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of European ancestry

To be a German

Michael Colhaze

To be a German is not easy. Though it got a lot better. And it was much worse.

Take me, for example.

Me and World War II, many summers ago, saw the light of day only a few months apart. When I was a year old my father, an airman, died in Belgium, together with his driver. Both careened, late at night and probably under the influence, into a tree laid across the road by the valiant Resistance. The driver was in his early twenties, my father had just turned thirty. I do not remember him, of course. Once, while passing Belgium on my way south, I deviated and went to visit his grave. The German government pays the Belgian government for the upkeep of the cemetery, so all is neat and proper and meets every standard of good Ordnung. Simple white crosses as befits a brave soldier, with name, rank and date, stretch into the distance as far as the eyes can reach. The afterglow of so many candles prematurely quenched is still strong, and the sheer number fills the heart with a dread that can never be put into words. A dread I felt strongly as I stood there under the low sky, with a few wild flowers in hand I had plucked in a meadow before, thinking too late of a more fitting tribute. I never went there again. But as so often before, I wondered what kind of man he had been. And father at that. He tried his hand at the Fine Arts in his leisurely hours, and I still cherish the only canvas that survived, a small still life. It shows, strangely appropriate, a bunch of wild flowers in a simple vase set against a dark background, lit by a ray of light that gives the daisies and dandelions a becoming inner glow. And from that, and the rare comments my mother occasionally ventured, I deduct that he must have been a good man.

The first years of my childhood were uneventful. We lived in a small village, not far from the military airport where my father had been stationed. The war  was far away, and thinking back, I remember only farms under endless blue skies, with poultry wandering freely about, pigs rolling in the mud, horses clip-clapping over the cobble stones. I had a friend, my age but about half my size, and whenever we turned up in a courtyard the women kept a sharp eye on our movements. My mother wore black, very elegant for Sunday mass, rather drab during the week. I could hear her sometimes crying at night, and she occasionally shed a tear while smiling at me, and I probably believed this to be the accepted behaviour of silent and beautiful women in black. The one great tragedy of that time was the death of my sparrow, dearest friend for more than a year, who mistook a mirror for the passage into undiscovered lands.

Slowly the war moved closer. My mother received orders to work in a make-shift factory, there to assemble ammunition in the company of PoWs who spoke foreign languages, some French. One gentleman of that tongue turned up shortly after the war had ended and brought roses, homemade sausages and other unheard of delicatessen. But my mother must have discouraged any serious intentions, because when he left, he looked as sad as she did while accepting a last peck on her marble cheeks.

I meanwhile spent the days in the kindergarten and remember a generally joyous time.

Until the day when the first enemy planes began to appear high in the sky. Glinting dully in the sun, huge even from where I stood, uttering a throbbing roar while trailing long white tails, accompanied by sleek hornets with a shriller pitch that turned into an ugly shriek when diving to meet an adversary.

Once I saw from far away a true air battle that involved four or five planes, with two bursting into fire and smoke while one parachute opened and, in the strangest antilogy, drifted gently earthwards like a big white cloud.

Soon afterwards my father’s airport was bombed to smithereens, including a row of houses just around the corner, with the result that one third of the kindergarten went missing and never showed up again. Air raid sirens had been introduced long since, and now they began to scream at every reasonable and unreasonable hour. It became a nightly occurrence that my mother grabbed me in the dark, since even a candle might give the position of the house away, and carried me downstairs and into the cellar. There we crouched with a few neighbours on a low bench, shivering and huddled close together, listening to the heavy thuds as they moved closer and closer, sometimes so close that the house shook to its foundations, accompanied by the roar of engines that eventually passed overhead and then disappeared into the night. While the sirens wailed, escalating from a muffled howl into an ear-splitting scream and then sagging again, on and on and on…

Fear!

Naked, undiluted fear.

I am not easily impressed, and later in life found myself occasionally in a tight spot without getting weak in the knees. But whenever I hear the monthly check of the local air raid sirens in the town not far from where I live, my body turns cold and my heart starts beating high in the throat and a nameless horror raises its ugly head and I need all my willpower to wrestle it down.

  

J.C.C. Dahl Dresden under a Full Moon Oil on Canvas 1839

As the war moved into its final years, it brought first hunger and then disease. Once a week a loaf of bread was the official decree, plus loads of turnips until they came out of your ears, and on Sundays a soup cooked from a handful of wheat ground in the coffee grinder, followed by a few potatoes fried with margarine. Diphtheria, pneumonia, meningitis and other afflictions made the round, and people began to succumb in frightful numbers. The jolly and very fat farmer’s wife from next door coughed blood for a few days, then told her husband that their time together hadn’t been that bad after all, and chuckled for a last time. Agnes from across the road went as well, which upset me nearly as much as the death of my sparrow. She was my age, and in a somewhat patronizing manner my friend and I had allowed her, before the advent of the bombings, to join us on our forays. Agnes the Lamb, blond, with cornflower-blue eyes, a freckled little nose and an angelic face that radiated pure light when she smiled. The last time I saw her she was laying on her little bed, a rosary in the folded hands, thin like a waif. Her face had a yellowish tinge, with dark shadows under the closed eyes and a slight frown as if she still tried to understand what had happened to her. 
The Allied Powers, I learned much later, would apply something hideous called the Morgenthau plan when victorious, an infamy bound to cripple Germany into a few rural serfdoms, never to be free again. And ten times worse than the injustice of Versailles, if that was possible. Which must have been the reason why even those who had little sympathy for Hitler and his Reich fought furiously to the last bullet. And which, as we are told to believe now, made the attacks ever more vicious.  
The weekly handout of a loaf of bread at the local baker had turned into an excursion fraught with danger, and one day my mother drove her bicycle and both of us into a ditch as something huge exploded nearby. For a long second, and before my mother pushed my face into the dirt, I saw a massive splinter that looked like one of Lucas’ spaceships passing my field of vision, strangely in slow motion. It hit a sidewalk and burst into thousand fragments that hissed into every direction. I still believe that on that day I owed my life to my mother for a second time.  
It must have been the winter of ’44, because one day, again on some errand, my mother stopped her bicycle on a bridge that spanned a small river. Some ancient chaps of the Home Defence had pulled a woman and her child from the icy waters. Both had been near an exploding phosphor bomb, as could be seen by the burns and deep holes in their bodies. Phosphor, in case you didn’t know, doesn’t need oxygen to burn. It sits on your arm like a beautiful green light, and when you try to douse it, it splits up and sticks to your hand as well and burns another hole into your hide. The Israelis are using phosphor bombs in Gaza today. The poor woman jumped into the shallow river to save herself and her child, not knowing of course that even under water the deadly fire would continue to burn both to death. As my mother stared at the terribly mutilated corpses, something snapped in her, and for once in my life I saw her flying into a rage. She dropped down on her knees, raised the arms at an empty sky and demanded to know, in a hoarse and inhuman scream I will never forget, how it was possible that they could murder women and children in such a horrible way.
But apparently they could.  
The day when the Americans took over was warm and sunny. Hitler’s gaudy banners and flags had long since disappeared, and white bed sheets hung from every window in case someone might be in doubt and continue the carnage. We were again in the cellar, and my mother held me tight, and I saw olive-green legs in strange boots passing stealthily along the narrow window. Then they were in the house. My mother called something in English, which surprised me because I thought her only foreign language was French. A soldier with a funny round helmet appeared and pointed a gun at us. But my mother said something again, and the soldier only nodded and winked an eye at me. They left soon afterwards, taking my fathers ceremonial dagger and sabre along, plus a wooden target board that showed a hand-painted wild boar whom he had smacked right between the eyes and so won the competition.  
The next day all of America’s armoured might passed by or stopped occasionally, and my mother told me to remember my manners and address the newcomers in English with a measured “How do you do?” Which I memorized by heart and extended later into a reasonable command of that language. My first contact was a huge negro who reclined on top of a Red-Cross vehicle. I had never seen a negro before, except in the Struwwelpeter, Germany’s foremost children’s book. It shows a rather diminutive negro with a black umbrella who is taunted by three wicked boys, but an over-large St. Nicolas comes along and dips them into an inkpot and they are black with a bluish tinge which makes them blacker than the negro ever will be. After I had muttered my piece rather sotto voce, he flashed snowy white teeth, and said probably something like: “Just great, man! Yeah!” and dropped me a beautifully wrapped item called Wrigley’s. It was sweet and tasted of peppermint and made me nearly faint with desire and I swallowed three quarters and kept one quarter for my mother after much inner struggle. Who refused it gracefully, read the cover and informed me about the nature of chewing gums.  
Slowly things got back to normal. The Polish enforced labourers were set free, got drunk on everything they could find, including methyl alcohol, staged a rampage including theft and rape, and my mother took me to town where we stayed in a small pension until the Poles were sent home. Our grand piano went for a few pounds of butter, but that was, as far as I remember, the final aftermath of the terrible war.
Germany began to recover amazingly fast, helped by the fact that the old alliances had crumbled and new strategies were needed to contain communist Russia. My elementary school years evolved uneventfully. While at high school, Germany won the football world cup, which lifted sprits even more, but must have caused a few indignant frowns in certain quarters.
My years at college were chaotic. We were forty boys in an overcrowded classroom, most of us for inexplicable reasons uncommonly tall, on the whole an unruly lot, and taught by teachers still heavily marked by the war. Our Latin master, I remember well, had been something of an air ace who flew the final missions mostly on amphetamines and little else. We adored him, and always sat motionless when he stopped dead in mid-sentence and grabbed his left arm with the right hand because it began to tremble uncontrollably while he stared with naked horror at something that had come back to haunt him. My own accomplishments were poor, due to a nearly total incomprehension of algebra barely counterbalanced by a few merits in other areas.   
It must have been during those years when the first terrible rumours began to emerge.

Dresden 1945

It did not take long and the rumours turned into a thunderclap so deafening that everybody stood benumbed, unable at first to grasp its full impact.  
Germany had begun to recover amazingly fast. At Nuremberg the Allies did a thorough job and strung up those ringleaders that weren’t of further use, while the lesser satraps got locked away or were let off with the proverbial black eye. Something not in store for the German prisoners of war who died by the tens of thousands in Eisenhower’s atrocious winter camps or Stalin’s monstrous gulags. The propaganda machinery continued for a while at full pelt, presenting Hitler’s Germany to the world as a nation of aggressors, gangsters, murderers, barbarians, collaborators and petty criminals, to name but a few, and in short the beastly Hun of old who had fully deserved his terrible fate.  
History is written by the victors, and even those who knew better clenched their teeth, shrugged, thanked God for their miraculous survival and busied themselves with clearing away the rubble. While those who were already duped into believing their implicit guilt thought it a reasonable price for a full belly and tried to look forward and never backwards again.  
As the years went by and the ugly Bear behind the Iron Curtain began to growl always louder and more threatening, Germany’s strategic importance became paramount. Which required a change of tactics, including an upgrading of the Hun into something like a human being. One that had to be accepted, with much grovelling and tail-wagging from its intellectual quarters, into the Family of Man again. The capitalist edition, naturally.       
My mother meanwhile had remarried, a union of convenience soon fraught with discord. It did not last long and sadly clouded the most formative period of my youth. She died recently, and the last time I saw her she asked me to take off my shoes and lay by her side. Already on the threshold and fading fast, she saw not the son but his father instead, the only lover of her long, long life. On my occasional visits to one of our great cathedrals I light a candle for both, and pray that they may be united again in a world of pure light, happy as on the day they first met, and their love a pledge that will outlast Eternity.

 

Caspar David Friedrich  Summer  Oil on Canvas 1807

For a while at least I became part of a real family, and one of its great moments was the arrival of a TV set. I still remember vividly the advent of the ruinous machine, font of utter stupidity, manipulator, death knell of civilisation’s last foundations. Though in those years it had a simple and almost innocent demeanour. Small, black and white, with a flickering screen, did its only channel disseminate carefully filtered news, much culture, Hollywood B movies, and some home-grown entertainment of dubious merit. High on the agenda stood a quiz show whose novelty remunerated for the sheer imbecility of its content. The quiz master himself became Germany’s most famous personage, focal point of a shattered nation’s rebounding dreams, and unaware that he was the brainchild of Freudian hoodlums who had, as part of a much subtler propagandistic machinery, taken it upon themselves to keep the tamed Hun from getting mischievous again.  
A new and more reliable High Priest for the young, they said approvingly, and, with disgust, for the elderly an ersatz magician in lieu of the real one who had blown his brains out only ten years previously.  
Some news items of those years are still much on my mind. Particularly the day when Sir Winston Churchill received the Karlspreis, or Charlemagne Award, at Aachen in the great Emperor’s beautiful chapel that dates back to 800 AD. Which had miraculously survived the combined USAF and RAF onslaught, contrary to countless civilians who had not. I don’t know to this day who came up with the idea, if one of those bootlicking, spineless, blathering politicians that are so endemic among modern democracies, or someone with a sardonic touch and a bright mind. Whatever the answer, the old boogie had just been given the boot by his own conservative buddies and was vainglorious enough to accept yet another distinction. Wheezing and shuffling down the long road to extinction, he must have felt positively bemused while observing a Germania redux, its new and somewhat synthetic phoenix rising powerfully from the ashes, whereas his own empire crumbled irreversibly into oblivion.      
‘It can’t be true’, whispered my mother as we watched the ghostly pageant in black-and-white. ‘This man is responsible for the death of millions! What has happened to the world? Have we all gone mad?!’  
We have, apparently. Though in those days, and already heavily indoctrinated, I missed the full meaning of her words. Whereas now I don’t, particularly after reading Patrick Buchanan’s Unnecessary War and Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. Who really boil it down to one single, terrible truth, namely that this man and his paymasters were the instigators not only of the death of Britain’s and America’s finest young men, but also of the greatest carnage, the worst fratricide committed in Mankind’s entire history. It is really here, in the inordinate hate for Germany as the old heartland of our incomparable Christian-European civilisation, that the roots can be found for the ever intensifying assault on the White Man’s right to exist.  
I wonder sometimes how this man must have felt during the twilight years of his life. Terrible, most likely. Fiddling with some pitiful canvas utterly devoid of human warmth, let alone artistic gratification. Abandoned by his old paymasters because that’s what they inevitably do once you’ve lost your expediency. Deserted by his political cronies who knew damn well what mess he had landed them in. Prowling the casinos of Monte Carlo where a greasy Onassis dropped an occasional chip into his pocket since he had blown his pension already at the tables. Bored to death by all the glorifications and laurels and distinctions which honoured, as he himself knew perfectly well, only the one great lie that was his life.  
And haunted by Agnes the Lamb and millions like her.  
If the Hereafter could be described as a mirror image of our present deeds and aspirations, their accumulated medium as independent of time and space yet perfectly real, then I prefer to see this man not sizzling in one of Hell’s deepest dungeons, but rather in an icy and echoing void where the whole Universe has recoiled into itself, leaving him alone with the terrible truth of his crimes, and the knowledge that whatever hope for redemption he has left must be abandoned, now and forever and into all Eternity.  

 

Caspar David Friedrich  Sea of Ice  Oil on Canvas 1824 

The thunderclap came one leisurely evening between supper and a glass of red wine. It was called By Night and Fog and changed my life forever.  
A documentary, it was called. Whereas in fact it was the testimony of an atrocity so vast that it defied imagination. Six million innocent souls killed in cold blood, with ruthless German efficiency, in the most horrible way possible. 
Three and a half million in Auschwitz alone. 
I have never seen the flick again. I couldn’t, and now I won’t. I don’t even remember particular sequences of it. All I can call to mind, in a sort of general way, are mountains of corpses, mountains of shoes, mountains of spectacles. And while I and the country still digested the seismic aftershocks, even worse was to come. 
Human bodies made into soap, human skin used as lampshades, human skulls boiled down to half their size like those of the Amazonian headhunters. Barbarous SS men smacking new-born babies against a wall. Dr. Mengele conducting unspeakable experiments with small children… 
A deathly pall fell over the country. Whoever had dared until then to point out the injustice of Versailles that was really the reason for everything in its wake, whoever maintained that Hitler’s Germany was not only the dreaded Gestapo and sinister SS but in many ways also amazingly caring and sane and clean, whoever stated that Hitler only wanted to recuperate stolen German land and never sought war except perhaps with Stalin and his murderous gang, fell silent for good. Because whatever had been done to Germany was total peanuts compared with what Germany had done to the Jews.  
Which was the reason why the land of Bach, Goethe and Kant became for the next fifty years a colony of lepers, openly or secretly despised by everyone except for their money, a commodity they lavished generously on the rest of the world in a timid effort at absolution.  
My education has been reasonably complete. Added were over the years more languages, simply by living, sometimes for over a decade, in various European countries. I read Byron, Leopardi, Lorca, Villon in the original. I adore them, of course, just as I adore Verdi or Vivaldi. Yet I could never, in a strictly subjective manner, prevent myself from being most awed by the incomparable phalanx of poets, composers, painters, philosophers, mystics and educators my own country has produced over the centuries. There was never any arrogance in this sentiment, though surely a subdued pride. And a deep and continuing sadness, even dread, that the holocaust could have happened in a nation of such intellectual magnificence.     
Soon I began to feel its effects on a practical level.  
On my first visit to Amsterdam a young Dutchman told me expansively, in perfect German and with the friendliest smile, of how to get in the quickest possible way to the Central Train Station. I walked for half an hour until I realized that he had sent my into the opposite direction. When I finally arrived, my train was long  gone and another one would leave only the next morning. So I stretched out on a bench in the waiting room, ready to pass the night there. But an official came and growled: ‘No Nazis here!’ I slunk away, and in a quiet street found another bench under a wide tree. When I woke well before sunrise, stiff and cold with an aching back, the resident company of doves had thoroughly splattered my coat with their droppings.   
In Paris the proprietor of a run-down pension asked me, once the bill was safely paid, if I had been a guard in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In Copenhagen some snotty poof who insisted he was part of young Elton John’s entourage wanted to know if my father had been an SS colonel. In Belgrade a woman spat into my face for reasons I can only imagine. And in Cadiz, during my seafaring days, I got into a fight with some Swedes who taunted me for once beyond endurance. Which left the pub in shambles, the Swedes on the floor and me with a black eye and three front teeth missing. Plus a night in jail and a heavy fine. Whereby the latter, to my great relief, was revoked after I had lisped my version of events to the Captain of Guardia Civil in charge. 
Keeping it in a nutshell, Germany’s glorious history had been reduced to a mere twelve years of unspeakable barbarity. Attempts at damage limitation were of course underway, like outing Hitler and his gang as Germanically  atypical, him a heathen Austrian at that. But whenever I stated in some foreign parts my name and nationality, I saw the minute hesitation, felt the slight inner recoil, and knew perfectly well what people were thinking. To tell the truth, and as the years went by, and me not being timid or over-sentimental in any case, it didn’t bother me too much. I began to know my own worth, and screw those who refused to recognize it. But as a result, the ugly German in me, and on the whole in many of my compatriots, tried always to be marginally more upright and just and honest than everybody else, even more forgiving. Which, not surprisingly, served us well in the long run. Only recently, after many a year, I revisited one of my old haunts high up in some Spanish mountains where I had spent nearly a decade and employed half the village in a varying and often hazardous enterprise. The warmth and simple joy I was received with made me swallow hard and wrestle down an aberrant tear.       
In my early twenties, while roaming through Europe by way of hitchhiking, I hung out for a few days in one of Rome’s many youth hostels. As the usual soiree of cheap Chianti and even cheaper Grappa got into full swing, a Jewish gentleman of Eastern provenance approached me and asked for a favour. He had twinkling little eyes, an uncommonly large and bulbous nose, high blood pressure, an ample midriff and must have been about seventy five years old. I fell of course over my own feet to accommodate him. His English was atrocious, and it took me some time to understand that he was on his way to Germany and needed a letter of introduction. Or better, a document that would help him to claim indemnifications. What for, I asked appalled, fearing immediately the worst. A good question, he conceded, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions. So we sat down and cooked up a story whose details I don’t remember anymore, but would probably blush crimson if they were read to me today. Rounding it off, he needed a name, since his was acoustically too cumbersome, too long and too Cyrillic in any case. As an experienced cosmopolitan I suggested Cohen, which for unclear reasons didn’t sit well with him. After some deliberations I came up with Germany’s foremost nonsense poet, and thus Mr. Morningstar was born. I hope he achieved his aims, continued to shine brilliantly, and lived happily ever after. When all was done, he patted my cheek approvingly and said: ‘Son! You are a good Nazi!’ Which left me, historically speaking, with the profound satisfaction that there must have been at least one of those in the whole wide world.  
Nazi, then. 
A label that became, like an unspecified threadworm, part of my inner make-up. It lurked at the back of my head, needed only one of the many catchwords to spring to attention, and haunted me sometimes in my dreams. As to the catchwords, Germany began practically to drown in them. Nourished by the war’s spineless intellectual leftovers and their aforementioned paymasters who had crept into every strata of the burgeoning media, they soon became a perverse gutter creed that secretly and intentionally challenged the established religion. It scuttled and hunkered wherever you looked, jumped onto your back in the most inappropriate moments, and snapped at your heels when you knelt down for a moment of silent prayer. To prop it up a giant and worldwide propaganda avalanche was launched in clearly predictable intervals, flaunting yet another horror story that had so far been overlooked by the prostrate historians. Which ended inevitably with the payment of yet another billion of German taxpayers’ money to some holocaust victims’ great-grandparents, great-grandchildren, third-degree-cousins and their murdered pet hamsters.  
As for myself, it took nearly fifty years until the first doubts began to appear. Doubts as hideous as the certainties that had beset me for most of my life.

Left: Auschwitz (Original Photo);      Right: Auschwitz (Wiesenthal
                                                                                                          Centre Rendering)
                

 

Published on April 4 and 11, 2010  at the Occiental Observer website,
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Colhaze-GermanyI.html
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Colhaze-GermanyII.html