I was a reporter. To be precise: I was the reporter, editor, typesetter, printer and publisher of Paulstadt’s only news­paper, the Paulstädter Bote.

*

After more than five years of war, when instead of my father – whose face and voice I could no longer recall even then – all that came back was a typed, official letter that spoke of the performance of soldierly duties in keeping with the oath of allegiance for the greatness and future of our fatherland, as well as sincere condolences and irreplaceable loss, I hid behind the stairs to the coal cellar and drafted my first ever letter. It was addressed to my dead father, and I never had any intention of sending it. Where to? I put the letter in an envelope and buried it under the blackcurrant bush in our garden. Then I walked out into the fields, lay down in a furrow and wept until I felt as dry and brittle as the earth beneath me. It was a hot summer, and I was fourteen years old.

The mound of earth under the blackcurrants must have caught my mother’s eye. She found the letter, and after reading it several times from beginning to end, as she told me later, she called me into the kitchen. She sat on her stool and scrutinized me. Something in her gaze had changed. I thought it seemed infinitely sad, but there was also something in it that made me take heart. I felt oddly tall and strong, yet at the same time I was ashamed of this feeling. She folded her arms across her chest. For a few moments all was quiet in the kitchen, then suddenly she said, ‘You were the most wonderful child I could ever have imagined.’

I stared at her in alarm. She rested her hands in her lap. ‘You’re not a child any more,’ she said. ‘You may not be a man yet, but you’re not a child any more. You’re my son, and you’ve grown to be cleverer than I ever thought pos­­­sible. You can think. You can see behind the curtain. You have potential – use it. Promise me you’ll use your potential!’

Later I found out that, after the war, she made two copies of the letter and sent one to the readers’ letters section of a national newspaper, and one to Paulstadt town hall ‘for the personal attention of our esteemed mayor’. There was no response from the mayor, but the newspaper printed the letter, and my mother framed the page and hung it on the living-­room wall, where it remained until her death, as a mark of her pride and a perpetual reminder to me. The reminder was: never be a worse person than you were at fourteen.

I realized back then what a great impression a few well-­formulated sentences can make. I decided to dedicate my life to writing. To be precise, I decided to devote my life to writing down the truth, even though I didn’t have the faintest idea what the truth might actually be. My father’s death had seemed false to me somehow, a great big lie. What did the fact that someone had ended up in a muddy trench with their head shot to pieces have to do with heroism? And if someone was irreplaceable, as the lieutenant’s letter had said, why did they put him in such a trench? And why was the talk all of the fatherland, when for ages now fathers had been returning from this mess confused or crippled, or not at all? These questions bothered me. And they prompted others. Questions I never had the nerve to ask my mother. Questions for my teachers, my schoolmates, the town hall, for every random passer-­by who was able simply to walk across the street while my father was long since dead in the ground somewhere. And then there were questions for myself. Who was I? Who did I want to be? Who was I capable of being?