Interlude Two

Exactly one week after the disastrous interview with Sigmund Pfeiffer, Jay had a call from one of the financial journalists he had consulted telling him that it was no longer a secret that the Littmann Bank was discreetly looking for ways to survive and that a number of senior executives, among them Pfeiffer, had been asked to take early retirement. Jay immediately phoned Pfeiffer’s secretary to ask her to whom he could now speak.

“Oh, Mr. Gordonson,” she said. “I am so glad you phoned. I never did ask you where you were staying. Otherwise I would have called you. Herr Walter Grossmann is assuming all of Herr Doktor Pfeiffer’s responsibilities.”

He made an appointment with him for the following Monday at eleven.

Jay, Hans and his girlfriend, Hildy, and the red-haired Cella were sitting together in the crowded and noisy pub in front of Hans’s garage-warehouse-office on the Textorstrasse, drinking beer and excitedly talking about Herzberg’s autobiographical fragments.

“It’ll be better than Premonitions,” Cella prophesied.

“It’ll sell well in Bucharest,” Hans declared. “You’re a great comfort to me, Cella. I’ve always known Bucharest is a hotbed of wife-swapping and immoralities of all kinds. The Paris of the Balkans.”

“Like Weimar,” an elderly, pleasantly professorial-looking gentleman at the next table interjected. He had been following the conversation with ever-increasing interest, consuming a succession of schnappses. “I mean Weimar in Goethe’s time. Not the sober, post-communist Weimar we have now.”

“That’s a somewhat fresh view of Goethe’s Weimar,” Hildy laughed. “Please explain yourself, mein Herr. That’s certainly not the way we learned it at school.”

“What do you think was going on in the house of Baron Fritz von Stein, whose bluestocking wife Charlotte carried on with that shameless poet from Frankfurt who had ingratiated himself so disgustingly with the local duke? Three letters a day for about ten years.”

“What’s wrong with writing letters?” Jay asked. “Nobody does it any more, so I don’t know anything about it. Was that all that happened — writing letters?”

“That was all,” the gentleman said. “A thoroughly frustrating arrangement. Until Goethe said ‘enough is enough,’ ran away to Italy and had a splendid time with a number of prostitutes.”

“I don’t see any similarities with our story,” Hildy said with a heavy frown.

“Well, I do,” the gentleman said, ordering another schnapps. “You don’t seriously think Herr Doktor Geisel was happy in the role of the Baron von Stein, do you?”

“We haven’t heard from him yet,” Hildy observed.

“Sooner or later you will. I don’t suppose anybody in your potboiler will want to compete with Goethe, who was a virgin until he was thirty-eight — even though in his twenties he wrote a bestseller about a Byronic love triangle that ended in suicide and he became a world celebrity. You can imagine how women adored him. No, don’t talk to me of Goethe.”

“Nobody did,” Jay said amiably.

“And after he was thirty-eight and the ice was broken, so to speak,” the professorial gentlemen went on, ignoring Jay, “what do you think of a man who couldn’t go to bed with a woman of his own class, only with women of what used to be called the lower classes such as his wife, whom his mother called his Bettschatz, his treasure of the bed. With others, of whatever class, he was apparently often a non-performer. Except with his pen.”

“What disgusting things did he do with his pen?” Cella inquired.

“Listen to this,” the gentleman said. “One day, en route to somewhere or other, he had to spend the night in a tavern in the country. First, he had to have his supper. The buxom waitress liked him. After he went up to his room, getting ready to go to bed, there was a knock at the door. It was the buxom waitress knocking — a situation we all dream about it. They embraced. He took off her clothes. They went to bed. He couldn’t do it. In the morning he wrote a poem about it in his diary, and explained he couldn’t do it because he was thinking of his wife. Can you imagine!”

The gentleman rose, asked for his bill, and said to the group at the table “Sorry to have butted in. Au revoir.”

Jay was present when Hans cross-examined Gisela Hanauer, née Geisel, in her comfortable apartment in the Schumannstrasse in Frankfurt’s west end. She was a psychologist whose job as guidance counsellor to several schools gave her time off during the summer. Gisela and her husband were separated. The apartment was on the top floor and there was no elevator.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

“A vital part is still missing before the book makes much sense,” Hans said. “Your grandfather’s part.”

“I realize that,” Gisela said. “Would you like another piece of Zwetschenkuchen? It’s not as good as my mother’s plum cake, but it’s the best I’ve found.”

“Yes, please. We must find out what he really thought of your grandmother’s rather bizarre vacation with Herzberg. Readers will want to know.”

“So do I,” she said. “When my husband started straying, I left him. In all other respects he is a perfectly nice man. It’s hard to imagine that we take marriage more seriously today than they did eighty years ago.”

“Maybe we do. Some of us anyway. So you say you are sure there were no clues in that leather case where you found Hanni’s diary, or in the story. And the photographs. No letters of any kind?”

“None.”

“And there is nobody around in Frankfurt who remembers him?”

“Look — they left in 1935! By the way, that’s the same year Herzberg left. For New York. Most likely they also saw each other there.”

Hans was deep in thought.

“There must be people there who remember them … Do you know what he did in those years in New York? It must have been hard. Geisel couldn’t take any money with him, could he? And he was not young. He must have been in his mid fifties. Too old to go to law school again. Did your father ever talk to you about that period?”

“Oh yes,” Gisela replied. “My grandfather wouldn’t have managed if the people in the New School at Columbia University hadn’t given him a small job to lecture on German jurisprudence. But that didn’t happen right away. The New School consisted largely of transplants from the Frankfurt Institute. But Teddy Adorno didn’t come until 1938. And he later went to California.”

Hans turned to Jay.

“Maybe you can find an excuse for your bank to send you to New York for a week and snoop around,” he suggested.

“I wish I could,” Jay said, shaking his head sadly.

There was silence.

“And Hermann died in 1939. And Hanni moved to California, where so many other refugees went, taking all her belongings with her, including whatever papers Hermann left behind. Did she know Thomas Mann?”

“Not until she went to the States. She met him in Los Angeles through Adorno. And she died in 1949, four years after my father returned to Frankfurt. The year I was born.”

This conversation clearly went nowhere.

The next day Nicola had a bright idea.

“Let’s simply put an ad in the paper and see what happens.”

And that’s what they did — with spectacular success.

A brewery worker in Sachsenhausen by the name of Franz Graubner replied. He was the grandson of Fanny Graubner, the Geisels’ cleaning lady.

He had inherited from her a brown envelope of letters and papers Hermann had given to her before they left.

With the brown envelope he also inherited a draft of a play and some notes for an operetta.

“This will be worth a million marks,” he said to his grandmother as he gave it to her. “When all this horror is over somebody will want to write my biography. Half of it will be yours.”