The Scholl Case Read online

  He was thrown onto a truck, taken to a cell in Heringsdorf and released again the next morning. He was told to report to the campsite guard a few days later and show his ID. When he did so, he was arrested again. Manfred Schlögel had no idea what lay in store for him. ‘I was so naïve. I told the guard he should ask his boss to get a move on, because I didn’t have much holiday left. And that I was in the B-pool of the national rowing team and had to compete for the Blue Ribbon of Warnow in the championships. I’ll never forget the look he gave me.’

  For four days and nights, from 9 August until 13 August 1961, Manfred Schlögel was interrogated in Rostock. The 13th was a Sunday—that, too, he remembers. ‘On the Monday, the interrogator danced about like Rumpelstiltskin and said: “None of you are going back to Berlin. We’re building a wall for undesirable elements like you.”’

  Heinrich Scholl and his friend Hans were unaware of their friend’s troubles—the campsite was big and the beer tent too expensive for them. They were busy with their little day-to-day struggles for survival, went swimming and met the girls from the kitchen in the evenings, and had no idea what had happened to Schnuppi. Nor did they know that the borders had just been closed. In the middle of Berlin a wall was put up overnight.

  Until then people had still been able to go back and forth between East and West Berlin. Many worked in West Berlin, where they were paid in the more valuable deutschmark, and lived in East Berlin, where rents were lower. They would go to the movies in the West and grocery shopping in the East. But on 13 August, traffic between the two parts of the city stopped dead. Families were ripped apart and jobs lost. A country was divided, a new era begun.

  Manfred Schlögel was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in Bautzen ‘for subversive acts and gang formation’. Brigitte Knorrek was the only one who sent him parcels. They were filled with ham, sausage and jam—only food was allowed. When Manfred Schlögel returned to Ludwigsfelde on his release, she was married and had a son.

  It is hard to say just how Brigitte Knorrek and Heinrich Scholl came to be a couple. Only one thing’s for certain: it’s not a particularly romantic story.

  Gitti was only twenty when they married. The carefree times—when her friends had dropped in and out and she had gone to the cinema on Potsdamer Platz with Inge or careered through the streets on Schnuppi’s Java—were long gone by then. A wall had been built around West Berlin. Inge had married and moved away to a town in the north. Schnuppi was in jail. And in May of that year, 1964, Brigitte Knorrek had given birth to a son.

  The father was a tall, good-looking man from nearby Kleinmachnow—Gitti’s type. She had met him dancing and he visited her a few times, but was soon interested in another girl. Frau Knorrek, who was Catholic and feared for her reputation in town, was frantic. There was only one way to limit the damage: her daughter must get married. This is where good old Heinrich came into play. He was now twenty-two, had completed his apprenticeship as a toolmaker and was studying at the school of engineering in Riesa, an industrial town on the Elbe. But he was still under his mother’s thumb. She grumbled that he would drive them all to ruin and demanded that he spend every free minute working and earning money.

  The best-paid work was doing night shifts at the pit furnace in the Riesa steelworks. Fifty marks he got for eight hours at the furnace, pulling out red-hot moulds and knocking them off. From the works, he’d walk straight to the station without any sleep and take the train to Ludwigsfelde, where his next chores were waiting. He helped Frau Knorrek in the salon, lugged coal for the neighbours and, if he had any time to spare in the evenings, he would paint landscapes in oils, which he copied from postcards to sell to people in town. In the summer vacation he worked as an extra in Gojko Mitić films. The Serbian actor was famous in East Germany for his westerns, in which the Native Americans, not the white settlers, were the heroes. Heinrich played a Native American, donning a special costume for the part. Every pfennig he earned was handed over to his mother. She never said thank you.

  One weekend, when he had just got back from a night shift at the furnace, she announced to him that she was going to sell the house and move to West Berlin with little Gerhard. The child’s mother, Christa, had met an American and wanted to emigrate to Oklahoma with him. Everything was planned. Elfriede Scholl, who had just retired, had applied for an exit visa; the house was to go to an uncle; Heinrich Scholl was to keep the little room under the roof. He wasn’t asked for his opinion.

  Heinrich didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t news to him that his mother didn’t love him; he was just surprised that she could live without him. ‘Everything I’d done up until then had only one purpose: to earn money for her. Without me and my extra earnings, she wouldn’t be able to manage.’

  Elfriede Scholl simply vanished from his life, without big goodbye scenes, without tears. He now had no father, no mother and no home. When he came back to Ludwigsfelde from Riesa at the weekend, he climbed up to the garret room in his parents’ house like a stranger. Six square metres were all that remained to him. He wasn’t allowed to enter the other rooms or go in the garden.

  At the weekends he often stayed in Riesa now, spending the money from the night shifts at the steelworks in the harbour pub or at a dance in Merzdorf. The students were not especially popular with the locals, but they were popular with the girls—particularly Heinrich Scholl. He was the best dancer. Twist and boogie and rock ’n’ roll—he could do everything, swivelling his hips like Elvis Presley, and throwing the girls in the air and catching them again.

  There was one girl he danced with a lot. Her father worked in the steelworks; she worked in the cotton spinning mill. Heinrich Scholl sometimes went home with her after the dance. She became pregnant at almost exactly the same time as Brigitte Knorrek and, like her, gave birth to a son.

  A week after the birth, Heinrich Scholl left his son’s mother. He has never seen his son; he doesn’t even know his name, he says. The girl understood. ‘We came to a very sensible agreement. The welfare office stipulated how much alimony I had to pay. I had it transferred every month until his eighteenth birthday.’ They simply weren’t a good match. Her parents were very uncouth, he says; they both drank. It reminded him of his own home—of the life he was trying to escape.

  One of Brigitte Scholl’s friends says that in fact the girl went to the head of the engineering school and complained that she had been deserted by her child’s father. The school put pressure on Heinrich Scholl to marry the girl, and because he didn’t want that, he quickly married Gitti instead.

  His best friend Hans only knows that everything went very fast. ‘Heiner came to me just before the Christmas holidays and said: “I’m with Brigitte now. We’re going to get married.”’ His reaction had been: ‘You can’t do that; you know what she’s like.’ Hans Streck wouldn’t have put up with Gitti for a single day and didn’t understand why his clever friend was marrying a woman who was nothing but a younger version of his mother. But these objections seemed not to get through to Heinrich Scholl. His friend says that Heiner was probably looking for a home—that he wanted a family. ‘He had no one left. His father was dead; his mother was in the West; his uncle was horrid to him.’

  Brigitte Scholl’s friend Inge says that everything happened at once. ‘She was pregnant. Then Frank’s father walked out on her, or she walked out on him; I don’t rightly know. In any case she was pleased when Heiner took her. She had Frank to think of and he was in good hands with Heiner.’

  Heinrich Scholl says that he had hinted to her when she was pregnant that he was at her disposal, and then a few weeks later she had asked him and he had said yes. ‘We knew each other. We knew what we were like. She could depend on me entirely. She needed a father for Frank. It was the most convenient arrangement.’

  Did he love Gitti?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I certainly liked her a lot, but we never told each other that. It’s not the way we were. We didn’t need that.’

  Brigitt
e Knorrek and Heinrich Scholl’s wedding took place on 28 December 1964. There was no lavish party, no guest list, no carriage, no white dress. Few people even knew about it.

  The date was decided for them: in 1964, for the first time since the Wall had been built, there were to be passes available between Christmas and New Year’s Eve permitting West Berliners to cross to East Berlin for a few hours—and Heinrich Scholl wanted his mother to be there. He hadn’t seen her since she had left Ludwigsfelde and he hoped she would be proud of him, now that he had conquered Brigitte Knorrek, the hairdressers’ daughter.

  On the morning of 28 December, they took the train to East Berlin. They had left the baby with Brigitte Knorrek’s mother in Ludwigsfelde. It was a cold day. She wore a dark jacket and skirt, he a suit. At Friedrichstrasse Station—the border crossing point known as the ‘Palace of Tears’, the site of many emotional reunions and farewells—they met Heinrich Scholl’s mother. She had brought little Gerhard with her, now a teenager. They stood facing one another in divided Berlin, surrounded by border soldiers and flustered people with bags and suitcases. A mother, her son, his young bride. It was the moment Heinrich Scholl had been waiting for. He had thought something might happen—that the knot might loosen.

  ‘They came out of the Palace of Tears,’ he says, ‘Gerhard and this little mother in her coat and her fur collar. I hugged and kissed them. But there was no response from her. She simply didn’t like me. I resigned myself to it then. What did I care?’

  The marriage ceremony took place in the registry office at Alexanderplatz. There was a picture of Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, hanging on the wall, and the registrar reeled off something about the importance of the socialist family in socialist society. They said ‘Yes’, exchanged rings, kissed. Then, in their thin coats, they walked down Stalinallee to Café Moskau. Café Moskau was East Berlin’s most modern restaurant. The dining room was bright and empty, the prices steep, the waiter unfriendly. He took their order, brought food and drinks, and they had soon had plenty to eat. But they couldn’t leave. The pass was valid for the entire day, but they had nowhere else to go.

  ‘It was awful,’ Heinrich Scholl says. ‘The waiter kept coming to our table and asking if we wanted anything else. We had to sit on our hands all day and couldn’t go out. It was much too cold for that.’ When evening came at last, they took his mother and Gerhard back to Friedrichstrasse Station and returned to Ludwigsfelde. Heinrich Scholl did not go back to the room at his uncle’s that evening. He slept with Gitti in her childhood bedroom, her little boy in the room next door.

  He had a home.

  When Heinrich Scholl returned to Riesa after the Christmas vacation, it was with a ring on his finger. Otherwise nothing had changed. His room was in an old barracks; it had three bunk beds, three cupboards and a table in the middle. He shared it with five other men and a great quantity of vermin, including some mice they caught and kept in roll-mop jars and fed with leftovers.

  Heinrich Scholl studied and at night he worked in the steelworks, but he no longer had to hand the money over to his mother; he could keep it for himself. He was a frugal person; he didn’t mind sleeping in the barracks, eating sausages out of a tin or drinking beer in the smoky harbour pub with the other students of an evening.

  Gitti was different. Nothing was good enough for the hairdressers’ daughter with a sister in the West, and she was keen to let others know. Only once did she visit her husband in Riesa. It was a disaster, in spite of Heinrich Scholl’s best efforts. He met her at the station with flowers, strolled through town with her, showed her the town hall, the Sachsenhof Hotel and the River Elbe. He wanted to offer her something, to show her his world. Riesa may have been a workers’ town like Ludwigsfelde, but it was bigger and more cosmopolitan. There was a harbour, where ships arrived and unloaded, an old city centre and lots of young people, who studied there like him. He knew his way around and was greeted on the street, but Gitti acted the fine lady and refused to be impressed by anything.

  Her big scene came when Heinrich Scholl tried to take her to his favourite bar, the harbour pub, with his friend Hans. Gitti took one look at the smoky room and the men with their beer steins, then turned on her heels and said: ‘I’m not going in that pub.’

  She insisted on going to the most expensive establishment in town, the Sachsenhof, and in a show of generosity, she treated her husband and his friend to dinner. As they were eating, she told Hans that it wasn’t done to mash your potatoes; you should just crush them slightly with your fork, if you had to. ‘Assi, you can’t do that—if anyone saw you,’ she said. Hans Streck still remembers the incident fifty years on, so odd did he find Brigitte Scholl’s behaviour. But Heinrich Scholl’s reaction was odd too. He sat there and didn’t say a word.

  Heinrich Scholl was different when he was with his wife—subdued, almost cowed. This had always been the case, even when they were still at school. But now it was more noticeable. Maybe because Heinrich Scholl was usually very different: self-confident, impudent, daring, someone who didn’t seem afraid of anything.

  One evening, the boys from his barracks decided to go out for a beer together. Each of them was to chip in with a few marks, but Heinrich Scholl had no money and had to come up with something. A dare. He looked at the jars where they kept the mice and knew at once how he was going to come by his beer. Two crates of bock he was promised, if he’d bite the head off a mouse. They didn’t think he’d have the guts. Heinrich Scholl took a mouse from one of the jars, held it tight, closed his eyes and bit.

  ‘I’d do anything,’ Heinrich Scholl says. ‘I was a boy who was always having to prove himself.’

  It was a side to him that people who knew him admired, but also found a little unnerving. Scholl’s friend Hans Streck deliberates for a long time before making up his mind to tell another, similar story. It was shortly before they graduated. The final maths exams were nearly upon them and some students were afraid of failing and being thrown out of college. Their maths tutor—a short, fat, nasty piece of work, nicknamed Pig Cheek—had only recently expelled one of their classmates, and revelled in his power over the students. In each class, he would point to his bag and with a broad, sneering grin he would say: ‘Your questions are in there.’

  Heinrich Scholl’s class decided to get the better of Pig Cheek. They had planned everything down to the last detail. In the break between classes, one of the students was to engage the tutor in a lengthy talk in the corridor, one was to keep a lookout, one was to take the exam paper out of the tutor’s bag and one was to copy out the questions. Someone was soon found for the talk in the corridor—and for keeping a lookout and copying out the questions. But no one dared open Pig Cheek’s bag and take out the exam paper. No one, that is, except Heinrich Scholl.

  ‘He simply had no fear. He took every risk,’ his friend Hans says. ‘Even though he had absolutely no need to do it. Heiner was good at maths; even if he’d botched the exam, he’d have passed.’

  Everything went off smoothly. Their tutor didn’t notice anything. No one failed the maths exam. Heinrich Scholl passed all his other exams effortlessly too. At the end of the academic year, he packed up his things from the barracks and moved back to Ludwigsfelde, to his wife and son.

  Their new flat was above the hair salon and Gitti’s mother’s flat. They had two rooms, a box room and a small kitchen. The box room was Frank’s bedroom.

  Frank was a year old and Brigitte and Heinrich Scholl didn’t want another child. Heinrich Scholl says this was Gitti’s decision. One child was enough for her. The topic had only been raised once. ‘And we said to each other: “The scores are level between us. You have a child, I have a child. Why chance it again?”’ He hadn’t been particularly eager to have more children either. ‘I think it’s the woman’s business.’

  He says this soberly, almost with indifference, as if children were mere figures in life’s grand account. It was in the same unexcitable way that he dealt with his stepson. He adopted hi
m—and the other, biological father was blotted out from the life of the Scholl family like the girl from the spinning mill. There were no photos, no letters, no get-togethers. The deposit and withdrawal slips from the alimony payments were filed and locked away. Gitti was the mother, Heiner the father, Frank the child. A perfect family. Not even Gitti’s closest friends were told who Frank’s father was, and Heinrich Scholl applied himself to his new role as husband and family man with such vigour that no one dared question it.

  Brigitte Scholl had chosen him from among all her men because he was hardworking, and in this respect he did not disappoint. She called the tune in the house; she told him what was to be done, and it would never have occurred to him to question his role. He had always carried out the Knorreks’ instructions and worked through his mother’s lists. Now it was his wife’s lists: do the shopping, take the rubbish down, wash the kitchen floor. As a rule, Brigitte Scholl also added the precise time. She made lists for her husband, and as soon as her son could read, she made lists for him too. ‘It was Gitti’s way of sharing out the chores,’ says Heinrich Scholl. ‘I helped Frank in school and was on the parents’ committee. She challenged him at home.’

  In his mother-in-law’s hair salon, his range of duties had, to be sure, considerably expanded. He still washed the floor, but he also had to attend to other, more fundamental things. Business wasn’t what it had been. Frau Knorrek had started to drink. Sometimes she was out of it by lunchtime and had to withdraw to her flat. No one knew the reasons. Was she unhappy? Was she worried about the business? Was it a strain on her, running the salon all by herself? Did she miss her elder daughter, who now lived in Cologne? Was she kept awake at night by images of the war and the flight west? She never talked about her problems. She had always been strong Frau Knorrek—successful, well-off, generous Frau Knorrek—and it was important to her that it should stay that way.