An Austrian singer, a Malayan pirate, a German terrorist. In earlier years, people thought he was Udo Jürgens. Until he grew a beard. Then the children ran after him and cried: “Sandokan, Sandokan!” wore hair long.
The women looked after him, in the café he spoke to the guests in a sophisticated chatter, everyone thought he was smart and nice, only Bärbel said: “You’re a crook at heart.” She loved him for it. Loved him since that summer night in 1966, in the “Riverboat”, a dance hall on Fehrbelliner Platz. They were dizzy from dancing, and then he carried them across the Kurfurstendamm.
She didn’t mind that he flew to Durban, South Africa for nine months to green the waterfront. He had completed an apprenticeship as a gardener and studied landscape planning. But just in moderate latitudes. Humid, subtropical conditions prevailed here, and Wolf chose completely the wrong plants, which were often washed over by the waves of the Indian Ocean and spoiled within a very short time. That didn’t bother him too much, he traveled to Johannesburg and Cape Town, looked at the Atlantic, ate grapes and thought of Bärbel and the sentence he had inculcated in a friend before he left: “Make sure that no one is in my absence hooking up with my girl.”
Twice his girl was seriously upset. First there was his roulette whim. He found Bad Homburg particularly chic. He went to the casino and one day he actually won a million. Why not two or three? he asked, stuck in the player trap. Of course it all just melted between his fingers. “If you gamble away a single mark from me,” Bärbel threatened, “I’ll drop you like a hot potato.” That worked. And then he was afraid of getting stomach cancer, an uncle had died from it. Something was always squeezing and gurgling in my stomach. His menu changed often, too, from Bocuse’s nouvelle cuisine to salmon, which was well past its sell-by date. Then the prostate, a check-up. Out of sheer fear he swam out into the Mediterranean off Crete, where they often travelled, drifted for hours and wanted to sink. Exhausted, he swam back to the beach and then tried to sink again in Berlin. Then Bärbel exploded: “I’ll tie stones to your legs and push you into the water. I guarantee you, you’ll go under!” That also worked.
Basically it was a romantic notion of death. No bed rolls, no pain, just a gentle descent. Wolf thought anyway that he would have been better suited to the 19th century. He recited Hölderlin, lay in meadows and thought about the world. A bohemian in Bavaria, where he and his younger brother and mother ended up after the long escape from Breslau. The father did not survive the war, the mother worked as a maid, although she had studied theology. One day, Wolf fell into a not entirely frozen river, his four-year-old brother ran to his mother, who saved him. The boys went to umpteen high schools and boarding schools, they were always the outsiders. Wolf dreamed of his own world, and his A-levels were correspondingly miserable. He wanted to study law, but should first learn something down-to-earth, hence the gardening apprenticeship. His place of work was mostly the cemetery, where he dug with numb fingers even in winter. He began studying landscape planning. And he stole someone else’s 16-year-old girlfriend. The girl became pregnant, the two married. Wolf loved little Frank, but the marriage didn’t last.
Everything was different with Bärbel. They traveled through Africa, they slept in a one meter wide bed, Bärbel became a surgeon and senior physician, Wolf went to university and after 15 years without children, they had Karen and Lena. “You stay at home,” Bärbel decided, and Wolf did nothing better than that. He built the girls a tent in the Tiergarten and an igloo on the Teufelsberg, he hung them swings in the trees and picked sorrel with them. When the girls at school said, “Our mother works,” the teachers would ask, “Are your parents divorced?”
Wolf heard Bach and the Beatles, he went to the Theatertreffen, he had an annual cinema ticket. And he worked in the allotment garden. In the winter of 2009, he remembered that he hadn’t turned off the water there, drove there, the pipe broke, he ran to a pit on the edge of the property where the main water tap was, unfolded a plastic sheet, lay face down on it, slipped headlong into the depths and stuck. Bärbel became restless. Where is he? His cell phone was silent. She went to all the cafés with her daughters. It’s quite possible that he was sitting somewhere again, chatting with someone. But nothing. The foreboding darkened. Until they came up with the idea of looking in the garden. In the darkness they fumbled around with the flashlight. And suddenly heard the choked voice: “I’m here!”
In 2014, on the eve of their 45th wedding anniversary, Bärbel fell over and died, probably from a heart attack. “The best and the most beautiful woman.” In 2022, doctors discovered cancer in Wolf. He flew to Crete one last time with his daughters. But not to go under.
