In 1804, with the approval of the Swedish-Pomeranian government in Stralsund, the place was renamed “Behrenhoff,” and cavalry captain Johann Carl Ulrich von Behr turned the farm estate into an entail in favour of his grandson Carl Felix Georg, with the stipulation that primogeniture should always apply in event of its inheritance.
The latter had a new, two-storey mansion built behind the old farmhouse in the late classical style based on plans by Friedrich Hitzig, a pupil of Schinkel, which was completed in 1838. In 1896, the building was extended by Carl Felix Woldemar, who had been elevated to the Prussian rank of count in 1877, and the two single-storey verandas enlarged, with another storey added on top. From 1936 to 1939, Countess Mechthild von Behr, widow of the last count, the Imperial District Administrator and longstanding member of parliament Carl Friedrich Felix von Behr, who died in 1933, placed the mansion at the disposal of the Confessing Church as a lecture venue. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is said to have been a guest there on several occasions.
† On May 8, 1945 the mansion went up in flames. The burned-out ruins were used by the local residents as a source of building materials for new farmhouses.
The nine-hectare landscaped park designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and laid out between 1840 and 1860 today has protected status.
I remember the open window. It is night, and the air is cool. An open window on a summer’s night. No moon in the sky. Only the diffuse light of the street lamp. It smells of earth. Perhaps it has rained. I cannot remember.
It was July 31, says my mother. She is quite certain, because July 31 is Tante Kerstin’s birthday, and that evening she was having a celebration in one of the old estate workers’ cottages opposite. It definitely didn’t rain, she adds. It was a fine day. Sunny the whole day. As you’d expect in July.
The weather records also show that it was a hot day, indeed that the whole summer was warm and exceptionally dry.
Summer 1984. It is my earliest memory: this I know, I think, I claim. I could telephone Tante Kerstin. She is still alive. As are my mother and both my fathers. The one who conceived me, and the one who, later that night, would cool my legs with ice and wrap them in gauze bandages.
I play in the cemetery between the mounds overrun with greenery. I hide behind the graves and headstones, I crouch between plants with tiny blue and white flowers. An elderly woman, shrunken from stooping, throws wilted blooms and dried-out wreaths onto the compost. She holds a tin watering can under the rusty water tap then disappears behind the box hedges.
I duck down, run my fingers over the smooth stone, feel the rough indentations of the chiselled letters and wait for the improbable. I wait to be found. I want to be found. I’m afraid of it.
Throughout my childhood we lived in villages, in rural localities that gave little hint of their more glamorous past. Then, too, we were living in a village, just a few steps from its one and only bus stop, on the first floor of the old verger’s house next door to the towerless church with its high stone chancel. Our backyard was directly adjacent to the cemetery. Not even a fence separated the two compost heaps. In my memory, I was almost always alone. Alone in the graveyard, alone in the orchard surrounded by high red walls, alone on the heap of stones which, according to my mother, I kept jumping from on that day.
But no one came; the miracle, as always, failed to materialise. Instead I picked a few flowers from the little flower beds, plucked pansies out of the ground, and extracted single tulips from their pointy plastic vases stuck in the earth.
I had some kind of inkling, but I did not know. Not, at least, that the flowers belonged to the absent, to the dead rotting in wooden boxes beneath the earth. When I took the posy home, my mother was cross and did not explain why.
I had no knowledge of death as yet. That people die, that I myself would one day die, lay beyond my imagination. When, some time later, my cousin let me in on this secret, I did not believe him. I was certain he had overheard something and misunderstood it, as he often did. He grinned. He was sure of himself.
I felt dizzy. I raced through the newly build flat that was our home at the time, into the kitchen and asked my mother whether it was true that people really died, whether we would all die one day, in other words, me included. She nodded, said yes, and shrugged her shoulders. I looked at the rubbish bin and, for some reason, imagined that the dead ended up in this container, as shrivelled beings, to be carted off by the refuse collectors. I clamped my hands over my ears, even though no one was speaking now, and ran into the hallway. Yellow light was shining through the ridged glass of the window onto the dusty green plants in the stairwell.
I keep my eyes closed on the ghost train at the funfair in a neighbouring village. My parents let me go on it. Two of their pupils sit to the left and right of me, a boy and a girl.
As we plunge into the darkness, I cross my arms in front of my face. A cool draught brushes my skin. I hear a clattering, the jolting and rolling of the car, a scream. I feel the skin of my eyelids, squeeze my eyes even more tightly shut, hold my breath for a moment, hum and wait. An eternity goes by.
At some point someone taps me on the shoulder. My mother’s voice says: It’s over. I open my eyes. We are back outside. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, I say proudly. I cheated it. I cheated fear. What a waste of money, says my mother and lifts me out of the car.
I play in the garden among the apple trees. I pick masses of buttercups and stain my fingers with dandelion juice. By the compost heap I discover a spiky ball. It is breathing. It is alive.
When my mother sets a saucer of milk in front of the ball, it transforms into a wondrous creature. We crouch down. Black button eyes look at me. I feel my mother’s hand on my head. A pointy nose sniffs out the milk. A tiny pink tongue darts out. The animal grunts and slurps. Its prickles bob up and down.
I enjoyed life. I was expecting nothing. My mother was expecting a baby. But I have no memory of a rounded belly or a man’s hand stroking its curves. She must have been pregnant, the dates tell me. She was pregnant, the photographs show. One month after that July night which cannot have been cool, my brother would be born and my grandmother, having taken the telephone call from the hospital, would stand in the bedroom doorway in her midnight-blue dressing gown and speak his name for the first time.
I sat there in my grandparents’ bed, heard the name, which meant nothing to me, and turned back to the lipsticks, an astonishing collection of small shiny cylinders which my grandmother kept in a case above the bed.
The bedroom window is open, but the door of the flat is closed and locked, and the key is not hanging on the keyholder or lying on the kitchen table. I have woken up and climbed out of my cot. I have opened the bedroom door and searched the whole flat. All the rooms are dark, all the other windows closed: the semicircular dormer window in the living room, the skylight in the kitchen, and the jet-black hole of the windowless boxroom which my father has turned into a small workshop.
There were no other rooms. The bathroom was downstairs on the ground floor. We shared it with Tante Viola from the top-floor flat. We shared the loo, the roaring boiler, the four-footed bathtub, and the raffia mat in front of it. Tante Viola worked in the school canteen in the old stables at the north end of the grounds, a yellow brick building with a stone horse’s head looking down from either side of the entrance gate. Where once horses ate their hay, we now had our midday meal. We stood in long queues, the kindergarten children, the school pupils, the teachers, half the village. Tante Viola had bleached blonde hair, purple eye makeup, and a lorry driver for a husband, who came home on Saturdays and left again on Sundays, a large faceless figure. The school was behind the grounds, two new buildings with long rows of windows. My parents and also Tante Kerstin taught there. The grounds were large and belonged to the palace that no longer existed. Neither Tante Kerstin nor Tante Viola was a real aunt. We just called them that.
The palace was not a real palace either. It was a mansion, an elongated two-storey building, the centre of the estate, with, next to it, a stable block, a sheep shed, a cattle shed as well as an outbuilding and two barns. An avenue of lime trees led directly to it from the Bear Gate on the village high street, through the northern part of the grounds, which was out of bounds for villagers. My kindergarten stood on what would once have been the generous front drive, a grass-centred circle in front of an open portal that also served as a porch, surmounted by a balcony supported by eight pillars, with triangular gables over the windows, and Virginia creeper growing up the facade.
The window is open; the door of the flat is locked and bolted. My arm stretches up, reaches for the door handle, grips it, pulls it downwards—but the door stays closed. I remember the big wall cabinet in the living room, the toys lying around by the stove, the rocking chair in suspended motion, an oversized, tidy dolls’ house. Only the bedroom window is open and the air outside cool.
The church was in the middle of the village, but everyone just walked on by. Nobody looked over the red brick wall, nobody glanced at the graves and crosses. Only a few stooped old women ever ventured through the creaking gate into the graveyard. We lived right next to the church. But none of it meant anything. Not the huge edifice of hewn granite and rough stone, not the vicarage diagonally opposite, not the wooden bell cage down at ground level, not the bell-ringing on Sundays, not the lopsided rusty crosses in the churchyard, not the weathered burial chamber of the counts behind the wrought-iron gate, the crosses in amongst the ferns, the stone angels in low relief above a crumbling bench no one ever sat on, nor the plaque bearing the motto I did not understand, even that time when my mother read it out to me: “Love never fails.” They were remnants of a past that, so it seemed, had been overcome once and for all.
It was an old, aristocratic family that had given the village its name, vassals of the counts of Gützkow and the dukes of Pomerania—“brave, beloved and trusty knights,” according to an old deed of enfeoffment.
They are words from a fairytale. They appear in columns of dense writing in which the branches of the family trees go off in many directions. The von Behrs were squires and stewards, chamberlains and counts, provosts and professors, district and town councillors, curators and commanders, court tutors and cavalry captains, valets de chambre and young nobles in court service, soldiers, marshals, majors and captains, lieutenants—in the Polish war, in the Swedish household guard, in Danish or French service. A canoness and a prioress, a captain’s wife, even a poetess. But most importantly they were the owners of this place, including their fief, their possessions, seeds, chattels, and livestock. A feudal estate which, for lack of an heir, passed back to the old ancestral line in which, since time immemorial, the firstborn had counted for more than those born later, and the daughters for virtually nothing. They had goods which they sold and exchanged, retained and acquired, collecting interest on them or pledging their shares in them. Sometimes they signed deeds of enfeoffment, affixed their seal to thick paper, a sticky mass, as red as ox blood: a dancing bear with a swan on either side.
My mother’s ancestors were farmers, livestock and timber traders, carters and master butchers, a forester, a pointsman, a sailor. My father’s ancestors, my biological father, that is, were millers and master tailors, cartwrights and carpenters, a musketeer, a few doctors, a seamstress of fine fabrics, a fisherman, a railway guard, a chemist, an architect, a factory owner, an armaments manufacturer, who after the war became a cemetery gardener.
We only lived in that village a year, but it is the first year I can remember. It was not the cemetery but the grounds of the mansion that our yard backed on to, my mother says. And there were also the remains of a tumbledown wall, she adds.
Some said the mansion was demolished after the end of the war, others that it had burned down before the end of the war, along with its entire inventory: the magnificent chandeliers in the entrance hall, the leaded glass of the doors to the two drawing rooms, the dark furniture, the books, the silverware and the china, the gilt mirrors, the old maps and the gallery of ancestors with its massive portraits of serious-looking gentlemen on large horses.
We do not own any old things, any heirlooms. Only the house we live in is old. At night you can hear the marten in the attic. My parents are waiting for a flat in the prefabricated building behind the swan lake. Three rooms, central heating, and a bathroom with hot running water. They are on the waiting list. Time is short. The baby is due soon.
It was not uncommon for the old buildings to be in such a dilapidated state that they collapsed in the night, like the cooperative store the previous autumn. The roof had simply caved in. In the morning the door could only be opened with brute force. I remember the cluster of people gathered in front of it, shop assistants and customers, women in flowery housedresses carrying limp string bags, men who came and pulled tin cans out of the rubble. They loaded the dusty goods into wheelbarrows and piled the tinned food, bags of flour and bottles that the milk float delivered in a dark, musty room on the ground floor of our building. An emergency sale got under way. The light was on all day. The ringing of the till could be heard all the way up to our flat.
I was wearing a sleeveless batiste sleepsuit with a pattern of tiny orange flowers on it. It had an elasticated waist. I remember the open window, the mild air, because it wasn’t cool, it couldn’t have been cool, and not so much as a breath of fresh air entered the room, for it was July, and Tante Kerstin’s birthday, and why Tante Viola had not come to check on me I do not know. I was three and a half years old, nearly four. Four fingers stuck up straight, nearly a whole hand.
I have no memory of a pile of bricks, of a heap of stones in the yard which, that day, I apparently climbed on, higher and higher, and kept jumping down from. I see only the open window. The windowsill is level with my chest. I try to hoist myself up, but it is too high. I take a few steps back, think: Judith, you are not stupid, and say: Judith, you are not stupid. I keep repeating these words, first quietly to myself, then out loud. The words lead me into the kitchen. I take hold of the kitchen chair and slide it across the tiled floor. It makes a loud scraping noise. I drag it over the threshold, I haul and heave it over the orange living-room carpet, over the threshold into the bedroom, past my parents’ big bed to the window, which is standing open. I think of little Häwelmann in the fairytale, but my nightshirt is not a sail, nor is my cot on wheels. It stays put next to the heater all night. I peer through the bars. I stand at the rail. I am Häwelmann, but the moon, which, speaking in my mother’s voice asks, “Surely that’s enough?”, has disappeared behind a cloud. Its edges glow. No one can stop me. I clamber onto the chair, my feet in their slippers. Dark-blue corduroy ones. I climb onto the windowsill and crouch there. The toes of my slippers are pointing out into the open air. I don’t wait. I don’t wait for anything. I don’t look at the lamp. I don’t look at the branches of the apple trees. Only down. The pavement. The patch of greenery below me.
My mother leaves the hospital without a baby, takes the train to the new village, which has not only a bus stop but also a railway station. She walks past the church, on top of which there are storks feeding their young, past the co-op, a new building with bicycle racks on the concreted area in front. But the gossips in housedresses are already there. They look in her direction and whisper: a teacher from Behrenhoff who’s just moved into the new block. They beckon her over and ask if the baby was stillborn. They ask in standard German and in dialect: Were ’e stillborn?
An old woman finds me. She leans on her walking stick, bends over me and says: A right pickle you’ve got yerself into, duck!
My mother comes home without a baby. She does not even come home, because while I am at my grandparents’ for a week, my parents move to a newly build flat in a neighbouring village seven kilometres away, endlessly far away. Kilometres, that’s the largest unit, as inconceivable as years. I am three and a half years old, nearly four, but this I only know because it is shortly before my fourth birthday that my brother has his first glimpse of daylight—or rather the strip lights in Greifswald women’s hospital—and soon afterwards the light of the phototherapy lamp on his jaundiced skin. The flat has a bathroom but no central heating. In the cellar there is some coal left over from the previous tenants. It is enough.
Like a snake, the umbilical cord had twined itself around the baby’s neck and first delayed his entry into this world, then complicated it and ultimately so jeopardised it that the live birth of the infant, whose hands and lips had already turned blue, bordered on miraculous.
I remember a nightmare in which I am underwater, sinking ever deeper, a layer of ice above me. I remember a cartoon on the television where a woman dives into an empty swimming pool and, like a doll, shatters into pieces. Even today that image still sparks a nameless terror in me.
I do not know what it feels like to be dead. I ask the teacher in my new kindergarten, a tall woman with a shock of curls.
She shakes her head. I don’t know, she says. I’ve never been dead.
I want to know what happens to the dead and buried. They rot. I do not understand the word.
Like a wrinkly apple which, as time goes by, gets infested and eaten up by worms and maggots, she explains.
I find myself thinking of the rubbish bin in our kitchen, then she adds: You don’t notice anything though. Because you’re dead, of course.
Evil is the skin on heated-up milk, the thin layer of ice on the frozen village pond, the dozen shiny-black slugs in the yard. Death is an old woman in a flowery house dress. Goddesses of Behrenhoff destiny wear a headscarf, walk with a stick, and speak in dialect. They talk about stillborn babies, about a right pickle, and rake the graves of their prematurely deceased husbands.
The von Behrs were once brave, beloved, and trusty knights. Their palace burned down, say some. It was demolished, say others. The villagers looted it themselves and set it alight when the Russians came and the old countess had fled, says one elderly lady, who ought to know. They took whatever could be taken: the magnificent chandeliers in the entrance hall, the leaded glass of the doors to the two drawing rooms, the dark furniture, the books, the silverware and the china, the gilt mirrors, the old maps, and the gallery of ancestors with its massive portraits of serious-looking men on large horses, the silver cigarette case bearing the count’s crest: a black bear rampant on a grey escutcheon, its front paws raised as if in greeting, surmounted by a helmet topped by two swans facing away from one another with curved necks.
I land in a patch of stinging nettles. My slippers still on my feet, an ache in my legs. A numb feeling. The stinging of the nettles. The silhouette of a hunched old woman in the light of the street lamp. The asphalt shines. It has rained.
I read recently that stinging nettles grow wherever people settle, by walls and among debris. Like most prickly and thorny plants, they have traditionally been ascribed antidemonic properties. Pliny writes that the root of the stinging nettle can cure three-day fever if, as you dig it up, you utter the name of the sufferer, and whose child they are.
I did not know whose child I was.
I see the dazzling bedroom light, the cupboard with its woodgrain pattern beneath its smooth varnished surface. I lie on my back with my legs in the air like a beetle. I see my parents, larger than life. They do not look at me, only at my legs, which they wrap in gauze bandages. My legs hurt, my feet are numb. Their faces are bright patches with hairdos.
Nothing was broken. The X-ray images left no doubt about it. Nobody spoke of a miracle. Neither my mother nor the doctor in the nearby town. The nurse wrapped my sprained ankle in a zinc-paste bandage. My vaccination card, which she stamped, had three strips of plaster stuck on the first page. On them were written in block capitals my name and my new address in the village by the railway line, in my mother’s handwriting, a clearly legible teacher’s hand.
Nothing was broken, but I was unable to walk properly for many weeks. I hopped and hobbled, I held my arms out. My mother picked me up. Legs wide, I cling to her hips, inside her belly the unborn child.
Later on, my parents often talked about all the troubles my leap had caused them. But not about happiness or about the miracle, because miracles did not happen at that time, in that country.
I knew no god and no angels. The first time I saw one, in a colourful framed painting above the curiously short bed of an old woman, I was already going to school. The picture was a relic from a bygone age as dark as all the rooms in the estate workers’ houses with their rough stone gables and masonry, as remote as a world in which children are led away over a wooden bridge by the light of the moon by a long-haired man, colourfully attired, with large wings, glowing cheeks, blonde curls, and shining eyes.
At supper I looked at my mother for a long time. Was she really my mother? Was it not possible that she was only pretending to have given birth to me, after days of pain, as she mentioned repeatedly? Was it not just as feasible that she had simply found me somewhere and kept me, or had taken me from my actual real mother, who was waiting for me somewhere, inconsolable, as in the song of Little Hans?
I watched her butter my bread, cut it into small pieces, and put it on my board. I studied her brown eyes, her mouth that was hiding something. I ran into the bathroom and positioned myself between the two mirrors, stared at the image repeated ad infinitum and looked for similarities.
It was a riddle, but I did not even understand the question, the task before me. The question was an open window. The answer was an open window. A jump from a height of four metres.
Years later I am lying ill in bed at my grandparents’. It is the holidays. The guest room is unheated. I am in pain and running a fever. They call the doctor. A tall man, who lays his pale hand on my neck and studies me with a long, hard look. He has a soft voice. His eyes are so deep-set they look as though someone had pushed them back in their sockets, from where they now peer out all the more urgently, strangely enlarged by the glass of his spectacles. It is a look that is trying to tell me something. His hand slides a photograph out of his wallet. It shows a child with sturdy calves in white socks, a huge umbrella in her hand. I nod and am none the wiser. It is a riddle, but I do not even understand the question, the task before me. The child in the photograph is me. The doctor is my father, and is not my father.
More than thirty years later, one cold spring day, I hold a measuring stick up to the facade of the refurbished verger’s house and am amazed that it is four metres exactly, to the last centimetre. The first-floor window has been widened. The old vicarage diagonally opposite is for sale. From its veranda you have an uninterrupted view of the open country, a flat landscape, meadows, fields with sandy, clayey topsoil. A man comes and points through the milky windowpanes. Saltpeter, he says. It sounds like a death sentence. Only now do I notice a white, encrusted scum on the walls. It looks like an infectious disease.
For the first time I go into the church. On the north wall of the chancel is a painting of the jaws of hell. Frogs, snakes, and people are tumbling in, condemned souls who are devoured by the flames. And sitting in splendour in front of all this is a pig-faced prince of hell complete with sceptre and lightning bolt.
Is the jump out of the window my earliest memory? I ask my mother about the hedgehog. The hedgehog appeared the year before, sometime in the autumn, says my mother. But I do remember the hedgehog, which has to mean that my earliest memory is of that curious creature, and not of that night in July.
The stone bears still stand supreme on their rendered pillars at the entrance to the grounds, their paws clutching the weathered escutcheons, the crest of the last counts. An avenue of lime trees leads into the grounds. The cobbles have almost sunk into the earth. A landscape full of rhododendrons, sweet chestnut trees and magnolias, with two copper beeches, even a red oak and a tulip tree. Spreading over the ground is a white carpet of flowering spring snowflakes, snowdrops, and anemones.
At the edge of the sports field I discover the moss-covered stones of a hip-height wall. It must be the remains of the palace. It must be the remains of the mansion, which only became a palace when the only part of it left standing was the cellar vault. In the southern part of the grounds, a pair of swans sit in front of two artificial islands, as if painted.
