Karl-Otto Saur Junior is still wearing his hair long to hide the bull neck he inherited from his father, the sturdy Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the last head of the technical office at the Armaments Ministry of the Third Reich, whom Hitler, in his crazy will of 1945, named as Speer’s successor. Karl-Otto Saur comes through the Nuremberg trial with no conviction, because he agrees to testify against Krupp in the Krupp Affair. Karl-Otto Saur embarks on a better life in 1946, released from charges and guilt, even from the guilt of employing hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the production of weapons for exterminating the selfsame Hungarian Jews he “employed”, which was evident, later, at the Wehrmacht exhibition in Berlin and cities throughout Germany, at which point I see many events much clearer, and because of this monstrous clarity I sleep less and nauseatingly badly. This same Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the one who opens up an engineering office after the war and then starts a publishing firm, which thrives today under the guidance of his elder son Klaus-Gerhard Saur, has descendants whose hair is unusually shaggy, reaching down to their shoulders, as if with their long hair his descendants will cover the possibility of history repeating itself, but they won’t, with their long hair they’ll cover nothing but their necks, so reminiscent of the neck of their father. We should probably be able to learn something from the repetition of history, repetitio est mater studiorum, but despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners, and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist, it goes right on repeating and repeating itself, I will repeat myself until I faint, it says, I will repeat myself to spite you, it says, until finally you come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just grow our hair, hide and lie and feign innocence. Besides, for some of us, those of us who like Santa Claus lug sacks on our backs, sacks brimming with the sins of our ancestors, History has no need to return, History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History is in our blood and in our blood it flows quietly and destructively, while on the outside there’s nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades.
At this point I, Hans Traube, do some research, and I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna in 1919, that she was raised in a strict Catholic family, that she joined the S.S. in 1939, and from then on worked as a guard at the concentration camps in Poland. I learn that the Austrian Court for War Crimes sentences Hermine Braunsteiner to three years in prison in 1948 and that she is released nine months later by that same court. I learn that until 1957 Hermine Braunsteiner works as a saleswoman in picturesque tourist towns in Austria, then meets her future husband, an American called Russell Ryan, and goes with him first to Halifax, Canada, then to the United States. I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan lives in peace until 1968, when she is discovered by Simon Wiesenthal, and thanks to Wiesenthal is extradited to Germany and tried in Düsseldorf for the murder of “at least 1,181 camp inmates” and for being a co-perpetrator in the murder of another 705 persons. She is sentenced in 1981 when she is sixty-one and has many lovely memories, when she remembers her happy days, when she has grown children, American, who might cherish an affection for whips and high boots. Of course, these little histories that I research surface only after 1998, because until 1998, until Martha Traube informs me of the agonizing truth of my birth, I dig into nothing, into no past, just as many others never do, why should they, life goes on, look to the future, people tell themselves, tell them, tell us, everybody says so, at home, at school, on stage, parents say so, friends say so, and politicians, priests say so, and the Church. Then, when I least expected it, the Past jumped out at me in a flash, hop! like a carcass, like some rotten corpse, it draped itself around my neck, plunged its claws into my artery and it still isn’t letting go. I’d like to shake it off, this Past, but it won’t let me, it swings on me as I walk, it lies on me while I sleep, it looks me in the eyes and leers, See, I’m still with you. Like Hermine Braunsteiner’s boots, the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined.