Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [58]
‘I was just coming to fetch you,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d give you a bit more time.’ She takes the tape from me. I steady my breath. I don’t know whether she can tell I’ve panicked and is having a bit of fun with me. Perhaps I’ve started to take deadlines, train times and closing hours too seriously in this land of merciless punctuality.
A week later an anonymous man calls me. Herr Winz has told him what I want, and he is ringing to check me out before he calls Herr von Schnitzler. In a few minutes he phones back and says that Frau von Schnitzler will take my call. He gives me the number. Frau von Schnitzler answers, and she tells me their address.
13
Von Schni—
It’s her maiden name, not his on the doorbell. A fine-faced woman in her sixties lets me in. She has bobbed dark hair, red lips and red fingernails. Frau Marta von Schnitzler was an actress.
‘Welcome,’ she says extending a lacquered hand. She shows me through to the living room. The apartment is small but light. The accumulated debris of a lifetime rests on bookcases and shelves, hangs on the walls: books, medal boxes, figurines, and plastic cups full of biros.
In the living room a man with square glasses and a carefully contoured beard sits in an easy chair. His right hand, smooth for a seventy-nine-year-old, holds the top of a walking stick. He greets me, nodding in my direction. On the coffee table there’s a thermos of hot water, a jar of Nescafé and a medicine bottle. In front of him Herr von Schnitzler has a large wineglass of something that looks like red cordial. I sit down opposite. His head is larger and more wizened, the cheekbones more pronounced than on television but it is unmistakably ‘Sudel-Ede’ or ‘Filthy Ed’. Behind his head I notice another row of other heads at the same level on a picture rail: a bust of Marx, a daguerreotype of Lenin, and, as my eye casts along, even a miniature full-body statue of Stalin.
‘Herr von Schnitzler,’ I say, ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about your biography—’
‘Yes, that’s important, a) for my life history, and b) because what you will have read about me is 95 per cent false.’ His voice comes croaky through a dry old throat.
‘You think—’
‘I don’t think, I know. It is so.’ His voice is gaining strength and timbre.
‘—but I’ve been reading books you wrote yourself,’ I say. ‘They wouldn’t be wrong, would they?’
‘Well, in that case, it’s different,’ he says, but he doesn’t even crack a smile. ‘No, that’s good, that’s very good.’ This is not going to be easy. He looks challengingly in my direction. I can hear him breathing.
Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler was born in 1918 into a wealthy Berlin family. His father Julius Eduard Schnitzler had been Emperor Wilhelm’s consul-general in Antwerp, and a lieutenant in the Prussian military. In 1913, the emperor elevated Julius and his two brothers to the nobility, granting them the privilege of using the prefix ‘von’. The family remained close to power into the Nazi regime. One of von Schnitzler’s cousins was banker to Hitler, another was the sales director of IG-Farben, the company responsible for delivering the poison gas Zyklon B to concentration camps.
Karl-Eduard reacted against the disparities of wealth, and the Nazism around him. At fourteen he became fascinated with Communism. He briefly studied medicine, then switched to an apprenticeship in sales. During World War II he served in Hitler’s army. In June 1944 the British took him into custody in their ‘anti-fascist’ POW camp Ascot, and a few days later he began making broadcasts in German at the BBC for the program ‘German Prisoners of War speak to the Homeland’.
Von Schnitzler was released back to Germany in 1945, where he continued to broadcast from the British Occupied Zone in Cologne, but before long his staunchly Communist views brought him into conflict with the British administrators and he was sacked.
In 1947 he left for the Soviet Occupation Zone. When he got there he told its future