Lothar Brückner

Lothar Brückner is 45 and a military antiques dealer in Stuttgart. Robust, with a broad, ruddy face, a thick brown mustache and gray hair combed back with brilliantine, he is jovial and talkative, tells stories with an Eastern accent and laughs at his own jokes before reaching the end. He fled East Germany in the 1950s and never lost the accent.

He sells helmets, medals, soldiers' letters, everything the war left in attics. He paints landscapes in his spare time, so as not to go mad, and says nobody buys landscapes, but medals sell every day. He lives in a semi-detached suburban house, with a living room of flowered wallpaper, a brown leather sofa, a record player with operetta records and a permanent smell of pipe tobacco.

He wears a brown leather jacket over a printed shirt open at the chest, with a gold chain around his neck and a signet ringsignet ring Finger ring engraved with a seal or initials, once used to stamp wax on letters and documents. on his little finger. His hands are broad and his nails stained with blue paint, which he hides from customers without much conviction. He shakes hands too hard and hugs people he has just met.

He met the reporter when he came into the shop looking for old things, like any collector. They talked about war and airplanes, and one day he told him about the notebooks. The man's eyes lit up like a child's at Christmas. About money, he says he is still in the same little shop as ever, while others change suits, and that he prefers to keep what he earns in silence, like the old folk where he comes from.

When the question suggests he forged the notebooks, Lothar answers with an "Me, forge?" and warns that he will say nothing more without his Stuttgart lawyer. The laughter that always precedes his sentences does not come this time. The shock of an honest merchant treated as a swindler, or the laughter missing from someone rehearsing his defense?