TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

and not just alibi Jews, but genuine, close friends, Benjamin, Buber, Scholem, Rosenzweig, Gutkind, and who moreover felt the deep bond that connected him, as a Christian, to Judaism, how the son of such a man could have become an “ardent” Nazi. He can’t understand it. That rupture, that ominous shadow, weighs on his chest. He tells me he knew his parents’ Jewish friends very well when he was a young man, and that after the war he tried to reconnect with some of those who had survived the twelve-year Reich by emigrating. Understandably, most of them curtly turned him down, and no further exchange came about. When my father traveled to America for the first time in the early 1950s, he went to see Erich and Lucie Gutkind. He shows me their reply to a letter from his father, in which they protested against having been named as guarantors in a visa application to enter America, without having been asked beforehand. Yet their letter ends with these 168

words: And if your son wishes to bring us a spark of the old fire, that will give us great pleasure. Once he was there, he tells me, the two of them did indeed welcome him warmly, two nice old people sitting opposite him in their tiny New York apartment. And here too everyone kept silent. Over a half century later, my father feels ashamed that he sat in this couple’s home and presumably accepted their hospitality while offering no explanation and saying nothing about the fundamental issue, and I love and honor him for that shame. I tell myself it’s the most precious thing we have. The burning of that shame lasts decades, gets passed on; not held up high like an Olympic flame, but quietly entrusted to the next person. I’m grateful to my father for that. Perhaps the Gutkinds don’t know that one of their old friend’s sons was a Nazi. They are very friendly to my father. They don’t ask any questions, not even of this young 169