MY LETTER TO MERSEBURG IN East Germany produced an unsurprising silence, but their lack of courtesy and cooperation only made me more certain that they were the ones who held all the secrets in their vaults. I felt if I could just persuade them to unearth those secrets they would reveal the whole story. The ever-increasing layers of mystery, and the brick walls of silence that I kept coming up against, made me all the more determined to find a way to convince the East Germans to open their archives up to me.
Aware that Ken and the boys may already be growing weary of my obsession—my constant talking about it and my gnawing frustration as I seemed to be going nowhere—I had been staying off the subject as much as possible at home. But the puzzle was still churning around in my brain every waking hour and often in my dreams, the unanswered questions eating away at me. I knew the moment was approaching when I was going to have to win Ken over to my cause and persuade him to come with me to Germany, a place that held a great many mixed memories for both of us.
“Let’s go to visit the archive in Dahlem,” I said breezily over breakfast one morning, hoping that if I talked fast enough he wouldn’t have time to think of all the reasons why he didn’t want to go. “We need to meet these archivists face-to-face if we want to win them to the cause. Then while we are there, perhaps we can go over to the East and visit the archive in Merseburg.”
I hoped I had said that casually enough not to alarm him, but there was no chance of that. If nothing else, I had succeeded in gaining his full attention. It was now 1973, more than three years after my mother had died and the notebook had passed to me. We had been back to Germany a few times since the end of the war, the last time in 1966 when we had taken the children to see my family’s flat in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg and my old school, both of which had miraculously survived the bombs and the postwar reconstruction. It had been an emotional experience, bringing back numerous long-buried memories, and I think Ken had hoped that I would accept it as a closure on that part of my life. This time, however, it was different. I was asking him to go into the Communist East in case we had to take on German officialdom there.
“Dahlem, okay,” Ken sighed, looking up from the plate of food he had been attacking with gusto. “But Merseburg? Think carefully, Eve. Have you any idea what it was like for me getting my parents out of Germany? Are you really asking me to go back in there again and face another dictatorship?”
I realized just how much I was asking of him by suggesting we go back. Having already escaped from Nazi Germany to London, Ken went back to Frankfurt in 1938 to arrange false papers for his parents. He had previously worked at the Dresdner Bank as their youngest ever foreign exchange dealer, and a bank director agreed to help him with the papers. Ken knew that the man was a leading local Nazi and could well betray him, but was forced to trust him. It was a chance he had to take because there was no alternative. The gods were smiling on Ken, because he managed to obtain the papers for his parents and that night, as he was mailing a letter, an anonymous passing woman warned him that he was in great danger. Miraculously, Ken escaped safely back to England that very night.
“It’s a different world over there now, Ken.” I tried to make light of his worries, although I understood all too well just how much I was asking of him because the idea frightened me as well. The prospect of never being able to find out the truth about August and Emilie, however, was worse. I felt I had to take the risk and, selfishly perhaps, I didn’t want to take it without Ken, my protector, at my side.
“Eve,” he spoke patiently, as if trying to explain to a rather dim child the error of her ways, “the East is a totalitarian regime that tortures spies and incarcerates human beings for no reason. Ring any bells? You were born in East Germany. They could hold you there forever if they chose to. Just the thought of being within their reach is unbearable, don’t you understand that?”
“We’ll take Anthony as security,” I said brightly. “He was born in England.”
I was confident that our eldest son, who was twenty-three, would be up for a bit of an adventure. He had not had to live through the horrors of the war and the Holocaust and consequently had all the confidence of a young citizen of the modern world. He had recently won a short film award at the National Film Theatre and was planning a career in television and films, so I was sure he would be happy to spare us a few days for a mission this interesting. Feeling that the adventure I was determined to embark on might end up becoming all-consuming, I had called our three sons together when I decided to pursue the secrets of the notebook and told them exactly what I was planning to do and why I wanted to do it. It was, after all, their heritage I would be investigating just as much as it was mine. Over the following months they had become almost as excited by the story of Emilie and Prince August as I had. Despite his reservations about the wisdom of the whole venture, I also knew that Ken would be there to support me once he realized I intended to go anyway and that I could not be talked out of it however hard he might try. I knew there was no way he would ever consider letting me go to such a dangerous place on my own.
Sure enough, a few weeks later Ken, Anthony and I arrived in West Berlin. At that time the western half of the city I had known as a child was a tiny, walled-off island of democracy, marooned in the East since the end of the Second World War after the victorious Allies divided the defeated German Empire. West Berlin was accessible only by air and heavily guarded to prevent anyone disenchanted with communism from escaping to the West. It felt so strange to be back among those familiar streets and buildings. Some I could still remember so clearly from my happy early childhood. But now it was unnerving, knowing we were surrounded on all sides by lands that were rigorously policed by a ruthless and all-powerful communist dictatorship. A walk down the Unter den Linden, the beautiful boulevard running up to the Brandenburg Gate, which should have brought back so many pleasant memories, now ended in rolls of barbed wire and the high blank face of the Berlin Wall, which divided the East from West so brutally and symbolically. Everywhere we looked as we stood staring at this monstrosity we saw signs bearing skulls and crossbones predicting instant death for anyone who even thought of crossing over without all the right paperwork and permissions. It almost felt like I was being warned off from going any further with my hunt for the truth, as if the authorities were giving me one last chance to give up, turn back and go home before I had committed myself too deeply, unable to put whatever genie I might be about to unleash back into the bottle.
The director of the archive at Dahlem did not seem as pleased to see us as I was to see him. He reluctantly admitted that he was in charge of the Hohenzollern archive, and gave me the distinct impression that he believed I was just one more in a long line of gold diggers who had been knocking on his door over the years trying to prove their lineage and thus claim some long-lost fortune or title. When he eventually listened to my story, I sensed he was able to feel how passionate I was about the search, and his suspicions seemed to subside a little, but not enough to make me think that he was really on my side. After a while he started to open up a little about the subject of the Hohenzollern family, perhaps secretly pleased to have a captive audience who was so passionate about a subject he had some expertise in.
“If the Prussian kingdom had survived,” he explained, “Prince Louis Ferdinand would now be king.”
“What about Emilie Gottschalk?” I asked, now that I at least had his attention. “What do you know about her?”
“I have never heard of her,” he replied, a little disdainfully. Perhaps he didn’t like having to admit that there might be a hole in his knowledge. Or perhaps he wasn’t interested in any name that didn’t carry a great title with it. “Prince August only had two women in his life,” he added categorically, as if daring us to argue.
Two others? I knew so little about his life that even this snippet of information was news to me. “Who were these two women?” I asked.
“There was Friederike Wichmann, his first wife, who was bestowed with the title Von Waldenberg by the king when she married the prince, and then his second wife, Auguste Arendt, who was titled Von Prillwitz. They were both morganatic marriages because the women were commoners who were given these titles by the king. The prince’s descendants from these two wives are still well respected families living in Berlin and have inherited these titles.”
He made it sound like I was deliberately trying to upset the status quo and cause trouble for August’s established heirs, or that I was trying to muscle my way into high society in some way, but I wasn’t going to let his superior tone put me off now I had come all this way. I pulled out the miniature of Emilie and showed it to him.
“But you have never heard the name of Emilie Gottschalk?” I tried one last time.
“I’m sorry,” he snapped irritably, hardly glancing at the picture. “I can’t help you. Like I told you on the phone, you will need to go to Merseburg in the East. Any surviving papers of the Hohenzollern family will be there. But I wouldn’t bother if I were you because the authorities won’t allow anyone to access them. You need their permission just to go there, let alone have files opened for you. These are dangerous times, particularly if it is information you are looking for.”
I hardly dared to look at Ken as we listened to the director. I knew that these words of warning would reinforce all of Ken’s fears about crossing the border to the East, coming on top of my father’s warnings not to go searching. It was sounding increasingly as if I was embarking on a wild goose chase, but I knew I couldn’t give up and go home now without at least trying to talk the East Germans into helping me. I knew that what this man was saying was true and they would almost certainly turn me away at the door, even if they didn’t arrest me. But in my heart I wanted to believe that there was always a chance that they would want to help me and would agree to open their files to us. I couldn’t abandon Emilie’s memory just because I had come up against a few obstacles. She deserved better than that.
“We have to go to Merseburg now,” I said to Ken and Anthony the moment we were back outside the Dahlem building, trying to sound more confident about the idea than I actually felt.
“Evechen,” Ken said, hardly able to hide his exasperation at my persistence, “it isn’t safe. We can’t visit the East. Come on, let’s go home.”
“The British Embassy will help us,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard him. “Maybe the consul will see us. Let’s go and ask.”
Probably imagining that the consul might be able to make me come to my senses even if he and my parents couldn’t, Ken agreed reluctantly to come with me to talk to him. The consul listened calmly and politely to what I had to ask. Ken and Anthony remained quietly in the background, allowing me to do all the talking. The consul was obviously intrigued and stared at the notebook intently as he listened, turning the pages thoughtfully, hearing me out to the end.
“The British government has no diplomatic representation in the East,” he reminded me when he realized what I was actually hoping to do next. “I’m very much afraid you cannot go over to the East, Mrs. Haas. You were born in Breslau, in East Prussia, and the authorities over there will be aware of that. They seem to know pretty much everything about anyone who crosses their borders. If they chose they could stop you from leaving. They could arrest you on some trumped-up charge and put you in prison without even informing us. There you would remain and we would be helpless to do anything for you from this side. We probably wouldn’t even know where they had taken you. Besides you can’t just turn up at the archive and expect them to welcome you with a cup of tea. Where is your invitation? Do you have one?”
His tone was so reasonable and his words so final I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Maybe I wouldn’t to be able to do this after all. Just when I was about to give up and politely thank him for taking the time to hear me out, I heard my husband’s voice beside me sounding strong and firm, coming to my rescue like the white knight he always was.
“We have a letter,” Ken said, passing a copy of my letter to Merseburg across the desk. I felt a wave of optimism invading my thoughts, and gratitude to Ken for speaking up on my behalf, especially since I knew he was even more anxious than the consul to discourage me from this mission.
“But this is your letter to them requesting an invitation,” the consul said after a quick scan of the letter. “It’s not an invitation.”
“Correct,” Ken nodded, as if that were obvious but irrelevant.
“It’s all far too dangerous,” the consul said, shaking his head and returning the letter. Ken slid it back in his pocket.
I knew that although the consul was duty-bound to say these things to cover himself in case anything went wrong, he couldn’t actually stop me from doing anything I wanted if I wasn’t breaking the law. I was a citizen of a free country and, as long as I was in West Berlin, I was still in a free country. If I wanted to put my life in danger, that was my business and no one else’s. It wouldn’t be that bad, I told myself. I decided I had no option but to continue ignoring everything that had been said to me.
“Well, I would like to give it a try,” I said to the room in general. “So how do we go about it?”
The consul continued to try his best to change my mind, until eventually he realized, as Ken must have done, that there was nothing he could say to deter me. He let out a deep and prolonged sigh, deciding to advise me as well as he could to limit the potential damage. “From the first moment that you enter the East, Mrs. Haas,” he said, “be very, very careful. You must report first to the Reise Bureau on Alexanderplatz, a so-called ‘tourist office’.” If by some miracle they grant you official permission to travel to Merseburg, it is a journey of about forty miles. Even if they do give you permission, it will only be for one day and they will insist that you are back at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point for foreigners between East and West Berlin, by 8:00 p.m. sharp on the same day. When you are safely back through to the Western side, report to the French, American or British soldiers on duty and tell them that I must be informed. They will contact us immediately. Be safe and good luck.”