by Michael Dean
It was time. She needed her mother to be out, but she was out quite a lot these days. She was having an affair. After supper, she asked Manfred Brenner, as she now thought of him, no longer Papa, to step into her room, which was on the top floor of the luxurious family house in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. Manfred looked at his daughter curiously, but did as she asked.
Katya sat down in her favourite cracked brown leather armchair — Sperrmüll, her parents had been horrified and wanted her to get rid of it. She waved her father to a seat in the hard chair opposite.
The central light was off; two wide anglepoise lights illuminated Lautrec and Beardsley posters, splashing against the white, dappled walls. The bed was neatly made with a red counterpane over it. The matching cupboards and the writing desk were teak, specially designed for a teenage girl’s room.
‘Arno has discovered that during the war you were a euthanasia doctor,’ she began, almost conversationally. ‘There is no doubt as to the facts.’
He shook his head hard, wonderingly, as if he was trying to get rid of a fly in his ear. So that was it! He was almost relieved. At least he knew what was wrong. And he could settle this. But first … She had just used the Sie form to him, as if he were a stranger.
‘You are my daughter,’ he growled. ‘You call me by du not Sie.’
Katya ignored this completely and continued to use Sie for the rest of the conversation.
‘You do not deny it?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You always told me you were on the Russian front. That was a lie.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because our work at the euthanasia centre is widely misunderstood. These are different times we live in now.’
‘Your oath as a doctor was to preserve life. You took it.’
He looked at her contemptuously. He had thought it would be more difficult than this. ‘I did not take full lives. These were seriously ill people. What we did was a relief for them, a release.’
‘They were people. Human beings. Do you agree?’
‘No, I don’t. Their lives were very limited.’
‘By “limited” you mean they had diseases which included schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy …’
‘Yes.’
‘It didn’t occur to you, as a doctor, to look for cures or alleviations of these sicknesses?’
‘No, it would have been a misdeployment of resources, during the war.’
‘Do you regret what you did?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘Why?’
‘Why should I? Euthanasia is eu-thanatos in Greek. A good death. We gave them a good end.’
‘For their benefit?’
‘No, for society’s.’
‘Explain.’
‘Ultimately, having too many limited lives weakens the society. The strong cannot prevail if there are too many weak people who do not contribute to the society.’
‘Did you see this as a cleaning-up operation for society?’
‘Yes.’
‘You also sterilised women?’
‘Yes, for the same reason.’
‘Your work in sterilisation was influenced by the work of Auguste Forel, who began the sterilisation of women on grounds of racial hygiene in Switzerland in 1892. Correct?’
‘Yes, we had all read Forel.’
‘Forel’s specialism was the study of ants.’
‘Correct.’
‘Many of the followers of Forel believe there is no God and our society is based on instinctive reaction, like that of ants. It therefore makes sense to eliminate weaker members whose instincts are not functioning properly. Do you agree?’
‘Yes. But emotions are also instincts. Love is an instinct. These creatures we put to sleep could not have loved as I, for example, love. Ever since you were born I have loved you more than I love myself. Please do not do this, Katya.’ He paused. ‘I’m begging you.’
He said this in the same monotone as all the rest.
‘The euthanasia theory sounds like it comes from Binding and Hoch.’
‘I’ve read it. Yes.’
‘Karl Binding, a lawyer and Alfred Erich Hoch, a doctor, published The Freedom to Destroy Unworthy Lives: Its Degree and Form in 1920. They believe that the life of a being who cannot make moral judgements is worthless to itself and the society. They conclude from that, that the worth of a human life is equivalent to its value to society. Is that what you believe? That is what you just said.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did the victims come to the euthanasia centres voluntarily?’
‘I’m not answering that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s a stupid question.’
Katya’s cheeks coloured briefly. ‘Did they know they were going to die?’
‘That’s not much better, but I’ll answer it. In most cases, no. A lot of them believed they were going for a shower, so they brought soap and flannels with them.’
‘And you encouraged that?’
‘Yes, we thought it was quite funny.’
‘Did their relatives know what was going to happen to them?’
‘Usually no. The relatives were a nuisance. In the end we hit on the idea of directing the relatives to the wrong euthanasia centre. Relatives of those killed at Hartheim were routinely directed to Grafeneck. We thought that was quite funny, too.’
‘How did you feel about the relatives?’
‘I never met them.’
‘If you had met them, how would you have felt about them?’
‘It depends on the individual. If they had been worthy people, useful to society, I would have felt sorry for them and tried to console them for having an unworthy member in the family. I would also have expected their thanks for eliminating the burden of this unworthy member from their family.’
‘That is all my questions about your work as a euthanasia doctor. I have some more about your membership of the National Socialist or Nazi Party. Dr Brenner, you have a very low party number, 56139. Were you a convinced Nazi?’
‘Don’t call me Dr Brenner.’
‘Please answer my question.’
‘At the time, yes. Very much so. It’s easy to preach, now we have lost.’
‘Why? I mean why were you convinced?’
‘Above all, because Hitler got the Jews out of Alsace. And he cleaned up the mess in this country.’
‘What is your view of the Nazis now?’
‘They lost. That’s all there is to say. They lost because of the second front. If they had won, the society they would have built would have been better than this shitty democracy.’
‘That concludes my questions. Here are my conclusions. Dr Brenner, I believe you represent what Fromm, Horkheimer and Adorno have characterised as the “authoritarian character” particularly disposed to fascism. This type has been subjected to massive societal pressure, in your case the eviction from Alsace. The reaction is to develop a deep resistance to this pressure. This results, according to Adorno, in a massive, irrational development of the Super-Ego, an inflated sense of one’s own worth. The individual concerned can fit into society only when he finds obedience and the subordination of others — a basically sado-masochistic picture. The ambivalence of sado-masochism is above all evident in blind obedience to an authority, in your case Nazism, and the readiness to attack anybody who seems weak and is accepted by society as having victim status, in the case of your generation in Germany that was Jews, the handicapped and so on. The Third Reich seems to have actively sought such personality types for its programmes of murder.
‘Dr Brenner, although you are my biological father, I hereby renounce and repudiate you as such. Of course I understand that any benefits that would have accrued to me, inheritances and so on, are forfeit. I shall be leaving your house as soon as possible. My mother will know where I am but I do not wish you to contact me or to speak to me again.’
‘Katya, you’ve gone mad.’
&
nbsp; ‘Dr Brenner, please leave this room.’
Manfred Brenner looked at her. She was pale but calm and controlled. She was righteous, some would have said. He left and went to his study.
*
Arno arrived an hour later and found Katya writing a more than competent biology essay with complete concentration. When he heard what had happened, he insisted she stop working and come back to his house. It was one of the few times in their lives together that he overrode her will.
Back at Arno’s family house, in his room, when she was sure his parents were out and they were alone, Katya cried. It was the only time she ever cried for Manfred Brenner. She didn’t cry at his funeral.
*
Dr Manfred Brenner took his old army pistol from his study and walked out into the fields behind the house. He didn’t want it to be Katya or Beate who found his body. He shot himself upwards through the inside of the mouth and died instantly.
He never knew Beate was planning to leave him.
34
Mainhardt Plutznick was telling his father, Julius, that the fine English lady they were all so proud of having in the family was deceiving Hartmut and whoring with someone else. Robert and Mario were also present, in the Plutznick front room. Berthe was out at work, at the Salamander shoe factory. Elvira was reading a magazine, upstairs. Ursula was unconscious, also upstairs.
Mainhardt gave a lurid and elaborated account of the public petting he had seen, adding that Naomi was speaking English with her lover. He then described the vile seducer. It was almost as good a description of Himmelfahrt as Hans-Peter Fauser had given the police, on Himmelfahrt’s first day in Ludwigsburg when he peed in the cemetery.
Old Julius gave Mainhardt a cuff round the ear, to cover how hurt he was. To make himself feel better, he grabbed Mainhardt and pushed him against the wall, elbow against his throat, gibbering vague incoherent threats.
‘What have I done?’ the indignant Mainhardt spluttered, voicing the grieved feelings of shot messengers of bad news down the ages.
‘Get out!’ screamed old Julius. ‘Get out the lot of you!’
The moment his sons fled the room, old Julius seemed to deflate, shrink. He stayed like that. There were still angry mutterings, curses, threats but they were a pale parody of what had gone before. Dying, as he knew, of lung cancer, the old man never hit any of his family again. Without this defining attribute, he was like a singer with no sense of rhythm or a ballerina with no balance. The essential Julius disappeared.
After they heard Mainhardt’s lurid tale, Mario and Robert swore revenge. They held a ‘council of war’ — Mario’s phrase. Mario was excited. He was happy that Hartmut, the superior sod, had a bit less to be superior about. He felt, in a vague but arousing way, that this would deliver Naomi up to him. But above all …
‘This,’ Mario declared in ringing tones to Robert, ‘is about the honour of our family.’
The defence of Plutznick family honour was, however, handicapped at the planning stage because the two avenging knights were on different substances. In Berlin, they scored paregoric, co-pilots, amphetamines, barbs, pot, LSD, DMT, meth, coke and H. At the moment, Mario was on coke and was at the nervous, excitable stage (complete with nausea). Robert, however, was on a chemically induced journey in the other direction. He was on his preferred barbiturate downers (tuinal, taken as a suppository, which he enjoyed more than he cared to admit). So while Mario was manic, Robert was half asleep and kept knocking things over.
The plan to ‘get’ Naomi’s lover therefore took three hours to hatch but it did seem absolutely brilliant at the time. The English cuckolder was obviously one of Naomi’s colleagues. They had a good description. So all they had to do was wait outside the language school in the van. And then …
‘And then,’ said Mario, wild-eyed, manic. ‘We run him over.’
Suiting the action to the word, it took Mario only another hour and a half to get Robert as far as the van.
*
Himmelfahrt was pacing the echoing classroom. He was fed up. Manfred Brenner had cried off his last lesson and now, 20 minutes past the appointed time, he had failed to show for this lesson, too. Not even a telephone call this time. Dr Brenner was not going to turn up. Obviously.
Himmelfahrt was always distraught when anything went wrong with his lessons, though not so distraught that he ever prepared one in advance (he still had not actually read English). When his class numbers dipped, as they did occasionally, John or Naomi had to take him for a beer to cheer him up. But a student just not turning up lor a conversation lesson was humiliating. Especially Dr Brenner. Himmelfahrt liked him. They had a rapport, were on the same wavelength, had things in common. He had put so much effort into the doctor’s lessons.
Of course! That was it! Dr Brenner had asked for correction but Himmelfahrt had overdone it. He had put Dr Brenner off, lowered his morale. Dr Brenner had stopped learning English and it was all his fault. Himmelfahrt could have kicked himself. Still. Not too late. Maybe phone Dr Brenner, ask him to come back, tell him there would be no more correction?
No. Give him another ten minutes, then go for a beer.
*
As Himmelfahrt came to this decision, his contractual employer, Gustav Stikuta, was on his way to sack him. Gustav had dozed on the fast international train from Ulm, but woken in good time. He congratulated himself on his sailor’s alert catnap. Born in Bolderaja, the dock area of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava, his mother, a prostitute, had thrown him out when he was ten. He never knew who his father was. Since then he had lived on his wits, thieving as a child, pimping when he got older, finally slipping into the Norwegian Merchant Navy and late in life opening a language school. And then another language school when he found Hildegard Dubnow, now Hildegard Stikuta, his wife.
The idea of a language school came to him when he found a copy of English abandoned on a coal freighter plying between Stavanger and Leeds. He learned English from it. It was easy. He started to teach English to some of the other sailors. He was good at it. At the end of the war Germany was wide open to new businesses. Even Gustav’s modest savings from his sailing days were enough to rent office space, buy old school desks, a blackboard and chalk and call it a school. He even managed to get hold of some more copies of English.
Then Gustav heard that there were teachers to be found in the internment camps in Ludwigsburg, so he had travelled down from Ulm to find one for his language school. Hildegard had been teaching infants. She was living in a classroom in the Kerner Gymnasium, the school having been turned into an internment camp. It was some years later before he found out how she had got there.
*
In the Balkan States and on the Russian front the Nazis used Einsatzkommando groups behind their own lines to kill every Jew they could find. It was at the trial in the late 1950s in Ulm of a leader of one of these groups, who had shot thousands of Jews on the German-Lithuanian border, that led to the founding of the ZSL in Ludwigsburg to gather information about war crimes.
One such Einsatzkommando group just outside Tartu, Estonia, had murdered all the men in Hildegard Dubnow’s family. The women, the mother and two sisters, including Hildegard, who was in her late twenties, had been raped by all six men in the Einsatzkommando, beaten and left for dead.
As the Germans retreated she was seen wandering in a forest by an SS Major, Fritz Kohl, who did not know who she was. Although she could not or would not speak, Kohl made her his mistress and took her back with him to his home town, Frankfurt.
In March 1945, when Kohl fled to South America, after having plastic surgery, he abandoned Hildegard who was again found wandering and hungry, this time by advancing American troops in the Taunus. She was cared for, then sent to one of the internment camps for misplaced persons in Ludwigsburg.
Hildegard never spoke of her past and as far as Gustav knew she never thought about it. In effect she had no past, she had eliminated it. But she was a good teacher, that was the main thing; the school in Ulm
did well. It made sense to start another one and anyway Hildegard wanted to go back to Ludwigsburg, where she felt more secure. It made more sense to marry her than pay her to run the new Ludwigsburg school.
It was then, for the first time, that they had spoken of personal matters. Hildegard told Gustav her story. Gustav had told the rather prim and proper Fräulein Dubnow that he was the son of a preacher, a missionary. He was stuck with it now.
The Ludwigsburg school did well from the beginning. Its profits paid for Hildegard’s small rented flat in Ludwigsburg-Hoheneck and she came back to the house in Ulm at the weekend.
Gustav had never attempted to touch or kiss Hildegard. After all that had happened to her, he knew very well how she would react.
*
The train pulled into Ludwigsburg station. The storm outside was biblical: sheet lightning, claps of thunder and a wall of rain. Cursing softly to himself in Latvian, Gustav Stikuta put his umbrella up and made his old man’s way down Myliusstrasse in the rain, to sack Mark Hill.
*
Robert steered the Plutznick furniture van down Schorndorferstrasse past the palace, frowning because the windscreen wipers were not working in the lashing rain.
‘Why aren’t the windscreen wipers working?’ he asked Mario, sleepily.
‘They are working, you twat,’ shouted Mario, excitedly.
They parked in Arsenalplatz, opposite the language school. Mario reassured Robert that they had stopped, as the older brother thought they were still moving and was continuing to drive.
Himmelfahrt, abandoned by the absent Dr Brenner, came out of the building that housed Sprachschule Stikuta. He was miserable at the weather and at having to keep himself company for half an hour while Naomi and John were teaching. Even in the dark, Mario recognised the slim figure with long black hair and glasses from Mainhardt’s description.