In late 1989, Annette said, days after the fall of the Wall, Hans-Joachim was struck by exactly the same idea as Renata and her cousin Inge-Margot would have during their conversation in Florida a year later – except he didn’t need Saddam Hussein to jog his memory. That property in Prenzlauer Berg! Now the moment had really come to get it back! At first, he thought that the best plan would be to do a deal with the heirs of the former Jewish owners, much as his father had tried to do with Herbert Liepmann. They would surely want to talk: after all, it wasn’t easy for people scattered around the world to repossess an old business and get it started again.
But then he thought better of it. Why go into coalition with the Jewish heirs? His case was surely stronger than theirs. As his father had rightly argued, it wasn’t their family’s fault that the original owners had been thrown out; but once they were, the place would have gone bankrupt if someone hadn’t come along and rescued it. And if they had stayed, would they have been able to persuade Göring’s Ministry to buy jackets and shirts off them? Could they have afforded repairs to the bomb damage, immediately after the war? Of course not. But beyond all that, his family had suffered a greater injustice than the Jewish heirs had; for at least Herbert Liepmann had received compensation back in 1954, whereas the communists had grabbed Eichenberg without paying his father a penny. Hence he was entitled to its restitution. He engaged a law firm to press this case.
Though not entirely without logic, Hans-Joachim’s arguments were hardly going to cut ice in 1990s Germany, and his claim for restitution was officially rejected in 1992. Like his father before him, he never got over the loss of Eichenberg. He would say: ‘My goodness! How can all this that my family built up, with so much love and effort and money, now be gone?’ And then, Annette added, he would try to console himself: ‘We were like the German aristocrats who lost their ancestral estates behind the Iron Curtain.’ After the communist takeover of East Germany, she said, they also suffered the confiscation of what they loved and was rightfully theirs. He recognized there was nothing he could do, but he couldn’t accept it.
Again, like his father before him, he told his son always to remember Eichenberg and how much their family had done for the firm. Shortly before he died in 2005, Annette said, he gave his son a share certificate of the company. ‘Keep that in memory of our beloved Eichenberg,’ he had said. ‘Let its memory live. It was ours.’
Annette had been telling me all this in our phone calls; her openness amazes me now, as it did then. Her story flowed whole and vivid, as if it had occupied her for years. Though I had no further pressing questions to ask, I wanted to see that trunk in her cellar, stuffed with Eichenberg papers. Above all, I coveted the share certificate bearing the firm’s Aryanized name, VEWAG, that she’d offered to give me. Perhaps it was just the thrill of holding a document that non-Aryan hands couldn’t have held in 1942, when the new name was registered; and of touching history in however token a way.
I decided to visit her on my next trip to Germany, a few weeks later.
But our evening was uneventful. Annette and I had already exhausted the subject in our calls. And being face to face was oddly inhibiting, as if trying to establish a personal connection made it harder to discuss this intensely personal matter; whereas, talking as strangers down a phone line, we’d been unguarded and relaxed.
When the time came to leave her house, it felt an abrupt change of gear to remind her of the trunk and the share certificate.
‘Of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come down to the cellar, but I’m not sure there is as much there as I had thought.’
There was nothing – not a single paper about the firm. There was a lot about other family businesses back to the 1930s; and there were documents from the 1940s and ’50s that seemed to concern the car dealership.
‘No Eichenberg papers at all?’ I persisted.
‘Oh, I did find a photocopy of the 1954 court judgement about the 40,000 Deutsche marks that we paid Herbert Liepmann and the other Jewish people from England,’ she said, as we were leafing through yet another file on the car business. ‘I put it upstairs on the coffee table. You can have that, if you wish.’
‘I know that document; it’s in my own Eichenberg file,’ I told her.
‘Well, they got the 40,000 and then the building back. I think they should at least have refunded my husband what his father spent repairing the damage inflicted by British and American bombs. We should have got that money back!’
She spoke in a strident tone that had earlier been completely absent. But now was hardly the time to reopen all that history. Besides, her husband’s lawyer had already demanded, several times, that we refund the 40,000 – though, as far as I knew, he hadn’t also claimed the money that Albert had spent repairing the bombed roof.
‘And the share certificate with the Aryanized – the new – name?’ I asked again as we climbed back up from the cellar.
But she had changed her mind. I wasn’t going to get the trophy I wanted.
Her voice became colder still, as if the tangibility of the Aryanized share certificate brought home her family’s loss of Eichenberg with a vividness that banished the charm of reconciliation with us, the descendants of the original owners. The only document she was prepared to give me, she repeated, was a photocopy of the 1954 court judgement that had gone against her father-in-law and that, in her mind, justified financial compensation from the Jewish families to hers.
But I already had that – in duplicate.
‘Why can’t you give me one of the certificates in the name of VEWAG?’ I asked yet again. ‘It would mean a lot to me – and you said that you had several of them.’
I was about to point out that a share certificate in an abolished company, denominated in an abolished currency, and issued by an abolished state was surely of no practical use to either of us, when she said:
‘You never know, one day my son or his descendants might need it.’