Listen, my colleague says to me, Tipura said, this Stille Hilfe is a fairly repulsive organization and it is run by Frau Gudrun Burwitz, who is actually Frau Gudrun Himmler, says my colleague, Tipura told me. So off we went to see what’s what. Time has stopped for Gudrun, but on the other hand it hasn’t. Gudrun’s name is no longer Himmler but Burwitz, yet she behaves like a Himmler and dreams Himmlerian dreams, said Tipura. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s daughter is neither a Himmler nor a Burwitz, women have it easier, they can always take their husband’s name, right? said Tipura, though men can change their names too, when necessary, why not? There, in Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s house, we met her daughter, who was very upset by our visit, Tipura said. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s adult daughter was completely beside herself when we came. She leapt at us, don’t you dare air my mother’s name in public, she threatened, Tipura said. None of my friends know who my mother is, cried Gudrun Himmler’s daughter, even my husband doesn’t know, she said, Tipura told me, which was remarkable information for me, Tipura said. What about Himmler’s children born out of wedlock, the two Himmler had with his secretary Hedwig Potthast, who he moved into a newly furnished villa near the rest of Hitler’s cronies so that everything would be as she wished? What about Helge Potthast Himmler, born in 1942, and his sister Nanette Dorothea Potthast Himmler, born two years later? wondered Walter Tipura. If they are alive, what do they tell their children and grandchildren? Do any former Nazis and their descendants suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Do they ever manifest symptoms of P.T.S.D., little hints suggesting that their soul is attacking their body and their body is burrowing through their soul? Katrin Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich’s nephew, a 37-year-old scientist, married to a Jew (I no longer see this as coincidence), a Jew whose relatives disappeared in the Polish death camps, is beside herself: I dread the day I will have to tell my son that one half of his family exterminated the other half, says Katrin Himmler, Tipura told me. She dreads it so much that she started writing books about it, about Heinrich Himmler’s brothers, about their children, who are her uncles, Tipura said.
I know that coincidences are rare, perhaps there are no coincidences, there is only our stupid and superstitious need to duck behind our own carnival life which prances by us. Our coincidences, which are actually our pasts, we bury under our family trees on which grow berries full of sweet poison. It is no coincidence that my friend Wolfgang, who works at the Austrian Documentation Centre for the Reparation of Victims of the War, pursuing the dirty past of the by now already senile murderers condemned to a quiet demise, and searching for stolen artworks in the well-concealed safes of their descendants, remembers how, after the war, the cronies and fellow fighters of his Nazi grandfather went to the Berlin Opera in a long line of black limousines, seeking respite from their memories. I know it is no coincidence that Wolfgang’s mother, the daughter of a militant Nazi who after the war sat serenely in his loge at the Berlin Opera in blessed oblivion, focusing totally on the music that nourished his soul, that Wolfgang’s mother married the son of a rebellious anarchist who met his end (by secret order of Stalin) in a Siberian backwater. It is no coincidence that Serge Klarsfeld, born in 1935 in Bucharest, whose father dies in Auschwitz, falls in love with Beate Künzel, born in 1939 in Berlin, the daughter of a member of the Wehrmacht, who learns more about the horrors of the Holocaust when she is in Paris in 1963. It is no coincidence that Beate and Serge become Nazi hunters and manage to drag the “butcher of Lyons”, Klaus Barbie, from Bolivia to his Paris trial. It is no coincidence that there are so few random coincidences and there is so much repressed ressentiment. People wash themselves any way they know, heal themselves as best they can, find straits through which they navigate quietly, on tiptoe, to avoid, at all costs, meeting themselves. Who can keep track of all these branchings? No-one, because all those branches proliferate and proliferate, because families grow and spread, because families have a name (and behind every name there is a story). Unless those family branches interlace once and for all, just as that worm coiled itself around the eye of that frantic, unfortunate woman from a civilized European country, and unless, thus entangled, those branches penetrate into the centre of the pustule which becomes the axis of their silenced past, unless they reach the roots of their trees, their axis steeped in putrid pus, there can be no salvation for those who remain and those to come. The story lasts as long as the past, forever. Ah yes, that hurts, I know.
My father, said Tipura, was born in 1929, and he grew up with a foster family, because his mother entrusted him to a foster family because his mother was only fifteen when she agreed, on 31 December, 1928, to go to the flat of a waiter who worked at a café at the hippodrome, a great aficionado of horse races, a fanatic gambler, who would, nine months later, become the biological father of my father, Norbert, said Tipura. As an adult, my father, too, became a fanatic gambler, a fixture at the horse races, I don’t know how that happened, said Tipura, but now I, too, love horses and horse racing. My father, said Tipura, became head of the Munich branch of the Hitlerjugend, at home he had a large world map hanging on the kitchen wall and he pinned flags on it whenever the German troops, the Wehrmacht troops, captured a town, a region, a country, which then lost its name and became Germany. When the war ended, my father saw 1945 as a year of crushing defeat, rather than a year of victory. I was young, my father would later say, Tipura told me, and he often repeated, Lord, what would I have become had Nazism prevailed. But he did not dig deep, he never dug into the family shit, he only poked at it, smeared it around, said Tipura. His portraits of the children of Nazis are almost nostalgic flashes of the past, tender portrayals of helpless victims. And so, when I found my father’s notebook, I set out on my own exculpatory journey, I looked for the same “children”, for the ones my father spoke to forty years earlier, and I found elderly people clutching well-worn bundles of family history, bundles they baulk at unpacking, and when they do, everything inside is greyness.