Unity by Michael Arditti

birth to 7 May 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender to the Allies, he aimed to portray himself as a phoenix rising from the ashes of war (there were some who maintained that the ashes were those of Hitler’s bunker). He was therefore able to forge a parallel between his own development and that of his country. The process of self-definition had begun.
    The inability to know the truth about a fellow human being was a recurring theme of Wolfram’s work and one that he exemplified in his life. He lied not only about his age but about his background . When he arrived at the Bettlertheater , he claimed that he had been born in the GDR. He confided in each of us individually – and supposedly uniquely – that he was the illegitimate son of a top-ranking politician, even hinting that it was Ulbricht 87 himself. He warned of the danger of our being seen in public with someone who was under constant surveillance by the Stasi . Such was the paranoia and, I am forced to admit, the chemical consumption of the day that we believed him.
    Wolfram’s alleged father had met his alleged mother while she was plying her trade on the Linienstrasse during the War. He was subsequently brought up in a brothel, the details of which brought tears to our eyes until we discovered that they had been taken straight from a biography of Edith Piaf (in whose life-story Wolfram long hoped to film the author of this memoir 88 ). The truth is at once more mundane and more moving. His father was killed on the Russian front. His widowed mother scavenged and scrounged to provide for her three-year-old daughter and six-month -old son. The ravages of peacetime took their toll and the little girl died – officially of typhus, in reality of malnutrition. For the rest of her life, Wolfram’s mother blamed herself for neglecting her daughter in favour of her son. Wolfram, on the other hand, never uttered a word of regret for his dead sister. On the contrary, his solitary survival confirmed his sense of destiny.
    That sense was reinforced by his guilt-ridden mother and the household of doting female relatives who lived with them. Kristel Meier spoke many times of how, from his earliest years, Wolfram’s behaviour marked him out as exceptional. When asked by his teacher to name his favourite smell, in place of his classmates ’ hot chocolate or sizzling sausages, he answered ‘American soldiers’. When that same teacher found him digging assiduously in the school sandpit, she inquired if he were making a castle. ‘No,’ the eight-year-old replied, ‘I’m digging your grave.’ He was transferred to a new school shortly afterwards. When challenged about the incident years later on a chat-show, he declared that his strongest reason for wanting to kill his teacher had been the 365 Day calendar on her desk. Every morning she ripped off a page at Registration as if time were just so much waste paper.
    Time for Wolfram was a precious resource. Childhood was fast disappearing. When he was ten, his mother married again. Her new husband was a butcher (a profession vilified throughout Wolfram’s work). Stepfather and son made no secret of their mutual loathing. Wolfram also turned against his mother, pouring particular scorn on her explanation that she had only accepted the proposal in order to provide him with an adequate diet. A year into her marriage, she became pregnant. When she went into labour, she left Wolfram in the care of his stepfather. On the first night that they were alone, the two slept together. Wolfram told the story with glee, relishing the horror on our post-adolescent faces. He denied that he had been in any way harmed by the encounter, insisting that, on the contrary, he had been its instigator , feeling the simultaneous thrill of consummation and of power. He claimed that every boy of that age had sexual feelings and would welcome such an opportunity: a view that never proved to be more