repute about him. Most of us put it down to envy. Only very rarely did we see in class glimpses of something slightly disturbing. One instant was when he threw his heavy briefcase across the room for no apparent reason, missing my friend Kalle by a fraction. Other moments of concern were when our history teacher seemed to freeze in the middle of a sentence. Once he looked out of the window and proclaimed the world was made of glass. We interpreted these occurrences as part of Dr Petersen’s idiosyncratic teaching method, his peculiar sense of humour even. We were all quite certain he was deeply committed to his class and cared for individual students as if they were his own flesh and blood.
On one occasion he informed us he’d been the national champion in boxing. We expected another original teaching analogy of our master in unusual didactics. He’d won the final bout in Berlin by knockout after having been hammered by his opponent in earlier rounds. At this stage we all thought we knew where he was going. But then, after a dramatically prolonged moment of silence, Dr Petersen looked at his class and declared: ‘I was a Nazi.’ Having outed himself, his big bodily frame froze. We sat in silence, devastated and strangely hurt. Only Hannelore, sitting in the front row, began to sob. I was waiting for the bell to ring. This confessional showdown had to end! Our respected teacher, the star of Grammar, had knocked himself out. Our collective disappointment was in urgent need of consolation. We all remained silent. We continued to be stunned, unable to respond. Why weren’t we told we could leave the classroom? None of us knew what to do. Then Dr Petersen spoke again. This time he took off his glasses and adopted a terrifying grimace. ‘I’m also a nutcase, an idiot, crazy, mad, kaputt.’ I felt goosebumps on my back as I instinctively called out: ‘No!’ Eerily, there was no other response from the class. We all kept sitting there, unable to move. ‘I shouldn’t be allowed to teach.’ Was that Dr Petersen’s voice? It sounded so different it couldn’t have been him. ‘Well,’ the crazy voice continued, ‘I wasn’t allowed to teach.’ He stared at us almost triumphantly, then froze again. When at last the bell rang Dr Petersen suddenly stormed out of the classroom as if chased by the devil himself. He’d said, ‘I was a Nazi.’ I wondered whether a Nazi could ever cease being one. Could Hitler have become a normal, average, decent member of society?
Years later, in Melbourne, I received a long letter from my former teacher. He was now working in a small private boarding school at Timmendorf near the Baltic Sea. The letter consisted mainly of quotations from the Bible, many of them underlined in red, and complaints about the behaviour of students in the dormitory. An old classmate had already informed me that some time ago Dr Petersen’s wife had filed for divorce. Only a short while ago my cousin Ingrid, who had graduated from Flensburg’s Danish grammar school, then passed her German Abit-ur (school-leaving examination) at Goethe Grammar, wrote she too had been taught by the charismatic history teacher whom she had come to admire greatly. It appears Dr Petersen was passed around several of my hometown’s secondary schools.
My own problems caught up with me in my final year at Old Grammar. One day I collapsed in my attic. When I was found the next day, the local doctor was called. A week later I was sent on a rest cure to a sanatorium in the small Saxon town of Bevensen.
The clinic, run by a motherly woman in her fifties who had lost her own son during the war, made every effort to make it appear as if it were not institutionalised. Located in a picturesque landscape, surrounded by cornfields and small woods, part of the treatment was to let nature take its course. Mens sana in corpore sano. I went for early morning runs through the woods, ate a hearty breakfast and presented myself to a group of doctors an hour later. After lunch patients were asked to take a two-hour nap followed by snacks in the dining room and ‘constitutional strolls’ through the park and gardens. Some were allowed to visit the neighbouring village of Medingen during the afternoon. I remember the sanatorium as a very pleasant, caring place that allowed its residents maximum freedom. After my first medical I was given ‘the tower’, located in a quiet and peaceful part of the main building, as my habitation. Completely overgrown with thick ivy and featuring two high windows, it offered magnificent views across the countryside.
My time at the clinic was perhaps too quiet, with too much leisure to think. It seemed I was responding well to the personal program of recovery designed by the doctors. I was well enough to make jokes about my room, referring to it as ‘my Holderlin tower’, an allusion to the great German poet who during his madness spent years in a turreted building in Tubingen. I don’t know what made me climb out of the window so high above the ground, especially as I suffer from vertigo. Somehow I found myself hanging from the window-sill almost twenty metres above ground. I fell down a considerable distance. The drop would almost certainly have been fatal had I not instinctively clung to the sturdy stems of overgrown ivy on the way down. It would have been a rather literary, poetic death. Medical opinion remained divided. Apparently my admission documents included reports on the domestic situation back home. After lengthy deliberation it was decided to keep me a bit longer for observation. After a couple of weeks I managed to convince the staff it was time to leave, if only because final school examinations were coming up.
I would have liked to stay longer at Bevensen, but school was more important. My mental condition was no longer considered serious, and on a sunny spring morning I took the train back to Flensburg. The thing about madness — let’s call it that, everybody else does — is that it’s tricky, quite literally. Take my grandfather Marius, for instance. He came from the Danish island of Alsen and settled in South Schleswig. In Flensburg he bought a big property at the turn of the century made up of three separate building sections. The front building included a large shopfront with a couple of apartments on top. Here Marius set up our family chemist shop, which turned into a successful business almost immediately. In line with the political situation at the time he called it The Imperial Eagle. The trouble was that the rear buildings could only be described as dilapidated. That was why my grandfather had purchased the property at a very low price. No local investor was prepared to bear the cost of repair and restoration.
Marius’ seemingly foolish investment caused a general shaking of heads. When, half a year later, excavators and other heavy machinery entered the passageway to the property, people openly referred to ‘the crazy Danish guy’. My grandfather began to be mocked by almost everyone. ‘You looking for gold?’ they asked him disparagingly. ‘Have you a mining licence?’ That last comment wasn’t far off the mark. Unperturbed, Marius treated all of them with polite indulgence. The citizens of Flensburg were stunned when my grandfather became the owner of an immensely profitable mine of sodium chloride. At the height of his empire he owned several ships providing virtually the entire Scandinavian fishing fleet with precious salt, the vital sprinkle preserving the catch.
Admittedly, towards the end of his life the same man used to walk around the city of my birth with a hand grenade in his coat pocket. It took a while before local restaurants discovered he would not be separated from the weapon when he entered their premises to join members of his family for a five-course meal. I never knew my grandfather, but can’t help thinking that carrying a small bomb to defend oneself in the company of family might sometimes not be such a bad idea.
So much for the perils of recognising madness and the risks of madness itself. Not the least diagnostic uncertainty is the trickery of language. Like madness it can prove misleading. A life of fiction, for instance, is not the same as a fictional life.
It’s my third day at Humanitas, and I have my first formal appointment. I was given a brief medical on my arrival, but this I’m told will be the introductory session of what they call psychological profiling. The idea that complete strangers seriously believe they can discover who I am just because they are psychiatrists, strikes me as absurd. Who do they think they are? On the other hand, I sense that with complete cooperation my stay at this clinic may well be shortened. So it’s important I give the impression of being responsive and assisting the doctors in their probe.
At ten I’m taken to what is euphemistically
