Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.
Harry Robbins Haldeman. Watergate and Related Activities. 1973.
Some high-ranking diplomat in the German Foreign Office seems to have an eccentric hobby: vintage and antique stamps, mostly of the times of the German Reich, between 1871 and 1945 — and the period following until 1990. He steals them together with old envelopes from the archives of the Foreign Office. Jack Boulder gets a helpless telephone call from Berlin:
“We don't know what to do. That’s where you would come in. His office was searched secretly, no trace of these stamps could be found. Nor does he sell them — anyway, they are not very valuable. But the people working in the archive have seen him slipping them in an envelope — several times. We have cameras there. Our security is excellent. So — what happens to them? You would find out, wouldn’t you?”
Jack Boulder thinks: “Who cares? Some well paid days in Berlin …” Then other people suddenly care — in Berlin and at the other end of the world, in South America.
Boulder meets Amanda Prutz, a charming, well-preserved widow of mature age and small stature who some twenty-five years ago had left her hometown Bytów in Kashubia in Eastern Pomerania. She finally reached Germany after a detour via Winona, Minnesota, in the United States, but now she spends a lot of time in Patagonia.
She speaks German and wanted to live in Germany or, as she put it: “Heim ins Reich — Home to the Reich.” Now a provincial hamlet in the middle of nowhere seems to attract her — apparently a closely knit German-speaking community. But why does she carry old stamps from the archives of the German Foreign Office to that godforsaken place?
Peter de Chamier works for an international scientific and humanitarian foundation. He has a doctorate in history.
The author has written and edited a number of non-fiction books that were translated into seven languages. He has contributed numerous newspaper articles to the culture and arts sections of several leading newspapers, and has a regular column in a scientific news magazine.
→ More about the author and some of his remarks about writing.