The Room

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.