The Henss Journey

In 1394, a man named Contze von Bornheim borrowed nineteen Rhenish Gulden from a Jewish financier at a gate in a thorn hedge on the western edge of Frankfurt. The document survived six centuries of fire, flood, and war. It is the oldest piece of evidence this book has. Everything else had to be found.

The Henss Journey is the story of one family across six centuries and two continents, told through the archives that preserved them and the silences that nearly erased them. It ends in a suburban Melbourne cemetery in 1996, where a man named Walter Henss rests in the same soil as the schoolteacher who vouched for his character to the Commonwealth sixty years earlier. Between the thorn-hedge gate and the cemetery lies everything: the Frankfurt furrier guilds, the Thirty Years War, the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, a five-week ocean crossing on the Orient Line, a bomb in a suburban garden eight days after Australia declared war, and one night in March 1944 when a Lancaster pilot from Suffolk marked the city of Walter's birth for destruction without knowing the man whose city he was destroying was on the other side of the world, pouring a glass of beer in Melbourne.

Walter Henss was born at Klostergasse 34 in the Frankfurt Altstadt on 2 November 1903. A maidservant named Susanna Brandt had worked there in 1771, killed her newborn child in the laundry room, and been beheaded in the public square on 14 January 1772. A young Frankfurt lawyer named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe attended her trial obsessively and transformed her into Gretchen, the tragic heroine at the moral heart of Faust. Walter Henss was born in that building. He did not know the story. Most people do not know the stories of the buildings they are born in.

He left Germany in 1929, four years before Hitler came to power, and never returned. He carried a furrier's qualification, a German accent that sixty years in Australia would not touch, and an address on a piece of paper: care of Henry Uhlig, 297 Little Collins Street, Melbourne. He arrived at Station Pier on 18 November 1929, stepped onto the dock, and began again.

These are not famous people. None of them appear in histories of Germany or Australia. They are the people who built the civic fabric of both countries: teachers and furriers and stone cutters and shoemakers, doing the work that held communities together and leaving behind, in the archives, just enough evidence for a determined researcher to find them.

Walter Henss survived the Weimar hyperinflation, a failed first marriage, the Depression, classification as an Enemy Alien, a gelignite bomb thrown into his garden at 1:30 in the morning eight days after Australia declared war on Germany, four years of curfews and possession bans, and the systematic destruction by Allied bombing of every street and building that had formed him. He survived all of it without speaking about Germany. In sixty years of Australian life, his grandson Peter heard him mention the old country once: buying bread with a wheelbarrow of money. That was all.

The question that drove this research was where.

History connects the lives of strangers without asking permission. This book is the record of those connections.

The Henss Journey is narrative non-fiction for readers who believe that ordinary lives, examined with sufficient care, reveal everything about the worlds that produced them. It is a book for families who want to understand where they came from. It is a book for anyone who has ever stood at a graveside and wondered what it cost the person in the ground to make the life they made.

Walter Henss called his grandson Peter Boy and led him to the compost heap and poured his beer carefully into a glass and never spoke about Germany.

His granddaughter Olivia sings in German.

That is enough. That is more than enough.

Peter Henss is a Canberra-based author. Search for Peter Henss on Amazon.