Ingo Schulze - New Lives

SOME SEVEN YEARS AGO, while casting about for the stuff of a novel, I began to collect material on German entrepreneurs. Heinrich Türmer aroused my interest because within just a few years, he turned a newspaper into a small empire and brought the entire region along the border between Thuringia and Saxony under his influence. The collapse of his widely diversified enterprise was both unforeseen and sensational. As 1997 turned into 1998, debtors and tax collectors found themselves gazing at open doors and empty coffers. Türmer had fled to avoid prosecution. Others were left to pay the price of his speculations. The consequences are still being felt throughout the region.

During my research I stumbled on many extraordinary and unusual occurrences. One modest detail, however, led me to a discovery that could not have astonished me more.

Türmer’s first name was originally Enrico, and it was not until midyear 1990 that he began using the German form, Heinrich. The fact is, however, that I knew an Enrico Türmer who had been born and raised in Dresden. He was the brother of Vera Türmer — a friend with whom I had lost all contact after she left for the West — and also a schoolmate, although in a different class. I found it hard to believe that the overweight, elegantly dressed executive in newspaper photos could be the unremarkable Enrico with whom I had played soccer and sung in the choir.

I was even more surprised when my search under the keyword Türmer turned up a handsomely bound edition of short stories (Göttingen, 1998). I presume its publication could not have been possible without financial backing from the author. The scattered reviews were without exception derogatory. Rightly so. Were it not for the bitter after-taste of his flight, one might respect Türmer’s attempt to give a literary hue to the workaday world of the entrepreneur, with all its worries, pressures, and joys. In his foreword Türmer praises the world of work as “the promised land of tomorrow’s literature.”

My attempts to establish contact with Heinrich Türmer through his publisher met with no success. I did, however, receive a reply from Vera Barakat-Türmer. She even encouraged me in my intention of using her brother’s life as the basis for a novel. In a selfless and generous gesture, Vera Barakat-Türmer placed at my disposal all the papers her brother had already transferred to her care in 1990, thereby preventing the court from seizing them. And now, or so I hoped, I would be able to trace Türmer’s career to at least the initial phase of his entrepreneurship.

There were five dusty shoeboxes stuffed with diaries, letters, memos, and fragments of fictional prose — along with receipts, train tickets, shopping lists, and the like. Most of what Türmer had put to paper between 1978 and 1990—as a schoolboy in Dresden, a soldier in Oranienburg, a student in Jena, and a man of the theater in Altenburg — proved, however, to be of no use for my purposes. The juvenile tone was barely tolerable. Every sentence Türmer wrote, even in his letters — or so it seemed to me — kept one eye cast on an imaginary audience. Of telltale significance is the fact that he always made carbon copies of his own letters, but only very rarely kept those addressed to him.

A growing aversion to the figure of Türmer now threatened to jeopardize my plans, when I finally struck it rich.

Before me lay the letters to Nicoletta Hansen. Their quality led me to doubt Türmer’s authorship, but I sought in vain for any validation of my suspicions in the handwriting.

Among the letters to Nicoletta — at irregular intervals but from the same period, the first six months of 1990—were others addressed to Johann Ziehlke, a friend since boyhood. As in his correspondence with Nicoletta, here too Türmer appeared to have succeeded in ways that escaped him in his attempts at literary prose.

In response to my request, Vera Barakat-Türmer managed to persuade both Nicoletta Hansen and Johann Ziehlke to hand over the entire original correspondence for my personal inspection. In addition to this, Vera Barakat-Türmer provided me with thirteen of her brother’s letters addressed to her.

Once I had put the letters to all three addressees in chronological order (from January 6 to July 11, 1990) and read them as a whole, there unfolded before me a panorama of a period when everything in Türmer’s life — and not just his — stood in the balance.

I read about a man of the theater who becomes a newspaper editor, about a failed writer who becomes a lucky entrepreneur. I read about a schoolboy whose longing for fame proves to be a curse; about a soldier who manages to avoid an attack on Poland, but not an attack by his comrades; about a student who falls in love with an actress; about a fence-straddler who becomes a hero against his will. I read about demonstrations and the first steps westward; I read about a brother who cannot live without his sister; I read about illness and exorcism — in a word, I read a novel.

And I decided to set aside my own plans for a novel and devote all my energies to publishing these letters.

To anticipate the question: Both the search for a publisher and discussions with the interested parties lasted several years.

It was not always possible to obtain the consent of all parties or to comply with their provisos. Almost everyone who came under Türmer’s gaze has learned how biased, indeed how false and malicious, his representations can sometimes be. Nor was the author of these remarks spared the experience of finding his image distorted in Türmer’s funhouse mirror.

My special thanks go to the actress Michaela von Barrista-Fürst and her son, Robert Fürst, with whom Türmer lived at the time. Without their understanding and magnanimity the project would have been doomed to failure. Elisabeth Türmer hesitated for some time to give her consent — after all, publication will not cast her son in the most favorable light. That she finally did agree merits acknowledgment. Likewise his schoolchum Johann Ziehlke, who later studied theology, had to jump over his own shadow to give his consent. Türmer’s flight was for him — as his confidant and chief executive — not merely a betrayal of friendship, it also brought with it major legal and financial difficulties for him and his family. What few deletions he requested were perfectly acceptable and insignificant in terms of the larger context.

At times consent was obtained only on the condition that a counter-position be included. I am very pleased that Marion and Jörg Schröder, his former newspaper colleagues, agreed to such a compromise. Last but not least, I would like to thank Nicoletta Hansen, who had severed her relationship with Türmer by 1995. In some instances such consent is lacking — as, for example, in the case of Dr. Clemens von Barrista — when people’s whereabouts could not be established.

As to the appendix and notes, I would like to state the following:

Twenty of the letters to Nicoletta Hansen were written on the reverse side of old manuscripts. These manuscripts are — and Türmer himself was the first to recognize this — mediocre at best, as well as fragmentary and incomplete. They are included in an appendix in order here and there to explicate matters excluded from or merely implied in the letters.

The footnotes are meant to facilitate the reading experience. What may seem superfluous to some will be greeted with thanks by other, particularly younger, readers. I have refrained from comment whenever circumstances are explained in some later context.

The attentive reader will not fail to notice that in writing his letters Türmer describes the same incident in very different versions depending on his addressee. It is not the editor’s task to assess the implications of this.