Prelude

Jay was pleased when that strange-looking man in a dark red open shirt and jeans spoke to him. He always seemed to be there when Jay dropped in for a beer between his various errands. The man was usually alone, reading a book. He was short, had a lively, mobile face, a defiant chin and almost no neck. He was probably around his own age, in his early thirties. His face reminded Jay of the Punch in Punch-and-Judy shows.

They were sitting at adjoining tables in the pleasantly rundown Roland Bar on the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt.

It was a Wednesday in July and the weather was lovely.

“Do you work at a bank around here?” the man asked. It was a safe question — Jay wore a dark grey suit and there were a number of skyscraper-banks in the neighbourhood.

“Well, not exactly.”

It was not the first time Jay had been asked that question. He was in Frankfurt on a confidential mission to scout out the possibility of his Canadian employer, the Bank of Ontario, buying the venerable old Littmann Bank, which had nearly been wiped out by the recession and, if there was such a possibility, to prepare the ground for its acquisition. The bank’s numerous connections with Eastern Europe made it attractive. Of course, he could not reveal all this to a stranger. But his nature was communicative and he was intrigued by the man’s Punch-like qualities.

“I am a Canadian and I’m here to buy the Deutsche Bank,” he declared, his expression deadly serious.

“What a good idea.” Punch nodded thoughtfully. “The chairman of the board told me the other day he was looking for a new owner. A Canadian bank would be just right. Wide open spaces and all that. I am sure such an idea has never occurred to him. He knows the present owner is too old-fashioned, narrow and unimaginative to meet the new challenges we keep hearing about. By the way, would you rather I speak English?”

“Oh no, thank you,” Jay responded “I must practise my German. It is very rusty, I’m afraid. But it’s good of you to ask.”

“Are you enjoying Frankfurt?”

“Too soon to tell,” Jay responded, inspecting his fingernails. “I’ve only been here for a few days. And, incidentally, my name is Jay Gordonson.”

“And mine Hans Kielmann. Unlike most of my friends, I don’t mind bankers.”

“What a relief. So what do you do?”

Hans pointed to his book.

“I sell old books on the internet. Antiquarisch. I don’t know how you say that in English. I leave new books to Amazon.”

“You mean you sell second-hand books?”

“Yes. If you’re looking for anything specific, say the early poems by Johann Gottfried Seume, you can ask me and I may be able to find them for you. Somewhere or other.”

“Do you have an office or do you sit at home in front of your computer?”

“I have a little room around the corner in the Weserstrasse because it’s convenient to have a foot in the centre of town. I am also helping a cousin of mine set up a children’s bookstore around the corner on the Elbestrasse. But my real office is a garage in Sachsenhausen. Would you like to see it? Say—on Saturday morning?”

“Nothing would please me more.”

On Thursday and Friday Jay circled around the Littmann Bank. Before the Second World War its headquarters had been in the old part of town, on the Allerheiligenstrasse. It was bombed out. After the war the new office was on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, next to the post office at the corner of the Niedenau. Jay only inspected it from outside. He met with investment people, some in skyscrapers, some in modest buildings on side streets, to get a feel for the situation. He also had talks with several financial experts and knowledgeable business reporters. The impression he developed was that the Littmann Bank was indeed in desperate trouble.

When he was ready to talk to the bank directly, he phoned to make an appointment with Sigmund Pfeiffer, one of the partners who, two years earlier, had worked with the Bank of Ontario to bail out a Polish bicycle manufacturer. Jay’s plan was to say that he was in Frankfurt on other business, but, since the two banks had worked so well together in the past, he was wondering whether they might cooperate on other matters.

Unfortunately, the secretary said, Herr Doktor Pfeiffer was on vacation in Tuscany, but would be back on Thursday. Would eleven in the morning be convenient?

“Of course,” Jay said.

Thanks to his quick wit, his friendly blue eyes, his boyish charm and his easy conversation, he was usually well received, and not only by girls— some even wanted to marry him, a proposition he had so far successfully resisted. It was not apparent at first that he was relentless in the pursuit of whatever task was assigned to him, and impatient and irascible whenever there was danger of a diversion. Thanks to these qualities he had quickly worked his way up to his present position, in which he had recently had some remarkable successes, especially in connection with the Bank of Ontario’s acquisition of the Riddell Trust in Virginia. His superiors gave him full marks for discovering early in the game that Goldman Sachs had been eyeing it, so that the Bank of Ontario could snatch it before they did.

Jay’s status was that of special counsellor reporting directly to the vice-president of merger and acquisitions. One would search in vain for his position on any organization chart.

He was staying at the Hotel Diana in the Westendstrasse, near the Mendelssohnstrasse, a conveniently situated private residence converted to a comfortable small hotel. Jay preferred it to the ritzy hotels in which upper-level business people normally stayed.

On Saturday morning at ten Hans Kielmann picked him up. This time Jay wore not a banker’s suit but a short-sleeved blue shirt and grey slacks. It was pleasantly warm. Hans drove an unwashed, beaten-up old Volkswagen. The back seat was covered with books. It was not clear to Jay why he took the trouble to be so nice to him. Was he so pleasant to everybody?

As they were driving across the bridge over the river Main, Jay asked him outright.

“Surely you have better things to do on a Saturday morning in midsummer than to show your office to a mysterious stranger from Canada who likes German beer?”

“No, I can’t think of any,” Hans replied. “You’re the first Canadian I’ve ever met in the flesh. Please admire the view.”

It was indeed a memorable view — the Dom, the other churches, the rows of old houses along the river with the skyscrapers behind them forming a dramatic contrast. The word “cityscape” came to mind.

“You can’t compete with that in Canada,” Hans observed. “Can you?”

“Oh yes, we can,” Jay shot back. “When you approach Montreal from the south and look across the St. Lawrence River it looks pretty terrific. And as you may remember from the Olympics not so long ago, the view of Vancouver from the sea is spectacular.”

“Yes, I saw it. Not bad, I admit.”

“How old is Frankfurt?”

“Let me see … Charlemagne was our founding father. He was crowned in Rome around the year eight hundred. You figure it out. But the Romans had been here already.”

“I took history as an undergraduate but my father persuaded me to switch to economics for my graduate work. I now think he was right. There’s no future in the past. Unless you collect old things. Or sell books — what was the word? — antiquarisch. But my heart is still in history.”

By now they were driving down the Schweizerstrasse.

A few blocks after crossing the river, Hans turned to the left and drove along the Textorstrasse. He stopped outside a shabby tavern where, so the sign said, they served beer and Appelwein.

“Here we are.”

He drove into a driveway and parked in front of the garage. They got out of the car and entered the garage. It was filled with rows of bookshelves.

A young man was sitting behind a computer.

“Freddie, let me introduce you to a real live Canadian.”

Freddie was a student in German literature who was spending the summer working as one of Hans’s three assistants. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and shorts.

They shook hands.

“I understand you have three days of summer in Canada,” Freddie said. “Is that true?”

“No,” Jay replied. “Four.”

“Oh, by the way,” Freddie turned to Hans, “there’s an order for ten copies of Premonitions.”

“Good. From whom?”

“Somebody in New Zealand.”

“Freddie, could you please show a copy to our friend while I produce some coffee.”

Hans went to the sink, picked up three cups and put on the kettle. Freddie found a paperback on a shelf near the window. It had an attractive golden-brown cover with a pattern that looked like a skirt worn by one of those luscious Viennese beauties painted by Gustav Klimt.

“This is Hans’s pride and joy,” Freddie said as he handed it to Jay. “It’s his own work. Mind you, some of us helped him a little. It was fun putting all the pieces together. Got the Bavarian Book of the Year Prize.”

Jay looked at the back cover. It said that the work was about Schwabing, a magnet for artists, writers, freethinkers and many others who wanted to escape from bourgeois life in the decade before 1914.

“Where is Schwabing?” Jay asked.

“A neighbourhood in Munich. Now indistinguishable from any other neighbourhood. But then — a great big bubble of creative energy, brimming over with big ideas about the future.”

“Is that why you called it Premonitions?”

“Exactly.” Hans had returned with the coffee. “We did it for people like you,” he said. “History buffs. All kinds of celebrity thinkers were there, more or less at the same time. Lenin, rightwing poets like Stefan George and his crowd, Wassily Kandinsky, the Countess of Reventlow who was the leader of the free love movement, Thomas Mann, Adolf Hitler…”

“He was there, too?”

“Yes, even Adolf Hitler. At the very end. In 1913. A refugee from Vienna, which he hated. He loved Schwabing. But our main character was Otto Gross, a brilliant disciple of Freud. A kind of tragic genius, a drug addict, now totally forgotten. Women were crazy about him. It was a lot of hard slogging, digging up stuff about him. Finding it in unexpected places, such as an old castle near Pilsen. Somebody should make a movie about him.”

They drank their coffee. Jay expected Hans to ask him what he was doing in Frankfurt and whether he had any connection to a particular bank. There was never again any reference to Jay’s silly joke about the Deutsche Bank.

“May I have a look at some of your books?” Jay asked.

“But of course.” Hans led the way to one of the shelves in the back.

“You asked about the old Frankfurt. Local history is here.”

The shelves were filled with books about old Frankfurt families, politics, business and, of course, the Rothschilds.

Jay was fascinated. He picked a book about the old ghetto.

“Enough of this!” Hans said suddenly, all excited. “Who needs these dusty old books? Let me show you the real old Frankfurt as it lives and breathes. Or rather, what’s left of it.” He led Jay back to the car.

The weather could not have been better. They drove along various side streets in the direction of Offenbach, to the Gerbermühle, a complex of new buildings along the river. One of its attractions was a large garden. A number of people were sunning themselves. Children were chasing a ball.

“You’ve no doubt seen the Goethehaus.”

“I have.”

“So you know something about Goethe. Even Canadians must have heard of him. There was an old mill here, and a villa that belonged to an adventurous widowed banker by the name Johann Jakob von Willemer, an old friend of Goethe, a generous patron of actresses and dancers.”

“Did you say he was a banker?” Jay asked.

“Yes, so the textbooks say.”

“A competitor of old Littmann?”

“They probably hated each other. Why do you ask?”

Why not tell him, Jay wondered.

“My bank has his eyes on the Littmann Bank,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Aha,” Hans said. “That makes a lot of sense. “They are nearly — what is the English term I like so much — you know — like a fish…”

“Belly up.”

“Oh yes. Belly up. Lovely. Or — there’s another English phrase for it — ripe for the plucking. This time it’s a chicken.”

“We hope so.”

“How far have you got?”

“I am seeing one of their people on Thursday.”

“Good luck! Now let’s talk about important things. I was telling you about Goethe.”

“So you were. You were saying he hung around with bankers.”

“Yes, he did. He was well known for choosing his friends carefully. He did not like the poor. As a matter of fact, he celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday right here. Willemer had kind of adopted an alluring actress-dancer with tousled hair by the name of Marianne Jung, of uncertain Viennese origins. It was said he bought her from her impecunious mother, also an actress, for two hundred guilders. He introduced Marianne to Goethe. Goethe was charmed. Because of her he often came here. She was no longer in the first flush of youth — about thirty when she met Goethe. One of the things that charmed him was her amazing gift for poetry. They played charades and masquerades together and began writing love poems to each other. She assumed the role of the oriental beauty Suleika. Her poems were as good as his. Maybe better. He included hers in his wonderful collection Der Westöstliche Diwan and never thought of giving her credit for her contributions. Typical. He was very fond of himself. Nobody would know about it if she had not told a friend many years later, when she was an old lady. But the story ended happily when the enterprising old banker married her. He happened to be a widower. Right here, at the Gerbermühle. Too bad Goethe already had a wife.”

The Littmann Bank was an elegant grey building, designed in the best postmodern style of the nineteen-fifties, not much larger than the usual pre–World War One residences of the Frankfurt west end.

“Oh, I am so sorry, Mr. Gordonson,” Pfeiffer’s handsome secretary said. “I phoned several hotels but you were not listed. I wanted to tell you that Herr Doktor Pfeiffer has decided to stay a little longer in the Toscana. He will definitely be back on Thursday.”

“I understand,” Jay said. It would have been a little impolitic to say he probably does not have much to do in Frankfurt anyway at the moment.

“Shall we say on Thursday morning at eleven?” the secretary asked.

“That’s fine, thank you.”

It was only a minor blow. It gave him a few more days to talk to people. Hans introduced him to a number of his friends. He met Hans’s girlfriend, with whom he shared a basement apartment in the Wolfgangstrasse. Her name was Hildy Soden. She was an elementary schoolteacher and had dimples and a stub nose. Jay found her delightful.

Among the people he also met were Werner Schenker and his wife, Anna. He had a travel agency and she was a social worker. They had both been to Canada and insisted on speaking English with him. Hans also introduced him to Claire Sommerlatt, a white-haired lady who had become a friend because she ordered books for the medical faculty at the university, and to Hin Lee Wong, who played the viola in the symphony orchestra and was married to Yvonne, an alluring professor of French who came from Dijon. Hans played the violin and sometimes he and Hin Lee played in the same string quartet.

And there was also the flamboyant, red-haired Cella Lubescu, born in a village near Bucharest. She sold tennis equipment in a sporting goods store in Bockenheim. At one time she had been a roommate of Hildy’s. Cella had a loud voice and a strong Romanian accent. Jay could understand only half of what she said, in German or in English.

What a contrast to the gorgeous, soft-spoken Nicola Wenzel, a radio producer at the Hessische Rundfunk, with sparkling blue eyes and a gentle, velvety voice. She had a daily afternoon show, with all kinds of interesting guests. He found her immensely attractive. Since she knew many people, professionally and privately, it was most flattering to him that she liked him, too, although only — so she often announced publicly — because of the shape of his ears. She explained that she always judged men by their ears.

The third time he took her out, on a Sunday evening, they had dinner at a small Italian restaurant in a side street off the Bockenheimer Warte. It had a pleasant garden at the back and was frequented mostly by people from the university, only a few blocks away.

By now Jay had told her quite a lot about himself but he had not yet mentioned the Littmann Bank. When he eventually did he discovered that she knew quite a lot about it.

“It was the second biggest bank in Frankfurt until the Rothschilds came along,” she told him. “When Napoleon retreated from Russia in 1813 he couldn’t decide whether to spend a few days to relax and recover at the Bethmann Bank or at the Littmann Bank. Both had secluded residences outside the city and both had sent him invitations. They were in hot competition, about this and everything else. The defeated emperor stayed with the Bethmanns. The Littmanns never forgave him. They are still sulking about it.”

“Is that the only thing that’s on their mind?”

Before Nicola could answer, a jovial, middle-aged lady came over.

“May I butt in?” she asked.

Nicola said she was delighted and introduced Jay, a friend from Canada.

“No doubt you had him as a guest on your afternoon show,” the lady said, pulling up a chair and sitting down,. “I’m sure he told you all about snow and ice and Eskimos. Don’t believe a word of what he says.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Nicola assured her. She turned to Jay. “This is Gisela Hanauer, who does occasional book reviews for me. Gisela, Jay is a friend of Hans’s.”

“How fortunate you mention Hans,” Gisela said. “I called him this morning and left a message. I have something that may be just up his alley. I think I discovered a goldmine.”

“Hans likes goldmines,” Nicola observed.

“I was thinking of his Premonitions. This may be the beginning of something just as good. Maybe even better. I don’t know whether I ever spoke to you about my grandparents.”

“I don’t think you did.”

“They left Frankfurt in 1935 and went to America. My grandfather Hermann Geisel was a lawyer who was in the black books of the Nazis because he had made a name for himself as a relentless researcher of the misdeeds of the Weimar judges, who grossly favoured all those early Nazi murderers. It didn’t help that my grandparents were Jewish. My grandfather died in New York in 1939, just after the war broke out. My grandmother Hanni survived him by ten years. She was an amazing lady who was a great hostess in her day and played the violin. She also wrote very well and had literary ambitions. By the way, my grandfather played the cello and collected Expressionist paintings. Yes, they were quite a couple. They had a lovely house on the Untermainkai that was destroyed during the bombing.

“Now, it so happens that I found a little brown leather case among the books they left behind. It contained Hanni’s diary from the year 1927, and a few loose photographs. Her handwriting was terrible! But there was also an extraordinary typewritten story that she probably hoped to publish. No idea why she left these things behind. Maybe because she wanted to make a clean break with the past. The story is quite amazing. There may be all kinds of reasons why she didn’t want to take it along.”

“Amazing?” Nicola asked. “Why?”

“It’s about the beginnings of a love affair. Written in the third person. A love affair with Erwin Herzberg, a prominent journalist and film critic who later became very well known as the author of From Fritz Lang to Leni Riefenstahl. But it’s not hard to guess that it’s really about herself.”

“She could easily have torn it up. Or burned it.”

“Maybe she secretly hoped that one day it would be discovered.”

“As it has been.”

“How long had your grandparents been married?”

“Nearly twenty years.”

“How old was your grandmother in 1927?”

“Let me see. Not so young any more. She must have been about forty-five. The same age as my grandfather. They had two teenage sons, Karli and Tommy, Karli being my father, who died five years ago. If he knew anything about a love affair of his mother’s in 1927 he never mentioned it. My father was one of the few refugees who came back after the war, while his mother stayed behind in the United States. He could easily have got a job playing the trumpet in any American orchestra but he came home to play the trumpet at the Frankfurt opera.”

“And never regretted coming back?” Nicola said.

“Not as far as I know. Anyway, he couldn’t very well say so because the real reason he came back was to marry my mother.”

Gisela turned to Jay.

“When you see Hans, will you please ask him to call me?”

Jay promised he would. They spent the rest of the evening listening to Gisela’s stories about her guests, one of whom, a writer, had been in Toronto to attend the annual festival of authors.

The following morning, Jay and Hans met Gisela for coffee. Without barely saying a word, she handed Hans the little brown leather case. He read through the 1927 diary and the accompanying short story with lightning speed and ever-accelerating excitement. He seemed to have no difficulty deciphering the handwriting. Soon he was convinced the diary and the short story had to become the core of another Premonitions. They revolved around the International Exhibition of Music in 1927 in the Festhalle and “The Summer of Music,” the first occasion after 1918 when Germany was allowed once again to play a role in the world’s cultural life, occasions that had now been totally forgotten. Yes, these documents simply had to be published. Moreover, an extramarital love affair lurking in the background made the story absolutely irresistible. But would these documents stand up by themselves? Would they not raise too many unanswered questions?

Soon Jay was as involved in the documents as Hans, which put him in a difficult situation. He was, after all, in Frankfurt on business. He had a specific assignment, entirely within his range, and it was the sort of thing he was good at. Normally, he was relentless in pursuit of his objective, like a terrier, looking neither right nor left. He had made a reputation for himself — not as a mere detective, not as a mere diplomat, not as a mere problem solver, although he had all these skills — but as a hound dog. The problem was that hound dogs are not usually history buffs. As far as scholars can tell, they don’t even have private lives. They may sniff at the odd lamppost, but, generally speaking, they know only one thing — and that is to be a hound dog. Jay had an appointment with Pfeiffer on Thursday. The mental preparation for it should occupy all the spaces in his mind. Now this diary, and this story, evoking a fascinating moment in the Weimar Republic, came along. It was more than one little lamppost. It turned out to be the Holy Grail of lampposts.

“Why was the Weimar Republic called the Weimar Republic?” he asked Hans.

“Because of Goethe, of course,” Hans laughed. “The best Germany had to offer, even if he cheated Marianne out of immortality. Goethe left his native Frankfurt for Weimar when he was in his twenties and rarely came back except to see Marianne. Weimar was the reason why for a long time Germany was considered the land of poets and thinkers. Largely because of Goethe. And when in 1919 the politicians were looking for a suitable place to compose a republican constitution, after the flight of the Kaiser in 1918 and the revolution, Weimar seemed to be just the right spot, mainly for symbolic reasons.”

For Jay all this opened up another era, another universe, less than a century ago, full of new names, full of politics and, surprisingly, full of music, something he knew little about. It also gave him a crystal-clear impression of Gisela’s grandparents, Hermann and Hanni Geisel, and their role in Frankfurt society in the nineteen-twenties. The few photographs slipped between the pages of that leather-bound notebook of course helped enormously. Hermann was in good shape for a man of forty-five, although he had lost most of his hair. He had a wellsculpted, noble nose and an amiable mouth. As a socialist and pacifist, Jay learned from the diary, he held passionate convictions and devoted much of his spare time to documenting miscarriages of justice committed by parts of the mostly right-wing judiciary that had survived from the Kaiser’s days and opposed the Weimar Republic. He regularly published his findings in journals and books.

Hanni was elegant and attractive but far from beautiful. The diary mentioned that a visitor from Paris once called her une jolie laide, a plain woman who was good-looking. She was clearly a talented violinist and at one time considered becoming a professional. She was also a good writer. She hoped one day to publish a collection of her short stories.

Every Saturday, from one to four, she presided over one of Frankfurt’s most sought-after déjeuners. There, carefully chosen guests conducted lively, often heated conversations while enjoying dishes prepared by a former chef of the Frankfurter Hof and consuming vintage wines.

Hans asked Freddie to dig up a few press reports about the International Exhibition of Music in 1927.

He came up with these:

The task, which the organizers of the international exhibition [Music in the Lives of the World’s People] have set themselves, is very high — reconciliation through the power of music.

– Münchner Zeitung

The exhibition is one of the greatest events in the history of music.

– The New York Times

One should try to persuade all music-lovers to travel to Frankfurt. There they will find a unique exhibition and be able to listen to the best orchestras and concerts available anywhere today.

– L’Intransigeant, Paris

Last Sunday thirty-five thousand visitors passed the gates of the exhibition. For some hours in the afternoon no additional people were admitted to contain the crowds.

– New York Herald

This is an international event as had not been seen since before the war.

– Luzerner Neueste Nachrichten