I spent the
Christmas of 1990 with my German girlfriend Anke and her family in Hamburg.
While we were there we took some trips through what was until a few weeks prior,
East Germany. Germany had just been reunified a couple of months before and you
could drive from Hamburg to Berlin, for the first time in over 40 years, which
we did. We were thinking about opportunities there might be in the newly-unified
city. I had never been there and was eager to see what it looked like before
the wall that surrounded the western half of the city was completely torn down.
I grew up on spy novels and Berlin was, of course, ground zero in the Cold War,
the gateway between East and West through the Iron Curtain.
By the time
we returned home to Brooklyn, we had decided to move to Berlin the following
summer. I had to break the news to my parents. My mother would be fine as long
as she could meet the girl with whom I was making the move. The problem was meeting
my father was always a potential deal breaker in any relationship I’d had.
I remember
introducing him to a beautiful girl named Cornelia I was dating in college. We
were at his house in Philadelphia one evening and I remember my father handing
off the phone to me while talking to one of my sisters. While I was talking on
the phone, my father offered to show my girlfriend his war room in the basement
where he had a giant table set up with a World War II battle scene with toy
soldiers, artillery and tanks. When they came up from the basement Cornelia
glared at me. She took the first opportunity to tell me that my father had made
a pass at her in the war room.
That’s the
way it was with my father. If he liked a girl I was dating, he eventually ended
up making a pass at her and if he didn’t like her, he was vicious and cruel
toward her. So you can understand my apprehension. I wasn’t concerned whether
my father would like Anke, but that he wouldn’t at least be civil to her and
she would come away from the experience wondering what kind of family she was
getting involved with. Add to this the fact that Anke herself was very quiet
and unassuming.
A few
months after coming home from Germany, my father called to say my sisters were
coming to Philadelphia to spend their spring break there. He invited me and my
girlfriend to come for the weekend and I
thought it would be a good opportunity for Anke to meet my sisters and, of
course, my father, if ever there was a “good” opportunity. So we drove down to
Philadelphia from New York.
At first
everything was going well. I think my father was on his best behavior because
of the presence of my teenage sisters. I don’t remember what we ate, but it was
probably one of my father’s great pizzas he made from scratch, having spent the
afternoon picking up ingredients at the Italian Market in South Philly. Anyway,
family gatherings with my father usually converged around the playing of a
board game, in which he would berate us on the stupidity of our moves and
otherwise humiliate us in the company of whomever had the misfortune of letting
themselves be dragged into this private hell known as game night.
I think in my father’s mind the choice of the
game was decided by the fact of Anke being German. The Second World War would
be reenacted in a game of Risk. As my father handed out the different colored
playing pieces, he looked at Anke and—in a bad German accent—said, “And SS
black for za fraulein,” as he gave her the black tokens. The pained expressions
on the faces of the rest us showed embarrassment, if not surprise, at my
father’s typical bad taste. I knew this wasn’t going to end well.
I never
understood by father’s fixation with the military. The full extent of my
father’s service was being bounced out of ROTC after being classified 4F for
bad eyesight, bordering on legal blindness and flat feet. But it never seemed
to dampen his interest in all things military. In his library of over six
thousand books, there were over 500 books on war and military. He had a toy
soldier collection that once belonged to Hermann Göring. He knew by heart the
dates of all the great battles in history. A game of Risk then was mere child’s
play for a great amateur war strategist. Except that the black tokens were
slowly spreading across the board from Europe and into Africa, Scandinavia and
Russia.
The Risk
board was beginning to look a lot like those maps in World War II newsreels
showing what would happen if Nazi aggression went unchecked. When my girlfriend
Anke made any kind of unconventional move in the game, my father would stroke
his chin and say, “Verrry Interrresting,” like Arte Johnson in a German uniform
peeking through a potted plant. He started referring to her as “Fraulein
Clausewitz,” alluding to the great German military tactician, which, coming from
my father was the closest she’d ever come to receiving any kind of compliment.
It was not
my father’s finest hour as Britain fell to Fraulein Clausewitz’s army, which
she then used as a stepping stone to Greenland, Canada and eventually the
United States. One by one the rest of us were eliminated from the game leaving
my father and Anke battling it out in what was left of the U.S. My father was
beginning to seethe as Anke clearly demonstrated her Aryan superiority and more
importantly seemed to be immune to my father’s remarks, which always had the
effect of throwing us, his kids, off our game, allowing him to win.
Finally, my
father conceded the game to Anke by throwing down his cards and saying, “I’ve
had enough. I’m going to bed,”
“You
surrender?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he
answered curtly.
“Unconditionally?”
I added.
“Smartass,”
He said and without so much as a by-your-leave stalked upstairs to bed. Suffice
to say that the atmosphere for the rest of the weekend was chilly.
Although my
relationship with Anke ended that following summer in Holland, just 10
kilometers short of the German border, I don’t believe that in this particular
instance the breakdown of the relationship had much, if anything, to do with my
father being an asshole. But I underestimated my father’s ability to hold a
grudge until some four years later when I was going through my father’s papers
after his death and found a version of his will, almost identical to the
version that was ultimately probated except for a few minor additions and
deletions, that excluded me from any inheritance if I was married to “that Nazi
bitch, Anke [Last name misspelled].”
