Before he died, Albert told his son Hans-Joachim to continue battling to get Eichenberg returned to their family.
Taking his father’s wishes to heart, Hans-Joachim travelled to East Berlin with Annette not long after Albert’s death. They walked for an hour or two around the dilapidated building. The parts that Albert had paid to have repaired in the 1940s were still pristine, but otherwise it looked weary with neglect. Yet the visit only stiffened Hans-Joachim’s resolve to take it over and restore the range of products that it had made before the Aryanization. He began looking for an apartment for his wife and their children, but when Annette saw the tiny communist dwellings with their shabby interiors and run-down yards, not to mention the empty shops, she put her foot down. ‘You can go there, but without us,’ she told him. ‘I am not living in a communist country, for any factory in the world. This whole Eichenberg business destroyed your father’s marriage’ – Albert divorced in the late forties after his years in Berlin had estranged him from his wife of nearly four decades, whom he had left in their home town – ‘and if we go back to it, it will destroy ours.’
‘He thought that I’d like the boat on the Wannsee!’ she added.
‘The boat?’
Eichenberg, according to her, owned a boat on the Wannsee for entertaining its clients – along with a boathouse, or a share in one.
Eichenberg’s corporate boat was news to me. It certainly hadn’t tempted Annette to move to East Berlin. Nor was she prepared to compromise by living in West Berlin while her husband worked from Monday to Friday in the communist part of the city. That would have required him to cross the Wall twice a week, with all the security and the searches – an insane idea, she said.
As she spoke, I wondered if my grandfather’s boat on the Wannsee, which he and his family had occasionally sailed on summer weekends, was the same boat. My mother was always greatly amused by Ernst’s pride in it. It was one of her father’s touchingly naive ideas, she would say. Apart from being a financial millstone, Berlin’s long winters under low-hanging grey clouds made it unusable for much of the year; Ilse alone knew how to work it; and they could all think of better things to do with their free time than schlep out to the Wannsee only to expend hours preparing it to sail and then closing it up again at the end of the day.
Not to be deterred – or believing that his wife would change her mind once the factory was his again and she had laid eyes on the boat nestled in its wooden hut – Hans-Joachim engaged a lawyer to explore how he could get the business back. But he received the same advice as his father had a decade earlier. Even if he and his family became East German citizens, he was told, restitution in any form was unthinkable because the factory had been taken over under Nazi Aryanization laws. It wasn’t that the communist government cared about its expropriation from Jewish ownership, Annette emphasized; rather they weren’t going to help anyone who had benefited from Nazi policy.
After their meeting with the lawyer, they retraced their steps back to Eichenberg’s building. Hans-Joachim took out his camera and looked about him furtively. A passing pedestrian glanced at this Westerner and said sternly: ‘Over here, you are not allowed to photograph.’ He quickly took a few pictures with his camera concealed under an open coat, noticing the new name of the company: Fortschritt! – Progress!
Back home, he put the photos in that trunk in his cellar, which Annette had mentioned in our first telephone call. He would regularly go down there to dust them off and to imagine a new life in the communist east, reunited with his rightful inheritance and investing his future in Fortschritt!