A Legacy of Guilt
HANSER, RICHARD
Writers &Writing ALEGCY OF GUILT BY RICHARD HANSER I bNGEBORG Day's Ghost Waltz: A Memoir (Viking, 242 pp., $11.95) is a curious particle in the enormous emotional fallout of the Holocaust, a...
...Day in German, inaccurately) . His story could be duplicated a thousandfold, and his daughter is at pains to tick off all the circumstances that would justify, or at least explain, why he became a National Socialist: Times were terribly hard after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918...
...Day works on a woman's magazine and her prose often shows it...
...It was done to me...
...Jude...
...She does not know when or how...
...One may salute Mrs...
...If I detested anti-Semitism with my brain and soul, I had to distance myself from my parents to a degree unbearable to me...
...His daughter, a generation later, is reduced to wondering whether he might have thrown a rock or two on Kristallnacht, no worse atrocity having been found in his record...
...Day expresses with breathtaking frankness...
...On at least one point she is unduly concerned...
...The SS was an elite formation with strict standards of admission...
...It was simple," she says...
...Day, all things considered, is carrying around more weight than necessary in regard to her father's past...
...One prefers not to have one's parents lumped with history's worst: the Nazis," she writes, but her parents, her adored Vati and her beloved Mutti both, were indeed on the side that destroyed the Six Million, with Vati a card-carrying member of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party...
...This is surely no far-fetched assumption in regard to her father, whose career she proceeds to examine in some detail in an effort to ascertain what made him that way...
...She does have a few words of approval for Andy's chanting—"the kid's great"—yet before the paragraph is out she is back in her customary form and observing that "this thing is endless...
...She does not know why she feels this way...
...We knew before she went that gefilte fish would make her wince and that the doings of a group of Jews would be mysterious to her...
...In describing one of her reveries on what makes her feel as she does—reveries "beyond sense and reason"—she is capable of setting down the following lines:" I felt: the legacy of the Holocaust has tarnished me beyond all methods of cleansing...
...a 'bad magic' word...
...this book is her attempt to come to terms with it and, if possible, exorcise it...
...As she gives it, her father's story is in no way remarkable for his time and place...
...To some it might seem that Mrs...
...It means contemptible, it describes revulsion...
...Something else would have to take its place...
...Richard Hanser, our guest columnist, is the author of Putsch...
...Day's courage in facing up to her moral and emotional quandary, and wrestling with it in public, but the adjective "noble" hardly applies...
...This is hardly the dispelling and repudiating of anti-Semitism that the publishers claim for the book...
...I felt: I hate the guts of every Jew alive...
...Then she adds: "I have no choice but to assume that my parents made clear, somehow, very early on in my life, that they were anti-Semites...
...It was not easy for his daughter to dig up these details, since her father, despite his title, was small potatoes and remained so...
...The behavior of the congregation is "mysterious...
...Often it is more like floundering...
...having my flesh crawl at the sound of Yiddish...
...In the longest chapter in the book Mrs...
...She tries to root out in her psyche the sources that produced them...
...So I detested anti-Semitism with my brain alone...
...But he also joined something called the NS Soldiers Ring, a forbidden activist group that had to stay underground until the Hitler takeover of Austria...
...She cannot recall, she says, that in her girlhood she was ever taught anything about Jews by word or precept...
...It requires something of an effort to work up much outrage at this late date about an obscure Nazi accountant...
...I was not born like this," she says...
...She describes her father's mouth as "luscious...
...There was a ravenous inflation...
...This sort of thing would not be especially significant if Ghost Waltz, this minuscule Roots, did not leave the reader—one reader, at least—with a disagreeable aftertaste...
...The phrase, in fact, has a whiff of the absurd about it...
...His involvement in the National Socialist movement was on a modest scale...
...It made her uncomfortable...
...For all the probing and dissecting of her attitude toward Jews, it remains the same at the end as it was at the start...
...A Jewish man...
...The cantor's singing sounds to her like "forlorn cadences going nowhere...
...Writers &Writing ALEGCY OF GUILT BY RICHARD HANSER I bNGEBORG Day's Ghost Waltz: A Memoir (Viking, 242 pp., $11.95) is a curious particle in the enormous emotional fallout of the Holocaust, a groping and confused rumination by one who was neither killer nor victim but who, nonetheless, feels herself implicated in the fate of the Six Million...
...How Hitler Made Revolution and A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler...
...She says that all Austrian policemen were "subsumed" under the German police and, since Heinrich Himmler was head of that organization and of the SS Jhey thus became SS men...
...They come under the hoary rubric of "some of my best friends," though she makes a point of scorning that dismal cliche...
...There is worse...
...Or...
...She writes of her mother as a "succulent" woman who laughed in "shimmering cascades...
...People lived on potato soup, if they could get that...
...She makes much of the assertion that Vati, besides being a Nazi, was also an SS man, the worst of the worst...
...When, later, she is offered a portion of gefilte fish, she winces but "gobbles the dreadful stuff anyway...
...Though she apparently went to please Andy, he has small reason to be happy that she did...
...Mrs...
...She wrestles with them...
...Ernst and Margarete Seiler of Graz, Austria, left their daughter a tormenting legacy...
...Never having attended a Bar Mitzvah, I cannot judge the accuracy of Mrs...
...Some of her ways of fighting it can only be regarded as questionable, if not hopeless...
...Ernst Seiler could have been any one of those shoulder-to-shoulder Brown Shirts who marched through the streets of the Third Reich to the strains of the "Horst Wessel" song (quoted by Mrs...
...It smacks more of alibi...
...His role was essentially that of an accountant in the Graz police department...
...B ' ut the problem of her anti-Semitism remains, and she is rightly disturbed by it...
...She does not, of course, simply record such sentiments and let them stand...
...Day describes her attendance at a Bar Mitzvah...
...The Party selected him for a cram course in police administration and he achieved the rank of Inspektor...
...Day's rendition of the event, but it is hard to grasp why she describes it at all except as an exercise in authorship, to show her stuff, so to speak...
...Finding this exotic and somewhat perverse, she gave it up...
...Nobody became a member of it automatically or involuntarily, certainly not every cop who happened to be on the roster when Himmler's security forces moved in...
...She uses shopworn slang like "up front" and she says "nauseous" when she means nauseated...
...The legacy includes a deep-rooted anti-Semitism which Mrs...
...The publishers describe Ghost Waltz, in the customary language of blurbing, as "haunting, brilliant and noble...
...She speaks of "this aversion [of hers] to things Jewish" and tells how merely looking at a newspaper picture of a group of Hasi-dim, with their black hats and earlocks, makes her dislike them "intensely, specifically...
...The pattern is familiar...
...What would Vati say if he could see her now...
...That is not how it worked...
...There is not much waltzing it it...
...She speaks of a band making an "ungainly" noise...
...One is left to wonder what was supposed to be conveyed by her attendance at the Bar Mitzvah and the description of her reaction to it...
...The effect of the book is depressing rather than elevating...
...From her own evidence, he could not have been...
...Unable to get a decent job, Ernst Seiler lied about his age (he was not yet 18) and joined the Austrian Army as well as the National Socialist Party...
...While not outright contemptuous of the proceedings, she does not exert herself to be gracious...
...When that happened Ernst Seiler packed away his tuba...
...Day, in her 40th year and a naturalized American citizen, invites us to share in her struggle to reconcile her love for her late father with the fact that he was a dedicated Nazi...
...No particular point is made...
...She evidently cannot write: "I went to bed with a Jew...
...She even fondles the idea, over two pages of defensive musing on her situation, that, after all, everybody feels the same way more or less...
...I slept with a Jewish man once," she tells us in describing her self-administered therapy...
...Nazism seemed to be the way out...
...Democracy was a joke...
...Why did he, who seemed so splendid a person and who taught her Schiller's Lied von der Glocke, line by line, when she was a little girl, become a Nazi...
...There was epidemic unemployment and political chaos...
...He played in an Army band and then in the Graz police band—innocuous activities and no cause for distress to his progeny...
...She toys with the idea that it may be something in her genes, but discards it as a rationalization...
...Somewhere in her unconscious she links it with loyalty to her parents...
...The boy involved was Andy, who did errands for her and with whom she is on amiable terms...
...she fights it "fiercely," she says...
...Day can relieve her mind on that score...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 24
