the more serious or extreme a patient’s condition the greater their excitement. They’ve stumbled on a ‘case’ disturbing and astounding enough to warrant further research. A full-length study or article in The Psychiatric Journal of America beckons, with promises of prestige, promotion and prominence. Excitement is written all over their faces. I must not disappoint them.
Dr Springer tries hard to conceal her exhilaration. She resumes control of the interview. ‘Let me get this straight, Professor. Are you saying you have more than one father?’ I’m pleased to provide her with the answer she’s hoping for.
Calmly I reply: ‘Not counting what you might call father figures, I have three.’ It seems I’ve dropped a bombshell.
Is it a coincidence or could there be a curious kind of plot taking place? I don’t want to become paranoid, but now that I’ve been ordered to give an account of my life — allegedly to restore me to full mental health (as though knowing or remembering one’s life can really guarantee emotional and spiritual wellbeing) — I keep getting letters from people I haven’t seen for half a century: schoolfriends, former lovers and members of what I like to call the Danish side of my family.
A male cousin who sees himself as a kind of official family historian writes to me about Otto Bluschke, my fascist maternal grandfather, born in the Silesian forest near the Polish border, far away from the northern German-Danish town of Flensburg. Despite the fact that he embarrassed at least one part of the family by becoming a passionate Nazi, my grandfather in fact looked, in the words of my cousin, ‘rather Jewish and employed gestures attributed to Jews’. I must confess I have no idea what these ‘gestures’ might be, but my cousin informed me that whenever someone pointed this out to Ortsgruppenführer Bluschke, he replied: ‘My family comes from Silesia, where my father was a senior forester. Have you ever come across a Jewish forester?’
Perhaps it was a need for over-compensation that made him run around town dressed in the brownshirt uniform of the Sturm Abteilung. My grandfather, who was bald and not very tall, looked more like Benito Mussolini. Like his beloved Führer he had a German shepherd dog. Otto Bluschke’s purebred hound was called Janko, Hitler’s was known as Blondie. Everybody in the family knew a black cloud hung over the relationship between Grandfather Bluschke and my father Claus Jürgensen, but no one was prepared to reveal the reason. At one stage my grandmother intimated it had something to do with money lost during the currency reform, but that turned out to be untrue. I assumed it had something to do with my grandfather’s passionate belief in Nazism and Hitler, but only discovered the real reason from my father in Caracas, many years later. I’ll come back to it. The strange and unsettling thing is that when my grandfather was subjected to post-war denazification my anti-fascist father wrote him a reference of ‘good conduct’. Did he provide that ideological reference in lieu of some other debt? The problem of Nazism is that its web is almost impossible to penetrate.
My grandfather’s background seems to fit the peculiar tribal culture of many Germans. Clearly the forest still holds an almost sacred position in contemporary German consciousness. Various Teutonic tribes derived their identity from large areas of trees and undergrowth. Caesar’s attempt to invade Germania failed largely because its natives were able to fight the Roman troops in the forests. One of their weapons was pouring hot pitch and sulphur onto the invaders from ancient oaks and other trees. Ironically, having been defeated by such primitive but effective weapons, the Romans stayed west of the Rhine and were unable to civilise the barbaric tribes in their dark forests. This limited influence is reflected in the German language. Just one example: while the old tribes lived in houses without protective windows, near the Rhine where the Romans had a military and cultural presence, fenestrae were introduced — or Fenster, the word modern German has retained. Forests had saved the ancient Germanic tribes, but they were also responsible for Germany’s long lasting inferior cultural development. The historic battle of Teutoburg Forest ( Teutoburger Wald) in 9 AD in which Arminius annihilated the Romans meant the defeat of Roman civilisation on German soil. Once again it was a forest that asserted and defined German identity. In honour of this tradition South Germans to this day have a penchant for wearing variations of the green forester’s Tracht; Bavarian lederhosen also relate back to the dark forest days of tribal life and warfare. It seems my Silesian grandfather’s obsession with uniform and our town’s idyllic forest Marienhölzung expressed a deep-seated, almost instinctive sense of origin and belonging. Every Sunday Otto Bluschke went for a ritualistic walk through the woods of his adopted hometown. Only a few decades ago Germany’s notoriously backward culture of popular music featured a bestseller called ‘A Walk through the Black Forest’. I’m not sure Germans have yet fully emerged from their primeval dark forests.
These revealing snippets of my family’s history may be profoundly disturbing, but I can’t help wondering how and why I’m being provided with them right now while in custody at a psychiatric clinic. How has Humanitas managed to get in touch with my cousin?
My memory of Otto Bluschke has mellowed into that of a pathetic little man who was seeking recognition by joining the brutal forces of fascism. Like most Germans at the time, he was no leader, rather an inept cowardly follower. When told to write about my life I must admit I began looking for parallels, good and bad. It seems noteworthy that while I crossed continents to travel as far away from the town of my birth as possible, my maternal grandfather moved from the southernmost eastern part of Germany to its northernmost city. Does that mean we have something in common? Unlike me, however, he stayed within the ‘Fatherland’. As the third son of a forester, he would have been paid off, rather than succeed to an estate. Trying to build a career in business, he first went to Breslau (Wroclaw), then to Berlin and Hamburg. It was in the Northern Hanseatic city that he met and married my grandmother, an attractive young woman orphaned by the city’s devastating cholera epidemic. When Otto was invited to run a branch office of a large tobacco company in Flensburg, my grandparents moved to the German-Danish border town. Both my mother and my uncle were born there. Today Otto and Lina Bluschke share a peaceful grave in the New Cemetery of Flensburg.
Perhaps the development of my mother’s father, first into a Prussian nationalist then a ‘master race’ German Nazi, can be ‘explained’ historically. His own ambivalent origin — there was more than a hint of Polish and Gypsy influence in the Bluschke Silesian family background — may have led him to overcompensate for his perceived lack of ‘pure Aryan’ appearance, especially in the big cities and cultural centres of Breslau, Berlin and Hamburg. It appears Otto Bluschke had an overwhelming need to belong. Travelling in search of a profession from the far south-eastern forests to Germany’s northernmost fishing port, ironically he moved from one controversial border area to another. It could be said that over generations my family quite literally led a borderline existence. Could it be that the widely discredited literary historian, anthropologist and folklorist Josef Nadler was right in at least one of his controversial nationalist and racist assertions, namely that human culture and political consciousness are shaped by native environment? If many of his writings had not prepared the ground for Germany’s emerging National Socialism, such an observation would perhaps have been accepted as almost self-evident.
Otto Bluschke’s commitment to an Aryan Nazi Germany cost his children dearly. During the Second World War his son Bodo was captured in Russia and spent many years in a Siberian prison camp. On his return home I remember that as a child I simply could not understand how the skeleton in front of me could still be walking. The term ‘dead man walking’ wasn’t yet coined. My mother, Bodo’s sister, had kissed her husband goodbye: the great catch and dashingly good-looking young man she’d married joined the International Red Cross to rescue the wounded and dying on the battlefield. He disappeared for over a decade, during which my mother ran Marius Jürgensen’s old chemist shop The Imperial Eagle in the heart of town while raising her three boys. I have already mentioned that she was awarded the title of ‘German Mother’ and received a New
