Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen
is the ultimate luxury of trust. However, as I’m supposed to record (reveal, chronicle, list?) even the earliest events of my life (‘for my own good’!), I’ll do what I’m told and scribble it down on the expensive Humanitas stationery. It might keep my captors happy.
The child born on, before or after 26 March was of course blissfully unaware of history and the world. He didn’t know yet that his life would turn out to be different from that of other children, but he was aware that his birth was not so much a delivery as a rejection. The baby already felt a physical repulsion for the woman who’d carried him. He didn’t know he’d have two mothers, at least three fathers, two countries and at least one more sister than the girl who was born seven years after him and promptly referred to in the family, with its usual precision and sensitivity, as the ‘afterthought’.
The midnight war child is given a wet nurse named Marie. Although she’s a stranger, I immediately recognise her body in creature-like knowledge as part of me, or rather as a natural provider of my needs. We love each other so much, and when she later has a child of her own, she gives it my name. In truth, I don’t remember much of the earliest period of my life, except for one thing: my first memory, the overwhelming feeling that I’d come to the wrong place. No doubt the Swiss shrinks would read a fundamental existential angst into that certainty. You can see why I’m keeping certain things to myself. As far as I know, I was neither psychic nor retarded as a baby.
I’ve been told that after the birth of my younger brother Claus my mother suffered a mental breakdown. Shocked family members pitied her for the way she treated the baby. It wasn’t clear whether he was born deaf or had lost his hearing as a result of an illness. Throughout the remaining war years she sang to the toddler or spoke to him demonstratively in public, as if it were some kind of theatrical performance. People would point at them and make disparaging remarks. The young imitated my mother behind her back. It was not until much later I understood why she behaved in such an over-the-top embarrassing manner. To be born deaf was quite literally a fatal flaw in Nazi Germany and, despite the strong historical Danish minority, most of Flensburg’s inhabitants were at that time German. What made my mother’s situation even more precarious was that her own father, a small businessman running the local branch of a national tobacco franchise, was a prominent local Nazi group leader. I don’t really know the exact level and nature of his membership in the party. He once told me he had been, or still was and would forever remain, a so-called Ortsgruppenführer. The official title was in fact Ortsgruppenleiter, but my grandfather who was known to indulge in self-aggrandisement couldn’t resist the suffix führer, if only to declare his loyalty to the Überführer, Adolf Hitler. I think it more likely he was in fact a so-called Block — or Zellenleiter, not quite as significant in the hierarchy of evil, but bad enough. From our conversations over games of chess I know he believed he had risen well above that lowly station and had truly become one of the Führer’s Führers.
Allow me to cut in here once more. Humanitas kindly allowed me to read what my friend has written, but I was not supposed to alter the original text. In fact I’ve read my colleague’s submissions only shortly before you have. Nonetheless I managed to get in touch with Flensburg’s municipal archives in the hope of clarifying details of his grandfather’s Nazi past. Frankly, I was worried about the ambivalence of my friend’s description and a possible threat of defamation from his own family. However, I was informed by the archive that ‘it holds no documentation of local Nazi party membership. The reason for this was the late British occupation of the area (10 May 1945) which allowed enough time for any compromising documents to be destroyed.’
However, the Landesarchiv (state archives) of Schleswig-Holstein obtained records from Flensburg’s Entnazifizierungshauptausschuss (Central Commission of Denazification) verifying that Otto Bluschke joined the NSDAP very early, i.e. on 1 May 1933, and in his own words was appointed Zellenleiter in 1941-42. How much further he advanced during the war could not be established.
I’ve always considered the concept of original sin not only deeply offensive but also morally reprehensible. To condemn all mankind to absolute evil seems to me a violation of human nature. I do not see it as a religious dogma but a sin of theology. Nothing good would ever come of humanity if its genesis were evil. Yet despite my indignation I was presented with more and more evidence that much of my own origin was iniquitous. The discovery of my grandfather’s commitment to the Nazi Party all but destroyed my idealistic humanism. Going through the sixty pages of his denazification file I grew bitter. Already Otto Bluschke had achieved something my writing and teaching won’t equal: his deeds had outlasted his life. As 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