The German House
Page 30
“Stefan visited me and said that he would give up all his presents if I came. My return ticket is for Friday.”
“Christmas will be over by then. We could ask if there are any seats available in the flight tomorrow. Then we’d fly home together.”
Instead of answering, Eva dug through her coat pocket, pulled something out, and placed it on the glinting chrome tabletop. It was the little package of red-painted wood.
“What is that?”
“The gift brought by the Moorish king.”
“Myrrh,” Jürgen said, taking the little red cube and turning it around in his fingers. Eva told him the story behind it. As she did, she could see her mother before her, setting up the Christmas pyramid on the cupboard in the living room. Fitting it with four red candles. Going through the motions silently this year, for the first time ever failing to recount the story of the missing package. Eva saw her father sweating in his kitchen, preparing the best goose for his family, all the while knowing that his daughter would not be coming to share in it. She saw her family leaving church on Christmas Eve, skidding over the icy streets in a row, their arms all linked. She was missing. That evening, her parents would sit in the living room till her father said, “I’m sure she’ll come next year.” Her mother would remain silent, wondering whether her life was actually over.
“What is myrrh used for?” Eva asked.
“It’s a resin. It was once used for embalming dead bodies. And it represents human nature. For the earthly realm. It is both bitter and healing.”
Eva put the little package away. She took Jürgen’s hands firmly in hers. If nothing else, she knew this much was good. “There’s no shaking this feeling of love inside me.”
It was time to check on the lost suitcase, but they sat close for a while longer in the futuristic café. They looked at each other from time to time and thought that they really would be good together, while planes descended onto the airfield and others climbed calmly into skies heavy with snow.
Author’s Note
I would like to express my gratitude to the staff at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt. Their remarkable work, and in particular, the extensive archive of materials from the first Auschwitz trial were indispensable to my research. Over the years, the transcripts and sound recordings of witness testimony (https://www.fritz-bauer-institut.de/mitschnitt-auschwitz-prozess.html) became the springboard and source of meaning for my artistic work. The fictitious witnesses who appear in the novel exemplify the fate of survivors in my mind. To create them I sometimes quoted excerpts from original testimony. In other cases I merged statements; this creative consolidation represents an effort to provide a platform for as many voices as possible. I bow to those individuals in the trial who revisited their traumatic experiences and confronted the perpetrators. They provided the world with comprehensive, lasting testimony of what Auschwitz was.
The following participants in the trial were quoted directly:
Mauritius Berner
Josef Glück
Jan Weis
Hans Hofmeyer (chief judge)
Fritz Bauer (attorney general)
Hildegard Bischoff (witness for the defense)
A Note From the Translator
Translating Annette Hess’s The German House presented a range of linguistic, stylistic, and thematic challenges, as the story moves from past to present, between characters representing different ages, backgrounds, sensibilities, and intentions, and from internal thought processes to external actions. Like Eva, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to do justice to this story, to translate faithfully and thoughtfully the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors and the process of this young woman’s coming-of-age and crisis of identity, as she discovers the truth of her family’s past and must question her own role within it. Eva’s painful personal reckoning parallels the slow thawing of widespread reluctance among her fellow Germans to account for the crimes of the Nazi era—crimes of such magnitude that, indeed, they could never have come to pass, had only a tiny sliver of the population been complicit.
The quick pacing of the narrative demanded nimble, colorful language that contributes to the novel’s page-turning quality and reflects the dynamism that characterized the economic boom in post-war West Germany. This energy carries over into the many passages of dialogue, where my task was not only to convey the content of conversation, but to stay true to each character’s distinct voice while maintaining the tone of mid-century speech.
The kinetic world that Hess creates for readers in The German House—from the noisy and rapidly changing cityscape of Frankfurt to the ways her characters love, fight, negotiate, tease, or sing—is counterbalanced by moments of recollection that may be quieter, but are no less powerful. Memory plays a central role in this story. Defendants claim not to remember what happened at Auschwitz, while survivors recall their trauma before a public audience that expects their memories to be flawless. Eva realizes that what she has always accepted as her childhood memories can no longer be trusted. Memories are often fragmented, incomplete, illogical in the way the mind stitches them together, yet they help define who we are. It was critical to reflect this sense of both distance and immediacy in the language of their telling.
—Elisabeth Lauffer
Here ends Annette Hess’s
The German House.
The first edition of this book was printed and bound at LSC Communications in Harrisonburg, Virginia, October 2019.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this novel was set in ITC Legacy Serif, a typeface created by Ronald Arnholm. He first got the idea for the font when he came across the work of fifteenth-century French engraver and type designer Nicolas Jenson while a graduate student at Yale. Impressed by the classic yet clean lines of the roman font, Arnholm went on to start a revival of Jensen’s work with the creation of ITC Legacy.
An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices, offering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other points of view via the language of the imagination.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE GERMAN HOUSE. Copyright © 2019 by Annette Hess. English Language Translation Copyright © Elisabeth Lauffer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as Deutsches Haus in Germany in 2018 by Ullstein.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hess, Annette, 1967- author. | Lauffer, Elisabeth, translator.
Title: The German house : a novel / Annette Hess ; translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer.
Other titles: Deutsches Haus. German
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2019] | Originally published as Deutsches Haus in Germany in 2018 by Ullstein. | Translated from the German. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019030720 (print) | LCCN 2019030721 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062910256 | ISBN 9780062910257 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062910318 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PT2708.E84 D4813 2019 (print) | LCC PT2708.E84 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030720
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030721
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ISBN 978-0-06-297645-1 (Intl)
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-291031-8
Version 10092019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-291025-7
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