Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,39

on it in red letters. A great name for a removal firm. A motorbike droned past us.

‘At the end of the war I was no longer wanted. I’d been a convinced National Socialist, an active party member, and a tough prosecutor who’d also argued for, and won, the death penalty. There were some spectacular trials. I had faith in the cause and saw myself as a soldier on the legal front. I could no longer be utilized on the other front following my wound at the start of the war.’ The worst was over. Why hadn’t I simply told Frau Buchendorff the sanitized version? ‘After nineteen fortyfive I first worked on my in-laws’ farm, then in a coal merchant’s, and then slowly started doing private investigations. For me, my work as a public prosecutor didn’t have a future. I could only see myself as the National Socialist I’d been, and certainly couldn’t be again. I’d lost my faith. You probably can’t imagine how anyone could believe at all in National Socialism. But you’ve grown up with knowledge that we, after nineteen forty-five, only got piece by piece. It was bad with my wife, who was a beautiful blonde Nazi and stayed that way till she became a nice, round Economic Miracle German.’ I didn’t want to say any more about my marriage. ‘Around the time of the Monetary Reform they started to draft incriminated colleagues back in. I could have returned to the judiciary then, too. But I saw what the efforts to get reinstated, and the reinstatement itself, did to my colleagues. Instead of feeling guilt they only had a sense that they’d been done an injustice when they were expelled and that this reinstatement was a kind of reparation. That disgusted me.’

‘That sounds closer to aesthetics than morality.’

‘It’s hard to tell the difference any more.’

‘Can’t you imagine anything beautiful that’s immoral?’

‘I see what you mean, Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will and so on. But since I’ve grown older I just don’t find the choreography of the masses, the bombastic architecture of Speer and his epigones, and the atomic blast brighter than a thousand suns beautiful any more.’

We had stopped by my door and it was approaching seven. I’d have liked to invite Frau Buchendorff to the Kleiner Rosengarten. But I didn’t dare.

‘Frau Buchendorff, would you care to dine with me in the Kleiner Rosengarten?’

‘That’s nice of you, many thanks, but I won’t.’

7

A raven mother

Quite against my principles I’d taken the file with me to dinner.

‘Working and eating izza no good. The stomach is ruined.’

Giovanni pretended to seize the file. I clung to it tightly. ‘We always work, we Germans. Not the dolce vita.’

I ordered calamari with rice. I abstained from spaghetti because I didn’t want to get any sauce stains on Mischkey’s file. Instead I spilled some Barbera on Mischkey’s letter to the Mannheimer Morgen with which he’d enclosed an advertisement.

Historian at the University of Hamburg looking for oral evidence from workers and employees of the RCW from the years before 1948 for a study of social and economic history. Discretion and reimbursement of expenses. Replies to box number 379628.

I found eleven responses, some in spidery handwriting, some laboriously typed, that answered the ad with not much more than name, address, and phone number. One response came from San Francisco.

Whether anything had come of the contacts wasn’t revealed by the file. It contained no notes by Mischkey at all, no clue as to why he’d put this collection together, and what his intentions were. I found the contribution to the commemorative publication photocopied by Frau Buchendorff, and further on the small brochure of an anti-chemical-industry action group – ‘100 Years RCW – 100 Years Are Enough’ – with essays on work accidents, suppression of strikes, the entanglement of capital and politics, forced labour, union persecution, and party contributions. There was even an essay about the RCW and the church with a picture of the Reich Bishop Müller in front of a large Erlenmeyer retort. It struck me that during my Berlin student days I’d got to know a Fräulein Erlenmeyer. She was very rich and Korten said she came from the family of the aforementioned retort. I’d believed him, the similarity was undeniable. What had become of Reich Bishop Müller? I wondered.

The newspaper articles in the file dated back to 1947. They all bore reference to the RCW but otherwise appeared to be ordered randomly. The pictures, sometimes blurred in the copies, showed Korten first as a simple