My German Mother

© Silke Hesse, 2013

My German Mother

Silke Hesse

My brothers and I grew up in Australia during and after World War II at a time when  people of German lineage and heritage, even if they were citizens of this country like we were, were made to feel that they came from a deeply flawed “race”. In a wider context, and as an act of revenge or retribution, this was not unfair; it was after all Germans who had made opportunistic and evil use of the concept of race, at the time considered by many to have a certain validity, in order to bring horrific death and destruction to millions of human beings. Our parents, however, had actually been forced to leave Germany after trying to oppose a regime of which only the worst could be expected. And we children of course, born in Australia, were personally quite innocent of German crimes. So we felt both ashamed and victimized in a confused sort of way. In the wake of the Holocaust, the civilized world made a decision that people must never again be disadvantaged and persecuted, or indeed privileged, because of their biological characteristics, be they looks, race, gender, mental or physical health, disability, blood-line or age. It then did not take long before the concept of race was completely discredited insofar as it indicated more than the most superficial and insignificant of differences between peoples.

I eventually chose German Studies as my career, partly in the hope of  better understanding what had gone wrong with a nation and culture that could bring forth, elect, submit to and even actively support a regime like that of the Nazis. It was not entirely surprising that in an age of nationalism and on a continent where innumerable relatively small and heavily populated ethnic states bordered on each other, most of them without geographically distinct boundaries, so that there was a need to display unique characteristics to justify their separate and inviolable identities, “tribal” race or ethnicity would be of interest as a marker. This could be presumed to be most obviously the case in states like Germany or Poland with historically shifting borders and few natural ones. It was also not surprising that on such a continent there would be movements, both peaceful and violent, to join these separate states into alliances or empires, that such movements would become more urgent after the Industrial Revolution when economies of scale were required for success, and that they could lead to wars of the dimensions of the two World Wars if satisfactory solutions were not negotiated. Nor was it surprising that a global economy might eventually ease the competitive pressure between these nations.

But why did racism develop on the scale it did in Germany? Was there something in German culture that predisposed it to racism and would it then have been discernable in the attitudes my parents too, and particularly my German mother? Did they export such attitudes from their homeland and did they guide our own upbringing within the family? Both my parents were constant and gifted writers of letters, diaries, reminiscences and family chronicles and in recent years I have read or reread many of these. Together with my own memories, they have begun to build up into something like an answer for me, an answer deriving predominantly from the brief moments of surprise and incomprehension that have confronted me every now and again.

Quite unexpectedly, this answer that has suggested itself to me locates the motor of racist attitudes not in obviously morally reprehensible views and activities but in the Germans’ deep reverence for nature that had found superb expression in the literature and philosophy of the greatest period of German culture, Romanticism. The German Romantic Movement developed as a reaction to the rapid progress of industrializing modernity which was changing the landscape and converting what was once mythical, ancestral and sustaining nature to a resource often used indiscriminately and destructively. While industrial production seemed to enhance the lives of the minority that initially benefitted, it degraded the lives of the many it displaced and enslaved along with the landscape. It drove people away from the life-styles and values that had been meaningful for centuries. Romanticism helped them to celebrate and mourn what was lost but also to preserve what could still be preserved.

The values of Romanticism have come into their own again now that the world is facing the destruction of nature that is likely to accompany climate change. It was wild, untouched nature that German Romanticism sought; my father looked for it and found it in the wilds of unexplored and pristine New Guinea which was at the time beginning to attract prospectors, timber cutters and plantation farmers but which more often than not, due to the remoteness and the difficult terrain of those islands, still resisted the onslaught of such developers. My father himself was caught between his need to earn a living supported by his fascination with pioneering achievements, and his veneration of untouched nature.

Nature as a conservationist and environmentalist sees it, as landscape, atmosphere, flora and fauna, all subject to invariable laws, is reasonably unproblematic as a concept. Human beings are of course also creatures of nature, though never exclusively. They are capable of making considered and unpredictable choices. It is the balance between nature and human choice or free will that is always crucial. To put things very simply: too much nature, and humans become its slave; too much free will, and nature is in danger of being destroyed by humans. In the Germany of Romanticism leading on to twentieth century Naturalism, human nature was seen as dominant over human free will, at times to the extent that man was perceived as totally at the mercy of his fears and passions, his heredity and ultimately his fate. Though both my parents were of themselves strong, active, independent and moral people, the culture of German Romanticism, to which they had both been exposed, adhered to them, particularly in unconsidered moments, and gave a glimpse of the mentality of many of those in the country they had left behind. When I sift through my memories it can flash into visibility.

Let me start with beauty. During my youth, my parents’ conception of beauty often puzzled me because physical perfection was so central to it. It had a Greek flavour and Greek culture, of course, as I have since learned, represented the classical ideal of Germany, and was much preferred to the civilization of Rome. Hitler too used Greek architecture and sculpture as a guide for the monumental and bombastic works he commissioned. Greek sculpture sought the perfectly shaped and proportioned body and face. When my mother’s nose was smashed in a car accident, she chose a Greek nose for the reconstruction. From his early letters, I discovered that my teenage father’s favourite painter had been Anselm Feuerbach with his well-proportioned classical women, such as “Medea” and “Nanna”. I myself found such classical figures somewhat boring. I was more attracted by faces that expressed personality, faces where unusual features were emphasized rather than hidden. I remember my mother calling one girl whose amazingly different face I had marvelled at  “ugly”, saying pityingly that she had to make up for her deficits with character. It was an assessment that would not have occurred to me. My mother was beautiful in the classical sense and that had certainly attracted my father; I merely had the ordinary good looks of youth. But apart from that, I was obviously closer to the generation of the Expressionists and above all Picasso, to what Hitler had called “depraved art”. These painters could make a “beautiful” painting of “ugly” things so that they became utterly new and exciting. I have actually never had much use for either of those words: “ugly” and “beautiful”.

Both my parents disapproved of make-up; it was considered “vain” if a woman tried to enhance her natural face, and vanity was the next best thing to a deadly sin. I was led to believe that what nature had provided would always be the closest you could aspire to beauty. It was necessary and proper to accept the cards that you had been dealt, and thus to accept your “true” self. I was shocked but also quite excited when my girlfriend told me one day that whenever she felt depressed, she went to particular pains to make herself up. And I can remember that she could look quite exceptional, for her face required colour and enhancement to come into its own; it would then also light up when people gazed at her admiringly.

The doll every German girl aspired to was the “Käthe Kruse” doll. These dolls were fashioned after the faces of the designer’s children, sweet children’s faces, not modishly pretty like French dolls: very natural faces. I had to wait till my own daughter was born till someone gave us such a doll but I would have been happy to have it much earlier. Dolls here in Australia generally looked artificial, some quite grotesque, with tiny bright red mouths and exaggerated eyes and lashes; I suppose they did not try to disguise that they were only make-believe babies, and this was honesty of a sort. But I didn’t want to be constantly confronted, as I would now put it, with some adult designer’s condescending humour. I too was to some extent a German girl.

When my mother read us Grimm’s fairytales, or when she turned them into puppet plays which the adults then performed for us, the princess was always beautiful. Nobility, virtue and beauty were apparently qualities that were inseparable, and if beauty is above all radiance, I agree that can be true. In the adult world in which these tales were first invented, the figures that populated them had been symbolical, so that their beauty too was symbolical; but as children’s stories they now tended to lack that dimension. For me, princesses ended up being beautiful in the same way that Hollywood actresses were; it was a generic and impersonal beauty. If you thought about it at all, it was most likely to epitomize the triumph of privilege, for it was clear that beautiful people simply did better in life than those less well endowed. When beauty is conceived normatively and moralistically, it becomes easy to declare a different style of face, e.g. a “Jewish” face, to be ugly or even depraved. I am not suggesting that this normative view of beauty was confined to Germany, but I think it was particularly entrenched there.

Another thing I remember from my youth is how persistently my mother would classify my various physical features as having been inherited from one or other close relative. Here she actually cheated a bit, and that should have given me occasion to think, because what she liked usually came from her side of the family and what she disapproved of from my father’s side. I was, apparently, a patchwork of other people. On one occasion when I was asked to shave my underarms for a theatrical performance she would not help me because “like her” I had no need of that. It gave me a momentary insight into how little she distinguished between the two of us. As a girl, I sometimes felt like a clone of her rather than a person of my own. My talents too were seen as inherited and predetermined with little leeway given to opportunity and education. Thus music was not for me, irrespective of whether I liked it or not, because my mother considered herself not musical. Perhaps my mother’s scientific training gave her this interest in heredity, in the human being as the random outcome of natural processes rather than as a unique individual. Of course race fits well with such attitudes.

My mother had grown up first as the only girl among boy cousins who were her age or older and then as the big sister of four brothers. Though she felt herself to be the bravest, most determined, intelligent and “masculine” of them all, she experienced being constantly excluded or insulted because she was a mere girl. She told me that when her brothers acted like “cry-babies”, they would be dressed in girl’s clothes and mockingly called by a girl’s name, something that enraged her but that she was helpless to prevent. Once her father, whom she idolized and had always emulated, realized that his gifted daughter hoped to study medicine, he took her out of school and sent her abroad to acquire womanly skills. He didn’t want her to become an “unmarriageable bluestocking”. That didn’t, of course, mean that she didn’t enjoy and make the most of her time in Wales. It was later due to her mother’s insistence that she was allowed to train as a pathology technician. My mother was lucky that my father always valued her as a friend and companion and that their courtship fell into the brief flowering of the tolerant and egalitarian Weimar Republic in Berlin before the Nazi winter set in. Yet my mother still needed the pseudo science of Otto Weininger, who taught that men and women had different mixes of masculinity and femininity in them, to perceive herself as an exceptionally masculinely inclined woman and thus worthy of being the equal of men. (It was of course “scientists” like Weininger whose theories allowed Jewish men to be denigrated as despicably feminine by the Nazis.) It was later a great disappointment to her that I was far less of a tomboy. She nevertheless encouraged me to succeed academically and unlike the parents of my Australian class mates, she was more than happy to see me at university fulfilling ambitions she had been denied. In those days Australia too was still a very sexist society that offered few career opportunities to women. Once Feminism started to draw attention to itself, my mother discovered to her surprise that she and I could also be valued as women, for womanly qualities.

Though neither of my parents were racist, they were both proud of their Germanic good looks. They saw themselves as worthy representatives of a noble race, though they always valued the good looks and special characteristics of other races equally. For them, as for Herder, the beauty and interest of the world lay in the great variety of its many peoples. Their views were racialist, never racist; of course the horror of racism has been such that racialism too has now been outlawed and replaced by a prescribed racial blindness.

   

Following the First World War, in which my father had fought and in the wake of which the generation of fathers tended to be accused of having sent their sons, their potential rivals, off to the slaughter, my father’s generation rebelled against their fathers. The rising Jugendbewegung or youth movement reversed the traditional hierarchy in favour of the young; ageism was replaced with “youthism”. For years, my father’s well-meaning but autocratic father had a hard time with his disobedient and independent-minded son.

But the household in which my mother grew up still had an authoritarian character and she rescued much of this “benevolent despotism” into her own family. For me, the oldest child and the only girl, she presented herself as the absolute authority in all things. I never openly challenged her because that would have been pointless, but I was also careful not to confide in her.  As an outsider in Australian society I could not afford to lose her support, and it was always generous support, yet I could not risk giving her more power over me either. I also hated the thought of being at odds with her because I loved her very dearly. This situation persisted to some extent right into the years where she became the family matriarch over children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a regal role she had learned to admire when it was enacted by her gifted and anomalous "half-Jewish" grandmother. Ageism remained a factor in our family, as it did in many Australian families of the time, often those headed by talented women who had insufficient outlets for their energy and ability. My mother had, incidentally, made sure underemployment would not be her problem by early assuming the long-term leadership of a German-Australian charitable organization.

And lastly I must mention what is perhaps the most easily recognizable form of biological privilege, the aristocratic blood-line. Aristocratic titles as such were abolished in Germany and Austria after the First World War; they were now to be considered merely part of a person’s surname, though few people took this too seriously. In Germany the hereditary “von”, which marks the lowest rank of nobility, had always been awarded for services to the nation. My mother’s family name bore such a “von”. Her grandfather  had earned this honour for his contribution to banking. But though I admired their refined and cultured life-style on my visits to the German family, it confounded me that some of my great-grandfather’s descendents, as well as other bearers of the noble prefix, actually seemed to consider themselves people of intrinsically higher worth. It surprised me still more when level-headed German citizens felt deeply moved and highly honoured to be greeted by an aristocrat, or even to consort with someone whose ancestor had been awarded the “von”. Britain too has a firmly established class system but nobility is far less obvious in names and it is less wide-spread, usually inherited by the oldest son only and very rarely awarded as an honour for services. I can’t help feeling that it was their veneration of aristocratic status that allowed Germans to be so readily seduced by Hitler’s pronouncement that they were a superior race.

One of the consequences of a biologistically determined view of the world is the difficulty of effecting change when change is needed. Here religions can offer a way out. Supernatural change or supernaturally sanctioned change tends to be seen as legitimately overruling nature. In Catholicism, obedience to the supernaturally instituted Church with its sacraments is the only path to salvation. In strict Lutheran theology there is nothing man can do to remove the stain of original sin beyond faith in divine redemption. In Calvinist theology a belief in “predestination” means that no amount of good works can influence God’s seemingly quite partial decision as to whether someone will be saved or condemned in the afterlife. Of course Pietism with its very personal relationship with a benign God had soon begun to modify such views. Original sin was certainly never part of the Christian upbringing my mother gave her children; her initial religious indifference had been discarded when she was sent to an exceptionally humanistic Christian school. But I think that the pessimistic helplessness embedded in German Catholic and Protestant cultures meant that divinely pronounced dogmas, divinely dispatched prophets or leaders, and divinely determined fate were easily welcomed as the only source of redemption. Thus the Nazis cleverly built up Hitler’s aura of prophetic authority, knowing that many Germans whose traditional religions had been undermined by science and modernity would be tempted to trust in it. My father, like numbers of other young soldiers, had proudly distanced himself from all belief in divine intervention when he experienced the indiscriminate slaughter of World War I. But though he was never inveigled into seeing Hitler as an alternative savior, years of his student life were taken up with studying the contributions of  “great men” to human society.

I could perhaps mention here that when my mother’s mother, grieving for a young daughter and deserted by her husband, turned to religion, it was to Rudolf Steiner’s version of Christianity, which Hitler had outlawed. Steiner’s approach was to take religiousness deeper into nature where simplistic determinism is replaced by profundity. That gives somewhat greater scope to the human imagination, though natural cycles and laws and precepts with their normative restrictions still play a central part. Anthroposophy is a very German religion, anchored in Romantic philosophy and natural science.

To complete my story and the story of German biologically justified status: I married a German man who had grown up during the sexist Nazi era and found to my dismay, just like most of my Australian girl-friends, that I was expected to honour my husband’s birthright of superiority at all times. Having grown up with my parents’ egalitarian marriage as a model, this was a shock to me. Today sexism, like everything else I have mentioned here an attitude that condones biologically determined status, is still a far more virulent force in Australian society than it is in Germany with its well-accepted female Chancellor and its many war-widowed, fiercely independent grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

But biology was, without doubt, a more widespread determinant of status, self-perception and privilege in German society than it ever was in English-speaking countries. Even before war was declared, under the last Kaiser with his passion for uniforms, unified Germany was becoming visually a uniform nation of people in uniform. Uniforms always emphasize the similarities between people and these tend to be “natural” similarities. A family history my mother wrote notes how on the eve of WWI her uncles all attended the christening of her brother in flamboyant uniforms. Months later in war, soldiers everywhere then came to be treated as little more than the bearers of natural strength and endurance and natural mortality, with all individuality and humanity discounted. And to mention yet another instance of German biologistic thinking: In Germany, situated as it is in the ethnically organized patchwork of Europe, nationality was until recently determined by the “German blood” of the parents and not by place of birth as in the often insular countries influenced by British law. This discrepancy between definitions allowed my father and his sisters to be endowed with two nationalities.

I believe that it was Germany’s cultural biologism which did much to encourage, sanction and sanitize racism and allow it to gain such extraordinary momentum. (It does not, of course, explain the more complex phenomenon of anti-Semitism.) My German mother had brought with her the culturally acquired habit of presuming humanity was defined primarily by its biology rather than its freedom of choice, though this view was in many ways quite at odds with her personality and was less noticeable in later years. My own childhood as the eldest had unfortunately fallen into a period of widespread racism in Australia, also a time when my father was often not present and when my mother’s younger sister, who was stranded with us by the war for many years, augmented conditioned German approaches; it had, moreover, included two years of war-time internment that strengthened German influences in crucial years. For my brothers, it was later more likely to be Australian society that demonstrated racism, and this country of course has always had its own problems in that area.

Should my mother then be seen as a bearer of guilt for the racism that destroyed six million Jews and many thousands of disabled people because they were supposedly biologically inferior, or that drove the terrible invasion of Russia because its supposedly inferior Slav population predisposed this country to be a site for colonization, for Lebensraum? Was her and our influence likely to be a danger to Australian society, as the Australian parents, who withdrew their children en masse when she enrolled us in a kindergarten most likely thought?

I do not believe so. For one thing, the man whom my mother loved all her life and whom she had left Germany to marry, my father, preached quite the opposite of biological determinism to his children, namely that there were no limits to what humans could achieve if they set their minds to it. His own varied and adventurous life seemed to verify this proposition. Our father had spent his childhood in Australia exposed to its pedagogical influences, had fought in the mind-changing Great War, had then studied in Germany and thought deeply and sympathetically about German culture, and had later lived and worked in many very different countries. He had thus been unusually free to make his own choices and during World War II this led him to insist on remaining neutral and retaining both his nationalities and identities.

Not surprisingly also, none of my mother’s children later chose to revert to a German culture they knew only at second hand. To some extent my younger brothers simply became Australians. But growing up between cultures and languages, for my mother had always insisted that German be the exclusive language of the home, also gave them the opportunity, where they wished to take it, to be critical or appreciative as the case might be of both cultures. For me, in turn, the differences between cultures were always food for thought; they later became subjects for discussion with students who might one day carry ideas, both critical and constructive, into wider society, perhaps even out into the world. It is precisely when cultures meet that habits and ideas are scrutinized and assessed; where they clash in the heritage of individuals this is more than ever the case. If we are worried, for example, about the culture of Islam, we should allow Muslim children to grow up here where their heritage comes face to face with very different ideas. Individual minds can then sort out what deserves to be honored and what should be discarded. My hopes rest with a world of great variety, one that has been consciously chosen by many responsible people to embody the best they can envisage for us all.

My Mother's Fairytales

© Silke Hesse, 2013

My Mother’s Fairytales

Silke Hesse

My mother’s brother, my very dear Uncle Arnold whose judgment I always trusted, once said to me: You know, your mother writes fairytales. I have often thought about this pronouncement. What was he trying to tell me and what does it mean to be writing fairytales. Is it necessarily a bad thing?

Of course I knew what my uncle was referring to specifically on that occasion. When my mother was sixteen and he was twelve, my grandfather had divorced the wife who had borne him seven children and who had recently spent the better part of three years trying to get medical help for her terminally ill second daughter. He had done so in order to marry a “femme fatale”. To make things worse, this woman had previously been my grandmother’s house guest for extended periods. My mother, who had up to then adored her father and been furthered as his gifted darling, was absolutely outraged. But for her teenage brothers this seductive, flirtatious, and beautiful stepmother was a revelation. My uncle had clearly admired her greatly and the lovely woman he then married probably resembled her in charm and beauty and style.

The very first writings of my mother that we children got to know were her fairytale puppet plays. They were performed for us and the other children of a war-time internment camp. The one dedicated to me on my first camp birthday was called “The Magic Crown”. It begins with a princess who has been lost for three days in a wild forest, (a forest much like those my mother had talked about roaming as a girl.) The princess’ crown, to which her fairy godmother had attached three wishes, has that morning been snatched from her by a swan. Shortly after, the princess comes upon a house and then upon its owner a witch. She there discovers that her predicament is due to that wicked enchantress’ spells. The witch, furious that the crown she so covets is missing, dramatically vents her anger before stabbing the princess. Next, a soldier enters; the swan (actually the fairy godmother in disguise) has just brought him the crown and told him that he is expected to perform some heroic deed with its help; if he succeeds, his courage will be rewarded. The soldier (my father was, incidentally, a decorated veteran of WWI) now comes upon the beautiful dead princess and since he is holding the crown, successfully wishes her back to life. When she tells him about the witch, he rushes forward to kill the murderess. The witch deftly paralyses the soldier; he won’t escape her! The princess however, knows the power of the crown and uses the second wish to dispatch the witch and annul the spell;  the third wish then secures a happy married life for the couple.

The play is dynamically rhymed but the story is too simple even for children, also rather too bloodthirsty. Why did my mother not choose one of the kinder traditional fairytales that we were all familiar with? Years later, when I read her description of her stepmother and particularly of the precautions she felt she needed to take before introducing her fiancé to that enchantress, I understood that she had to get this story off her chest before writing anything else. My mother’s stepmother had, one could say, tried to take her crown off her by estranging her father from her and causing him to deny his daughter her birthright, namely the schooling to study for a profession of her choice; who knows, she may also have intended to paralyze and win over my mother’s fiancé with her charm, much as she had her brothers. But my mother was able to alert my soon-to-be father by mimicking the enchantress’ predictable performance; and thus warned of her wiles, he could laugh at her act. So all ended well and the couple did live “happily ever after”. (My uncle, of course, would hardly have recognized the stepmother story in this play.)

My mother’s next puppet play was all about healing her heroine’s sick father. This becomes a quest that requires great bravery, perseverance and kindness on the girl’s part. She first sets off to find a rare herb which can give her father some relief, but compassion then forces her to give it to a sick old woman she meets by the wayside (of course this is, once again, the fairy in disguise). Thereupon she is told how to achieve more permanent healing. She will first have to steal the devil’s three golden hairs which each contain a wish. Once in hell, she then has to forge an unsavory alliance with the devil’s grandmother in order to get what she needs. Next, she has to scale a high cliff at the top of which a dragon guards the water of life. And finally, after refusing to commit the deadly sin of killing the dragon, she has to awaken the prince hiding within the bewitched monster in order to secure the precious water for them all. (Perhaps, in this story, the father stood for ailing Germany, the prince for bewitched Germany, and the various ordeals presumably alluded to the potentially dangerous and at times unsavory anti-Hitler activities my mother was drawn into after meeting my father in Berlin in January 1933. Of course we children would have had no idea of all this.)

The third play is about an unemployed soldier who has made a pact with the devil that requires him to be unkempt and nomadic for seven years in order to gain the riches needed to marry and do good in the world. It obviously alludes to my father’s life. I cannot, nor would I want to, reconstruct the messages that passed between the three actors of this play, my mother, her younger sister, and my father, but I am quite sure there were messages and they would have hinted at basic rules. We were at the time an unconventional family composed of three adults and three children who inhabited two tiny adjacent rooms; as it turned out, the adult triumvirate worked well for a good ten years in all.

As far as we children, for whom the plays were ostensibly written, were concerned, they were clearly intended as entertainment, much of it relying on my mother’s lively, often funny and sometimes outrageous dialogues. As to be expected of “fairytales”, their stories also contained simple lessons about the rewards to be expected for bravery, kindness, perseverance and loyalty. My mother’s plays could perhaps be classed as “family entertainment”; they addressed more than one audience at a time, though never admitting as much, and they upheld solid “family values”. Of course they were not really fairytales; at the time my father was writing those for us.

My mother was a writer by talent and temperament with an excellent control of eventually two languages. She always wrote for the people in her life: long informative letters at the very least. In 1973, when my husband and I were over in Germany with our four children, she sent me the German draft of a family history concerning the people who had been closest to her when she was a child: the grandmother she adored, her mother, her father, her cousins and the aunts and uncles who would assemble for family gatherings. Over the years, she had told me any amount of stories of all these people and I felt I knew and loved them. In this account she presented them critically for the first time. There was her great-grandfather whose business in Buenos Ayres had failed and who had eventually died in an institution for alcoholics, leaving his wife and three daughters relying on their ingenuity to survive elegantly in straitened circumstances. One of the daughters was her gifted grandmother, who ended up marrying a rich, thoroughly kind and decent man with whom she was, however, initially not in love. She chose marriage to escape the ignominy of having to earn a living for the family with piano lessons. She was then a grateful, loyal and loving wife till his relatively early death. Her daughter, my grandmother, grew up sheltered by the stifling protectiveness of a mother whom she had no hope of challenging or rivaling and who made sure that while her grooming, her singing and her social graces were furthered, her mind was left quite undeveloped. Thus my grandmother’s only escape from her much loved mother had been to publicly declare her engagement to her brother’s friend, my grandfather, at a house party, thus creating a situation where her mother could not intervene. With this move, the young woman, who was soon to give birth to a child almost every year, had placed herself at the mercy of her clever and travelled husband. He, for his part, had decided to follow the trend of the times and switch from the beauty-worshipping Athenian lifestyle, with which his wife had grown up, to a masculinist Spartan one. So my grandmother was required to be harsh with herself and her children against all her natural inclinations and acquired habits; and that meant that her mothering suffered. My mother’s manuscript also told of her father’s family. With the exception of her father, who made a name for himself as a banker, the other sons and daughters, her uncles and aunts, all elected to become or to marry soldiers in elite, aristocratic regiments. They wore decorative uniforms but were somewhat debauched and fulfilled little useful purpose in life. Their children, whom my mother had encountered when she was four, seemed to be permitted if not encouraged to be aggressively and nastily hierarchical in their games.

My mother wrote this family history at a time when the failings of German society, which had supposedly led to the disasters of the 20^th century, were under constant investigation by academics, writers and journalists. Her account could have provided a disturbing and welcome contribution. But she chose, perhaps wisely, not to translate this text or show  it to other members of the family. All the same, she continued to write about various branches and generations of her German family.

Family was very important to my mother. As a young child, she had been allowed to wander unrestricted through the gardens and past the villas of her many relatives who all lived close by and kept an eye on her as she passed. She and a “twin” cousin from down the road had grown up like brother and sister; together they had a day a week with their amazing grandmother. Later, my mother also had extended stays at the houses of other relatives. Her father’s family owned a large country mansion that had room for everyone to get together at holiday time, so the cousins all knew each other. In those days, people from the upper middle classes had large houses, servants to do the chores, and women with leisure-time for guests. They also had lifestyles, education, and culture that provided valuable learning experiences and they had good manners to make you feel at home wherever you were. By the end of WWII, most of these people and their houses had disappeared: three of my mother’s brothers and a stepbrother had fallen, her parents had died, her father and his wife by suicide to escape the Russians who were hunting for landowners, the house in Berlin had been flattened by bombs, my grandfather’s historic little palais in Silesia had become Polish and would soon be demolished, factories no longer existed, and so on and so on. But of course my mother had left Germany by then; my parents’ livelihood now lay in Australia where our German family was soon, unfortunately, no longer welcome.

It was always important to my mother that we should have the sense of belonging and background that comes with a large and interesting family, and as this family no longer existed in real life, she created it for us in her family histories. Because she wanted us to be proud of our ancestors, she generally neglected to mention their faults; because she wanted her readers to be fascinated, she emphasized the “olden days” and their historical settings; and because she wanted it all to be alive, she placed herself in the middle of the stories and wrote them from a participant’s perspective. She also wanted us to feel part of an ethical tradition of caring, community involvement, and love of the world that may not ever have existed in quite the way she described it but that could form a solid basis for her own family’s values. So she wrote family history a little like the chroniclers of royal houses once wrote histories of kingdoms, with a future in mind that would need to garner pride and loyalty from its past. My uncle was right: she did write fairytales about an imaginary golden age but she wrote them to inspire, not to deceive and she wrote them for the young generation rather than the adults who could be expected to face the facts. She also wrote them in defiance of those who had once been Germany’s enemies and refused to forget their anger. In her stories, she was both “the princess” and the wayward little girl who had to learn to acknowledge her errors; it was easy to identify with her in both roles. What she wrote was always wonderful to read for she was a natural storyteller. And in the end I think she did succeed in creating something like a dynasty but more importantly, also a close community of people with compatible values who were genuinely fond of each other and helpful to each other beyond the call of duty. The open house she kept for children and grandchildren, where we would all holiday together at Christmas, was the practical side of her campaign.

My mother died some fourteen years ago but the family she created, that swirling current of love and jealousy and helpfulness and rediscovery and above all of belonging, continues to exist with its fringe of outsiders who have elected to be members and been accepted. Throughout her life my mother had many foster children as well as other adopted relations. Recently –  it had been eight years since the last reunion –  fifty or so of us met again. In preparation I had decided to translate and distribute at long last her critical account of the family. If anyone read it, no one has since felt the urge to comment. Her decision to let it disappear had obviously been right. I also translated a story about her great-grandfather she wrote for our children, her first set of grandchildren, when they were young and I offered to read this to a new generation of children. In spite of the inconvenient and noisy rain, everyone turned up, adults included, and the reaction was extraordinarily powerful: there were cries and the tears flowed freely.

In brief, this is the story: Great-grandfather Balduin von Bartels, a wool merchant living in Buenos Ayres with his Jewish-Christian wife and his young family of three daughters, goes on a hunting expedition one day and shoots a puma. It turns out to have had a cub. Full of remorse, Balduin takes the little creature home and rears it as a pet. His daughters love playing in the garden with their rather large kitten and Balduin himself takes it for walks through the town after work. He is its master and it obeys him completely. But as the animal grows, Balduin’s wife, who has seen it lying in wait for the servants, becomes more and more worried. After some time, the family has to move to England. The captain of their ship very reluctantly agrees to let the animal travel in its master’s cabin. It is the frightened crew who are now the wild animal’s pretended prey whenever Balduin is not looking. In London a hotel owner too is coerced into letting the puma stay in its master’s rooms. Neither the girls nor the puma like the bleak, foggy and restrictive city; the Londoners, in turn, are highly suspicious of the big cat being walked through their streets at night. One day someone forgets to close the apartment door and the puma escapes into the corridors and eventually the foyer of the hotel, causing panic. The game is up; Balduin has to take the animal to the London zoo. There the puma is miserable and reproachful when visited on weekends; it is then not long before it dies. This is a colonial version of the Romantic dream of a Golden Age, a Garden of Eden where man and beast can live together in peace and harmony. But only until the first sin is committed.

My mother had prefaced her tale with a letter to her grandchildren describing how her grandmother, the eldest of Balduin's three little girls, used to tell her and her cousin-brother this story. Recently I mentioned the Puma story to this cousin’s widow. But it was I who told your mother this story; she didn’t know it at the time, was the response. I protested; but then I started to wonder why our mother had never told it to us, her children, when the supposed teller, her grandmother, had always played such a large part in her reminiscences. My mother told me she later showed her cousin her story and he was able to contribute the name and sex of the puma: she was a lady-cat with the name of Desdemona, a detail his widow claims not to have known. Maybe my mother had initially forgotten the story and then recalled it all when her memory was jerked. Her cousin’s widow had a very different take on the Balduin story: “What a ridiculous affectation to be walking the streets with a wild animal on your leash! What did people like that think they were doing!” was her comment. The cousin’s family had inherited a portrait of Balduin which they had no interest in displaying, perhaps because it came with the story of his alcoholism and his eventual death in an institution for drinkers. My mother, for her part, presented Balduin to us as a noble and universally respected businessman, though she knew that his business had failed either before or after he transferred it from Buenos Ayres to German Town in Bradford. The two different slants on the story could hardly both have originated with my mother’s grandmother. Was my mother’s the “true” story as her grandmother had told it to the children, her tribute to a lost father? All we can say with certainty now is that Balduin had a puma which he reared from a cub; everything else could have been just a fairytale. Luckily I was unaware of these complications when I read my mother’s story to its rapt audience.

In 1954 when she was 44 and the mother of a significantly handicapped, four-year-old Down’s Syndrome boy whom she always insisted on caring for herself, my mother accepted the Presidency of the newly formed Australian-German Welfare Society. It was an honorary position offered to her by the wife of the German ambassador and it consumed most of her formidable energies for the next thirty years and more. At the time, Australia was taking in large numbers of German-speaking displaced persons. Once they had left, Germany no longer accepted responsibility for them while Australia would only do so after five years of residency. Many of these migrants were young people who had only ever known the turmoil of war and its aftermath; many had less than the normal education, spoke little English, and had little professional training. They had often coupled up with whatever partner they could find in their fractured and lonely worlds. Some had been severely traumatized by their war experiences. All this meant that there were soon problems related to poverty, unemployment, loneliness, marital breakdown, alcoholism, sickness, accident, mental health and the orphaning of children. Australian welfare organizations, who could not speak these clients’ language, were finding it difficult to work out how to help and welcomed the new charity they had lobbied for. For the German-speaking volunteers of the Welfare Society all this meant a busy life. There were home visits to make, often to distant five-acre blocks with their shabby temporary homes, and days of office appointments. Governments had to be lobbied and bureaucracies dealt with. There was fund-raising with its organization of large-scale society balls. There were health issues and legal conundrums to be dealt with, as well as worried parents and possessive grandparents in Germany. My mother was involved with all aspects of this work.

At some stage, my mother started writing a monthly newsletter The Welfarer, in which she explained to donors and volunteers what the work of the Society entailed; among its most persuasive contributions were case studies which she turned into stories of individual clients or families, always using changed names. In 1987, 26 of these were then published under the title Fates and Fortunes. Experiences of German Migrants in Australia in the Günter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, with an introduction by Professor Horst Priessnitz. My mother writes of these histories: “they should make our readers aware of the infinite variety of problems which face people who, uprooted from their original countries, are trying to adapt to Australian conditions and the English language” (15). These biographies add up to a fascinating history of German post-war migration to Australia. It is hard to know to what extent my mother adapted or simplified them; they sound authentic and typical. But here too we have elements of fairytale. The team of anonymous welfare workers is presented as being always of one mind, working as cooperatively and efficiently as bees in a beehive. This was of course never quite the case. I know there were, for example, people who resented my mother’s dominance. There were also different philosophies of social work around at the time, some more paternalistic or more enabling than others. For my mother, not surprisingly, the welfare society’s function was to stand in for the absent families of migrants and she had plenty of family experience.  Fates and Fortunes gives the impression of an ideal, cooperatively egalitarian and amazingly efficient workplace, the sort of workplace we might all strive to have. Its lack of drama effectively puts the narrative spotlight on the migrants and their problems and that is perfectly proper here.

In 1994, at the age of 84, my mother once again drew on her formidable memory  to write an account of our two years in the family internment Camp at Tatura, Victoria. She intended it as a resource for the recently opened Internment Museum, curated by Lurline Knee. It has since been available there, first in German, soon also in an English translation. The internment of women and children during WWII had been a well-guarded secret up to then and it took a certain amount of courage to bring it to public attention. My mother felt that this was not the time to come forward with complaints. Our internment camp was initially quite Spartan and by no means hygienic, but it had been organized as efficiently and humanely as possible under the circumstances and it was also gradually improved. My mother wanted to make the point that here, as elsewhere in life, it was ultimately up to the individual to make the best of his or her situation.

The camp could be seen as having its good sides and she listed them. It allowed you to meet an amazing number of people from many parts of the world, hear their stories and make new friendships. It allowed you to function as part of an egalitarian community. It released you from many of the pressures of everyday life, such as supporting yourself financially and running a household, and it gave you enough leisure to be creative in a medium of your choice or to study if you were so inclined. In it your children had the opportunity to go to a school run by talented amateurs and become proficient in German, for some, like her own children, a second language. And we had playmates galore. The inevitable war-time worries about loved ones were easier to cope with if you were among people whose hopes and fears were similar. It was also easier for internees to receive Red Cross or Vatican messages from relatives overseas than for the rest of the population. The primitive conditions and the school camp atmosphere could give rise to a playfulness most adults in the real world had had to put aside. Improvising became a game, as did token resistance to authority. And you could learn here how little one needed to be content.

It was this framework: what does a human being actually need to live, that my mother chose to give her collection of memories cohesion and something like scientific legitimacy. She began by asking whether humans required anything more than food, shelter, and the equivalent of clothing, needs they had in common with other animals. Her answer eventually is that humans distinguish themselves by a desire to learn and to teach and these two basic human needs manifested themselves powerfully once the more primitive animal needs were catered for, as in the camp. (I personally would have thought that the human need to control one’s life, to make life choices, which often required some ingenuity in the camp, is more basic and learning more often at its service.) As a writer, my mother was of course herself a teacher, her main lessons being resilience and getting on with life for the benefit of all.

Surprisingly, one of the conclusions she came to here was the irrelevance of money. She seemed to forget that somebody, namely Australian and British taxpayers, was paying for our board and keep; and when it came to extras to be ordered from outside the camp, our family, which had not had its accounts blocked because we were Australians by nationality, had all the money we wanted. But complaints about the money economy are a rusted-on part of the German “back to nature” syndrome. The real appeal of having and needing no money was, of course, the egalitarianism this produced.

As earlier said, internment had its positive sides and to illustrate that, my mother could recall any number of amusing and interesting situations and episodes from camp days. For herself as narrator, she invented a cheeky, gregarious persona to get this message across, a persona that was completely new to me. My memories of her in the camp are of a serious, dignified, slightly haughty person who did not mix easily with any but close friends of a similar background, also someone with a meticulous sense of duty, and a deep sense of sadness. She took things much more seriously than either my father or my aunt. I cannot remember her laughing. But she was always a warm, caring and unselfish mother for us. I suspect that she only realized what qualities were needed to enjoy camp life much later in life. Writing her account would have given her the opportunity to make up for past deficiencies, at least in the imagination, for my mother worked on herself all her life.

In summary: What characterizes all my mother’s typical writings is an avoidance of psychological perspectives in favor of practical problem solving and an avoidance of conflict in favor of ideal harmonious scenarios. (I grew up to believe that arguments were never permissible; consequently, I was almost incapable of fighting for myself.) This approach meant that her characters never plumbed their depths. My mother had encountered a good deal of sorrow in her life: the betrayal by her father and the long preoccupation of her mother with her ailing sister, later the war-related loss of nearly all her family, the hostility she met with in Australia, the drowning of a little daughter on her shift, the early death of her second sister through a car accident, the difficulties of raising a disabled child that would never grow up, and more. She never talked about these things, though she could listen sensitively and wisely to the problems of others. What was needed, in her view, was stoical strength and defiance, and what was important was to get on with life, enjoy it, do good deeds, and be of maximum help to those around you. In this she succeeded admirably: but with spiritual help, she would have said. My mother was an active elder in her church. And during one period of her life she recorded a number of significant and arresting dream visions. I think I was the only one apart from my father she showed them to.

The Winterking

The Winterking

Stories from Internment in WWII Australia

Ekkehard Beinssen and Silke Beinssen-Hesse
Translations by Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Melbourne 1985

Foreword

When my father, Ekkehard Beinssen, died in 1980 he left his papers in my care, hoping that I might find a way of making at least some of them available to an interested public. Among these papers were six stories which he wrote for his three oldest children between Christmas 1940 and Easter 1946. For most of the years in question he was in various internment camps including Camp 3 Tatura where he was allowed to join us after our internment.

On trips to Germany in 1948 and 1950 Ekke went to some trouble to try and have the stories published. He even had an artist create illustrations. But though the editors liked them there were problems. In the first place, they were written for specific children in a very specific situation and with the end of the war and the beginning of the economic miracle in Germany the context in which they would be read had changed. A more significant impediment for publishers was that they addressed different age groups - I was four when the first story was written and nine for the last one -  and children’s books were marketed according to age group. There seemed to be no way around this problem. Even separate publication was out of the question as later stories built on earlier ones.

In view of all this, it seemed to me that the only way the stories could be appreciated today was if they were presented in their context, both the political context of war and internment and the psychological context of children growing up in unusual circumstances. So I have embedded them in my memories of first living in war-time Australia as an enemy child with a father detained in various internment camps, later when my mother and we children were also interned, of Camp 3 Tatura between mid 1942 and mid 1944 and, finally, of living in Australian society in the last year of the war and the years immediately following Germany’s defeat. In this way the stories are of course no longer presented as reading for the age groups for which they were originally intended - and consequently only one of them is quoted in its entirety - and a new theme emerges, namely how to support and inform children in circumstances where society excludes them for reasons that have nothing to do with the children themselves. I hope that those interested in Australian history and those wishing to make a case for multiculturalism may find this hybrid document of some interest.

I should mention that approximately ten years after this was written my mother, Irmhild Beinssen, wrote a report on life in camp 3 Tatura that is being made available to the public by the Tatura Museum. As both texts go back to a common fund of family memories  there are, inevitably, some duplications. Finally, I would like to thank my brother Wally/Uwe for occasionally tidying up my memories.

Melbourne, 1999
A Christmas Tale

It was Christmas Eve, perhaps the last which all the children and grandchildren were to celebrate together in the beloved old house that was now going to be let to strangers. On at least three dozen such occasions Ekke had lit the candles for us. The room was still darkened to block out the reality of a sparkling summers afternoon but the magical aroma of pine, candle smoke, spiced biscuits and excited people was beginning to feel heavy. It was time to pull back the curtains for fresh air and let the children shake off the fairy-tale, run down for a swim in the warm evening and marvel at the phosphorescing jellyfish lighting up the waves. As always we had given each other presents and hoped that beyond being beautiful and useful they might also happen to be right, a godsend in some way we could not directly influence. That was what Christmas was about.

Alice came up to me and asked: do you think Ekke is watching us now? The memory of Ekke was very real that night; Alice had probably been thinking of the fairy-tale he had once written for us, for me and my two younger brothers, that Christmas in 1940 when he could not be with us. She stood with me for a while; memories seemed a natural and permissible part of this evening. What is the time? she asked. When I looked at my watch I realized it had stopped at two twenty-two. That was the exact moment of Ekke’s death, eight months ago. Look, I said, and when she appeared puzzled I added: it must be on seven. We fetched in the supper and then everybody went for a swim. When I reset my watch I discovered it was not broken; no doubt this was one of the little miracles Ekke had always been fond of.

There is a portrait of Ekke painted in 1942 by a fellow internee. He is wearing a green pullover which in various reincarnations accompanied him through most of his life, is holding a cigarette and probing the distance with his light warm eyes. Behind him one can guess at the banksias, the yuccas, the red-hot pokers and the birds of paradise of our garden and then the sand, the ocean, the headland and the reef. In the fork of one of the trees is a mischievous Uwe and on the beach Mum with baby Peter on her arm and me beside her, skipping as though my arms were wings that had never quite unfurled. There are small inaccuracies in the picture as the painter, who had never seen us or our surroundings, had to rely on photographs. How accurate would Ekke’s memory have been during those years of captivity?

Of that early Christmas with only Mum and her golden-haired sister Gisela - later when puppet plays were performed for us she was always cast as the fairy-princess - I remember very little, except that the Christmas tale, Ekke’s present to us, was read to us while we snuggled up to our mother on the couch.

All Ekke’s fairy-tales were set in the mountains and the vast fir forests of a country that was presumably Norway where a family, in which each of us had his unmistakable counterpart, lived in harmonious isolation.

There was once a man who lived with his wife in a land far to the north where it was very cold in winter. They had three children. One was four years old and called Wibke, the other almost three years old was called Ulli, and the youngest was just a year old and called Pitt. The house in which they lived was made of big logs and situated in a valley in the middle of a forest in the high mountains. When winter came and the snow began to fall the father said to the mother:

"Soon the big snowstorms will come and then we will be snowed in for many months and unable to get to town. In a week's time it will be Christmas, so it is best if I go to town tomorrow and buy the stores for the winter."

"And when will you get back?" asked the mother.

"It is a long way to the town," said the father, "and the snow is already quite deep. But on the morning of Christmas Eve I will be back again."

These children knew why their father had had to leave home. Winter and snow-drifts and the need for food are things a child can understand. I remember exactly the day my father was arrested. It was early afternoon, an unusual time for visiting, and my parents sat in the living room with three strangers, two men and a woman - she perched sideways a little uncomfortably on the narrow window seat against the backdrop of sea and beach. Years later I met her again and she was just like anyone else. She had been the interpreter, superfluous as both my parents spoke perfect English, though she was apparently asked to assess their large German library. Like us, my father was born in Australia and had spent his childhood here; the family later returned to Germany. My grandfather was a wool buyer who traded with Germany and as this necessitated regular travel between the countries it made little difference to him where his family resided. By 1910 an eleven-year-old German schoolboy in an Australian boarding school already had to cope with an  undercurrent of hostility towards German nationals and this had presumably been a factor influencing the decision to move the family home back to the country of origin. At the age of seventeen my father had then enlisted to fight in the First World War on the German side - there was no choice - an experience of great horror that had made him a convinced pacifist. In the post-war period he studied in Berlin and Munich before embarking on years of travel in the Middle East, the Pacific, Australia and America. An interlude in the Germany of the early thirties had led to his exile for anti-Nazi activities.

On that day in 1940 when I walked into the rarely used room, which I always thought of as the Christmas room, I was promptly sent out. Gisela, or Gigi as we called her, then kept us confined in the nursery refusing to answer questions; every now and again she herself crept out for a few moments to listen. I pulled a chair to the window and watched the chaotic grey sea with screeching seagulls fighting the wind and each other. It was not possible to cross adults.  Later we were allowed to kiss Ekke good-bye as he left with a bag and a mattress and a joke presumably intended for someone. We grew up in those old-fashioned times when the truth, whatever it might be, was deemed unsuitable for children and so we were always straining to catch the meaning behind everyday occurrences. Ekke’s Christmas story contained no hint of an answer to the questions I had.

In the story the week passes and Christmas Eve comes and, as was to be expected, the father has not returned.

The father was on his way back from the town. It was hard going in the deep snow and he was making little headway. The big bag with provisions for the winter was so heavy that he sank deep into the snow with every step. He had been on his way home for a considerable time now and had as yet not covered half the distance.

"Today is Christmas Eve," the father thought, "and I cannot possibly be home in time. The snow is so deep and the bag so heavy and I am so tired by now. Mother and the children will have to celebrate Christmas Eve without me."

And he became quite sad. -

All of a sudden he saw footsteps in the fresh snow. They looked just like footsteps on the beach where people have walked barefoot on the wet sand, except that the footsteps that the father saw were all golden.

"Who can that be," he thought. "I have never seen golden footsteps in the snow before. And who would walk barefoot in this cold?"

He quickened his pace and followed the footsteps.

And what did he see when he reached the place in the woods where there were a whole lot of small Christmas trees? ... Three angels with big white wings and long silver curls. And every angel had a halo just like the Christchild, only narrower and made of moon-silver.

The angels were so busy selecting the finest of the trees that they did not hear the father approach. Only when he called out did they turn around and come running up to him. The father saw that everywhere their feet touched the ground the snow lit up with a golden gleam.

"What are you doing all alone in the big forest and why are you so sad?" the angels asked the father.

So he told them that he had been to the town to buy stores for the winter but that the snow was so deep everywhere and his bag so heavy that he could only make slow progress. He still had a long way to go before reaching home and consequently he could not spend Christmas Eve with his wife and his children. The angel said:

"Good man, you must not be sad, for Christmas is the festival of joy and the Christchild wants everybody to be happy on his birthday. You must be tired after your long and difficult trek. Go just a little further and you will find a hut. Go in and light a fire so that you will not be cold. Then lie down on the straw and rest. And tonight when you are asleep we will come and fetch you and carry you home on our wings. You will then be permitted to enter the Christmas room with the Christchild. First the children will have to sing their carols outside the closed door and then you will be allowed to ring the silver bell. And the door will open and what joy when the children see the tree and all their beautiful toys. But you will be invisible; no one must know that you are in the Christmas room. For, to tell the truth, God has forbidden us angels to carry humans like you through the heavens. But on the Christchild’s birthday he is sure to close an eye and even though he will see it with his other eye he will not be angry. So you will be able to watch the radiant happiness of the children when they run into the Christmas room. Later we will carry you back to your hut."

That was the ritual of Christmas that the family had always adhered to. In the story neither the mother nor the children are aware of the father’s presence. The Christchild’s visit and a glimpse of his golden halo are enough to turn their sadness and worry into joy. Not till late at night in bed do the children remember to say a prayer for their father’s safe return. It was not only for us that Ekke wrote this story - he was fully aware that, up to a point, children take things as they come - but surely to allay his own homesickness, to fly himself home on the wings of imagination. Or better, the tale was a greeting card: “Enjoy yourselves, don’t forget me, will be thinking of you all with love. Make sure that everything happens just as I am imagining it.” But from then on when I lay in bed at night and prayed to the Father in Heaven, as I had been taught, I often felt my own father looking down from where he lay on the wings of angels. It never occurred to me to pray for his safe return. He was there in the sky above me whenever I reached out to him with my thoughts.

Was my father religious? His Christchild and angels mix easily with the heathen goblins and deities of his later stories. Perhaps one can say, there was never a more fervent believer in the ethics of Christ and never a stouter protester of the supernatural powers to be tapped within each individual. He supported the local German church as a body of well meaning people who were prepared to help each other and for years served as its treasurer. He chauffeured my mother on Sundays and sat through the sermons uncomplainingly but he made it quite clear to every pastor that he was not one of the flock. All the same, or perhaps for that very reason, he was the best friend and confidant of a number of pastors. During his years in New Guinea he had come to terms with magic as imagination with the power of life and death over the individual. If the ‘white master’ claimed that his magic was more powerful than that of a victim’s enemies then that victim would recover miraculously.  Ekke believed that you could overcome disabilities with self-hypnosis. He also believed in premonitions. In later years whenever he took me to the airport he would ask the last minute question: do you have a good feeling about flying, don’t mind the money or the inconvenience, fly only if you feel confident. Luckily, I always felt confidant. When Ekke’s grandmother died his father, a down-to-earth businessman, saw her walk through the room and smile at him. Ekke never doubted the reality of this event. He wrote about angels because he needed images for very real experiences, images that we could be encouraged to accept for as long as it took for perception to grow.

If I say that at night I sometimes perceived my father to be floating above me, I am not suggesting that I was not fully aware of his real life existence. He had been gone for little more that a week when I first visited him in Long Bay Penitentiary. The guard in the visiting room was friendly and I was allowed to hug him to my heart’s content. Less than three weeks after his arrest my mother took my brother Uwe and me to the internment camp at Orange, a converted oval, where we and Ekke’s friends sat together casually on the grandstand benches. As it happened to be my fourth birthday I was the focus of attention and proudly dealt out my marzipan bacon and eggs to all who came until I suddenly realized that I had missed out myself and would have to wait, maybe for years, to know the taste of food that came from the magic land of dolls.

I had of course been experimenting with magic long before Ekke drew my attention to it. I was convinced that by sheer supernatural will-power, by flexing every muscle of my face and pushing my eyes far back in my head, I could turn my doll Nannei into a real live child. Then one day her beautiful porcelain face was smashed beyond repair. Of course this proved nothing about magic. Uwe was more successful. For the second Christmas without Ekke he was given a strange little male doll with dark velvet clothes which he welcomed ecstatically. Little Peter was also given a doll but he threw his out of the window. It was rescued by Uwe who named it Rosemary. Rosemary was a doll like other dolls who needed her share of care and attention. But Noeck was magic. By this time we had moved from our house by the sea to one in the mountains. Our neighbours and the FBI had come to suspect that we would supply enemy submarines if we were allowed to live so close by the sea and had demanded that we move a hundred miles from Sydney. They too obviously believed in magic. But on one occasion Uwe was allowed to accompany Mum on a business trip to Sydney and it appears that it was there he discovered the true identity of Noeck. For Noeck was a powerful sea god who had access to all the secrets beneath the variously opaque and glittering but never transparent surface that the ocean showed to mere mortals. We knew of these secrets for in the early morning the mermaids had sometimes painted them on the walls of our library at home in a shining, flowing, curling writing which we had never learnt to read. I was in awe of Noeck and wondered how many of his secrets were known to Uwe. Noeck’s power manifested itself, among other things, in the withholding of kisses for he was their custodian and his displeasure with any adult who had insulted his friend led to lengthy periods of frigidity.

There can be no doubt that Ekke wrote for the converted.

The Guardian Angel

When we left Sydney we first moved to a little house in the Blue Mountains. It was built of dark stained wood and was hidden in a garden of native shrubs and trees on the edge of a vast expanse of bush that led, eventually, to the sheer cliffs so characteristic of that area. The house was called Wycherley and had a charm so different from that of our seaside home that we felt like figures from a picture book. We were taken for long walks into the valleys and up again the hundreds of high stone steps, past mossy, trickling rock walls with ferns clinging to them. Along the roads and the railway sidings the gorse and broom bushes flowered in golden pools. At first none of our neighbors seemed to take any notice of us.

That was a relief, for in Sydney we had been enemy children. There was the night when Uwe and I quarreled about switching off the bathroom light and people had alerted the police to our signalling. My parents and my aunt, even we children, looked like those Nordic Aryans whose superior race was to populate Hitler’s purified earth one day in the future and perhaps due to naivety, perhaps to a misguided assertion of identity, my mother and aunt frequently wore their admittedly beautiful dirndls. On the street and in the shops people no longer greeted us. There was an incident where baby Peter was told not to touch someone’s little dog with his dirty German hands. When Mother enrolled Uwe and me in a kindergarten, all the other parents withdrew their children in protest. But the persistence of the directress, who refused to accept the legitimacy of a war against children, won out. We continued to be taken there each morning despite our tearful pleas. My mother used to tell us how we embarrassed her; I cannot remember what precisely it was that evoked such horror. - People were nervous. Their menfolk were in danger, fighting what those at home perceived to be a direct threat to themselves but a threat so intangible that it could only be approached with the imagination of the novelist. They too wanted to be active and do battle. So in their novel we were the unlikely villains that had to be exposed and they let us row out each night in our hidden invisible boat to supply German submarines.

The word war must have been mentioned to us for I remember that for a time I called myself Mrs Peace whenever I impersonated the mother of my dolls. Then one day the war became visible. Soldiers with their trucks and war machinery took over the Long Reef headland onto which our house bordered. They practised shooting at a dummy which a khaki blowfly of a bomber dragged backwards and forwards across the sky. When they needed water they jumped over the fence into our garden and stopped to exchange a few words with the young women of the house. The neighbors disapproved but soon Uwe and I each had our own soldier and the two spent most of their spare time playing with us in the garden or on the beach. My soldier was a handsome, lanky eighteen-year-old called Mac, the eldest of a big country family, who was obviously homesick for his brothers and sisters. Uwe’s soldier was blond and called Jim. We were taken to the army soup kitchen to get a bowl of baked beans for lunch, as I remember the only children to be distinguished in this way. For what became evident was that these men had decided to take the opportunity to meet the legendary enemy they were about to fight and that our two soldiers were making sure that everyone had seen German children at first hand. One afternoon when we were playing together on the beach Jim’s gun went off. Trembling with shock, Mac grabbed us both by the hand and took us home, explaining that it was after all too dangerous to be out among the soldiers and would Mum please make sure we did not leave the garden. We never saw Mac and Jim again. We understood that the war was some kind of threat to us which the soldiers, who were fond of us, deeply regretted but that it meant separation.

In the long run, the mountains to which we had moved were not much better than Sydney. The kindergarten, run by a withered Dickensian old woman, was probably no more of a nightmare for us than it was for the other children. I can remember a day - someone had wet their pants and left a puddle on the floor and one side of the classroom was to be punished for this - when Uwe and I clung to each other crying hysterically and refused to budge from the playground for the entire afternoon session. Other incidents were more ambiguous. One afternoon on the way home from kindergarten we wanted to stop along with the other people to watch the digging of a hole. They’re building an air-raid shelter, my mother said, they won’t want us around. At first the bus driver would not pull up for us but that was probably just some misunderstanding for once my pretty aunt had talked to him he was quite obliging. We made friends with some children evacuated from Queensland and played new and delightful games. When a less kindly family took over their house, we were asked to stay away. One day a lady bent down to me as I was walking home and smilingly asked me whether my mother ever beat us. I was seized with uncontrollable terror and arrived at home shaking. All sorts of things assumed a sinister meaning. There was a dark green pool in our garden surrounded by a high wire fence. And one day I discovered that a worm had spun its web in the core of the apple I was eating and the horror was such that for years afterwards I was convulsed at the thought.

There were also more concrete things to worry about. One morning I noticed my mother and the gardener standing at the window. Curious to see what had caught their attention I squeezed between them just in time to see the baker in his cart racing down the road whipping his horses and pursued by a wall of flames. At the last moment the wind veered and the fire raged through a vacant allotment and into the bush behind our house where it was to stay for many weeks. Firemen came and fought the blaze which had by then invaded the lower part of our garden. Uwe and I mixed up buckets of cordial and heaved them down to the thirsty men. Again and again the fire appeared to have been conquered but there was a peat bog in the hollow and the moment the wind blew up it would flare out once more. My mother and aunt kept watch in shifts and the tireless firemen always came when they were called. This was a heroic fight and we were in it together.

By then my father’s second story had arrived in time for my fifth birthday, along with a picture of a little girl in a red and white gingham dress and green apron walking along a forest path with the sunset behind her. But if you looked very closely you could see that the sunset was in reality a beautiful angel with halo and wings and arms spread out protectively. My father had found it in a magazine and a fellow internee had made a frame for it. So it now hung on my bedroom wall.

True to the seasonal inversion my birthday was now in summer. Summer had come to the valley where the log house stood. Very early each morning the father went up to the high mountains to fell the trees which he would then pull down into the valley like huge sledges when the snow had covered the ground once more.  

When the children come into the kitchen one morning they find their mother baking. After breakfast they are sent out to pick blueberries for her pie.

"Look after your little brother, Wibke," the mother called after her. There were so many blueberries in the forest that the children picked only the biggest and best and the baskets were soon filled. But Wibke and Ulli had paid attention only to the blueberries and not to each other. Without noticing they had gone in different directions. When Wibke looked up after a while to show Ulli how much she had picked, she could no longer see him.

"Ulli, Ulli, where are you?" cried Wibke. But Ulli did not answer. Wibke became worried. Mother had said that she was to look after her little brother.

"Ulli, Ulli," she called and ran back and forth through the blueberry bushes under the firs. "Ulli, where are you?" But Ulli was nowhere to be seen. Then Wibke remembered her mother's warning: Make sure you do not go too close to the cliffs with their terrible precipices.

"If only he doesn't fall down there," Wibke thought fearfully. She ran so fast that she spilt many of the lovely blueberries she had just picked. The birds followed her and pecked up those she had lost.

Suddenly she came to one of the big precipices. She saw it only after she had tripped over a root and fallen. She let go of her basket; that rolled on towards the cliff, fell over the edge and down to the depths. Wibke got a terrible shock because she had almost fallen down along with it.

It is strange how the stories of your childhood stick with you. Years later, ten years to be exact, I was allowed to accompany an uncle and aunt, visitors from Germany, he the only one of my mother’s large family in Germany who survived the war, to a rain-forest resort. A ranger, to whom we reported, explained the way to all three of us. I was feeling a little awkward; the couple were walking slowly and seemed preoccupied with one another so I went on ahead. At some stage I realized they were no longer in sight. I stopped and waited. After a while I walked back. They were nowhere to be seen. I looked down another path; surely they too had been told the way. Then it occurred to me that they might have passed me so I ran along the original path. Dusk was setting in and panic overtook me. I was suddenly and absurdly convinced they had fallen down a cliff, though there were no cliffs in this area. When I was almost totally exhausted I saw them approaching from the opposite direction. They had gone back after they lost me and the ranger had shown them the other way. They were angry that I had walked off. In exhaustion and despair I threw myself over the path as though it were a cliff in a teenager’s dramatic variation on Ekke’s story. In those years I suspected almost everyone, even my wonderful uncle, of wanting nothing to do with me.

Because the basket with all those lovely blueberries was lost and because her little brother could not be found and she too was now lost and unable to find her way home, Wibke began to cry. - Just then she heard a voice:

"Why are you crying, child?" Wibke looked up and through her tears she saw a beautiful big angel, her guardian angel, standing beside her.

"I have lost my way and I cannot find my little brother Ulli. Now I'll never get home again."

"Nothing has happened to your brother," said the angel. "Ulli ran straight home when he could not see you anymore. You don't have to worry about him."

"But how can I find my way home?"

The angel said: "Come along and I will show you the way."

We had been told other fairy-tales: Little Red Riding Hood eaten alive by a wolf when she innocently left the path. All she had done was pick flowers for her sick grandmother. And Hansel and Gretel caught by a witch when they lost their way in the woods. That was a world full of unexpected danger and nastiness but my world - this was Ekke’s birthday wish - was to be divinely protected, even if at times I was not quite blameless. Not that his wish could render unheard those other darker tales, with happy endings, even they ....

And the angel took Wibke by the hand and led her through the forest. Soon they came to a broad path that ran through the firs.

"Follow this path straight ahead and it will take you home. I will walk behind you and watch you."

And Wibke went along the forest path and behind her went the angel. The halo of the angel shone so brightly that all the forest animals came up to the path to see what it was. The deer came with their young fawns, the hares, the rabbits and the squirrels, and on the trees at the side of the path sat the birds.

(All this was painted on my picture.)

When the creatures saw the angel their eyes grew wide and soft and the birds sang more beautifully than they had ever sung before. On the path sat a painter who had come up from the big stone city to see the forest with its birds and animals, and everything he saw he painted onto a canvas. He had just finished the picture when he noticed Wibke coming along the path with her red and white checked dress and her green apron. So he quickly painted her onto the picture as well.

(Years later my parents brought back from Germany just such a red and white gingham dirndl with a green apron for my youngest daughter.)

"What are you doing here all alone in the big forest?" the painter asked Wibke as she approached him.

"I lost my little brother and was looking for him and then I lost my way as well. But my guardian angel has shown me the path that will take me back home."

"Your guardian angel?" the painter laughed. "But angels don't exist and you certainly cannot see them."

"But my guardian angel spoke to me," said Wibke, " he is walking behind me."

When Wibke turned round, however, to show her guardian angel to the painter, the angel had disappeared and could no longer be seen.

Another memory. I was three years old and we were spending a holiday at Jenolan Caves. We had been told that caves were inhabited by dwarfs; it was to be expected that the area was teeming with them. As we climbed through the bush I noticed a dwarf ducking into a warren or fissure in the ground. Of course I called everybody over to see. My aunt confronted me: are you sure you saw a dwarf, you are not telling a fib are you? I became dreadfully confused and distressed. Ekke’s story was like a belated vindication; had he noticed my predicament?

The painter laughed again and said:

"You are a silly child if you still believe in guardian angels. Big people don't believe in angels."

"But I saw it," said Wibke. "A moment ago it was still behind me. My father is a very big grown-up man and he still believes in guardian angels."

The painter accompanies the little girl home. On their way they meet the parents who are out looking for her. The painter again laughs at Wibke’s story but when he shows the family his picture everybody can see that he has painted the angel without ever realizing.

This painting was now in my possession as proof for evermore that no evil could befall me. In our new garden - we were no longer in Wycherley - we had berries growing for berry pies;  in the autumn Mum and Aunty Gigi took us blackberrying down the road. And our garden had avenues of roses. Early in the morning when the scents were distilled in the dewdrops I would walk from bush to bush and feel the passages of my head light up differently for every flower.

Time passed. One day policemen came without warning and took Gisela away. She was a German national while my mother was Australian by marriage. A little later they called for a foster sister. Henriette had been living with us for some months so that she could continue to go to school in spite of her parents’ internment, for initially there was no camp school. Now her family wanted her back. The twelve-year-old child was formally arrested, kept in a police cell for the first night and then in transit camps for weeks without explanation to her own family or to my mother. - More than once when I came home from kindergarten policemen were in the house and every drawer had been emptied onto the floor. My mother was too proud to admit how they exasperated her. They found her German embroidery cottons and wanted them, explaining that they all spent the long uneventful night shifts knitting and embroidering and some of them had won prizes at country shows. She stubbornly refused though she could not have known how important they were to be in the camp.- My constant babbling got on her nerves. She told me that she would put me in the garbage bin if I did not keep quiet. Though I thought it unlikely that she would actually carry out her threat, I took the precaution of checking the lids of our bins to see how tightly they fitted before pestering her again.

Then the time came for us. I learned later that my mother had arranged our internment by contacting a parliamentarian who had once offered his services when they met at a private party. Of course people were not allowed to request their internment. But once the Palestinian families had been brought to Australia, a separate internment camp was set aside for families and under normal circumstances men were permitted to join their women and children. My mother was tired of being alone with us in hostile surroundings. Again a police car drew up without warning and we were given half an hour to pack and make arrangements. My guardian angel picture was left behind and though a friend later came and sorted and packed our belongings it never turned up again. Only the story survived.

The police car took us to Liverpool reception camp, corrugated iron huts and dust surrounded by a lot of barbed wire. The soldier who stood guard at the gate called us over to him. He said he would let us play on the road outside, as long as we didn’t go too far. So, somewhat puzzled, we exchanged the dust of the camp for the dust of the road. It was obvious that it angered him to have to guard children as prisoners of war; he probably could have justified himself for the Australian Government persistently declared that children were not prisoners.

I developed a fever and a doctor was called. He could find nothing wrong with me and finally put my sickness down to teething problems. As he left he picked up a bobby-pin from the floor and told me to give it to my mother. When I did she flared up. The pig, if he thinks he can treat me like that. I had no idea what had upset her but, in any case, I had almost given up trying to understand anything that was going on. I must have recovered in time for the long train journey to Tatura during which a number of surly uniformed men and women kept us under surveillance till night when they switched off the lights to enjoy each other’s company.
The Winterking

The camp at Tatura was a diamond of four compounds in the shallow hollow of an almost treeless paddock. Between the two barbed wire fences the strip of no-man’s-land was fortified with more coiled barbed wire. Four corner towers guarded the complex. About a thousand people lived here in corrugated iron barracks, two to each small room. In our compound there was a toilet and shower block (initially, before pits were dug, the toilet buckets were often overflowing and we children were not allowed to use them), a large dining room and kitchen, and a hospital barrack. Our barrack was close to one of the two remaining trees of the camp, a tall graceful gum. People had begun to plant small bright flower-beds in front of their huts.

When we arrived we were shown into two bare cubicles, joined across the barrack through a gap in the partition. The walls were unlined; there were large ventilation gaps between them and the roof, and the bitterly cold winter wind swept through the rooms. (Later the huts would be lined though, unfortunately, the plywood contained bugs that were immune to fumigation.) There were no palliasses, blankets or sheets for us and we eventually spent the first night in the hospital barrack. - Food in the camp was plentiful but the Italian and Arab cooks spiced it so heavily that, in my mother’s view, it was quite unsuitable for children. So we lived mainly off white bread and melon and lemon jam till she and other mothers could organize the cooking of a children’s menu with vegetables from the camp gardens. - The ground between the huts was bare red dust and there was red dust everywhere, the rooms were coated with it, the clothes on the line were pink, and every so often great red storms blew across from the inland. - The Italians who were our neighbors on both sides spoke noisily to each other and created a sound screen for us, some privacy in this ocean of people. At night floodlights lit up the camp. For two years we never saw a star.

We had expected to meet Ekke on our arrival but it took some weeks before he came. It appeared that the detectives who searched our house had found a letter he had smuggled out, one of the many. So he spent the maximum twenty-eight days in the little red house of the men’s camp, the tiny red brick prison and cage visible at a distance from each camp. But Gigi was there to welcome us and a little while later she moved back in with us. Once Ekke was home, activity started. Our beds were sawn off to make room for wardrobes, as though it were a foregone conclusion that children would not grow in this place. - So we had all our adults around us; none of them could escape. All our possessions were close; nothing could be kept from us. It was a child’s dream of a safe world.

One day Uwe and I ventured to approach a group of children. They were squatting beside one of the open drains that carried the laundry water, playing with paper boats and wooden chips. A little boy dropped his apple into the cloudy stream, fished it out and chewed on. A woman walked past and scolded him; you’ll get sick, she said. Suddenly the water changed color to dark red. The children screeched ‘blood, blood’ and ran off, leaving their ships to sail down the river. We followed the drain to the laundry and met Mum on the way. They are boiling out the dye in the men’s clothes, she explained. The men were issued army clothes dyed burgundy but by the time they wore them they were as khaki as those of their guards, one of those small symbolic triumphs in which prisoners delight. - We were soon dressed in overalls made of grey army blankets, like all the other camp children. But our bibs were brightly embroidered with flowers; Mum had packed her embroidery cottons. The army patrol that took roll-call each day could not fail to notice our camp uniform. So there were blanket inspections to make sure we still had our five blankets per head. While these were being carried out on one side of the hut, the newly checked blankets were taken through the back door to the next hut. The whole exercise must have been a game. There was a sense of chivalry among most of our guards.

Not long after our arrival all three of us became ill. Our bowels, accustomed to clinical cleanliness - Mum had trained as a pathology technician - were determined to expel every impurity and there were many in this camp. When our strength was exhausted the next illness took over. Now it was our skin that rebelled as we succumbed to the camp epidemic of chicken pox. And the blisters had not yet disappeared when my parents were told of cases of whooping cough. This was worrying and my father decided to insist on immediate immunization. By the time the vaccine arrived it could only boost the developing disease and I can remember how I coughed and gasped for air while people tiptoed into the hospital barrack to express doubt about my ability to pull through. But eventually the coughing died down, everyone lost interest and went about their daily work and I sat alone in the hospital barrack, still under quarantine. I had been told that I could pass the disease on to other children but one day when there was no one much about I decided to run back to the hut. In doing so I took every precaution and was consequently surprised and indignant when I was received with anger. My mother was worried about camp rules and so it was decided that my father would have to beat me with a bundle sticks which had been supplied to all camp families for the purpose of chastising their children by a man dressed up as Saint Nicolas. My father had never hit me before and didn’t like his task. So he entered into a conspiracy with me whereby I was to scream while he mimed the beating. In this way we supplied the camp disciplinarians with an appropriate drama and out of it came a complicity which was to characterize our relationship from that day on. If we could not ignore the demands made by our surroundings we could at least refuse to let them corrupt our relationship of trust.

Due to the scarcity of teachers and suitable rooms the camp school provided only every second grade. It was decided that an elderly lady who held degrees in law and philosophy was to tutor me till I was ready to join the appropriate class. This was by no means a perfect arrangement. She had never taught a child, she was ambitious, and she believed that terror was the memory’s best adhesive; Nietzsche had once expressed that opinion. In the first two lessons I was taught the alphabet. Not long after, I was locked in a room and told to produce a composition. I did the impossible and thereby set the tempo for the remaining eight weeks. By that time I had reached grade four level and, due to her insistence, was actually included in that much older class in which I always felt out of place. Uwe, who was to be the next in line, preferred to spend his mornings under some hut in the company of the deadly - so we were told - redback spiders. My compliance had created a precedent which, for the sake of all potential future victims, had to be rendered null and void. But Aunt Lotte, as we called her, always kept a fondness for me and till her death showered me with presents and affection. In the boredom of her camp life I had been a moment of achievement.

The combination of pressures had affected my health. I was pale and had convinced myself that I suffered from constant headaches. It was decided that I should be sent to Waranga Internment Hospital for observation. Along with other patients I was taken in a closed army ambulance - not a crack in the canvas through which to take a peep at the landscape. It was a strange sojourn. I was not ill and the medical staff ignored me. Not even the dreaded blood test, of which I had been warned, was carried out - though I practiced my courage several times a day with a pin. The other women were in for treatment. Once in a while somebody would ask me to interpret, a six-year-old whose vocabulary was rapidly diminishing. Sometimes I read them a few pages of my storybook. One morning one of the garbage men asked me my name. He was from the men’s camp next door and knew my father and from then on he brought me a banana every morning which I swapped him for my peppery pea soup. It was strictly forbidden to talk to other prisoners so we went into contortions of secrecy. In the evenings I strutted up and down the fence with one of the ladies whose friend in the adjoining men’s camp did the same. I was taken along to make it all look harmless. During the day I was permitted to play on a tiny patch of real lawn between the buildings. I liked this and as there was nothing else to do I practiced hopping one-legged in circles for hour after hour. The hospital staff became worried and on one occasion I had two nurses and a doctor begging me to stop. At least I had succeeded in being noticed. Somebody told me that there was a baby in the hospital who had been there since birth due to some congenital ailment; he thought that the nurses were his mothers. This gave me an idea. When my mother came to visit me on the weekend I pretended not to recognize her and was so convincing that she went away with tears in her eyes and I in turn had almost persuaded myself of my deeply tragic fate. After a fortnight I was sent home again.

It was announced at school that the soldiers had given us their oval, appropriately fenced and normally padlocked, and not long after, we were taken there to jog and play ball games. The ground had a cover of lawn-like green and when the sun came out yellow flowers, like stars with a clear dark center, opened up. One morning as I strolled past I found it unlocked and myself completely alone; this was a magical experience. All around me in the sunlight was a sea of flowers; I started picking them and threading them together to make chains for myself like a flower-fairy. (My excitement was probably also due to subconscious guilt for I had conveniently forgotten that it was the time for roll-call. When I came home I was told that I had caused my parents embarrassment but there were no consequences.) Not that I really needed those chains of flowers to adorn myself - in one of my children’s books the flower-fairies bitterly complained of children who wantonly destroyed their homes - for like many of the other girls I had several flower bands for my hair, some crocheted, some made of felt, and my mother had decorated my newest dress, made from one of Aunt Lotte’s navy blue cast-offs, with a broad necklace and belt of vividly colored embroidered flowers. Flowers meant a lot in the camp. People carefully tended their little flower gardens and you could walk between the barracks and admire brilliant displays. On festival days girls with white dresses and embroidered bodices danced with garlands of crepe paper flowers; I longed to be one of them but my parents disapproved of the Nazi youth groups. - Yet more magical than anything else was the creeper-covered bower at the end of one of the huts near us where the painter Cesare Vagarini worked. I was sent there once to be assessed for a portrait; but Vagarini was not a portraitist of pale little girls whose features had not even begun to develop. With his palette-knife he could mold paint to reflect the light like jewels and the drab corrugated iron huts and their little gardens became a sparkling marvel. Imprinted with these paintings you went through life seeing beauty in the strangest places.

Many evenings my mother would sit on the step of our hut and read to the children of the camp, often dozens of them squatting in the dust outside. She read all sorts of stories but my father’s fairy-tales were particularly popular; I think they liked knowing the author. For the first camp Easter - we had stood at the fence for a while and seen a rabbit or two hop by - my father produced another story and it was again mainly for me. It was called ‘The Winterking’. Whenever my mother read it to the camp children I would sit behind her in the hut and wonder if they all realized that it was me they were hearing about, for I alone was truly in the story while they were outside in the heat and the dust.

In the valley in the north the snow was still deep although it was almost Easter and the log house in which Wibke, Ulli and Pitt lived with their parents stood in snow up to the window ledges. The low roof was still covered as with a thick white sheet. From the guttering hung icicles in all shapes and sizes, thick and thin, long and short, as though they were the glass pipes of a winter organ.

At night when all the animals were asleep and the sky was stretched over the earth like a black silken cloth embroidered with golden dots and the wind and every sound remained hidden under the cover of snow, one could often hear a gentle ringing and tinkling as though dwarfs were striking the icicles with silver hammers. Then people said: "The Winterking  is playing his organ."

One evening the ringing is so clear that the father comes to the children’s bedroom and suggests to his wife that they be taken out to hear the music.

The children who had been warm in their beds felt the cold air flow over their faces like an icy crystal-clear mountain stream and their cheeks became red and began to tingle. It seemed as though they were drinking the air, so icy was it as it penetrated their lungs.

"Oh just look at the big golden stars," cried Ulli.

"Look over there, one of them is falling onto the earth right between the firs," Wibke called out, pointing excitedly to where the silent white firs stood on the eastern mountain.

"Oh," cried Ulli, "when it's Easter and the snow has melted we will go up there and look for the star. It must have fallen right between the blueberry bushes."

"It is not very likely that you will find it," said the father. "By then it will have been fetched by the forest dwarfs who live between the roots of the old trees. For all the gold on the earth originally came from the sky but the cunning tribe of dwarfs is quick to carry it underground and very reluctant to hand it back again."

And we, the dusty children of the crowded camp where no stars were ever visible, sat transported to a holiday in a world that had everything that we missed. 

At first the children were too restless to hear the music. Then suddenly the great lonely night was filled with music, with fine pure sounds, delicate and distant and yet near and clear as if the music were not outside among the mountains and firs but within, close to the heart. It seemed that from their infinite distance the stars were calling down to the earth, or that the long needles of the firs had become like the tongues of bells and were gently ringing the tiny glassy snow crystals.

"Tonight the great master himself is playing the winter organ," the father whispered mysteriously.  "I have never heard it played so beautifully. It must be the farewell concert for winter. You can sense the coming of the warm south wind that will throw back the white blanket from the earth. Easter is close. Soon the Easter bells will ring instead of the winter organ."

"Will we hear the Easter bells too?" Wibke asked softly.

"How could we hear the Easter bells," replied Ulli. "We are so far away from all the villages and towns that no sound of church bells carries into our valley."

"All the same," said the father, " you will hear the bells of Easter. In the first warm spring night all the snowdrops push their heads through the earth. That is when the little people come out of their winter hide-outs, the dwarfs and elves and gnomes, and ring in the spring with snowdrops. Then the deer in the forest stand still and listen. The sound tells them that winter is over and that the juicy grass in the meadows and dales will become abundant. At Easter time you will certainly hear the Easter bells."

When Wibke is back in bed she hears a rap at the window. It is the Winterking himself come to take her to his castle and show her his organ. After a moment of hesitation she decides to let herself be wrapped in the skin of a polar bear, covered by the beard of the huge old man, and carried off through the night. Once or twice the king almost trips because the gnomes have put roots in his way. Finally, he catches one for Wibke to see and releases it only for the ransom of the newly fallen star. This star is given to Wibke as a talisman. It will protect her by calling her guardian angel, comfort her and help her to be good. Eventually they arrive at the palace of the Winterking.

“Here is where I am at home,” he said. "The glacier is my fortress. Now you will also see the winter organ and my golden treasures.” Three times he struck his stick against the wall of the glacier and a huge gate opened. It lead into a great hall, as large as the inside of a cathedral with rows of pillars all around, except that they were not of stone but of ice, enormous pillars of ice that carried the dome and gave out a soft blue light which lit up the hall.

Gently the old man set Wibke on the floor and together they walked hand in hand through the two huge pillared halls of the glacier fortress that seemed to have no end. Finally they came to a great gate of shiny ice, beautifully decorated with snow crystals and ice fern. Upon a sign from the king the double doors sprang open and Wibke stood blinded in a flood of golden light.

When her eyes had accustomed themselves to the glow she saw before her the winter organ, built of thousands of shimmering icicles and gleaming in supernatural beauty. For a long time she stood dumb with wonder. At last she turned her face to the old man and said:

"How beautiful. But where does all this golden light come from? The whole hall appears flooded with gold."

"That is the dragon's treasure shining," the old man said. "Look in here."

On the floor in the middle of the hall was a slab of thick transparent ice and when Wibke looked down she saw the dragon's treasure gleaming deep down below. There were crowns and swords, lances with golden heads, countless numbers of golden chains, rings, bracelets set with the most beautiful jewels, goblets and buckles, brooches and pins, cups and plates and the finest table ware, all of pure gold, one piece more beautiful than the next. Wibke was blinded by so much magnificence. Then the old man began to relate:

"This treasure once belonged to the old Viking kings. Many thousands of years ago they ruled over all this land now called Europe. They were good kings, those old Viking chieftains, that ruled their country justly and peacefully. But it happened upon a time that a huge dragon came into the land from the East. He stole the king's treasure and concealed it in a cave high up in the Dragon Mountains. And along with the dragon disorder and rebellion came into the land. For every day the dragon took twelve virgins from the surrounding villages and consumed them live to satisfy his enormous hunger. The people demanded of the king that he free them of the curse of the dragon. So the king sent out a call to the young men of the country to venture forth and kill the dragon. Many followed the call but all were vanquished by the monster. Finally the young son of the king, Gol by name, set out to fight with the dragon. He was reputed to be the strongest warrior in the land, a man who knew no fear. For three days and three nights he fought with the monster and at last struck off its head with one powerful blow. But he himself was so badly burnt by the fiery breath of the creature that he too died soon after. He died in my arms," said the old man. ”His last words were: You are the eternal one. Keep the treasure in your glacier fortress till such time as war and rebellion and wickedness are banned from the earth. You are to deliver the treasure only to him who returns peace and order to the world and restores good will amongst the peoples of the earth. But this time has not yet come," the old man added sadly and thoughtfully.

"And when was it that Gol slew the dragon?" asked Wibke who had been listening to the story of the old man attentively.

"Many thousands of years ago."

"You are as old as that?" Wibke cried out in amazement.

"As old as the mountains and the glaciers," the sage answered. Then he took Wibke to the end of the hall, set her onto a bench covered with furs and said:

"Now I shall play on the winter organ for you. When it starts sounding in here all the icicles out in the forest and the valley vibrate in harmony and create that fine, bell-like ringing that sounds as though dwarfs were tapping them with silver hammers."

The old man ascended the steps of ice and sat down at the organ and Wibke saw that the Winterking was now wearing a white ermine coat and a crown made of precious blue stones. Then, when he started playing, Wibke closed her eyes and it seemed she was floating through the wintery world, carried by the silver music. Soon she went to sleep on her bench and the music of the winter organ followed her into her dreams.

When Wibke awoke it was dark around her. The music had ceased. She sat up and suddenly saw to her amazement that she was in her own little bed. Outside the morning was beginning to dawn and the morning star stood high above the eastern mountain. [...] But how had she come back? Had the Winterking carried her home as she slept?[...] No, surely she would have woken. Perhaps it had all been no more than a dream. Perhaps it had not really happened to her. Yes, of course, it was a dream. Just then she felt something hard and heavy in the pocket of her nightshirt and her heart rejoiced. She knew then that she had really experienced it all, that she had not dreamed it, for from her pocket she now took [...] the golden star! She never discovered how she returned from the hall of the Winterking. But when she told her parents and brothers about her night's adventure the father said that he too had once been the guest of the Winterking and had seen the dragon's treasure. Wibke had not dreamed that;  it had really happened.

Even the story recognized the bond that existed between my father and myself. There was also something about it that made me a little uneasy. For years ago - I must have been three at the time - Gisela had told me that I was not musical, music was not for me, I should stay away from it and ever since, I had felt ashamed and guilty when I sang or played a scramble of notes on the mouth-organ. Quite likely she had intended what she said only as a light-hearted comment on some flat little tune I had sung to myself and would have been horrified had she known how deeply it had affected me. Did my father not know that he was breaking a taboo? I in the land of music could happen only in a fairy-tale but how good that fairy-tales existed and at least this one night of beautiful sound had been granted to me.

Years later I discovered a series of etchings of organ music done by an artist friend and cousin of Ekke that must have inspired the story; so this story too had its illustrations. And the tale of the Viking treasure? It contains just enough allusion to political mythology and historical reality to alert us heirs of an unspeakable past. Once the whole of Europe had been subject to the noble Vikings: is it possible to read that now without deep misgivings? But of course the Winterking was refusing the treasure to their latter-day descendants.  

The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs

There is no other place quite like an internment camp. Apart from the mothers whose daily tasks never vary a great deal, the schoolteachers, the two doctors and the dentist, most adults were at a loose end. They no longer needed to provide for their families - the enemy was doing that - and there were no achievements in the workplace; not even heroic sacrifices for the fatherland were required. Life, though restricted, was comfortable enough; there was no opportunity to show fortitude. The distinctions between academic and laborer, artist and businessman, farmer and tradesman dropped away. They no longer had relevance. People lived in identical barracks, ate identical food, had the same routine of roll-calls and lights out at ten and took it in turns to do the same chores. It became necessary to find something to occupy the time, but still more, to establish an identity that would raise you above the grey sameness. Some people learned crafts.

There was no privacy. Even the whispered word was audible to neighbors and liable to give rise to a rumor; so little happened that infinitesimal deviations from the everyday had to serve as material for a sensation. Faced with the inevitability of publicity, people made a point of speaking aloud; their conversations became stage shows designed to present the characters in which they wanted to be known. If you were bored you could walk through the camp and listen to what was being played in the huts: to the brave man and his submissive wife, the ne’er-do-well and his righteous spouse, the fastidious housewife and her clumsy husband. - The children delighted in inventing nicknames for each other or competing in name-calling matches. They drew attention to themselves by showing off or creating a commotion that in turn gave the adults an opportunity to put themselves on display. People seemed to take pleasure in being their own caricatures. It was a voyeur’s paradise and I would walk through the camp as their precocious invisible audience.

The Italians had put together a theater of marionettes with characters from the commedia dell’ arte - Pantalone, Capitano, Dottore, Isabella, Columbina - who bragged and fought and flirted and ranted and conspired on stage in improvised dramas that gave their operators every opportunity to turn their frustrations into dramatic passion. At the end of one performance, given especially for us Germans, the players’ heads popped up at a particularly angry moment to continue the fight above stage. The Germans were speechless; those damned Italians, they couldn’t even keep the peace for the duration of the show. In Germany there is no tradition of self-mockery; it is doubtful whether the indignant critics were ever aware of their own role-playing.

Some time after our arrival an Australian philanthropist began to donate a weekly film screening to the children of the camp. The first film I saw and the only one I can remember seeing, Walt Disney’s ‘Pinocchio’, had every ingredient necessary to delight its audience. It was the story of a puppet come live, human enough to be subject to the moral rules and restrictions to which children must conform, doll enough to be happily oblivious of them most of the time, an adventurer who escaped from home to roam the wide world, there to encounter both the real and unreal, as though there were no limits to his ability to embroil himself in danger and yet get off scott-free, a prankster who could serve as an inspiration to every bored little boy and girl and who still grew up to become a respectable, hard-working young human and earn the approval of the beautiful fairy with the sky-blue hair.

But it was hard for camp children to be imaginative. The only prankster who showed real talent had the sadistic German urchins, Max and Moritz, for his models. On one occasion he managed to persuade little Peter to stick a pin into the broadly swaying bottom of a certain gentleman in what promised to be a twofold feast of sadistic delight. But as always somebody had been watching and so in the end it was actually the true offender who got the hiding.

We little girls each had our autograph album in which we set out to collect the identities of all our friends and acquaintances. Though there was an occasional person who decorated her contribution with a little bunch of bluebells or even a pressed flower, the rhymes all came from the pen of others:

            Have the sun in your heart
            Though it storm or it snow
            Though the sky be all black
            And the world full of woe

or with more patriotic fervor:

            Be ever noble, good and true,
            Do as a German girl would do

or more randomly: ‘The early bird catches the worm. Your Nina Schmidt.’ None of the pages of the album could later elicit a memory.

One of the teenage girls decided to produce a play. There was a story outline. I had been given the part of the doctor but, as things turned out, we were incapable of even the smallest improvisation. In the end the curtains and garments with which we had draped ourselves in anticipation of becoming somebody new and different had to be returned to their owners as useless.

The adults were more successful, but then they had a text to follow. It was my father who organized and produced the performance of Lessing’s play ‘Minna von Barnhelm’, one of the very few comedies by a German playwright. It is the story of a young army officer who has fallen on hard times; the war is over, he has lost his income and an injury has crippled his arm. As he is unable to pay his rent - and much too proud to accept money from a friend or, alternatively, a widow indebted to him - the landlord evicts him to make room for a wealthy young lady. She turns out to be his fiancée in search of him. While the landlord and the servants provide the burlesque, the lady musters all her ingenuity to teach her friend that bad luck is no disgrace and people are there to help each other as the situation demands. It was a point my father had made more directly in the earlier years of his internment when for some of the more impecunious inmates lack of personal funds had meant foregoing the weekly grocery delivery. Gisela played the part of the young lady with its fine balance between teasing and delicacy and managed to create an image of womanhood that captured the imagination. When I meet people from the camp today Gisela’s Minna is still one of the things they talk about.

For the Christmas break-up the school put on a performance. Our item showed children at a fair, clamouring to have the various toys on display.  I had to beg for ‘the little kitten with the white mitten’. It was perhaps an unfortunate choice as it drew our attention to all the nice things that we missed. That Christmas the German Red Cross sent every family a miniature Christmas tree with gilded walnuts that contained tiny trinkets. There were also rolls of rose-hip lozenges for the children, to boost our vitamin C intake here in the land of orange and lemon orchards, and from the soldiers each of us received a Violet Crumble Bar, the epitome of luxury. At other times of the year our only sweets were small lumps of jelly crystals, illegally sold to us by one of the men from the kitchen; they had of course been provided to make dessert for us.

In time for my seventh birthday, the second in the camp, my parents had ordered a set of puppets from the wood-carver Mr König. A young man, a princess and a witch were the first to be delivered and instead of a birthday party there was a puppet show. The play was written by my mother. It told the story of the wicked witch, Schnarzjunke, who in worthy imitation of her Shakespearian sisters had brewed a magic spell in her cauldron to lure the lovely innocent young princess into the forest and steal her magic crown so that she, the witch, could be queen herself. But the princess arrives at the witch’s house without her crown, much to the chagrin of the latter. The girl’s fairy godmother, the giver of the crown, had come unrecognized in the shape of a swan and taken the crown away. The angry witch paralyses the girl and then kills her with the knife she has painstakingly sharpened in front of her. Meanwhile the crown has been given to a young soldier who is aware that he is expected to perform some task with its help. When he finds the lovely dead princess he wishes she were alive and as the crown is endowed with three wishes, his wish comes true. But the witch is not easily crossed; when the soldier goes to kill her he in turn is paralyzed. Now it is the princess who frees him with a wish and the witch is dispatched without further ado. As to be expected, the young couple declare their love to each other, the third wish is used to ensure a happy future and the dulcet voice of the fairy informs us from the wings that it too will be granted. The best part of the play was of course Schnarzjunke, played by my mother, who screeched and cackled and cursed and said the most marvelously outrageous things, all in a doggerel verse where each rhyme was an anxiously awaited achievement and the rhythm clanged with the same delightful woodenness as the heads of the puppets when they banged together in a kiss. Whereas my father’s stories told of error and wrong-doing but never of evil, my mother’s plays drew all their effects from the most drastic depictions of wickedness. With serious plays presented in a comic and miniature mode, we were free to detach ourselves or, if we were brave enough, creep into the terrified heart of a princess or soldier, knowing of course that the good fairy was always in the wings. Once we were adults, the play told us, but that was a while off yet, we would have to learn to cope with evil and that would always be easier if two of us were helping each other and the fairy was in control. Evil, it seemed, was the envious and ruthless desire for power.

But over and above its moral the play had another attraction. For we knew from her stories that my mother had herself spent years of her youth as the little princess of the manor or Schloss on a large estate in the east of Germany and had there whiled away the uneventful days walking alone through the vast forests, a pastime that was not without risks, for on one occasion, as she admitted to us much later, she had found a secret underground arsenal, perhaps intended for an eventual uprising against the harsh restrictions of the Versailles Treaty - the new German boundary bordered on the estate - and on another she had stumbled upon a colony of destitute people, perhaps refugees from the Polish Corridor or victims of the current economic malaise, who were encamped illegally on her father’s property and presumably supported themselves by poaching. On the one hand nationalism, on the other the proletariat preparing their bids for power. We were interned because nationalism had won the day.

Even though my mother’s next play was written jointly for the birthdays of my brothers, it appeared to be aimed at me, for in it a kind and courageous girl brings life to the world, - an almost perfect little girl, if only she were not so woodenly good, a ray of hope for the world, if only she could do with a little less magical assistance, an inspiration for dreams if the laughter of the devil did not ring so disconcertingly in the background. Perhaps the play was after all written for my brothers who, as the years went by, missed ever fewer opportunities to ridicule my girlish endeavors.

With the aid of additional puppets - an old father, a devil, and a magnificent dragon made from mottled green socks - this second play, ‘The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs’, extended over three acts. Wanda and her dying old father live alone in the wild forest. The father knows that somewhere in the courtyard of a castle built on an inaccessible rock there is a fountain of life guarded by a terrible dragon. The girl goes off into the forest to look for the herb which the doctor has said will bring her father some relief. When she has eventually found a sprig of the rare plant and is hurrying home with it, she is accosted by an old woman who claims to have lain injured in the forest and without food for three days. Though the girl is willing to help, she is at first very reluctant to part with the herb for which the woman begs. But finally charity prevails and she is about to start her search all over again when the old woman turns into a fairy. She had assumed her guise only to test the girl and since the latter has proved herself worthy she is now told how she can attain the water of life. It is not an easy enterprise. She must go down to hell - the gate is just a little way on in a hollow tree stump and has a toadstool for a doorknob - and rob the devil of his three golden hairs which will give her three wishes, the first to take her up the cliff, the second to open the gate, and the third to conquer the dragon guarding the water of life.

Scene two takes place in hell. The Devil and his grandmother are quarreling; she feels cold because he hasn’t stoked the fires well enough; he is grumpy because hell is not nearly dirty enough. Eventually he goes off demanding raven’s eggs baked in sinner’s bacon for lunch. This is the sort of scene my mother was best at. When Wanda arrives in the Devil’s kitchen she is naive enough to tell the Devil’s grandmother what she wants. And she is lucky; the grandmother is prepared to help Wanda, just to take revenge on her bad-tempered grandson. When he comes back she offers to search his hair for lice and in so doing pulls out the golden hairs one by one, with the Devil waking up and making a hullabaloo each time. Then just as Wanda is about to leave with her booty he returns and catches her, but luckily the good fairy keeps her promise and comes to the rescue.

At the beginning of act three Wanda has used the first two hairs to climb the cliff and open the gate. Now the terrible dragon approaches her and the third golden hair volunteers to kill him. But prompted by the fairy, Wanda remembers in time that murder is a deadly sin, throws away the hair, and approaches the dragon as though he were human. At this the dragon demands a kiss which she gives after initial hesitation. Needless to say, the dragon turns into a prince. He had been punished by the fairy for selling the water of life only to the rich who could afford his inflated prices. But he has learnt his lesson and the young couple and the old father will live happily ever after, which should not be difficult as they are in possession of the water of life.

Here good reveals itself as compassion and evil as hard-heartedness. We have come a step further along the road to morality.

My mother’s third puppet play was her most ambitious. There are now five acts and Gisela has been recruited to compose the music for the songs. The war is over and an unemployed soldier - how strange that peace should again be seen as a calamity - makes a pact with the devil. He promises not to wash, pray, enter a church, or sleep in the same bed for more than one night for seven whole years; in return the devil will provide him with all the gold he wants. If the soldier succeeds in surviving the seven years, the devil is to lose all power over him. We meet the soldier again after four years and by now he is thoroughly sick of the contract. A beggar girl to whom he gives money offers to pray for him. He is finding it increasingly difficult to get accommodation but once again his gold makes the innkeeper pliant. In the inn, the soldier discovers a man whom the innkeeper has maliciously imprisoned and helps him with his money. The man takes him back home to choose one of his daughters for a wife. Ilsebill, the older, flatly refuses the unkempt and smelly man but Agathe the good is prepared to sacrifice herself for her father’s sake and so, after three more years and a test of fidelity, it is she who marries the wealthy and attractive man while the wicked Ilsebill, who now would not have stopped at murder to capture him for herself, and the wicked innkeeper are taken off by the devil. - Here we have a strangely pragmatic approach to evil. It is permissible to take the devil’s money as long as you occasionally put it to charitable use. The play gains life through its inner tensions for though we are told outright who is good and who is bad, the good are either so sickeningly perfect, so dubiously self-seeking, or such self-righteous informers, that we cannot help but occasionally join the authoress in aberrant sympathy with the wicked. Life is after all too complicated for the simple morality of the fairy-tale and admittedly the camp would have been less entertaining without its devils. But it is difficult for a child brought up with rigid standards of good and bad to find an acceptable place for evil in the world. I never quite succeeded in internalizing my mother’s puppet plays; they made demands yet laughed at you when you tried to fulfill them.

The part of the soldier was of course played by my father and I’m sure Mum used the opportunity to have a dig at him. Ekke too had fought in the First World War, had been an impoverished student during the inflation years in Germany and had then wandered the world for eleven years between 1924 and 1935. He had worked as a tank mechanic in war-torn Arabia, had driven trucks through the Persian mountains when they were still the stronghold of robbers, had then gone to New Guinea, helped to build an airstrip there, worked on plantations, and had eventually survived a long ill-fated expedition into the interior of that country in search of gold that was never found. During that time he was often dirty but never rich. In 1932 he returned to Germany and when Hitler’s terrible stranglehold on the country seemed intractable, he had joined the National Socialist Left under Otto Strasser in a bid to topple the dictator by splitting the party internally. When the struggle was lost he was exiled from Germany. He then worked on a Californian oil field for some time before it was bankrupted by crooked business practices, once more leaving him without a job. Wealth did not come till he took over his father’s wool firm in Sydney. There can be no doubt that in his time my father had seen many varieties of filth at close hand and when my mother married him he was not, in spite of a degree and a publication, what her father considered a respectable suitor. In the early years of their marriage he had the soldier’s careless habits and restlessness, but not his gold.  Whether Mum’s refusal to play the role of Agathe in our puppet play - it was always Gisela who impersonated the good - was also intended to send a message to my father, would have been lost on us children.

The Light in the Forest

Camp life had its daily routine. Ekke worked as a stoker keeping the cauldrons boiling and ladling out water for the women who came with their buckets and pots. Mum peeled onions for the kitchen; it was an unpopular job and consequently the hours were shorter. A group of men tended the vegetable gardens outside the camp. A young boy blew the trumpet for roll-call each morning. And we children took it in turns to run through the camp ringing the bell for midday rest. Doctors and dentists treated their patients. Missionaries from Palestine or New Guinea held Protestant church services and Italian monks from Palestine, who spent their retreats in tiny tents lined up along the edge of the camp, ministered to the Catholic. A shoemaker fixed our shoes, a cabinet-maker built the furniture we needed from the wood of discarded crates or the stolen materials of half-built barracks, and a dressmaker sewed clothes on her treadle machine - there were no power-points in the huts - and was paid, like the other craftsmen, in the ring-shaped camp currency. The knowledgeable became teachers, writing their own textbooks. The hut leaders, compound leaders and, heading the hierarchy, the camp leader busied themselves administering us in the name of the Führer and the camp commandant.

The camp contained a strange mix of people. The largest group were the Templers, members of a Swabian sect that had emigrated to the Holy Land in the eighteen-sixties and there established prosperous farming communities. No German government before Hitler had shown much interest in them and so they had become naively enthusiastic Nazis. They were a long-standing community who knew each other and had shared views and values. Some of the Italians with us had also been transported from Palestine; others came from the islands. Then there were a few German traders or professionals from Persia and other Middle Eastern countries. The group from New Guinea consisted mainly of missionaries and other mission employees. Last but not least, there were the Deutschländer - as the Templers condescendingly called them - representatives of German firms, businessmen, academics, and the Australdeutsche, who had made their home in Australia, among them the occasional immigrant from way back who had almost forgotten his or her German. The most incompatible among the groups was the Jews. Some time before our arrival a section of D compound, which also contained professed anti-Nazis, had been sealed off to prevent clashes. One rarely saw movement in the tiny ghetto. The German boys would occasionally abuse their counterparts across the fence - who were away at boarding school most of the time, for the compound had no school - with shouts of coward. Presumably the Jews had requested the separation. Why, in a war against Nazis, Jews should have been under suspicion is hard to fathom.

At school each lesson began and ended with ‘Heil Hitler’. As Hitler was never discussed, we took the greeting for granted until one day it was announced that we would have a military inspection; on this occasion we would not say ‘Heil Hitler’. My query gave my parents the opportunity to explain their point of view, cautiously, for children have a way of relaying modified versions of what they are told. - Not long afterwards the whole camp was summoned to a general meeting. The camp leader called somebody - I knew the man he was talking about - a pig and a traitor. It was all very interesting and we wanted to have it explained there and then; my father had to fight us off. On the way back to the hut he mumbled something about nonsense but was not forthcoming on the sensational detail we had hoped for. The man had been released early, he said, he should not have been there in the first place. There wasn’t a story.

One summer evening we were allowed out of bed in our pyjamas to join a crowd that had gathered around one of the huts. People were watching as half a dozen soldiers dug up the ground to reveal a subterranean structure with layers and layers of bottles. It was the still of  an Italian whose name I have forgotten. The intrepid criminal stood by with a grin. Eventually he was handcuffed and led away and for the following weeks we could see him appearing and disappearing in the cage of the little red house. Imprisonment outside the safe enclosure of the camp was a punishment almost too terrible to contemplate. The camp had come to seem a refuge. It was hard to perceive the friendly, matter-of-fact soldiers, who came round for roll-call each morning, as dangerous enemies and so I had half and half reinterpreted the fact that they were guarding us with machine-guns as a protective activity. The world was a dangerous place. The eldest of my mother’s brothers - the first of four - had already fallen victim to the war. I knew that guns could go off by mistake - that was a worry - but I felt sure that no one would shoot us intentionally. Here we were looked after; none of us could get lost. - I was not with Uwe when he crawled into the barbed wire enclosure one day, after shouting explanations to the guard on the tower, to rescue a confused little rabbit; the guard had pointed his machine-gun straight at him - a joke no doubt.- When the Italian children saw a plane they always burst into a chorus of welcoming jubilation: ‘aeroplano japanese’, an ally come to the rescue.

We did not have much to do with the Italian children; most of them were beautifully dressed, fussed over and well behaved; but there were a few who were rough and made war on us. They captured my doll and bloodied her face with bright red lipstick - she had to be declared dead. But it was a German bully who tore Uwe’s Noeck limb from limb. - On the fifth of December Saint Nicolas walked from hut to hut with his bag of apples and his huge bundle of switches to reward and punish the children. When he came to the door of a particular man he considered his enemy he forgot his benign habit and viciously beat his foe’s young son (who was admittedly a rascal). Then on the following day the two men fought and had to be separated. But this was an isolated incident. - It was good to be tough. Little boys in brown uniforms marched around the camp for hours on end carrying sand-filled knapsacks on their backs, training to be soldiers of the future. On Mayday a huge and slippery pole was erected and the boys competed in climbing to the top to pick a flower from the suspended wreath to give to their girl. On midsummer night there was a bonfire and couples leaped through the flames together. Songs were sung, folk-songs but also the grand and aggressive songs of the new Reich.

Someone in the camp had built a dolls’ house for his little girl and had issued an invitation to the camp children to come and inspect it. It was meticulously crafted; every one of the many rooms was neatly furnished and the taps in the bathroom actually worked. From then on the vision of this home never left me; I spent all my spare time trying to turn cardboard boxes into gracious dolls’ houses, unfortunately with little success. Once the house had been made it only needed just enough magic to turn myself into Thumbelina. - When I nurtured my headaches after school my mother would bed me down in the darkened room and read me Möricke’s story of lovely Lau, the mermaid who lived in the bottomless Blautopf. Lau would rise to the surface to form friendships with humans, only to disappear again when her swains became demanding and possessive. I yearned to be able to escape to a place of dream and shadow where no one could follow me. The world of the camp was a world of men; the wall of the mess hall was adorned with a monumental mural of three German soldiers capturing three British soldiers in their trenches. The girls in my class played hopscotch and stilts and chasings and cat’s cradle that were fun for a while but ultimately mindless games that left the imagination starved. I yearned for a sister to join me in my world. That is how I explain my reaction to the birth of my third brother. As usual, I was in bed sick when the news was brought to me. I turned over to the wall and sobbed. Later of course I loved minding the baby.

It must have been shortly after Konrad’s birth that Ekke read us his fourth fairy-tale, for in it a brother is born to the children. Or had I just chosen not to hear what he was telling us? While it is  possible that he made up the story to reconcile me with a reality I had to accept, it is more likely that it actually was a Christmas story, written to inform us of the coming event five months before it was due to happen.

It is the morning of Christmas Eve. The parents are completing last minute preparations with the appropriate secrecy and no matter where the children go, they are in the way. Eventually the father sends them off to the woods to cut branches; they are to make a festoon for the front door through which the Christchild will come later on in the day. On the way the children manage to catch a glimpse of a gnome by attracting him with a tinsel star. Then they walk on, pick their spruce branches, have their picnic and get ready to go back home. Just then there is a golden gleam and a tinkling of bells. The Christchild has passed. At home the tree will be waiting for them; they are a bit late with their branches but perhaps these will be noticed when the heavenly sleigh returns.

Meanwhile at home the parents are beginning to worry about the children who are still not back. Eventually the father goes out to look for them, while the mother waits anxiously at home (not much like our mother, who would have gone out with him, for sure.)

After the sleigh of the Christchild had passed through the forest the children hurriedly began to make their way home, carrying their fir branches. Soon they came to a rise and from there they could see a golden gleam down in the meadow below. They stopped to look; there seemed to be no explanation for the strange light. It looked as though some of the glow that had surrounded the sleigh of the Christchild like a golden mist had been caught on the snowdrop meadow. So they decided to go and have a quick look. They left the path and ran down to the dale as fast as Pitt could follow.

The closer they approached the brighter the gleam became. Suddenly they could hear a soft cry.

"Perhaps a fawn has lost its mother," Ulli suggested as the children stopped to listen.

"That is not the cry of a fawn," whispered Wibke, "that sounds like a little human."

They hurried on and, lo and behold, when they came to the edge of the snowdrop meadow they saw a tiny angel lying there in the snow crying bitterly. It was the angel's halo that had sent out the soft golden gleam. It had spread over the whole meadow because every snowdrop and every ice crystal wanted to reflect a little of the sacred light.

Now the children had reached the angel. Wibke picked it up out of the snow and nursed it on her arm just like a real little mother. She noticed how the angel was shivering with cold for it was wearing only a shirt and was barefoot.

"We will have to dress it warmly," said Wibke, " it is dreadfully cold."

"I'll give it my woolen jacket," said Ulli.

"And it can have my woolen scarf," cried Pitt, tugging at the scarf which was knotted round his neck.

"And I will give it my coat; we can wrap it up in that. Then we will carry it home to the warm fire as quickly as possible."

The children threw their knapsacks onto the ground to take off their clothes.

"I'll give him my socks too. I can walk in my boots without socks," said Pitt.

Then they dressed the angel who was still crying and finally Wibke wrapped it in her coat and hugged it tightly to her warm body. And now it stopped crying.

Wibke sat very still on her rock and just could not believe that she was holding a real angel in her arms, while Ulli and Pitt squatted in the snow and marveled at the miracle.

When the angel had recovered a little and lifted its head with the golden halo to look around, Wibke said to it:

"How is it that you were lying in the snow and why didn't you fly back to heaven?"

Then the angel told its story: ”I was helping the Christchild paint toys for the children on earth along with the other angels. When everything had been done and the Christchild was about to commence its great Christmas journey down to earth, I asked if I could come along. But the Christchild said I was too little. The earth was at present covered with snow and it was bitterly cold down there. Under no circumstances could I come this year. - But I so much wanted to see the earth and go with the Christchild. So when the reindeer sleigh was being loaded, I secretly hid in the back between the bags of toys without anyone noticing. Then the great trumpets of heaven sounded and down the Milky Way we went at a breathtaking speed. My, was that marvelous! But when we arrived on the earth, oh dear was I cold! The road also became rough and uneven so that I bounced backwards and forwards between the bags of toys. I had to hold on with all my strength. Then when we crossed this meadow the sleigh hit the big rock on which we are sitting and I fell out and was left in the snow. Oh, if only I had not been so disobedient! Oh if only I had done what the Christchild told me! " And the little angel began to cry again.

"Why don't you just fly back to heaven?" asked Ulli.

"Because one of my wings is broken."

"Does it hurt, you poor thing?" asked Pitt.

"No, it doesn't hurt," answered the angel. "But I can't fly any more. How will I ever get back to heaven?"

"We will take you home," Wibke said comfortingly. "You will like it there. You can sleep in my bed [...]"

"And you will get my eiderdown," Ulli interrupted.

"And you will be allowed to sit at the table in my high chair," Pitt cried out eagerly, "and play with my train and [...]"

Wibke interrupted him: "We have to go home now. Do you want to come along with us?"

"Oh yes," the angel said happily. "But how will I ever get back to heaven?"

"We will nurse you and when your wing has healed then you will be able to fly back to the Christchild in heaven."

The children had not noticed how late and dark it had grown. Black clouds were hiding the sparkling stars completely. But the angel's halo glowed so brightly that everything round about gleamed in its light.

Just as they were shouldering their knapsacks once more to make their way home they heard a distant call.

"That sounded like Father's voice," said Ulli. "Perhaps he is looking for us."

"Quickly call back," said Wibke, "you have the loudest voice."

And so the father takes them back home to the happiest Christmas they had ever celebrated, in the company of a real angel.

The angel stayed in the log house with Wibke, Ulli and Pitt;  it was wonderful for the parents too. Every day they grew fonder of their little visitor and nobody wanted to think of the time when he would have to return to heaven. But one day the angel said:

"Now my wing is healed. I can fly again. Tonight I will have to go back to heaven and ask the Christchild to forgive me for being so disobedient."

Everybody was very sad.

"Can't you stay with us and be our little baby," the children begged.

So the angel promises to ask for permission to become a human child. On Mother’s Day the children get up early to pick flowers.

Holding their colorful bunches they softly knocked at the door. The father opened it and put his finger to his lips smiling mysteriously. And what did they see when they walked up to their mother's bed? There was a tiny child in her arms.

"Look, it is our angel," the mother smiled and it seemed to the children that a little of the gleam of the halo was still over the bed.

"Now it is your little brother."

"Oh it kept its promise," the children cried out in joy and surprise. "Now it will always stay with us and we will love it so very very much."

Konrad, who was born almost on Mother’s Day, was a robust little boy who seemed to have made a determined effort to shake off his airy past. He walked before he was nine months old. But by then we had long since left the camp. It had actually not been an entirely welcome surprise when, due to the unsolicited efforts of our lawyer, we were suddenly released almost a year before the end of the war. I sometimes wondered whether the camp leader ever convened a meeting to brand us pigs and traitors. Though I doubt that he would have had a responsive audience for my class took the first lesson off school to farewell us with the round Gisela had written especially for me and they were not the only well-wishers.

The Test

In spite of having been released early, we could apparently not be trusted. The rules were that we must live a minimum of two hundred miles from the coast - my father’s lawyer had bought us a farm at Orange that almost fulfilled the requirements - and even our train journey was to take us no closer to the warships lying in wait to pick up our signals. So we traveled by a circuitous back route which necessitated frequent transfers, long midnight waits on platforms with little Konrad sleeping or crying in what looked like a shopping bag, and once a brief sojourn in a hotel room which seemed all plush and splendor. We sat spellbound and watched a pretty young woman on the seat opposite apply in turn bright red lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil and powder, as though to demonstrate the exotic world we were about to enter. On the last lap we squeezed into the solicitor’s car.

It was late winter when we arrived. Pink, yellow, white and orange poppies floated like butterflies above their long thin stalks in the car tire edged beds that ornamentaly dotted the garden. Probably nobody wanted to be accused of wasting resources during a war and the trucks were off the road in any case. Part of the front lawn had been turned into a huge onion bed. The back garden, surrounded by a massive double cypress hedge, was a wilderness of uncut grass. We’ll change all that, my mother said, it will look like a park. The house was old with high dark cedar furniture on flowery linoleum and stained glass in the front door and the bull’s eye window of the bedroom in which Uwe and I later slept. But what was most fascinating was that every piece of furniture was adorned with mirrors. Wherever I turned I was confronted with myself, that thin, pale, wide-eyed face that had been withheld for so long that it now seemed like a stranger. I used to stand and gaze at it.

It was hard to believe that we could open gates and walk through them with no threat from guns. The trek to the mailbox five minutes down the drive seemed endless and I can remember mustering up courage to cross the ramp and set foot in the outside world for the first time. In the early weeks of our stay in the camp we had once been taken for a walk along a similar gravelly road - a spectacle for the one embarrassed horseman we passed - until we could see Waranga reservoir from a distance and were turned back. (My mother, who had an eye for geological specimens, had found perfect quartz crystals in the gravel on the road.) Not long afterwards a group of young people were allowed a bit closer, had abused the privilege and swum out into the lake. They had to be called back with shots. So the initially planned fortnightly walks were cancelled once and for all and even though no one had been hurt, the story of the shooting made us shudder at our narrow escape and be grateful for our confinement. - Now we had suddenly been dumped right in the middle of the world.

There was plenty of work on the farm. We fetched water to wash the cow’s udder before milking and took the slops to the pigs. When the draft-horses had been harnessed to the dray we climbed up for the bumpy ride to the top paddock, where we all helped to pick up the round red volcanic bombs, missiles from a disaster that had taken place millions of years earlier. The windmill that pumped up the water from the deep dank wells, which we peered into through the crack in the divided covers, broke down and had to be replaced. We played with the jigsaw puzzles of caked mud at the edge of the dam and squelched into the water with our gumboots.

Spring arrived. In the garden there were banks of fragrant violets, the sweet-smelling stocks were all in flower, lilac bushes buzzed with bees, roses blossomed and the privet hedge almost made you dizzy. The two thousand or so trees of the orchard were also in blossom and full of chirping birds. The cow had calved; to feed the little fellow you had to put your finger in the milk bucket and let him suck it with that funny rough tongue of his. When the calf had outgrown his shelter, we were allowed to use it as a play-house. We furnished it with big and small fruit boxes and I kept house while my brothers went out to hunt, just as though we were the cave children from the book Mum read us each night. We walked barefoot in the lovely powder-fine red dust and rubbed it onto ourselves to match our Indian head-dresses, made from the feathers of crows and magpies and roosters. It had been so long since the three of us played together and we were completely happy.

But it only lasted a little while. I noticed my mother was quite upset when she said to me one day: do you too have to get so dirty, couldn’t you help me a bit instead. And from then on I did what girls are supposed to do and helped at home. There was a lot of housework on the farm. Some of the time the water had to be carried from a distance - summer had brought a severe drought - and much of the time there was no electricity. We did our ironing with little metal irons that were heated on the hotplate of the wood range. Gisela and I had sneezing contests when we made the beds with their kapok pillows each morning. After I had helped hang out the washing I sometimes went into the outside toilet to watch the topsy-turvy image of flapping clothes projected onto the wall; it came through a tiny camera obscura hole. Every afternoon one of us children was sent off to collect wood chips for the bathroom heater. We made our own butter each day.

September came and with it the time to go to school once more. Unfortunately we had completely forgotten our English and attempts to revive it at home were not very successful. My parents were worried about the reception we, as German children, might get in a war-time community. They decided to appeal to the Christian charity of the Sisters of Mercy at the Catholic school, all Irish women whose families had probably never quite seen eye to eye with British politics; they promised to be kind to us and, what was more, agreed not to make any attempt to convert us, their only Protestant pupils. Next the authorities had to be tackled. One of the conditions of my parents’ release from the camp had been that they were not to leave the farm. They protested that they would not let young children (Peter was not quite five) walk two miles to school and two miles back unsupervised; the authorities argued that my parents were required by law to send their children to school. Eventually good sense prevailed and the restrictions were partially lifted. Now it only remained to purchase a vehicle to take us in in the mornings and pick us up each afternoon; a sulky was chosen with a pony that must have been bribed by the enemy, for it so persistently refused to be caught in time that it eventually had to be discarded. We ended up riding bikes through the gravel, down one steep hill and up the next, even little Peter. But a family of older children from a farm down the road met us each day and kept us company. There were always people who made a point of being nice.

School here was a completely new experience. Statues of Our Lady of Mercy, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint Theresa of the Flowers and Saint Christopher, surrounded by vases, made the front of the classroom a sea of fragrance and color. The nuns in their black habits with only a small round of face showing, almost permanently fingering heavy rosary beads that hung from their waists, seemed to come from a different world. (There were rumors that the piano teaching nun could read your thoughts, something almost as awesome as a miracle.) The curriculum was contained in a weekly school magazine; it could easily have been done in a day but it was spread over five. Much of the rest of the time was used for religious instruction, which included long periods of kneeling on the floorboard cracks, saying the rosary. We were encouraged to visit the huge dusky church in our play times. I was once taken along by a friend who explained the stations of the cross to me, but when I proudly put up my hand with those who had been for ‘a visit’, I was told this was not for me, I was to stay away from the church. One morning I crept into the orchard early to pick flowers for the classroom saints; when I went to get the bunch to take to school they had mysteriously withered.

When we first went to school we spoke next to no English. I spent the day copying out a sentence the teacher had written in my exercise book. My mother translated it for me that evening: it said ‘I am a good girl’ - so embarrassingly kind. A little while later I was asked to sing German songs to the children at lunchtime, a horrifying imposition, and the performance went on and on till I had to sing even the songs I didn’t like. Eventually, when the bell rang, the school’s star singer was asked to finish off with a song about the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover which she sang with operatic splendor putting me completely to shame. We were a class of girls and they were all friendly to me. My best friend was Janice. Her father was missing presumed dead somewhere in the East and her mother sewed to support the family. Once she made a dress for me too. For my birthday they gave me six gossamer thin silk handkerchiefs that the father had sent back from Japan; my mother was shocked, as though this were some form of infidelity, but surely it was a gesture of lovely good will. Uwe once said to me: the days at the convent school were like paradise; everyone was kind and there were flowers everywhere. His nun was called Sophie and mine Aloysius.

But after sunset a different dark world began to encroach on us and once we were in bed and the lights were switched off it took over. I would lie rigid, knowing for certain there were lions under the bed that would devour me the moment I betrayed myself with the slightest movement. I was so certain of the threat that I tried to persuaded Uwe too to be terrified. After what seemed hours I would fall asleep from the sheer exhaustion of fear. - Outside all the while the night was magnificent. Sometimes Ekke would take us onto the veranda to look at the stars, just as the father of Wibke, Ulli and Pitt had done, and on these occasions we often saw shooting stars that were supposed to make a wish come true. But in contrast to the fairy-tale father, Ekke would talk about the stars scientifically, their size, nature, speed, distance. So at a tender age we acquired all sorts of astronomical information.

By now the boys felt quite at home on the farm. They crawled onto every piece of machinery and into every hay- and chaff-loft. They duped the pigs with false food and chased the cow so that she lost her milk. They swung on the gates and, worse still, they forgot to close them. One day a calf escaped into the orchard with its thick cover of legumes and was later found bloated and dead. If the boys were not up to mischief they were as likely as not to be quarreling and as the fights were unequal Peter took to complaining and soon had the reputation of a cry-baby. It appears Ekke thought he could influence them by pointing out faults and suggesting more positive behavior. The story he gave us for Christmas was the most exciting he had written yet, strangely enough, it was the first to be damaging. Peter was upset to see his weakness on record; and he had been given the lesser role in the story. Uwe would for evermore feel burdened by the expectations placed upon him. And I was simply left out of the story, excluded from the adventure because I was a girl who had to stay home and help her mother. I had still not quite forgiven my mother for breaking up my comradeship with the boys by wanting me in the house.

This was the story: One summer morning the father announces that he has decided to work in a distant part of the forest and camp there for a week. The children want to come along but the father says that the boys are too disobedient and too sooky respectively to be trusted, while Wibke is needed at home to help with baby Knud. The boys have a conference and agree that Pitt can prove his manliness by letting Ulli whack him (later when Pitt has passed the test he is allowed to return the whack) and Ulli promises obedience and reliability. They are allowed to come; this will be their test.

The path to the mountain lake where they will camp and work is rough and precipitous. Several torrents, straddled by log bridges only, have to be crossed and then the track leads over a steep ridge. Ulli asks whether these Dragon Mountains are really inhabited by dragons and the father replies that though no one has seen dragons there, it is not quite impossible. At dusk they arrive by the lake and pitch camp. Pitt gets water and Ulli wood. At first light they are up and after a quick breakfast the father begins to chop down the huge firs with the boys chopping off the branches. Whenever a big tree is about to fall the father calls out to the boys to run for safety. But on the third day of their stay things go wrong; for some reason the boys do not hear the father’s warning call and worse, Pitt comes running over just at the critical moment. The father rushes forward to throw him out of the path of the falling tree and in so doing is himself caught. His leg is broken; the boys manage to free it from the branch that is pinning it down by chopping this off with their axes. Then they use a blanket to support the leg while the father crawls back to the tent. Obviously the time has come for the boys to prove themselves. The father decides that Pitt is to stay with him to help him and cook for him. Ulli’s task is more daunting. He is to cross the terrifying Dragon Mountains all alone and tell their mother of the accident so that she can organize help. Ulli is frightened but he knows that he bears the responsibility for the other two. At first things go reasonably well. But in the late afternoon a thunderstorm with a heavy downpour swells the torrents and when Ulli reaches the crossing the bridge has been torn away. (This section of the story could almost have been taken from my father’s account of his adventures in the steep mountains of New Guinea). Ulli decides to climb up alongside the stream in the hope of eventually finding a place to cross. The gnomes annoy him by tripping him up with their roots but Ulli’s real fear concerns the dragons that could still be lurking in these parts:

As dusk was beginning to settle, Ulli saw a huge fir that had been struck by lightning and had fallen across the chasm. That meant salvation. He had to get across it. But when he began to crawl along the trunk and saw the giddy abyss beneath him fear took hold of him once more. At that moment he thought of his injured father and his responsibility. Everything depended on him. Without looking down, with care and determination, he worked his way across the trunk to the other side. By the time he had managed to climb down a big branch and step onto solid ground once more, it had become so dark that he could barely see where he was going. [.....]

Gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the dark and he could make reasonable progress.

But what did he see, to his horror, when he rounded a turn of the gorge?! Weren't those two fiery eyes there on the other side of the rock wall? His heart stopped: "A dragon", he thought and stood petrified with fear. When finally a fiery breath seemed to blow out through the hole between the eyes, flaring up and throwing off sparks, Ulli knew that he was surely facing a real dragon. Now there was no help but flight.

Just as he was about to turn and run off he listened again. That sounded like the laughter of men. Yes, those were the voices of men. Was there no dragon after all? Or had the dragon captured the men? But surely then they would not be laughing. He could hear it quite clearly, the rough wild laughter of several male voices. Summoning up his courage he crept closer to the lights, taking care that the glow of the dragon's breath did not fall on him. As he came closer he saw, to his surprise, a cave with three exits and in it a fire was burning. Around the fire sat four bearded, wild looking men. They were playing with dice and every time a die was cast and one of them won that wild, abandoned laughter would ring out.

"Who could these men be?" Ulli asked himself. "They might be robbers, maybe murderers, who are hiding out here in the forest." What should he do? He was about to sneak past the cave quietly when the thought struck him that they might not be evil men after all. Perhaps they would even be prepared to carry Father home. He had to give it a try.

Without much ado he jumped into the cave and right amongst the men. They got such a fright that they leaped up from their seats and cried out in astonishment. But when they realized that the cause of their dismay was only a small, rather tired and frightened looking boy, they burst out laughing and could not contain themselves for some time.

At last the biggest man with the bushiest beard caught Ulli round the hips, lifted him up and sat him on his knee. Then he said laughingly and not without some admiration in his voice:

"How does a little fellow like you get up here into the Dragon Mountains? What is a little gnome like you doing all alone in the dark forest on a wild night like this? Don't you have a father to look after you?"

"Yes, I have a father," Ulli replied. "But he is lying in his tent with a broken leg, miles from here. My little brother Pitt is with him and looking after him. I was on my way home to fetch help but the torrent has torn away the bridge and so I had to go this detour to get across the ravine."

"And weren't you afraid all alone in the dark forest?"

"Yes, I was afraid," Ulli replied with honesty, "I was afraid of you too, you look so wild and dangerous. But somehow I have to get help for Father."

"Well done," said the bearded fellow, "you have more courage than many a man."

Ulli glanced round at the men in turn. Then he asked cautiously and suspiciously: "And who are you? Are you murderers or robbers? Are you going to hurt me?"

At that the men laughed their rough laughter again: "Is that what we look like?"

"Yes," retorted Ulli, "you look a bit like that."

"We may look like that," said the slim man with the red hair, "but you don't have to be afraid of us. We won't hurt you."

"If you aren't murderers or robbers then what are you doing hiding in this cave in the Dragon Mountains? You are not by any chance woodcutters like my father?"

"We are treasure hunters," the man they called Fritjof answered. "We are here looking for the dragon treasure."

"A dragon treasure?" Ulli asked with wide-eyed amazement.

Then Fritjof told him that they came from the far north. They were descendents of the Vikings. In the legends of their people there was an account of a treasure that a dragon had stolen many thousands of years ago which lay buried in a cave in the Dragon Mountains. A prince, a very strong hero from the heathlands, had killed the dragon. But he had not been able to find the treasure, so deep in the ground had the dragon buried it.

"And now you are looking for the dragon treasure?" asked Ulli.

"Yes," replied his friend.

Ulli breathed a sigh of relief. Treasure hunters did not necessarily have to be bad men. Perhaps they would help his father. But before he could ask, Fritjof said: "Where is your father and where do you live?"

"We live in the low meadow and my father is at the mountain lake."

"How far is it to the mountain lake?"

"I walked from ten in the morning until now and hardly rested on the way. It is a very long way."

"And you went alone all that way?"

"Pitt had to stay with Father. He is a bit too small anyway."

"One would think you had Viking blood in your veins."

"I have," Ulli said proudly. "Father has told me all about the old Vikings. His ancestors were Vikings too."

"Fellows," said Fritjof. "The man lying out there is one of us, one of our race. We will have to help him right away. Are you ready, you Dederick, you Knut and you Sven?"

The three men nodded. "Let's get going right away, Fritjof," said Dederick. "We'll piggyback the little fellow. He can sleep on the way."

"Well let's be off," said Fritjof and got up, swinging Ulli onto his shoulders.

The three younger men extinguished the fire, took their axes and knapsacks and out they went from the cave into the darkness of the forest. Ulli was floating high up on the shoulders of Fritjof. He was so tired that he soon dropped asleep. He didn't wake again till the dawn was breaking and was most surprised that he was no longer on Fritjof's but on Dederick's shoulders. He hadn't even noticed the changeover during the night.

Since Ulli's departure the father had lain in his tent, unable to move and in severe pain. He was worried about Ulli. The wild storm that Ulli had encountered on the way had hit the lake too, and the father's thoughts were with Ulli constantly. He had to think of the bridge across the torrent. Would it have stood up to the storm? What would Ulli do if it had been washed away? In the meantime Pitt had been busy. He had fetched wood and water from the lake and had cooked rice pudding according to his father's instructions. He had been extremely hungry and had had three full plates himself. He had then made coffee for his father and later washed up everything in the lake. In the afternoon the father had sent him off to the forest to cut poles for a stretcher. Pitt had got them, peeled off the bark with his penknife and put them in the sun to dry. There were also a lot of other little jobs Pitt had to do for his father and he had done them all to satisfaction. By night he was so tired that he dropped off to sleep in the middle of dinner.

Because of his pain the father could not get to sleep and when dawn broke he was still awake thinking of Ulli. Would he have arrived home?

As he was pursuing these thoughts he suddenly heard a call from the forest. Was it a human being or just an early bird? He sat up and dragged himself to the entrance of the tent. There it was again. That was Ulli's voice, he thought excitedly. He quickly woke Pitt. "Pitt, get up and listen. Isn't that Ulli calling".

Pitt rubbed his eyes. "Where is Ulli?" he said sleepily. But then both of them quite clearly heard Ulli's voice calling: "Father, I am coming and bringing help."

The father was afraid to trust his ears. So soon? That couldn't be possible. But there it was, four large bearded men stepped out of the forest onto the meadow and the first was carrying - there was no denying it - Ulli on his shoulders.

"Ulli," the father called back. "Good on you Ulli. How did you manage that?"

But Ulli only waved his arms about furiously.

The Vikings splinted the father's leg and then carried him down home through the mountains on a stretcher. They had made the stretcher from the poles Pitt had prepared and from a blanket. When Ulli and Pitt, who had walked the first part of the way, started to get tired, Dederick took one and Sven the other on his shoulders, which the boys absolutely loved. Towards evening they arrived. They could see the light of the log cabin from afar. Ulli ran ahead to prepare Mother for the shock. The Vikings put Father on his bed and Knut, who had some training in these things, splinted the leg properly. Fritjof said he was sure Father would soon be able to walk again.

In the meantime Mother had made a tasty meal and had brought out the home-made mead. Before the exhausted children were put to bed the father said to his sons:

"You have both passed the test. You have proved that you can be obedient, courageous and reliable. I am proud of you. And particular thanks to you, Ulli, for getting help so quickly." At that Ulli and Pitt were very proud and happy.

Obviously Ulli and Pitt had reason to be proud, but real children are touchy. Uwe and Peter had done nothing to prove themselves. And even in the story Peter was a cry-baby, he was greedy - three helpings of rice pudding! - and he had had the stupidity to cause the accident. He had also been too sleepy and dopy to notice Ulli’s return. And cooking and washing were hardly jobs to bring glory to a boy. Every time the story was read - and there could be no doubt that it was irresistible - fresh salt was rubbed in the wounds.

Uwe, on the other hand, had been credited with a heroic feat well beyond his years. He clearly felt that to win his father’s approval he must do something comparable. Two years or so after the story was written he failed to come home from school one day. A neighbor who saw my mother looking for him said she had noticed a little boy in school uniform and with a big suitcase hiding in the bushes near the bus stop but had not actually seen him get on the bus. Somebody suggested my mother ring the inspector’s booth near the Middle Harbor Yacht Club and ask him to apprehend the boy. This was done. Uwe had planned to swim across to a little dinghy with his suitcase and then row up Middle Harbor to Central Australia where he intended to join a tribe of Aborigines. Not long afterwards, he persuaded Peter and a friend to attempt a similar journey by land; Ekke and the police were out looking for them till after sunset when two-year-old Konrad, whom the boys had taken along at the last minute, barefoot and by now very cold, gave them away. Next Uwe and a friend built a raft of boards and kerosene tins. They took off with some biscuits to sustain them on their Kon-Tiki voyage to New Zealand or South America, but were noticed by someone who alarmed the surf club and rescued when they were almost out of sight. Ekke was at a loss how to handle his son. He liked his initiative but was appalled by his lack of realism and common sense.

And finally there was me. I had been excluded from the story as I had been excluded in so many other situations of my life. I would have to turn to creating my own fairy-tale. From the first day the lovely female saints of our classroom with their mythical robes had caught my imagination. Some time later we were taken to see Bing Crosby’s film ‘The Song of Bernadette’ - based on a book the German-Jewish Catholic writer Franz Werfel had written in gratitude for his successful escape from Hitler’s regime, as I was later to discover. It was the story of a little girl whose visions of the Virgin had led eventually to the establishment of a place of healing that brought peace and happiness to countless people each year, - though not before the girl herself had suffered the persecution that awaits all those that are different. I probably spent a good deal of time day-dreaming about having visions of divine ladies showing me the path by which I was to bring redemption to the world. But at some stage I also began to have real dreams. They always came when I went to sleep in the Christmassy incense of the cypress hedge. There was no doubt that it was the Lady of Lourdes who would then appear high on the highest of the trees. She would ask me to mind her child. So in my dreams I minded the lively little toddler who would come running up to me and push me down into the clover. He was a bit like Konrad. Though it was hard to interpret the message of the dream I felt singled out and important; it no longer mattered that the church was closed to me and the saints had rejected my flowers, nor that I was excluded from the story-time adventures of my brothers.

I also had my more practical moments when I sat and tried to compose letters to Hitler - later it was Stalin - that would persuade these two dictators once and for all to become good people.

The Red Snowdrops

It seems that Ekke was aware of the problems his last story had created. His next story - and it was his final one - tried to make amends. I was now included in the group that accompanied the father to the mountain lake and I also had an equal part in the adventure. Pitt had the central role and but for one lapse - which unfortunately was fairly significant - was a responsible and really quite exemplary little boy. And Ekke must have sensed my yearning for a female deity too.

Quite a lot had to happen before the story was written. There was that morning when we heard screams and shouts from the packing shed. My father emerged and came back from the house with a box of beer. It was victory day in the European war; Hitler was defeated, the world was saved, and our friends in Germany were in deep distress. To celebrate the occasion, Harry Bargwonna had torn apart Dick Esslick’s hat, which was then suitably inscribed and nailed to the rafters of the shed. It was still there forty years later.

As the weeks and months passed, my mother received news that three of her brothers and one stepbrother had been killed, that her fourth brother was critically wounded, and both parents had died during or as a result of the war. As the only non-German in the family, she had been made sole heir of an estate that appeared to have been either destroyed by bombs or lost to the enemy. - My mother was able to contact someone’s daughter who lived in the town where her last brother lay in hospital and this woman went to visit him. She brought him fresh forest berries she had picked at a time when he had almost succumbed not so much to his wounds as to starvation. - My father grew concerned about my mother who was exhausted with nursing my brothers and me through the measles and arranged a holiday in the Blue Mountains for her and me. She had a miscarriage all the same. - Three days after my ninth birthday an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima - man had found the means to turn the earth into a lifeless desert - and so the Japanese war too was over; the world was actually at peace. Had news of the annihilation camps reached Ekke when he wrote this story for us?

The Red Snowdrops

As Fritjof the Viking had predicted, the father's leg healed in a few weeks and he could go out into the forest to fell trees once more. Ulli and Pitt were often allowed to come along and Wibke too occasionally took part in these excursions, cooked for the men and kept the tent tidy. The year before, her mother had taught her to distinguish edible herbs from those that could not be eaten and now she cooked the tastiest dishes from the herbs, roots and mushrooms she collected in the forest herself. Pitt was a particular admirer of Wibke's cooking skills and maintained that her herb and mushroom dinners tasted much better than the bland rice puddings he had been so fond of the year before. One late summer's afternoon, when the father was returning home from the mountain lake with his three children, they heard a shot in the distance. All four stopped dead and listened.

"That's sure to be the Vikings," the father said. "They are still searching for the dragon treasure and won't ever find it. The stupid men don't know that there are many other treasures in the world that are so much more beautiful and valuable than a dragon treasure like that, even though they may not gleam quite so brightly."

"What treasures are you talking about, Father," Wibke had asked, when suddenly they heard the hoof-beat of a frightened, fleeing animal. It sounded like the frantic throbbing of a fatally wounded heart. Just then a young fawn burst out of the forest thicket and came running towards them along the narrow path, blind with fear.

"A fawn" cried Pitt. "A little white fawn."

And since he happened to be ahead of the others he knelt down on the path and spread out his arms to catch the fawn.

Did it sense that the little human would shelter it, or had it just reached the end of its strength? Be that as it may, it threw itself into Pitt's arms, laid its head on his breast and looked up at him imploringly with its dark, frightened eyes. It was shaking all over and Pitt could hear its little heart racing.

"The poor little fawn, the poor little fawn," Pitt repeated again and again and stroked its warm, soft fur to comfort it. In the meantime the others had caught up and stood marveling at what they saw. When the father bent down he noticed that the little creature had been wounded. It drew back in fear when he examined the bullet wound in its right flank, as though it remembered a similar human figure that had recently fired the shot.

"They won't hurt you, they won't hurt you," Pitt whispered. "I'll look after you. I can take it home and nurse it and feed it, can't I Father?"

"The wound isn't bad," said the father. "It should heal soon. But will you promise that you will always take care of the little creature properly? Don't forget that you will have to begin cutting grass now if you are to have enough hay for the winter. Winter is long and the snow is often deep. Many a little fawn starves in winter."

"You can depend on me, Father," Pitt assured him. "I will look after it all by myself and never forget to feed it."

"Then you are allowed to take it along and it shall be yours because it fled into your arms. In return you have the sole responsibility for its life and well-being."

"Oh thank you," Pitt cried ecstatically and rose from the ground with the fawn lying quietly in his arms.

"You can keep it in the enclosed meadow behind the house. There it will have plenty to eat and be safe from dogs and hunters. But now we have to make tracks. It's getting late."

They had not gone far before they rounded a bend and saw a man approaching them. It was Fritjof, the Viking and treasure hunter. Tall and broad in the shoulders, he outstripped the father who was by no means small himself by almost a head's length. Just like a giant, thought Ulli, who was gazing up at the bearded face of his friend from below. But now he was angry with Fritjof for injuring the little white fawn. The father too looked angry.

"You should never have done that, Fritjof. Don't you know that all white animals are sacred. They are not allowed to be hunted. White deer, white stags, white hares, white ravens, they all belong to the Winterking, who also owns the dragon treasure which you will never find. For the Winterking keeps it concealed behind his glacier walls and no axe and no crow-bar can break down those walls".

Fritjof did not seem to be listening. His eyes were fixed on the fawn which Pitt was holding lovingly in his arms. And then as they followed the direction of Fritjof's eyes they all noticed what only Pitt had seen up to now, namely that the fawn carried a little golden bell around its neck.

With a single grasp Fritjof had hold of the chain and seized the bell.

"Give it back," said Pitt. "The bell belongs to the fawn."

"Yes, give it back," Wibke and Ulli cried angrily. But Fritjof only laughed. "The bell belongs to me now. It is part of the dragon treasure. I am keeping it. As far as I'm concerned you can have the fawn, you little mite."

"Give it back," Ulli cried furiously and beat at Fritjof with his clenched fists. But he might as well have fought an old oak tree. Fritjof didn't even seem to notice the attack.

"Lay off, Ulli," said the father and put his hand on Ulli's shoulder to calm him down. "And you, Fritjof, you and your comrades, leave our valley. You have laden enough guilt upon yourselves and have brought disaster to all of us. For the Winterking will take revenge. We will have a severe winter this year."

Fritjof merely laughed. "Are you afraid of the old iron-beard? If he wants to take up the fight with me and my friends just let him come. I am not afraid of him."

Fritjof looked so wild and determined when he said these words, so huge and fearless, that Wibke grew frightened and secretly hoped that the Winterking would not take up battle with him. With a scornful and challenging laugh Fritjof departed. But before disappearing between the firs he turned around once more and called back: "And thanks for telling us where to find the dragon treasure. Now it will soon be ours."

Then he went off into the forest singing a war song. The echo of his deep voice filled the valley.

The father and the three children walked home silently for the rest of the way. Even late at night, when they were in bed, they still heard the wild war chants of the Vikings drifting through the night from high up in the Dragon Mountains and the red glow of a huge fire shone through the forest like the evil eye of a dragon.

All autumn the white fawn leaped around the meadow and grew and thrived thanks to the juicy and plentiful fodder. It had grown so tame that it would run up to anyone who came into the meadow and let its head be stroked and its ears fingered. Eventually it became so used to the house and the people that Pitt could leave the gate to the forest open. When the sun shone warm, the fawn looked for a shady spot in the forest but it always came back when Pitt called it or in the evening when it grew dark. If it sensed a stranger in the area it would flee to the house and seek refuge with the humans it knew.

Pitt also worked hard and made hay. Every day he went out into the meadows with the sickle that his father had given him, cut grass, spread it out to dry, and then carried it into the empty shed in the enclosure. Often Wibke and Ulli helped him too. And so with persistent hard work the shed had filled right up to the roof by the time winter arrived. There was no doubt that Pitt had been conscientious. His little charge was not to go hungry in winter. When the first snow fell, and it fell early that year, the father built a small shelter beside the shed. In it Pitt made a bed of soft straw for the fawn, so that it could spend the night protected from snow and storms.

Oh, how Pitt loved the little creature. He often disappeared for long periods at a time. If you looked for him then you could usually find him on the straw beside his fawn, stroking it or talking to it. From gratitude the fawn licked the hair at the nape of his neck and sometimes his ear-lobes too; that tickled terribly but he really liked it all the same.

As the father had predicted, it turned out to be a long, severe winter. It began to snow steadily much earlier than usual and the snow piled up in front of the door. Herds of deer came down from the mountains to trek to the warmer and flatter regions in the south of the country, as though they sensed what was to come. The valley in the north became deserted.

When one of the big herds passed close to the house on its trek to the south, Pitt's fawn leaped out of the gate and joined them. Pitt wanted to run after it and fetch it back but the father stopped him.

"Animals know better than we humans do what is good for them. Let it go off with the others if it wants to. Its wound has healed, thanks to your care. I am sure it will come back in spring."

Pitt was heartbroken and cried bitterly.

But in the evening the fawn was back in its shelter on the hay, to the delight of all the children. It had changed its mind and would now probably stay with them all winter. That night Pitt gave it a particularly big heap of hay to eat.

The Vikings had declared war on the Winterking. They wanted the dragon treasure, no matter what the cost, and the Winterking for his part had accepted the challenge. It happened in the following way. The four men took up their positions on the top of the glacier and Fritjof with his powerful voice demanded that the Winterking hand over the dragon treasure or else they would destroy his glacial castle. The Winterking retaliated with a storm that brought ice and snow and almost blew the four men off the slippery glacier. With beards frozen stiff, all disheveled and bruised, they returned to their cave, lit up a huge fire to warm their stiff limbs, and held a council of war.

In the course of the following weeks the men set about to conquer the glacier with picks and crowbars. The Winterking allowed them to proceed. He could only laugh at the foolish humans who believed they could conquer his glacial fortress with picks. Then one night when they were dead tired and sitting around the fire in their cave Fritjof said to his friends:

"That is not the way to go about it. We can go on hacking and shoveling for years and never get to the heart of the glacier. We have to be more cunning. The Winterking is using the elements to fight us. Tomorrow we will fell trees; we will then drag them to the edge of the glacier and pile them up for an enormous bonfire. After that we will light it and the fire will melt the glacier. Then the treasure is ours."

The others enthusiastically agreed to Fritjof's plan.

That was what the father saw when he looked towards the Dragon Mountains in the long winter nights and could find no explanation for the red glow. Night after night the flames flared around the glacier, as though the fire came from the depths of a crater. One night a thunderous roar filled the valley as though a huge avalanche had come down and in the morning, when the first rays of the sun struck the snow-clad Dragon Mountains, the father saw that a large section of the tongue of the glacier had broken off and fallen into the abyss.

So the fight of the elements, snow, ice and frost against fire, continued all winter and the fire ate its way down deeper and deeper into the slowly melting glacier. The Winterking brought ever wilder storms, ever more biting frosts, avalanches of snow and icy rain into the fray, while the Vikings felled ever more trees and slid them down icy slides into the fire. The mountains became barer till at last all the big firs in the vicinity of the glacier had been felled.

It was already mid April and still the wild winter storms swept through the valley. It had snowed without a break for three days, as though it were still in the deep of winter.

At breakfast the father said: "Tomorrow is Easter. Will winter never come to an end? What will become of us if spring does not set in soon? Our stocks of wood are diminishing, food is getting scarce, and the snow is so deep that it will be quite impossible to get down to the town to buy new provisions."

"Yes, it will be a sad Easter tomorrow," the mother agreed.

"By the way, Pitt," the father asked casually, "how has your fawn weathered the last storms?"

Pitt's face turned a fiery red. He couldn't give his father an answer and admitted  that he had not seen or fed it for the last three days. It was the first time that he had neglected his duties.

Filled with apprehension the three children rushed out into the enclosure. The shelter was empty. The fawn had gone. All they could find was the fresh trail of the little hooves in the snow; it led through the gate and into the forest.

Oh, how Pitt began to fear for his little charge. Now he also remembered that upon waking in the morning, just as it was getting light, he had heard a shot coming from the direction of the forest. The children hurriedly put on their snow-shoes and set out anxiously following the trail.

Deep in the forest they eventually came to a place where the trail suddenly appeared to  stop; but the fawn was nowhere to be seen. It seemed as though it had grown wings and flown away. Soon, however, Pitt found the tracks again, five meters from where the old trail had stopped. And then they saw the terrible thing [...]

The snow was dyed red at this spot and next to the tracks, which had been drawn apart through a series of great leaps, ran a trail of blood drops. The children followed it as fast as they could. It wasn't long before they came to a secluded place in the woods, a little meadow enclosed by high trees; in the middle stood a huge oak tree. The father had named it the shady glade. There, close against the trunk of the oak, the children found the fawn. It had colored the snow a deep dark red with its blood. And it was dead. Pitt laid the lifeless little head in his lap and caressed it. All the children wept bitterly[...].

Just then a little man stepped out from the hollow in the trunk of the oak. He had a long white beard with icicles in it that tinkled like bells whenever he moved his head. On his head he wore a thick fur cap and in his hand he carried a large stick. Wibke, who as we know had met the Winterking, thought that he looked just like him, only much smaller.

"I have been sent by the Winterking," the little man said. "I am to tell you that spring will not come to this valley till the guilt that the humans have laden upon themselves has been expiated."

"But what can we do?" asked Pitt, who considered himself to be one of the guilty ones because the sacred white fawn had died due to his negligence.

"Yes, what can we do?" the other children also wanted to know.

" Listen," said the little man. "The white fawn that is lying dead before you is Osatara, the goddess of spring. She was shot by Fritjof, the Viking. Until such time as Osatara has been raised to new life and Fritjof and his followers have ceased to desire the dragon treasure and to assail the fortress of the Winterking with fire, spring will not come to this valley. At Easter the winter storms will still be raging and it will be as cold as in the deepest winter."

After a pause the little man continued: "And now I will tell you how you can contribute to averting this disaster from the valley and lifting the spell that the Winterking has placed upon it. Do you want to help?"

"Oh yes, we do," the children cried eagerly.

"But how'" asked Pitt "can the little fawn be made to live again? It is quite dead."

"Listen," said the little man once more. "You there," and he pointed to Wibke, "know all about herbs. Go and look for the herb Heal-all. When you have found it, bring it back here and give it to the little fellow," and he pointed at Pitt. "He is to rub it in his hands and then put it on the wounds, here where Fritjof's bullet entered and where it came out. Till your sister's return you will have to keep watch beside the fawn so that the wolves don't tear into it. I will leave you my club as a weapon."

"What about me? What can I do?" asked Ulli, who was dying to be allotted a task too.

"You, my lad," said the little man," are to go up into the Dragon Mountains to the cave of the Vikings and bring Fritjof a message from the Winterking."

"But how will I find the way there?" Ulli asked with some concern; he was quite apprehensive about the long way through the deep snow.

"Follow the trail of blood till you come to the spot where the fawn was shot. There you will see a rock to your left. Fritjof fired the shot from there. You will find his tracks there. If you follow them they will take you to the Viking's cave."

"And the message?" asked Ulli.

"You are to tell them that the Winterking is prepared to give each of the four Vikings a precious piece from the dragon treasure if they agree to return the golden bell to the white fawn and to leave and go back to the north from where they came. If they accept the proposal then they will find their gifts at that place on the mountain that is lit up longest by the rays of the setting sun. Fritjof is to give you the bell and also its chain. You for your part are to bring it back here as quickly as you can and the little fellow is to hang it round the fawn's neck. For the bell is Ostara's magic bell. Only when it is around her neck can she turn back into her true shape. And before that has happened there can be no spring. - Now go and do as you have been bidden."

With that the little iceman disappeared into the hollow tree once more.

They were difficult tasks that the children had been set. With heavy hearts the older two said farewell to Pitt who, in spite of being very much afraid, was determined to defend to the last his poor little fawn whose death was partly his fault. He took the club which the little iceman had given him firmly into his right hand and never let it go, least of all when he heard a howling sound at nightfall that could only come from hungry wolves.

Wibke knew the herb Heal-all. Her mother had once shown it to her and had also told her that it was extremely rare. But how was she to find it under the deep snow? She set out for the place where her mother had once pointed it out to her. But in the snow everything looked different than it did in summer so that she soon lost her way and no longer knew where to go. Tired and full of despair she squatted on a rock and tried to fight back the tears and the terror that were rising in her.

All at once she remembered the star which the Winterking had given her and which she always wore around her neck.

"If you are ever in trouble hold it to your heart and your guardian angel will come and help you" the Winterking had said. She pressed it to herself fervently.

Suddenly she heard a rush of wings above her and when she looked up she saw two white ravens. They seemed to be calling something out to her that sounded like "there, there, there".

Perhaps they want to help me, Wibke thought hopefully. She rose up and followed the ravens; they always flew just ahead of her. When she was almost too tired to walk on she heard the silver murmuring of a little stream that seemed to be flowing under the heavy snow cover. There the two ravens alighted on a stone and pointed their beaks towards a place in the snow, all the while calling "there, there, there".

Wibke hurriedly dug away the snow with her hands and there on the edge of the stream she actually found a small plant of the miracle herb. She quickly picked it and after thanking the white ravens she followed her own trail back with new zest, refreshed by hope and joy.

It was night by the time Ulli reached the cave of the Vikings. On the last stretch he was so tired that he would have loved to lie down in the snow and just go to sleep. But he too had heard the howling of the wolves and fear spurred him on. In the cave he would at least be safe from the wolves. When at last the forest ended and he stepped out of the firs he again saw the fire in the cave like the glowing eye of a dragon. Before it grew dark he had made sure to take note of the spot where the last rays of the setting sun struck the mountain. It seemed to him that he could see something like gold glittering there. The final thirty meters to the cave were so steep and icy that Ulli could not manage them any more. With his last strength he called the name of his friend Fritjof. Then he lost consciousness and fell. When he came to again he was in the cave. He was sitting on Fritjof's knees and the other men were rubbing his hands and feet which had been frozen quite stiff. A huge fire was giving out a pleasant warmth.

"Well," said Fritjof kindly, as Ulli opened his eyes. "Are you feeling better? Is your blood circulating through your veins again?"

"Yes," said Ulli, "but how did I get into the cave? Did you hear me call?"

"Yes," replied Fritjof. "When I went out I saw you lying down there. We have been trying to wake you up for the last hour. You almost froze to death."

"I didn't even notice anything," said Ulli. "It doesn't hurt at all to freeze to death."

"And now tell us, my lad, what has brought you to our cave a second time. Has your father broken his other leg this time?"

"My father is well and his leg has mended nicely. This time I have come with a message from the Winterking."

"Would you believe it?" the men called out in amazement and Fritjof laughed and asked incredulously: "What sort of a message do you have from the Winterking? Don't you know that we are fighting an all out battle with him? It is dangerous for little boys to go where Vikings and demigods are at war."

"I know it is dangerous and we could see your battle from our valley right through the winter. But I had to bring you the message."

"And what is this message for which the Winterking has chosen of all people a little whipper-snapper like you?"

At that Ulli informed the Vikings of what the little iceman had told him in the name of the Winterking.

Fritjof would not believe him. "You dreamed that my boy when you were lying half frozen in front of our cave."

But when Ulli assured him that he had seen the golden presents of the Winterking on his way up, just where the last rays of the evening sun struck the mountain, and that they were sure to be able to see the spot from their cave, the men stepped out and Ulli, on Fritjof's arm, showed them the place.

In the light of the full moon they could see a golden gleam and when they looked closer they could see blinking swords with golden hilts. Then they knew that Ulli had spoken the truth. With huge strides the Vikings sprinted up the mountain, attracted by the magical gleam of the gold. Ulli did the trip on the arm of Fritjof who had hurriedly thrown his bear-skin over him.

When they reached the top they saw that the swords had been rammed deep into the rock; each of the men hastily seized his to pull it out. But, strong as they were, not one of them could budge his sword by as much as a hair's breadth. As they looked at each other in astonishment they suddenly heard a mighty voice.

"Lay off, Vikings, that is not the way. First Fritjof has to hand over the golden bell of Osatara."

When they gazed up in amazement they saw the Winterking standing on the summit of the mountain, great and powerful, his beard of ice clanking. With admiration, even with awe, the four men gazed on the noble, kingly figure. Then the Winterking went on:

"You have fought valiantly. You are men whom I respect. You want the dragon treasure but I can tell you that you will never find it. Even if you were to melt my entire glacier with your fire, you would not find the treasure. So I am making you this proposal: Stop your pointless quest, leave this valley, and promise that you will never shoot my sacred white animals again. Promise also that, in future, you will use your strength for the good of your people and of humanity and not for avaricious and selfish purposes. Then I will make peace with you and as a parting gift and token of my respect give each one of you a golden sword from the dragon treasure. But keep in mind that the swords will only strike their target if they are being used in a just cause. If they are used unjustly they will become soft and pliable like wicker switches. Do you accept my proposal?"

The men glanced at each other for a moment. Then Fritjof called out loudly: "I accept it and will keep it."

"So will I," the others called too.

"Then give the little bell to the boy, Fritjof."

Fritjof took the little bell from his pocket and gave it to Ulli whom he had meanwhile set down on the ground. Ulli received it with both hands as though it were a precious jewel.

"Now draw the swords out of the rock. They are yours."

The Vikings who had not been able to move the swords before now drew them out of the rock as though this were made of butter. They raised their golden swords high and greeted the Winterking with deep respect.

"And you, Ulli," the king continued, " go as fast as you can to where your brother and sister are waiting for you. As long as you have the bell with you you will not feel tired."

Then there was a clap of thunder and a ray of lightning so bright that Ulli and the four Vikings were completely blinded. When they regained their vision the Winterking had disappeared.

After a brief farewell, Ulli hurried off on his way.

Meanwhile Pitt had bravely kept his lonely watch beside the dead fawn. That didn't mean that he wasn't afraid. On the contrary, Pitt was quite terrified, above all when he heard the wolves howling in the distance. But it is the sign of true courage that you are afraid and still do not give up your position. Pitt would make a dependable man one day. Pitt was also miserably cold and just could not find a way of keeping warm. A few times he crawled into the hollow trunk. It was warmer there but he became so overwhelmed with tiredness that he was afraid of going to sleep.

Once, when he had again retreated from the cold into the tree trunk and was on the point of dropping off, he suddenly heard soft footsteps and the sound of heavy breathing. When he cautiously came out of his hiding-place he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a huge wolf that was sniffing the dead fawn and then turned towards the cavity in the tree. Before he had time to think, Pitt took his club and hit the wolf on the head with all the strength he could muster. The beast gave a single terrible howl and then dropped down and was dead. It was only then that Pitt woke up properly; he just could not believe that he himself had slain the huge wolf. He touched the monster carefully with his foot. Perhaps he wasn't quite dead after all. But the wolf did not move. There was blood trickling out of his snout. Pitt must have hit him just right. Probably the club of the little iceman was a magic club. Pitt was as proud and happy as could be. It is true, he could hear other wolves howling in the distance, but now he was no longer afraid. He was sure that the magic club would save him a second time too.

The round Easter moon was crawling across the sky incredibly slowly and painting black shadows onto the white snow. Then at last Pitt heard a call from the distance and recognized Wibke's voice. He wanted to run off to meet her but quickly restrained himself. He wasn't allowed to leave his position. But already Wibke was running towards him across the moonlit meadow and holding the herb Heal-all in her hand. Full of joy, Pitt ran up to her and threw himself in her arms. And a moment later Ulli was there too. How happy the children who had been given such solitary tasks that night were to be together again. They quickly ran over to the dead fawn.

"What is that?" Ulli cried suddenly and stopped as he caught sight of the wolf lying beside the dead fawn.

"Oh," said Pitt, "I just gave him a tap on the head a few minutes ago and he was dead right away."

Ulli just couldn't believe his eyes. His admiration for Pitt took on enormous proportions. Wibke stood rigid with fear. She had always been particularly afraid of wolves.

"Are you quite sure he is completely and totally dead?"

"Sure," said Pitt and fearlessly kicked the wolf in the stomach. "Do you think a live wolf would let someone do that to him?"

Wibke was satisfied and handed the herb Heal-all to Pitt. He cautiously rubbed the juicy leaves between his palms, careful not to lose anything. Then he gently put half on the side the bullet had entered and half on the other side and hung the bell that Ulli had brought back round the neck of the little deer once more and as he did so he said earnestly, almost as though he were saying a prayer:

"Please, dear little fawn, come alive again and forgive me my negligence."

When he had spoken these words a dense white mist wafted down onto them from the crown of the ancient oak-tree and through it the astonished children saw a silver light shining with ever greater intensity. The mist transformed itself and grew more dense and soon took on the shape of a flowing garment. Then when the moonlight shone clearly once more they saw that the dead body of the fawn had disappeared and before them in legendary splendor and beauty stood Osatara, the fairy of spring. The silver light which they had noticed first emanated from a large star she wore in her hair. Her white robes were covered all over with magnificent spring flowers and her many-colored wings resembled those of the most beautiful butterfly.

"I am grateful to you children that you have redeemed me,"  said the fairy. "Now spring can come at last. You are tired from the exertions of the night and still have a long way home. Here, drink a sip from this silver beaker and you will be as fresh as if you had slept all night."

With that she handed the children a little silver chalice and each of them took a sip. It tasted sweet, like honey, and had the aroma of spring flowers. Their tiredness passed away that same moment.

"And now I will take you home to your parents," said Osatara and took the children by the hand.

"Oh our poor parents," Wibke suddenly realized. "They must be so anxious. I have only just thought of that."

"You need not worry," said Osatara. "My father, the Winterking, sent the little iceman to your parents to tell them that you were well and that I would look after you. They were not to worry. You would soon be home again."

That put the children's minds at rest and as they walked on through the forest with the fairy of spring they noticed that everywhere the snow was beginning to melt and when they looked around they saw the snowdrops were pushing their heads through the cover of melting snow. They could also hear a soft fine tinkling, as of bells, for which they could at first find no explanation.

"Those are the Easter chimes of the snowdrops," said Osatara. "Humans can only hear the sound when they have taken a sip from the silver cup. Listen carefully. You may never hear it again."

 Silently the children walked through the awakening forest and listened with delight to the delicate music of the Easter chimes. Suddenly Wibke knelt down in the snow.

"What is this," she cried, "I have never seen anything like that."

"They are red snowdrops," the fairy explained. "When I was shot by Fritjof I ran through the forest in terror on my way to the oak where you later found me. Wherever a drop of my blood touched the snow there is now a red snowdrop growing. From now on each year at Eastertide there will be red snowdrops in these places beside the white, in commemoration of my resurrection from death which the three of you made possible. And in future, whoever finds a red snowdrop will have good luck for all the rest of the year." With that she picked a few of the red flowers and gave them to the children.

At the edge of the forest the fairy took leave, kissed each child on the brow and promised to bring a greater than usual variety of flowers this spring. Then she wafted away.

The children raced across the meadow to the house and hugged their parents. There was so much to tell. Now it would be spring and they had made it possible. They were all very proud.

A little while later the Vikings came too. You could hear them singing their wild old songs from afar.

And Fritjof had something good for his friend Ulli.

"This time I am the one to bring you a message from the Winterking," he said. "He is pleased with you and sends you this golden ring from the dragon treasure. It is a magic ring which gives courage and strength in any struggle for a worthy and just cause. - Pitt may keep the magic club which will only deal out blows if it is directed at something evil."

The boys were very proud and happy.

They celebrated the Easter festival together. Mother served a delicious meal and the men finished off a small barrel of mead. In the meantime the children searched for Easter eggs and little Konrad, who was already walking on his short sturdy legs, found most of all.

That year there was no one who celebrated a more joyful Easter.

Clearly this story was directly relevant to our war-time world and its aggressive Germans. It gave Wagnerian images a new message, telling us that negotiation, forceful defense and healing were the three ways by which the evils of the world could be conquered, evils that were due primarily to greed, a misguided insistence on ancestral rights, however distant their origins, and a delight in matching strength against strength. Pride of race had here not yet been exposed as the virulent poison it had by now shown itself to be. Possibly Ekke himself had not yet become fully aware of its significance; he had always been proud of his German origins. Earlier, in the camp, we had had only a censured news bulletin and though our Italian neighbor, who worked for the soldiers, had occasionally smuggled in a paper, war-time news would have been under suspicion of including a good deal of propaganda. Even later at the farm my parents were perhaps not well informed about the Holocaust that had taken place in Germany in the years of their absence.

In Ekke’s fairy-tale Wibke, Ulli and Pitt had been told how to redeem the world. But where, precisely, were the wolves to kill and the wounds to heal for us children, living in a country so far from the theater of war?

What this story also told us was that in all cases the success of the redemptive enterprise depended on the magical intervention of supernatural powers. Perhaps the most important initial step was to gain access to these. I attentively read a book on the strange and hostile world of Germanic mythology with its thunderers and eternally fighting heroes. The cover recommended it as ‘a magnificent book for young and old that belongs into every German family.’ It is true, I was fascinated by the stories and a year or so later I had a teacher who encouraged me to tell every one of them to the assembled school over a period of weeks. Was she testing the extent of my Nazi indoctrination? - But how can gods that see fighting as the very essence of life and the only thing that can gain a man - women were in any case irrelevant - immortality, gods that moreover knew that they would inevitably be destroyed, help to bring peace and happiness to the world? Osatara, the goddess of spring, was an exception. She was certainly the only one among them who could be trusted to reintroduce life to a devastated world in which the severity of winter would, however, always retain superior power. Why was the Winterking so grand and the harbinger of warmth and beauty and light and life his inferior?

I tried other ways of courting the supernatural. I made fairies from clothes-pegs and green apple papers and did my best to invest them with the glorious aura of our class-room saints. - Later, when we returned to Sydney, I went for endless walks in the bush and on the beach. The huge trunks of the Angophoras were smooth as skin - you could caress them almost as mythical creatures in the image of man that would one day move and speak. Once I saw a gilt-edged gateway open in the clouds and emit paths of light that reached down to the earth and in the pulsating air figures seemed to be moving. I wrote a story about this in which a girl receives a message that enables her to avert a terrible flood. But I knew from the start it was no more than a story. - Then I began to paint, almost blindly, as though my hand and the landscape could have communion with each other without my mind playing a part and could surprise this mind with a miracle like that in the painting of the guardian angel which had so conclusively proved the angel’s existence. But none of my paintings gave me insights. At best they reproduced the mood of the day. - Still later my preparation for confirmation seemed to offer an opportunity; I had a great many questions ready and immediately proceeded to ask them. The minister - a man whom the Australian authorities had once interned as a Nazi - was uncommunicative and refused to commit himself to religious dogma, still less explain it. There were probably as many confused German adults in those days as there were confused children. I remember that in the years immediately after the war Ekke too often seemed subdued and depressed.

All the same, the war was over and since the enemy submarines had been put permanently out of action it was now safe for us return to our home in Sydney. We arrived at twilight one evening with the sea murmuring restlessly and the air saturated with the scent of freesias that had grown up through the neglected lawn in hundreds and with the tangy smell of salt. In February we went to our new schools, now no longer run by kindly nuns who filled the classroom with flowers and avoided teaching us hard facts but by ambitious and aloof professionals who had only recently taken part in all kinds of patriotic activities intended to further the war effort. My mother and the headmistress had agreed that I should conceal my past which had suddenly become a terrible disgrace. But my name betrayed me and right from the start the whole school knew that I was a German. The girls excluded me; whenever I approached a group in the playground they would drop their game or conversation and move away from me as though I had some contagious disease. Eventually one of the girls whose father had met my father as a businessman (it was important for me to know that her parents were not hostile) left the class group to join me. It was a courageous act; she would have known that it was on the cards she would not be allowed to come back. Years later I was able to return a little of the favour when a series of illnesses put her in need of support. Occasionally a teacher terrified me by singling me out for kindness that further stigmatized me in the eyes of the others. Having to suffer for my origins, for I had always been Australian by nationality, made me stubborn. I spent all my spare time reading German books and I even cultivated a slight accent. My brothers reacted differently to the shame of their descent, avoided speaking German and did everything to assimilate. All the same, there was hardly a lunchtime where they did not have to defend themselves physically against the class. When all Australian school children were issued with a Victory-Peace Medal the teacher withheld theirs because they were Huns. The club that Pitt had been given struck out at the wolves but never succeeded in subduing them; perhaps it was after all not a just struggle. For by now we knew that what the Germans had done was indeed a disgrace of the vastest proportions and, like it or no, in some way we were a part of all this.

An anecdote that was laughingly told one day drove this home to me. It was before the war, I was just two and we were returning from Germany on a liner filled with Jewish refugees. (My parents had decided to risk going back for a visit.) We were on deck and watched by scores of idle people on the look-out for something of interest when I decided to come forward and demonstrate my newest skill. Back in Germany my parents had left me in the care of somebody’s nursemaid while they visited friends for a few days (ironically among them Jews who needed assistance to emigrate) and it was she who had apparently taught me to raise my arm in patriotic enthusiasm. Sooner or later you are bound to meet someone who was on board our ship and witnessed your little act, my mother warned. It took forty years but I did meet this person whom I had dreaded all my life and felt too foolish to explain that my parents had not been my mentors.

With almost missionary fervor I used the opportunities that were given me at school to draw attention to the beauty and morality of prewar German culture. But I was also aware that it was up to me to change people’s image of the evil Germans by being a paragon of virtue at all times. I became the best little goody-goody imaginable. Instead of going out to play, I wrote letters to lonely old ladies and people in hospital. I spent about six months of the year making Christmas presents for all sorts of recipients, I helped my mother with the housework, and I never did a thing wrong at school. In most subjects my marks were the best in the class. In retrospect, it was no wonder that the class shunned me and even at the time I realized that my virtue did nothing for them, rather put them to shame, and I felt agonizingly guilty without knowing how to resolve the conflict. This was the world of my mother’s puppet plays which had never really become a part of my being, the world that derived its dramatic interest and vitality from the conflict of good and bad, the world in which virtue always looked a little ridiculous, the world that required you to compromise with evil. Whenever someone praised me I felt like bursting into tears. I dreamed and spoke in two languages, German and English. And my thinking seemed to take place in a no-man’s-land somewhere between the two, in a language that did not exist. There were years when I found it very difficult to say anything at all.