Two Brothers

Girl on a Pavement London and Berlin, 1989 and 2003

IN 1989 OTTO Stengel heard the news of the collapse of the Berlin Wall while listening to BBC Radio 4 in the kitchen of the north London home he shared with his wife Billie.

The last of their four children had long since flown the nest and Billie was rushing off to her job as a fashion buyer at Marks and Spencer. Therefore Otto, who was a semi-retired cabinet maker, had the day to himself. He spent it in his garden workshop, listening to the unfolding saga of the people power revolution taking place in the city of his birth. Sometimes he paused over his saws and his wood planes to sip a little scotch, smoke a Lucky Strike and wonder what it might all mean for the East German official with whom he had last had contact in the Märchenbrunnen, thirty-three years before.

That same morning in Berlin, the retired Stasi officer known as Silke Stengel disappeared, leaving behind the flat she had lived in since the Second World War and no trace of where she’d gone.

Shortly thereafter Dagmar Fischer, a Jewish woman believed to have been dead for nearly half a century, reappeared in West Berlin. Her story of a life spent in the East was vague and confusing but her identity was clear. She had documentary proof taken from Stasi records filed in 1956, and subsequent DNA testing put the matter beyond legal doubt.

Thus established, Dagmar Fischer began a courtroom battle to gain compensation for assets lost under the Nazis and in particular to regain control of her father’s department store on the Kurfürstendamm. This had been largely destroyed during the war and subsequently leased by the West German authorities to various retail chains.

Dagmar Fischer was successful in her efforts and the Fischer department store was restored to its former glory, reopening its doors in 1992. For the remaining eleven years of her life, Miss Fischer arrived in a limousine outside the store every morning shortly before eight thirty, in order personally to open the magnificent front doors of the shop on the exact stroke of the half-hour.

She was in the process of performing this self-appointed task on the morning she died, suffering a heart attack as she stepped out of her car. Falling to her knees on the pavement, she slumped slowly forward until her face was on the stones, her mouth open and her tongue lolling out. A concerned crowd quickly gathered round and a young man stooped down to ask if he could help her.

‘You’re too late,’ Dagmar whispered to the paving stones as the breath of life left her body. ‘Seventy years too late.’