services, fetching clothes from the dry cleanersâ, sewing on buttons, and then stayed for coffee and cake. There was an Italian or was it a Portuguese pickup, young, who sold tickets at a cinemaâwith her married lover she was invited to threesome dinners. When Marlene Dietrich on the final-appearance world tour that famous actors and musicians are reduced to in their decline, came to Africa, the sister-Berliner who had idolised the unique voice and incomparable legs, treated the family to a performance. The family saw another old lady up on stage, whom the grandmother with the same raggedly-red painted mouth as the singer jumped to cheer emotionally as they did live appearances of pop stars. But old Greteâs love of celebrity did not belong back in the past. The adrenalin worked even for current sports heroes in the adopted country, and certain political figures, General Jan Smuts, as it had for Walter Rathenau. Grandmother is a groupie. As there are playboys, she must be accepted for herself, a playgirl.
What was banished was much; quite other. What could not make a good story to entertain, draw on light-hearted liveliness, was not admitted for communication. Foreign to her nature. Although they had lived through devastating events together in their life, back there, she and her son never talked of them to one another, nor, for relief, in private confession to others; evidently she imposed this self-practice to be respected by him. His father, her husband, had died at fifty when the boy was twelve. Apparently she felt no need to return to what the loss must have meant to them, together and differently. The son learnt by chance, later, that his father had had an affair with an intellectual, a woman among their familiars, thatended only when he suddenly became ill and died. His mother had known; but the only reference that could be traced to this was that sometimes, describing the company recalled at splendid social occasions she mentioned mischievously, by name, the usual presence of the woman whom, she added, she and her sister knew as
âDie Bärinâ
, the She-bear, unfemininely hairy.
His mother married again when he was eighteen and his brother already living away in Hamburg in the first stage of a peripatetic career with women. The new man was a fashionable surgeon with the added distinction of reputed great skill and a professorship at a university. He must have been one of the guests at the dinners and midnight suppers the lively and wealthy widow continued to host after her husbandâs death. Edgar was a catch, almost a celebrity, his knife restored the health of opera singers and he contributed piquant indiscretions about some of his patientsâoh Richard Tauber achieved such sweet high notes because he had only one ball.
Arnulf (but to his mother her son was always âArnieâ) found a kind of elder-brother intimate friend in his motherâs substitute husband, if not exactly the substitute father; the biological one had disappeared with childhood and in the adolescent six years since there had formed some sort of scaffolding for the structure of guided adulthood processes missing behind it. Perhaps as fellow male but not one in authority Eddie was an ally in the sociable trio with the flighty mother. There was comfort in unconventional family relations that were unconsciously in line with the shifting of certainties being declaimed by beery oratory in Munich. If that voice was ignored by the new happy couple, the younger son became more and more aware that the professors at his university were preparing him for a life that no longer existed. It would be replaced bythe fellow students wearing the swastika instead of sports insignia on their caps who beat him up when he turned for some sort of alternative future by joining the student socialist association. The year he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy was that of the burning of books. He completed his cycle, so far, to