room shine out into the early evening, there are four cars parked out front, no one comes here on foot at night. The Forsthaus lies there alone; the family that runs it lives in the middle of the forest, completely alone on the Winterstein. My uncle parks in rank and file with the other cars, gets out and stands there for a moment, hunched over a little. Then he walks around each of the other cars, studying them with interest. He walks over to the paddock, but everything is dark there, not a single horse left outside. Aside from the fact that my uncle is almost forty now, everything here is just as it used to be, nothing has changed; only the cars are newer models. My uncle walks into the inn.

The hunters were there.

…

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About the author

Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim in 1967. In addition to winning the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Competition in 2000, he received the Jürgen Ponto Foundation’s Literary Support Prize and the Aspekte Literary Prize for his first novel Wäldchestag.

About the translator

Jamie Lee Searle is a freelance literary translator from German. Her recent translations include Ursula Poznanski’s Five and a co-translation (with Shaun Whiteside) of Florian Illies’ 1913. Other translation works include extracts and short stories by contemporary authors such as Anna Kim, Vladimir Vertlib, Ralf Rothmann, Feridun Zaimoglu and Andi Rogenhagen. Together with fellow translators Rosalind Harvey and Anna Holmwood, she co-founded the Emerging Translators Network in late 2010.

Content

Andreas Maier
The Room

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About the author