Higher Ground, Anke Stelling [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

I remember Ulf made a vow that he would never, ever accept a pfennig from his parents — it was the early 1990s, when money was still marks and pfennigs — because they, in turn, had built their fortune with money from their parents, who were Nazis and arms manufacturers, and so it was as brown-tainted as his grandfather’s shirt.

K23’s façade is light beige. Like delicious vanilla ice cream. The windows are set back into the walls with wooden frames painted in a white glaze that lets the grain shimmer through; in the garden, there are only tender-leafed plants — no evergreens or privets, just birches and lilac trees and bamboo and vines. Not very resistant to constant kicking, and not exactly dirt-repellent: not made to withstand attacks, and if K23 is a castle, then it doesn’t look like one from the outside.

‘You could have moved in,’ Ulf keeps saying.

I don’t keep pointing out that he broke his vow. It’s not that I want to remind him, but I can’t help remembering it myself, and I have to find a place for this memory; and yes, it probably has to do with being older and wiser than the rest. As Winston Churchill said: ‘Anybody who’s not a socialist by the time they’re twenty has no heart. If they are still one at forty, they have no brain.’ But I don’t want world phenomena, or my friends’ odd behaviour, explained to me by birthday cards and Churchill; I’d like to make rhyme and reason of all this myself.

That’s another nice phrase about writing right there.

The act of self-empowerment that lies in telling stories is proverbial.

Ulf’s mantra goes: ‘You could have been a part of this! You could have moved in.’ He really seems to think I’m just envious and that if I had everything he has, I’d see and feel exactly how he does. And it might even be true, but we’ll never find out, because I’m not and I didn’t and I probably don’t even want to; and this means I’m saying (even if not out loud): ‘You didn’t have to do it, you didn’t have to build the house, or if you did, you didn’t have to move in,’ and suddenly we’re quits, and everything is on the line.

Thirty years ago, when Ulf and I were still together, we really believed there was no difference between us, and that it didn’t matter where we came from. There I was, somebody who could only trace their ancestry back to my parents’ grandfathers, both of whom they’d known personally; and there he was, somebody whose family tree was bound in a leather book and stood on display in a cabinet at his parents’ house. I was the first in my family who had been allowed to take A-levels; his great-grandmother had studied in Heidelberg. It was our mothers’ idea not to exclude their families from politics, but to let us children lead the way, even across class boundaries. Which is why I ended up at a Gymnasium, and Ulf was not going to attend boarding school on Lake Constance under any circumstances. So we met, and we were equal.

But then there were all these little discrepancies and misunderstandings, molehills that increasingly looked like mountains, and which began to feel painful, and I started asking myself: Am I allowed to mention that? How do I talk about it? How am I meant to find words for something that doesn’t officially exist?

February 1989; Stuttgart.

We were seventeen and still living at home. We had made it into the sixth form at school: in two years, we’d be sitting our A-levels.

It was still the 1980s, and the rich still had to pay taxes to build swimming pools for the poor. Our mothers’ idea captured the spirit of the age and was also manifested in acts of parliament. So, I knew how to swim, and when the upper grades set off on their annual ski day, I would go with the other upwardly mobile kids to the aqua-fun pool in Sindelfingen and have fun. But then my group of friends — Vera, Friederike, Ulf, Christian, and Ellen, in other words — wanted to spend a weekend skiing at Christian’s parents’ holiday home in the Bernese highlands of Switzerland.

We were all still living at home, and these homes were differently furnished, but we didn’t notice that at all. Christian’s parents were the richest by far, and that was just as unimportant as mine being the poorest. The annoying part, though, was that I couldn’t ski. I could swim, but we didn’t have any skis in our garage. We didn’t even have a garage, which I only realised then, and which hadn’t bothered me in the least before; quite the opposite, in fact. I didn’t like garages. They always stank of petrol, and the whole family had to clear them out once a year, which my friends always complained about. Garages were there to house parents’ cars and other junk that didn’t interest me, and the door often jammed, or the key was missing, or the automatic opening device didn’t work. But along with all the other junk came ski equipment, and with ski equipment came ski holidays and knowing how to ski from an early age, and I lacked all these things, which is why I didn’t find the idea of a ski weekend as appealing as the rest of my friends did.

Ulf, who I’d been going out with for nearly two years by then, looked at me pensively and said that skiing was fun, and that he missed it since he’d stopped going away with his parents and spent the holidays with me and the others instead. And that the others felt exactly the same way. And anyway, they weren’t that competitive or speed freaks like some, and perhaps I could take a sled, or something to read, or just go for walks during the day until they returned in the evenings.