Europe @ 2.4 km/h (14 page)

Another thing we will never know is whether Edward felt any shame at the consequences of his philandering but, three years before his death, he actually married Maud. My genealogically inquisitive cousin was referring to the fact that, at one time a successful tailor, he was eventually declared bankrupt when she said, ‘He was a bit of a gambler’. She could equally have been alluding to his love life.

Armed with this new mine of family information, I sit at Steen’s computer in suburban Copenhagen and wonder, if Desses still live in Bremen, which is on the next leg of my European trip, whether and how I can bridge the gap between me and my unmet German family. It’s time to do some research of my own …

July 2007, Friday the 13th, is an overcast day so typical of this ‘wettest summer’. From the stop opposite Bremen Hauptbahnhof (central station) I take the tram out to Walle Friedhof. I am ready to meet the family — the ones, at least, who stayed behind in Europe.

Walle Friedhof (Friedhof literally means ‘place of peace’) is congested nowadays. Bremen — with half a million living inhabitants — is not such a big city, but it has been renowned throughout Germany since medieval times as a freethinking, independent and prosperous one, qualities that always encouraged people to settle there. Today I find it a pleasant and compact place, as well as a peaceful one — and it is a strange sensation to realise that I feel very much at home here. If this were my hometown, I tell myself, I could imagine not wanting to leave. Several of the family obviously felt the same: their earthly remains are to be found beneath the Friedhof greensward.

Entering the reception area (whose walls are painted a cheerful yellow) I greet the recordkeeper, Sonja Pierach, who is seated between a vellum-bound tome and her computer. Frau Pierach’s database lists all the cemetery plots and she looks keen to help but speaks no English. I cannot come all this way and not press my quest so I wait, hoping for someone to turn up who can act as interlocutor.

Not only is the next person through the door an anglophone but he puts the business that brought him here aside long enough to explain to Frau Pierach that I come from Australia and am descended from the Dess family, several members of which lived and died in Bremen. She pledges to do her best and quickly traces a couple of promising leads from the desk register. A few weeks later, the post brings me fresh tidings. As the haze that had enveloped this part of Europe linked with my people’s past begins to lift, I find the Old Country beginning to look less foreign.

Frau Pierach’s mini-dossier mentions four family members — a husband and wife, their son and his son. All will survive into old age. Johann Eberhard Dess was born in March 1880 and died, two months after turning 80, in May 1960. His wife, Marie — my mother’s name, but surely that’s coincidence? — survived him by six years. Their son Eberhard — born on 27 April 1900 — died on 7 August 1973.

As anyone who has investigated family history will know, there comes a point, usually a handful of generations back, when documentation must give way to intelligent guesswork. The period between Carl Eduard’s 1851 marriage in Bremen and Johann Eberhard’s birth (in 1880) spanned a complete generation. Carl Eduard, he who had abandoned Thora, my great-grandfather’s mother, in Denmark, took a second Bremen bride in 1861. There is a real, old-time generation gap here — a missing link in the family chain — and Frau Pierach’s researches do not quite cover it. Perhaps, I surmise, Carl Eduard’s Bremen wives produced sons whose descendants live in the city today?

Before I leave, Frau Pierach — her words translated by my English-speaking friend — offers a sobering caution against getting my hopes too high. ‘When the living stop coming,’ she explains, ‘it is not long before the plots are recycled.’

If there’s one thing more common in these parts than cycling, I have observed, it’s recycling. The German love of efficiency and tidiness is legendary —
Ordnung muss sein
(Order must be) — and, when you think about it, there is no reason why such a cold passion should stop this side of the grave.

While still in Copenhagen, aided by Steen, my search for living family in Bremen had made good progress. Today the phone numbers of most people, at least in the West, are a few mouse clicks away, provided you know how to go about it. In the German White Pages, I quickly found a list of eight Desses living within 10 km of the city centre, and began ringing them.

No luck at first. Two of the eight people I phoned spoke English but knew of no family connection with a Carl Eduard. But then I expanded the search to include Desses living within 25 km of town, and immediately scored a bullseye. The first name on my list was Birgit Dess, who took my call, speaks English and wasn’t in the least daunted by our being lifelong strangers. Her father, Jurgen, had looked into the family history and she thought, from everything I’d mentioned, that we must be related. But I would have to wait for certainty because he and her mother were on a cruise ship right now. ‘Where?’ I asked idly. ‘Off the coast of Norway.’ A few weeks earlier, and we could have passed each other on the deck of a Hurtigruten steamer. My laugh reverberated down the line — and was that a ghostly echo coming back my way?

Next time we speak, Birgit has told them about my call and she has news for me. Yes, indeed, her grandfather Eberhard was the grandson of Carl Eduard, cigar maker of Bremen. Eureka! So Carl Eduard, grandfather to my Nin, Ruby Dagmar, was also the grandfather of Birgit Dess’s grandpa Eberhard. Suddenly the sprawling Dess family tree seems more like a stepped pyramid, with Birgit and me on the same level. Collateral cousins, we find ourselves just around the corner.

We arrange to meet in Bremen, near the station, on the evening of 10 July. Steen has accompanied me to Hamburg, where we stay for a few days, but — pleading non-cousinship — returns to Copenhagen while I press on.

Birgit Dess is a young 39 and single by choice. She does not drive a car, and from the very first strikes me as smart, friendly without fawning, fun-loving but also capable of being businesslike. Born at the end of 1967 in Osterholz Scharmbeck, a small community near Bremen, she is amused at my suggestion that she is better settled here than anyone outside Walle Friedhof.

Birgit has a steady job as a secretary to someone in aviation. Very German in her modest manner, she says, ‘I never wanted to be a secretary. But I knew English and French. My American friends would say that I didn’t have the balls to do something with my degree.’ We laugh. She is very forthcoming, an easy person to warm to.

Her early life Birgit dismisses as nothing remarkable but I find one of her first jobs fascinating. Having helped out over the years in her parents’ tea shop, she was once employed as an apprentice tea taster. ‘You have an inquiry from your customer. He wants to replace last year’s order with this year’s, not only the quantity but availability and quality. You try to find the right variety or blend from, let us say, the crop of 2000 in a certain area of Assam.

‘So you could say I’m a tea connoisseur, just like a professional wine taster.’ And does she spend her leisure hours sipping tea? ‘Not exactly. I would love my life to be painting, creating things. The father of one of the ladies who married my great-grandfather was like that — a painter.’

This statement is full of insight. Her phrase ‘one of the ladies’ tells me that the Dess men’s aversion to monogamy extended to yet another of Carl Eduard’s sons, confirming that this behaviour pattern in the male line is global in more than one sense. Europe and Australia, at least, are not nearly far enough apart to disrupt it.

Birgit has brought along a certificate that belonged to her grandfather. It is not, as I might have expected, his death certificate from 1973, but one issued by the Bremen civic authorities in 1934 — No. 1636 — signed by President Paul von Hindenburg, no less, in the year of his death. Under the capitalised preamble IN THE NAME OF THE FÜHRER AND THE REICH CHANCELLOR, it awards Eberhard Dess an Honourable Cross ‘for being a participant in the remembrance of the War’ pursuant to the 13 July general decree of that year.

In Germany 1934 was a year of consolidating Nazi power through mass rallies and other public manifestations of enthusiasm for the new regime. So it seems a fair assumption that Herr Eberhard Dess — my cousin’s grandfather — was a zealous Hitlerite. But there was an odd exception to his German nationalism. When I ask Birgit why her given name is Danish, rather than the German variant, Birgitta, she smiles. ‘He was the one who insisted over my mother’s wishes.’ Thinking about it later, I conclude that this could have been done in recognition of his own grandfather, Carl Eduard, the German who went to live in Denmark
.

Her other grandfather, Birgit tells me, was a submarine commander during World War II. Is she trying to shock me? No, she is telling me how things were. By this time we have trudged so far over the territory of the past that the future seems more enticing. Tell me who you would like to be, I ask Birgit, and she answers, ‘I would love to be a wine-drinking nocturnal painter’. Stupidly I ask, ‘When would you sleep?’ and she replies, ‘The days’. Then adds, ‘Picasso lived this way; Hemingway lived this way, didn’t he?’

Yes, I reply, in 1920s Paris Hemingway was a night owl known to down five or six glasses of red wine at a single sitting.12 ‘But this is a bad example,’ comes her rejoinder. ‘He had four or five wives and he treated each one of them badly.’ (Right on both counts. But she didn’t need to go beyond our family to find such examples.) Afterwards I will examine my feelings at discovering that someone in the extended family was a Nazi military commander — and, while it is briefly unsettling, my attitude is ultimately the same as it is to Edward Dess, my prolific great-grandfather.

Both are members of the family from which I claim descent.

To be so widespread, a tree must have deep roots, intertwining branches and many a shady nook. It may be given to those who come later to know more but that doesn’t necessarily make us entitled to judge. For the rest of eternity, Edward, like all those who no longer have to plead their case, has the right to remain silent.

My long journey has now taken me to the centre and the periphery of the Desses’ ‘known world’. The descending branches of the family tree that sprouted from the union of Edward and Maud are entangled in a thicket of desertion and infidelity, one in which Edward might easily stand condemned. But consider his actions in their context — the stigma of poverty attaching to his mother’s family, the lack of a responsible father figure — and his falling for a much younger woman becomes at least comprehensible.

It should not be overlooked that Maud had her own story to tell, and what a tremendous love story that was. Still in her teens, Maud fell for this dapper older man who became her lover and to whom she bore fourteen children. This was a strong and abiding love — for the rest of her long life she presided over this growing brood of theirs, enduring, no doubt, a double alienation: her common-law husband’s as an Australian with a recognisably ‘foreign’ surname — a German one being an unpopular thing to have after 1914 — and their shared alienation from the standards of conventional morality.

Gaze on her, again, through what historian Manning Clark called ‘the eye of pity’. Her looks must have been striking. And, for someone her age, she must have had a steely resolve that she would need to withstand every adversity in the decades ahead. Mum remembers that ‘Grandma Maud’ spent her last years in a wheelchair — a sidelight I find of more than passing interest — but that even the amputation of a leg didn’t stop her getting about. Maud, my mother’s mother’s mother, died in 1955, when I was just a year old. She was 86 — and only now, for the first time in my life, do I have a clear picture of her.

This journey within a journey — this voyage around my great-grandfather — may have struck you as a gigantic detour, but I did set out to tell you about the people I would meet in Europe and, with so many family secrets now laid bare, it should surprise no one that I’ve made one last discovery. Part Viking, part Germanic, I am at core a European too.