Like us, I tell them, they look like us.
Helga Schneider I remember from Salzburg, then we met again at the promotion of her book in Bologna. Many of us write books, make films, hold photographic and video installations, paint the horrors we excavate from our own innards, monstrous worlds that remain mostly unintelligible and inaccessible. We are a lot unto ourselves, an ilk that has unhooked itself from Earth and now wanders through space. We are little Helnweins and Bellmers in search of stars and meteors, of straggling heavenly bodies on which we could land, just to feel the ground beneath our feet, even if that ground is very far away. We do not believe in any gods, especially not in supernatural gods. In fact, we have no faith, because it is faith we do not believe in. Least of all do we believe in the Catholic faith, it has sullied itself the most, it has defiled itself.
Helga Schneider comes to Salzburg at the age of seventeen. I am ten at the time and I am already hanging out at Isabella Fischer-Rosenzweig’s photography studio. Helga drops in during the afternoon, because she cleans Isabella’s darkroom and mops the floors for pocket money. Helga takes me out for an ice cream.
By the time Helga Schneider tells me her story in 2001 I am already in frantic search of myself, I seek the dwarf who has resided in me from the time I was born, who breathes with me as I take each breath, who has been crouching for fifty-seven years in the dark, in the dark of my skull, in the gloom of my gut, who touches my bones and squeezes my heart with his little hands. Then I arrive at Helga’s book launch in Bologna in 2001.
I was four in 1941, Helga said. It was a cold autumn evening. She said, I am leaving. She said, So, auf Wiedersehen, meine Kleine. She picked up her suitcase and left, Helga said. She didn’t kiss me. She didn’t say where she was going, why she was leaving, when she would be back. My brother was still an infant, and he was asleep. We were left alone, Helga said. Then we cried, we howled, because our father was off fighting, I don’t know where, all I know is that he was fighting for the Führer and the Fatherland. Then my father’s mother came from Poland, Grandma Emma, whom we loved, but father remarried soon and he sent Grandma Emma back to Poland, and mama’s name, Traudi, was never mentioned again in our household, Helga said. Traudi is dead, father said, dead, remember that, he said. His new wife didn’t like me. She loved my brother. I got on her nerves, Helga said, so she dumped me in a reformatory, and afterwards sent me to a school for problem children, although I don’t know why. I asked them, my father and my stepmother, Why am I a problem? What have I done? and they said, You’re untidy. You’re messy all over, especially in your head. I would see my mother again only thirty years later, in 1971, Helga said. But I did see Hitler. In December 1944 I was seven and still living at home and someone organized a visit to Hitler’s bunker for children of high-ranking parents. It was festive. We were supposed to shake hands with the Führer. Special children of tried-and-true Nazis went, not just anyone, Helga said. So we, my brother and I, went. The food was decorated beautifully. There was a lot set out to eat and plenty of colours. We could hardly wait for the handshaking to be over, Helga said, so we could eat. Then the Führer arrived, and he walked terribly slowly, dragged his feet, his footsteps slid as if snakes were slithering over the stone floor and hissing. Hitler walked hissing his feet, Helga said, all hunched over and grey, and while he was walking towards us, his head shook and his left arm hung there, swinging like a long, dead fish, Helga said, as if it were made of modelling clay, she said. He extended to me the other hand, the one that wasn’t dangling and looked me straight in the eyes and I froze. I saw his pupils dancing, Helga said, and I waited for some evil little man to come leaping out of his eyes and drag me away with him. Hitler’s handshake was soft, limp, Helga said, and the palm of his hand was moist. This is like holding a frog, I thought. And his cheeks sagged. Everything on him sagged. He had bags under his eyes. He was all flab. Only his moustache stood firm. Then he asked me, What’s your name, dear? and I told him, Helga. I said only Helga, but forgot to add “mein Führer”, which was a serious omission, Helga said, but my brother did not forget to say “mein Führer”, my brother said it at least two, possibly three times, “mein Führer”, “mein Führer”. Then the hostess came and gave us each a bar of marzipan. We didn’t get any of the lovely food, just a little marzipan bar each. Then the war ended, Helga said, but the hunger did not, and the great chaos became even greater. Father came back from the front. He decided in 1948 to take up residence once more in his homeland, Austria, which had reinstated its name and borders, which once again belonged only to itself. So we left Germany forever, Helga said. Things at home turned from bad to worse because of my stepmother, so one night, Helga said, I ran away and never went back. That’s when I got work at Isabella’s, she said, and I also washed glasses at a Salzburg beer hall where it wasn’t too bad. I could have lunch there, mostly sausages, and all the beer I wanted to drink. Then I finished secondary school, Helga said, and played little supporting roles in an experimental basement theatre, a Kellertheater, she said, and then I went to Vienna, and in Vienna I posed at the Kunstakademie for students and met Oskar Kokoschka. I rented two machines in Vienna: one for sewing, a hand-driven Singer (today that Singer is probably a museum piece), and one for writing, because I wanted to write about my life. I used the sewing machine to alter second-hand clothes I bought at the flea market for practically nothing, and on the typewriter I wrote a novel about my life that nobody was eager to publish. A publisher finally did offer me a small advance, however, and with it, Helga said, my friend and I went to Italy for a break, and in Italy I met a wonderful young man, Helga said, my future husband, and, to keep the story short, she said, we had a son. His name is Renzo. I worked as a foreign correspondent, I learned Italian, after many years everything was good, life in general, my schöne Zeiten have come, she said. When my son was born, my mother-in-law called him il piccolo Austriaco and those words stirred memories of my mother, and I thought to myself, Say, Helga, now you are a mother, but whatever happened to your mother? so I decided to look for her, maybe retrieve the mother I never had, my son would have another grandmother, that would be nice, ah, yes. I wrote to my father, Helga said, and asked if he knew anything about my mother, where she was, what she was up to, and he answered, I have no idea and I don’t care, it would be best to forget her, he said, Helga said. Nevertheless I went looking for my mother, though I knew nothing about her. The only thing I knew for sure, Helga said, was that both of them, my mother and my father, were born in Vienna, she said, so my reasoning was that if she’d survived the war, she must have gone back to her city. I asked a Viennese friend, Susanna, to check the register of births, marriages and deaths, to search the phone books for everybody with the surname of Schneider, then I wrote to five women and one of them wrote back to say, It’s me, that’s me, Helga said. Then I told my husband, I’ve found my mother and now I’m going to Vienna and taking Renzo with me, so he can meet his grandmother. In Vienna I found a vigorous, good-looking, sixty-year-old woman who took me straight to her bedroom, showing no interest in Renzo, she just gave him a glass of milk and some biscuits, she took me to her bedroom, Helga said, opened the wardrobe, pulled out some sort of uniform and said, Here, try this on, I want to see how it fits. I didn’t understand, Helga said, I thought, that must be a theatre costume, I was totally ignorant, because at that point I knew nothing about my mother’s life, Helga said. Then I asked her, Why? and she said, Just put it on, for years I’ve been wanting to see you in that uniform, and again I asked, Why, and she said, Because I wore this uniform at Birkenau. So, Helga Schneider said, after thirty years I had in front of me not a mother, but a monster. And this monster, this woman who gave birth to me, was standing there smiling and saying over and over, Es war so schön, so schön! I will not put on this uniform; it’s soaked with blood, I told her, Helga said, at which point Traudi Schneider pulled out a handful of jewellery she had looted from the victims of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and said, Here, take this. I grabbed Renzo and flew out into the street and realized that I have no mother, that I’ve never had a mother and that I will somehow have to get along without a mother, said Helga. Life went on. Renzo grew up, my husband died of cancer, and I dug around in the archives and dossiers and got to know the life story of this S.S. camp guard, this fanatical-unto-death Nazi, Traudi Schneider. Then in 1998 a letter in an ugly pink envelope arrived from Vienna. Your mother is in a nursing home, wrote a “close friend of Traudi Schneider”, Helga said. Your mother is nearly ninety, wrote the friend. At times she loses her grip and she may die soon, she wrote, why wouldn’t the two of you meet once more, she wrote, After all, she is your mother. I say to myself, she may be feeling remorse, Helga said, so I go to Vienna, I buy flowers and visit the nursing home. I find a thin old woman, weighing less than forty-five kilos, frail and neglected, and I feel sorry for her. I am your daughter, I tell her, Helga said, and Traudi Schneider shrieks, You are not my daughter, my daughter is dead, if you are my daughter, call me Mutti, children call their mothers Mutti, shouted Traudi Schneider, and then pinched me on the cheek, and I couldn’t say Mutti, I couldn’t utter that word Mutti, and then Traudi Schneider said, Just so you know, I was the strictest guard there, she said, I beat the inmates and they spat blood, she said. Then she straightened up, Helga said, and started describing the horrors of the medical experiments, and she said, Of course I was in favour of the Final Solution, why do you think I went there, for a holiday? And then she said, in those chambers, not everyone died at the same rate, she said, babies took only a few minutes, we’d pull out some who were stiff and bright blue, and sometimes there wasn’t room in the crematoria, so we shot people in the head. We would line the Jews up along the edge of a huge pit and shoot, and they’d fall into the pit, all of them, men and women and children in the arms of their mothers, and I shot, of course I shot, I was a crack shot, said Traudi Schneider, smiling, O, schöne Zeiten, she said, Helga said, and once, Traudi said, two Jewish whores got into a fight over a crust of stolen bread and we saw it, we saw everything, those whores, and we took them off to be shot, naked, naked, of course, and torn up, with open gashes all over, because before that they had been lying in the punishment cell for fourteen days in the dark, with rats as fat as cats feeding on them, nearly eating them alive. That’s why they were covered in wounds, and when we pulled them out, they were already mad from the horror and they could hardly wait to get a bullet in the head. I hated those damned Jews, ugh! A horrible race, a terrible race, believe me, revolting. And then I screamed, said Helga, I screamed, Enough, stop, I’ve read all your files, I already know all that, enough’s enough, and I left, I went back to Bologna. I had terrible nightmares and my heart pounded as if Traudi Schneider were jumping inside it with a pistol in her hand and howling, Let me out! I’ll shoot if you don’t let me out, I’ll kill you! And then the doctors gave me some pills and now my heart is as quiet as if it had died.