I read about his selfless dedication to Hitler’s party I could hear Shakespeare declare in Julius Caesar: ‘The evil that men do lives after them’. Often when faced with critical challenges I’m inundated by literary quotations. It’s the déformation professionelle of my occupation . I remain a man of letters in most aspects of my life.
There are others who know how to handle revelations of Nazi members in one’s family rather more soberly. I can’t. I have since learned almost all German friends and colleagues of my generation have parents or close relatives who were tainted by committed Nazis. In the light of such discovery the notion of collective guilt assumes a rather more convincing validity. More importantly, it drives home the reality of evil. I live with the stark truth that I come from a people harbouring vice, sin and villainy. It was four decades after my grandfather’s passionate commitment to Hitler’s party that Peacetime Holger’s son of the third generation committed murder, killing a friend’s mother.
Ironically, harbouring a criminal past in the family is not unusual among Australians either. In fact, in some circles such heritage is now considered chic. It may be true that many of the felons sent to the British convict colony to serve penal servitude were little more than petty thieves. But there were also others who had committed more serious offences. In any case, my homeland of choice, the proud democracy of contemporary Australia, undeniably shares its origin with criminals. It has now become apparent that in the late 1940s and during the 1950s our Department of Immigration frequently failed to identify Nazis escaping justice for their wartime atrocities in Europe. Some of them are only now discovered, fifty years later. The organised massacre of Aborigines constitutes an attempted genocide of equal brutality to the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews and other persecuted groups during 1939 to 1945, albeit on a smaller scale. I’m not trying to draw parallels (there is no relativity of evil), except admit to the bitter irony that I did not escape my place of birth for a place of innocence. It seems evil has played its part in the creation of most nations on earth. The brutality and inhumanity of man appears to have no boundaries.
In Germany the bureaucracy of evil extended beyond the end of Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’. When after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 the operations of its secret service (Stasi) were exposed they revealed essentially the same structure as its forerunner, the Gestapo. Ranking and responsibilities of the Communist state security service were not unlike those of Nazi office holders ( Zellenleiter, Blockleiter, Ortsgruppenleiter, P.G.s, Kreisleiter, Gauleiter, Reichsleiter and der Führer). Some former Stasi officers hold important positions in Germany today. Perhaps I should add that many prominent East German writers were also implicated in the totalitarian control of the people.
To protect the Aryan purity of the German race, under official Nazi rules children born with major irreversible mental or physical defects were to be euthanased. My mother’s ‘insane’ denials of her younger son’s deafness was designed to save his life. I felt deeply ashamed when I discovered the real reason for her mad behaviour during the war. Her psychogenic conditioning had serious consequences: during the 1950s a number of nervous breakdowns forced her to spend time in a mental home.
It had never occurred to me that a mother would have to protect her child against her own father. ‘Dysfunctional’ was not a term invented yet by trendy sociologists, so let me say it loud and clear: I was born into a time and place, a country and a people where evil and crime were rife. My family proved no exception. Its strong Danish connection did not protect it from the murderous regime of the Nazis. My aunt Gertrud, a concert pianist and strong supporter of the Danes, was sent to a concentration camp for performing Mendelssohn in public. Home provided little shelter for adults or children. When I was old enough to attend St Mary’s on Sundays, nothing made as much sense to me at that time as being told about original sin.
The first few years of my life remain shrouded in a haze of mist. While Mother was crazy with fear over her deaf son, my wet nurse Marie continued to look after me. When she left us I became a motherless child.
Like me, my deaf brother Claus had a difficult childhood, albeit for different reasons. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t hear; it seems the tension surrounding his very existence had affected his health in other ways. His main problem was that he could not keep his food down. My grandfather called him a ‘ruminant’. When I asked him what that meant he explained Claus was a ‘rehasher’. I loved my brother from the very beginning, sensing the precariousness of his life. He was a beautiful child, clearly the most attractive of us all. Dark-haired and brown-eyed, he looked like a gypsy. Despite his handicap he later grew into an athletic build and excelled in sport. We’ve remained good friends to this day. He’s retired now and lives with his deaf wife Sigrid in a neat terrace outside Hamburg. They have two adult children: Stefan, an IT specialist, has no hearing problem, and his younger sister Cathrin, a psychologist, wears a hearing aid. Both have ‘healthy children’ of their own.
I spent much of my childhood with Claus, mainly around the harbour. We spoke a sign language that is now no longer in use, but whatever its shortcomings it was articulate enough to express our love for each other. I remember my brother placing his hands on the piano to feel the vibrations when I played. In a way, that was how we communicated in sign language. It also became a kind of secret code in which we could say things that others, including my mother, wouldn’t understand. My older brother Holger and my younger sister Astrid also used sign language with Claus, but their range and knowledge of the code was limited. In family mythology my mother had an alibi to prove her son could not be deaf: the infant reacted to air-raid sirens.
Saturdays or Sundays, Claus and I would watch a game of football. As teenagers we both joined the local club Flensburg 08. I was thrilled to see how gifted my brother was as a player. School separated us. He had to attend a boarding school for the deaf in Schleswig and came home over weekends. I’ve only been to Schleswig twice in my life: once to visit my brother Holger in hospital — he’d injured himself as a soldier of the new ‘bourgeois’ German army, as it called itself — and on another more upsetting occasion to attend a Christmas celebration at Claus’ school. I have never been so distressed as when I listened to a group of deaf boys reciting Silent Night in the auditorium. Was I the only one in the audience (my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t come) mindful of the fact that not only nights were silent for them? The sounds they made were like an open audio-wound, a croaky and sobbing cry. I felt heartbroken over the weeping appeal of those boys who were celebrating just like us. Their performance has remained the most memorable Christmas of my life. For it was a festivity for them, as it was for those of us who had come to join them.
The wonderful thing about my brother Claus is that to the best of my knowledge he did not have to suffer the ignominies of so many other challenged men and women in society. After some deliberation over which profession to choose — my brother had strong artistic leanings, especially as a draughtsman — he joined a large publishing company as a graphic artist. One of his tasks was to retouch the outlines of mainly female celebrities on popular magazine covers. He enlarged or reduced the size of breasts, albeit only on commercial graphic and photographic reproductions. I understand he found it an inspiring and well-paid job. Socially too Claus had few problems. He may not have been able to hear the music, but that didn’t prevent him from being an excellent dancer. I believe in the end his partners didn’t even have to tell him what kind of dance it was. It took him a couple of seconds to recognise the movements of others and follow their lead. Now in his late sixties, he’s still a very handsome sporty man who spends a lot of his time travelling.
In 1992 we spent Christmas and New Year with Claus and his wife in Brisbane and Sydney. They both took an immediate liking to Australia. Christmas Eve festivities at Brisbane’s Southbank included a long procession of parents and children accompanied by live camels, sheep and other animals. Our visitors were delighted. Again and again they commented on the friendliness of the Australian people. It was a Christmas very unlike the one so long ago in the Schleswig School for the Deaf; my deaf relatives were fully integrated and made welcome in a foreign land. We watched as they met deaf Australians.
