Two Brothers

The Saturday Club Berlin, 1926–28

THE BOYS’ INITIAL reservations about their father’s new music student evaporated at the very first lesson when Dagmar Fischer arrived for her tuition bearing a large chocolate cake.

Paulus and Otto had certainly seen such a cake before. On rare holiday visits to Fischer’s famous food hall with dirty fingers and noses pressed against the glass of the Konditorei counter. But never had they imagined that one would ever be sitting on the table in their apartment. A slice of one perhaps, carefully chosen after much debate, cut with great ceremony by the shop lady, wrapped in greaseproof paper and put in a stripy box to be carried home and put away till after supper. Then to be divided up, a process in which Paulus insisted on using scales, a set square and a ruler for absolute fairness.

But never a whole cake.

Shamelessly the boys, who had been dreading the arrival of the posh kid and seriously considering a cup of water balanced over the door, simply melted with gratitude.

Mixed with not a little awe.

After all, a girl who had access to a cake like that must be at least a princess if not a queen in her own right.

‘Can we have a bit?’ they asked tentatively.

‘We can have all of it,’ Dagmar said. ‘Papa said that in his experience most nasty little thugs could be won over with cake.’

‘Your father sounds like an astute man,’ Wolfgang said, getting plates and a knife, ‘and fearlessly honest.’

Silke (who had never been close to even a slice of so much cream and chocolate) was made of sterner stuff and refused to be impressed. She folded her arms, put her chin out and declined even to taste it.

For possibly as long as fifteen or twenty seconds.

After which the four of them plus Wolfgang demolished the entire gateau, apart from a rather small portion which they forced themselves to leave for Frieda.

‘Just because we ate your cake,’ Silke whispered angrily to Dagmar when bidden to show the new guest to the toilet, ‘doesn’t mean you’re in our gang.’

‘Just because I let you eat my cake doesn’t mean you’re in mine,’ Dagmar replied with haughty indifference.

Wolfgang had decided to include the boys and Silke on Dagmar’s lessons because he felt that getting through ninety minutes with a group of children would probably be easier than doing so with just one. He also thought it would be more fun. He was right on both counts and the lessons were a great success from the very start. Despite or perhaps because of the endless squabbling and fighting that the four young students indulged in.

Secret notes were exchanged. Solemn pacts made and broken. Alliances formed and betrayed.

And in the midst of it all some music was actually taught. Dagmar’s father had been right, his elegant little girl did show some talent at the piano. And because of that, the twins, spurred on by jealousy and the desire not to be beaten by a girl, started applying themselves to various instruments. After all, their dad was a composer, Dagmar’s just ran a shop. Otto showed more instinctive flair but Paulus was more diligent and by sheer force of concentration made himself the better player.

Only Silke was completely without any ability to play but she could keep a decent enough rhythm so Wolfgang kept her on tambourine and maracas. Then one day he overheard her regaling the other three children with dirty songs she’d been taught by her mother’s boyfriend and Wolfgang realized that in Silke he had a vocalist.

By the end of the first year the children were able to mount a small concert for Dagmar’s parents, which even had a printed programme, created using a ‘John Bull’ printing set which Frieda had brought back from a conference she had attended in England.

Edeltraud, Silke’s mother, was also invited to the performance and came accompanied by her new boyfriend Jürgen. A pleasant young man, who held his hat in his hand, twisting it nervously and thanking Frau Stengel for allowing him into her home. He was clearly totally in awe of the celebrated Herr Fischer and his wife, and stood up when either of them entered or left the room.

As the months went by Dagmar began to spend more and more of her Saturday afternoons at the Stengels’. The lessons lasted for an hour and a half but she successfully lobbied her parents not to be picked up by her nanny for as long again after that. The Fischers were happy that their daughter was gaining some experience of children from a different class to her own. This was the twentieth century after all and Germany was a proud social democracy. Besides, the music teacher’s wife was a doctor and the children’s grandfather was a police inspector so clearly this was a good solid household. And if the little blonde daughter of the housemaid was rather rough and ready with her grazed knees, scuffed sandals and a Berlin accent that could have cut glass, then it would do Dagmar no harm at all to gain some experience of such a very different sort of girl. After all, one day she would no doubt be employing them as part of her household.

The Fischers perhaps imagined that the children spent their time in improving pursuits, reading and listening to records. Or playing board games, Snakes and Ladders perhaps, or the newly arrived and hugely popular Monopoly that Herr Fischer thought wonderful and most educational. What the kids were actually doing was wandering the streets of Friedrichshain getting up to whatever mischief they felt inclined to, which was plenty. Frieda worked on Saturdays, and Wolfgang, who could not put up with the noise of four children going wild in a small apartment, simply turfed them out, allowing them to spend glorious free and easy hours ducking in and out of tenement courtyards, playing hopscotch, throwing stones, pinching fruit from stalls and occasionally inspecting each other’s private parts.

In this last activity Dagmar was a spectator only. She never ever showed, not even her knickers, although the boys got round that one by simply lifting up her skirt. Silke, on the other hand, was happy to give the boys a look any time they wanted. She couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Thus, as the months went by, a strong bond formed between the four youngsters, a bond separate to their school friends and their individual lives. They were the Saturday Club, a secret society of which only the four of them were aware and which none other could join. Many solemn oaths and secret vows were taken, binding each of them always to be loyal to the club and to each other. It is true that the bit about loyalty to each other was often broken by internal feuding, particularly by the girls, who made a habit of crossing their fingers behind their backs when swearing, whispering ‘except Dagmar’ or ‘not including Silke’ under their breath. But nonetheless the friendship in the Saturday Club was real. Paulus, Otto, Dagmar and Silke were a true gang of four.

Of course the boys saw far more of Silke than they did of Dagmar, and in her innocence Silke fondly imagined that this made her the insider of the two girls, that there was an elite gang within a gang. The opposite was the case. Dagmar’s absence lent her mystery, which in combination with her effortless superiority simply made her all the more fascinating. Silke could never quite understand how the meaner and more snooty and more indifferent Dagmar behaved towards the boys, the more they seemed to like her. Whereas her own eagerness to please just led to her being taken for granted or, worse still, ignored.

It was to be two years before the three Friedrichshain members of the Saturday Club bumped into their elegant Kurfürstendamm comrade on anything other than their name day. It happened at Lake Wannsee during an inter-school swimming gala. These were the Weimar years of increasing egalitarianism, and expensive private schools like Dagmar’s occasionally found themselves competing in sporting competitions with their state-supported rivals.

Paulus and Otto were sitting about on the beautiful banks of the swimming lake when they spotted Dagmar laughing with her friends quite close by. They decided not to make themselves known, partly out of shyness, there being so many other posh girls with her, but also from the sheer unfamiliarity of seeing her outside their usual haunts. Instead they were content to watch, fascinated to see their long-legged friend in her bathing costume, and in some strange, half-understood way enjoying the spectacle.

That was until they saw her approaching the victory podium.

‘What’s she doing?’ Paulus said. ‘Bloody hell! She’s not going to mess around with the cups, is she?’

Dagmar was certainly making her way towards the table where the trophies were displayed.

Tea had been announced a few minutes earlier, and with the various teachers and judges all intent on claiming their share of the refreshments, Dagmar had accepted a dare. Paulus and Otto watched in wonder as she sidled up to the table, took up the grand trophy and stepped up on to the little jetty which led to the diving platforms to pose for a photograph.

Unfortunately the jetty was wet and she slipped, dropping the splendid trophy and breaking its base. Stunned at what she’d done, she simply stood, quaking in terror as a whistle was blown to mark the end of tea and the resumption of the gala. It was then that Paulus and Otto charged up and grabbed the broken trophy from her.

‘Get out of it, Dag!’ Paulus blurted. ‘Get back to your friends!’

Moments later the judges returned to find two contrite little boys in bathing trunks holding the broken trophy.

‘What is the explanation of this?’ the master thundered through his snow-white whiskers. Every inch the old professor with his stiff collar and frock coat and his cane.

‘Some rough boys were playing with it!’ Paulus said.

‘We were playing with it. It was us!’ Otto declared simultaneously.

‘We chased them into those woods and got the cup back,’ Paulus went on.

‘We broke it. It was us, we did it!’ Otto said.

The two boys turned to each other.

‘You idiot,’ Paulus said.

The upshot was that the Stengel boys were given a public beating, which Dagmar watched, astonished at their kindness and thrilled at their bravery. And, if she were honest with herself, rather pleased: it’s not every girl who gets publicly defended in front of all her friends by two strange tousle-headed boys who don’t even cry when they get ten on the backside. Plus four extra for Paulus for trying to make up a story.

They might perhaps have given way to tears if they had received their beatings alone, but neither was prepared to be the first to break in front of the other.

And particularly not in front of Dagmar.

Silke was also present at the gala with her school and, although she hadn’t seen the incident, she quickly heard all about it, as word of what had happened spread like wildfire amongst the children. Later when the competition resumed (minus the disgraced Stengel twins), Silke pushed her way through the various school groups to confront Dagmar. Facing each other, the two little girls made quite a contrast. Dagmar, tall for eight, her beautifully fitted school swimsuit of the latest two-way stretch elastic. Silke, small and tough, in a baggy suit of knitted wool (holed in a number of places), her legs bruised and scratched as they always were from some fight or other.

‘You got our boys a beating!’ Silke snarled.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dagmar replied loftily. ‘I didn’t ask them to take the blame, did I?’

‘You should have said! They wouldn’t have whipped a girl.’

‘That would have just looked ridiculous. Paulus and Otto had already given different stories. I don’t think a third would have helped, would it? They’d still have been beaten. Besides, the boys wanted to help me, isn’t that what the Saturday Club’s about? I think it was very noble.’

Silke’s fists clenched. She was red-faced. Angry but also embarrassed and ill-at-ease, a scruffy kid amongst so many little rich girls, all dressed in the same identical, beautiful bathing costumes that Dagmar was wearing.

‘Who is this child?’ a stern female voice snapped as Dagmar’s forbidding-looking teacher approached. ‘She should be with her own school. Girl, why have you left your group?’

‘I came to talk to Dagmar, miss,’ Silke mumbled at the ground.

‘Chin up and speak out, girl! We are not at home to Mrs Mumble here,’ the teacher snapped, provoking much giggling from the posh girls, which turned Silke positively crimson.

‘I came to see Dagmar Fischer,’ Silke said, raising her head a little.

The school mistress gave Dagmar a dubious look.

‘Do you know this little girl, Fräulein Fischer?’

‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim. She is the daughter of the woman who cleans the apartment where I have my music lessons.’

Silke’s jaw dropped to hear herself so dismissively described.

‘We’re friends!’ Silke asserted.

This caused further giggling amongst Dagmar’s classmates and it was Dagmar’s turn to go red.

‘Well, she must run along now,’ Frau Sinzheim said with a dubious look at Silke, ‘as the finals are upon us and you need to concentrate, Dagmar. Under-tens freestyle, breaststroke and the relay. I look to you to deliver Gold in all three.’

‘Yes, Frau Sinzheim.’

The mistress turned back to Silke.

‘Get away now, little girl. You have no business here.’

Frau Sinzheim moved on, leaving Silke staring at Dagmar with blazing eyes and poking out her tongue.

‘Come on, Silke,’ Dagmar said. ‘You’re just jealous. You wouldn’t have minded one bit if it had been you the boys took a whipping for. But do you think they would have done?’

Silke looked as if she was about to reply but then didn’t. It seemed that perhaps Dagmar’s observation had hit the mark.