The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach Page B

instance, ‘We Germans always rate nature above other human beings.’ But he didn’t. It was nothing to do with him. He wasn’t going to have to live in the mountains; some time he could leave this place and go back to Berlin. The city is the right place for human beings, he thought. Biegler pulled himself together. ‘Relax,’ the doctor had told him.
     
    In the middle of a trial four weeks ago, Biegler had fallen over one evening, just like that, in the corridor of the Central Criminal Court in Berlin, the Moabit. He had hit his forehead on a stone parapet and slipped to the floor. The doctor had sent him to a hospital where he and other patients suffering from ‘burn-out’ sat in a circle, throwing brightly coloured woolly balls to each other; in the afternoons he was supposed to cut shapes out of paper. Biegler had discharged himself after two days.
    ‘Then at least go to the mountains,’ the doctor had insisted. Preferably the South Tyrol. The doctor had read something out of a brochure: at this hotel, the Zirmerhof, it said, peace was understood as something more than ‘the absence of noise’, it was an ‘inner quality maintaining life’. Many famous people, the doctor assured him, had come to this mountain hotel to recuperate. He reeled off the names of Heisenberg, Planck, Feltrinelli, Trott zu Solz, Siemens, and a whole series of artists and writers. Eugen Roth had even written a poem about the hotel. Biegler booked a room.
     
    Now the hotel guests were leaving the terrace with the mountain guide. Biegler stood up, arching his back. All the chairs at the Zirmerhof were uncomfortable, and he wondered whether there was some ulterior reason for it. The other guests – most of them mountain walkers – thought it weak-minded to sit on the cushions meant for the outdoor chairs. Biegler always took two of them.
    He got a book out of his coat pocket. The doctor had not forbidden him to read. Biegler opened the book. He had been here for four days, but he still couldn’t concentrate on it. It was called
Positive Thinking For Managers
. His former secretary had given it to him as a goodbye present, saying that it would do him good. By now Biegler owned a considerable collection of such books.
Feeling, Thinking and Acting in Harmony With the Universe
;
The Power of Good Feelings
;
Living More Consciously, With 30 Motivational Maps and Online Materials
;
Seven Steps to Congeniality
; and finally Biegler’s favourite title:
Positive Thinking: Walking To Success. Mental Training For Your Personal Victory
. His secretary had just retired, and he had seen her successor only once.
    Biegler’s wife Elly also despaired of his dismal mood. They had been married for twenty-eight years. Elly thought Biegler’s grouchiness was the result of his career and the murder trials in which he acted for the defence. However, she was wrong; Biegler simply considered ‘positive thinking’ a stupid idea. He had tried to wean the junior lawyers in his chambers off it. Good-tempered people, he thought, were either childish or sneaky.
    A farmer was mowing the meadow in front of the terrace. His tractor was a fine-looking machine, but there was something wrong with its exhaust. Biegler thought there was something wrong with the farmer too – he mowed the same part of the meadow every day. He tried the positive-thinking trick and said a civil good morning to the farmer. The farmer stared blankly at him. Biegler nodded, satisfied.
    He walked a little way. Over fifty larchwood benches stood round the hotel. As a guest at the Zirmerhof, you could buy the right to have your name burned on one of these benches by the village joiner. Biegler tried them, one by one. They were always placed so that he was obliged to look at the allegedly idyllic sights: mountains, meadows, trees, footpaths, rocks. Biegler’s mood darkened from bench to bench.
    He didn’t want to disappoint Elly. He went to his room, which was no larger than the conference