Heini Göbel (on the left) in Die Zwölf Geschworenen
"Look Phil", said Chris, and he showed me a DVD with Heini on the cover. Chris loaded it up while Lothar, who had just successfully come out of a week long artificially induced coma, talked to me about the best way to kill a wild boar.
"They are clever animals, he said, very clever, and when the full moon is out there is no point in trying to hunt them, they'll see you."
He was showing me pictures of an animal, with long, rough, hazelnut hair, laid out on a forest floor in autumn. The boar was more bear than pig. This is what the big horned old boars looked like in ancient times. Lothar squatted behind the animal, his complexion was rosy then, his body still bulky.
He pointed to the boars testis in the picture; they were swollen up into twin balloons, and said:
- "You can't eat this kind, the flavour is too strong, although some of the local Romanians do. It's an acquired taste. We were the some of first hunters allowed in after Ceauşescu's, execution."
From the corner of my eye, still listening to Lothar, I can see Heini in 1963, the chairman of the Jury in the German remake of "Twelve Angry Men".
"This is the kind of film we can relate to, isn't it?", Chris said.
There Heini was. He wasn't hamming up. You could see he was a good actor; his performance was powerful, but understated, self-effacing.
At the restaurant, I swapped places with the German administrator of the Staatsschauspiel and sat amongst the actors.
"Heini was a Prima Donna, wasn't he?" I said, winding them up.
"No, no he wasn't", they said.
"Did you do any Shakespeare?", I asked.
"Of course".
"And how about you".
"I played many roles but my most famous was as Lady, Lady; how do you say it in English? - Lady Macbeth."
"You musn't say Macbeth; it is bad luck?", I said.
"Macbeth?"
'There, you said it again. You must refer to it as "the play" don't you have that tradition?'
"About Macbeth?", said the actress.
"Yes. It's very bad luck to mention the name of the play."
"Ah. I see. Well I played the Lady in; "the play", she said.
I was teaching my grandmother to suck eggs and soon they were going to be annoyed enough to boot me off the table -so they booted me off the table.
The last time we came to Munich, Tere and I, we had a big argument in the airport. I insisted on buying Heini a huge kitsch box of Harrod's assorted teas. I did so because, whenever we had chatted to Heini in the past, we always did so over cake and tea. Heini loved tea time.
Tere arranged for me to buy a new suit for the occasion and I then lost her in Oxford Street. We both met up later at home. What an insufferable place Oxford Street is at the moment. Full of people who don't know which side of the pavement to walk down, and who push.
Kate, on the other hand, was going to the funeral in flip flops.
"If you die, I'll wear flip flops to your funeral and flap about on your grave. Formality is pretension, isn't it? Is it?"
"That's OK. Come dressed in a thong, what the hell."
* * *
At the airport I was bending Kate's ear over an expensive cup of coffee.
"Look, the Germans have to face up to what they did in the war and, by and large, they have. Right in town are the signposts to Dachau. It is not strictly a concentration camp, but it is a place that symbolises supreme evil. Imagine taking a trip to work every day and going past the signposts to Dachau.
"Imagine being a young German and going to school and learning about fascist escatology. The Germans are facing up to their past, but where's the slave museum staring at you in the face in Bristol?"
"Actually", Kate said, "there is a slave museum in Bristol."
"Yes, never mind, you know what I mean. We don't have the empire and the slave trade rubbed in our face all the time. Perhaps we should. Perhaps then our government wouldn't have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only that Kate, but look. This excellent railway system is publicly owned and they also know how to treat teachers here."
With the last point, Kate started to warm to the Germans. She and her Tower Hamlet's colleagues have just won a famous victory against cuts. Her management capitulated. But there is nothing about it in the media at the moment because Tower Hamlets College has set a "bad example" to the rest of the public sector. Tower Hamlets and Kate took took on the slash and burners and they won.
* * *
Morning pastries are delicious in Munich. The bread is so good. The six of us sat around and breakfasted in Solln before going to see Rose in Stohr Strasse - a street which none of the neighbours seem to know exists, because it is so small. Heini's house had been one of the first to be built in that part of Solln, in 1948.
We took a taxi to Loretta Platz to the crematorium, come cemetery and bought a quick and pretty basket of flowers at a row of flower shops. Bavarian cemeteries are like a dream of forests - idyllic. The trees are taller than many English trees.
The building was large, well designed and functional. It looked Bauhaus. Square red bricked and functional and we shall quickly draw a post-modernist veil over that, shan't we.
We had to wait our turn and gathered like a hover of crows, as one does, all dressed in black, all except for Kate, and Andy - unshaven in an indigo Paul Smith shirt. The floor of the hall was concrete and the interior reminded me of a church in Brighton which had been built in the same cubit measurements as Noah's arc - a tall box.
At the funeral, we were in the second row. We were behind Rose and Ulla, Renata and Ruth and we listened to the speech and a eulogy: the first was given by the resident Lutheran pastor, a tall thin woman with curly hair and the eulogy was given by the adminstrator of the Munich theatre. The actress read out a poem that was particularly significant to Rose.
Du bist ein schatten am tage
Du bist ein shatten am tage
Und en der nacht ein licht;
Du lebst in meiner klage
Und stirbst in herzen nicht.
Wo ich mein zelft aufschlage
Da wohnst du bei mir dicht;
Du bist ein schatten am tage
Und en der nacht ein licht.
Wo ich auch nach dir frage
find' ich von dir bericht,
Du lebst in meine klage
Und stirbst in herzen nicht.
Du bist ein schatten am tage
Doch en der nacht ein licht;
Du lebst in meine klage
Und stirbst in herzen nicht.
Friedrich Ruckert
There was a huge black curtain, drawn. I placed our little basket in front of it next to the red roses, sunflowers and lillies. Albinoni played, Bach played and then curtain slowly started to close - but caught on our little basket of flowers.
After a while a hand came out from behind the stage and whisked the basket away.
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