‘This present fashion for parchment lampshades, paper lampshades even – what on earth is that? It shows a complete lack of taste. Firstly, an alabaster shade gives out a soft light that can be tinted to any colour you like, and secondly . . .’ And he would launch into a lengthy excursus on the advantages of the lamps made by him. Mrs Sponar, his espoused wife, had something of the dethroned queen about her, an air of Mary Queen of Scots in the hour before her execution. Her hair too was snowy-white, crowning a face that was white and almost wrinklefree, there was something Junoesque about her figure, and she had what one might call an ample bosom – which she knew how to carry off. It was not hard to tell who wore the trousers in that marriage. The retired artist obeyed the dethroned queen in all matters without question. I rather doubt if it had always been this way. This undoubtedly clever, or at least wily, woman would surely not have allowed her husband to ruin himself so foolishly while she stood idly by. I imagine he did it all behind her back, and only when she discovered the full extent of his business failure did she seize the reins of government. But it was too late. They had become impoverished – worse than that: they were on welfare. The rent that I paid them – and it was no small amount – all went to the mortgage lenders, who were happy to get a little interest at last on the money they had lent. In the meantime the Sponars were living off the meagre pension that the social services paid them during those lean years, which probably amounted to something like thirty marks a month – that’s for husband and wife together, of course! As the saying goes: not enough to live on, too much to die for. Things were made easier for them, of course, in that they were still living in ‘their’ own house and could feed themselves from ‘their’ own garden. In other times, needless to say, the mortgage lenders would have long since lost patience and forced them to put the house up for auction; but in order to prevent total chaos in the property market one of the previous governments had introduced something called ‘foreclosure protection’, which meant that a foreclosure could only be initiated if the borrower gave his consent, which of course happened only in very rare instances.

Such were our landlords, and such were the circumstances of their lives at the time, which they made no secret of. In general we got on very well with them; as tenants we were not the petty-minded type, and if something needed repairing I had it done at my expense, even though it was technically the landlord’s responsibility. The fact is that the Sponars were destitute. I even paid the old man a small monthly allowance, in return for which he pottered about a bit in my part of the garden, strength and health permitting. But we were more cautious in our dealings with the dethroned princess: she acted all condescending and friendly, but we never quite trusted her. Her big eyes often lit up with something like pain, and I sometimes thought that she hated us because we had what she had lost: property, a carefree life, happiness. The days passed and turned into weeks and months, and we felt more and more at home in our villa on the Spree. Our little boy cheered every tug boat that went past almost under our windows, belching thick black smoke and towing long lines of barges in the direction of Berlin. We went for long walks in the woods, and sometimes we forgot for hours on end that Berlin even existed, even as the Nazis there continued to strengthen their hold on power, banning other political parties and confiscating their property. I remember saying to my wife in outrage, when the Liebknecht House was taken over and changed into the Horst Wessel House with a lot of pomp and ceremony (as if they had won a huge victory or something): ‘It’s so brazen, the way they carry on! It’s just theft, pure and simple! But they get away with it precisely because they are so shameless about it, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world!’

But if we happened to be in Berlin and came across formations of brownshirts or stormtroopers marching through the streets with their standards, singing their brutish songs – one line of which I still remember clearly: ‘. . . the blade must run with Jewish blood!’ – then my wife and I would start to run and we would turn off at the next corner. An edict had been issued, stating that everyone on the street had to raise their arm and salute the standards when these parades went past.