It was never clear whether such crashes were due to mechanical failure or sabotage – or even whether they had happened at all. If the authorities needed a heroic explanation for the death of someone whom they had decided to kill, or who had embarrassingly committed suicide, the crash of a test flight, or some other accident, might be cited.
Ernst Udet, one-time client of Ilse’s photographic atelier in Berlin, was a case in point. He was a hero of the First World War and one of the creators of the Luftwaffe, but he had gradually fallen out with Göring; and when Udet buckled under the pressures of bureaucratic infighting and his boss’s contemptuous treatment of him, and then committed suicide, Göring’s office issued a sombre announcement regretting that he had died while testing a new weapon. The regime even put on the spectacle of a state funeral. Who knows whether Walter Meltzer was really in that aircraft that took off from Schönefeld?
Whatever the explanation, Ellen could no longer delay going into hiding. Walter had probably been her great protector, and with him gone she decided to vanish. The last time Walter’s family saw her was at his funeral. Though it was a sweltering summer’s day, she showed up in a large fur coat with which she tried to conceal the bulging evidence of Walter’s Rassenschande: the ‘racial disgrace’ of sexual relations between an Aryan and a Jew, which were prohibited by the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’. She disappeared as soon as the coffin had been lowered into the ground.
That evening, she made for the remote countryside near Janowitz in Silesia, where, Klaus said, friends in the circle of the rebel cleric Pastor Niemöller had arranged for her to be hidden and to find forged identity papers. Four months later, she gave birth to Klaus.
Ellen never loved anyone as she had loved Walter. In losing him, she lost her own life too; she became severely depressed, started drinking, and by the end of the war was an alcoholic.
Then, in 1946, she met Friedrich Edelman. It certainly wasn’t more of the same. Far from being a Protestant, a Nazi, and a German, Freddy was a Jew, a Zionist, and an American. He had been born in Austria, fled to the United States when Hitler marched into Vienna, and was now back in Europe with the occupying US Army. But he didn’t intend to stay long in Germany. He wanted Ellen to move with him to Palestine, soon to be the State of Israel; and, in a striking reversal of the direction of travel in our family, he insisted that Klaus be raised as a Jew and no longer as a Christian.
Ellen craved a new life after losing both Walter and her father, but not quite as new as this. Unhappily resettled in Haifa, she was soon reversing the reversal: while Edelman steered Klaus towards Judaism, she, at the same time, prohibited him to learn about it. She demanded that Klaus leave the room any time a Jewish celebration was about to start, even one as routine as lighting the Sabbath candles. Only when it was all over and the prayer books had been locked away was he allowed back in. In fact, she wanted him to avoid not only Judaism but Jews – something of a challenge in Haifa – and encouraged him to look on their Jewish neighbours as strangers.
Edelman quickly made plans to return to America, ostensibly to start a business, but possibly because he was finding life with Ellen unendurable. She was missing Germany terribly and had never found in Edelman the vertiginous sense of safety that Walter and his family had inspired in her. In 1952, she departed with Klaus for Munich.
A few months after arriving back, Ellen met Heinrich Seidel. He was neither a Protestant nor a Jew, but a former Roman Catholic monk with a weakness for women and westerns. He made only one demand of her: Klaus had to convert to Catholicism.
The ten-year-old boy was duly transplanted from German-Jewish Haifa to a conservative Catholic orphanage in rural Bavaria in which Seidel worked as an orderly. There, he made friends with children who had lost their parents in the war and received his first Communion and his confirmation. Like me, he became an altar server.
The new family had some happy times, in particular at Christmas. Ellen would send Heinrich and Klaus out to the cinema while she prepared the crib under their Christmas tree, laid a festive dinner table, and cooked a goose. When they got back from the cinema, they would put on their best suits and wait patiently in the corridor of the small apartment until Ellen rang a bell that summoned them into the living room. In the middle of dinner, Heinrich would stand up and read the story of Christ’s birth from an old Bible that she had had bound for him in pigskin.
At Christmas, birthdays, or sunny weekends, the storm clouds over Ellen’s life would briefly part; but otherwise she was increasingly dogged by fears of persecution, and her alcoholism became crippling. She began to shut herself off from the world and often didn’t know which country she was living in. Like Ilse towards the end of her life, she became convinced that Nazis were encircling her and would turn her home into a killing zone. From the mid-1960s, she was barricading herself in her apartment and closing all the curtains ‘in case the Gestapo find us’.
One day, Klaus found her standing on a chair, pointing frantically in the direction of a skylight. ‘They are going to come through there; they are on their way to get us; they are going to deport us,’ she screamed. As soon as she woke up in the mornings, she reached for the bottle. She was screaming in her sleep and she was screaming by day. In 1971, she died of alcohol poisoning, aged fifty-two.
The Nazi, the Jew, the ex-monk: Ellen had been least troubled with Walter. But her letters to the young Staffelkapitän and the photos of them together seem to reveal something beyond delight in Walter for his own sake: namely, her euphoria at the primordial safety that she believed he could vouchsafe. His allure must have intensified as Theo became more isolated and depressed, unable to work, stripped of all civil rights, and finally deported and murdered.
Walter’s passion in those letters and photos feels more subdued. His happiness appears inflected with unease, even doubt. Perhaps he was naturally reserved; but was he also concerned at the almost godlike safety that she craved from him? Did her love become a burden when he realized the power of that craving? Did he worry whether its fearsome appetite could want anything about him that didn’t satisfy it?