Herr Haberland
In the heart of the old city of Braunschweig, Lower Saxony is a square where cabbage was sold in more agrarian times. The only thing left of the cabbage is the name of the square, Kohlmarkt. Braunschweig has more famous squares, like the one where a large gilded statue of a Lion honors Henry the Lion, a medieval prince, Or the square with the statue of Til Eulenspeigel, where legend has it that the mischievous jester baked bread shaped like owls and monkeys. In the ’50s and ’60s, a prosperous German family ran a hardware and appliance store from an ancient building facing the square, C.H. Kleucker & Sons. The family who owned the business did not carry that name, and the Kleucker’s had moved on. But the business still carried the name. And the family who owned this and several other local businesses lived in an old but elegant apartment above the store. The store offered free delivery service. This service was carried out using a blue VW Transporter van with the firms name and address in white on the side. Herr Otto Haberland was the driver.
I know this because I was the assistant driver. That is not to say that I actually got to do any driving, since I lacked a German driver’s license. My job was to ride along keeping Herr Haberland company until we got to the delivery site. Then we would have to carry a coal stove or dishwasher or refrigerator up several flight s of stairs. Since these were heavy and awkward, he appreciated the help. For this service I earned 2DM per hour, the equivalent of about 50 cents at a time when the US minimum wage was $1. That is not a complaint. I took the job willingly, because, as an exchange student I wanted to see inside working class German homes. What I saw was in stark contrast to the apartments and houses of my classmates at the Hoffman Von Fallersleben Schule, a Gymnasium focusing on teaching languages, math and science. So,every weekday after school, at about 2:00pm, He and I would load way more weight into the little van than it was designed to carry, and head out.
Many deliveries where in towns and villages in the lush green farm land of Lower Saxony around Braunschweig. Wolfenbuttel, Celle, and Salzgitter were all on the itinery. And Herr Haberland knew the area, having lived there all his life except for his service in the Whermacht on the Russian front. The valiant 50 horsepower motor of the overladen van only had one speed as far as Herr Habeland was concerned. The motor was on or it was off. On meant that the pedal was depressed by his scuffed black work boot until it was at the same plane as the floor. Even with his Grand Prix approach to the accelerator, the van was incapable of exceeding about 50 miles per hour.
But what he knew the best was where the Bierstube were. Many afternoons we would complete about half of our deliveries and stop for what he called “Liquid Bread”. I am sure our employers did not realize we did this, and at age 18, it did not occur to me to feel guilty about it. He was well known in these places. Having an American youth as an assistant was enough of a novelty to get us the occasional free beer, whereupon I was given advice about everything from sex to American Foreign Policy. There was this cutie back at the shop named Renee and the East Germans had just erected their “Anti-FascistProtection Rampart” also known as the Berlin Wall.
After this, we would continue with our deliveries in a cheerful mood. Herr Haberland would drive the van straight down curved roads, with no particular concern about which side of the road he was on. While I know of no accidents involving him, I am sure this driving technique was responsible for other drivers hitting the ditch and perhaps a few grabbing their chest and going into cardiac arrest.
When we did see a fender bender, He would point and say, “Es hat gebumped”, or just “gebumped”. I say this to this day when I see a minor traffic accident .
And so, Herr Haberland, a jovial German delivery driver and his teen aged ambassador of good will, would deliver the goods to Germans of all walks of life.
Get Arnold 'Mike' Morton’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Often, they would greet us with hospitality.
One evening we delivered a small package to a Russian who lived alone in a small urban flat. He had been brought to Germany by the Third Reich as a guest worker, which was their euphemism for one sort of slave. He did not return to the Soviet Union when the war was over since Stalin’s government treated these returnees as traitors. A short balding man of about forty five with a pasty complexion, he was dressed in a tattered but well pressed brown suit, white shirt with a ring of gray soot around the collar and solid blue tie. Honored, I think, by the presence of an American, he pulled out his best china teacups. These were delicate porcelain with blue and green floral designs. He served us each beer in a tea cup. He did not drink any himself.
He explained that his status was “Landenloss”, which means he lacks citizenship in any country. Unable to get a passport, he could not travel outside of West Germany. Nor could he vote. He existed, with no rights, at the pleasure of the host government. After finishing our delivery, we thanked him and left. Herr Haberland was scornful of anyone who would serve beer in a tea cup, but the man had offered us his best, in a spirit of gracious hospitality. Like so many others, that lonely man’s life had been capsized and sabotaged by the Geopolitics of the 1940s.
We arrived at one farmhouse in the early darkness of a winter evening. A cold rain was falling, turning the yard of the place into a mucky mire. The mud continued into the entry hall, where the family’s boots were stacked in a pile and oilskin coats were hung on hooks still dripping. The walls had probably been painted yellow once, but now were covered with the brown residue of years of tobacco smoke. Patches of plaster had broken away in places revealing the rough lathe underneath. The air had the odd aroma of boiling cabbage mixed with humidity, stale tobacco, and smoke from the coal stove.
After we left this home, Herr Haberland said, “It looked like Poland in there. No, it looked like Russia.” I did not reply, but wondered if the mud and the cold, combined with the smells were reminding him of his time as a young German soldier mired in the hopeless chaos of the Russian Front during World War II. He would have seen far worse as a witness to the struggle between the Third Reich and Soviet Union as these two European Titans embraced in a danse macabre along a two thousand mile battle line.
One evening, we tarried to long in the pub, and made our last delivery well after dark. It was a small package, and Herr Haberland considered it a minor stop on our way home. However, when we arrived, the family had already retired, and we woke them up to give them their recent purchase. The man of the house berated us for coming in the middle of the night. This was not technically true, but I could see his point.
One afternoon we went to an address in a part of town that was unfamiliar to me. The building was a stark concrete structure with no style or architecture to soften the fact that it was a World War II military building that the Germans call a hochbunker. The family that was our costumer lived in one large cement room. A simple table in the middle of the room was the family gathering place. The walls were gray with the occasional rusty rebar showing through. The beds were little cubbyholes around the sides of the room with thin white curtains hung to provide a little privacy. The father of the house who took the delivery was a large man with thick arms and legs. He was wearing his work clothes, which still had the mud of a construction site drying on them. This family did not have a very comfortable life, but at least they would be a little more comfortable because of the small coal stove we had just hauled up three flights of stairs.
I ran across some pictures of my time spent in Germany the other day. There were several photos of the march my classmates and I participated in to protest the construction of the Berlin Wall. It was orderly and well organized. We marched arms locked and sang the West German anthem which translates to “Unity and Justice and Freedom”. These lyrics were penned in the nineteenth century by our schools namesake while the music came from Hayden. Banners declaring “Berlin stays free” and “Open the Gate” were proudly held aloft.
But under these old photos, I found a fading picture of Her Haberland taken at the wedding of the oldest son of our employers family. He was wearing an apron and drawing a beer out of a keg. It shows his dark hair greased and combed straight back and a cigarette held precariously in his lips its long line of ash threatening to bomb the floor. His weathered round face displays the grin and glow of having had a couple of beers himself. The picture shows him just as I remember him. When I found it, I somehow wanted to sing a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
