Origins

By Reiner Schürmann and Elizabeth Preston

“Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it.” So writes Reiner Schürmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schürmann’s semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents itself as a continuous quest for—and struggle to free himself from—his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his fractured identity—in his childhood at his father’s factory, where he learns of the Nazi past through a horrible discovery; in an Israeli kibbutz, where, after a few months of happiness, he is thrown out for being a German; in postwar Freiburg, where he reencounters a friend who escaped the Nazi concentration camps; and finally, in the United States, where his attempts at a fresh start almost fail to exorcise the ghosts of the past.

Originally published in French in 1976, Origins was the winner of the coveted Prix Broquette-Gonin of the Académie Francaise. In close collaboration with the author, this meticulously crafted translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schürmann’s premature death in 1993 prevented its publication process and, as a result, one of the most important literary accounts of the conflicted process of coming to terms with the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past has been unavailable to English readers until now. Candid and frank, filled with fury and caustic sarcasm, Origins offers insight into a generation caught between disappointment and rage, alignment and rebellion, guilt and obsession with the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diaphanes
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9783037346099

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Reiner Schürmann

Origins

Translated from the French

by Elizabeth Preston

in collaboration with the author

diaphanes

Foreword to the English Edition

This is a book about the power that a past War holds over a German growing up in the 1950s and 1960s: born too late to see that war and too early to forget it. The narrative shows how painfully public events — the shadows, rather, of events gone by — intrude upon a life and shape it.

The English translation appears at a moment when most of the key issues have radically changed. Germany has signed what amounts to a peace treaty with her former enemies, and she is one again; Louis, without whose light the narrator’s life would have turned dark long ago, has died of Aids; the narrator himself is no longer an awkward job seeker in America, but a professor at a graduate school in New York.

Yet, now even more than when I wrote them, I dare believe that these pages tell something of the human condition. Nothing indeed has changed. Ghosts, it has appeared to me, are more tenaciously alive than the living. They impose laws on us that hold longer than those made by states or ideologists. I often joked with Louis: were I to write more about us, the story would be entitled, Follow Me If You Can. These words now have a meaning never anticipated then. When I will have followed him, in a very Greek sense of justice my life will have come full circle: back to the howlings in the midst of which, half a century ago today, it was conceived and born — back to my origins.

Reiner Schürmann, February 4, 1991

How I Learned to Clench My Fists

Thirty years ago I was in comfortable circumstances. Surrounded by warm and nutritive liquid, a parasite in the belly of a German woman who was indifferent to political ideas. Outside, the snow and the bombs fell. I learned to clench my fists and hit out against the walls that shut me in. Nails grew on my fingers and toes. Today I have twenty all told. Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it. Rocked by events which I did not experience. Sometimes I shake them off, as I shake flies off my shirt. They settle down again in other guises: sounds in the air, smells in the nostrils, movies, tombstones, commemorative stamps, distracted faces, mayoral and presidential speeches, solitary nightmares, bursts of laughter, bursts of anger, simply bursts. I touch my body, biceps, thighs, genitals and all: to be born in the midst of massacres and to have a body that functions normally — it’s maddening. However, I have a way of thinking that is not normal. For me, thinking is building dams. To dam up the accusations. I contrive windshields against language, against the to and fro of wretched syllables. Always the same words. Jew or Nazi? Ally or Axis? Winner or loser of history? I, for one, lost. At the end of the war I was four years old. Therefore I do not know what the words and images mean that pursue me. I do not quite know what reality is. Sometimes it seems to me that the persecutions of the past are more real than the comfort of the present. I do not know how to forget either. That, I do not know at all. Nor if I am right to devote myself to these counterfeit memories of Nazism. Nor what all this adds up to.

So, Anna was pregnant with me. My fabrication got under way when Germany invaded France. Recently, at the table, I said to my father: You must have had a jolly celebration in May of 1940.

Why?

Well … I was born nine months afterwards.

Nonsense.

I found this strange. My father grumbled, protested. I in- sisted.

Obviously, one night after the Invasion you were rather intimate.

Not at all. Your mother and I were hundreds of miles away from each other.

This is getting more and more interesting!

He took some more soup, tranquilly swallowed two spoonfuls. A mystery, then. The first of a long series. Accepting that my origins are forever bound up with the war. Anna lived in Amsterdam. Everybody was talking: the maid, about dinner, the radio, about air raids, Anna, about the peace. Meanwhile I quietly proceeded to my first cellular division in the little bubble inside Anna. She did not suspect anything, nobody suspected anything. When I think about all this, after a while I see the floor tilt upwards. Something happened between the first clenching of my fists and today. Something which did not make for unclenching my fingers. Nothing serious. But its symptoms appeared very early. Tottering steps, dumbness. I learned to laugh and to make laugh, even to listen, but I am never entirely present. Part of me has not developed since 1941. It got stuck in the prelogical phase. All I want is to know. To know whence, how and why I have been linked to exterminations. If only someone would give me the word. The name of that towards which I advance, pushing and pulling. If only someone would tell me why I come from that era of howling, and why I am running. An encounter with oneself which does not come to speech is the most miserable of defeats. But up till now no one has been able to pronounce the word that would explain to me. I asked those who took part in the events. Stalingrad and all that. Their harpings! They rehashed the same tedious arguments. They bored me stiff. In spite of their shrapnels in the thighbone and their newspaper clippings, they understood nothing. I expatriated myself mentally. I was led to run well ahead of those who today flee their offices, courtrooms, bedrooms, classical studies, modern studies, their steak and french fries, their hangers-on, their hang-overs, all sorts of hang-ups. My own hang-up is clear enough: having been born with a million corpses on my back. And having too good a memory as well. Never mind if this is confused. I am going to spell it out, the question which torments me. And as I get ready to spell it out, it starts tormenting me again: Why this past? Why is this past mine? A past which I did not even know?

* * *

Today I am thirty. Since there is no one to give me a birthday present, I am undertaking this book. It is only natural that it should be dedicated to myself.

Speaking of birthdays. I grew up on the grounds of a factory. Mining explosives. There was a red-haired worker there. A weary, enormous matron with unhealthy skin, usually tightly clad in an almost transparent dress. I never knew either her age or her name. I can still see her, resting her elbows on the hood of a broken-down truck. Her arms perpendicular to her body, leaning as if on the counter of a bar. She had languorous eyes. I found her beautiful. She spoke to me with a sort of affection. I felt complacent and bovine. I don’t like faces that express distrust towards me. Silent distrust especially horrifies me. With her it was all pure approbation. Her eyes slid over me from head to foot.

You have something about you which would have pleased me several years ago.

I suspected that she had something in the back of her mind. But I wasn’t afraid yet. I said to her:

Why several years ago? Why not now?

Oh, well, you know, now …

She looked around. I had often seen this movement with her. She turned her head very slowly. First over her right shoulder, then over the left. There were always people about. We stood next to a metal rolling shop. The workers came and went. This woman didn’t give the impression of working very hard.

Come back tomorrow.

She shambled away. Her dresses were always dirty. She had big hips, hips that gave off a wild-animal smell which will always remain my sensual reference. This woman imprinted deep within me a fascination for the monstrous. She was stolid and probably had a vile character. When she spoke I went from hot to cold and from cold to hot. She said that when one finally knows, it is too late. And that anyway one would never really know. I felt myself overtaken by anxiety. I did not understand at all, but her face spoke louder than her words. I consulted her like a Pythia. I came back every afternoon. Then one day she decided that the time was right. She leaned towards me suddenly.

Come on, let’s go. It’s your birthday. I have a surprise for you.

I did not understand. She was nervous. I had never seen her in such a state.

Follow me. Keep ten feet behind.

She walked around the broken-down truck, went the length of the shop, turned to the left, then to the right, and then left again. I had never been to this part of the factory. My father told us every week that it was off limits. All I knew was that there were underground passages with stocks of melinite. It is very dangerous, said my father.

Wait here till I call you. And for God’s sake, don’t let anyone see you.

She went down some steps. I heard her swear, then nothing more. A door creaked far away underground. I heard the click of a switch.

Come on, but don’t make any noise.

I groped my way along a sweating wall. At the end of a corridor I saw a rectangle of light. The door. Behind it a light bulb.

Follow me. I’m going to show you the pyjamas. At your age you have to know.

We were several yards underground. She walked fast. Very decidedly. Resistance rose in me. But not enough to make me go back the way I had come. Dank rooms, dank corridors, more rooms. Sometimes a door had to be unbolted. Electric wiring ran everywhere. Most of the light bulbs worked. I avoided stepping in puddles of brownish water. When I crushed cockroaches, they made a tiny, dry sound.

It’s going to stink behind this door.

She turned two strong levers. She pushed the door with her elbow, then backed up.

Careful. Don’t step on them.

At first I couldn’t see very well. Something like a pile of rubbish at my feet. It gave off a sweet, sickening stench.

Take a good look.

I saw fingerbones clenched around the handle of a rusty knife. I saw some other bones. In the middle of the shapeless mass, I saw two human skulls. They were partially covered with a dark conglomerate. Like a thick mold. I stared madly. I also saw shreds of striped cloth.

We called them the pyjamas. Forced labor. They were housed in these underground passages.

I leaned forward to see better. Suddenly a warm, brown liquid escaped from between my lips. A uniform stream falling directly upon one of the two skulls. A fundamental reorganization of my inner liquids began.

Let’s go back. Rinse out your mouth before you talk to your mama. And nothing about this visit. Understand?

Ever since this excursion I have lived in fear of having to blow out candles. That same evening everybody sang Happy Birthday to me. I inhaled deeply, quickly ascertained the number of little flames, bent forward. Then the cake was covered with vomit.

Those two fellows in the underground passages had sought to escape. With a knife they had tried to pry away the sheet of iron on the door. Their guards had simply abandoned them on the arrival of the Allies. That’s how they had died. That the past exists for the sake of the future I would admit and even believe myself. That the memory of my compatriots reaches back no farther than last week, or last year at most, I believe as well. But I don’t believe that you can wipe out the past by simply forgetting it. I don’t believe that years blot out deaths by the thousands, nor that the future belongs to the young, and so on and so forth. Nor that life loves me. Today I have a bank account, a Volkswagen, trousers with creases down the front, political opinions, a personalized signature. I can speak with a semblance of clarity about things that might interest ordinary mortals, and at night I go to bed with plans for tomorrow. But I am incapable of feeling accepted. Running away. I run away. I spend my time eclipsing myself. I feign interest, but in truth I am preparing another escape. With the passing of the years, I have become expert at organizing my flights. I like them to follow one another without any loss of time.

For two or three weeks I did not go back to see the red-haired woman. I kept close to the house. Most of the workshops were still destroyed or dismantled. My father was progressively rebuilding the factory. His life’s work. A few years later he would sell his products abroad. The exploders were assembled in halls partly still without roofs. At twenty-five past four the workers got ready to go home. You did not see anyone in the aisles. They clustered like grapes behind the entrance doors. Five minutes later, the siren. Closing time. Then came the crush. All the doors were flung open at the same time. The workers jostled one another to be first to the showers. A three hundred yard run. The horrible rush, said my mother. She required us to be inside at that time. From my window I watched the workers scramble. The fat redhead was always last. Each time she threw me a glance. It made my heart beat faster. For that reason alone I installed myself at the window.

One day I signaled to her. She stopped, looked around. Always this movement of the head. Then she came closer. I jumped down to the foot of the wall.

Can I ask you a question?

Anything, but not about love. You’re too young for that.

I would like to recall exactly what she said to me. I have trouble bringing back the least detail from that epoch. Foreboding has acted as a censor. I already suspected the general decomposition in and around me. But I did not know it yet. I was suffering from something very precise. A sort of colossal question without words. The flaccid face of this woman is my only point of reference. I spoke to her, standing, close to the old truck. After a few sentences I had to sit down on the running board. What the worker said entered into my legs and softened them instantly. Once her words made me wet my pants. At other times digestive gas escaped uncontrollably. I understood nothing that she said. I was absorbed in my trousers.

You told me I would have pleased you several years ago.

Oh, yes, with your cute little mug. Like on the Nazi propaganda posters. You would have looked splendid carrying a beautiful banner.

In other words: you would have been a Nazi just like the rest of us, and that’s that. I know she was right. But I did not understand. The tickling in the back of my throat started again. Strange that I should seek out that woman, when I usually came back from these interviews with soiled pants or shirt. But how to resign oneself to ignorance, with Hitler gone only a few years? Still today, I would like to throw up the past as one vomits a meal. I have learned nothing since my consultations with the redhead. Till the day of my death I shall learn nothing. I want to blow up the walls of the conceivable. That is what I demanded of this somewhat embittered woman: the word for the inconceivable. I have never recovered from my initial astonishment. The words of the red-headed worker come back to me.

Your father came here at the end of 1945. Everybody respects him. He impressed me. But I suppose he’s tough. As a father, I mean. The house that you live in was the headquarters of the work police. In your room they tore off the fingernails of Ukranian pyjamas. I’m telling you because I’ve worked here all my life. The bosses were from the Wehrmacht … Yesterday they beat up a Tommy.

She talked, it was mirific. But in all her explanations it seemed as if there was something that was purposely being hidden from me.

You are keeping something from me. You’re doing it on purpose.

A big laugh. Then she threw herself into incomprehensible pronouncements. These hinged on one sentence:

We did not fight for Nazism.

For what then?

Our dignity. They took away our dignity. To do that to a nation is unforgivable.

I thought dignity was something like a crayon box that gets lost. I myself had mislaid one just a few days before. I understood at least that much of what she said. But my comprehension stopped there. I remain incapable of finding a meaning in the past. It is not wise to teach children history. Of that I am the living proof. Here are the words that I recognize immediately on a printed page: extermination, German, torture, border, concentration camp, death, law court. Here are the things I like: family albums, misty mornings, the Rhine, kites, baths that are too hot and last too long, fooling policemen and the military, inventing stories about passengers in a subway car. May Day parades for internationalism, fits of genuine indignation, abstract words as far as possible from reality. Things I do not take seriously: talk about reconciliation, moonlight, uniforms, churches, Sigmund Freud, my tears when they are due to alcohol. What other people do not take seriously: my anger. When I am going to blast an enemy my throat closes up. They do not understand a word. I produce hoarse sounds in a strangled voice. I find myself formidable, but they ask politely: What did you say? Excuse me, sir? I am more accustomed to beseeching inflections. No wonder for one born into horror. Friends tell me it does not help you live a better life. It comes from the liver, says the doctor. It comes from Karma, or from the atomic bomb, or from the incoherence of destiny, or from a nationalism in reverse. Here again, I do not know.

* * *

For years brutality remained concentrated in this redhead. By some curious transfer, the blood, the screams, were her. I had a dream. I go into a tent. The interior is humid, the air tainted. Hundreds of visitors come and go. Their clothes are soaking wet. A film is projected. Biplanes fly over a house. You can see the pilots, they are wearing leather helmets. Near a wall a naked woman is stretched out on her back. She seems familiar. But I cannot manage to place her in my memory. The airplanes beset the house, depart, return. The upper stories crumble. Wreckage and dust bury the naked body. The woman writhes in all directions, not from pain but from laughter. She spreads her legs. The airplanes attack faster and faster. The woman laughs. I make out her carroty pubic hair. In the tent, some children are sitting on the floor. They look on in silence. Behind them, electric guitars charge the atmosphere with violence. Some spectators turn away. Others are laughing too. Heaps of debris cover the woman’s body. In close-up you see her bloodied vulva. The hairs shine with thick, red drops.

The tetanization of my mind. When exactly did it begin? In the underground corridors with the two corpses? Or rather during the conversation with the redhead when I asked her:

Why these Englishmen in uniform?

So you have seen them.

Or perhaps the day the Englishman refused a seat on the bus to my red-headed friend. Germany was occupied. Soldiers of all nationalities marched in the streets. Every day one of the workers from the factory deposited a sack of coal in the bushes under my window. Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. They arrived at a set hour, shortly before the siren announced the end of work. A few minutes later a British soldier came by. Apparently quite by chance. I waited behind the window curtain. The Englishman crossed the square outside the factory, stuck his hand into the branches. The sack was hidden from his view. He seized it with a sure, routine movement. He never took any precautions to conceal it. He recrossed the square as if nothing were afoot.

What was this traffic in coal about? Evidently it was