TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

German.

with unimaginable and absolute force on his shoulders, nor on those of his young son. For as he writes later, he took his son out of school in order to teach him himself, because the teacher inspired no confidence in him. This was, he says, a terrible time for father and child. My patience snapped more often than was right. But the bad thing was that every time it snapped, and with every reprimand, and in general in the whole atmosphere of the lesson, the oppressive power of an authority bore down on the child, an authority which carried far more weight than that of a normal teacher and wasn’t merely the authority of a father, a very serious father, but that of a priest who carried the burdens of all of humanity and divinity and himself felt unhappy carrying them. He rebels against the God who encumbered him with that burden without giving him shoulders that could have carried it. He rails against the people around him, their mindlessness, 151

Some parts of the autobiographical sketch are typed and therefore easy to read. In those sections, Sanderling writes about his life as a pastor in the Poznań region, about his daily tasks which covered my soul in detritus and which consisted, for example, of disputes over school finances, alleged cases of perjury, and having coffee with the schoolmaster’s wife. Detritus seems to mean more or less the same thing as the quotidian , if by that one understands trifling matters, small deceptions (including of oneself), pettiness that swallows people whole. Had he been an idealist of the same kind as his parents, believing in attainable, quotidian ideals, then perhaps he would have blossomed in his priest’s role, or at least have found it satisfying. He would, to the best of his ability, have accomplished what could be accomplished, and helped others to do the same. The unattainable would not have weighed 150