escape the other interrogators.
‘I’d like to come back to an earlier statement, if I may,’ he begins. ‘If the notes are correct, how are we to understand your claim or inference to belong to two genders?’ While the others respond to his question with visible unease, the examiner devours me with his eyes. Familiar with the look, the tone of his voice, the gestures and the movements, I decide not to offer an explanation. Instead, I suddenly hear myself shout: ‘ I want to see my wife! ‘
At first the only response I get is an exchange of meaningful looks among members of the panel. But then Dr Springer informs me officiously: ‘At admission we protect all our patients with a kind of embargo. For several weeks at least, depending on the nature of the illness and the progress of our treatment, we try to keep all outside influence from them. Which means you will not receive visits, phone calls or any other form of communication for a while. Let me assure you there’s nothing sinister in our precaution. We just want to make sure our patients aren’t exposed to potentially harmful influence from anyone. You need to rest and find yourself first. Trust me, you will see your wife in due course. In the meantime try to be patient.’
‘In due course’ — when is that? I’ve become their prisoner!
I think I’d better cut in here with a plea to leave my friend’s assumed bisexuality for later. Right now we’re dealing with his childhood, not any sexual preference in adulthood.
I’m not suggesting he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Let Freud assert whatever he likes. After all, he was a psychoanalyst. What I’m asserting is that sex isn’t a part of childhood, at least not consciously. As I see myself as a provider of facts and reminder of broader circumstances, I can inform the panel of only one curious incident during their patient’s early boyhood years. Shortly after he was born his mother received an overseas parcel containing pink baby clothes and toys for a little girl. Mysteriously, it was posted in Caracas without the name of the sender, puzzling the family because as far as they knew they had no relatives in Venezuela. After initial bafflement and wonder the matter was soon made light of, put down to an amusing case of mistaken identity. In due course, once Germany had conquered Venezuela, Ortsgruppenführer Otto Bluschke suggested, with a rare sense of humour, that the identity of the secret sender would surely be revealed. If need be, he’d have the culprit shot. Meanwhile the strange event made the rounds among family and friends, providing much hilarity and questioning. Of course the child itself was and later remained blissfully unaware of the confusion his birth had caused. His mother, almost immediately pregnant again, kept an embarrassed silence on the subject, refusing to respond to playful taunts and teases.
All of which demonstrates that the infant’s gender may have been misjudged by some unknown person in Venezuela and thereby become the subject of some unfortunate or amusing confusion at home. What remained puzzling was the identity of the sender and the reason for assuming the boy was a girl. Who could have provided such misinformation to a complete stranger in a faraway land, and why? The facts are unequivocal: my friend was born male.
This may be an opportune moment to warn against distortions and fallacies spread and endlessly reiterated by anecdotal family mythology. We all know such amusing misrepresentations are prevalent among one’s own flesh and blood. They may be entertaining, but the mere repetition of such stories does not make them true. I feel part of my responsibility is to guard the reader and protect my friend against potentially damaging inaccuracies brought about by no more than a desire to tell a joke.
On another related matter, I can testify that in 1945 Flensburg’s St Mary’s Wood was indeed dangerous territory, long before the Norwegian and British military came to occupy the city. Sensing the imminent end of the war, all kinds of dubious characters sought refuge in the woodland along the border. The five-year-old boy may not have been aware of these desperadoes, but he certainly knew St Mary’s was anything but a peaceful suburban forest. One of those hiding in the woods near the harbour was a man given the name of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ by the Allies, a notorious traitor broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Hamburg throughout the war. His real name was William Joyce. An American and a German citizen, he was born in Brooklyn in 1908 and executed in Britain in 1946. Joyce was an upper middle-class member of the British Union of Fascists. The British gave him the name ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ while suffering his increasingly mad ravings over a period of six years. It was near St Mary’s Wood that the infamous Lord Haw-Haw was finally captured on 29 May 1945. Like many others in the woods, he was on the run. But the infamous broadcaster of ‘Germany Calling’ had nowhere to go.
William Joyce’s biographer, Mary Kenny, reports that Goebbels’ instructions were to take Lord Haw-Haw and his wife ‘from the Flensburg border area to Denmark’. On her own travel to my colleague’s city of birth, Mary Kenny wrongly calls ‘Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein’ a ‘Hanseatic city on the Baltic, only a few kilometres from the Danish border’ from where she visits ‘a seaside resort called Wassersleben beyond Flensburg, virtually straddling the border with Denmark.’ I know that during the early years of his life my friend used to go swimming at this very place. ‘Within this village,’ writes Mary Kenny, ‘is a hamlet called Kupfermuhle — Coppermill. It is most picturesque, looking out on the calm, tideless Baltic Sea, and surrounded by wooded copses of tall birch, silver beech and green pines.’
Today, the landscape is much as it was during the final days of the Second World War. William and Margaret Joyce, living as Wilhelm and Margaret Hansen, resided at Christiangang, a ‘little cluster of artisans’ dwellings’ that looked like ‘Hansel and Gretel cottage houses’. By a ‘strange synchronicity of fate’ it was a German Jew, a refugee in England, who delivered Lord Haw-Haw to justice. Horst Pinschewer, who was now Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry, in the company of Captain Alexander Adrian Lickorish, ran into William Joyce while collecting pieces of firewood in the beech wood on 28 May 1945. When Lord Haw-Haw reached for his false passport, Perry shot Joyce through the hip. The elusive traitor was arrested and his trial commenced at the Old Bailey on 17 September 1945. He was hanged on 3 January 1946. It took a Pinschewer and Lickorish to bring Lord Haw-Haw to justice. The names of the participants may suggest a clownish circus act, but Joyce’s treachery proved no laughing matter.
I can’t help finding it remarkable how personal histories not infrequently unfold in the context of monumental historical events. On 23 May 1945, Hitler’s successor Karl Dönitz was arrested by British troops at the Military Naval Academy in Flensburg-Murwik, a harbour suburb not far from where the cold and hungry Manfred used to play with other children. Hitler had appointed Donitz on 28 April as his successor, bestowing upon him the title of President of the German Reich, a Reich that had by then ceased to exist. His government ‘ruled over’ Germany’s defeat for twenty-three days. It formally ended on Flensburg’s harbour. With a coincidental touch of irony the British ordered Donitz to the passenger liner Patria where he was officially declared a prisoner of war. So the ‘thousand-year German Reich’ surrendered to the Allied Forces. It had lasted barely twelve years, seven years longer than my young friend’s age at that time.
I should add that during the months of April and May 1945 several other prominent Nazis tried to use Flensburg as a hiding place, among them the notorious ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, who was executed in 1946 at Nuremberg, and arch-fiend Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, organiser of the Gestapo’s terrorising, concentration camps and mass murder of Jews. Rosenberg was given refuge by Dr Muntsche, a well-known local Nazi who lived near St Mary’s Woods. This little forest became a veritable centre of desperate scenarios during the final weeks and months of Hitler’s regime. My friend’s own childhood experiences correspond to events on a larger historical scale. Dr Muntsche put a plaster cast on Rosenberg, classified him as severely wounded and ordered an ambulance to drive him to the small Angeln town of Kappeln on the Schlei, where he was placed in a temporary hospital and relieved of his plaster
