by Daša Drndic
Instead they used swords;
their plowing was of bodies, their furrow cut to the heart;
they plucked out hearts like tree stumps,
they burst gall bladders,
with livers they fed the vultures on their shoulders.
At the last they rolled away the skulls
like stones for building,
but for building there was never time.
So, when the soldier Andreas Ban is granted leave, he does not go home to Belgrade, but to the Struga Poetry Evenings, into the center of the world. He plunges into yet another history, into hundreds of personal histories, which drive some people mad and others to write poems. He looks at Lake Ohrid, resembling a small enclosed sea over which one cannot sail away. The Golden Wreath is won that year by Pablo Neruda (in absentia), the symposium is led by Viktor Shklovsky and the Miladinov Brothers’ Prize is awarded to Gjuzel, at whose table, in a little prefabricated house erected after the Skopje earthquake, Andreas Ban will many years later drink and listen to Bogomil’s latest poems, stories of his friendship with Czesław Miłosz and Isaac Bashevis Singer, stories of his political past which evoke anger, impotence and nausea, to whose wife he will flee from his current provincial languor into an embrace as secure as a mother’s.
That year, 1972, from West Germany to Struga comes Nikolas Born (1937), seven years later he dies of cancer, while from East Germany arrives Sarah Kirsch (1935), for the first time permitted to leave the country and accompanied by the trusted mediocre poet Eva Strittmatter (1930–2011), whose books at that time have print runs in the millions and whose husband Erwin Strittmatter, a novelist of rural themes, it is discovered in the 1990s, served during the Second World War in the 18th Regiment of the SS police, deporting Jews from Athens, then lived briefly in Poland as a guard of the Kraków ghetto, then, after taking some courses in anti-Partisan warfare, went to Slovenia. When the Berlin Wall is erected, Erwin Strittmatter becomes an informer for the Stasi, while his writing becomes increasingly permeable and popular. That year, 1972, in the little Struga backwater, cut in half by the Black Drim River, Nicholas Born and Sarah Kirsch try to patch up their country with illicit embraces. And do not succeed. In that year, 1972, Andreas Ban also meets the attractive W. S. Merwin (1927), now the renowned Carolyn Kizer (1925) and Peter Henisch, who makes every effort to arouse the empty-headed sinners of this planet, who keep on reproducing, crawling all over the place and depriving others of air. As early as the 1970s, it was with Peter Henisch that the publication of so-called Vater Literatur in Austria and Germany began, about the secret sins of fathers, which, in Eastern Europe, including Croatia in 2010, is decanted into sentimental, artistically irrelevant, historically insignificant campaign against an uneducated readership, not confronting history, fumbling around with trivial family traumas of writers. That quasi-literary settling of scores with dead fathers, the ironing of one’s crumpled conscience, those furies of impotent sons cowering in the shadows of their progenitors, those variations on self-pity, guilt, hatred and fear written in a cascade of semiconsciousness, provoke in Andreas Ban nausea, disgust and sorrow. Even Kafka was afraid to confront his living father, so he wrote a letter to him, in cautious steps (petits pas) at odds with his inner turmoil, and asked his mother to hand it to his father which she did not, so that his problematic letter only saw the light of day once all the protagonists were long since dead.
Henisch’s Negatives of My Father (Die kleine Figur meines Vaters, 1975) disturbs the Austrian-German public, which, long after the war, scrupulously consigns to oblivion its desecrated soil. The little figures of Henisch’s father are thematically selected photographs by Walter Henisch, one of the most prominent photographers of the Third Reich. Walter Henisch tells his son Peter Henisch, Listen, little one, I had no connection with the politics of the Third Reich, I was completely apolitical, just as I am apolitical today; I did my duty, and my duty was to take photographs for the homeland, for our Germany.
And Peter tells him, Listen, old man, I shall write a book about you and all the horrors that you witnessed with a smile on your face and a Leica at your eye. And I shall write that you participated in the crimes and that after the war you made no mention of them, and that you are lying now.
Oh, I am proud of the professional way in which I conducted my wartime duties, says Walter.
Yes, in the service of Nazi propaganda, says Peter.
The half Jew Walter Henisch (1913–1975) began his career in his native Vienna in the 1930s, and continued it from 1939 in the Wehrmacht, of which he was a member until the end of the war. As early as 1940, Henisch was part of Goebbels’s machine, taking photographs on the front lines in Russia, Poland, France and the Balkans, he also clicked away in 1944 in the course of Operation Rösselsprung, i.e. the Seventh Enemy Offensive, or the Raid on Drvar, when he raised the soldiers’ morale. Then, after 1945, Henisch first worked freelance (no newspaper would employ him, in light of his wartime past) and much later placed himself at the service of the social-democratic press. He had received awards for his work during the war, including several of Hitler’s Iron Crosses. But then came the Austrian new age, followed by a wave of oblivion.
The early 1970s. In Vienna’s Rathaus the political and cultural elite are gathered, the atmosphere is festive, it is touristy, the city is clean, Judenrein, and onto the stage climb a throng of citoyens to whom their country is indebted. Among them is Henisch whose exceptionally reduced biography, with the war years omitted, is recited in a chirpy voice by the young hostess. A member of the Austrian government then cordially praises the photographic achievements of Walter Henisch, particularly those that display his exceptional sensitivity to the social and communal issues of his postwar homeland, and also his unforgettable portraits of children (in peacetime), while the whole ceremonial is recorded in silence by new young photographers. In the background, classical music plays, as befits the Viennese hall. And so, after transience had swallowed up the years between 1936 and 1948, historical and collective memory has folded. The fotographischer Standpunkt that reflects the gaze, and distorts it, remains a powerful tool to this day. That’s why Andreas Ban no longer believes photographs.
Andreas Ban’s obsessive thoughts
After Peter Henisch come increasingly acute public showdowns in literature and film by the traumatized postwar generation with their SS fathers and grandfathers. That painful process still continues to jolt the German and Austrian literary-historical scene. In the book Trieste, Andreas Ban reads about the well-known graphic artist Christopher Meckel and his book Suchbild. Über meinen Vater and Suchbild. Meine Mutter, about Monika Göth (daughter of the infamous commander of the concentration camp in Plaszów, condemned to death by hanging), who today seeks out camp survivors, victims of her father Amon Göth, asking for their forgiveness, she wanders through the world, repeating, I am not like him; about Peter Sichrovski and his book Born Guilty: The Children of Nazi Families; the book Trieste mentions Beate Niemann in the documentary by Yoash Tatari My Father, the Murderer, and Peter Schneider and his novel Vati (“Dad”), and Dan Bar-On, Andreas’s colleague, born in Haifa in 1938 to parents of German origin, who writes the essay “Legacy of Silence: Encounters With the Children of the Third Reich,” and then there’s Niklas Frank. Unlike those for whom it took fifty or more years to discover the truth about their Nazi fathers and who now portray themselves as the traumatized victims of history, in Trieste Andreas Ban reads about how Niklas Frank protests from the end of the war until today, emerging from that painful struggle devastated but victorious.
Until 1945, Andreas Ban reads, life in Wawel Royal Castle, which dominates Kraków and from which there is a spectacular view of the Tatra mountains, seems like a dream to Niklas Frank. While his father Hans Frank, “the King of Poland,” is working on the liquidation of the Polish elite, maintaining that “Poland has to become a land of workers and peasants,” with no educated class, throughout the Generalgou
vernement he shuts down theaters, schools and universities, forbids the population to listen to radio broadcasts, destroys libraries, proscribes the printing of books and eliminates the Polish language, while he limits the distribution of provisions to a level below that required for survival, the Frank family lacks nothing, from food to servants and stolen artworks, Hans Frank entertains high SS functionaries, including Himmler, and, with caviar and champagne, strums piano keys, playing — oh, what splendid times — Chopin. From that book Trieste, Andreas Ban discovers that, writing and talking about those days, Niklas went on an excursion with his nanny Hilde Albert to a place where some jolly prankster was forcing very thin people to mount a donkey that would kick, throwing them to the ground, and those very thin people found it hard to get up. I watched the performance and laughed as though I was at the circus, Niklas Frank says, and I went to a camp for forced labor, in the so-called subcamp of a nearby concentration camp. Niklas Frank becomes an angry teenager and a fanatical hitchhiker, he travels through the western part of his divided country of Germany and takes its pulse. As soon as I said I was the son of a famous Nazi executed at Nuremberg, the drivers would buy me lunch. In all my years of hitchhiking only one driver stopped, opened the door and told me to get out, says Niklas Frank. In the Berlin Documentation Center Niklas Frank studies his father’s dossier (which Beate Niemann could have done as well). Niklas Frank visits the archives, reads Hans Frank’s diaries, visits aging Nazis who had once been connected with his father and close associates, visits servants who worked for the Frank family in Berlin and Kraków, goes to America and talks to the priest Sixtus O’Connor from whom Hans Frank sought God’s forgiveness before he was put to death. Was the noose over his black hood tied tightly enough? Niklas Frank may have asked himself. Was there a crack when the chair was removed? Could it be heard loudly enough? he may have wondered. I imagine myself biting into Hans Frank’s heart while he bellows like a wild beast, and I sink my teeth ever more deeply and he howls ever louder and the blood spurts and then his heart stops, empty and dead, he says. For a long time after the war, Germany bathed in collective denial of individual responsibility for the war, says Niklas Frank. My father was a coward and depraved and he was guilty of the deaths of two million people.
What Niklas Frank discovers in the course of long years of searching is converted in 1987 into a lifelong obsession, into a mission imbued with fury because of the deafness that oppresses the country, transforming it increasingly into a Beckettian landscape in which the players are left at the end of the game with just a few pawns and a limited number of moves. In his book Der Vater, not Mein Vater, but Der Vater, Niklas Frank enters a dangerous duel the outcome of which not even Freud could decipher, for which no Greek tragedy has an answer.
Then, in 2005, Niklas’s new book Meine deutsche Mutter is published. Niklas Frank does not let go, Niklas Frank does not give up. “The Queen of Poland,” Maria Brigitte Frank, unscrupulous, greedy, calculating and promiscuous, and already long since dead, fares no better than her “King.” Niklas Frank continues to howl in a cosmos of deaf and lifeless silence.
So, in Germany and Austria, almost seventy years after the end of the war, ever new serials of undigested Nazi trauma keep appearing, while in Croatia, in a patriotic trance, Ustasha crimes and their perpetrators dress up in carnival robes of rotten nostalgia, their descendants keep quiet or lie about their fathers’ and grandfathers’ pasts, at Christmastime masses dedicated to the leader Pavelić are still held, it is a deaf age of defiled silence through which pigs grunt as they stampede over the paving stones of memory. And Andreas Ban languishes in his exile in a mouse hole on the edge of the world.
Besides, what’s so terrible about being a photographer in Goebbels’s propaganda hell, or a journalist, musician, writer, painter, a poet loyal to Pavelić’s State Information and Propaganda Office (DIPU), or the Main Directorate for Propaganda (GRP); what is so terrible about making films, conducting symphony orchestras, composing, acting in national theaters, writing wishy-washy poetry, “fireside” fiction that is thrust forth as the standard of supreme art, nauseating, singing to the people, encouraging the people not to falter in their love for their beautiful, enlarged, future homeland (their Croatian mother) of pure blood, for “culture” strengthens the people’s spirit, makes them better and they, the people, swallow all that, this great Mass of dedication, while somewhere out there, “in forests and mountains,”* people die singing quite different songs, far away from the everyday, enclosed by walls and wire or under gas showers, or with an Ustasha curved knife at the throats of Jews, Serbs, Roma and antifascists, millions of the “unsuitable,” the vast heap of “human trash,” transformed into an army of skeletons, “freed from work,” they listen to the heavenly music of obliteration.
In October 2010, at the age of eighty-one, in a clinic in Schönau — oh, the irony and “happenstance” — near Berchtesgaden, with a lovely view of Obersalzberg, the location of Hitler’s favorite mountain spot Berghof, the producer and writer Thomas Harlan dies of emphysema. Thomas Harlan was the son of the famous Veit Harlan, extremely popular during the Third Reich, a bon vivant and ladies’ man, the blue-eyed and fair-haired creator of the infamous anti-Semitic film Jud Süss. This “artistic” propaganda product, melodramatic and heartrending, which ends with the bloodthirsty execution by hanging of the greedy, ugly and smelly Süss, while the masses scream “Kill, kill the Jew,” inflames people throughout the Reich, including many Croats in the NDH (Independent State of Croatia).
Because many Croats in the NDH are already organized, prepared, blinded, conditioned and loyal. As early as 1941, anti-Jewish propaganda and the struggle to protect the Aryan blood and honor of the Croatian nation are prospering and pecking at their brains, as advertisements do today. The newspapers are obedient and loyal, they keep warning of the danger of “the Jewish spirit that emerges from Jewish blood,” but they also remind Croats of the good fortune that the Croatian countryside has preserved “its pure racial foundations,” because “Croatian blood in the countryside has not been infiltrated by a foreign, Jewish influx.” The Zagreb newspaper Novi list calls for “a biological regeneration of our milieu,” which would completely cure the Croatian national organism. It is necessary, therefore, to eliminate Jewish blood from the cells of that Croatian organism, because at present, due to the Jewish blood that still circulates here and there, its threat is enormous. That is why the introduction of race laws is the best defense of the purity of Croatian blood, the newspapers, that is the journalists, say. Their names no longer matter, do they, they are dead, and the fact that their children and grandchildren don’t wish to talk about it, that’s their right, isn’t it, their right to silence, the thick, suffocating silence, pumped full of the poisons of patriotism. The registration of Jews begins, yellow stars are sewn on and other yellow scrap-like tin badges resembling grotesque brooches are pinned to the “defiled” chests, and in May 1941 journalists remind their readers that every Jew is a parasite on the body of every Croat, a worm that corrupts him, and with its great destructive strength destroys the Croatian family, Croatian villages, Croatian municipalities, towns and the whole Independent State of Croatia. Those Jews, those foreigners, aliens, make use only of lies, deceit, cunning, dishonesty, and if necessary murder, the loyal Croatian journalists report.
The State Information and Propaganda Office (DIPU), later renamed the Main Directorate for Propaganda (GRP), run by the journalist and chief censor Ivo Bogdan,† the devoted Ustasha, powerful ideologue of the Independent State of Croatia, the rabid radical clerical fascist in love with Franco, this GRP, then, has eyes and ears for the entire public and private life of its beloved homeland of Croatia. That DIPU and GRP, that is, the Leader’s sycophants, determine what will be published, which gramophone records will be sold and which will be destroyed, which films will be shown, what the radio will broadcast, so that the life of the Croats should flow smoothly and securely, so that the cafés should
be full, evening outings relaxed and entertaining, the women well turned out, fluttering and smiling, the music in Sunday matinees melodious among horticultural greenery, and the church tranquil. (Quite incomprehensibly, while Andreas Ban imagines Zarah Leander soothing tense Nazis, stoking passions suppressed by their fanatical patriotism, with the aura of Zyklon B, he finds in his storeroom, in a cardboard box amidst a heap of Bakelite 78 records, one with the label “Elektroton, Zagreb,” most probably from the NDH era, on which Zarah Leander sings compositions by the well-known Theo Mackeben, who spent the entire war actively conducting, composing and making films, cheerfully scampering around the cinematic and musical scene of the Third Reich.)
Journalists, filmmakers, international congresses, exhibitions, cultural cooperation with the Third Reich, oh bliss, everything is under control, as it should be. New criminal laws are instituted, the disobedient brought to order, above all order, effort and reeducation.
Poglavnik!‡ exclaim the NDH journalists and all the editors of the Zagreb newspapers at a reception hosted by Pavelić in 1941, as they sip Herzegovinian wines and nibble authentic Livanj cheese, dear Poglavnik, they exclaim, Croatian journalists are now and for ever more, for the Homeland — ready!
So, in addition to politicians, and journalists and scientists and students and artists — painters, writers, musicians, singers, actors, producers, and priests and young people and children too, so many are ready (not all, to be fair) to contribute by law to the “protection of the Aryan blood and honor of the Croatian nation” and its “national and Aryan Croatian culture.” The scene is set, the terrain sounded out, and so, with great pomp, on July 1, 1942 in Zagreb, in the Art Pavilion on Strossmayer Square, the exhibition is opened “about the development of the Jewish population and their destructive activity in Croatia before 14.10.1941,” which also illustrates “the solution of the Jewish question within the NDH.”