Coffee and Cigarettes

by Ferdinand von Schirach

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

'One of the most distinctive voices in European literature' (Daily Telegraph)

How does the legacy of a family past shape who we are?

Ferdinand von Schirach is one of Germany's most eminent criminal defence lawyers and an internationally bestselling crime writer. He is also the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth movement.

In Coffee and Cigarettes, his most personal book, von Schirach confronts his family history, through autobiographical vignettes and short stories drawn from his life and career. From conversations with imprisoned clients, great writers and supreme court judges; meditations on art, film, writing and smoking; to reflections on Germany's heavy history, Coffee and Cigarettes is a portrait of the author, and our modern world, depicted in von Schirach's signature cool and incisive prose. Revealing, revelatory and thought-provoking, these essays confirm von Schirach as one of the most inimitable writers in Europe today.

Release date: May 11, 2023

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter 1

In the summer, he’s down at the pond every day. He sits on the Chinese bridge leading to the small island, water lilies and marsh irises beneath him, catching occasional glimpses of carp, bream and tench. Dragonflies with huge compound eyes hover in the air before him. The gun dogs snap at them, but always miss. Dragonflies can do magic, his father says, but such tiny wonders that they’re invisible to the human eye. It’s only behind the old chestnut trees and the stone walls of the park that the other world begins. His isn’t a happy childhood, things are too complicated, but later he’ll always remember the slowness of those days.

His family never goes away on holiday. The high points of the year are Christmas, with its long Advent season, fox hunting with horses and hounds in the summer, and the big drive hunts of autumn, when the beaters eat stew, and drink beer and herbal schnapps in the hunting lodge courtyard.

Sometimes relatives come to stay. One aunt smells of lily of the valley, another of sweat and lavender. Their old fingers stroke his hair, and he has to bow and kiss their hands. He doesn’t like it when they touch him, and he doesn’t want to be around when they have their little chats.

 

Shortly before his tenth birthday, he’s sent to a Jesuit boarding school. It lies in a dark, narrow Black Forest valley where winter reigns six months of the year, far from the nearest large town. The chauffeur drives him away from his home, away from the chinoiseries, the painted silk wallpaper and the curtains with the brightly coloured parrots. They drive through villages and empty landscapes, past lakes, and then down and ever deeper into the Black Forest. When they arrive, he’s intimidated by the cathedral’s huge dome, the baroque buildings and the priests’ black soutanes. His bed is in a dormitory along with thirty other beds, and in the bathroom the washbasins are lined up next to one another on the wall. There’s only cold water. The first night he thinks: any minute, someone will turn on the lights again and say, ‘How brave you were, it’s all over now, you can go back home.’

He gets used to boarding school, the way that children get used to almost anything. But he feels like he doesn’t belong, like something’s missing that he can’t articulate. The green and dark green of his former world gradually disappear, the colours in his head change. He doesn’t yet know that his brain is linking perceptions ‘falsely’ with one another. He sees letters and smells and people as colours. He assumes that other children see the same things, only learning of the term synaesthesia much later on. One day, he shows the poems he’s written about these colours to the priest who teaches German. The old man phones his mother – the boy is ‘in peril’, he says. Nothing more comes of it. When he gets the poems back, just the spelling mistakes are marked up in red.

 

His father dies when he is fifteen. He hadn’t seen him in a number of years; his parents separated when he was young. His father had sent him postcards at boarding school – street scenes from Lugano, Paris and Lisbon. One time, there was a postcard from Manila. It showed a man in a pale linen suit standing in front of the white Malacañan Palace. He imagines that his father looks just like this man.

The headmaster gives him money for the train ticket home. He doesn’t take a suitcase because he can’t think what to pack. All he has with him is a book. The bookmark between its pages is the postcard from Manila. On the journey, he tries to memorise every train station, every tree outside the window, every person in his compartment. He’s convinced that everything will fragment if he can’t remember it all.

He goes to the funeral on his own. A family chauffeur drops him off in front of the chapel in Munich. He hears speeches about an odd stranger – about his excessive alcohol consumption, his charms and his failings. He’s never met the new wife sitting in the front row. She’s wearing long black lace gloves, and all he can see beneath the veil is her red lipstick. There’s a large photograph next to the coffin, but the man in it looks nothing like his father. An uncle, whom he’s only ever seen twice, embraces him, kisses him on the forehead and tells him that he’s ‘blessed’. He feels uncomfortable, but smiles and responds politely. Later, on the cemetery path, the sun reflects on the coffin’s polished wood. The earth he throws into the grave is wet from the previous night’s rain. It sticks to his hand and he doesn’t have a handkerchief to wipe it off.

 

A few weeks later, the autumn holidays begin. He sits by the fireplace in the entrance hall of the house. At his feet lie two dogs called Shakespeare and Whisky. Suddenly, every sound he hears is equally loud: the distant voices of his grandmother and the housekeeper, the tyres of the car the chauffeur is turning in front of the house, the shriek of a jay, the ticking of the grandfather clock. And now he sees everything in hyperreal detail – the oily shimmer in his teacup, the texture of the light green sofa, the motes of dust in the sunlight. He gets frightened. For a number of minutes, he can’t move.

Once his breathing is calm again, he goes up to the library in search of some lines he once read. On 20 November 1811, Heinrich von Kleist and his close friend Henriette Vogel, who was suffering from cancer, journeyed to Kleiner Wannsee near Berlin. Both wished to die. They took rooms at a modest inn and composed farewell letters into the early hours of the morning. A letter from Kleist to his half-sister closes with the inscription ‘Stimming’s, near Potsdam, on the morning of my death’. On the afternoon of the following day, they ordered coffee and had chairs brought outside. Kleist shot Vogel in the chest and himself in the mouth, knowing that the temple was too risky. Shortly beforehand, he had written that he was ‘contented and serene’.

The boy waits until everyone else has gone to bed, then heads to the bar, settles himself in an armchair and, taking small sips, works his way methodically through a bottle and a half of whisky. When he tries to get up, he stumbles and pulls over a small table, tipping the crystal decanters onto the floor. He watches blankly as the dark stain spreads. Down in the cellar, he opens the weapons cabinet, removes one of the shotguns and exits the house, leaving the door wide open. He walks to the elm tree that his father planted to mark his birth, sits on the ground and leans his back against the smooth trunk. From here, in the morning light, he sees the old house with its flight of steps and its white columns. The rondelle lawn is freshly mown; it smells of grass and rain. His father once told him that he’d placed an African gold coin under the elm tree, and said it would bring him luck. He puts the black barrel of the gun in his mouth. It feels strangely cold on his tongue. Then he pulls the trigger.

The next morning, the gardeners find him lying in his own vomit, the shotgun in his arms. He was so drunk that he’d forgotten to load the cartridge. He tells no one about that night, in which he saw himself.

 

At the age of eighteen, he goes on holiday for the first time with his girlfriend. He’d worked for four weeks on a factory assembly line and his earnings are enough for the trip. They fly to Crete and travel for three hours across the mountains in an old bus, along ever narrower serpentine roads, then onwards to the southernmost tip of the island. They rent a room in a guesthouse – whitewashed wooden floors, white bedsheets. Beneath the window lies the Libyan Sea. The village has just a handful of houses and a tiny supermarket selling fruit, cheese, vegetables and bread. The owner bakes sweet biscuits and savoury pastries on alternate days, and that’s what they live on. They spend their days at the beach. It’s quiet.

At some point she wants to know why he is the way he is. How can a sunny person understand darkness? He thinks. He tries to explain using medical terms. She listens and nods. Depression isn’t a form of sadness, he says, it’s something quite different. He knows that she won’t understand.

In their room, she hangs her dress over the back of the chair. She stands in the bathroom, her slender body in front of the steame. . .