Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir

Chapter 1

I had two sets of parents. The set I remember adopted me in 1945, when I was four. They loved me and did for me what was within their power under circumstances they taught me to accept as hostile; you worked hard in such a world and you kept to yourself.

Only glimpses remain to me of another couple, thrilling, luxurious. An exuberant man swings me high into the air above him, his upturned face aglow. A succulent, rose-gold woman laughs shimmering cascades as I learn to walk.

My adoptive parents never referred to my real parents. Early on I assumed that what had made necessary this transfer of a child from one sort of family to another was The War. Of all explanations and nonexplanations, The War was the most unassailable. God was no match for it. When I was nine or ten, my adoptive father sometimes argued with me about the existence of God. Fortified with phrases from my religious education classes, I believed in such an existence. He did not. The argument was meant as—and was—a treat for me. Time simply spent with children was rare.

One could discuss God but not The War, how it had come about or what, and who, had been involved, though the last of these questions was easy to figure out, even for a child. It had been us against, well, the Americans, and, let’s see, the Russians, and the French, too, and of course there’d been the English, whose occupation forces were quartered less than a block from where we lived. The most daring of the neighborhood children (ill-concealed behind gray wood posts that held up clotheslines sagging under sheets) would shout to impassive faces: Tommy-go-home.

It was not in my vocabulary to ask my adoptive parents about my real, my former parents. Not once while they were alive was I able to find the words: Look folks, what happened to you? What changed you so?

Chapter 2

Do not exaggerate, the truth suffices." Professor Doctor Szekely once wrote that on a composition of mine. She used the formal Sie, the first adult to address me in this manner, I was twelve. Her short, white hair was held behind each ear with a silvery pin, tweed suits accentuated her fragile grace. Her passions were language and the teaching of German, and because I was in love with her I loved the subject she taught and wanted to spend my life writing compositions, which she might grace with profound and oracular comments using Sie.

Would she write do not exaggerate across my paper now? Of course I wasn’t adopted. Of course the difference wasn’t that extreme. Of course my parents laughed after 1945 too, sometimes they told jokes, once my father danced with me. But it’s no exaggeration at the crux of it, at the soul of it.

Chapter 3

The woman in a flowered dress has already published a book on the topic being explored, and the one in black has nearly finished writing hers. They are talk-show guests, discussing the rewards and perils inherent in being a mistress. I scrutinize the women’s mouths and bodies and try to imagine what they do in bed, and whether what they do is more adventurous than what their lovers’ wives are accustomed to doing. It is not a rewarding speculation, though it results in the spineless calm that sometimes accompanies doing what is expected of one: in question after question, the host panders to an audience he assumes is thinking what I am thinking. He leers, and winks and leers.

Dialing full circle produces nothing but commercials, I am tired of reading, and it’s too early to go to sleep. Through half-closed eyes I watch the women converge on their host and wind microphone cords around his neck, carefully following the line where wavy white hair meets the collar of a made-to-order shirt; he gasps and promises never to sneer in public again. . . . But the mistresses have left, the first part of the program is over, there is more to come.

Seven or eight men are introduced, writers, writer-historians, historians, a psychiatrist. They have gathered to discuss the fascination a man named Adolf Hitler holds for the public, why so many books have been written about him—nearly fifty thousand between 1945 and 1975 alone, claims one of the historians; though his neighbor contests this figure, an amiable consensus continues to prevail—the components of National Socialism, genocide, lunacy and evil, and whether there is a difference between the latter two.

One scholar takes exception, with all due respect, to what another has succeeded in advancing. A third agrees with the former, though in direction only, not in emphasis—or maybe the direction is shaky and the emphasis is richly deserved—while someone in the corner labels the thrust of the current argument not the most productive, and suggests that his colleagues consider instead his very own emphasis and direction. These are men devoted to their specialty, the one who has published most recently looking more genuinely at ease than his peers, the book is doing well. I have stopped switching channels. The host does not condescend to this group, he is impressed and eager to impress in turn. How did it happen? he asks. And, gravely, again, What made it possible for it all to happen?

There is a hush, then the guests dive into the void at once. Their genial moderator soothes and sorts them into order until they deliver themselves of differing theories one by one. Riveted, I listen to each. On the nearest piece of paper I scribble the answer that resonates most profoundly, the man pronouncing it makes it easy for me; he repeats the phrase twice, slowly and emphatically, his somber face given over to the camera as a sun worshipper’s, . . . the comprehensive crisis of a capitalist economy. While the host says, . . . short pause, I look down at what turns out to be my grocery list for tomorrow: milk, bologna, peaches, toilet paper—my needs rendered vaguely ominous, titled as they are by the historian’s statement. I watch the men lean toward each other in soundless conversation as the camera pulls up and back, then I turn off the set.

Better to speculate about the plight of the kept woman in today’s-society-in-transition-blah-blah, I think, even that may come in handy someday. What use, on the other hand, will these learned men’s pronouncements be to me, their fascination with a minuscule portion of the topic they have made their life’s work? I know better. Hitler got as far as he did for one reason, a simple one. It all happened because my father joined his party and idolized him, and because my mother did and felt whatever my father did and felt, and enormous masses of people did and felt as my parents did and felt. And a comprehensive crisis of a capitalist economy it may well have been, and a lot of other things too, but that’s neither here nor there for me.

Chapter 4

My parents are dead and I need to think highly of them.

By highly I mean: I need to think of my parents as an ordinary couple surrounded by ordinary numbers. Two children, forty-two schillings, three days to Christmas, seventy-eight kilometers to our grandparents’ farm. I need to think of my parents as an ordinary couple unconnected to the numbers that in some of my nightmares they expose to me on their bared wrists. (My mother pushes up the sleeve of a sweater she has knitted for herself, my father turns back the frayed cuff of a plaid workshirt, newly washed, ironed with care.) I need to think of my parents as an ordinary couple counting ordinary numbers, unencumbered by tattoos: Six Million. A large six, six perfectly rounded zeros.

A psychiatrist says to me, What’s the matter with you, who do you think you are, anyway! You think those two little people caused it all? What kind of megalomania is that!

That isn’t the point, though. Even if they did not cause it all, even if they did not cause anything, directly, one prefers not to have one’s parents lumped with history’s worst: Nazis.

Clearly, that’s not the point either. The point is, Six Million is unimaginable. If my parents were connected—at all, any which way—with the amassing of this number, then they are unimaginable too.

My father (the former Nazi, the man I remember) did not speak about Hitler, The War, or Jews. I wish I could have known the boy who grew up to be the man who became the Nazi. As it is, most of what I have is conjecture.

I still don’t know if my mother belonged to the party, but she loved my father. They happened to sit next to each other in a movie theater in 1937 and toward the end of the show she cried and he offered her a handkerchief and she adored him from then on and never slept with another man.

If I think Six Million, my parents become monstrous in my brain and more monstrous and then so monstrous that I fight for breath and they become abstract. Abstract, they are specimens to me, and I begin to breathe again. I cannot think, Six Million, and see my parents (Mutti, Vati) in personal terms. In order to envision my parents, I have become adept at scores of highly specific, varying maneuvers of my own design. These maneuvers are as convoluted, intricate, eerie, and without apparent pattern as certain works of lace, madness-made-decorative, fashioned by inmates of a Belgian insane asylum. Marvels, one art critic dubbed them. As I spin out my maneuvers, I conjure up anonymous, mad lacemakers (silently moving their lips, frowning in concentration) laboring at theirs. Mine do not result in a visible product. They consist of relentless attempts—successful, at times, for months; more often an unraveled failure within minutes—to blank the Six Million out of my mind.

Chapter 5

When I first came to the United States in 1957, as an exchange student and at the age of sixteen, I discovered that a four-year-old might throw a plate of peas across a room and be no more than mildly reprimanded, that milk did not need to be boiled on the day it was purchased, that adults chewed gum. (I had received my first stick of gum five years earlier, from an English soldier, on my way home from school in a streetcar. He stood next to me in the aisle. Just before getting off he turned toward me, looked past my left ear, and thrust the gum at me. When I got home my mother slapped me, had me throw out the wad, and—between sobs—made me promise never to accept anything from a stranger again, particularly a foreigner, most particularly an occupation soldier.)

I discovered that pupils in high school did not sit in one room all day but surged through mammoth hallways past lockers with metal doors, which they slammed on their way to different rooms, once every hour. That boys and girls went to the same school and that girls wore ungainly socks in contrast to my Austrian peers and myself, who had worn stockings for years. At home I had come to feel comfortable with the foreign language in which I’d had six years of thrice-weekly lessons, working up from the cat is on the mat to Shakespeare. Now came the discovery that my English was not the anonymous raincoat I had fancied it to be: serviceable, a garment appropriate for a variety of alien climates, a measure of protective coloring allowing the foreigner beneath to pass among the natives without attracting undue attention. Instead I was obliged to flaunt the most restricted of wardrobes: language as outlandish apparel, gaudy, mismatched colors jarringly at odds with beige Shetland sweaters, an oddity impossible to overlook amid hundreds of identical jackets proclaiming my new school’s name. Though I longed to disown my foreigner’s garb I knew I needed it. I wrapped it tightly across my shoulders and clutched its fringed ends to my chest with both hands lest it slide off me during a moment of carelessness, leaving me mute, bereft even of this flimsy and garish shelter, my English, an improbably unfashionable, loosely crocheted shawl, consisting of many more holes than thread. Such big houses, I would say, but they were tall buildings. One did not say please in response to thank you, one said, you are welcome, a phrase that, translated back into German, not only made no sense at all in a post-thank-you context but sounded comically, absurdly, like something Winnetou would say, my Sioux hero from the Karl May books that I had loved only a couple of years ago. Of course, my Gymnasium English lessons had been designed mainly to teach me to read. But even my confidence in the ability to decipher the written word was short-lived. TaterTots defied my dictionaries.

There were major discoveries, too. One occurred on a peaceful evening during one of the pleasant talks through which the American couple, who had offered to harbor a foreign student, now attempted to get to know this foreign student. They asked friendly questions that I answered happily, flattered by their attention and interest. I told them about my grandparents’ mountain farm, about my scrappy twelve-year-old brother, and how important it was to my parents that I do well in school. And that my father had been building a house with his own hands, literally, year after year, every day after work and every weekend. It had taken him eight months to dig out the basement. Neighbors, marveling at the thickness of the homemade walls, had dubbed his project Seiler’s Bunker.

Mom and Dad, as they had instructed me to call them, were delighted with this detail. And he works at his job all day too, think of that, said Mom. And Dad asked, Has he always worked as a clerk in a factory?

No, I said, just for the last few years. Before that he worked as a laborer in that same factory and before that he was a locksmith, and before 1945 he was a policeman.

There was a silence, during which I smiled first at one, then at the other of the two adults facing me. A policeman, repeated Dad. "You surely don’t mean to say that your father was a Nazi."

Yes, I said, I think he was.

The questions that followed were put to me with a great deal more urgency: What rank had my father held, why had he never gone to prison, had he gone to prison? Where had he been during the war, how long had he been a policeman, how long had he been a Nazi, what rank had he held?

I was unable to answer any of these questions except one: No, he had never been to prison. Mom and Dad repeated the remaining questions and asked a number of others, but when my answers continued to be unsatisfactory the inquiries came to an end. Nazis were evil, said Dad gravely.

It’s time to go to bed, said Mom.

Right, said Dad. Now we won’t talk about any of this anymore, but National Socialism was evil and would have destroyed the world if we hadn’t stopped it in time.

My second major discovery was television. Enjoyable as it was to watch the Mouseketeers with the four-year-old after school, dazzled as I was along with the family by Raymond Burr at night, nothing compared to what I came across three weeks into my stay. The set was kept upstairs, in a room next to the bedroom that I shared with the fifteen-year-old daughter of what was referred to as my American family. Everyone was asleep. I quietly shut the door on the girl breathing deeply in the bed next to mine, moved a chair to within a foot of the set, and turned it on, very low, only to hear someone bark in German. An American actor, clearly, and mangling his lines so as to make me stifle a giggle and wonder whether my English appeared this comical to Americans. But linguistic concerns quickly became unimportant. When the make-believe German wearing a swastika armband had finished barking, he raised his rifle and struck a feeble old man on the head. The old man, whose hands were tied behind his back, collapsed at the attacker’s feet, his face coming to rest, in close-up, partly on a cobblestone and partly on the kind of boots my father used to wear when I was a child.

Chapter 6

So I had come upon my first war movie, to be followed by what seemed like hundreds. Throughout my stay I could count on seeing one