I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS brilliant that Anne came from the West. It gave her something special, and it gave me something special too. As a child, I sometimes cleared out her handbag and looked at all its contents. On her ID card it said: born on 25.2.1947 in Düsseldorf. Anne explained that the city was in the Rhineland and quite rich. I knew Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul lived in Düsseldorf. They drove a white Ford estate car, and once gave us a Carrera Bahn, a Scalextric set, which I still think was great of them. I never understood how Anne could have been so silly as to move to the East. I knew there were people who went to the West. But I’d never heard of anyone doing it the other way around. Anne said I should be glad because I wouldn’t even have existed if she’d stayed in Düsseldorf. That sounded logical enough.

While she’s still living in Düsseldorf, Anne sometimes stands at the window with her great-grandmother Bertha, watching the people in the street. Bertha divides the passers-by into orderly and disorderly. You can tell the disorderly ones because they swing their arms when they walk.

Anne’s family live in a huge, grand apartment on Jürgensplatz, which was assigned to Gerhard when he got back from France. As recognition of his combat in the French Resistance, Gerhard had been promoted to lieutenant in the French Army, and in Germany an officer of the victorious forces has a right to a suitable apartment. The people who had lived in the flat before were a Nazi family who had been interned by the British. Anne’s parents took over the furniture, because they didn’t have anything themselves. It must have been strange living with the enemy’s furniture, but they probably had other concerns at the time. There are photographs of Anne as a child, lying on a brown bearskin. Gerhard calls the skin “our Aryan bear”. He is working as a journalist with the Communist newspaper Freiheit, where Anne’s mother is also employed as a secretary. At the weekend Anne goes to the swimming pool with Gerhard. She throws a comb into the water and he brings it back like a trained seal. In the evening before they go to bed Gerhard sings old partisan songs or plays the accordion. He can tell stories and and draw pictures for them at the same time. As far as Anne’s concerned he’s the most brilliant father in the whole world.

One day Gerhard is gone. Anne’s mother says he had to go and work in another city and will be back soon. Time without Gerhard is boring, because her mother can’t play the accordion and doesn’t much feel like telling stories. A few weeks later, in February 1952, Anne and her mother go on a skiing holiday in Oberhof in the Thuringian Forest. They stay in the “Ernst Thälmann” Party holiday home and wait for Gerhard, who turns up a few days later. They celebrate Anne’s fourth birthday together. The same evening there’s a conversation between the parents. Gerhard says they’re not going to go back to Düsseldorf because there’s a danger that he might be arrested there. From now on they will live in East Berlin, the comrades had already got everything ready. Anne’s mother asks no questions. She’s used to there being things she’d rather not know. A driver takes the family to Berlin in a black Wolga. They drive to a house in Pregelstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. There’s a flat there that’s already been fully furnished, and a few things have already arrived from Düsseldorf. They are given passports with new names. They are now called Oswald. Two comrades tell them it’s very important to forget their old names as quickly as possible. A few months later, Anne’s grandmother visits from Düsseldorf. She tells Anne it’s entirely normal to get a new name when you move to a new town. Anne thinks that’s perfectly reasonable.

In the family, the explanation for the hasty move to Berlin was always that Gerhard was persecuted as a Communist in the West, and therefore preferred to help build up the GDR rather than be pushed around by reactionaries. I only discovered the true reason for the flight to the East after the GDR had already collapsed. When my father’s secrets could no longer be kept.

In Berlin there’s a playground in front of the house, and lots of children who meet in the afternoon and move around the area without their parents. For Anne this is all new and exciting, and she’s soon forgotten Düsseldorf. In the neighbourhood there’s a Pioneer troop where they do crafts and sing. Her parents tell her that they now live in a country where everyone’s free and equal, where the good people are in charge and where her Papi doesn’t have to be frightened any more. Two years later they move to Friedrichshagen and all of a sudden they’re called Leo again. Her parents say she mustn’t tell anyone that they were once called Oswald, so that the bad people can’t find them. Anne has a favourite children’s book, Oswald the Monkey, that she no longer dares to read. In Friedrichshagen her parents tell their new neighbours that they’ve come straight from Düsseldorf. On one occasion the owner of the house meets Anne on the stairs and asks how come she’s got such a strong Berlin accent. Anne freezes with fear and says, “That’s how they talk in Düsseldorf as well.”

Two years later Anne takes the train to Düsseldorf with her mother and two sisters. It’s their last visit to their family in the West. On the border at Helmstedt the compartment door is pulled open and a fat man in uniform asks to see their papers. He flicks through a black book and asks Anne’s mother her husband’s first name. To Anne’s great amazement, her mother refuses to give out any information at all. The man becomes angry and asks again and again. Eventually his eye drifts towards Anne. She is sliding uneasily back and forth on her seat, her lips pressed together. She’s worried that she might divulge her father’s secret name if she opened her mouth even slightly. The seconds under the quizzical eye of the uniformed man seem long and unbearable. In the end the West German border guard furiously closes the compartment door and goes.

All these secrets, the worry that the bad people might come and get her beloved father after all, must have left a deep mark on Anne. Long before she can understand what’s happening around her, the Cold War has slipped into her little world and made her a comrade. For Anne the world is divided into two camps from the outset. There are the good people, including her father most of all, and there are the others, the ones you fear and fight against. As her father did, as her father’s friends did, as everyone who feels a spark of decency must do. For a long time Anne thinks the GDR is full of such courageous fighters, until she understands that she and her parents belong to a tiny minority. To a minority that took power in the GDR, and who nonetheless feel strange in this Germany from which they were once banished.

In Friedrichshagen there’s a tall, white-haired man in the neighbourhood who has an English hunting dog which the children are sometimes allowed to stroke. Anne is even allowed to take the dog out on a lead. The old man has serious conversations with her, and once he invites Anne to his house. Anne must have been ten or eleven at the time, and she feels very flattered. There is hot chocolate and biscuits, and all of a sudden the man starts talking about a night when lots of houses in Berlin were on fire. The man is very worked up, and tells her how sorry he was “that your department stores were on fire”. Anne is baffled, she doesn’t know what the man is talking about. His hands wave in the air, copying the flight of the burning bales of material. Anne imagines she can see the fire of that night blazing in his eyes. She contradicts him, saying that her parents never owned any department stores. Ah, the man replies, of course you all had department stores. He also talks about a girl who lived in his house and looked very like Anne. He says he was so sorry that she “went away”.

Anne goes home rather confused, and tells her parents about her strange encounter. They get worked up too and explain that the man was talking about Kristallnacht. “Because we’re Jews, he obviously thinks we owned department stores as well,” Gerhard says. Anne doesn’t know what it means to be a Jew. She just knows that Gerhard had to leave Germany when he was still a child. She feels a strange anxiety, a sense of helplessness, of strangeness.

Downstairs in their building live the Holzmanns, who her parents say are Jews. Herr Holzmann had been in Auschwitz, and had lost his family there. Later he had married again and had a son called Benjamin, the same age as Anne. One day the Holzmanns ring the doorbell, bringing matzos. They wish the family good health and a happy Pesach. Anne’s parents are visibly unhappy about this visit, which Anne doesn’t understand because the Holzmanns are nice people and even brought something nice to eat. Anne asks what Pesach is, and her mother tells her that’s the name the Jews give to their Easter festival. It’s clear that they themselves don’t want to be Jews.

Gerhard once told me he fought as a Communist in the war, and not as a Jew. I think being Jewish for him means not being able to defend yourself, being a victim. He once told me how he fled the advancing German troops in July 1942 in France, and hid for a while in a Jewish children’s home based in a castle near Limoges. One day French police came to the home and wanted to take all the children away. Gerhard had locked himself...