Andreas Schäfer Die Schuhe meines Vaters
[My Father's Shoes]

Early on is a memory: every Sunday his father running his laps at the track in Zeppelinheim, a few kilometers south of Frankfurt, where his family lived. He would wear a white or beige dress shirt, the ones he normally wore to work. The shirt wasn’t dirty enough for the laundry, and so it was used as sportswear. The father running in a button-down shirt, the boy – the future writer Andreas Schäfer – standing next to the track, counting the laps out loud. An eloquent image.

Another powerful moment: in June 2018 the father, now 81 years old, pays his son a visit in Berlin. The tumor that his father had recovered from twenty years ago is back; the doctors suspect metastases in the bones and head. Before the crucial tests in Frankfurt, his father does his usual rounds: theater, café, walks. Back in Frankfurt, he suffers a cerebral hemorrhage during a biopsy at the University Hospital and falls into a coma. The doctors notify the son and his mother, separated from the father for decades. It is up to them to decide when to disconnect him from life support. He has no chance of survival; it is now a matter of when he will die.

This distressing situation is the starting point of a remarkable book. In circular movements, memories and reconstructions, Andreas Schäfer approaches the mysterious figure of his father. On the one hand a self-centered individual: highly sensitive and easily offended, embarrassing his son in front of other people. On the other hand an introverted, reclusive character who loved nothing more than going on long, solitary hikes. A man who, having separated from his Greek wife, lived alone on the sixteenth floor of a slightly sordid high-rise in the Sachsenhausen neighborhood of Frankfurt, even though his income would have opened up other possibilities.

Andreas Schäfer doesn’t pass judgment; he doesn’t accuse, but presents his father in the full ambivalence of the life he lived. This gives the man his due while creating a form of documentary objectivity that elevates the book to a level beyond the mere personal. The father, born in 1936 in Berlin into a family of butchers, grew up with an aunt and uncle in Friedrichshafen and Zeppelinheim. His uncle was Kurt Schönherr, helmsman on the Hindenburg airship and survivor of the disaster at Lakehurst. The father’s parents later disowned their son when he married a Greek woman. Yet no matter what the son seems to learn about him, the father remains a living contradiction. A man who traveled the world, making extensive trips to Egypt and Pakistan, and who kept a meticulous record of the kilometers he hiked. In Andreas Schäfer’s recollections, he suffered from the permanent quarrels with his wife yet routinely provoked her with his vicious remarks.

Seemingly in passing, Andreas Schäfer depicts the almost paradigmatic life of a child of war. The traumatic experience of being bombed out and becoming a refugee. And then the transition to the young Federal Republic with all the attendant stations of a life lived during the economic miracle: a business degree, employment as an auditor at Coop AG, buying a house, starting a family, having two children. “In My Father’s Shoes” is a book of remembrance and the investigation of another person’s life, but also the self-interrogation of a writer, Andreas Schäfer, and the admission of his own failures. The man whose death he is mourning, and whom he genuinely loved, ultimately escapes any attempt to approach him, even after his death. And so he is left with a void.

Looking through his father’s papers while cleaning out his apartment, Andreas Schäfer stumbles across the carbon copy of a letter his father wrote to him almost twenty years before: “I’ve spent half my life fighting,” Schäfer reads, “not always against something or someone, but for things too, against circumstances so to speak, but often against myself as well.” Discreetly and with a sharp eye for detail, Andreas Schäfer tells about the struggle of the reconstruction generation. In this sense a book about the writer’s father is also a book about Germany.