8. Sibylle, The Orderly One
I ONCE READ somewhere that people have to be hugged three times a day to survive, six times to keep their feet on the ground, and twelve to grow. I think the people of my generation and that of my parents just got the minimum needed for bare survival, if that much. That's probably how things went on for hundreds of years, from generation to generation. My parents followed the educational methods of my grandparents, and who knows what I would have done had I had children. My father once told me that as a child he never was given the things he wanted, not even the most insignificant things. For example, he wanted to have raspberry soda with his meals, but as a matter of educational principle he never got it.
My three brothers and I also were subjected to a rigid fascist regimen at home. Hidings were routine. If I tore my dress-a beating; if I got poor marks-a beating; if I talked back to my parents-a beating. And if, as sometimes happened, minor transgressions piled up, then there too was a beating. The ritual never varied: we had to fetch the stick ourselves, lie down across a chair, and then it began. There was no point in trying to resist. And no back talk either.
Trying to talk our way out of it or persuade our parents not to hit us only made things worse. Mother was in charge of my punishment, and Father took care of my brothers. The only way out was not to get caught. That was an accepted, even approved method of avoiding the inevitable. As Father used to tell us: "Don't get caught."
Added to this there was the pecking order among the four of us, and so my older brothers also got into the act. I got it from both sides, from my brothers and from my parents.
I'll tell you why I call it fascist. Whatever self-respect we might have had was beaten out of us. They broke our will. Self-confidence and joy of life were trampled on in our family. I still remember when I was little how sore I was at Little Hans, the boy in the nursery rhyme who cried when he got lost in the woods. Why, I asked myself, was he so eager to go back home? Just because his mother was going to be sad? I thought he ought to be glad finally to have gotten away.
All I ever wanted was to escape, preferably to a place where I didn't know anybody and where nobody knew how bad I was. I thought I must be bad, else why would my parents beat me? Recently I talked to my aging mother about these endless beatings. Unfortunately she hasn't changed. She still doesn't feel that she'd ever been unfair. Her only comment was: "If you'd behaved nobody would have punished you." And she added: "Anyway, you liked it." I don't understand what she meant by that.
It took me a long time to break away from my parents. Only in the last two years have I begun to feel that I'm living free and independently. Before that things were very different.
When I was little I didn't react to the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son the way other children did. I believed that parents had the right to kill their children. My father had also been the unloved child in his family. He had a brother two years older who died at the age of ten; he had been his father's favorite. Grandfather was in the steel industry. He was a heavy drinker and died young. My father also was in the steel business, and during the war he was stationed in Upper Silesia. He was exempted from military duty.
My mother comes from Magdeburg. [i] Her father had worked himself up and owned an oil-processing plant. Her brother was killed in the last days of the war.
Neither my mother's nor my father's family saw much intergenerational harmony. There was a great deal of fighting between parents and grandparents. Consequently I grew up without grandparents.
My mother was born in 1919. She met my father when she was quite young, about nineteen or twenty. At the time he already had an important job in the arms industry. He was a handsome man, tall, slender, and blond. They married soon after they met, and my brothers were born in rapid succession, 1942, 1943, and 1944. I was born in 1946, their only postwar child.
My father joined the SS right in the beginning, while still a student. He told me that he did things like ushering at meetings, and once he even was a bodyguard when Hitler came to Bad Godesberg. He said he wanted to make himself useful.
I wasn't actually all that interested in what he did during the war. I really believe that he didn't do anything. At least he wasn't connected with any concentration or extermination camp. What concerns me is what came afterward, the persistence of his frame of mind after the war. And his eternal sermonizing, that's what was so awful. He didn't let up until the very end, until maybe the last six months of his life when he got so sick.
Just a few days ago, in thinking about our conversation, I tried to pinpoint when I first learned about the crimes of the Nazi era in some detail. I think I must have been around twelve or thirteen. We had a priest who was preparing us for our first communion and he talked to us about it. At school we weren't told a word about anything. When I was thirteen I spent my summer vacation at a boarding school in Switzerland to learn French. Many of the girls there were American Jews. I remember how surprised I was by how friendly they were. I'd thought they'd ignore me.
At any rate, by then I already knew what the score was. But I didn't find out anything more specific until I was seventeen, when I visited relatives in East Germany, and for some reason or other we went to Sachsenhausen. The East German guides always tried to tell us visitors from the West that we were the ones who were responsible. We from the West were the evil ones; they hadn't done a thing. They were the better Germans.
They took us into the cellars and showed us the pictures of the Americans liberating the camp. Afterward I sat down by myself on the lawn outside and couldn't understand how it was possible for the sun still to be shining.
When I got back home I told my mother what I'd seen. Her only comment was: "The things you subject yourself to."
And it was just about then that my parents began with those speeches of theirs, or maybe my memory keeps harping on that time. The more I spoke about the past at school or at home, the more aggressive my father became: "That damn school, befouling their own nest. Things weren't that bad. And that business about the 6 million Jews, that's also exaggerated."
My parents had read Eugen Kogon's The SS State. In it he mentions a concentration camp doctor. It seems that my parents knew him, and according to them the day Kogon places him in the camp he wasn't there at all but at our house delivering one of my brothers. That was all the proof they needed to know that everybody, not only Kogon, was lying.
They always tried to minimize everything. The things that had happened were just accidents. No guilt feelings for them. The crowning touch was their cynicism in naming me Sibylle, having my first name begin with the letter "S," so that my initials now are SS. One of my father's little jokes, ice cold and unfeeling, making me go through life with that burden. I didn't think it very amusing. And when I said so, all they could say was that I had no sense of humor.
Our disagreements grew more and more heated the older I got. Again and again the question arose about how much they'd known and why they hadn't done anything about it.
And sometimes, very rarely, through hints, it became clear that they'd known everything. Once my father told me about waiting at the station at Eisleben [ii] when a train with people in cattle cars pulled in. "Let us out of here," they cried. "They're taking us to Theresienstadt." At that point he knew what fate had in store for these people. But when I asked him what he did about it, he got red in the face and shouted: "What did you expect me to do? With three young children. It's easy for you to talk."
After that I just gave up. I thought to myself, It's no use. Every argument we had about the Third Reich always went hand in hand with other prejudices which in the final analysis had nothing to do with the war. Jews and blacks were subhumans, and there was a whole catalogue of others he couldn't stand, like Indians and Greeks and Spaniards. And he never held back, regardless of where he was, whether in a neighborhood pub or among strangers. He also despised everyone who wasn't like him. He disparaged all who were too cowardly to speak their mind, even though, to hear him tell it, they agreed with him.
He was unsparing in his disdain. In 1967 I was on a Mediterranean cruise with him. It was the last time I spent a vacation in his company, one last attempt to share something pleasant with him. Half of the four hundred passengers were deaf-mutes, and that got him going. I was still stupid enough to try to reason with him. He cut me off by saying that he preferred two hundred deaf-mutes to two hundred blacks. Always that cynicism, that refusal to take me and what I had to say seriously. Things weren't as simple as I thought, I was illogical. One evening he got furious when I danced with an older man, a Jew, and jokingly said that I could imagine marrying someone like that. Yet when we landed in Israel two days later, he became enthusiastic about the uniformed young men and women in the harbor.
A year later, in 1968, came our final break. I turned Red overnight. In Bonn I'd fallen in love with a Communist, and he lent me a book by Ernst Fischer. Now for the first time I began to understand what was going on, and I promptly started to agitate. Of course there was a big row at home. Some weeks later I received a letter from my father. I had refused to spend Christmas at home with my parents. He exploded. He wrote he couldn't understand my extreme selfishness, couldn't understand why I bothered about blacks and Vietnam, that this riffraff was bound to disappear from the face of the earth without leaving a trace. I knew nothing about men, he said, and they don't like to have the things they'd created taken away from them. Men were proud, and I just didn't know what a real man was.
My mother added her signature to the letter. She agreed completely. Just imagine, all this happened nearly twenty-five years after the end of the war. And still that same language, that unchanged frame of mind.
After that letter everything was over. I became isolated, separated from the family. My brothers also knifed me in the back. They never had any problem with Father's past. And the fact is it was difficult to charge him with anything specific as far as the war was concerned. By sheer accident it seems that he was never present at any of the horrendous things that happened. And so he also had no problem with his de-Nazification. Yet a few months before the end of the war, when it seemed that he might be drafted, he wrote a letter to his oldest son, a testament of sorts, couched in the blood-and-soil phraseology typical of that era. I shudder to think that I'm related to its author.
My father remained a fascist to his dying day, and it really doesn't matter what he did or didn't do during the war. You can't imagine the beatings my brothers received. Once one of them was supposed to memorize a poem, and every time he stumbled Father let him have it. I can still hear the screams. Mother took me by the hand and led me out of the room. "Father's going to kill Erich. We better leave," she said to me. Things got really bad later on when we lived in our own house, with no next-door neighbors and no danger of being overheard. After that there was no stopping him. Given a choice I would never again live in a one-family house.
In my early twenties I tried to stand on my own two feet. But many of my own traits also frighten me, above all my lack of compassion. I think my greatest fear was that I would carryon the tradition of my parents and grandparents. I once saw a woman on the street hit her child, but I didn't intervene. I stood by and did nothing. And the real reason was that I didn't like the little girl. She just stood there and didn't defend herself, and that's why I didn't like her.
And later in the feminist movement, when I saw pictures of abused women, my instinctive reaction was: They had it coming, why didn't they defend themselves? If they'd defended themselves they wouldn't have been beaten. My compassion was reserved for people who defended themselves. My brothers and I also never defended ourselves when we were being beaten. We took everything, every conceivable humiliation.
But slowly I began to change. Years later I had a dream about a child that was being mistreated by other children. My first reaction in the dream was, well, they're only playing. I then saw them tie the child to a post upside-down and hit it on the soles with a stick. At that point I thought-still in the dream-these are torture methods. I went over to the child and intervened. That dream was a turning point in my life.
In 1973, six months after his retirement, my father died of cancer. When he became ill our relationship improved somewhat. We called a truce. At the very end he softened somewhat, becoming more gentle and sensitive. I spent much time taking care of him. My mother, on the other hand, paid him back for everything he had done to her. She treated him abominably and refused to have a nurse in the house. My father had intestinal cancer, and she really tortured him. She would give him an enema only if he was obedient. At the end things got so bad that his doctor insisted on calling in a nurse.
I was horrified by the way she treated that dying man. I moved back home, but it was a terrible time. I spent many sleepless nights.
Soon after my father's death I got involved with a man twenty years my senior. I now realize that he was just like my father -- authoritarian, dogmatic, and domineering.
But now, after all those problems over the years, things have finally changed. I am living with a woman, and for the first time in my life I'm happy. I've given up the idea of emigrating. Three years ago I still toyed with the idea of going to South America and buying lots of land. But now that's all over. I'm even beginning to feel comfortable here in Germany; I realize that this is my home, despite or maybe because of everything that has happened here. I see all the ugliness, but also all the beauty, and I realize that I can't change very much, that nothing much has changed, and that it is possible that everything could happen all over again. The great pedagogic enterprises of the past twenty years haven't really changed the people. It can't be done by book learning alone.
I see that in the people I come in contact with. When one of my brothers was temporarily without a job he lashed out against everything around him-the foreigners, the unions, the workers-but as soon as he got a job again he became friendliness personified. The remnants of the past live on in all of us. The slightest disruption and we immediately take out after the others, always blaming others for our own inadequacies. Unfortunately I also see this trait in myself.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like if I'd had children at my mother's age. I'm sure that I would have made them my victims. Now I'm glad that I don't have children and don't plan to have any. I don't want to be like my mother. I know that sounds absurd, but this distancing myself from her is important to me.
She hasn't changed. She's the same way she was thirty or fifty years ago. Once, when I told her about Viktor Frankl's book about Auschwitz, she said: "Oh, he must have been on the staff." She simply can't understand that an eminent doctor could have been an inmate in a concentration camp. The people in the camps were, after all, subhumans. That's what she believed then and that's what she believes still. She had a limited view then and she has a limited view now.
My parents were always-I'm sorry to have to put it so bluntly-limited, uninterested, and stupid. The terrible thing about them was their willingness to be manipulated. That, and their indescribable coldness. It's too bad, but I just have to talk about it. For years I tried to tell myself that they had a hard time, that they'd gone through a lot. Now I no longer have understanding for it. My father could have made a different choice, and so could my mother. At any rate, they could have done so after the war. After all, there's something like free will.
There was a time when I wondered how I would have acted in their place, and feared I might have been no different. But not anymore. I cannot relieve my parents of the choice they made. However, there's one thing I will never understand, what on earth made them decide to have four children.
There was a time when a reconciliation with my parents might still have been possible, but they missed the chance. If only once my mother had said to me: "Listen, I've thought about it, basically the worst thing we did was to close our eyes, and I will carry this guilt to my grave. But I hope you'll be different and learn from me."
I could have made peace with a mother like that, even if it turned out that she'd been a guard in a concentration camp.
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Notes:
i. A commercial center in Saxony.
ii. A city in Saxony.