Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women

Love led Linda down unusual paths. “At the ticket counter of the Schlosspark Theater in Berlin a young man who was right ahead of me was, in my estimation, an American. He didn’t understand what the woman at the counter was trying to explain to him. I intervened and helped him get a seat right next to me for the sold-out performance of Genets The Balcony. He felt obliged to strike up a conversation; his name was Peter Mayer, and I found out that he was a student at Berlin’s Free University intending to write a dissertation about Klee and Kafka. I told him that I knew Klee’s son Felix who was a producer at Radio Bern.

“Peter spoke a funny broken German. His parents were originally from Essen and had emigrated via London, where Peter was born, to New York. After the performance we already were almost friends. He asked me to drive his car from the city’s edge to downtown; he would take me on his motorbike to the car. Thus at midnight on the backseat of his Lambretta I clung to a man who had been an utter stranger to me just a few hours before and then followed him in is blue Volkswagen in the direction of Berlin-Center. Crazy…!”