It isn't exactly clear when my father arrived in Berlin. According to family stories, it was as early as 1896, but his presence is only documented from 1903 on. Before that (the stories go) he was supposed to train as a priest at a Christian mission school in England, but he ran away from there and went to Germany. He was able to do that because he had identity papers identifying him as an inhabitant of the German protectorate. There is also evidence that he worked on the construction of the Berlin Underground system. It was one of the few ways in which he could make a good living as an unskilled worker. It was certainly not an aristocratic job. Official registers from that time describe him as a “laborer”.

At the beginning of the 1920s he appeared as an extra in silent films. My brother and sisters and later I too accompanied him to the studio and were also hired. In an early silent version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream Christiane played Puck and James and Juliana were fairies. That was before I was born. Their teachers weren't enthusiastic about these engagements, since when the children were working in films they obviously couldn't attend school.

Life with our father was always exciting. He was always trying to improve his own income and ours, for example when he negotiated with the movie bosses over what we would be paid. He liked to take his children along. And they behaved “like Africans” – they made a lot of noise. That meant that the negotiations were always kept short, to his advantage, since the men he was dealing with were desperate to get us out the door as soon as possible. My father deployed similar tactics when there were major purchases to be made. He preferred to be the first into the shop on Monday morning, because he knew that the shopkeeper wouldn't let him get away without buying something, and that gave him a good opportunity to haggle. Those small shopkeepers were often Jews. But his behavior had nothing to do with the anti- Semitism that was already growing at the time. I'm certain he had no idea what that was all about. He just liked to bargain.