A very special trip

para mi prima Jennifer Levine

As a translator of the following three languages, I know that French idealizes, Spanish dramatizes and English banalizes. Almost any nonsense expressed in French will always sound elegant or significant, and in Spanish urgent and forceful. That’s why it’s so much harder to be a writer in my matter-of-fact, depressingly direct language, because its very lack of inherent style requires one to say something, not just to sound good.

An excellent illustration of this aesthetic inferiority of English is the word "trip". It means to jump, hop, and even if the first trips were to the next hamlet, the Anglo-Saxon mania for brevity was such that "trips" got bigger and bigger and can now take you around the world. The Latin-derived words voyage (from viaticum, things you took with you on the road) and journey (for each day or, in French, journée of walking) as well as having more syllables which means more work, sound to our pragmatic ears too abstract and metaphysical. We keep them for when you’re searching for something or groping your way, making an inner voyage, an endless journey, rather than carrying out the touristic act of going to get to a pre-determined number of places, staying in each of them for a precise amount of time, and coming back on schedule. A sordid shuttle between points of interest which lose a bit of their appeal every time they’re visited, like the charms of a prostitute. But in poetic French and its southern sisters, all of those things are the stuff of voyages, viajes, viaggi, viagens etc.

I could in at least one thing agree with Levi-Strauss, the armchair anthropologist par excellence and say, as he did in French, "I hate les voyages", although it would have to be translated as "I hate travelling", which makes another linguistic skeleton fall out of the closet. In confirmation of the previous paragraph, the word travel comes from the French travail, and then from a Latin word for torture, tripalium. That’s going a bit far even for me, however. Although I no longer feel the same thrill when I travel nowadays, because the whole thing has become a commercial venture rather than a personal adventure, I still wouldn’t describe it as being impaled on a three-pronged pitchfork. Just plain "trivial" would do, meaning commonplace and of little value, like the knick-knacks Roman street merchants sold at the junction of three roads, "trivium".

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that some privileged people began to take pleasure and find interest in what had always been something one only did when forced to, setting out to an unknown place for an unknown reason. In my village of southern Spain, until very recently the only people who had ever been out of the country, and even the region, were the peasants and gypsies, because they were forced to find work in Barcelona and France. The landed gentry stayed put in their villas and hardware stores, where they were sure to be treated with due respect.

But the temporary geographical displacement which I am going to describe, however poetic and romantic its purpose and the sensations it produced in me, was really no more than just what the title says, a trip. I thought of calling this piece something like "Journey to East Berlin" or "Voyage with a Berliner" but that sounded too pretentious and puffed-up, as if I were Dante being guided through the outer rings of Hell.

From a purely material standpoint, it was a short, quick, enjoyable trip, in the most crassly contemporary sense of the word, from one modern European country to the other, during which we had lots of laughs and a few decent meals, as well as prodding about in the ashes of the grey, grisly, and for me who didn’t have to live it, terrifying past. But even if it was only a trip, it was still a very special one.

I have thought about those few days often, and often spoken about them too, but it was only when Berlin recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the wall which divided it into two parts that I realized it was time to write them down for the future generations.

My father was a nomad by nature, but he did most of his travelling when he was young, wandering about Europe and North Africa, looking for work and adventure between the two wars when there was nothing at home in Germany. His stories of those times were the inspiration of my own youth, and I always dreamed of equalling them.

When our family went to Vancouver he settled down to become a successful businessman, and it was not until he retired that he began travelling seriously again. He visited me often in South America and Europe, and together we danced the samba with my friends in the favelas of Rio and visited the Pantanal marshlands in Matto Grosso.

We sat together by the fire of my farmhouse near Granada, and searched for the places he had walked through and sometimes nearly starved in around Ronda and Algeciras. I drove him up and down the streets of Paris – because his legs, unlike the rest of him, were beginning to give way – so that he could show me the place in Pigalle where there had been a cheap hotel he stayed in with a high fever, until he couldn’t pay and was thrown out into the wet streets, with only a pair of broken tennis shoes on his feet.

We went to London and took the tube out to the suburb where I was born, and saw the house he had bought for us a few years before the war broke out. A V-2 rocket fell nearby and the suction from the blast tore the front of it off one night, but we were all safely underground in a Morris shelter he had got from the government and put together in a hole he dug in the garden. When I grew up, my parents would tell me how shocked they were to poke their heads out in the morning and see their home looking like a doll’s house with all the rooms and furniture and beds and chairs visible from the street, and the façade lying flat on the lawn.

It wasn’t until he was well over sixty that he decided to return to Germany. This was partly to show Liz, his wife of that time – his third wife – the places where he had lived, but he also had a mission to accomplish, a sentimental one which had filled his thoughts for many years.

He wanted to search for his first wife, Elli, a pretty hat-shop shop girl he fell in love with when he was barely twenty years old. When the Nazis began to get too strong for comfort he fled to England and once there tried to have her follow him. But her brother had already become a brown shirt and denounced her to the police, who forced her to divorce because her husband was a traitor who had fled the fatherland illegally. After a last, desperate phone call from Berlin, he lost touch with her. My mother appeared in his life soon afterwards in the form of the 19-year old typist he was given as a translator at the War Office, and he was so enamoured once again that he put the first one out of his mind.

Just before leaving on his nostalgic journey (here the proper word for "trip" applies) he was given another mission as well. His mother and two sisters had by then come to live in Vancouver from Argentina, the country that had accepted them when there was nowhere else to go for Jews. They had heard that the German government was paying out indemnities to people who had been persecuted by the Nazis, to which his sister Irene, might be entitled.

As a young woman in Berlin she had an office job in a ministry, and when the first anti-Jewish law came out, banning people even suspected of being Jews from working for the government, she immediately lost it, plunging the whole family into misery. After so many years of suffering, Aunt Rene, as her many friends called her, just wanted to enjoy what was left to her of life and forget. But her more businesslike brother-in-law Fred asked father, when in Berlin, to visit the war damages office and see if he could get something for her.

The helpful young man who received father there listened not only to Rene’s story but Dad’s too, and how he had to flee Germany without his wife because the Nazis forced her to divorce him. He was told that he, also, could claim damages, for the psychological suffering he had been caused, in abuse of the basic human right that no one can be forced to divorce. But since father had long ago, in a fit of despair, thrown away the marriage certificate, he would have to either track down Elli herself or someone who could testify that they had been man and wife.

His searches for traces of Elli’s existence had already proved fruitless – he had called every central police station in the country and nothing could be found. She had almost certainly been lost in the war, like so many others, he decided. The only possible witness he could think of who had known them and whose full name he could remember was a painter who lived next door to them in Berlin, a kindly fellow who had painted a portrait of Elli and given it to him as a gift. I knew about this painting because he often told me how he destroyed it when he fell in love with my mother, to pull a curtain over the past.

The police helped him find the old man, who lived in another part of Germany, and he immediately sent father the requested letter, in very elegant longhand, testifying that he had known the young couple when they were his neighbours in Berlin. Father was retroactively awarded a not despicable sum to take account of the years that had elapsed since his involuntary divorce, and a monthly payment equivalent to a modest old age pension for the rest of his life. He always called it his "Nazi money", with a snicker.

While in Berlin he looked up an old family friend, a spinster called Ingeltraut , and from then on she wrote to him every Christmas. When the wall that divided the city in two was torn down, she visited the places where they had all lived in the Friedrichshain district, and wrote to say that that the tenement building where my grandmother Bluma struggled to keep herself and her four kids alive was still standing, but dilapidated, like the rest of the neighbourhood. The government had plans to bring East Berlin up to the standards of the rest of the city, which suggested that many of Dad’s old haunts, about which he had told me so many wonderful stories, might soon disappear.

So it was that in the year 1992 I urgently asked my father, August Edward Böhme, to show me all this while it was still there, especially since he wasn’t getting any younger. In the month of June, he came from Canada with Jean, his fourth and as it was to be last wife. He met me in Paris where I was then working or, to put it more precisely, hunting for enough translation work to support myself and small family back in Granada.

I didn’t feel that my boxy little Russian jeep was comfortable enough to drive the two old people so far, so we rented a streamlined Volkswagen Passat at Orly Airport – a German car, appropriately enough, and not only because that was where we were going. Although my father maintained a cordial dislike of most Germans ever since the war, he always bought German cars only, and I suppose the same would have applied to renting one if it had ever been necessary. No Chevrolet or Buick could lure him away from his first Mercedes Benz sports model, which he drove for thirty years until he sold it to a collector. From that time on he used the slightly newer BMW which he had bought for his third wife.

As soon as we crossed the border I realized what a good idea it had been to get a faster car, because there was no speed limit in Germany and I had to keep moving at at least 140 kilometres per hour just not to get swept off the road. To make it even more frightening, the Autobahns hadn’t been rebuilt since Hitler created them and were in very bad shape, with repairs going on everywhere, in the midst of the traffic.

Jean’s family had friends near Frankfurt, a bank manager and his wife and teenage daughter, and we stayed there for two nights. The family was only interesting for their total lack of interest, as bland and controversy-shy as Anglo-Canadians, and you can’t get blander and milder than that!

Still, we knew that our kindly, self-effacing host was the son of a convicted war criminal about whom he never spoke. My dear Dad managed to ruffle their nerves at dinner by reminiscing about his Nazi-period days and having seen, in a music hall, Göring surrounded with his henchmen. He even did his famous imitation of Göring slapping his thighs in pleasure, spread wide open on the seat because he was so fat. "Ah yes", sighed the poor bank manager distractedly, "Göring…", as if he had barely heard the name before. Once we were back on the road Jean told him off about that one!

The good man took us on a boat trip up the Rhine with a stop for lunch at a beer garden, and we visited a huge granite monument with warlike statues facing France on the other side of the river, a memorial to Germany’s first invasion of foreign lands in 1870. Their athletic daughter, a leggy girl with a gigantic plait of natural blonde hair hanging down her back, enthusiastically told us that she played Vivaldi on the violin and was preparing to immigrate to Canada to marry her boyfriend there. I thought she was so morally and physically irreproachable that even the "squeaky clean" variety of Canadian girls, who were bad enough, seemed pleasantly sloppy and uncouth by comparison.

The whole place seemed like a scrubbed-up caricature of Canada, even the fir tree that grew on the well-trimmed grass in front of the house. Its lowest branch hung just a few inches from the ground, as if the man’s highly-educated wife went out there every day to clip any branches or blades that might be about to touch the lawn. Everything was casual and breezy but discreetly under control.

All this made me think that if the Germans didn’t suddenly afflict the world with murder, plunder and hatred in 1939, they would never have been worth making so many Hollywood movies about or even discussing. They would have lived like these good people we stayed with, making themselves invisible and respectable and seldom ever raising their voices to one another, for fear of making a ripple on the surface of their goldfish bowl of a society.

They reminded me of a joke I was told while a student in France. A Parisian traveller spent the night in a hotel in Alsace. The next morning he came down for breakfast and asked the owner if there was a railway line that passed nearby, to which she said no. "C’est bizarre", he said, "because all night long I could hear what sounded like a train rattling by, and it went like this: danke-schoen-bitte-schoen, danke-schoen-bitte-schoen." "Mais non!", laughed the innkeeper, "that wasn’t a train, it was the two Germans who are in the next room, talking to each other!".

We spent the next night in Leipzig, after crossing a broad expanse of farmland in what had been the German Democratic Republic, in other words the eastern part controlled by Russia. The landscape was refreshingly bucolic, without the development and housing blocks and factories we had seen in the west, because, Dad said, that part of the country was left to its own devices after the Iron Curtain fell and had scarcely changed in forty years.

We stayed near the Church of Saint Thomas where Bach had been the chapel master, and I went there after dinner to see his statue which stands in front of it. It was a warm evening and I stood there by the Gothic church and felt glad just that he had existed. I wasn’t very fond of Germans myself, especially after living with a rather violent one when I was a student, but I made an exception for the three B’s, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, in that order.

What a difference from the busy towns of Bavaria! Gleaming tramlines stretched into the distance along largely empty streets, with the occasional vehicle making its way among the massive apartment blocks. There were very few people to be seen, except in a half-finished Western-style shopping mall where we ordered beer and sausages at a sidewalk table.

The big Soviet hotel was decorated in brightly coloured plastic and chrome fittings, as if trying to make up for the general gloominess. When Dad saw the meeting table at the end of his room, with metallic legs and half a dozen businesslike chairs pulled up around it, he joked that this was where the comrades met to discuss the latest five-year plan!

It was also quite expensive, for what it was. When we tried to take a shower we found there was no hot water, the explanation being that the city had a centralized heating system, as in Russia, with huge boilers which sent hot water through underground pipes to the buildings, but the one which supplied the hotel had broken down. Father made a fuss about it in the morning and forced the not-very-apologetic manager to give him a reduction on the bill, which a foreigner might not have obtained. He was always very proud of the quality of his German and enjoyed speaking it, even with people he met in countries like Brazil whom he thought were crypto-Nazis.

The next day we were in Berlin, where we stayed at Ingeltraut’s house. She had been very close to the son of Dad’s elder brother, Jack, a luckless fellow who went to Australia after the war and worked on freight trains that spent weeks crossing the country, with the only stops being at stations with well-supplied bars in them. Many years of that made an alcoholic of poor Jack, and when he drifted back to England to see his father, the cranky old man took one look at his drunken face and slammed the door in it. As father told it, the hapless Jack ended up back in Berlin and spent his last years living under Ingeltraut’s motherly wing.

She too lived in an attractive, leafy suburb just like the ones in Vancouver, in a brightly-painted one-storey bungalow with neatly-trimmed lawns all around. I hated the big slices of slimy black sausage she served for dinner, but loved the pickled baby herrings and of course the potato salad, which reminded me of my tempestuous Bavarian girlfriend.

Afterwards, since it was still bright, we drove straight across the city to the places Dad remembered from his youth, on the north side of the River Spree. We went past a tall brick church with padlocked doors and shattered glass, where father said he had been given his first suit of clothes. The Communist regime hadn’t much use for churches, so it was left to rot.

I knew this story from my childhood: the Protestant pastor wanted to increase his flock, and announced that whoever stepped forward to be christened would, if he didn’t have proper clothes for the occasion, be given a suit by the city’s welfare department. So Dad and his buddies all got matching trousers and jackets, first to be blessed in and then to go dancing. The idea always intrigued me, because I couldn’t imagine a formally dressed man being baptized.

I am told by my cousin Jennifer that her mother, my aunt Olive – Dad’s little sister – became a Lutheran there too, not because of any material rewards but because she loved going along with the neighbours to sing the hymns on Sunday. So she must have been the one who let Dad on to the chance of getting a free suit.

We stopped between two rows of neo-Gothic factory buildings, sealed up and silent. He pointed to the sidewalk in front of a gate. "That’s where my big brother Harold, who was a very skilled draughtsman, would do chalk drawings for the workers when they came out for their lunch. They would throw him a few pfennigs and say ‘Draw me a lion, draw me a castle, draw me Napoleon’, and Harold would do it on the pavement in a few minutes, there was always a big crowd standing around". I knew that story too, because father was very proud of the talent for design which he said ran in his side of the family. My mother, who was a painter, claimed that I got my own gift for drawing from her, but Dad said it was him.

We turned the corner onto an avenue which sloped down towards the river, called Warschauer Strasse, and pulled up in front of a grey tenement house in a row of similar buildings, framed in perspective against, in contrast, an indecently blue sky.

That was where he grew up, on Warsaw Street, from the age of six, in a room provided by the welfare service in this industrial district, a slum with factories really, even a sort of ghetto because so many Jews lived there, where whole streets of public housing had been built not so long before. Thanks to Bismarck, Germany had a social security system long before the rest of Europe, and from what father told me not even the defeat of 1918 was enough to disable it.

At last we were in the place we had come from so far away to see. An old woman in a dressing gown was looking out of one of the windows, at a curious trickle of "punks" who went back and forth, with orange and green hair and steel rings and clips attached to different parts of their faces. Only a few of the old-timers were left, and the quarter had been taken over by young squatters. And in the middle of this tableau was my father, waving his arms and conjuring up scenes of his boyhood, oblivious of the grotesque creatures shuffling to and fro around him, who of course were also oblivious of him. If it had been a photograph I would have called it "Oblivion".

He pointed to a memorial plaque next to the door, of the sort the Soviets were so fond of, dedicated to a Communist agitator who, in the chaos following the war, had been summarily executed on the sidewalk there. Dad’s working class district was the stronghold of the left-wing Spartacus movement, which wanted Germany to join the revolution going on in Russia and put an end to the double curse of "capitalismus" and "imperialismus".

There had been many of these communist agitators, father said. He remembered the one whose name was on the plaque, because he and his pals had helped him scatter printed pamphlets about. Just inside the door of the house was a dark staircase which led down to the basement, where the little boys, for whom these skirmishes seemed more of a lark than anything else, had hidden whenever the word went about that the polizei was coming.

And just over there, he said pointing up the avenue, was where the kindly old Jewish doctor lived, who fed him and the other boys because he thought they looked too thin. One day, ten years after the battles between the Spartacists and the Freikorps, the Gestapo came and forced him down the stairs at gunpoint. Before they drove him off in their van, they made him dance in front of the small crowd that had gathered, there on the sidewalk.

Across the River Spree from where we were – but father didn’t mention this one to me, I found it by reading – the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, founder of the Spactacus Movement, was murdered on secret orders from the government, and her body thrown into the city canal, during that same winter when Bluma arrived there from London with her children.

This makes me think that my readers could be following these stories without wondering about their strangest aspect, the one that makes my father’s memories quite different to those of other Berliners, German, Jewish or not, who lived through those terrible times. This was quite simply that the well-brought up boy who at age six became a charge of Berlin’s social services, in what was the most desperate and physically dangerous time Germany had ever known, was a born and bred Englishman. He was a little Londoner whose foreign but pro-English parents had proudly christened him Edward in memory of the last sovereign, the one after Victoria.

It was a cruel twist of fate that brought them all there, to be sure. My grandfather Otto (whose own parents had in the same patriotic spirit named him for Bismarck, who was still Chancellor when he was born) left Berlin at the beginning of the century to find fortune as a fashion embroiderer in London.  There, he began as an apprentice to a Polish Jew, and met the man’s foster sister, Bluma, who had just come from Lodsz to learn English.  Before long the girl was pregnant, forcing them to marry, which brought such anathema on my grandmother head that her entire family refused to speak to her ever again.  Otto set up his own factory for sewing elaborate patterns on silken evening gowns, and the young couple had four children, my father being the third. 

The business prospered until England and Germany went to war in1914, when Otto as an enemy alien was imprisoned and sent to a POW camp. He was repatriated during the war as part of a prisoner exchange and when Armistice came he wrote instructing Bluma to come to Germany. She was to sell off their house and belongings and, to get around the restriction on currency export, use the money to buy gold jewellery, which they were to wear on the trip to avoid paying duty in Germany.

But as soon as they arrived in Berlin – right on the train platform – Otto, with scarcely a word of greeting, snatched all the jewels from them, pulling them violently off their necks and wrists and abandoned the five of them then and there. He had planned it all in advance, and made them leave England for the sole purpose of getting back what he could of his lost property. Bluma soon learned that even before she arrived, he had already found another wife in Berlin.

My father met him again only once, fifteen years later, in a beer house. He was dressed in full officer’s uniform, complete with swastika and black boots. Many Germans were joining the Nazis then because they were bitter about the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty, and my grandfather had more to be bitter about than most of them.

Left to their own devices in Germany, a country they had never been to before, where speaking English in public branded them as hated enemies, all they could do was throw themselves on the mercy of the state. They became objects of charity, and of pity.

Bluma would surely have preferred to go back to England, but for the British, she had married a German subject and her own citizenship reverted to his. Why would they want to help a German woman return to England, in the wake of such a ferocious war? And there was absolutely no money to go anywhere, after Otto had taken all they had in the railway station. Rather than make them sleep in the street, the government gave them the room on Warsaw Street and a meagre allowance, and that was where my father grew up, becoming a German like all the others and even deliberately forgetting his English.

At the age of 16 he embarked on his first solitary journey, in search of adventure and perhaps some better things to eat, in France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Italy, walking most of the way and sleeping wherever he could, like many other young Germans who felt it was better to work for a pittance abroad and have a full stomach than be idle and starve at home. When he finally returned to Germany, the Nazis were already on the rise and getting bolder every day.

He already knew smatterings of several languages so he found work and married, but when his friends began donning the brown shirt and swearing allegiance to Hitler, because it was the only way to be sure of staying alive, he decided to get out. The Nazis had marked his family as having possibly Jewish origins, and to make matters worse he had for a short time been a registered member of the outlawed communist party. The borders were sealed, but with his birth certificate he was able to get a British passport and leave as a foreigner.

In England he married my mother and worked translating scientific documents smuggled out of Germany for the War Office. After the war we left the exhausted country for a new life in Canada, where, almost accidentally, he created the city’s first fire prevention company. He started by dragging around red-painted cylinders of carbon tetrachloride in a tiny car and by the time he sold out, thirty years later, he had a fleet of delivery vans.

My parents parted ways with much animosity when I was twelve, and a few years later mother took me and my sister to lead the artist’s life in Mexico, and then Jamaica, and then New York… Father came to visit me now and then, in different countries, but it wasn’t until he retired that he began to come much more often, sometimes every few months.

There we were on Warsaw Street, then, an old man and a no longer young one rooting about in the past like a pair of pigs in a compost heap. Dad did such a good job of making it all come alive for me that he got caught up in the drama of the thing himself, and for a moment seemed to forget I was even there. He led me into the courtyard, where he waved his hand at the two small windows on the third floor behind which his family had survived after one war, until the threat of a new one drove them away.

Every evening, he explained, the horse-drawn wagons which collected the neighbourhood’s rubbish were driven through a special gate that led to a sort of corridor formed by two low brick walls crossing the middle of the courtyard, and disappeared into a plot of land in the back, where the refuse was disposed of. "It didn’t smell, the rubbish was all tightly sealed in big black cases on the wagons, but it was so loud... I can still hear the horses and wheels clattering through, as one wagon after the other rolled in from the street", he remembered.

After the surrender in 1918, some Germans felt that the Kaiser should have continued fighting and others, pacifists and leftist groups, went about demanding an end to the monarchy, holding the Kaiser responsible for the disaster, and the abolition of war. After so many had been killed and mutilated on the front, the people were told that they had to accept disgrace and, even worse, hunger.

"The police would force the protesters into the nearest courtyard and shoot them on the spot, when they caught them. One day they brought in six of them from the street and shoved them up against the brick passageway of the rubbish carriages and shot them. We saw them from our window, lined up against the wall, but we were so frightened we fled back into the flat before the shots went off. When we peeped out again the police were gone and there were only six dead men on the ground".

The corridor had since been removed, he explained... but then his eyes fell on the marks which the walls had left on either side of the courtyard, two slightly less grubby strips of raw cement standing some eight feet high. His memory had not failed him, after more than seventy years.

Driving back across the railway bridge at the end of the street, father nudged me and croaked, "That’s where those bastards were going to throw me off the edge". I knew that story by heart, because if it had ended differently I wouldn’t be here today.

Coming home from the British Consulate with his new passport, he met on the bridge a gang of rough youths with cropped hair and brown shirts. Hitler hadn’t yet wiped out all opposition to his rule, but toughs like these were helping him do it.

When they saw my father, with his wavy black hair and swarthy face, they cried, "Hey, there’s a little Jew!" and punched him in the chest. "Who do you think you are?" he cockily answered, before he could get a grip on himself. "We’re going to teach you a lesson, Jew!" they shouted, and lifted him up bodily, pushing him over the railing and letting him dangle there, held only by his legs.

He saw the trains rolling beneath him and thought the end had come. But then he remembered his new passport, and shouted out, "You can’t do this to me, I am an Englishman!". England was still thought to be a friendly country, and the thugs muttered, "Ah, ein Englander" and pulled him back up. A small crowd had gathered and they slinked away.

Our next day in Berlin was for the normal kind of sightseeing, and he told me we were going to eat a great delicacy. Whenever he came to Paris, Dad and I would have lunch at a brasserie on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where they made an excellent steak tartare, a dish he relished as much as I did.

So now it was his turn to impress me with the Berlin version thereof, called, not very appetizingly, "hackepeter". It was similar to tartare, except that it was made of raw minced pork rather than beef, which I thought sounded both unhealthy and disgusting.

No, he insisted, it was a marvellous dish which he considered a great treat in his youth. He and a buddy would save up bundles of almost worthless banknotes, devalued by the raging inflation, to buy themselves a serving, which they ate with the most intense pleasure…

We chose a sidewalk restaurant on the riverside and took a table outside, to enjoy the breeze. A young waitress took our order and after serving us our mugs of beer, brought out two plates (like a good Canadian, Jean refused to eat any kind of raw meat) with a greyish blob of what looked like dead organic tissue in the middle, but not of the kind you eat.

It had little in common, to look at, with the glistening, lean red chopped beef we were served in Paris, with chunks of parsley and capers mixed into it and nestled in a crisp salade verte, with a mound of thickly-sliced frites on one side. As for the taste, even father had to agree that it was dreadful, greasy and insipid.

After a few bites we gave up on this sorry offering and ordered bratwurst sausages, which was about the only appetizing thing we got to eat since leaving France, apart from the herrings. Another one of Dad’s cherished illusions had been shattered, and I ribbed him about it for the rest of the trip. But he soon cheered up and began swearing that as soon as we got back to Paris we would go straight to that brasserie to order steak tartare, to make up for our disappointment.

When we drove past the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin, he told me how as a boy he had been racing on his bike down the leafy avenue poetically called Unter den Linden – "under the lime trees" – intending to sail through the great gate’s row of mighty columns. But he lost control and crashed into one instead. He showed me how the broadest gap between the six columns was in the middle, with the three on each side being much closer together, but he recklessly chose the gap on far right hand side, one of the narrow ones, and missed it.

He had to be escorted home to his mother with many scrapes and bruises and a broken bicycle. At least, I teased him, you chose a world-famous monument to bash your skull into! Perhaps it’s what made him so hard-headed, later in life.

The guard house at the border crossing which was called Checkpoint Charlie, separating the American, British and French zones from the Russian one in East Berlin, was still standing even though there were no more border controls and no more wall. The Russians insisted on isolating the other zones because so many people were using Berlin as a way of escaping from the Soviet Union, by just walking into the parts which belong to the United States, Britain and France. Many died trying to dash or climb across it, because for all its defects, people preferred capitalism. From the car we could see the sinister red and white striped barrier which the Americans could only raise for vehicles authorized by the Russians.

We heard that some remnants of the wall could be seen, but we didn’t go looking for them. The wall and everything it symbolized interested us moderately because my father had left Berlin more than a decade before it was built. Fascism was the bogeyman of his youth, not communism.

Apart from these distinctive sites, the western side of Berlin looked disappointingly like other German cities but more confused. This was because the traffic grids of the two halves had changed so much over the past half century that they no longer meshed, and work was in progress to make them flow together.

It was Sunday and in the afternoon we went for a walk in the park at the center of Kreuzburg, a neighbourhood which was famous for its counter-cultural atmosphere, which in 1992 meant drug addicts and punks, the bedraggled and stupefied survivors of the hippie movement. It was also home to many of the city’s immigrant Turks, which created a very bizarre contrast.

On a bandstand were a bunch of psychedelic musicians and a "singer", if you could call him that, all screeching and writhing about in their orange and purple tank tops and tattered tights, and Sioux Indian haircuts arching across the middle of their shaved skulls,. There were a few beer and sausage stalls manned and patronized by similar dazed-looking people with rings and safety pins protruding from their faces and ears, and hideous tattoos wreathed around their scrawny white arms and necks like dark blue tendrils.

But just a few steps away, all about on the grass, were Turkish families having their Sunday picnic. Very quiet and orderly, each one seemed to be composed of a very stern husband in his shabby business jacket and white shirt open at the scrawny neck, and stubbly grey sunken cheeks. Behind him, sitting on the other end of the rug they had spread out, were several women, possibly his wives, well-covered in tailored light-weight overcoats and white shawls hiding their hair, chatting around plastic containers of pilaff and stuffed grape leaves. It was clearly the man’s job to roast the meat, on skewers which he solemnly turned now and then over a small iron box filled with smouldering coals.

They all had some kind of radio or tape recorder which presumably played Turkish music, but you couldn’t hear it over the tremendous din from the bandstand. The punks were too spaced out to even notice the Turks, and the Turks took no more notice of the punks than the birds up in the branches and the ants at their feet.

The one aesthetic treat of my short visit to Berlin was the Pergamon Museum on the island in the River Spree where all the national museums stood. German archaeologists had, in the 19^th century, removed the open-air altar of the Greek citadel and transported it to Berlin where it was reconstituted and displayed in a vast room, atop its monumental flight of steps. I was never much of an admirer of Hellenic sculpture, but the reliefs that covered the walls of the altar were so full of life and movement, so boldly positioned and shaped, that I thought they were even better than similar sculptures by Michelangelo, who could’t have seen them because he never went to Turkey.

But apart from that breath of Mediterranean sensuality, there was little in Berlin to relieve the grim shadow which the past cast over it at every turn. An entire park had been transformed by the Russians into a war memorial to their fallen soldiers, with a massive statue of a mourning mother slumped in grief at the end of a vast avenue of trees. I wouldn’t exactly call it beautiful, but it did impose itself with a sepulchral serenity, as soon as you stepped in from the street and saw it there gleaming darkly in the distance.

It may be true that it was all built for propaganda purposes by a totalitarian state which was killing Russians at home just as ruthlessly as the Nazis had done, but it was still laudably understated when you thought of all it stood for.

Although he didn’t say much, I could see that Dad liked it, for the grief it so silently evoked and because he admired the Russians for the sacrifice they made. When I complained that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, he answered gruffly, "Yes, but sometimes it takes a bad man to destroy one". He didn’t care what the Russians did to one another, he just liked what they had done to the Germans!

He reserved all his scorn for the exhibition called the German Resistance Memorial, and even before he saw it, because the name took for granted something he vehemently denied, that the Germans had joined hands to stop Hitler. I knew that many individuals in fact perished for daring to speak out against the Nazis, but father insisted that they were too few in number to speak of a German resistance. For him, the mass of Germans had no reason to resist because they loved Hitler, and the few who hated him remained passive. Now, he snorted, this shameful post-war propaganda was trying to improve their reputation by displaying the photographs of a few hundred martyrs, most of them highly-educated writers and teachers, to create the impression that working-class German people rose up like the maquisards in France or the partigiani in Italy.

The whole, very smartly-designed installation was really a shrine to the dashing army officer Stauffenberg, who made the most daring attempt to kill Hitler, although his motives were not those of a peace-loving democrat either, contrary to what the exhibit tacitly suggested by not mentioning his dislike of Jews and fanatical belief in the destiny of Deutschland to rule the world. The generals and officers thought Hitler was a crude and impetuous upstart and Hitler resented them because they belonged to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy which had always rejected him. Dad was adamant in saying that Stauffenberg would never have tried to get rid of the Führer if Germany hadn’t begun to crumble, especially after the Americans entered the war. He felt certain that if Hitler had been winning rather than losing, the generals would have swallowed their dislike of him and fought on.

"When they saw that they were going to lose, that he wouldn’t let them surrender honourably, that they would be hanged for their crimes, they said ‘What is this madman doing? He’s leading us to disaster, he refuses to admit we’ve already lost the war and he wants the last one of us to die for him and his damned dream!’ That was then they began to seriously talk about assassinating him, but it had nothing to do with saving mankind or even Germany, just their own skins and their professional honour".

After several failed attempts, then, Stauffenberg put a bomb hidden in a briefcase under the big wooden table around which Hitler and his top brass were talking, but instead of sacrificing his own life and blowing it up himself, he set the timer, left the room in a hurry and sped away in a car. Since he saw and heard the building explode behind him, he assumed that Hitler was dead. What he didn’t know was that just after he left the room, an aide had moved his briefcase to one side because it got in his way, and Hitler was only slightly wounded, even though the blast was strong enough to blow off his trousers!

As soon as the dust literally settled, Stauffenberg was arrested and shot that very night in the courtyard of the building which was chosen symbolically for the Memorial, some ten years before our visit. When we went in the front gate of the Bendlerblock, as it was called, the first thing we saw was a long, austere cobblestoned courtyard and, all alone in the middle, the bronze statue of a naked man facing an imaginary firing squad, representing Stauffenberg who died in that same place.

Almost certainly, other plotters in the army rushed to execute him before Hitler could intervene, because they feared that under torture he might give them away. Many others were hanged with piano wire, and the Führer had each one of them filmed, so that in his odd moments he could enjoy the sight of them writhing as they choked to death.

Dad had always told me that the officers were like a pack of hungry wolves in winter turning on one another. When they saw the Allies were winning, they were terrified that once the inferno of the concentration camps was discovered they would all be hanged. But if they themselves eliminated Hitler, they might get off with a lighter punishment or even pardoned.

And he indignantly refused to be impressed by "this white-washing memorial crap", as he called it. "They were a bunch of clowns, with their military training all they were good for was killing helpless Jews and children. If this guy Stauffenberg was such a hero he should have made sure the bomb went off in the right place and sacrificed his own life. All the Nazis were armed to the teeth and any of them could have taken out a pistol and shot the bastard, but they didn’t want to die". His judgments were not impartial, but they were informed by direct experience rather than second hand hindsight, so can’t be easily dismissed.

On the way home we stopped in Amsterdam, since neither of us had ever been there before. By this time Dad was complaining about all the walking we had had to do in Berlin and that his legs were killing him. I decided not to make him and Jean trudge around the Rembrandt Museum, which had lots of staircases. As for the house of Anne Franck, which Dad would have liked to see, there were so many American tourists lining up along the canal to get in that we had to give it up.

But there was one memorable moment in that lovely town, although it was more comical than cultural. That evening we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, and afterwards, it being a very pleasant evening, I suggested taking a walk in the city’s famous red light district. In front of his new wife Jean, he made a big show of having no stomach for looking at such a sordid scene, and even exaggerated his limp so that I would give up the whole ridiculous idea.

But I knew my Dad, and I also knew that Jean, who was an earthy, backwoods sort of Canadian, couldn’t have cared less, so I insisted we just take a glance… By the time we had walked along a stretch of canal and seen the quite luscious Russian, Indonesian and African prostitutes, most of them in their underclothes, standing each in front of the window revealing her red-lit cosily-draped boudoir, Dad was suddenly transformed. He straightened up and quickened his pace, like the blind men and cripples of Victor Hugo’s Court of Miracles, his eyes began to shine and he stared about like a schoolboy, in wonderment at all those normally forbidden sights. He couldn’t enter one of those boudoir-boutiques like the youths milling about, but he could imagine himself doing so, which at age eighty was good enough.

A few months later, back in Canada, he got a letter from Ingeltraut saying that all the buildings on his stretch of Warsaw Street were being cleared away to make way for a capitalist-style supermarket and that the old house was gone. So we hadn’t got to Berlin a moment too soon.

When he called to tell me, I cockily told him that it just went to show that my impulses were always right, and that it was only my second thoughts, especially when influenced by him, that got me into trouble. He mulled over this for a moment and growled back, "You’re not as smart as you think you are, you damned blighter!", as if I were still his little boy.

Author’s note: the stories my father told me when I was young are related in the first pages of "Time of Madness".