Limit, The (13 page)

Three months after Rosemeyer died, German schoolchildren, including von Trips, received a handout printed with a poem about Rosemeyer written by Ernst Hornickel, the editor of a car journal:

In September 1940, as the Luftwaffe bombed British ports and factories, von Trips suffered the first in a series of illnesses that would afflict him during the war years, starting with an ear infection that required surgery and kept him home from school for a month. A second sickness, probably meningitis, caused intolerance to light. He spent six months recovering in a darkened room. By the summer of 1942 he was well enough to vacation with family friends on the Walchensee, an Alpine lake, when he lost feeling in his face. He was sent to a Munich hospital where doctors diagnosed polio. Within days he had lost all sensation in his lips and cheeks. He could no longer blink. Nurses refreshed his eyes with drops of saline solution.

By the time von Trips returned to the castle the alarm of war had intruded on the fairytale setting. The neighboring village of Horrem lay on a strategic rail line connecting Cologne and Düren, a manufacturing center. Night after night the air raid sirens sounded and the family scurried to a bomb shelter.

It is not known how the von Trips family felt about Hitler. There is no indication that they supported the Führer, but the German aristocracy tended to back him, however reluctantly, in hopes that he would strengthen the fatherland and hold off the Bolsheviks. Whatever the case, the count and countess sent their son for paramilitary training with the Hitler Youth. Wearing the Hitlerjugend uniform of black shorts and khaki shirts, he hiked, drilled with air guns, and sang songs glorifying Nazi martyrdom. After suffering three serious illnesses in as many years, he left for winter defense training at
Ordensburg Sonthofen, a military school in the Bavarian Alps, where he took an eight-week course in mountaineering and igloo building. He was recalled to Sonthofen later that year, but he missed several weeks when, with his propensity for mishap, he broke his foot skiing down the Nebelhorn, a 7,300-foot peak. “Nobody had seen me fall,” he said. “I poked my way down to the valley in horrible pain.”

By late 1944 the Rhineland had become a crumbling front. As the Allies swept east from France and Belgium, bombers spared the seven-hundred-year-old cathedral in central Cologne. But beneath its Gothic spires lay a city in flames and ruins. Virtually every building was damaged or destroyed. Rubble and broken glass choked the streets, starving families camped in basements, and corpses floated down the Rhine.

At age sixteen, Wolfgang was drafted to search through air raid debris. Working alongside other teenage boys, he sifted among the shattered remains of apartment buildings, schools, offices, theaters, and stores. “I can't remember how many corpses we carried out of cellars and picked off streets,” he said. “I saw the whole of human suffering firsthand.”

The horrors glimpsed in the rubble would stay with him—families killed in an instant, bodies of children charred beyond recognition, men weeping, women who had lost their minds, the elderly expending last breaths asking after loved ones. “I experienced hell for the first time,” he said.

In October 1944, as Allied forces attacked the nearby town of Aachen, von Trips rode his bike into Horrem and climbed a mountainous coal stockpile for an unobstructed view of the air raids. “From there you can follow the battle,” a friend had told him, “like Blücher on the general's hill.” It wasn't long before
he scrambled down and ran for shelter. “The planes were literally flying around my ears,” he said. “It was wide-open there, up on a hill. I got such a fright. . . From then on I was always first in the cellar when the sirens wailed.”

In the final desperate months of the war the Hitler Youth deployed von Trips to the Belgian front for combat training. After learning to handle machine guns and shoulder-mounted antitank rockets he suffered what was called a nervous breakdown. It would be understandable if he collapsed at his impressionable age after his nightmarish air raid duties. It might also be excusable if he exaggerated his condition to escape an odious mission in a failed cause. Either way he was dismissed—only to be recruited along with his father by a citizen militia, the Volkssturm, to dig foxholes as Horrem braced for a last-ditch defense against American battalions fighting their way east from the Roer River.

With the outcome no longer in doubt, von Trips, now seventeen, and his father decided to skip out on the digging and evacuate their home. They packed von Trips' mother and grandmother into the Opel and went into hiding. As the U.S. troops closed on Horrem, the family drove southwest, crossing the Old Rhine Bridge at Bonn minutes before German troops dynamited it to slow the American advance.

A farmer agreed to hide them at his home near the village of Rederscheid. Even there, tucked among the forested hills, they were not safe from the oncoming storm. Shortly after arriving they heard the drone of Allied aircraft, followed by dozens of bombs exploding with concussive blasts of light on the surrounding fields. Their host led them through the darkness to a damp cave entered from a hillside. They crouched inside with
the Opel camouflaged under a layer of leaves until the bombing subsided.

U.S. First Army tanks and infantry entered the cobbled streets of Horrem on the morning of March 1, 1945, after killing or capturing groups of German soldiers firing down on them from quarries and low hills east of the village. The Americans paused at Burg Hemmersbach before the final push into Cologne. Any bivouac with running water and flushing toilets was a luxury. Before moving out, the GIs burned and looted art and heirlooms, and they jimmied open a private compartment in the count's desk filled with souvenirs—Nazi propaganda and leaflets dropped by Allied aircraft showing broad fields filled with German graves. One soldier plundered the countess's boudoir, then left a sarcastic note promising to repay her after the German surrender.

The von Trips returned in May to find a second wave of Americans camped in their parlors. These troops had fought their way from Normandy and overcome a stiff German counteroffensive at the Battle of the Bulge during Christmas 1944. They were in no mood for charity to German nobles. The soldiers gave the family half an hour to collect what was left of their belongings, and allowed them to stay in one of the brick courtyard buildings used for farm work.

The family reclaimed silver utensils stashed in the castle and rounded up horse and cattle. “We were really down, had nothing left, had nothing to eat,” von Trips said. “Everything was destroyed. We had just enough not to starve. Even so—it was one of the best times I can remember with my family. Our fear of death was gone. We were able to stay warm. We had a place to sleep. We were back on our own land.”

Wolfgang von Trips around 1945, after his family returned from hiding to find Burg Hemmersbach occupied by American soldiers. (Gräflich Berghe von Trips'sche Sportstiftung zu Burg Hemmersbach)

The von Trips family still owned the castle and property, but they had lost practically everything else. They were forced to sell some parcels of land to survive. Wolfgang scrounged pocket money as the operator of his own miniature black market. If the British soldiers encamped nearby wanted whiskey or cigarettes, he bought them from the Americans and marked them up, or vice versa, traversing between camps in the battered Opel.

Within a few weeks the initial occupiers were replaced by
a black unit, which acted more sympathetically. We were the black slaves in our country, they said. Now you are white slaves in your own home.

Like Jim, the British boy in J. G. Ballard's novel
Empire of the Sun
, von Trips came to identify with the enemy. He tagged along with the black soldiers, listening to jazz on the radio and learning their slang. He went about the castle grounds in lederhosen, cast-off U.S. fatigues, and army boots. For the rest of his life he would speak nearly flawless Americanized English with the slight singsongy uptilt of German cadence.

The soldiers whooped when they saw his improvised repairs to the clapped-out Opel, which had been converted to run on charcoal and wood. The carburetor was attached to the side with an inner tube and the accelerator operated with a wire strung through the window. The radiator was connected to the engine with an American gas mask instead of a water hose. The soldiers gave von Trips his first lessons in car handling, and they donated oil, gas, and spare parts.

A British regiment, the Scots Guards, eventually replaced the black American unit. On the transfer day the incoming major pulled up to the castle forecourt in an officer's jeep and formally introduced himself to the Count and Countess von Trips. While the major inspected the house, a pair of departing Americans struggled to start a coughing, backfiring jeep. Von Trips jumped into the major's jeep and pushed them down the lengthy driveway. The major returned from the castle tour to find his jeep missing. “In a magnificent cloud of dust I rushed back,” von Trips said. “At full tilt I shot through the gate, and right outside the castle I slid to a quick stop with full brakes.” He stepped from the jeep and greeted the major in English
with a slangy black accent. “May we present our son,” his parents said.

Stealing a jeep from an occupying officer was no small offense, and the major might have jailed von Trips. In the end, he judged it not worth the trouble.

It was not von Trips' last brush with martial law. A Scots Guard sergeant gave him an old set of British tires for the Opel. When a military patrol spotted them, they pulled von Trips over and arrested him for possession of stolen property. A tribunal sentenced him to house arrest and confiscated the tires. The sergeant could not testify on von Trips' behalf because he had fallen out of a window and died during a drinking bout.

When his sentence was over, von Trips sold the Opel and bought a British prewar JAP motorcycle with no lights, muffler, or starter. “She stood out and made a spectacle of herself,” he said. “I dreamed of my JAP. I wish I could have taken her to bed.”

Von Trips was driving the JAP to school in Bad Godesberg, outside Bonn, when the motorcycle slipped out from under him on wet tram tracks. He fell and broke his hand. The pain was excruciating, but he tried to hide the injury from his parents. Inevitably they found out and traded the JAP for a jeep so that he could travel in comparative safety. They knew their son was in some ways ill-equipped for messing with motorcycles and cars. He was too dream-headed, too tender. They knew him as a gentle child with an almost girlish weakness for the natural world. He rescued swallows from nests perched precariously on high window ledges and lovingly cultivated carnations and tulips. He listened rapt when his mother played Chopin and Liszt. Throughout his life von Trips' sensitive,
ingenuous disposition would add to his appeal, particularly to women. At Bad Godesberg he fell in love for the first time. He had met “a girl who lit me on fire, made both of my ears red.” He walked with her beside the Rhine talking of his future like any lovesick teen.

When Wolfgang left for agricultural school at Walsrode, in Lower Saxony, his parents agreed to pay for a light 125cc Maico motorcycle from their modest budget. He was stopped at a railroad crossing one day when a classic twelve-year-old BMW 500 motorcycle with a black gas tank pulled up beside him. “She was like a princess in a fairy tale,” he said.

“Holy buckets,” he told the rider. “This is a beautiful thing. Where did you get it?”

“From my brother,” the rider said. “He was killed in the war. During the war it was under a blanket in the hayloft.”

Von Trips memorized the license number before the gate lifted and the BMW took off. He tracked down the driver, who offered to sell it for 1,750 deutsche marks. “Seventeen hundred fifty deutsche mark isn't much for a princess,” von Trips said. He sold his radio, wristwatch, and, finally, the Maico. He was still short.

Von Trips had a tendency to faint when he went without eating. He likely suffered from diabetes, though it was never diagnosed. To ensure that their son ate properly away from home, his parents made a deal with a hotel near his school: they would pay a generous monthly fee. In return von Trips could show up at any time for a complete meal.

The count and countess were unaware that their son revised the terms in order to complete his motorcycle purchase. He went to the hotelier and struck a deal: von Trips would take
90 percent of the payments; the hotelier could keep 10 percent without providing any meals. With his parents' money now rerouted to his own pocket, von Trips financed the BMW.

By 1950 von Trips had finished his agricultural studies and returned home. He was on a break before attending business classes—typing, bookkeeping, and shorthand—in preparation for managing the farmlands. At age twenty-two he could look forward to a life spent raising flowers, apples, and potatoes on the family grounds. Like his ancestors he would be an aristocrat farmer. A good marriage might even restore the family name.