Hamburg, it has to be said, is in rude health. A very Teutonic health. Behind the beautiful façades there is something substantial, there are pleasing depths. Compared to Germany, our beloved Frankreich looks like a badly run campsite. In France, we see healthiness as a sin, with all its connotation of money, monopolies, class struggle, and the exasperating exuberance of nouveau riche nonentities. If we spend so much time and money on our bodies it’s probably to purge our bourgeois sins. We have become overweight, chubby-faced, bright-eyed dyed-in-the-wool revolutionaries. With my haunted look, my deathly pallor, my face unshaven, I looked obviously French, something that clashed with my glaringly robust Nordic physique. I tried to make up for it, but I couldn’t: I’d forgotten how to be exhausted and hide it, how to get annoyed without losing my temper, how to be completely lost but walk as though I knew exactly where I was going. I rented a car and set out. All I wanted was to be alone. More alone than anyone in the world.
Deepest darkest Germany is really dark and deep, much more so than France, which is open to the four winds, bounded by the seas and the mountains, its last hidden beauty spots ruthlessly exploited by tour operators and estate agents. Tourism is a tragedy for any country. The hidden depths of a country need to stay silent and hidden; if not, they’re just cardboard sets for open-air theatre. In the hidden depths of Germany, which are vast and deep and Lutheran to boot, there is a mesmerizing stillness, a dread that harks back to earliest times where everything was in the mystery of stones and the contemplation of souls. What we see here seems set down for all eternity, and for those of us afraid to face tomorrow, that is the worst thing we can imagine. I drove through still suburbs, past still villages, still meadows, saw people standing motionless in their doorways, in their fields, hunched over motionless machines. I saw solemn black-frocked crows perched high in hieratic trees and, in the distance, through the mist, empty roads disappearing into the beyond. Movement is confined to the autobahn but the autobahn is obviously not a part of the country, it is a late addition, a concession to the foreigner and, above all, a means of keeping him at arm’s length. I had come to look deep into the eyes of Germany and already everything seemed infinitely remote, irrevocably secret.
Then, suddenly, I happened on people — people moving, talking, laughing loudly, eating heartily, walking briskly, scolding their sulky children or lecturing them in voices that were not bullying, but simply unequivocal. The German language lends itself to certainty and quickly oversteps the mark: “Befehl ist Befehl.” The scene seemed so alive, so familiar, so ordinary, so colourful, so utterly in keeping with the country I have visited so often. But hardly had I left the petrol station, the restaurants, the shops, when stillness and silence closed round me again. I felt obscurely angry that, for a while — the time it took me to eat lunch — these Krauts had made me believe everything was normal, mundane, predictable, when even they, with their bulbous beer-drinker’s noses, did not believe it. They sat at their tables, staring, wondering what this pretentious, pathetic Franzose was doing so far from home just as I was wondering how they could seem so cheery in this landscape heavy with significance. And then I realised: I carried the mystery inside me, my point of view was defined by my investigation, I was an investigation, the investigation. I was looking at this country through the eyes of a wounded man whose very existence was threatened by the history of their country. It was hardly surprising I seemed strange to them.
Hamburg, Harburg, Lüneberg, Soltau, Uelzen. Four short hops for an honest traveller but a yawning chasm for a broken, half-dead man, a man travelling back through time in search of his own humanity. Every mile was grueling, my breathing felt laboured. As I arrived in Uelzen, the town where papa was born, my heart was pounding in my chest. Since leaving Hamburg, I had been steeling myself for the shock, but when I arrived I realised once again that in life, the more you prepare yourself, the less prepared you really are. You conjure so many mental images that reality comes as a complete shock. When torn from our everyday routine, we’re like blind men deprived of our white sticks. Uelzen looks just like every other town in Germany, in Europe. A feeling of déjà vu follows me like my own shadow, whispering in my ear. Uniformity is the future — something business travellers like me have long known — it had been stupid to imagine things would be different, but I felt cheated that this town was so unlike what grief and distress had led me to expect. I’d been expecting a village out of the 1930s, all misery and rage, crushed under the weight of unemployment, tormented by primitive demons, hordes of officious, swastika-wearing party workers teeming through the streets, the Devil himself writhing at the heart of humanity. In reality, Uelzen is pristine, charming, welcoming, with every amenity a tourist could wish for, the people are warm, hospitable, the embodiment of cheerful artisans happy with their lot. The town that papa was born in is gone, swept away by the war, buried beneath the reconstruction. Everything I see speaks of the new world, a world of brilliance and soaring heights, a miracle of urban planning which has slowly grown to encompass new buildings and the great ideas of generations of town planners. Its suburbs are like any other suburbs, the pedestrianised town centre is like any other, but the beating heart of Uelzen is the financial district with its suited businessmen and hollow-eyed security guards. I was everywhere and nowhere, everything looks like everything else, the tsunami of globalization has swept away our heritage, erased individual traits such that we no longer recognise our own or those of others. Uelzen is a product of post-war urbanization. Millenstraße no longer exists and Landorf — which I had expected to be a patch of countryside in the town, or a scrap of town set in countryside — looks just like the Paris suburb I live in, though half the size and ten times as sturdy. We all live on the same quiet streets, with the same neatly trimmed hedges, in tidy little houses so similar we can barely tell ourselves from our neighbours. There is a vast Plexiglas shopping centre painted in bright colours to reassure the poor, the working classes, that they are on the right track, that wealth and happiness are waiting round the corner just as soon as the mortgage is paid off. How did Landorf look when papa pounded these streets? Was it all misery and rage or was it an idyll of bucolic tedium? I wandered the streets, sniffing the air in the hope that instinct might speak to me; I talked to strangers in the streets, the bars, especially to old people, who carried their memories around like libraries. Nothing. “Millenstraße? Never heard of it.” The name Schiller rang no bells either, except for those few who immediately thought of Friedrich Schiller. The Germans are an obliging race, too obliging, they feel frustrated and humiliated when they are unable to help. But they don’t give up easily: they direct the lost soul to someone who might know. “Try the post office,” they said, “they’ll know where it is,” or “Let’s ask the woman who runs the delicatessen, she knows everything.” Checkmate: at the post office, the woman asked me to submit my request in writing; at the deli, the woman suggested I might ask at the police station. This was something I had no intention of doing, talking to the authorities, since I would have to answer their questions and I simply did not have the strength. You wouldn’t risk it in France, life’s too short for regrets. I was looking for my father and no one could help me. I was a lost child.