Born in 1900 in Karlsruhe, Hans Frank enters the German Army at the age of seventeen, and later joins the extreme right-wing units of the Freikorps, which extorts politicians and frightens and kills people. Hans Frank is Reichsminister without Portfolio, leader of the National Socialist Association of Barristers, a member of the Reichstag, and, from 1941 to 1942, President of the International Chamber of Jurists. While he is serving as the Governor-General of Poland, his administration introduces death camps as a part of the design of the Final Solution. Millions of Jews, Roma and other “undesirables” disappear. Under Hans Frank’s administration, the S.S. and Gestapo commit terrible crimes against Polish civilians, treating them as members of the resistance movement; they rape, torch towns, mutilate women and children and organize mass deportations to concentration camps.
Hans Frank, condemned for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is hanged in Nuremberg on 16 October, 1946. While in detention he returns to the Catholic faith, and sees his execution as a partial expiation for his sins, although he does not confess to all charges in the indictment. Hans Frank leaves the courtroom in the company of an Irish Franciscan, Father Sixtus O’Connor, and two weeks later enters the place of his execution with a smile.
Oh happy day
Oh happy day
When Jesus washed
When Jesus washed
Jesus washed
Washed my sins away
Oh happy day
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la
Oh happy day
In 1946 Hans Frank is survived by five children and his wife Brigitte. Today, all except Niklas are dead. Niklas Frank was seven years old in 1946. His life until 1945 in the Wawel Royal Castle overlooking Cracow seems like a dream. While the “King of Poland” works to stamp out the Polish elite, claiming that Poland must become a land of workers and peasants, stripped of an educated class, while throughout the General Government he shuts down theatres, schools and universities, while he bans radio broadcasts, destroys libraries, proscribes the printing of books, and works towards eradicating the Polish language, while he sets the rationing of foodstuffs at less than starvation levels, the Frank family want for nothing, from provisions to servants to stolen artworks. Hans Frank hosts high-ranking S.S. officials, including Himmler, and while nibbling at caviar and sipping champagne he tickles the ivories, playing for them — oh, happy days — Chopin. Writing and talking about that time, Niklas mentions an outing with his nanny Hilde Albert to a place where a jolly man was persuading very thin people to mount a donkey, which bucked, throwing the thin people to the ground, and the very thin people struggled to get to their feet. I watched the performance and laughed as if I were at a circus, Niklas said. But I was at a sub-camp of some nearby concentration camp, he said. Niklas becomes a disreputable teenager and an avid hitchhiker, he roams throughout the western part of his divided country of Germany and takes its pulse. As soon as I’d say that I was the son of a famous Nazi executed at Nuremberg, the driver would take me to lunch. During my many years of hitchhiking only one driver stopped, opened the door and said, Out! says Niklas. At the Berlin Archive Niklas Frank studies his father’s dossier. He makes the rounds of archives, pores over Hans Frank’s diary entries, visits doddering Nazis, who at one time had been in touch with Hans Frank and his close associates, servants who worked for the Frank family in Berlin and Cracow, he goes to America to talk with Father Sixtus O’Connor, from whom Hans Frank sought the mercy of Jesus before his execution. Did the noose over the black hood squeeze his neck enough? perhaps Niklas Frank asks himself. What was the snap like when they kicked away the chair? Was it loud enough? he wonders. I imagine myself biting into Hans Frank’s heart while he screams violently, I thrust my teeth deeper and his howls grow louder and the blood spurts horribly and then his heart stops, empty and dead, he says.
For a long time after the war, Germany was awash in collective denial of individual responsibility for the war, Niklas Frank says. My father was a coward and a scoundrel and he is responsible for the deaths of two million people. What Niklas Frank discovers in the course of his many years of research is transformed in 1987 into lifelong, obsessive loathing, a mission laced with fury because of the deafness which presses upon the earth, turning it into a Beckettian landscape in which, at the end of the game, the players are left with a few pieces and a limited number of moves. In the book entitled Der Vater — not Mein Va ter, but Der Va ter—Niklas Frank embarks on a dangerous duel, the outcome of which even Freud cannot decipher, and for which Greek tragedy has no response.
I was completely absorbed by my own investigation, obsessed by searching for information to confirm whether I am or am not what I believe myself to be, yet may not be at all, when Niklas’ new book Meine deutsche Mutter came out in 2005. Niklas Frank is unrelenting. Niklas Frank is not giving up, so I won’t either. The “Queen of Poland”, Maria Brigitte Frank, unscrupulous, greedy, calculating and promiscuous, and dead for a very long time, passes muster no better than her “king”. Niklas Frank continues to howl in a cosmos of deaf and dead silence. A small consolation which I keep, which I hold onto, so that it won’t drop like overripe fruit onto muddy earth and rot.
12
I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences. I have spent eight years probing these lives, these pasts, at the same time drilling into myself. I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing I have come to. I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic. Now I am standing at the door of the hotel room in Gorizia, watching the terrible mess I leave behind. A pile of dead witnesses with eyes that gleam like cold marbles, empty and weightless like dry, mummified heads impaled on two rows of stakes along the path that leads to my lair. On the bed, the chairs and shelves, on the floor are strewn letters and documents, books, testimonies, photographs, heaps of photographs, some of them mine, some of them taken by others, tepid loves, grey passions. All this lies before me in a deep swoon like tired, aged time that has descended from the sky to rest or pollute the atmosphere, either way. But it will suffice to blow a puff of air, open the window, and all these pasts will leap, fly, sucked up by a mighty whirlwind, a tromba marina, a tromba d’aria filled with the cacophonic voices of the crazed dead, and if I don’t elude it — this vortex may sweep me up as well. The mess I have created can no longer be put back into order, nor can it be hung on a sturdy Kleiderbügel, a contemporary Aufhänger, to air.