the roofs of the old part of town and in the distance I could see the harbour. I didn’t mind being separated from the rest of the family. We were hardly ever together, and three rooms of the spacious apartment were still occupied by refugees. The problem with the attic was rising damp. I’d covered the walls with what I considered to be avant-garde patterned wallpaper (black with white Picasso-like designs), but it didn’t take long before it began to hang limp. If being sent to the loft was meant to be one more punishment, I didn’t mind. After I had sung in La Bohème at Flensburg’s Civic Theatre the attic retained its artistic ambience despite the drooping wallpaper. On clear winter nights the snowy roofs below lit up under the pale glow of a full moon. I would sit at the window for hours listening to jazz on BFN and Danish radio stations, cooking up plans of escape.
School was a kind of getaway, at least for a few hours, a break into regimented normality. But as a teenager I remained the domestic prisoner of my mother. If anything, her hatred of me deepened. Throughout my childhood and adolescence she never expressed any affection towards me, either verbal or physical. I’d long ago given up trying to find out what it was that made me so repellent to her. I only knew it was prompted by a deep-seated aversion she would not or could not reveal. When I finally discovered what it was I lived far away from her. I’m grateful for that because I don’t know how we could have faced each other. As so often, life took care of things impossible to handle before the time was right. But the non-relationship I had with my mother haunted me long after she died.
I saw my father at night. My parents lived what could be called a parallel existence under the cover of marriage. I never saw them touching, let alone being loving to each other. Neither my mother nor my father ever embraced or kissed me. First I thought that was the Nordic way. In Northern Europe people didn’t hug and kiss each other so much. Mediterranean people were considered unhygienic because they constantly touched each other. But I saw how my mother showed real affection to her other sons and daughter. My self-esteem sank lower and lower until I began to suffer from chronic depression, a condition diagnosed by my mother as adolescent obstinacy. Apart from school I was isolated from social contact and any form of personal intimacy.
There was something else. A couple of salesmen visiting my mother’s chemist shop requested her son’s company, usually in seedy hotel rooms. Another man visited him in his attic and afterwards rewarded him with opera tickets. During the warmer months someone else took him to St Mary’s Woods or the cemetery. When it was over he was told to pass on his regards to his mother.
Why did he never defend himself? When his mother hit him in the face with heavy cooking spoons and other utensils, marking his face for weeks, people began to ask questions. Why did he never hit back?
I can’t answer that. All I know is I planned to escape. It would take time and have to remain a secret. Should my intentions become known, they’d be thwarted as before.
Six months before the end of my last school year things came to a head. I was to undergo a medical examination for military service. One of the members of the Recruiting Board was my father. His eldest son had already been declared able-bodied and served in the engineer troops of the new German army. As my younger brother could not be considered fit for service it was important I should pass the exam ‘with flying colours’. Anything else would be a humiliation for my father, a point he made to me one night when I was washing up in the kitchen. I followed his implied order and not only passed, but volunteered for an extended three-year term in the air force. The immediate consequence was heartfelt congratulations all round. Colleagues on the Recruiting Board shook my father’s hand, and I was patted on my back as I left. What I remember most is the painful moment when I had to appear stark naked in front of my father. It wasn’t just that I was ashamed. It was more that I couldn’t help wondering what the man who didn’t show affection and never touched his child may have felt at that moment.
It reminded me of another unsettling confrontation I’d had many years earlier. Having been classified as undernourished and suffering from anaemia, I was asked to attend my hometown’s Public Health Office. At barely fourteen and in the light of my experience with men, I was apprehensive to go there alone for a medical examination conducted by strangers. My fear was alleviated somewhat when a receptionist informed me a Dr Jürgensen was going to look at me. At that time the prospect of being examined by my absent father seemed funny. Nevertheless, it was a nervous kind of amusement. As a result of my medical test with his namesake, it was recommended I be sent for six weeks to a sanatorium on the North Frisian island of Amrum where I would be nursed back to health. I remember the doctor saying something about the stimulating climate of the North Sea. I did go there and spent two and a half months in a beautiful place called Wittdun (literally ‘white dunes’). I owed the partial recovery of my health to Flensburg’s Public Health doctor with whom I shared my name. (A couple of years later I read in the local paper of a certain doctor who had practised with the public health service under a false name. A Dr Fritz Sawade had been exposed as the medical officer of a notorious Nazi concentration camp. His real name was Professor Dr. Werner Heyde, a mass murderer and standard-bearer of the SS, in charge of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ program. His trial took place in 1962 in Frankfurt, where the Chief State Prosecutor accused Heyde/Sawade of having murdered ‘at least 100,000 victims’. On 14 February 1964 the Flensburger Tageblatt reported the man who would have ‘euthanased’ my deaf brother had committed suicide in his prison cell.)
That day at the Recruiting Board with my father was a farce. I had no intention of actually serving. My escape plan was by no means secure, but serving in the German air force wasn’t part of it.
Then everything happened at once. I studied hard, anxious to do well in the final exams. At the same time business at the chemist shop took a nosedive and my parents began to fight each other openly. I continued doing the daily chores, shopping, preparing tea, cleaning the apartment. Too many of the salesmen who visited the chemist shop wanted to see me. I took refuge in the home of my favourite teacher, Dr Petersen. He’d joined our school as subject master in German and History during my final two years at Grammar. The entire class thought him the most charismatic teacher we’d ever had. Dr Petersen’s colleagues felt the same, albeit some with barely hidden resentment. I loved and idealised him because he restored my faith in people who really cared for others. He was not only a gifted teacher; Dr Petersen was a trusted advisor, a father figure and a friend who took a genuine interest in me. He sensed that something was troubling me and was anxious to discover what it was. He wasn’t prying; he wanted to help me and needed to know. I trusted him, but something made me hold back. I had spent a lot of time in his home where we talked literature, history and a range of other subjects we were both interested in. He made me forget he was my teacher. More and more I thought of him as a fatherly friend. I remember watching him build a playground for his intellectually-handicapped child. As he assembled the various parts, it seemed a picture of how he wanted to put me back together again. I was deeply moved by his caring temperament.
Dr Petersen must have learned something about my situation at home. I was stunned when he made formal attempts to adopt me. (It wasn’t the first time someone was prepared to take me into his home and become my legal guardian. Many years earlier a refugee couple, the Tormanns, had made an attempt to rescue me. Foolishly I didn’t agree to move to their flat in a new apartment near the beach of Ostseebad. I was afraid of Herr Tormann because he had only one arm and was a bailiff. He was in fact the most kind-hearted person I knew, but to me he was a constant reminder of the war and I didn’t like his profession. To levy a distress upon some poor debtor seemed merciless and cruel, no matter how kind the man who carried out the duty. Perhaps Herr Tormann sensed my reservation because once he told me in his calm and quiet voice, as if to appease himself or his profession, that the whole of Germany was ‘in pawn’. He didn’t realise his comment only helped increase my fear and alienation.) If Dr Petersen had adopted me he might have turned into a carer of two disturbed boys. What kind of a literary playground would he have constructed for me?
My love for my teacher knew no bounds, and Dr Petersen made little attempt to hide that I had become his favourite student.
