Page 2 of The Banned Books of Berlin

Berlin, June 1930

They seemed to have been waiting for an eternity. The apartment lay hushed and still, with only the curtains sighing and billowing in the breeze like the sails of a ship. Opening the windows to let in some fresh air, Freya had been startled by the sharp, sweet smell of linden blossom. It seemed extraordinary the outside world should still exist, so focused had she been on her mother’s laboured breathing and stifled groans as Ingrid tossed and turned in bed – for weeks, it seemed, rather than days. Yet a couple of streets away, the river Spree would be flowing steadily towards the centre of Berlin, past the Reichstag parliament building and on through Tiergarten park towards the magnificent Charlottenburg Palace before heading for open country and finally, the sea. Across the city, people would be lifting their faces to take deep, heady breaths of the intoxicating scent that spoke of summers gone by, of dappled sunlight falling through heart-shaped leaves and bees thrumming among the sticky yellow flowers.

‘Come outside,’ the trees called to Freya, their branches rustling, and she closed her eyes for a moment as she stood by the living-room window, folding her arms over her chest. She had been named after Freya, the goddess of love and truth who inhabited the lindens. ‘You can never tell a lie under a linden tree,’ her mother used to say, and now finally Freya had to admit the story she’d been telling herself for months – that Ingrid would recover and their family would survive, battered but intact – was merely wishful thinking. The doctor had called that day and warned them Frau Amsel didn’t have long. Ingrid’s time had come, and Freya would never again smell linden blossom with innocent pleasure. Her mother was calmer now, heavily dosed with morphine and sleeping for long periods with intervals of lucidity. The pauses between her irregular breaths were sometimes so lengthy that Freya would lean forward from her chair by the bed, watching with her heart in her mouth until her mother’s chest rose again. She couldn’t bear to let Ingrid go and yet at the same time, she wanted this torture to end. Her mother had suffered long enough; she deserved some peace.

And now Freya was waiting while her brother Otto sat with Ingrid – saying goodbye, presumably, though she couldn’t imagine that. Emotion made Otto uncomfortable. She took another breath of the scented air and closed her eyes, prolonging the moment, until the sound of the bedroom door opening made her turn around.

‘She wants to see you,’ Otto muttered, his eyes downcast, avoiding Freya’s enquiring gaze as he strode past. If they’d had a different kind of relationship, she might have made a move to comfort him, but she knew he’d resent her sympathy. She’d be allowed to cry because she was a girl and two years younger, but he couldn’t be seen as vulnerable. Strength, that was what he valued: the ability to withstand one blow after another and come back for more. Freya admired her brother and probably loved him, too, but he also made her a little afraid. So she merely nodded, pretending not to notice his distress. The whole family had become used to pretending over the past few weeks. If they’d been able to face the possibility Ingrid would not recover, they might have had time to talk while she was still able to speak, to share emotions that were too overwhelming to bear alone, and make plans for the future. But that moment had passed and now they were making their way through a strange land as best they could, inarticulate and alone.

The few steps it took Freya to reach her mother’s side felt endless. Her legs had suddenly become weak, and she had to wipe her damp palms down the frowsty dress she’d been wearing for the past three days. Ingrid was propped up in bed, her eyes closed. Freya laid her head gently beside her mother’s on the pillow. Ingrid no longer smelt of clean laundry, fresh bread or spiced biscuits warm from the oven; now she gave off an odour of disinfectant and stale sheets. She was already slipping out of reach.

‘ Mein Sch?tzelein ,’ she murmured, opening her eyes and stroking Freya’s hair. ‘My little treasure. How much joy … you have brought me.’ Every word was an effort.

‘I love you, Mutti.’ The phrase sounded so banal! Yet maybe language didn’t matter after all. Freya and her mother had always been close, attuned to each other’s moods; Ingrid would know how she was feeling. It was enough to lie here, just the two of them, their hearts beating in time.

‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ Freya murmured, although she hadn’t meant to say anything at all.

Ingrid sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Liebling . But you are …’ Her voice tailed away and she motioned towards a glass of water on the bedside table. Freya helped her take a sip, which induced a paroxysm of coughing that left Ingrid exhausted. She lay back, letting Freya wipe her face with a lavender-scented cloth as she knelt by the bed. Neither of them spoke for some time. Freya had assumed her mother had gone to sleep when Ingrid suddenly opened her eyes and gazed intently into hers. What was she thinking? Was she afraid of what was to come?

They stared at each other in silence for a moment before Ingrid murmured, ‘You must be … strong.’

‘Of course.’ Freya squeezed her mother’s thin, cold hand. ‘Don’t worry about us. I’ll look after Otto and Vati.’

‘No!’ Ingrid struggled to sit up, fighting for breath before falling back on the pillow. ‘You have to … get away. Find your voice … and use it.’

Freya didn’t answer for a moment, uncertain how to respond.

‘Promise me!’ Ingrid said, gripping Freya’s fingers so tightly that she winced.

‘I promise,’ she replied hastily.

Ingrid nodded, closing her eyes and turning her face away. ‘Fetch Ernst,’ she whispered, so quietly Freya could hardly hear.

‘Of course.’ She kissed her mother on the cheek, lingering for a moment at the bedside until Ingrid raised her hand in an unmistakeable gesture of dismissal. Freya opened her mouth to speak, but there was nothing more to be said. Her eyes blurred with tears, she stumbled towards the door and through the apartment, snatching a shawl from the hook.

She stood for a moment outside, scanning the street for trouble. Fights were always breaking out between the various gangs: Nazis and Communists, who hated each other, Reichsbanner veterans from the war who seemed to hate everyone, and local thugs, looking for any excuse to settle old scores. The police waded in with relish, armed with rubber truncheons and guns they were liable to turn on anyone who happened to pass by. Prostitutes were gathering on street corners and lamps were starting to be lit in the various bars that would stay open till late at night. Freya had lost track of time but the shops were closed now, their shutters drawn. Her father was bound to be drinking in one of them; he spent as little time at home as possible these days. Freya understood his need to stay away: Ingrid’s suffering was hard for anyone to bear, let alone her husband. Ernst was on the grumpy side of taciturn, but Freya had never doubted her parents’ devotion to each other.

She found him in the third bar she tried, sitting in a dark corner near the back of the room. He was staring into the empty beer mug in front of him, his shoulders slumped in an attitude of despair. Freya paused for a moment, looking at her father as though he were a stranger. He wore a cap, as usual, and hadn’t bothered to change out of his paint-stained overalls. He’d been working – when work was available – as a decorator for the past seven years, ever since his paint and wallpaper shop had shut down: a casualty of those terrible times when people couldn’t afford to eat, let alone decorate their homes. The country had been crippled by debt, forced to pay huge sums to the Allies after losing the war, and prices had shot up by the day until the mark had become virtually worthless. The money Ernst had been so careful to save over the years shrank to nothing. The government printed more and more money, first million-mark notes and then billion-mark notes; the amount of cash you’d need to buy a loaf of bread would fill a wheelbarrow. The only way to get Ernst talking was to mention the Treaty of Versailles, signed at the end of the war, and then you’d be in for a lecture. Germany could never get back on her feet, that was the gist of it: the rest of Europe and America were bleeding the country dry, getting rich on the sweat of honest German workers and laughing behind their backs in the process.

Freya’s earliest memories of her father were of him standing behind the counter in a shirt and tie and spotless white coat, directing his assistants up ladders to fetch tins of paint or rolls of paper, advising customers and negotiating discounts before ringing up their purchases with a flourish on the imposing cash till. That man and Ernst the house painter seemed two entirely different people. Losing the business had been a blow from which he hadn’t seemed able to recover, and now it looked as though he was about to lose his wife. Freya’s heart ached for him.

He didn’t look up until she was standing directly in front of him, his bloodshot eyes instantly alert and fearful.

‘She’s asking for you,’ Freya said briefly. ‘Better hurry.’

Ernst nodded, draining his glass of the last precious drops before shambling out of the bar with his cap pulled low. Freya let him go; he wouldn’t want her tagging at his heels and she needed some fresh air to clear her head. So, closing the door on a room that reeked of alcohol, fried sausage and cigarette smoke, she headed for the riverbank and walked along it for a while: briskly, so she wouldn’t be taken for a tart. A barge passed by, carrying coal to the huge Klingenberg power station downriver.

Why had her mother told her to get away, and how was that even possible? Freya had passed all her exams with excellent grades and in September she’d be going to teacher-training college. Her mother had been the driving force behind that idea. Ernst had originally said there was no point carrying on educating a girl who was only going to get married and raise a family, but Ingrid had insisted the world was changing and their daughter was far too clever to change nappies and wash dishes for the rest of her life.

‘God has blessed you with a talent, Liebling, ’ she would tell Freya. ‘You mustn’t waste it!’

Freya’s talent was her imagination. Her mother would read to both children every night when they were small, and while Otto lost interest in stories at the age of seven or eight, Freya never tired of listening to Ingrid’s soft voice in a circle of lamplight. They graduated from Grimms’ Fairy Tales to the adventures of Heidi, the little girl who was sent to live with her grandfather in his mountain home. For months, Freya would go to sleep dreaming she was Heidi, snug in the hayloft of a wooden chalet, blanketed in snow. Ingrid also shared her love of poetry; in particular the works of Heinrich Heine, which she recited reverently from an edition bound in turquoise cloth with gold lettering on the spine that lived in a glass-fronted cabinet. Heine could be lyrical, Ingrid said, but he was radical too, brave enough to embrace new ways of thinking that challenged the status quo. By the age of twelve, Freya was taking out six books a week from the public library.

Freya’s literature teacher, Fr?ulein Schneider, took a special interest in her star pupil – the most gifted to have come her way for years, she told Ingrid – and encouraged her to think of university. That was a step too far for Ernst, although Otto had paved the way to higher education by then. Ingrid wore her husband down. She had been putting aside some money over the past few years to help with Freya’s studies and was determined her daughter should stay an extra two years at school to prepare for college entrance. It was an investment, really, as Freya would earn higher wages with some sort of qualification. In the end, Ernst grudgingly agreed that if Freya passed the necessary exams, she could train as a teacher.

‘It’s not what we planned, though,’ he grumbled. ‘She was meant to be taking over the business from you.’

Ingrid was a well-established dressmaker with a circle of regular customers. She’d taught her daughter how to sew, and Freya had been helping at evenings and weekends as soon as her stitching was up to it. Yet her heart wasn’t in the work. Her mind might have been free to wander but she’d far sooner have been reading a book than squinting over a piece of cloth, and boredom made her slapdash and irritable. The only part of the process she enjoyed was watching her mother’s clients fall for the vision of themselves in silk or velvet that Ingrid sketched with a few deft strokes of her pencil. Once the sketch had been approved, a toile of the pattern pieces was made from calico and adjusted for a perfect fit before the final garment was put together. There was something unbearably poignant about the gleam in Frau Bloch’s eye as she stood before the mirror, admiring her squat, barrel-shaped body swathed in pale-yellow chiffon, or Frau Weber’s timidly produced picture of a willowy mannequin in a ballgown, torn from Elegante Welt magazine.

‘Freya hasn’t the knack for dressmaking,’ her mother told Ernst. ‘I shall find an apprentice and train her up instead.’ And that was that: once Ingrid put her foot down, there was no shifting her. Elisabeth came to join the household, and Freya only helped in the workroom when there was an emergency.

As Ingrid’s illness (no one ever used the word ‘cancer’) advanced, she stopped sewing and concentrated on supervising Elisabeth – until she was feeling better, that was the message for clients. She’d become too tired for shopping and housework, which Freya did her best to tackle when she wasn’t at school or cramming at home. A local girl came once a week to do the laundry and some dusting but apart from that, running the household was now seen as Freya’s responsibility – even though Ernst spent days at a stretch without work, and Otto had plenty of free time during his long university vacations. This situation is only temporary, she told herself, without daring to imagine how it might end.

Freya had always been conscientious. She’d learned from her parents the sense of achievement that comes from a job well done and had worked hard at school, besides doing her chores at home. Both children had their duties, with Otto helping Ernst in the shop at the weekend in the good old days. He was always drawing and making things: tiny houses out of matches, clay or cardboard, which he would paint or decorate with scraps of wallpaper from the shop. He loved woodwork classes at school and could soon turn timber offcuts or packing crates into functional furniture.

‘He might become a carpenter,’ Ernst said, seeing the tray Otto made for his mother, ‘and there’s no shame in that. Good honest work, when you can get it.’ The boy became obsessed with buildings, though, and carpentry fell by the wayside. He would cycle for an hour south of the city to watch the Horseshoe Estate taking shape: a huge ring of apartments and houses built around gardens in the centre, commissioned by a housing cooperative and designed by Bruno Taut.

‘This is the future,’ he told Freya, overflowing with enthusiasm. ‘Modern homes with bathrooms, combining the best of the city and country. Berlin is bursting at the seams – we should knock down the slums to make way for developments like these, clean and full of light. Taut is a genius.’

It came as no surprise to anyone when Otto announced he wanted to become an architect, though his father took some time to come around to the idea. His best friend at school, Leon Kohl, was hoping to become a lawyer and must have encouraged Otto to aim so high. Clever Leon, with whom Freya had been hopelessly, thrillingly, agonisingly in love since she was thirteen. She hugged her feelings close and most of the time they were manageable, although she was often tongue-tied and blushing in his company. While he and Otto were busy talking about football teams or summer camp, she would snatch covert glances at the dark hair curling at the nape of his neck, or the dimples in his cheek when he laughed, or the stubble along his angular jaw. In bed at night, she would go over everything he’d said, thinking of all the witty or insightful remarks she could have made that would have had him turning to her with new respect. She didn’t merely love him for his looks, but for the way he thought; he was so clever, and funny, and kind. Otto might have been his closest friend but Leon was nice to everyone, even the one-legged veteran who talked to himself on the street corner and growled at passers-by.

Unlike the Kohls, no one in the Amsel family had ever dreamed of university, and where would they find the money? Otto was determined, though, and his teachers told Ingrid and Ernst their son was right to be ambitious; scholarships were available for clever boys. Besides, as Ingrid pointed out, unemployment was so rife that Otto might as well study for a while in the hope more jobs would be available by the time he qualified. So he spent Saturdays making himself useful at an architectural practice, applied for and duly won a scholarship, and had now been studying at the Technical University in Berlin for nearly two years. It was accepted that he was destined for higher things and could no longer be expected to help around the apartment. His education came first.

Freya, on the other hand, knew she could only study once she’d finished her chores. There had never been any question of her neglecting the shopping or cleaning because she had an exam the next day. That was just how things were; Otto and Ernst would have laughed in her face if she’d asked them to help. That evening, she finally faced up to the reality of her situation. She would be run ragged with housework on top of her studies, and if she complained or fell short, she’d have to give up any idea of a career. There would be no ally to speak up for her, with her mother gone.

Her mother gone. Freya stared into the falling dusk, trying to absorb the impact of those words. She couldn’t bear to go back to the apartment and face the news she was dreading. If she could just stay sitting on this bench, gazing into the dark water, maybe she could keep Ingrid alive by the sheer force of her will.