TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

constantly revolving around a blind spot. But I think that’s the wrong way to conceive of it. They lived there together, waiting to be allowed to go home. They knew nothing about any blind spot. It took fifty or sixty years for that blind spot to spread itself out inside their heads. Like one of those small stains you try to get out with soap and water only to discover, once the fabric has dried, that a much larger stain, an auréole has appeared. A shadow. When he was allowed to go back home, his father hadn’t yet returned. He too was in a camp: in the British internment camp in Hemer, Westfalia, which until just recently had been the so-called Stalag VI A. In that camp, tens of thousands of mostly Russian prisoners of war had been forced to labor in the mines in the Ruhr and elsewhere, and many of them died. One can consider such things as facts, and acknowledge them, just as one has acknowledged the existence of other camps, 164

without ultimately being able to make sense of it all. Transit camps, internment camps, prison camps, penal camps, reeducation camps, concentration and extermination camps, there were dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. As if at that time there was no other place for the people of Europe to stay. After the end of the war, Stalag VI A was converted into a penal and reeducation camp for presumed National Socialists. When my grandfather returned home from there, in spring or perhaps summer of 1946, he had – according to my father – become a devout Christian. Even though this family thought very well of itself, they behaved just as many others did: in the following decades, there was never any talk either of the barking man with the little mustache, nor of anything that had happened during his reign. My siblings and I have extended that silence into the present. Not that I’d have dared to ask. Perhaps I shied away from doing so, but that wasn’t the real 165