Conditionals
by Anna-Christina Schmidl
We understand each other. Unspoken in the silence, the ghosts of history. You are learning German to read Marcuse and Benjamin. You say you like the sound of it. I learned how to say “I love you” in Hebrew. I am moved by A Walk to Caesarea. I watched Schindler’s List in the theatre with a friend for the 25th anniversary since its release. Afterwards he said to me: “Isn’t it weird knowing that everything you grew up with, all the institutions, are built on this?” When we watched Indiana Jones, you joked about the Nazis. “Nice uniforms! Come on, let them win.” You told me it is a form of revenge. You know about Nolte and the Historikerstreit ‘86–87. You know Jean Améry, and that Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine. You know Tom Segev and The Seventh Million. You know that Adorno and Horkheimer sought to liberate language from power. You know Moshe Landau and Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh, the judges at the Eichmann trial. Raveh was born Franz Reuss in Lower Saxony. He spoke German with the same accent as my grandparents.
I visited Mauthausen concentration camp in high school when I was 14. Less than a week later, my father died. His first name was Hermann, like Göring’s, whom he called “die Drecksau.” As he’d done, I read a lot about the Second World War. I looked at photographs in Vespignani’s Faschismus. I read how many tanks were deployed at Stalingrad. I memorized the names of the Vernichtungslager. Auschwitz-Birkenau Belzec Chełmno Majdanek Sobibor Treblinka. I whisper them under my breath, like the prayer in André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just.
I stayed awake an entire night after you told me your grandparents were survivors. I was deprived of language, lost for words. Adorno said writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Celan wrote die Todesfuge. We both know this. W.G. Sebald, your favorite, wrote The Emigrants. Can we, still? Talk to each other despite this crushing weight?
Anna-Christina Schmidl is an international lawyer and writer from Germany.