a meeting of students from the Hamburg metropolitan
area. The student representatives of all schools attended, from all districts. The one from the Johannes Brahms School in Blankenese was an arrogant bitch. I couldn’t stand her from the very start.” She grinned wryly. “Johanna Steinhagen. She epitomized my image of the enemy.
I grew up in Altona, and Rosa Luxemburg hung on the wall in my
bedroom and watched over my sleep. My mother dragged me to dem-
onstrations when I was no more than three, and by eight I knew that
capitalism stinks. And there sat this rich Hamburg bimbo and I was
supposed to politely discuss school politics with her.” She laughed. “I think we only snapped at each other during the entire conference, and it got on everybody else’s nerves. The worst thing was that we couldn’t 196
Dead Woods
help but notice how similar we actually were. It wasn’t just us; others saw it, too. Almost like Erich Kästner’s Lottie and Lisa. Though we didn’t look like twins, we easily could pass for sisters.” She took another spoonful of the sweet foam. “I told my mother about it in the evening.
I wanted to believe it was a dumb coincidence, but at the same time
all kinds of stupid scenarios crossed my mind: maybe I was adopted;
or my father from London also had a fling with the mother of this
Johanna, before she had married Meinhart Steinhagen. And maybe I
could find my biological father through her.” Lina sighed and sipped her coffee. “My mother wasn’t all that excited when I told her of the strange meeting, but also not surprised. ‘At one point you were bound to find out,’ she said and then told me that Meinhart Steinhagen is my father.”
She hadn’t believed it at first. One of Hamburg’s richest men, who
owned many buildings that her mother and her mother’s friends had
occupied in the past, was her father? The man who counted the most
important men of the city and the entire country among his friends, of whom it was said he could easily win City Hall if he finally decided to run for mayor—this man was supposed to be her father? Her mother
had sighed. “I didn’t know it when we got close,” she had told her. “We met at a district initiative, and he called himself Marc.” Lina had meanwhile found out that this was his middle name. He started to flirt with Asta Svenson, they ended up in bed, and five weeks later Asta found
out she was pregnant. She hadn’t seen Marc in two weeks, nobody
knew where he was, and nobody knew how to reach him. A short
time later, someone came across a picture of the young Steinhagen
in the newspaper and it was all crystal clear. Asta had fallen prey to a rich capitalist pig, who had only participated in the initiative as a spy.
She felt embarrassed and told nobody of the fling, which, fortunately, no one had caught on to. She did want to keep the child and didn’t
believe for one moment that she wouldn’t be able to love it just because of who the father was. She acted secretive when asked who the father 197
Maria C. Poets
was, and had “father unknown” entered on the birth certificate, even though Christian, whom she met shortly after Lina’s birth, offered to also officially become the father of the child.
“Does Christian know who my father is?” Lina had asked her
mother that evening when she found out the entire story. She still
didn’t fully believe it. Her mother had painted the father from London so vividly; especially when she had imitated his Cockney accent, Lina had often felt her father speaking to her with her mother as a medium.
Asta had looked at her daughter and shaken her head. “Nobody knows,
other than you and me.”
But it turned out that the striking resemblance between the girl
from a good family and the smart-alecky brat had led to questions
elsewhere. Shortly after her mother’s revelation, Lina received a call from Meinhart Steinhagen. He said he had found out that she was his
daughter and would like very much to meet her. Lina refused. She said her father was Christian and called Meinhart Steinhagen a liar.
He had laughed. “There’s no father listed on your birth certificate,”
he said. Lina had to sit down. If he knew what her birth certificate looked like . . . Had her mother gone behind her back and contacted
him? She felt betrayed, slammed the receiver down, and ran out of
the house. For several days, she was hanging out on the street or with