TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

almost ever is in this village not far from the sea, where the summer stretches out in front of me like a big white page. I think of a passage in a book by Otto Dov Kulka, look for the book, find the page: The colour is blue: clear blue skies of summer. Silver coloured toy aeroplanes carrying greetings from distant worlds pass slowly across the azure skies, while around them explode what look like white bubbles. The aeroplanes pass by and the sky remains blue and lovely, and far off, far off on that clear summer day, distant blue hills as though not of this world make their presence felt. That was the Auschwitz of that eleven-year-old boy. 1 The quiet of early summer consists of the sound of the past. The longer I sit and listen, the better I can hear that sound; behind the high birdcalls I hear the dark voices, no less incomprehensible, of the dead.

It begins with the shadow you can’t get rid of. You’d have to be able to sell it, like Schlemihl does in that story by Chamisso. But it’s not easy to find a taker for the shadow I’m talking about. Not even the devil wants it. I never knew my father’s father, even though he didn’t die until I was already an adolescent. Cases like mine – a child born out of wedlock – did of course occur, but one paid no attention to them. That he was a dear Grandpa is something I found out from my legitimate siblings. It begins with the memory. With the fact that in old age, childhood and youth come to life again, while the many decades in between fade out. A known phenomenon. Thus my father talks more and more often about the past. He was seventeen years old when the war came to an end. Shortly before, like thousands of others, he had been mobilized as an anti aircraft auxiliary. The Americans who took 161

1 Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of Death , trans. Ralph Mandel (Harvard UP, 2013), p. 75. 160