NILS SCHREIBER

Story

I CAN SUMMARIZE THE “INTRIGUE” in a paragraph. One of the top Stasi men was of hitherto well-obscured Jewish origins. After the East German collapse, he became fearful of prosecution in the West. He wished to emigrate but no country would take him. Proving beyond doubt what rich veins of irony these old GDR autocrats were capable of opening, what mines of dark absurdist bitterness, this formerly conventional Communist anti-Zionist began a covert negotiation with Israel based on the Jewish law of return. The negotiation involved, as intermediaries, certain trustees of one of the Jewish reparation funds in Germany, and in particular, Franz Rosen and by extension his boss Herbert Kaminski. The Stasi man, Mischa Lander, brought what pressure he could on Rosen and Kaminksi to effect his purposes, and offered a large bribe as well: he could obtain from the collapsed GDR a million gas masks, which Israel was said to need. The Gulf War was approaching. Israel had good reason to fear gas attacks from Iraq. But even in such conditions, Israel refused to accept Lander’s offer. It said it had enough gas masks anyway. What it did not say was that it felt it could not afford to alienate our newly powerful, reunited Germany. Franz Rosen, the trustee of the reparation fund and a wartime Berlin hero, was distressed by the collapse of this deal. For some time he had had a Palestinian lover, a young man who persuaded him that, yes, Israel had perhaps enough gas masks to protect its citizens, but few for all the Arabs in its occupied territories, who, given the erratic tendencies both of gas and Saddam’s likely ballistics, were in as grave a danger as the Israelis. Whether this was accurate or not I cannot say, but Franz Rosen was both distressed and outraged by what he took to be a moral lapse on Israel’s part. So he skimmed the interest from the reparation fund which he was managing and bought the gas masks himself, intending to deliver them to entities in the occupied territories for distribution there. I learned about the skimming from records which our friend Oksana had “borrowed” from her husband, and which were in the trunk of her car when she died in the crash. I had to bribe the Italian highway police to get hold of the suitcase which contained them. Most of the rest of the story I got from Franz’s Palestinian boyfriend, who had been betraying him right along, revealing to me Franz’s crime in order, presumably, to embarrass Israel in Germany at a delicate time. I came to believe, without actual proof, that this boyfriend was acting as an agent for one of the frontline Arab states, perhaps Syria. In all events, I “caught” Franz Rosen.

A long paragraph, but there it is. But the “intrigue” was not the real story, in my view. The real story, in my view, had to do with my newspaper, and journalistic standards, and ethics. I presented the story to my paper fairly much as I had put it together. My editor refused to publish. And why? For a complete answer you would have to know the financial straits that our alternativ paper found itself in that year. Like much of Berlin’s cultural life, it had come into being through the help of grants. Throughout the Cold War, the Western powers had been eager to promote West Berlin as a cultural capital. Now that the Cold War was over, and the vast expenses of reunification were upon us, such grants began quickly to seem superfluous. Our paper, which had been fine and brave in its best days and plain silly in others, was in danger of going under.

This is what Kröller, my editor, said, in response to my story: “It’s premature, Schreiber.”

I had worked on the piece for months. I had five key facts down incontrovertibly. I flew into my version of a rage, which was to feel my voice get as tight as my neck. “Premature? You wait much longer, you wait till the war’s over, you’ll have to put the story in a walker.”

“You haven’t given Rosen chance to rebut.”

“How can I? He’s fled, he’s gone to ground.”

“Find him.”

“Oh for God’s sake. Do you wait to publish every crime story till the criminal’s caught?”

“Besides…Herbert Kaminski has reimbursed the reparation fund.”

“What?”

“Out of his own pocket. I was waiting for you to walk in here. Kaminski himself called. No harm done. Completely mortified about the entire incident.”

“And doesn’t want the story out.”

“Now you can drop the sarcasm, alright? You, Schreiber, of all people, ought to be sensitive, in Germany you don’t implicate a Jew in a financial scandal before you have all the facts straight.”

So that was that. Or not quite that. Forty-eight hours later it was happily announced that the Herbert Kaminski Foundation had made a four million mark grant to our prize-winning alternativ paper so that it could continue its fearless brand of journalism. A “no strings attached” grant, a lifesaver, a tribute as well to the brokenhearted integrity of Herbert Kaminski, who put his deceased wife’s name onto the gift as well. Kröller phoned me with the brilliant news. He liberally sprinkled the phrase “no strings attached.” He promised me if I found Franz Rosen, he would reconsider publication.

And even this wasn’t the whole story, if you bothered to ask my heart. The whole story my heart would nominate would have to include my number one girl, who in the months I’d known her, until his disappearance, had grown increasingly close to Franz Rosen. They kept bumping into each other and then Holly discovered that Rosen’s uncle had had a summer house on the lake where her parents had theirs. They met in a piano bar to discuss this and Holly came home in tears. It was the first time I’d seen her in tears. She told me their conversation word for word. It had begun with Holly herself telling Franz that her parents had been happy at their summer house, that it was why she was pursuing her claim, that it was the happy time of their lives. To which, per my number one girl, Franz replied: “Yes, perhaps they were. Of course within the limits of each person’s capacity for such things. My uncle certainly felt arrived, pleased with himself. This self-, I don’t know what to call it, self-something, self-acceptance, I suppose, despite all the bad conscience of the Jew in Germany. Being told you’re rootless. Being told you didn’t belong. In all sorts of books and so on. And then looking at the land beneath your feet and it’s all true… You’ve trod it for however many years, but never enough, and a little slip of paper obtained through other little slips of paper says it’s yours. And blood, and most of seventy million people, saying, not really, you never bled for this land… Such a barbaric concept, don’t you agree? To have to bleed for land for it to be yours. Though even this game we played! The lists drawn up, the accountings, of the Jews that fought and died in 1914… Of course, I speak out of my feelings, perhaps not your father’s or mother’s whatsoever.”

Or perhaps I’ve filled in a few of his words. But a few such words can make a friend forever. Thereafter Holly was his defender whenever the subject of Franz came up, which it inevitably did, since I was working on it all the time. Once she told me that I was only doing it for the irony of it all. Another time she asked me if I was enjoying my little ironic turns over her body.

“Your body?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s how it feels, yes. You slay Franz, you slay me.”

“That’s unfair.”

“At least it’s not ironic,” she said.