TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

me concerns an older man who lived with his wife and daughter in a cottage by the river. He gives no reply to the question of what he wishes to be called. He cries and moans. So he is named Weinstein. And the next one Steinwein. And so on. I imagine that when the officers tasked with assigning names found themselves face to face with the Gutkinds’ grandparents, they didn’t have to think about it for very long. My father told me he’s also still tormented by the idea that in 1944 his parents moved into an apartment in Bielefeld that was directly above the offices of the secret service for the SS. In Grünstraße. An apartment like that would only have been assigned to someone the regime could trust, and only a faithful party member would have accepted it. Visits to this building by dissidents would have been inconceivable. But then what visits from dissidents could have happened anyway? The Jewish friends had emigrated a long time ago; 172

Benjamin had already taken his own life.

I look at my father, sitting there, sunk into himself, in his Eames Lounge Chair designed in 1956, one specimen of which is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, another in my father’s living-room. I see a man who’s now old, indeed in his dotage, with all the humiliating frailty he tries to hide and which, it seems to me, has brought him closer to me. And two feelings are alive in me at once, the first being my distress over the fact that he is permanently right on the edge of the abyss, that for some time now his existence seems to be hanging by a thread. When he gets up and walks a few steps, it seems as if he might collapse at any moment, and I’m on the alert, ready to jump up and catch him. He refuses to use a cane. As for the device on wheels that you push in front of yourself, he hasn’t so much as uttered its name. And at the same time there’s also something else.

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