But he has no idea of what is to come back then, as he drinks the fifth and sixth and maybe even seventh beer of his working morning in Frankfurt am Main. After all, what idea did anyone have of the future, the future they thought was directly ahead of them or perhaps even already there? It hadn’t been that long since the war and the uniforms of the brownshirts, the colour of which wasn’t dissimilar to the polo shirts worn by my hunting fanatic of an uncle, and even J’s car was that Nazi-brown colour, and now here they were sitting with the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards on a bench in the train station, drinking beer and smoking in an atmosphere of workplace collegiality. They unpack their lunch boxes, like the ones I used to be sent off to school with in the beginning. I still remember my uncle’s lunch boxes, I can picture them very clearly, including what my grandmother used to pack in there for him each evening, because of course she wouldn’t get up at three in the morning when he had an early shift, J had to get himself up then, get himself dressed and off to the station. She would put sausage sandwiches in there for him, tucked into a corner of the lunchbox according to a very specific spatial principle, and in the remaining space there would be an egg, a gherkin or an onion, all garnished with a serviette. When I was at school, I used to be given packed lunches too; going off to school or work was like embarking on a journey, you had to be well-prepared, you couldn’t have an energy slump in the midst of it all, you had to have something with you to keep your strength up, and since it wasn’t possible to buy things on the go back then, people always took everything with them. You couldn’t get take-away coffee anywhere, everyone used thermos flasks instead. There would be one in every bag, and my uncle J had one of these flasks too, filled with milky coffee. A land of thermos flasks. A little piece of home with you at all times.
My uncle took his coffee with sugar. He would add five teaspoons of sugar to an average cup of ground coffee (I always watched, aghast); so if you add it up, he must have shoveled around twenty-five to thirty teaspoons of refined sugar into every thermos. My uncle didn’t live a healthy life, that’s for sure, but then again it wasn’t really the fashion to live healthily back then — you could pretty much choose the way you would die, and usually it was the way you had lived. He smoked almost constantly, consumed vast amounts of sugar, and probably drank around four to five litres of beer a day. But he went to the forest too, he loved the forest air just as much as the air at the inn, and would go on long walks. He loved driving his car, the car he was allowed to have just like he was allowed to have a driving license, neither of which would have been permitted today. My uncle and his car, they were inseparable. He drove it into the Usa once, the river here, while his mother was next to him in the passenger seat. The car had to be hauled out of the Usa afterwards, and J stood by and watched. It was a VW Type 3 Variant, and it smelled like my uncle. Presented with the choice of either walking the three kilometres from the Uhlandstrasse house to my parents’ place in Friedberg (or vice versa) or getting into J’s car, I would have chosen to walk every time. Looking back now, it seems like everything about him was brown, everything Nazi-coloured, and yet they hadn’t even let him into the Hitler Youth, nor had he been a Luftwaffe assistant, and his only social interaction as a child and teenager had consisted of getting beaten up. He may have been fourteen by the time the war came to an end, but he was still an idiot, and would continue being one for the rest of his life, something which was already clear to everyone else. What’s more, my uncle J was one of those people who tend to idolise the very people who torment them. They develop an intense attachment to their torturers and tag along at their heels. My mother says that she and her brother were constantly having to escort my uncle, the oldest of all of them, whenever they could. But it wasn’t always possible, and if there was no other member of the Boll family around, he was told to walk home, or to wherever one of his siblings was, as quickly as he could. That was what they tried to drum into him. But presumably he always dawdled around instead, and day after day he would end up getting beaten as a result. His must have been a very bloody childhood, and he looked set to begin a bloody adolescence until they sent him off to the Rhineland, where he had some peace and even met Konrad Adenauer, whose rose garden he walked past every morning during what were probably his most idyllic years, my uncle in the Rhineland, the mentally-impaired Wetterau boy, the poor thing, and the Chancellor said hello to him politely, with no idea of who he was saying hello to.
My uncle was also fond of stopping to stare at the window display of Waffensteinökel in Friedberg. Waffensteinökel, on Friedberg’s Kaiserstrasse, was where the greyish-brown or yellowy-brown polo shirts would be put on display, very popular with hunters in the post-war years, through the seventies, and even today. They were a kind of camouflage colour, fit for use anywhere from the German forests to the African desert. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was probably another of my uncle’s heroes. The hunting and mountain climbing and those German war films were probably his real home, a time when everyone was great and he, in hindsight, still had a future ahead of him and could maybe even dream of a high-ranking position in the army or his own tank in Russia. The handguns at Waffensteinökel held a particular appeal for my uncle. He would study the different makes — he knew their specifications, or at least he thought he did — and get that Heino gleam in his eyes, and for a moment there in front of the window display at Waffensteinökel, it was like he was under a spell, perhaps like the state of rapture others experience when they hear Hölderlin’s poetry, because of the sheer beauty of the sound and depth of the words. Or like when a Russian reads Pushkin. He would go into a similar state, standing there in front of Waffensteinökel. Hitler and his Reich; he hadn’t been part of it, hadn’t been allowed access to it, and this turned into a longing that lasted his whole life, poorly assuaged by the hunting, the Bad Nauheim forest, the birds and the colour brown. After all, back then they had the tank and military magazines alongside the smutty ones, even if they didn’t yet have high-resolution photographs with a price tag and glossy finish to match. It was a longing, and it was a life, and it was the truth, like everything. My uncle, the animal, as many thought back then. My uncle, the creature of longing, as I think now.
We kids were always trying to provoke his rage, and he regularly lashed out at us to varying degrees. Whenever my parents were off in Austria or Italy searching for the holiday home they wanted to buy, he and my grandmother would come to stay with us. I say ‘come to stay’ even though he wasn’t actually allowed to sleep there with us and had to go back to the Uhlandstrasse house for that, but he was around a lot nonetheless, and sometimes even by himself. One time he was watching TV, a mountain climbing film starring Luis Trenker. He loved mountain climbing films and Heimat films in general, he never watched American films… although I only realised that later. When others were being transported to the streets of San Francisco, he was still in the hunting lodges of Silberwald, still watching films in which a quarter of the total length consisted of stags running up and down spectacular mountain meadows, the footage already aged and yellowed.