The Gentleman

No, I’m not - it’s just a cross-generational friendship that connects me to the patient. Shortly after, I am carefully pushing the door handle. I’m feeling a certain tension, since I don’t know what to expect. I last saw him shortly before Christmas, still in good health. I eventually recognize him in the middle bed. I pull up a chair, take his hand and say, ”Now that’s no way to be, my dear Swabian friend!” A smile flashes across his face and I’m sensing a hint of a shaking of his head.

Advent, 6 weeks earlier.

Mr B. is sitting across from me in his apartment. He gets up several times on wobbly feet to fetch drinks for us and offers me baked goods on a small plate. My eyes keep glancing at a painting of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. The Bridge of Sighs - what a name for this particular path for prisoners who may cast one last sad glance at freedom. The convicted were led directly from the Doge’s Palace into the prison or to execution. During a trip I myself looked out from the bridge and felt taken up into the history of Venice.

Finally Mr B. settles down across from me. A few months earlier I had the idea to subject Mr B. to some kind of interview process. Ever since I met him, piece by piece of his adventurous life story came together and awakened my curiosity. Mr B. is a humble man in his late 80s, a gentleman through and through, “old school”.

When I first told him of my idea to document his life, he bristled against it internally. He felt it was all too unimportant. But the thought won’t leave me, and little strokes fell big oaks. I adjust my dictation device and place it on the table. Slowly he begins to talk, his eyes travel to the past.

Mr B. is the oldest of 7 children and grew up in a suburb of Stuttgart. Since space and time were at a premium during those times, he moved in with his grandparents in the same part of town for two years, from age 6 to 8. Despite the fact that to this day Mr B. expresses a conflicted stance toward Christianity, he admired his deeply believing grandmother with her calm and patient manner, from whom he never heard an angry word. She expects respect from him and from her he learned all the important things, he says, such as coloring, tying shoe laces and especially playing the reed organ. As a side note I learn that during those young years he already completely mastered the famous St Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach. Grandma was a wise woman who recognizes that her talented grandson is a free spirit. Pressure of any kind creates resistance in him. Therefore she always offers him several options to choose from and thus he never feels coerced or patronized. The lived religiosity of the grandmother fascinated and shaped him. She is more of a relationship anchor than anyone else in the family. Still, he was more interested in “the opposite side”, as he says. After the Jungvolk he attends the Hitler Youth, where they play terrain games and sing passionate marching songs, like “This is the time of the young soldiers” and “Brittle bones are trembling”, which he knows verbatim to this day. The propaganda and the felt camaraderie don't leave him untouched.

At one point the well-known Rudolf Hess, Hitler's so-called deputy and leader of the NSDAP (Nazi party) rode in an open vehicle slowly through Mr B’s part of town. All the kids excitedly ran out of the school onto the street, alongside the black six-seater.

The young Gerhard B. manages to garner a special spot. He hoists himself on the back of the car, clings to the side and in this way rides through Zuffenhausen. The National Socialists who are riding along wanted to get rid of him but Rudolf Hess simply said,”Leave him be.” On account of that gesture Mr B. defends that National Socialist to this day as, in his opinion, the meekest of Hitler's minions.

Every evening an aerobatic pilot flies through Zuffenhausen, underneath the gas lamps, which awakens the dream of flying in young Gerhard B. The fascination and excitement for flying are the motivation for his enlistment in the service at the age of 16. His father, who had fought in WWI, impares these words to him,”If we lose, no one will remember you!” Full of youthful enthusiasm he replied,” We won't lose!” Nothing can stop him, not even the tears and apprehensions of his mother, on his way to Landau on the Isar, where he wants to be trained as a pilot. The first few weeks contain his training as a Luftwaffe-assistant. Now he regularly is woken up out of a deep sleep, learns to carry a rifle angled 45 degrees to the ground and receives hand-to-hand combat training. On a straw puppet they practice the most effective way to kill a person. One achieves this by ramming a knife into the stomach, turns it 90 degrees to the right and pulls it out. The imaginary enemy is ever present. He realized fairly quickly that reality isn't romantically transfigured and that wearing gas masks during summer is physically straining. They are stationed in Stuttgart on the rooftops of the Bosch works. There they meet blond young Russian prisoners of war who have to procure ammunition. When the Bosch works were bombed, those Russians ran away; they weren't ready to be cannon fodder. As a souvenir they leave bed bugs.

Shortly after his voluntary enlistment to the war he was on a train to France. At 12:30 am they passed by his hometown and he saw the familiar church tower of Zuffenhausen in the distance.

I wonder at this moment whether this sight triggered homesickness or a longing for his abruptly ended childhood, and for a split second my thoughts travel to the present, to my 16 year old daughter, who exudes so much happiness and childlike enthusiasm. I get nauseous imagining the also 16 year old Gerhard B.

They kept traveling to France. The railroad tracks were blown up in places by the French Resistance so that they intermittently get stuck and also unbearably hungry. Therefore there was no holding back when they come across glorious Mirabelle plum trees and they gorged themselves. But later they had to bitterly pay for that forbidden petty theft by standing at attention for hours.
At some point they arrived in Pommerie in the Champagne region. Only there one could get genuine champagne, which they bought for only 5 Reichspfennig per glass - cheaper than water. The young soldiers took advantage of this and Mr B says with a smile that they almost experienced a state of a constant high.

Some things one never forgets; the first day of school, the first love, the first kiss, but also sad experiences, pictures that won't let go of us and that are burned into our retina. For Mr B. it is the first encounter with death.

Quietly the young soldiers crept through the forest in France, out in the middle of nowhere. His comrade excitedly rams his elbow in his side and calls his attention to a “real” body that lay by the wayside. In young Gerhard that sight triggered contradictory feelings. On one hand the situation seemed creepy and nebulous, on the other hand something like pride welled up inside him-”Now I'm truly at the front lines!” Some time later they end up in Reims, a city in the northeast of France. This is where they were assigned to carry coffins. The unfamiliar comrades had been lying in the barracks for 2-3 days, relieved of jewelry, photographs and any other personal effects that would bear memories of a person's life.

16 year old Gerhard was surprised by the weight of the coffins, which they hoisted onto converted trucks. The smell of death and decomposition surrounded him. Was this what he had imagined being a pilot would be like?

Advent 2014.

I turn off the dictation device because I sense that the hour and a half long journey to the past has exhausted him. We briefly chat about his health and a couple other topics. Intermittently he cheers me up with a nice compliment. Humorously I remark that on depressing days where everything goes wrong and I am the subject of criticism, I only have to visit him, because he knows how to gallantly lift a woman's spirits. On this day I have no idea that it would be the last time that I can have a real conversation with him. So much about his life I probably won't find out about anymore - like the story behind the gold ring on his finger with the named “Jasmin” engraved in it, which is also the name of his daughter; or how he came to work for the space agency and he got to be part of the festivities of Germany's rich and famous; under what circumstances he functioned as a translator for the Russians nd whether he would've ever thought he'd one day speak 16 languages fluently.

Besides that I will never hear the story how he met the love of his life, Zita. Sadness wells up in me when I think of all the untold stories. Maybe Mr B., who now lives near his still surviving siblings in Tübingen, will be relieved that Mrs Martens no longer pesters him with questions and that some experiences will remain a secret - which is just gentlemanly.

Translation: Karin Allison