No, grandpa was not a nice guy, quite the opposite. Photo: dpa
At the end of the Second World War, it was rumored: «How quickly time flies: a thousand years have passed already!» Sometimes time doesn’t pass at all: Along with an examination in art, which was not only practiced in anti-fascist societies like the GDR, but received state support there, literature dealing with Nazi characters is like tasteless gum stuck in one’s mouth.
For the post-50s Federal Republic, which was steeped in the «Landser» comic book culture, it was uncharted territory to have something beyond combat boot romance and collective memory gaps. Siegfried Lenz’s «The Deserter» was only published in 2016, as it touched a taboo by writing about the desertion of a Wehrmacht soldier. Desertion – even during the days of the master race – was taboo in 50s West Germany; it didn’t help that Lenz rewrote the novel multiple times and the sympathetic character in the novel is a proud bearer of the swastika and poses questions about whether it was too much pandering to the stuffy zeitgeist.
Today, Nazi grandfathers are somewhat out of fashion in local literature: Alongside colorful page-edge books, German book fairs nowadays consist mainly of rehashed Stasi fiction being recycled between various book covers, ensuring that readers do not realize they are being served the same mushy nonsense repeatedly. When Large Language Models come along and assimilate literature, the machines will starve. For what has been inside for a long time already are only traces of authorship here and there.
A prime example of empty pages: Judith Hermann’s new book. Whether the West Berliner stumbled upon the bomb crater herself or her publishing house requested her to dig around in her family, matters little. Nothing seems to matter in general anymore: For «I want to go back in time,» Hermann, who once made a splash in the German literary scene with short stories reminiscent of Raymond Carver, delved into her grandfather. He was a member of the Nazi party and the SS stationed in central Poland in Radom, where the German fascists set up an external camp of the Majdanek concentration camp and a ghetto for 30,000 people.
Grandpa, committed Hitler loyalist who helped expand and industrialize mass murder, was allowed to return home early after the war. The former US allies preferred to keep him and a good chunk of the staunch Nazi group behind, in case there was a need to face the Soviet Union shortly after the German Reich’s capitulation.
Hermann’s mother, during an interview about her father with the blood type tattoo, shifts focus: «This remark from my mother, turning my grandfather into a story, stuck with me. She said thing but meant story, found one story inappropriate here, which she wasn’t entirely wrong about. Was the inappropriate part embellishing a serious family matter with a few invented details? I could say yes, but I have to make a story, some kind of story at least, I have no choice other than to create this grandfather, because you don’t tell me anything about him. When I imagine him, I embrace him. Furthermore, this grandfather, unlike most other people in my family, has no literary repertoire. Neither melancholy nor neurotic ailments nor quirks; but if he was superstitious, he kept it to himself. He wasn’t born in Breslau, didn’t have a squint, didn’t possess anything that would still be precious to me today, there is something about him that is more than dark, I have to say it. My grandfather is not a literary character.»
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No reliance on the Jew-beater! Yet the ceaseless digging into the Nazi criminal and run-of-the-mill types should not be in vain: Instead of doing what would be most reasonable, not writing the book, the book ends up on the market. After all, «Daheim,» the latest Hermann novel, is already five years old.
Hermann stylistically omits quotation marks and question marks, but she tirelessly points out that Grandpa was one of those with the double rune: It’s always the «SS motorcycle,» in the photo that Hermann has of her ancestor. Hermann brings it up time and time again, often intertwining it with an apple – a «Polish» apple, because, don’t forget! She is in Poland – and she babbles on, reading, getting sick and paranoid, until she develops a panic about someone trying to poison her. The idea of well-poisoning rings a bell somewhere. There’s no need to accuse Hermann of engaging in anti-Semitic delusions here; because despite the title of «I want to go back in time,» there seems to be little to nothing motivating her.
At some point, Hermann’s exhaustive research in Radom ends, and she sets off, dressed in transitional times, to visit her sister in Italy for a decent book section about the time of change in «Europe startled by the world situation.» Like Capital Europe protects its assets, Judith Hermann’s sister also tries to keep all bad things in the world away from her two children for as long as possible. Logically, the fortunate ones should not get their hands on their aunt’s new book to read.
Judith Hermann: I want to go back in time. S. Fischer, 160 pages, hardcover, 23 €.
