Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,70

the middle of the street.

On the piers I came across a car rental and rented a Chevrolet. I was taken by the one-piece front seating. It reminded me of the Horch on whose front seat I was initiated into love by the wife of my Latin teacher. Together with the car I got a town plan with the 49 Mile Drive highlighted. I followed it without trouble, thanks to the signs everywhere. By the cliffs I found a restaurant. At the entrance I had to edge forward in a line before being led to a seat by the window. Mist was curling over the Pacific. The show captivated me, as though, beyond the rents in the fog, Japan’s coast would come into view any second. I ate a tuna steak, potato in aluminum foil, and iceberg lettuce salad. The beer was called Anchor Steam and tasted almost like a smoked beer in the Bamberg Schlenkerla. The waitress was attentive, kept refilling my coffee cup without my having to ask, enquired after my health and where I was from. She knew Germany, too; she’d visited her boyfriend at the US base in Baumholder once.

After the meal I stretched my legs, clambered around on the cliffs, and suddenly saw before me, more beautiful than I remembered it from films, the Golden Gate Bridge. I took off my coat, folded it, put it on a rock, and sat on it. The coast fell away steeply, beneath me bright sailing boats were crisscrossing, and a freight ship ploughed its gentle path.

I had planned to live at peace with my past. Guilt, atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation – I’d brought it all together in an elaborate balance. The past had become abstract. Now reality had caught up with me and was threatening that balance. Of course I’d let myself be manipulated as a prosecutor, I’d learned that much after 1945. One may question whether there is better manipulation and worse. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it was the same thing to be guilty of having served a putative great, bad cause, or to be used by someone as a pawn on the chessboard of a small, shabby intrigue I didn’t yet understand.

The stuff Frau Hirsch had told me, what did it amount to exactly? Tyberg and Dohmke, whom I’d investigated, had been convicted purely on the strength of Weinstein’s false testimony. By any standard, even the National Socialist one, the judgment was a miscarriage of justice and my investigation was wrong. I’d been taken in by a plot made to trap Tyberg and Dohmke. My memory of it started to come back. In Tyberg’s desk hidden documents had been found that revealed a promising plan, essential to the war effort, initially pursued by Tyberg and his research group, then apparently abandoned. The accused repeatedly stressed to me and to the court that they couldn’t have followed two promising paths of research at the same time. They had only put the other one on a backburner, to return to later. The whole thing was under the strictest secrecy and their discovery had been so exciting that they’d safeguarded it with the jealousy of the scientist. That had been the only reason for the cache in the desk. That might have got them off, but Weinstein reported a conversation between Dohmke and Tyberg in which both agreed to suppress the discovery to bring about a quick end to the war, even at the price of a German defeat. And now this conversation had never actually taken place.

The sabotage story had unleashed outrage at the time. The second charge of racial defilement hadn’t convinced me, even then: my investigation hadn’t produced any evidence that Tyberg had had intercourse with a Jewish forced labourer. He was sentenced to death on that account, too. I pondered who from the SS and who from the economic side back then could have set up the conspiracy.

There was a constant flow of traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. Where did everyone want to get to? I drove to the approach, parked my car beneath the monument to the architect, and walked to the middle of the bridge. I was the only pedestrian. I gazed down onto the metallic gleaming Pacific. Behind me limousines whizzed by with a callous regularity. A cold wind blew round the suspension cables. I was freezing.

With some trouble I found the hotel again. It soon turned dark. I asked the porter where I could get