Born Guilty: A Brother and Sister React to Their Nazi Father
SICHROVSKY, PETER
BORN GUILTY A Brother and Sister React to Their Nazi Father PETER SICHROVSKY As a child, Peter Sichrovsky, a son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, played with the children of the "others," the sons...
...He was your father...
...I don't want to be pressed into a mold...
...On the contrary: our expectations of our father are diametrically opposed...
...M., that swine, still lives in his "Aryanized" villa nearby...
...I don't want to share in your suffering...
...From Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families by Peter Sichrovsky, translated by Jean Steinberg Copyright ©1988 by Basic Books, Inc., New York...
...Rainer the scourge of the bourgeoisie...
...Yes, he played games with me and read to me and consoled me when I scraped my knees when I fell off my bicycle...
...Rainer For just a moment there I thought that we might become reconciled...
...He never took a single item of confiscated Jewish property...
...Neither of us has it easy, I know that...
...Brigitte Brigitte: That's not how I remember your childhood...
...What a mixture of naivete and madness...
...Do you want to know what our father was...
...He was your father, your ideal and your hero...
...But I heard nothing from him, not a word...
...Having a father sit before me and confess his guilt...
...At best, you're the victim of your bizarre demands and objectives...
...I am not willing to live out the fantasy of psychologists who see in me the twisted child of a Nazi big shot...
...I don't understand how you can talk about him like this...
...You can really be proud of that model, a father who manages a bank as matter-of-factly as an army, a universally valuable and useful man, except in situations demanding even a minimum of feeling and sensibility...
...But do you know why I've failed...
...Our father behaved decently throughout...
...If you were in power today you'd hang the others...
...It's the well-tried system of praise according to ability, not need...
...But basically you're right...
...Your implacable righteousness is inhuman...
...I want to see as little as possible of you because your incompetence and helplessness get on my nerves...
...He told me that his fellow officers said among themselves that the war had to be won before Hitler could be overthrown, that they had every intention to try and build a democratic society after the war...
...I've never done anything to harm anybody...
...He didn't join any of the rightist groups, and he steered clear of all those reunions of old Nazis...
...And that's what I hold against him...
...And that was enough for me...
...Our father was— Brigitte: We're not the children of a Nazi family, but of a military family...
...Seven years of war and four years of prison is more than enough for one lifetime...
...Your indignation is so ridiculously hysterical, so forced...
...The real tragedy probably is the fact that my father's life elicits such disparate reactions...
...Anyway, I think it's stupid to air our differences about our father before the whole world...
...I don't want any, it doesn't interest me...
...And that's why I hate him, because in addition to messing up his life he missed the opportunity to let me profit from his experience...
...But reproaching him or me won't turn you into something you aren't...
...Our father spent four years in prison...
...For him war was a game played with colored pins on a map...
...Ralnen Stop it...
...He really thought that the war could be won...
...A criminal coward...
...It's pointless...
...All my ridiculous efforts, as you call them, to become someone else have been in vain...
...What I do is my own will and decision, and if that sounds ridiculous or pathetic, so be it...
...I don't feel like being put on the defensive by you from the word go...
...I know what happened back then...
...No thank you...
...Suddenly I don't seem to care how you feel about Father...
...He harped on the neutrality of soldiers...
...You're not the new, wonderful breed you think you are...
...I know that we don't agree about our parents, but maybe we can agree on terminology...
...If Father can't be vanquished then there is no future for me...
...Brigitte: Your cynicism won't do you any good...
...Some, like Brigitte in the following excerpt, were protective of their fathers, and underemphasized the role their fathers played during the war...
...Our neighbors, all those good friends— suddenly they all turned into dyed-in-the-wool anti-Nazis...
...But what about the duty to disobedience...
...A criminal coward...
...If you want to you can lie down in the mud, but don't let it rub off on me...
...He was both...
...Either we skip the personal interpretation or I leave...
...I've become resigned...
...You can be proud of your life, that senseless rerun of a senseless life...
...And he'd just sit there listening like a stuffed doll...
...You don't know how much alike you are...
...I don't understand how he could have done the things he did...
...I really don't want anything more than to be left in peace...
...Not every Nazi was a war criminal, but our father managed to be both...
...At times I feel that my little brother died long ago and that the man standing before me is a stranger...
...Do you want me to go on...
...The catastrophe of the Third Reich and its collapse live on in our family...
...Millions went off to war with enthusiasm, thousands participated in the persecution of the Jews and profited from it...
...Brigitte: You're dreaming...
...Just look at your husband...
...I live at home like a child and am afraid of being kicked out...
...I never participated and I never looked away...
...I long for the day when the last survivor of the Third Reich will be dead...
...I'm too weak to begin again...
...Let our children make a better job of it...
...It makes me sick to hear you talk in these generalities...
...It is no accident that I, a Jew, someone not burdened by past guilt, should have tackled the question of how these descendants of the perpetrators come to terms with the problem," says Sichrovsky...
...He was capable of change, and that presupposes an awareness of having erred...
...Can't you understand...
...Later that Star of David on a neck chain, and after that a Palestinian shawl draped over your shoulders...
...I feel sorry for you...
...But it won't do you any good, nor me, because I still hate him even though he's dead...
...That's how it was back then...
...I remember you as a six-year-old, coming home proudly with your first report card and your swimming medals, or the two of you going off to the movies on a Sunday afternoon, or you asking Father to read to you...
...It worked in the past and it still works with you...
...Perhaps then we'll finally get a chance for a new Germany...
...I don't know...
...Do whatever you want, but do me one favor—stop crying...
...He had the courage to join a movement that held out the promise for a better future...
...Brigitte: I won't cooperate if that's how you're going to start...
...I look forward to their extinction...
...And I don't see it...
...And victory was tantamount to pulling off a successful business deal...
...How could he play ball with me as though nothing had happened...
...I still can't believe it...
...I don't crawl and don't turn myself into an innocent bystander by pretending that I, along with thousands of others, am the victim of my father...
...He's gone through enough...
...Why didn't you refuse to take the money...
...You shout and rave, smash things...
...I really don't care...
...Rainer Ralnen Stop kidding yourself...
...My future...
...Did you see him hanging around with concentration camp guards and SS murderers...
...What other disguises do you still need...
...He settled matters within himself, and I am sure that it wasn't easy for him...
...I heard nothing from him, not a word...
...Let's stop this conversation...
...Brigitte: I'm sorry to have to disillusion you, but you're just as much of a stranger to me as ever...
...All of us, not only you, lost...
...Where was my father then...
...He created living space for Germans, brought back wheat from the Ukraine, oil from Rumania, and coal from Poland...
...If I were to take the hand you're holding out asking for help you'd try to pull me down with you...
...I think I'm very different...
...All that caution and consideration, that don't-come-too-close-to-the-poor-man business...
...What is it all supposed to mean...
...You talk like him, act like him, and even read the same books...
...You can stick to your version...
...I don't want to be someone to be sorry for, and no one except I myself am responsible for my fate...
...Rainer: My fanaticism, not your impotence or so-called understanding, will prevent the resurgence of fascism...
...You're terrified because you're the son of someone who committed a crime, and that fear has done terrible things to you...
...Do you think a little child can be lied to...
...That same fanaticism, only now in the opposite camp...
...Every Mao tract you bought was paid for by the bank where Father worked...
...He always believed that the war and the party would create a new type of German, or at the least that Germans would be the only survivors...
...Rainer This has been terribly taxing, and now I'd like to stop...
...A Mao portrait here, a Lenin picture there, a Marx bust on the desk...
...I always had to spare him, not bother him with my problems, my concerns, but only bring him joy—a playful, happy youngster...
...Am I an individual or a footprint in the sand...
...That meant nothing to him...
...He loved you and was a good father to both of us, you as well as me...
...You're not a victim of your father...
...What do you know about bombing raids, about fleeing from the Russians, about our panic when Father was arrested...
...The proud, upright fighter who returns with head held high, even from prison, and who never was able to shed a tear over the disaster which he helped engineer...
...I knew what had happened and I also knew about his role...
...When I tried to become a different German than he...
...What other games was he playing simultaneously in his lifetime...
...Tell me, what is the difference between you and your father...
...Couldn't he see back in 1933 what they were after...
...I always thought you were much stronger than I. Strange, but now I feel connected to you, more than ever before...
...Sometimes it was almost funny, those last surviving hippies coming out of your room dressed in panties and nothing on top, smoking pot...
...But you acted like a beast, trampling on Father even when he was already old...
...I am not the child of a perpetrator...
...Rainer All right, let's be completely objective...
...In 1938 Jodl even said that Hitler had the entire country behind him except for the General Staff...
...I can't help you, and I really don't want to...
...And your women...
...I glad that our father didn't do this, for I would have lost all respect for him...
...I remember that there was a time when you even toyed with the idea of converting to Judaism...
...And if my life with my husband is a continuation of my parents' life, it still is my own decision, my own will...
...Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, which is excerpted below, breaks that silence...
...What's all that supposed to mean...
...I, thank God, have broken the chain, the first nonmilitarist in maybe a hundred and fifty years...
...But perhaps it's also an opportunity...
...A milksop...
...He and his fellow officers on the General Staff planned whatever measures were needed to do away with the subhumans...
...As far as I'm concerned, ours was a family of Nazis, or perhaps better still, a family of war criminals...
...I never witnessed the Third Reich, I wasn't in the Hitler Youth, my neighbors weren't deported because they were Jews, I didn't amuse myself watching Jews scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes...
...That's the way we sidestepped all conflicts, all frank discussions...
...Why didn't you move out...
...When I look at and listen to you I can't believe that we're the children of the same parents, that we grew up in the same house, that we played together when we were small...
...A puppet with pension rights...
...And still later, when I took part in student demonstrations, I was again warned not to upset him...
...BORN GUILTY A Brother and Sister React to Their Nazi Father PETER SICHROVSKY As a child, Peter Sichrovsky, a son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, played with the children of the "others," the sons and daughters of Nazis...
...And it is not all that simple to pull oneself up out of this nothingness, this abyss...
...But until you came along they at least were real men...
...Brigttte: You don't know what you're talking about...
...I've lost my battle...
...I can't believe you...
...I didn't need any ridiculous admissions of guilt...
...And then I remember that he was your father as well...
...You say you want to stand up, but you're afraid of your unsteady legs...
...I think your hateful tirades are really directed more against yourself than against him...
...Ralnen He wasn't simply one or the other, either my father or a criminal...
...You never earned a single penny...
...For two hundred years the men in our family were officers...
...A poor replica of Father...
...In that case let's forget about the interview altogether...
...Sichrovsky writes, "The biggest failure of the perpetrators is their failure to bear witness...
...And often, when you talk about Father, I instinctively ask myself,' 'What does he know about my father...
...No more moving around divisions on drawing boards, with a few thousand casualties here and another handful there...
...The desperate are stepped on and the strong are praised...
...My battle is over, my goals are shrouded in mist...
...You were born after the war, you didn't witness the final months of the collapse...
...Brigttte: Tell me, do you honestly think he was a mass murderer...
...You are and will always be the son of a German officer...
...I'm glad that he didn't burden me with stories about the past...
...Nothing has changed...
...What do you think went through his mind...
...Perhaps it's sheer accident that you're on the opposite side...
...Of course he changed...
...At least I tried, unlike you...
...He gave his allegiance to whatever government was in power...
...After the war he no longer believed in National Socialism...
...As long as we live, his fate will follow us, even though he died a long time ago and will be dead for even longer...
...You'll always be the son of a German officer, even if you get involved in street brawls with alleged Nazis...
...For two hundred years the men in our family handed on to their offspring a tradition of unconditional obedience...
...Or you do and are distorting the facts...
...Can you tell me why...
...I suddenly found that I had to fight not one but the three of you, and for that I was too weak...
...After the defeat, while in prison, he had four years to think about where he'd gone wrong...
...fli...
...I must distance myself from you because you live in the past...
...I don't care whether or not you go to the bank...
...Others, like Brigitte's brother Rainer, saw themselves as victims of their fathers' pasts, victims also of fascist attitudes and actions of Nazis at home...
...I don't want that, can't you understand it...
...Laughable...
...It was the General Staff that warned Hitler against marching into Austria, against occupying the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia, and they even tried to prevent the war against Poland...
...Their mistrust, their awareness of the traces of the past in their compatriots, coupled with the fear of such a repetition, have not made the children of the perpetrators particularly optimistic citizens...
...But I also know that when my father joined the Nazis in the thirties he did so enthusiastically, convinced that what he was doing was right...
...I was always tempted to ask you whether you were doing this for our benefit, to show Father how unconventional you were...
...Yes, I'm waging war on the German past...
...Do you think that this sort of thing will help you throw off your past...
...Rainer I'm Rainer, and this is Brigitte, my sister...
...I have lost...
...General, father, husband, and finally bank executive, his last, respectable position...
...Is that your idea of a historic opportunity...
...You're the offspring of German officers, and that's in your blood, just as it is in mine...
...As a family we have failed...
...I don't intend to lie down next to you...
...Was he ever a real father to me...
...One word about the Nazis and Mother would stare icily and launch into her litany: "Leave Father alone...
...No hint of an apology, no admission of guilt, not a single word of regret...
...We're the children of a Nazi family...
...All those ridiculous things I did were an attempt to defend myself against him...
...I manage things differently...
...He hated me because I wasn't as scared as he...
...Father was the last link in a chain of generations of order-takers and masochistic obeyers, officer after officer, from Prussian to fascist, following orders...
...A milksop...
...He was a soldier, not a criminal...
...Ralnen So you're also resigned, just like me...
...I can do without such a father, a father who weeps and feels sorry for himself, a father who whines and tells me about the mistakes he'd made...
...I defended him in school against the lying teachers who overnight had turned into antifascists, against so-called friends who thought it would be exciting to go to bed with the daughter of a well-known Nazi, and against all those others who wanted to bring back the past and thought I was their ally...
...You don't have to act the schoolmaster with me...
...I had the unique opportunity of learning from someone who'd played a major role in the catastrophe...
...I don't see that as a negative...
...You didn't know anything about his past, and you wouldn't have cared...
...We more than most others come from a family that lost the war, because ours helped start it...
...Do you want to know what our father was...
...I can't go on...
...Rainer: I've always tried my best to become a new type of German, not to be like my father...
...I am backing away from you...
...And yet, Sichrovsky discovers, "Nearly all of the people I interviewed, regardless of their attitude toward their parents, were convinced that what happened under the Nazis could recur...
...A few divisions to the north here, a few to the south there, planes on the right, tanks on the left...
...As a matter of fact, I really don't want to see you again...
...Some healed and some will never heal, and perhaps will even be handed on to our children...
...Ralnen You talk as though you'd never been troubled by any of this...
...And their parents rarely, if ever, spoke of their own guilt or responsibility...
...He could have explained to me why he had submitted, why he hadn't offered resistance, or at least why he hadn't called a halt in time...
...I can remember when I was little, Mother always ordered me not to bother him, not to disturb him...
...And that's why I hate him...
...Bom in 1947 in Vienna, he does not remember hearing his friends speak about their parents' involvement in the war...
...His enemies were the Germans, the Germans in his own country...
...Nothing in our relationship is going to change...
...I think your hateful tirades are really directed more against yourself than against him...
...Couldn't he have pulled back after the Kristallnacht...
...Everything you say and believe in is alien to me, as though you'd never been my brother...
...Or did you want to shock us with that glimpse of bosom and behind...
...What do you mean that he believed he was doing the right thing, that he acted out of conviction...
...Couldn't he at least have joined the 20th of July group...
...And even the grass for your funny cigarettes came from him...
...Why didn't you leave the family and start from scratch someplace else...
...We were vanquished, and like a defeated fighter we drag ourselves to the locker room and try, slowly, to regain our strength...
...You and your friends can't fool me...
...Or do you think I should apply at the bank...
...Later, when I went to school, she asked me not to tell him when I got poor marks, for that too would only upset him...
...I am not willing to live out the fantasy of psychologists who see in me the twisted child of a Nazi big shot...
...But he wouldn't help me...
...Brigitte: I wasn't because I was proud of our father...
...Only once, toward the end of his life, did he talk more frankly about those times...
...I am not the child of a Nazi...
...And I've never relinquished it, regardless of who my father was and what he was guilty of...
...But at the trial he testified against Father...
...The main question in the minds of those in the generation after the war and their children is, "How could it have happened...
...Even after he came out of prison Father held his head high, and emaciated though he was, he carried himself with pride...
...Because his life is not a life I care to live...
...Just look at yourself...
...That almost reassures me...
...Again that victimization...
...Only 20 papers on this topic exist in the archives of the Federal Republic of Germany...
...That I could have understood...
...What should he have told me...
...Thank God he spared us...
...And even if you were to become a rabbi it wouldn't change a thing...
...I can still see you sitting on his lap while he read to you or played soccer with you in the garden or took your hand on walks when you got tired...
...Just listen to yourself when you talk about political enemies...
...But you want to live in an either/or world, a world of either friends or enemies...
...Don't kid yourself, you are and will always be the son of a German officer, and neither your stay in a kibbutz in Israel nor your disquisitions about fascism at the university can change that...
...After 40 interviews with children of Nazis, Sichrovsky identified several typical reactions...
...I've often thought that back then Father must have sounded just like that...
...Brigitte Brigttte: Stop whining...
...When you sit at the table with Mother and your husband I can see Father sitting next to you...
...This whole interview is stupid...
...Your concentration camps would be just as full as those old ones...
...It's nice to know that you feel sorry for me...
...But you're right, it's useless...
...What kind of heroism do you call it, insulting an old, sick man...
...That may be the only thing I hold against him, the fact that his background is an obstacle to normal family relationships...
...Our father—how should I put it—was a high-ranking officer in the German army...
...A puppet with pension rights...
...He became a true democrat...
...He paid for his house out of his own pocket...
...After the war...
...It might almost have been better if they'd executed him along with some of the others...
...And that's why he hated me so toward the end of his life, because I was like those Germans he thought he had exterminated with the help of his party...
...I had the unique opportunity of learning from someone who'd played a major role in the catastrophe...
...But your protest was underwritten by Father...
...And in doing so he made our life easier, not harder...
...Rainer Have it your way...
...What a terrible thought...
...And I hope this old type will soon become extinct...
...Ridiculous...
...He never had anything to do with the SS, nor with the concentration camps or the execution of women and children...
...He hated me because I was able to say no...
...Rainer Spare me your pity...
...The scars of that fight are visible on and in us...
...Brigitte: That's enough...
...And then came his prison sentence...
...Your left-wing enthusiasm was nothing but spite against Father...
...You should have seen yourself, how excited you used to get...
...But that's our fate, a hard fate for us, the children of those who caused and started it all...
...His enemies weren't the Russians or French or British...
...He, too, works in the bank, and who knows, he might even become its president if he continues to kiss enough important asses...
...I always defended him because I understood him...
...I try to understand people, why they act the way they do and why they are what they are...
...All he cared about was obligation and duty...
...A coward...
...What's wrong with that...
...I'm proud to be the one who's breaking this tradition...
...But he was the old type of German...
...Brigitte: You're just as scared as he, only you're scared of different things...
...Or is it all a farce...
...Nothing will change...
...Because Mother and you—and I hold you primarily responsible, because Mother after all was married to him—-didn't help me...
...The things you've done to turn yourself into a victim...
...Your whole life was an exercise in accommodation, a desperate effort not only to please him but to follow in his footsteps...
...I consider myself a human being responsible for her own actions...
...Sichrovsky observes that none of these children, bom at the end of the war or after it, had seen their parents in the glorified, heroic guise of the proud Nazi...
...Actually you're right, toward the end he'd turned into a nice old man...
...But what about later on when, full of dismay and inner doubt, I didn't know where I belonged...
...Your way of dealing with weakness is in the best family tradition...
...The things you've done to turn yourself into a victim...
...Just think of how you decorated your room...
...Unbelievable...
...When his war crimes drove me, as you so aptly put it, from one camp to another...
...He was like a household pet entrusted to our care...
Vol. 13 • March 1988 • No. 1
