Then there was a week in October of
'77 during which my search for employment took me to Germany. An advertisement
in the International Herald Tribune announced an employment opportunity. It was
not for the secretary-generalship of the United Nations or the command of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, but rather—more appropriately for my qualifications,
such as they were (and weren’t)—for an English teacher at the Opel car plant in
Russelsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt/Main. Payment in deutschemarks, cheap lodging
available, those proficient in both U.K. and U.S. variants of English most
desired. Well, bedad that was me, said I to meself, that was me, so it was, so
I “borrowed” a little extra for the train and I was off, o boys o boys was I
ever.
My
timing was unfortunate. It transpired that the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof
gang had chosen the day of my interview to execute the hostage they’d been
holding for several months, Herr Schleyer, a businessman. Simultaneously, the B-M
terrorist Gudrun Ensslin strung herself up with a nylon stocking in her
Stuttgart prison cell. Or was strung up. Either way, the timing of the dual
event was a jolt to the body politic of the placid Bundesrepublik. By lunchtime, tanks, army convoys and halftracks were
in the streets of Frankfurt. Sirens wailed. Helicopters flew overhead. I’d
landed right in the middle of the biggest upheaval and mare’s nest in Germany
since the bad old days of Adolf & Co.: “The German Autumn, Der Deutsche Herbst,” they
call it. Actually, for one thrilling moment it was like being back in the Third
Reich, but without the actual Nazis: tanks, feldgrau-ish German soldiery everywhere, and strutting polizei. The German state appeared to be coming perilously
close to the kind of brutal overreaction that the spoiled-brat killers of the
Baader-Meinhof Gang were counting on. Frankfurt’s Haus of Polizei was bustling
that day, not only with uniforms of a hue not dissimilar to those from the old
days, but with civilians snapping into walkie-talkies and diplomats and
journalists and, surrounded by reporters, Herr Burgermeister himself, or
somebody equally florid, silver-haired and self-important. Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt (shown in the photo above)? Herr Kohl, the leader of the opposition? No
matter. It all meant I couldn’t get anyone to listen to my silly tale of woe.
No one had any time for a hungover American who couldn’t speak German.
To
make matters worse, I'd contrived to lose my passport somewhere en route.
“So?
Go to your Embassy,” said a cop. Or to hell, implied the back of his head, as
he turned away to juggle a dozen phones. Another cop hustled me out. The police
building was now encircled by tanks. The journey on foot to the U.S. Consulate,
amid the heavy-breathing hardware and personnel of the mighty German state,
took me back again to the ‘30s; and like an undesirable of those days I fancied
that my secret or secrets—broke, undocumented, a foreigner, a member of the
Official IRA—would be visible to the first
passing polizist, whether
Geheimstaats or not…of course I exaggerate, but it was a tense moment,
all in all, emblematic of all the moments of my life when the assembled forces
of my misspent prior lives all seem to gang up on me at once.
Finally
I succeeded in persuading someone at the U.S. Consulate that I was all-American
and had been the victim of circumstances.
“We
can advance you some money but you can’t get a passport unless we get a signed
and stamped certificate of loss from the Police Headquarters,” said the
assistant chargé d’affaires, with visible delight.
“But
I just came from there. They threw me out.”
“Hey,
listen, Robert.” A dismissive shrug.
“Roger,
actually…”
“Whatever.”
Leaving
me alone and undocumented in a hostile world. All perfectly normal in a world
painstakingly designed by F. Kafka, Esq. Well, I was way ahead of Franz K., and
by the time I got to the French border, having spent the Consulate's loan on a
train ticket for several slow local trains that groaned and chugged and clunked
from Frankfurt to Mannheim and from Mannheim to Koblenz and Koblenz to
Karlsruhe and thence to Kehl on the Rhine, I was way ahead of the polizei, too, although the actual border crossing took a bit
of advance planning—Dutch courage at the wayside beer-and-currywurst stand (ah,
Germany)—noch ein bier, bitte!—then, when that customs chap walked left, I
nipped right, down the stairs, and through the door marked with the French
tricolor and “Rien à Declarer”—and
on the other side, in the land of Marianne, I babbled fluently to the
near-comatose French border guard about coming back from a job là-bas, en Allemagne, and that I’d forgotten my papers, just that once. (Momentarily
reminded again of the not-so-long-ago bad old days when indeed millions of
ordinary Frenchies went là-bas
for “jobs,” and not willingly.)
“C’est bon,” he yawned. “Passez.”
And vive la France. I actually said that, arousing suspicions. Just
joking, I explained, and made my way on another series of stop-and-start locals
through Alsace and the Jura to the creaking front door of my mother’s
Voltairean mini-manse.
(Oh.
The job? They decided to offer it to an Irishman. Ironic, eh? Citizen of the
EU, you see. Oh well.)
