TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

I’m right there with him, reading, and I feel pleasure at having a great-grandfather like this. One who lives in the most extreme inner isolation, who doesn’t wangle his way through any situation, but holds himself to the highest standards; one who is more sensitive and who feels more deeply than other people do. Then comes the visit to the lunatic asylum . What I now read hits me like a slap in the face (and not the way one of Hesekiel’s caresses struck Sanderling). I’m going to reproduce the passage in its entirety, even though I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I’m doing its author an injustice. Every quotation, every excerpt from a whole is unjust; how much more so in a case like this. Yet it shall be included here, along with many others. I do wish, however, for it to be read in the same way as all the previous ones – as a small sample that can’t do justice to the person speaking. 156

We were led through the same institution where the former pastor of the neighboring parish had for decades turned out insipid sermons and where I’d brought Ortlieb and Frau Niewöhner. There they were still, the idiotic children, being fed like animals or gluing cardboard boxes together and soiling themselves, and healthy people gave their labor in exchange for money to sustain those incapable of work and in a higher sense incapable of living, creatures whose relatives could no longer tolerate having close by and whom all of us were too cowardly to eradicate from the face of the earth; too cowardly. I saw the huge red walls of this establishment’s vast buildings, I saw the army of officials, the stream of gold that was necessary to sustain all of this and these few mentally ill people, I saw the mindlessness in my Połajewo parish and the poverty and the unfocused longings of those who really had vitality, and I wondered, why don’t you direct your gold, your services, 157