The Weimar Triangle (2 page)

“Nothing would please me more.”

On Thursday and Friday Jay circled around the Littmann Bank. Before the Second World War its headquarters had been in the old part of town, on the Allerheiligenstrasse. It was bombed out. After the war the new office was on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, next to the post office at the corner of the Niedenau. Jay only inspected it from outside. He met with investment people, some in skyscrapers, some in modest buildings on side streets, to get a feel for the situation. He also had talks with several financial experts and knowledgeable business reporters. The impression he developed was that the Littmann Bank was indeed in desperate trouble.

When he was ready to talk to the bank directly, he phoned to make an appointment with Sigmund Pfeiffer, one of the partners who, two years earlier, had worked with the Bank of Ontario to bail out a Polish bicycle manufacturer. Jay’s plan was to say that he was in Frankfurt on other business, but, since the two banks had worked so well together in the past, he was wondering whether they might cooperate on other matters.

Unfortunately, the secretary said,
Herr Doktor
Pfeiffer was on vacation in Tuscany, but would be back on Thursday. Would eleven in the morning be convenient?

“Of course,” Jay said.

Thanks to his quick wit, his friendly blue eyes, his boyish charm and his easy conversation, he was usually well received, and not only by girls— some even wanted to marry him, a proposition he had so far successfully resisted. It was not apparent at first that he was relentless in the pursuit of whatever task was assigned to him, and impatient and irascible whenever there was danger of a diversion. Thanks to these qualities he had quickly worked his way up to his present position, in which he had recently had some remarkable successes, especially in connection with the Bank of Ontario’s acquisition of the Riddell Trust in Virginia. His superiors gave him full marks for discovering early in the game that Goldman Sachs had been eyeing it, so that the Bank of Ontario could snatch it before they did.

Jay’s status was that of special counsellor reporting directly to the vice-president of merger and acquisitions. One would search in vain for his position on any organization chart.

He was staying at the Hotel Diana in the Westendstrasse, near the Mendelssohnstrasse, a conveniently situated private residence converted to a comfortable small hotel. Jay preferred it to the ritzy hotels in which upper-level business people normally stayed.

On Saturday morning at ten Hans Kielmann picked him up. This time Jay wore not a banker’s suit but a short-sleeved blue shirt and grey slacks. It was pleasantly warm. Hans drove an unwashed, beaten-up old Volkswagen. The back seat was covered with books. It was not clear to Jay why he took the trouble to be so nice to him. Was he so pleasant to everybody?

As they were driving across the bridge over the river Main, Jay asked him outright.

“Surely you have better things to do on a Saturday morning in midsummer than to show your office to a mysterious stranger from Canada who likes German beer?”

“No, I can’t think of any,” Hans replied. “You’re the first Canadian I’ve ever met in the flesh. Please admire the view.”

It was indeed a memorable view
—
the Dom, the other churches, the rows of old houses along the river with the skyscrapers behind them forming a dramatic contrast. The word “cityscape” came to mind.

“You can’t compete with that in Canada,” Hans observed. “Can you?”

“Oh yes, we can,” Jay shot back. “When you approach Montreal from the south and look across the St. Lawrence River it looks pretty terrific. And as you may remember from the Olympics not so long ago, the view of Vancouver from the sea is spectacular.”

“Yes, I saw it. Not bad, I admit.”

“How old is Frankfurt?”

“Let me see … Charlemagne was our founding father. He was crowned in Rome around the year eight hundred. You figure it out. But the Romans had been here already.”

“I took history as an undergraduate but my father persuaded me to switch to economics for my graduate work. I now think he was right. There’s no future in the past. Unless you collect old things. Or sell books
—
what was the word?
— antiquarisch
. But my heart is still in history.”

By now they were driving down the Schweizerstrasse.

A few blocks after crossing the river, Hans turned to the left and drove along the Textorstrasse. He stopped outside a shabby tavern where, so the sign said, they served beer and
Appelwein
.

“Here we are.”

He drove into a driveway and parked in front of the garage. They got out of the car and entered the garage. It was filled with rows of bookshelves.

A young man was sitting behind a computer.

“Freddie, let me introduce you to a real live Canadian.”

Freddie was a student in German literature who was spending the summer working as one of Hans’s three assistants. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and shorts.

They shook hands.

“I understand you have three days of summer in Canada,” Freddie said. “Is that true?”

“No,” Jay replied. “Four.”

“Oh, by the way,” Freddie turned to Hans, “there’s an order for ten copies of
Premonitions
.”

“Good. From whom?”

“Somebody in New Zealand.”

“Freddie, could you please show a copy to our friend while I produce some coffee.”

Hans went to the sink, picked up three cups and put on the kettle. Freddie found a paperback on a shelf near the window. It had an attractive golden-brown cover with a pattern that looked like a skirt worn by one of those luscious Viennese beauties painted by Gustav Klimt.

“This is Hans’s pride and joy,” Freddie said as he handed it to Jay. “It’s his own work. Mind you, some of us helped him a little. It was fun putting all the pieces together. Got the Bavarian Book of the Year Prize.”

Jay looked at the back cover. It said that the work was about Schwabing, a magnet for artists, writers, freethinkers and many others who wanted to escape from bourgeois life in the decade before 1914.

“Where is Schwabing?” Jay asked.

“A neighbourhood in Munich. Now indistinguishable from any other neighbourhood. But then
—
a great big bubble of creative energy, brimming over with big ideas about the future.”

“Is that why you called it
Premonitions
?”

“Exactly.” Hans had returned with the coffee. “We did it for people like you,” he said. “History buffs. All kinds of celebrity thinkers were there, more or less at the same time. Lenin, rightwing poets like Stefan George and his crowd, Wassily Kandinsky, the Countess of Reventlow who was the leader of the free love movement, Thomas Mann, Adolf Hitler…”

“He was there, too?”

“Yes, even Adolf Hitler. At the very end. In 1913. A refugee from Vienna, which he hated. He loved Schwabing. But our main character was Otto Gross, a brilliant disciple of Freud. A kind of tragic genius, a drug addict, now totally forgotten. Women were crazy about him. It was a lot of hard slogging, digging up stuff about him. Finding it in unexpected places, such as an old castle near Pilsen. Somebody should make a movie about him.”

They drank their coffee. Jay expected Hans to ask him what he was doing in Frankfurt and whether he had any connection to a particular bank. There was never again any reference to Jay’s silly joke about the Deutsche Bank.

“May I have a look at some of your books?” Jay asked.

“But of course.” Hans led the way to one of the shelves in the back.

“You asked about the old Frankfurt. Local history is here.”

The shelves were filled with books about old Frankfurt families, politics, business and, of course, the Rothschilds.

Jay was fascinated. He picked a book about the old ghetto.

“Enough of this!” Hans said suddenly, all excited. “Who needs these dusty old books? Let me show you the real old Frankfurt as it lives and breathes. Or rather, what’s left of it.” He led Jay back to the car.

The weather could not have been better. They drove along various side streets in the direction of Offenbach, to the Gerbermühle, a complex of new buildings along the river. One of its attractions was a large garden. A number of people were sunning themselves. Children were chasing a ball.

“You’ve no doubt seen the Goethehaus.”

“I have.”

“So you know something about Goethe. Even Canadians must have heard of him. There was an old mill here, and a villa that belonged to an adventurous widowed banker by the name Johann Jakob von Willemer, an old friend of Goethe, a generous patron of actresses and dancers.”

“Did you say he was a banker?” Jay asked.

“Yes, so the textbooks say.”

“A competitor of old Littmann?”

“They probably hated each other. Why do you ask?”

Why not tell him, Jay wondered.

“My bank has his eyes on the Littmann Bank,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Aha,” Hans said. “That makes a lot of sense. “They are nearly
—
what is the English term I like so much
—
you know
—
like a fish…”

“Belly up.”

“Oh yes. Belly up. Lovely. Or
—
there’s another English phrase for it
—
ripe for the plucking. This time it’s a chicken.”

“We hope so.”

“How far have you got?”

“I am seeing one of their people on Thursday.”

“Good luck! Now let’s talk about
important
things. I was telling you about Goethe.”

“So you were. You were saying he hung around with bankers.”

“Yes, he did. He was well known for choosing his friends carefully. He did not like the poor. As a matter of fact, he celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday right here. Willemer had kind of adopted an alluring actress-dancer with tousled hair by the name of Marianne Jung, of uncertain Viennese origins. It was said he bought her from her impecunious mother, also an actress, for two hundred guilders. He introduced Marianne to Goethe. Goethe was charmed. Because of her he often came here. She was no longer in the first flush of youth
—
about thirty when she met Goethe. One of the things that charmed him was her amazing gift for poetry. They played charades and masquerades together and began writing love poems to each other. She assumed the role of the oriental beauty Suleika. Her poems were as good as his. Maybe better. He included hers in his wonderful collection
Der Westöstliche Diwan
and never thought of giving her credit for her contributions. Typical. He was very fond of himself. Nobody would know about it if she had not told a friend many years later, when she was an old lady. But the story ended happily when the enterprising old banker married her. He happened to be a widower. Right here, at the Gerbermühle. Too bad Goethe already had a wife.”

The Littmann Bank was an elegant grey building, designed in the best postmodern style of the nineteen-fifties, not much larger than the usual pre–World War One residences of the Frankfurt west end.

“Oh, I am so sorry, Mr. Gordonson,” Pfeiffer’s handsome secretary said. “I phoned several hotels but you were not listed. I wanted to tell you that
Herr Doktor
Pfeiffer has decided to stay a little longer in the
Toscana.
He will definitely be back on Thursday.”

“I understand,” Jay said. It would have been a little impolitic to say he probably does not have much to do in Frankfurt anyway at the moment.

“Shall we say on Thursday morning at eleven?” the secretary asked.

“That’s fine, thank you.”

It was only a minor blow. It gave him a few more days to talk to people. Hans introduced him to a number of his friends. He met Hans’s girlfriend, with whom he shared a basement apartment in the Wolfgangstrasse. Her name was Hildy Soden. She was an elementary schoolteacher and had dimples and a stub nose. Jay found her delightful.

Among the people he also met were Werner Schenker and his wife, Anna. He had a travel agency and she was a social worker. They had both been to Canada and insisted on speaking English with him. Hans also introduced him to Claire Sommerlatt, a white-haired lady who had become a friend because she ordered books for the medical faculty at the university, and to Hin Lee Wong, who played the viola in the symphony orchestra and was married to Yvonne, an alluring professor of French who came from Dijon. Hans played the violin and sometimes he and Hin Lee played in the same string quartet.