“My Grandfather would have shot me.”
Can you think of a more provocative title for a book? Grandparents are usually the most doting individuals in one’s formative experience.
Who could this monstrous grandfather be?
If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film ‘Schindler’s List you’ll remember the terrifying figure of SS Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) Amon Göth (played by Ralph Fiennes) who becomes Kommandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, in southern Kraków, Poland.
The scenes of his wanton cruelty and savage brutality are perhaps the most unforgettable and disturbing in the film. The cold-blooded shooting of prisoners for sport from his porch, the merciless beating of his Jewish ‘housemaid’ Helen Rosenzweig Hirsch; these are just some of the scenes that come to mind.
Amon Göth (nicknamed the Butcher of Płaszów) was no fictional character; he really existed. And survivors testify that the Amon Göth depicted in the film is a watered-down version of the monster he really was.
He is also the grandfather from the title of the book I’ve just finished reading, written by Jennifer Teege. Göth was tried for his crimes against humanity and executed by hanging not far from the former site of the Płaszów camp, in 1948.
Why does Teege think he would have shot her, his own grandchild, had he lived on? Because Jennifer is the daughter of Göth’s daughter, and of a Nigerian father. This would of course have been sacrilegious to her grandfather’s notions of racial purity.
Jennifer Teege’s story is truly stranger than fiction. Born in 1970 in Munich and given to foster care as a child, she was adopted aged seven with no idea of her origins.
Quite by chance, at the age of 38, Teege found out about her family history, by picking a book in a Hamburg library (among the tens of thousands of books housed there) which happened to be her mother Monika Hertwig’s biography and where she discovered that Amon Göth was her grandfather. It took her by shock and plunged her into a deep depression. Her book “My Grandfather would have shot me: A Black Woman discovers her Nazi Past” was her cathartic response to her depression.
The book title had me hooked. Because we also live in an age where, both at home and abroad, collective hatred has become normalised, institutionalised, rationalised and invisibilised, the book seemed very relevant.
The devastating legacy of hatred among victims and their descendants even several generations later has been well-documented and studied. But what does it do to descendants of perpetrators? Psychoanalyst Peter Breundl discusses this in the book: “Violence and brutalization have a deep impact on the generations that follow. What makes them ill, however, is not the crimes themselves but the silence that surrounds them. There is an unholy conspiracy of silence in perpetrator families, often spanning generations.”
“Guilt cannot be inherited, but feelings of guilt can. The children of perpetrators subconsciously pass their fears and feelings of shame and guilt on to their children. This affects more children in Germany than one might think.”
Could one look at hatred dispassionately, epidemiologically, clinically? The way we would approach a medical disease? Either on the individual or collective level, what causes, or predisposes to, or facilitates, hatred? Are some more susceptible than others? If so, can it be detected early, and nipped in the bud?
Teege asks: “What kind of person takes pleasure in tormenting and killing others, in inventing different ways of doing so?” But there is no easy answer. “I keep on asking myself how it was that he became that way. I don’t think it was his childhood or even his hatred of Jews. I think it was much more banal than that: In this world of men, killing was a contest, a kind of sport. It reached a point where killing a human being meant nothing more than swatting a fly. In the end the mind goes completely numb; death has entertainment value.”
His driving forces: his love of his uniform and of Discipline, and a fanatical ‘love’ of ‘Fatherland’. Sound familiar?
Teege writes: “I read book after book, looking for answers, to find out what drove the perpetrators to act the way they did, but in the end I gave up. Yes, I found some explanations, but I would never understand it completely.”
It raises the spectre of the potential for evil within all of us, our darker side, which can come to the fore if we allow our conscience to be quelled.
As she puts it: “I think we all have a bit of him in us. To believe that I have more [merely due to lineage] would be to think like a Nazi – to believe in the power of blood.”
Teege mentions the 1967 book ‘The Inability to Mourn’ by psychoanalysts Alexander & Margarete Mitscherlich. The authors regularly dealt with patients who were active members of the SS or other Nazi organisations before 1945.” They didn’t appear to have any sense of remorse or shame; they and their fellow Germans continued to live their lives as if the Third Reich had never existed.”
The conclusion they drew at the end was that the Germans had denied their past and suppressed their guilt; ideally the whole nation should have been in therapy.
But the effect on their progeny is a different matter. Often, the grandchildren of Nazis come to him for totally different reasons, says Peter Breundl: depression, unwanted childlessness, eating disorders, or fear of failure at work. He encourages them to research their past and tear down their family’s web of lies. “It is only then that they can live their own lives, their own, authentic lives.”
He explains that, to ensure normal development, children need to grow up thinking, My parents are good people. “It is awful to have murderers for parents, to have to think, me, a child of killers. That’s why many people accept their parents’ silence on the subject, and they too keep quiet about it. They don’t ask questions about what their parents actually did during the war.”
Teege’s co-writer Nikola Sellmair mulls: “It is very easy to demonize the prominent Nazis, to treat them like animals in a zoo: Look, aren’t they cruel and perverted? It offers a way out of having to deal with one’s own actions, one’s family’s actions – or indeed of those of the many people who joined in on a small scale, those who no longer greeted their Jewish neighbours, and those who looked away and walked past when Jews were being beaten up in the streets and their businesses destroyed.”
I think this was one of the most hard-hitting passages in the book, relevant to our times. We can demonise our contemporary haters, the mob-lynchers, vigilantes, the for-hire thugs, the politicians who rabble-rouse and give the orders, all those directly involved in the bloody business of killing. But our own Day of Reckoning will also come, when we called to account, and asked what we did (or didn’t) do or say as all this happens in our time.
(An edited version of this article was published on 21 July 2019 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
