It quickly became apparent to me that the most delicate question would be that of lodging: I couldn’t stay indefinitely at the hotel. The Obersturmbannführer from the SS-Personal Hauptamt proposed two options: SS housing for single officers, very inexpensive, with meals included; or a room with a lodge, for which I would have to pay rent. Thomas stayed in a three-room apartment, spacious and very comfortable, with high ceilings and valuable old furniture. Given the grave housing crisis in Berlin—people who had a room empty were in principle forced to take on a tenant—it was a luxurious apartment, especially for a single Obersturmbannführer; a married Gruppenführer with children wouldn’t have turned it down. He laughingly told me how he had gotten it: “It’s not at all complicated. If you like, I can help you find one, maybe not as large, but with two rooms at least.” Thanks to an acquaintance working at the Berlin Generalbauinspektion, he had had a Jewish apartment, liberated in view of the reconstruction of the city, assigned to him by special dispensation. “The only problem is that it was only granted to me provided I pay for the renovation, about five hundred reichsmarks. I didn’t have the money, but I managed to get it allocated to me by Berger as a one-time aid.” Leaning back on the sofa, he ran a satisfied eye around him: “Not bad, don’t you agree?”—“And the car?” I asked, laughing. Thomas also had a little convertible, which he loved to go out in and in which he sometimes came to pick me up in the evening. “That, my friend, is another story that I’ll tell you someday. I did tell you, in Stalingrad, that if we got out of it, life would be good. There’s no reason to deprive ourselves.” I thought about his offer, but finally decided on a furnished room with a family. I wasn’t keen on living in a building for the SS, I wanted to be able to choose whom I met with outside of work; and the idea of staying alone, of living in my own company, made me a little afraid, to tell the truth. Lodgers would at least be a human presence, I would have my meals prepared, there would be noise in the hallways. So I filed my request, specifying that I would like two rooms and that there had to be a woman for cooking and housekeeping. They offered me something in Mitte, with a widow, six stations on a direct U-Bahn line from Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, at a reasonable price; I accepted without even visiting it and they gave me a letter. Frau Gutknecht, a fat, ruddy-cheeked woman past sixty, with voluminous breasts and dyed hair, examined me with a long, wily look when she opened the door to me: “So you’re the officer?” she said with a thick Berlin accent. I stepped across the threshold and shook her hand: she stank of cheap perfume. She retreated into the long hallway and showed me the doors: “This is my place; that’s yours. Here’s the key. I have one too, of course.” She opened the door and showed me around: mass-market furniture laden with curios, yellowing, wrinkled wallpaper, a musty smell. After the living room was the bedroom, isolated from the rest of the apartment. “The kitchen and toilets are in the back. Hot water is rationed, so no baths.” Two black-framed portraits hung on the walclass="underline" a man about thirty, with a little civil servant’s moustache, and a young, solid, blond boy in a Wehrmacht uniform. “Is that your husband?” I asked respectfully. A grimace deformed her face: “Yes. And my son, Franz, my little Franzi. He fell the first day of the French campaign. His Feldwebel wrote me that he died a hero, to save a comrade, but he didn’t get a medal. He wanted to avenge his dad, my Bubi, there, who died gassed in Verdun.”—“My condolences.”—“Oh, for Bubi, I’m used to it, you know. But I still miss my little Franzi.” She cast me a calculating look. “Too bad I don’t have a daughter. You could have married her. I would have liked that, an officer son-in-law. My Bubi was Unterfeldwebel and my Franzi was still a Gefreiter.”—“Yes,” I replied politely, “it’s too bad.” I pointed to the curios: “Could I ask you to take all those away? I’ll need some room for my things.” She looked indignant: “And where do you suggest I put them? In my place there’s even less room. Plus they’re pretty. You just have to push them over a little. But watch out! If you break it you pay for it.” She pointed to the portraits: “If you like, I can take those away. I wouldn’t want to inflict my mourning on you.”—“That’s not important,” I said.—“Fine, then I’ll leave them. This was Bubi’s favorite room.” We came to an agreement on the meals, and I gave her a section of my ration book.
I settled in as well as I could; in any case I didn’t have a lot of things. By piling up the curios and the cheap prewar novels, I managed to free up a few shelves where I put my own books, delivered from the basement where I had stored them before I left for Russia. It made me happy to unpack them and leaf through them, even though many of them had been damaged by humidity. Next to them I put the edition of Nietzsche that Thomas had given me and that I had never opened, the three Burroughs books brought back from France, and the Blanchot, which I had given up reading; the Stendhal books I had taken to Russia had remained there, just like Stendhal’s own 1812 diaries and somewhat in the same way, really. I regretted not having thought to replace them during my Paris trip, but there would always be another opportunity, if I were still alive. The booklet on ritual murder puzzled me a little: whereas I could easily arrange the Festgabe next to my economics and political science books, it was a little harder to find a place for this book. I finally slipped it in with the history books, between von Treitschke and Gustav Kossinna. These books and my clothes were all that I owned, aside from a gramophone and a few records; the kinzhal from Nalchik, alas, had also stayed in Stalingrad. After I had put everything away, I put on some Mozart arias, dropped into an armchair and lit a cigarette. Frau Gutknecht came in without knocking and was immediately upset: “You’re not going to smoke here! It’ll make the curtains stink.” I got up and pulled down the tails of my tunic: “Frau Gutknecht. Please be so kind as to knock, and to wait for my reply before you come in.” She turned crimson: “Excuse me, Herr Offizier! But I’m in my own home, aren’t I? And also, with all due respect, I could be your mother. What does it matter to you, if I come in? You don’t intend to have girls up here, do you? This is a respectable house, the house of a good family.” I decided it was urgent to make things clear: “Frau Gutknecht, I am renting your two rooms; so it’s no longer your home but my home. I have no intention of having girls up, as you say, but I am attached to my private life. If this arrangement doesn’t suit you, I’ll take my things and my rent back and leave. Do you understand?” She calmed down: “Don’t take it like that, Herr Offizier…I’m not used to it, that’s all. You can even smoke if you like. Only you might open the windows…” She looked at my books: “I see you’re cultivated…” I interrupted her: “Frau Gutknecht. If you have nothing else to ask me, I would be grateful if you left me alone.”—“Oh yes, sorry, yes.” She went out and closed the door behind her, leaving the key in the lock.