Hannes Seidelmann, an expert mechanic trained in setting up telegraph lines worked as a trouble shooter at the Post Office and as such he was pretty much free to do whatever he wanted with his time. His boss sat at his desk in Skalitzer strasse and could hardly be expected to check how fast the telephone lines were being fixed or to know what Seidelmann did in between assignments – like going back home for a quick cup of coffee, or looking after things in his garden. Or having a quick one with his girl friend. Today though he had asked for a day off. “You know the trouble with my brother Hermann…” They had been waiting for him to come home for five days now. Not a word from him. Hermann Seidelmann had left home on December 3rd. He was carrying over 3000 DM-East. Something terrible could have happened. Still… There was no news from the Missing Persons Bureau in the British sector where they had gone immediately the day after he had disappeared… maybe no news was good news. His brother lived in Saxony, in Plauen but every time he called his wife all she could say was: “No, no sign of Hermann here.” She didn’t seem too keen to see him come back. On the 17th of November Hermann had left for Berlin. He had come to attend their mother’s funeral. But he wanted to take his time coming back. He wanted to exchange some money, East Marks for West Marks and in West Berlin he intended to buy parts for his amusement park business. He was a fairground exhibitor and had carousels, seesaws and shooting stalls in Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz and other places in Saxony. It seemed he had also come to Berlin to have a little fun with the ladies. Although, apparently, he hadn’t had much success, until then.
“He’s a bit long in the tooth at 47.” Hannes Seidelmann said.
His sister disagreed. “There are so few men and so many women willing to take anybody. Take a guy and then take him for a ride, fleece him like a Christmas turkey. As far as Hermann is concerned I wouldn’t feel sorry for him. He’s got four kids and…”
Gerda worked as a ticket lady on the S-Bahn in Berlin. She didn’t trust anybody. First because of her profession: She sat in her ticket booth at Wedding station and punched the yellow cards of the people who were getting on the train but she also had to check the people getting off – to make sure they had payed the right amount for the trip. The “I” ticket was the cheapest, it cost 20 Pfennig but it was valid only on the Ringbahn or inside the Ringbahn limits. And it happened so often that someone had bought an “I” ticket but had started out from say Gartenfeld or Wollanstrasse. Her motto was: “People are capable of anything. And you too Hannes…” What she meant by this was that the two brothers had never got along, quite the opposite as a matter of fact. “Think of Cain and Abel.”
Hannes Seidelmann reacted angrily. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Don’t pretend. When he was called up before you, you immediately started something with his wife Irma. And now that he’s back, he’s a problem.”
Hannes Seidelmann was astonished. “I would never…my own brother.”
“No you would never. But the fact remains that he’s vanished.”
“With a lot of money on him. Money that you’ve always had your eye on…”
Hannes Seidelmann got up, went to the window, pushed the curtain aside and looked down into the street. “Bah, that’s nonsense. He’ll show up any minute and… He’s probably picked up a woman somewhere and can’t tear himself away. He hasn’t been in love with Irma in ages. Or else he’s shut up in a brothel and the girls are keeping him there until he runs out of money.”
“Hannes please!” Gerda Seidelmann was very sensitive and hated such coarseness.
“We’ve got to do something. At least go to the Missing Persons Bureau again.”
“Somehow I don’t like the idea.”
“Well then let’s look through his things and see if we find anything.”
Gerda refused. “That’s useless, we’ve already looked and looked again so many times.”
“Maybe we still missed something.”
“Oh well why not…”
The pull out bed that Hermann slept on stood in a small half room that the family called a bedroom. It had been the servant’s room before, now it served as a store room. Hermann’s trunk stood open: in it were his long underwear, badly ironed shirts and rolled up socks. Above the trunk a suit hung off a nail planted in the wall. The suit still smelled strongly of beer, sweat and smoke.
Hannes asked his sister: “Did you search the suit?”
“Of course I did, what do you think.” She couldn’t help it if she sounded rude. “Look at the lovely ties our Hermann has.” She held up two of them.
“But the prettiest was the one he was wearing when he left, the blue one with the yellow and red stripes. He always tied that one round his neck when he had a rendez-vous. Gee…” All of a sudden Hannes remembered that as soon as he arrived his brother had asked him where to buy the best condoms in Berlin. “Condoms…? Get them at the barber’s when you get a haircut.”
And where did men hide them from their wives before they went out on the town? In the little secret pocket inside the trousers’ waistband on the right side under the belt. He checked it. And sure enough, there was something. But it wasn’t a condom; it was a small piece of paper torn from a newspaper. There were five words on it: ‘beautiful woman at the zoo.’ He was sure it was Hermann’s handwriting. He turned to his sister. “Look at this…”
“It’s obvious he wanted to get together with some chick. Let’s go, now. Bring a picture of him.”
They left. The number 21 streetcar stopped close by and so they took it to Gotzkowskystrasse where they changed for the number 2. It took fifteen minutes to get to Zoo station. That section of Berlin was already almost as madly busy as during the Golden Twenties. It wasn’t so much because of the number of long distance travelers since most people only traveled daily on the remaining five or six interzone trains from the old head stations, but because of its legendary fame: “Chia, chia, cho, sharp guys cheat you at the Zoo…”
Since the end of the blockade and after the currency reform black market activities were basically a thing of the past but the money changing business was stronger than ever, it was really flourishing. Apart from that, tens of thousands of people switched trains or trams here, it was a hub for several S trains as well as streetcars and the A subway line. Add to that the people who came to the nearby ‘garden’ to see if any of their old friends the animals, elephants, wolves, bears and monkeys, had survived after the end of the war. As they themselves had survived. The steel skeleton of the train station had withstood the bombs, only the glass was missing. But it looked like the odd man out among all the ruins. Not all ruins though, the administrative high court was relatively unharmed. But both cupolas of the Zeiss planetarium and the Ufa Palace were burnt out and many of the other buildings were reduced to rubble.
Where did people meet then? They met under the big standard clock next to Dr. F. Kuhlmann’s perfume shop. Brother and sister went into the shop to show the saleslady their brother’s picture. “Was he by any chance in your shop and did he buy a bottle of perfume for a pretty woman…? He was born in 1902, he’s heavy set and he talks like someone from Saxony, he often uses the East Prussian dialect.”
She shook her head.” I’m sorry, I can’t remember.”
They weren’t really disappointed. It would have been a real coincidence if he… They figured they stood a better chance with the money changers.
But no, it was the same thing. “He was carrying a lot of money…” These words were met with a smirk. “He probably unloaded all that with some babes.” They were advised to look in the cafes on the Kudammm and the boarding houses on Augsburgerstrasse.
Hannes Seidelmann shook his head. “The note with ‘Beautiful woman at the zoo’ seems to indicate that Hermann wasn’t out to buy sex.”
His sister did not entirely agree. “It could still be that she was one of those… And even if she wasn’t, in any case he must have gone to a café or a bar with her.”
“You want us to visit each one? Maybe he also took the streetcar and took her somewhere else…” He pointed to the number 77, right behind them, ringing its bell. “Lichterfelde West-Goezerallee… Down Kaiserallee, Steglitz… Beautiful places for beautiful women.”
“Nonsense!” Gerda Seidelmann didn’t believe her brother had a secret love nest. “Hermann wouldn’t have dropped everything he had built up so painfully and blow it all for that.”
“You don’t know about these things.” He told her of his experience and what he had read and what he’d been told about ‘how men go crazy’. “As soon as a woman appears…”
“He doesn’t take her to bed immediately. First he takes her for a drink.” Gerda insisted that they go and ask about Hermann in the cafes and bars nearby. So they started down the avenue; despite the ruins and the ration cards and the absence of lights and stars the Kudamm was still alive and enticing. It was a promise that would not die: come in and feel the intoxication, champagne is flowing. Even a person as down to earth as Hannes Seidelmann could feel the pull and soon he felt as if he were living in a film. He was Paul Kemp in Amphitryon, Willi Forst in Bel Ami or Willi Fritsch in The Guys at the Gas Pump. He completed his thought. “You feel you’re on a cloud…”
But no one remembered a man by the name of Hermann Seidelmann from Saxony. They were told to try the Casablanca bar in Augsburgerstrasse. “If you want to please a girl, you take her there.”
As they made their way up the street they felt more and more out of place; in this neighborhood many of the grand houses dating from the nineteenth century industrial boom still stood and it was all very high bourgeois even if the huge mansions had most probably been divided into smaller apartments and rented out. Still, it wasn’t their kind of neighborhood. And people looked at them suspiciously, as if they were a pair of crooks staking out the place. Or was it their imagination? Hannes Seidelmann didn’t know. In any case he found it very difficult to knock at the heavy wooden door of the bar Casablanca. At this early hour it wasn’t even open. After a while a sullen employee, probably the bartender, condescended to open the door just a bit: “What, the Kripo again?”
Hannes Seidelmann thought quickly: would it be illegal if he didn’t deny being from the police and just pretended not to have heard? It wouldn’t. So he didn’t answer and, without a word, showed the bartender the photo of his brother.
“Was this man here…” The bartender patted his bald head with the flat of his hand. “Yes, just yesterday, with a pretty woman.”
The answer had been so spontaneous that brother and sister didn’t doubt it for a second. They heard what they wanted to hear: their brother was still alive. “I was afraid something had happened to him,” Gerda said and Hannes added: “You’ll laugh and so will I. You see, bad seed never dies.” They returned to Moabit relieved and prepared some herb tea.
As they were sitting down the phone rang. Hannes was one of the few people of his kind in Berlin to have a phone, the reason being of course that he was a long distance technical secretary at the Post Office, he got it “right from the source” so to speak. It was the Missing Persons’ Bureau. Could they please come to the East Berlin morgue on Hannoverstrasse?
“Has my brother been found? Is he…?”
“I don’t know. We have parts of a body that seem to belong to an adult male and we are informing all the people who declared someone missing.”
“Oh, I see…” Hannes Seidelmann felt relieved.
Again they put on their coats and went out. It was no joke to have to travel across the ruined landscape of Berlin in the cold and dark of a December evening, it was more like a dangerous journey. They took the number 21 to Invalidenstrasse and caught the number 44 which they rode all the way to the last stop, Sandkrug bridge. From there it was only a few hundred meters on foot. But what a neighborhood! If you wanted to know how it felt being scared, that was the place to go. They didn’t talk much. There was nothing to say.
On Hannoverschen strasse they were met by a thin and extremely sullen man who led them through a labyrinth of stairs and corridors. It was just routine. Finally there it was. “Don’t be scared,” the thin man said looking precisely as if he would enjoy seeing them scared. On a metal slab there was a white sheet and something underneath the sheet: the body parts that they had come to see, evidently.
“Look out!” cried the thin man as he pulled the sheet away like a magician performing a trick, like pulling off a tablecloth without upsetting the glasses and the plates. “What we have here are two shin bones with feet, one thigh and a left arm. The rest is missing… Now see if that’s your brother or not.”
Gerda Seidelmann buried her face in her hands, broke out in tears and fled the room, she was going to be sick.
Hannes too felt something well up in his throat but he managed to stay in the room. It was awful to think that these … that this was… He wanted to fix his eyes on the sheet or on the window or on the faucet but he couldn’t. It was as if some powerful force drew him to the body parts. He was transfixed by the ghoulish spectacle. Such a thing couldn’t be, it couldn’t be real, you had to be insane to imagine this kind of stuff, that was the reason people got locked up in asylums, “Doctor, I keep seeing my brother cut up in little pieces on a table in front of me, neatly sliced.”
The thin man was getting impatient. “Well…?”
Hannes staggered back and had to hold on to something. The color of the skin was right… a little pale…the dark body hair too… Everything seemed to indicate that the arm and the thigh belonged to Hermann, were Hermann. But he would not accept it. Impossible. He felt that if he admitted that the body parts were his brother’s then his brother would really be dead. So, even though he knew better, he said no, he couldn’t indentify anything. “Whoever this is, he’s not my brother.” Then his sister Gerda came back into the room, behind him; she had recovered and she said in a totally deadpan voice: “On the contrary, that’s him. He’d just had his corns operated on… here on his left foot he still has a bandage.”