GERT HEIDENREICH
579
my memory, but not my first walk to school, the old man leaning on a
pillow at his open window and shouting down the village street after
me:
Nazi bastard! Nazi bastard!
I was not-but we did live in the same
house as the wife of an SS man: once proud of the silver skull on his
black cap, that man had changed into a less-boastful farmhand striving
for anonymity.
Heimat,
so I must have learned in those days, is not only the space to
which you belong. You also have to belong to the people who share that
space with you. Otherwise they'll dispute your right to that
Heimat.
Over forty years later, I received a letter from the woman who once
lived above us, harboring her SS husband. She complained strongly
about the label
murderer elite
in a newspaper article I had written about
the SS Junker School in Bad Tblz.
During the following months I received about thirty letters from men
who had once counted themselves among this "elite." All of them grad–
uates of the Junker School in Bad Tblz, they advised me not to let my
children out of sight, to have my face changed, and made other cliched
threats. One detail set me thinking: this obviously orchestrated cam–
paign was not at all anonymous. These men had all signed their names
and given their addresses.
Such persistent continuance of the past in the present fed my distrust.
Because the past was filled with such monstrous violence and bar–
barism, it is so difficult to provide a safe and nurturing home ground in
the present. All the pretty lies, such as
the new starting point (Die
Stunde Null)
and
the blessing of being born late (Die Gnade der spaten
Geburt)
cannot prevent the word
Auschwitz
from appearing like a tat–
too beneath the word
Heimat,
turning home into a palimpsest.
Historical blamelessness is no defense. There's a task handed over by
the victims, a duty unlimited in times and easy to hear. We can choose
not to listen to it, but then we will be blind as well.
It
seems that
Heimat
can only be gained through hard work, or perhaps obstinacy.
Today, I think my generation's revolt-mystified as well as marginal–
ized by calling it the revolt of '68-was not really a political undertak–
ing, let alone an ideological one, but a romantic-patriotic new departure
to attain
Heimat.
Where did we come from? The Adenauer era of our childhood and
youth owes its name to a great chancellor who was all the same not
afraid of being contaminated by having Nazis in his own government
and who knowingly misinformed the German parliament about the true
conditions laid down for German reunification in the Soviet notes of
I952·
