Trieste
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My father, said Tipura, was born in 1929, and he grew up with a foster family, because his mother entrusted him to a foster family because his mother was only fifteen when she agreed, on 31 December, 1928, to go to the flat of a waiter who worked at a café at the hippodrome, a great aficionado of horse races, a fanatic gambler, who would, nine months later, become the biological father of my father, Norbert, said Tipura. As an adult, my father, too, became a fanatic gambler, a fixture at the horse races, I don’t know how that happened, said Tipura, but now I, too, love horses and horse racing. My father, said Tipura, became head of the Munich branch of the Hitlerjugend, at home he had a large world map hanging on the kitchen wall and he pinned flags on it whenever the German troops, the Wehrmacht troops, captured a town, a region, a country, which then lost its name and became Germany. When the war ended, my father saw 1945 as a year of crushing defeat, rather than a year of victory. I was young, my father would later say, Tipura told me, and he often repeated, Lord, what would I have become had Nazism prevailed. But he did not dig deep, he never dug into the family shit, he only poked at it, smeared it around, said Tipura. His portraits of the children of Nazis are almost nostalgic flashes of the past, tender portrayals of helpless victims. And so, when I found my father’s notebook, I set out on my own exculpatory journey, I looked for the same “children”, for the ones my father spoke to forty years earlier, and I found elderly people clutching well-worn bundles of family history, bundles they baulk at unpacking, and when they do, everything inside is greyness.
Martin Bormann Junior (a.k.a. Kronzi) was born in 1930, the first of ten children of S.S.-Obergruppenführer Martin Bormann, head of the National Socialist Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary, a stocky, muscular watchdog at the entrance to the Machiavellian Third Reich Hades, a hater of Christian churches, the fiercest anti-cleric among the Nazi officials, the man who sparked the Kirchenkampf, who committed cowardly suicide in 1945, biting into a cyanide capsule after he had been wounded while fleeing Adolf’s bunker. There is no help for Martin Bormann Junior, a dedicated young Nazi from 1940 to 1945, attending the Party Academy in Bavaria, who after the war embraces the Catholic faith and becomes a priest, so that he can repent the sins of his father, sins which spun around his body everlasting fibres, leaving him, Martin Bormann Junior, languishing for years like a squished caterpillar in a dark cocoon. Martin Bormann Junior is not helped by God or the Church or the fucking Our Father or “our trespasses, our trespasses”, which he mutters into his beard. So after several wasted decades he bids the Church auf Wiedersehen! and marries a former nun who has also told the Church addio, bye bye, and the two of them start making the rounds of German and Austrian schools, where they tell children of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Then they go to Israel and bow to the victims of Martin Bormann Senior, and in so doing, coexist with the ghosts who sit at their table and crawl into their bed. Martin Bormann Junior told me he remembers the furniture and decorative lamps made of human bones and skin in the home of Himmler’s mistress Hedwig Potthast, Tipura said. Bormann Junior does what he can to cure himself, Tipura said, but his sister Irmgard burns in her own hell, blinded by the flames of her diseased love for her “good and tender father, whom she would love and respect to her death”, Tipura said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father was a Nazi, Tipura said. Gustav Schwarzenegger asked to join the National Socialist Party as early as 1938, before the annexation of Austria, but it was only in 1941 that the National Socialist Party drew him to its bosom. In his medical records from the time, one can read, Tipura told me, that Gustav Schwarzenegger was a quiet and reliable person, a person of average intelligence, not remarkable for anything in particular. From 1947 until he retires, Schwarzenegger works as a policeman—since, they say, he committed no war crimes. Arnold, however, during a time of peace and blessed Austrian forgetfulness, develops his physique by lifting weights, and in 1967, when he is twenty and before he becomes the Terminator, he wins the title of Mister Universe and looks like this:
Today Schwarzenegger, who did not consent to speak with me, Tipura told me, today Schwarzenegger says, My father was an ordinary soldier in the army of his country. My father fought in Belgium and in France and in Russia, and it is known, Schwarzenegger says, that my father did not commit a single crime, because the soldiers of the Wehrmacht did not kill, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht merely waged war, says Schwarzenegger who probably did not attend the Wehrmacht exhibition, said Tipura, because had he attended the Wehrmacht exhibition he would have seen that even the ordinary German soldiers of the Third Reich committed appalling crimes, which was an insight that stunned the German public then, at that Wehrmacht exhibition, and perhaps that insight would have stunned him, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well, said Tipura.
I didn’t need Tipura. I could have done without his stories and his discoveries. By 2000 I had amassed my own file of the “case histories” of Nazi descendants, the descendants of the first, second and third generation of Nazis, big and little, known and anonymous, regardless, the symptoms are more or less the same, and my file kept growing, getting fatter like a goose I was ruthlessly fattening until it keeled over. In nearly every case I studied there was a similar pattern: the children and grandchildren of Nazis rarely faced the history of their families and their own story. Nazis, many of them with bloodstained hands, some condemned to death, some sentenced to years in prison, a sentence they often didn’t serve out, many who were never brought to justice, who went on working as physicians and judges, engineers and architects, living “distinguished” lives, these Nazis colluded in conspiratorial silence as weighty as a millstone under which life lies crushed beyond recognition and under which, by some inexplicable or, in fact, explicable miracle like Emperor Trojan’s goat’s ears, a grain of fragile truth would sprout here and there, truth that had a destructive, devastating power. It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask. But old photographs, unfinished manuscripts, hidden diaries surface; archives open, movies are made, books are written; the pebbles of history roll underfoot and in time our step grows less steady. Nazi, Fascist, Ustaša, Chetnik, regardless. Their germ has not been eradicated. Norman Frank understood this when he said, I will have no children, I want the vile Frank germ to disappear, then starts pouring milk down his throat, he drinks thirteen litres of milk per day, then dies. Norman’s brother Niklas, however, is alive. A defiant and tireless demystifier, Niklas Frank writes and shouts, and at his unambiguous, defiant declarations, articles, books and projects, not to say performances (such as when, for a couple of years in his childhood, he used to masturbate to the point of orgasm on the anniversary of Hans Frank’s execution), at every warning from him, the hypocritical and cowardly German public has been shocked for the last few decades, snarling at Niklas’ uncomprising stand, wanting to sleep easy, as if a father were a sacrosanct being. But he is not. There are no sacrosanct beings. Even God is not sacrosanct, perhaps He least of all.
The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banality of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse. There is no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity, those tainted minds shouldn’t have even been brought to trial, what miserable justice, what defence of which dignity, whose dignity, which pathetic Nurembergs, Stuttgarts, Dusseldorfs, Frankfurts, Munichs, Hagues, money wasted, time wasted, only dark, farcical performances after which not a single diseased mind has learned nor will learn a thing, all of them should have been executed after a summary trial the way the Russians and East Germans did in ’46, ’47 and ’48, their germ should have been sent to seed so the new ones don’t come along who keep coming and coming, they, too, should be swiftly done away with before they die in comfortable prisons playing chess or, worst of all, free, as heroes to whom monstrous monuments are raised, whose names bedeck city squares and airports, t
hat scum ought to be eliminated so that the story wouldn’t continue, elegantly and brazenly, inserting itself into reality and so that the malevolent Phoenix would once and for all stop hovering over our heads. That eternal and infinite Herumgeschmuse of the children of the murderers and criminals is becoming pathetic. Their “They were little Nazis” holds no water. There are no little Nazis. To begin (or end) with, to the children and grandchildren of the murderers and criminals I propose a verbal Exerzier and exercitationes of self-denazification, a mea culpa in the name of the second generation and the third. The fact that the descendants of the Nazis, Fascists, Ustašas, homeguard fighters, Chetniks, and so on and so forth, prefer not to recognize the crimes of their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, diminishes the overall crimes of the Germans and others, which were committed during the Third Reich. And this holds true, as well, for the descendants of former satellite Nazi-Fascist fabrications, formerly fascist countries. It applies across the board. And it applies to the Israelis today. I’m still waiting now for the Americans to bump off Morales, the silence has poured into a gigantic block of reinforced concrete, and the Catholic Church, this caricatured parade and more than revolting fabrication, this costumed theatre of transparent lies and empty promises should be done away with right now, once and for all, because the gatherings of the zealously blinded masses who bow down to the divine emissary are reminiscent of the ominous gatherings at which people shouted Sieg Heil!
Listen, says Bernhard, definitely Bernhard, I was confirmed in my suspicion that our relations with Jesus Christ were in reality no different from those we had had with Adolf Hitler. When I went back to school after the war, says Bernhard, the school was called the Johanneum and it became a Catholic institution with a new name for the old building, which had been a National Socialist institution. The day-room, where we had formerly been instructed in National Socialism, had been turned into a chapel. In the place which had been occupied by the lectern, at which Grunkranz had stood before the end of the war and held forth about the Greater Germany, there now stood an altar; where Hitler’s portrait had once hung on the wall, there was now a large cross, and in place of the piano at which Grunkranz had accompanied our singing of National Socialist songs like Die Fahne hoch or Es zittern die morschen Knochen, there now stood a harmonium. The room had not even been repainted. So, after the war, the colour of the ruling party was no longer Nazi brown, but once more the Catholic black it had been before the war. The gymnasium had always been and remained a strictly Catholic school, although after the war it was turned into a state gymnasium. After being subjected to the Nazi lie about history, I was now subjected to the Catholic lie. Both National Socialism and Catholicism are infectious diseases, diseases of the mind, but I succumbed to neither, since my grandfather had taken care to immunize me against them. Nevetheless I suffered under them, though not from them. Look at the Salzburg Summer Festival, which makes a hypocritcal pretension to universality, when so-called universal art is pressed into service to disguise this peverted denial of the spirit; and indeed, everything that goes on there in the summer is merely deceit and hypocrisy set to music and performed for all it is worth by various combinations of instruments. And all of it, the whole festival, was founded to temporarily mask the diseased, perverse and polluted being of that city, which does not greatly differ from numerous European Catholic cities that boasted of their National Socialism, or whatever it was then called.
When in 2005 I said to my colleague Ian Buruma, I must go to Sonnenstein, that’s where my biological father, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, began his career as executioner, Ian said, You won’t find anything there, all traces have been removed. Several years ago I was in Pirna, at the time a neglected but unusual little town with beautiful nineteenth-century villas, said Buruma, and with some examples of late Gothic architecture, he said. I wanted to see the building in which the first gassings of mentally ill patients took place, I knew the building existed, I had seen photographs of that building, at the time the “original” extermination house for the “useless”, in which more than 10,000 people were gassed with Zyklon B, but none of the tourist brochures offered any information about it. I had trouble finding the place, Buruma said. An old woman cheerfully sent me uphill, but I got lost, so I asked an elderly gentleman, Where did the Sonnenstein Institute use to be? and he said, Pardon? Where did what use to be? Again I said, the former euthanasia institute, and he asked, When was that? And I said, In Hitler’s day, and he said, Sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Nonetheless, I finally found it, this former “institute”, Buruma said. I went over to a yellow-walled villa where there was a plaque that read, SAUNA FOR THE ILL AND ELDERLY. A young woman asked me what I was after. When I told her, she gave a start: Oh, no, that wasn’t here. Here we work only with patients who require specialist therapy. You’re looking for a different building, that one over there, where there used to be a factory of turbines, the young woman said, Buruma told me. The building over there was surrounded by a rusty wire fence, and the building itself looked quite forbidding. On it was a plaque commemorating an Albert Barthel, OUR PARTY COMRADE WHO WAS KILLED BY THE NAZIS IN 1942. So, I concluded, Buruma said, that the institute had not been in that building either. All the same I went into one of the rooms and watched some young men having lunch. It turned out that they were deacons who cared for mentally ill children. The former euthanasia institute? Oh, no, no, thank God, they said, that institute was not here, no, it was in the building next to this one, said the deacons, Buruma told me. I peered into the cellar of the neighbouring building, an elegant French-style villa. On it there were no plaques. Wild grass and weeds had grown around the door, latched shut. I heard birds chirping and the rustling of leaves in the mild breeze and thought about the pile of plush teddy bears I had seen in the hall of the deacons’ building. Then I remembered Oskar Matzerath and his jazz music with Klepp at the elegant Zwiebelkeller in Dusseldorf and how the guests chopped onions and wept without restraint, how at last they were crying, how the tears gushed, even if they were artificial tears provoked by stinging onions, yet still they were tears that stung. Don’t go to Sonnenstein, Buruma said. Sonnenstein is nothing but weeds.
I met Niklas Frank at Thomas Bernhard’s. I was taking pictures, Niklas was interviewing Thomas for Stern. That was when Bernhard said, We don’t exist, we get existed. Never in my life have I freed myself from anything by writing. If I had, nothing would be left, there would be nothing to write about, said Bernhard. And what would I do with that freedom seeping into all the nooks and crannies of my life? he asked. I’m not in favour of liberation, of relief. The cemetery, maybe that’s it, Bernhard said, but, no, I don’t believe in the cemetery either, he said, because then there would be nothing left.
Niklas’ father, Hans Frank, was the King of Poland, the main man in the General Government, a lawyer with a doctoral degree, a tall, dashing dandy with a penchant for white suits and hats, for travelling to towns with old historical centres, for invaluable artworks displayed with finesse in the fancy villas where he stayed, a priggish bon vivant, a philanderer and closet homosexual whose pedantically detailed war diary in forty-three volumes became the most powerful evidence against him when he was finally tried at Nuremberg. On 2 June, 1943, Hans Frank notes in his journal, Here we began with three and a half million Jews; of those three and a half million only a few that work in camps are left, the rest have—let us say—emigrated.
Born in 1900 in Karlsruhe, Hans Frank enters the German Army at the age of seventeen, and later joins the extreme right-wing units of the Freikorps, which extorts politicians and frightens and kills people. Hans Frank is Reichsminister without Portfolio, leader of the National Socialist Association of Barristers, a member of the Reichstag, and, from 1941 to 1942, President of the International Chamber of Jurists. While he is serving as the Governor-General of Poland, his administration introduces death camps as a part of the design of the Final Solution. Millions of Jews, Roma and other “und
esirables” disappear. Under Hans Frank’s administration, the S.S. and Gestapo commit terrible crimes against Polish civilians, treating them as members of the resistance movement; they rape, torch towns, mutilate women and children and organize mass deportations to concentration camps.
Hans Frank, condemned for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is hanged in Nuremberg on 16 October, 1946. While in detention he returns to the Catholic faith, and sees his execution as a partial expiation for his sins, although he does not confess to all charges in the indictment. Hans Frank leaves the courtroom in the company of an Irish Franciscan, Father Sixtus O’Connor, and two weeks later enters the place of his execution with a smile.
Oh happy day
Oh happy day
When Jesus washed
When Jesus washed
Jesus washed
Washed my sins away
Oh happy day
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
Oh happy day
In 1946 Hans Frank is survived by five children and his wife Brigitte. Today, all except Niklas are dead. Niklas Frank was seven years old in 1946. His life until 1945 in the Wawel Royal Castle overlooking Cracow seems like a dream. While the “King of Poland” works to stamp out the Polish elite, claiming that Poland must become a land of workers and peasants, stripped of an educated class, while throughout the General Government he shuts down theatres, schools and universities, while he bans radio broadcasts, destroys libraries, proscribes the printing of books, and works towards eradicating the Polish language, while he sets the rationing of foodstuffs at less than starvation levels, the Frank family want for nothing, from provisions to servants to stolen artworks. Hans Frank hosts high-ranking S.S. officials, including Himmler, and while nibbling at caviar and sipping champagne he tickles the ivories, playing for them—oh, happy days—Chopin. Writing and talking about that time, Niklas mentions an outing with his nanny Hilde Albert to a place where a jolly man was persuading very thin people to mount a donkey, which bucked, throwing the thin people to the ground, and the very thin people struggled to get to their feet. I watched the performance and laughed as if I were at a circus, Niklas said. But I was at a sub-camp of some nearby concentration camp, he said. Niklas becomes a disreputable teenager and an avid hitchhiker, he roams throughout the western part of his divided country of Germany and takes its pulse. As soon as I’d say that I was the son of a famous Nazi executed at Nuremberg, the driver would take me to lunch. During my many years of hitchhiking only one driver stopped, opened the door and said, Out! says Niklas. At the Berlin Archive Niklas Frank studies his father’s dossier. He makes the rounds of archives, pores over Hans Frank’s diary entries, visits doddering Nazis, who at one time had been in touch with Hans Frank and his close associates, servants who worked for the Frank family in Berlin and Cracow, he goes to America to talk with Father Sixtus O’Connor, from whom Hans Frank sought the mercy of Jesus before his execution. Did the noose over the black hood squeeze his neck enough? perhaps Niklas Frank asks himself. What was the snap like when they kicked away the chair? Was it loud enough? he wonders. I imagine myself biting into Hans Frank’s heart while he screams violently, I thrust my teeth deeper and his howls grow louder and the blood spurts horribly and then his heart stops, empty and dead, he says.