TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

reason. Above all, out of childish spite, I wanted nothing to do with these grandparents who hadn’t even been willing to set eyes on the little girl I was. I punished them, though they never learned anything about this laughable, belated punishment, by paying just as little attention to them as they had to me. I was forty years old when I first saw photos of these people. By that point they were long dead. Many more years then went by during which my individual, defiant disinterest, my refusal to ask questions, coincided with the general silence, sometimes called leaden, of the German people. Only in the last few years, well over half a century after the end of the war, does my father talk to me when I visit him about the silence that weighs more and more heavily on his conscience. He tells me he no longer understands it, that he reproaches himself for it.

I travel from Normandy to the Rhineland to visit him. During the two days I spend there, our conversation frequently turns to the past. Was your father an opportunistic or a committed Nazi? I ask him. One who wanted to build his career or at least retain his position, or one who genuinely believed in the “cause”? I ask this as if no third possibility exists. But presumably there is not only a third, but a thousand other possible ways to have been a Nazi. Besides which, in asking the question, I’m not at all clear which of the two would have been more desirable. But perhaps I’d have preferred a stupid, sincere person to a lucid one with no scruples.

My father was a committed Nazi, he replies.

My preference for credulous blockheads doesn’t go quite far enough to elicit cheers from me. I ask him if he understands how a man whose father – Sanderling – for whom he felt great admiration, who had many Jewish friends, 167

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