I been taken here to get rest? But although I’ve lifted and replaced the receiver, the wretched thing keeps ringing. Suddenly I realise it’s not the phone but the doorbell. Hurriedly I look at the pages scribbled with illegible letters and lines. Surely I’m not expected to have finished my writing already! I feel ambushed and guilty. I rush to the door, open it and find no one’s there. The ringing still hasn’t stopped. Confused and annoyed I return to the room and discover the intercom.
Ah, you’re still here. It was nothing. A pre-recorded female voice informed me dinner would be served from seven to ten. To underline that this is a carefree kind of place her announcement was accompanied by jolly Alpine folk music.
Well, if you want me to, I can tell you a bit more. I trust you because I know you won’t use whatever I’m saying as evidence against me. The shrinks are convinced I’m mad and would think I’m talking to a ghost. Let them! I’ll just pretend you’re my reader, someone I can talk to on my own. Would you please pretend you’re reading my book? You know the expression: ‘I can read him like an open book.’ Well, I’m open, dear Ghost. To the author the reader’s always a phantom. All writers are looking for a soul mate. Well, then, please be the Ghost of Humanitas!
May I present you with some Strøtanker, a Danish word meaning ‘scattering thoughts’. Perilously close to scatterbrain, I admit. You may think the tales I tell are just wild and fantastic stories that don’t add up, but I promise you they are as true as us sharing this room. Perhaps you will find some of them interesting, even exciting, but in the end still unbelievable. But you see, that’s exactly how my life has been: compelling, dramatic and improbable. Let me begin at the beginning.
Two
Things fall into place, my father used to say. It seemed an evasive remark, an observation implying all will be well, revealing much about his temperament. Claus Jürgensen was not what you might call a decisive man of action. In fact, you could say he spent most of his energies trying hard to avoid confrontations of any kind. And he had the unnerving ability to disappear from time to time.
All was not well when sixty years after my birth I returned to the Flensburg Diaconate Hospital where I was delivered. I had been given permission to check the register of 1940 and immediately noticed that the documentation of my entry into the world had been tampered with. Listed in authoritative old-fashioned Gothic script, the child’s delivery was recorded as having occurred on 25 March, then crossed out and corrected in the same hand to 26 March. In a parallel column the time of birth was initially set down as 11.59 pm before that too was struck out and altered to 00.01 am. I remembered my mother and grandmother telling me I was in fact born on the very stroke of midnight. Confronting these bureaucratic adjustments to the beginning of my life, I did not know what to read into them. Was it in the name of administrative overzealousness or expediency, an obsession with accuracy or truth? Had it proved difficult to agree on the precise moment I was brought into the world? As if life were calibrated only by time!
As I left my place of birth I was in a joyful, pensive mood. It amused me to think hospital staff in 1940 had gone out of their way to avoid recording a birth at the stroke of midnight. Most likely they decided against all logic that twelve o’clock at night belonged neither to one day nor the other. If I was indeed born at precisely that time, it remained undocumented. I rather liked that. People know far too much about each other, only to draw wrong conclusions. My date of birth has forever remained classified information. It seemed midnight wasn’t a popular time either for mother and child or medical staff. I have to remember it was during the war. It seems strange that throughout my life I’ve never met anyone with whom I shared my ambivalent time of birth.
My grandmother, who coincidentally was also born on 26 March, referred to me as ‘the midnight child’. (I don’t know her precise time of birth, but that’s not surprising.) To distinguish me from my three-year-old brother Holger, I became Mother’s ‘war baby’. The name stuck. It was the one given by her before I was baptised.
Being a peacetime child was considered superior, comparable to the quality of pre-war goods. Ironically only Peacetime Holger would later join the new German army, and despite turning into a disciplinarian father, one of his teenage sons would commit murder. The year after I was born my deaf younger brother Claus arrived, and seven years later the family celebrated the birth of my sister Astrid — a remarkable record for a husband and wife living separate lives. Giving birth in Nazi Germany to three boys attracted public recognition. The Führer awarded the Nordic breeder the title of ‘German Mother’ and promptly sent her a signed copy of the New Testament. I was thereby sanctified as one of ‘Hitler’s children’. Much of what happened to me in childhood and adolescence I share with a particularly unfortunate generation referred to generically even now, not only outside Germany, as ‘Hitler’s children’. It is a curse I found difficult to bear long before I fell in love and spent eleven years with a woman who confided in me that she was brought into this world in the notorious Nazi breeding camp Lebensborn.
Don’t ask me to explain these things. My own subsequent enquiries into my family were met with evasive answers like ‘Those were special times’. During the war my parents occasionally met in health-resort hotels. By the time my father rejoined civilian life my childhood was over.
Wait a moment! Something makes me stop here. What is it? I listen for sounds. I thought I heard something. Did the intercom ring again? Standing in the middle of the room, I’m trying hard to concentrate. I must have made a mistake. All’s quiet. In fact, it’s eerily still. Not a noise anywhere. The whole of Humanitas is silent. Why should that unsettle me? I look around. There’s no one here. So who was I chattering with? Perhaps I wasn’t talking at all, merely thinking aloud. As Dr Fuessli, the University psychiatrist, warned me: ‘It’s all in the mind.’
Let me cut in here with a few factual remarks regarding my colleague’s place of birth. Who am I? Well, you may find this hard to believe, unless you accept that sometimes life throws up what might be called pointed coincidences, but my name is Manfred, too. Not really an unusual name for our generation. Like my colleague, I am a literary historian. Barely a year older, I grew up during the same post-war period. Although I don’t live in Australia, we’ve met in various countries, at conferences, congresses and during stints as visiting professors. Over the years we’ve come to know each other quite well. I consider the other Manfred my friend. When I heard about what had happened I immediately contacted the University of Basle and was referred to the ‘rest home’ or sanatorium of Humanitas. In a confidential interview its director, Dr Springer, explained to me that the newly arrived overseas patient had been asked to keep a kind of diary in which it was hoped he would record important events of his life as well as some more immediate thoughts about his present state of mind. She promised to provide me with copies of my friend’s self-portrayal, a document designed to form a vital part of the patient’s medical history. As yet I haven’t seen my colleague at Humanitas. In the judgment of Dr Springer it was far too early for that. She was adamant that in his present state, the patient could not under any circumstances be exposed to outside influence. She’d at first called it ‘interference’, but when I looked at her accusingly she settled for ‘influence’. I’m not sure what that means. I have no wish to interfere or influence. Manfred is completely unaware of my presence, and of course he knows nothing about my permission to read his papers. He probably hasn’t even started on them. But in time it may allow me to offer a few comments that might prove helpful to the doctors and anyone else who may end up reading these pages.
Where was I? Ah, yes, my friend’s colourful time and place of birth! If he has started his diary, I’m sure he’s talked about it. Like many
