by Daša Drndic
My name is Hans Traube.
I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944.
All my documents say my name is Hans Traube, and they say I was born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944. When someone says “Hans”, I look up. That’s what I’ve always been called: Hans. Ever since I can remember people have called me Hans. People I know well and people I do not know well call me Hans, for myself I am Hans, too, who else could I be but Hans, when I botch something, I say, Oh, Hans, Hans, what a mess you’ve made.
Oh, Hans, Hans, my mother said to me on her deathbed once you were called Antonio.
Ever since then, since the moment my mother Martha Traube moaned Oh Hans, Hans, and that was on 20 April, 1998, I have been searching, looking for this Antonio who has been lost, but who isn’t lost, who was in hiding for half a century, yet he wasn’t—all the while this Antonio has been crouching inside me watching, breathing with me yet listening to me breathe, dreaming with me while stealing my dreams, and I knew nothing about it until my mother Martha Traube, as she was dying, said, Oh Hans, you were born Antonio.
In Gorizia the search is over. After eight years I think the search is over. I believe I know the essential facts of my life, and since these essential facts are now known to me, I am convinced they will no longer matter, they will soon become completely unimportant and unnecessary facts, all those details I have been researching like a lunatic for eight years, digging frantically through archives in a number of cities, in a number of countries, examining countless details, now I see—utterly pointless details, that is why I actually know that soon, just as Thomas (Bernhard) said when I last photographed him in 1988, I believe I will say, Servus, now nothing matters.
I photographed Thomas in Gmunden, where he was living at the time, and where he died soon after we took some wonderful pictures of him, Thomas, and of Gmunden with the places where Thomas often walked. I am a professional photographer. I work for magazines and exhibit all over the world. Sometimes I write. That is why I went to Gmunden. Gmunden is a little town. It has about 13,000 inhabitants and very fresh air; since 1862 Gmunden has been known as a Luftbad. Today Gmunden is a tourist town through which tourists stroll in packs, passing thus by Bernhard’s house, too, though most of them who pass by his house have no idea who Bernhard is and probably will never read what he has written. Gmunden is located in a charming spot, on the northern shore of Traunsee, surrounded by woods. Today Gmunden also has a hospital, a small theatre, an observatory and the oldest electric tram in Austria (introduced in 1894). There are several secondary vocational schools in Gmunden, two gymnasiums and a Mädchenpensionat for the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Pottery from Gmunden is valued highly, as is Gmunden porcelain. Gmunden has several baroque and Gothic churches and monasteries and an interesting cemetery.
There are many paper mills in this area, Bernhard told me, and thus a lot of cripples because of the machines, he told me, which cut off their fingers or arms, or even their ears.
We walked by Schloss Oberweis and I took several pictures of the charming building, as Thomas called it, owned at one time by a Jewish family which disappeared, and today Oberweis is once again in private hands, Bernhard said, and it is inaccessible, he stressed, though this did not upset me, because I had no inclination to go inside anyway. Unlike Schloss Oberweis, which was designed to be grandiose, Bernhard said, my farmstead here was an ordinary barn, nothing but a ruin, rotten and in a state of utter decay, but I liked that, I liked bringing such a rotten state into some sort of acceptable order, he said, so I decided to restore this ruin as much as that was possible, although it remains questionable to what degree fundamental rot can be fully salvaged. I did all this with a man whose name was Ferdl and whom we buried the day before yesterday, said Bernhard then, in 1988. Ferdl was my dearest friend here, he said. A small, gaunt old man, he said, who died the day before yesterday of stomach cancer. For two years Ferdl had been saying: “Something’s eating me up, something from inside,” said Thomas, so one day I’ll write a book called Ferdl, he said.
From a polite distance we looked at that castle, that Schloss Oberweis, a large two-storey building surrounded by a well-tended lawn, surrounded by what are actually fields of dense, impassable grass, by what is actually a park with a fish pond. Why Bernhard didn’t tell me then, in 1988, the most important fact about Schloss Oberweis, I don’t know, but I suppose everything has its time and place. He said, It became apparent long ago that what they taught us was a deception. I couldn’t penetrate before into the everyday, lethal game of existence, I didn’t have the spiritual or physical wherewithal to do that, but today the mechanism moves forward on its own, he said. This is a daily alignment, a tidying of the mind: every day every thing must be set in its place, he said. And then, ten years later, when my mother Martha Traube said, as she was dying, We took you from Oberweis, I watched that lethal game of existence begin, I saw my game of existence begin, how just as it began, this game of my existence, it started moving in a downward trajectory towards its end. I watched how the mechanism sets itself in motion and how my life, of its own volition, is sliding into a one-way current, as if willingly heading for the gallows; how before it becomes extinct it is setting itself to rights, sprucing itself up, as if closing at one moment and opening the next like a fluttering figure of origami.
I sat in my hotel room in Gorizia surrounded by papers, archival documents, letters, photocopies, photographs, books, everything I had amassed over the eight years of searching and once again I arranged and rearranged my treasures, leafed through them, read them, repeated the facts as if I were preparing for an operation after which I would see once again. But games with eyes are deceptive games. The eye is a soft organ, which sees and does not see, depending on how you look at it. The eye is a sensitive organ, it wells often with tears; when it rebels, it calms quickly, it darkens, as if to say I won’t watch; it succumbs without a struggle to external and internal pressures, moreover the eye is easily destroyed and is particularly attractive for certain animals, which like to feed on it, on the eye, who knows why. There was once a woman whose eye was operated on and she convalesced in hospital with a bandage over the operated eye. This eye that you operated itches me terribly, said the woman to the doctors, but the doctors ignored her. The woman complained so bitterly—more each day, not only of the itch, but of unbearable pain—that the doctors decided to remove the bandage and inspect her eye. When they uncovered the woman’s eye they saw that the eye had become totally dead and useless, because inside it an ant colony had made a big hole and from the hole the ants were streaming out and crawling all over the woman’s face. Another woman complained of terrible headaches for months, but doctors found no medical anomalies. In the end she went to have her eyes examined. In one of her eyes medical experts discovered a twenty-centimetre-long worm that had coiled around her eyeball and was poised to enter the eye. The doctors drew the worm out of the woman’s head slowly and cautiously, so her eye wouldn’t be damaged, but the eye was already dead. I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims of predators, which are largely benevolent, tame and docile creatures, not usually ocular predators, are in harmony with their natural environment, part of Nature, close to the ground, I cannot say whether it is a coincidence that the victims were women, or rather women’s eyes. Perhaps these horrors could have happened to two men’s eyes and may well have, but this is how the stories go.
Schloss Oberweis was called Alpenland between 1943 and 1945, and children lived there, mostly small children, mostly children who had been stolen, mostly, I later learned, children stolen from Yugoslavia and the Adriatisches Küstenland. At Alpenland, at Schloss Oberweis, that is, there were also children from Poland, but these were merely a vestige of stolen Polish children, because about 250,000 stolen children had already been placed in some twenty Lebensborn homes throughout the Reich, and in the General Government, of course, in Cracow, in Otwock and in Warsaw, from where the little blonde, blue-eyed Poles were sent for brainwashing to
the hell of total Germanization, for adoption with trusted Aryan families or—if these stolen children did not meet the strict selection criteria—they were shipped off to concentration camps for lethal injections by Himmler’s tried and true physicians.
I grew up the way most children do, in an ordinary, routine and relatively boring way. Of course, the details of the big Third Reich secret, of the population project designed to boost and spread the Übermensch species, of that Lebensborn plan, I learned only once I’d begun researching, and I started my research after that (then) devastating sentence from my mother, Martha Traube, I did not give birth to you. My father Jürgen Traube was already dead when Martha Traube said, Now I’ll tell you everything I know, but it turned out that she knew very little, that she actually knew nothing, or pretended to know so little about me, about Austria, about the war, about the Nazis, because the war and post-war doubts of my parents Martha and Jürgen Traube (if they entertained any) ended in 1946. I knew I had a brother named Gottfried, Jürgen and Martha Traube’s son, because there was always talk of Gottfried in the house, while almost nothing was said of the war and National Socialism, at least not by the time I was old enough to remember such conversations. Gottfried had been killed as a soldier of the Wehrmacht on 24 November, 1942, at Stalingrad, when he was not yet twenty. The album with Gottfried’s photographs, a reliquary, lay in a small niche by the living-room window and I leafed through it, especially during my childhood, and whenever I leafed through it I’d ask my mother Martha, Where am I when I was little? Mama Martha would say, We lost one of the albums when we moved here, the album with your baby pictures taken before the pictures in this album which, as you see, wasn’t misplaced, and then I looked at myself in the second album in which I was already eight months old on the first page and sitting up. The war was nearly over, Martha said on her deathbed, and the Oberweis home was about to close. At Alpenland they told us that your father had been killed somewhere in the Adriatisches Küstenland, Martha said, that your birth mother died when partisan bands bombed Casa Germanica in Trieste, she said, and that German troops found you at a nursery for German children which was reduced to rubble. You can be sure, they told us at the Salzburg Lebensborn, this is a child of German blood, they said, although we hadn’t asked. You see, they told us at Schloss Oberweis, see how blonde and blue-eyed the child is and how tall for his age, they told us, Martha said, and besides, the child was examined thoroughly at the Race and Settlement Office, R.u.S.H.A., so there could be no doubt, they said. Everything happened at lightning speed. Our petition for adoption had been waiting for six months at the Salzburg Lebensborn, but then they called from Oberweis on 21 April, 1945. Come right over, they said, we have a child. The next day we wrote to R.u.S.H.A. in Salzburg. We asked them whether they had any new information regarding your background. Herr Obersteiner answered us personally. Herr Obersteiner was the chief of police and a high-ranking S.S. official of the Salzburg R.u.S.H.A. office, Martha said. Here is the document. Look, on 27 April Herr Obersteiner writes, We still have no reliable information on the background of your child, so we ask for your patience. We are hard at work on this case, writes Herr Obersteiner. We will contact you as soon as we have relevant information regarding the child. I hope your little Hans will bring much joy to your lives. See here? Herr Obersteiner writes, Martha said. We had no word from them after that. On 4 May the Americans enter Salzburg and immediately bomb Hitler’s “nest”, Berchtesgaden, chaos erupts. Thousands and thousands of Nazis from Germany pour into town and shout, Don’t you worry, in two weeks’ time victory will be ours! Still, they strip off their uniforms and in worn Lederhosen, carrying rucksacks, they leave to yodel in the fresh mountain air. Pitiful phantoms wander the streets, Germans and Austrians dressed in weird combinations of grimy, tattered uniforms of the Hungarian, Czech, Yugoslav and Italian armies, in the hope of saving their skin. The Salzburg Nazi government slinks off into the underground, burns documents, steals supplies of food and weapons, and flees. And we didn’t care, Martha said as she was dying, we only wanted a little Gottfried and that was that, Martha said. They didn’t send us anything, any documents, because the home at Oberweis was closed soon after that and the children vanished. Where they went to I don’t know, Martha said. When they handed you to us on 21 April, 1945, at Schloss Oberweis they said, Here is a new birth certificate, an absolutely valid birth certificate, a government birth certificate, they said, and on it we will write your last name and your child’s name. Hans, you say? they asked. So that’s it, Hans, repeated Martha as she was dying. For many years, Hans, Martha also said, this unspoken truth has been eating me up. From inside, she said.
Just like Ferdl, I said.
There was always chocolate in the house. There were chocolate balls and chocolate bars even when there was no meat, because my father Jürgen Traube worked first at the Café-Konditorei Fürst in Alter Markt, at Brodgrasse 13, where Paul Fürst began making his echte Salzburger Mozartkugeln by hand, where manufacture by hand continues to this day. Later, when Mirabell splits off from Rajsigl, a famous Salzburg chocolate factory, and Fürst builds his own plant in Grödig near Salzburg, Jürgen Traube works in the sales department at Hauptstrasse 14 and still brings home Mozartkugeln, which Mirabell may not have made by hand, but they were still authentic. So, probably for lack of other stories, Mozartkugeln and their authentic production by hand became, aside from Gottfried, the foundation of our family life.
Former chocolate magnate Felix Rosenzweig propels Jürgen into the chocolate industry in the late 1950s. Felix Rosenzweig is one of the pre-war owners of Rajsigl and Hofbauer and he flees Austria in 1939, only to return in 1950 with nothing but the shirt on his back, yet nevertheless alive and with some of his connections and company shares awaiting him, confiscated, in the vaults of Swiss banks. Felix Rosenzweig brings his wife Isabella Fischer with him to Salzburg, and she opens a small photography studio with a darkroom on the ground floor of a building that had originally been owned by the Rosenzweigs, but was confiscated in 1940, and, with the approval of the regime, some suitable people had moved in during the war. These same people generously rent Felix Rosenzweig his own premises in 1950, so that he can set up the photography “salon” for his wife Isabella Fischer, and for the whole time the civil court suits are going on, dealing with the (partial) return of Felix Rosenzweig’s property to Felix Rosenzweig, these people collect rent for Isabella’s photography salon. The reinstatement of the Rosenzweig family property to its members takes an unreasonably long time, partly because the other members of the Rosenzweig family who are holders of this property never show up, because, it seems, they are no longer around, and at that point, in 1950, it is difficult to prove where and how they met their end, because then (and even later, and even, to some degree, today) the Austrians stubbornly insist that they were the first victims of Nazism and that they haven’t a clue about anything, all they know about is their own losses, their own victims, their own vast suffering. My parents Martha and Jürgen Traube offer Felix Rosenzweig and Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) a small flat in the attic of the building where we live, until they find their feet, and are surprised and almost offended that Felix and Isabella bring up their Jewish background. Nonsense, Jürgen Traube says, Jews are people, too.
I develop my first photographs as an elementary school student in the back room, in the makeshift darkroom of the Isabella Photo Studio, following the instructions and advice of its proprietress, Isabella, who tells me war stories, always in a whisper. While my parents seem to know nothing of the war, for Isabella the war never seems to have ended. Felix Rosenzweig dies in 1978, and Isabella leaves Austria and moves to Yugoslavia, to the little port of Rijeka. Why, for what reason, she never says, though I visit her at least once a year until 2000, when I learn that she has hanged herself in the attic of a building near the train station. My father Jürgen Traube, as set out in Felix Rosenzweig’s will, was “to send a quantity of chocolate truffles to Isabella on a regular basis,
no matter where she was living, and if he, Jürgen Traube, should die before Isabella, then his son, Hans Traube, will assume responsibility for supplying the truffles”. So after my father dies in 1980 I send Isabella Fischer chocolates in numerous shapes and sizes made by the most famous chocolatiers. I send her confections from Manner, Lindt, Droste, Suchard, Nestlé, Milka, Neuhaus, Cardullos, La Patisserie, Asbach/Reber, Biffar (the only selection of candied fruit—the rest were all chocolates), Hacher, Underberg. I discover there are truffle balls called Joy of Life and Karl Marx Kugeln, so I send Isabella those, too. The most expensive chocolate truffles are, of course, the Austrian ones from Salzburg. By sending them I hope to delight Isabella. They are Strauss balls, actually praline cubes, and Constance und Amadeus balls by Reber, also previously co-owned by Felix Rosenzweig. I mention Isabella Fischer, because she is a source of key information about my possible origins.
“Lebensborn” means fount of life. As a registered society (Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) Lebensborn grew into a secret Third Reich project for preserving the racial purity of the German nation. It was S.S.-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who designed the project and brought it to life. A shy and sensitive, restrained and modest man, not tall, he rather resembled a subservient, pedantic bank clerk than the head of the state police. Himmler suffered from migraines and stomach cramps, and nearly fainted when they killed some one hundred Jews in his honour at the Russian front. That was when he called for the use of “more humane methods” of execution, which meant introducing gas into special chambers fitted with showers.
For many, Lebensborn ended in a nightmare; some came out of Lebensborn decapitated, cloned. Founded in 1935, the Lebensborn Project was designed at first to care for “racially and biologically quintessential” pregnant women, who would give birth to racially and biologically quintessential sons of the homeland, perfect stallions at least one metre eighty centimetres tall, blonde and blue-eyed, muscles bulging, and sleek, disciplined Spartans.