The German Mujahid

RACHEL’S DIARY, TUESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 1994

Face pressed to the window, I stare out at the carpet of clouds. Everything is white, the clouds and the sky, motionless, flickering fit to blow a fuse. I close my eyes. My thoughts are waiting for me, dark and murky, ready to drag me under. I feel exhausted. I open my eyes and look around. The plane drones gently, it is packed with passengers glowing with health, the light is mild, the temperature milder still. The passengers bury themselves in their newspapers, whisper to each other or doze. They are Germans, for the most part. This is their regular commute. When I was checking in at Roissy, I noticed most of them didn’t have any luggage, just a roll-on Samsonite, a briefcase, a couple of magazines tucked under their arm. This is routine to them, they could do the trip blindfolded. They’re freshly scrubbed, well-groomed, long-suffering as Buddhist monks. They’re tired, but they never let it show. It’s a matter of habit and considerable self-discipline. There is something terrifying about the deathly daily commute that passes for life in Paris. Somehow on a plane it’s even more depressing. Airports are the anthills of the third millennium, high-surveillance hubs with their business hotels like glass prisons, the hidden loudspeakers spouting counter-fatwas born in the bellies of all-powerful computers. When they arrive, there are the buses, the metros, the trains, the lines of taxis waiting to shuttle them onwards until at last everyone disappears into their hermetically sealed homes. Anonymity is daunting, definitive, spanning the planet and the movements of capital. These people arrive in Paris every morning, attend their business affairs, then take a plane back the same night or the next day, and by the time they land there another flight is waiting for them. They come and go and all they need to pack is a toothbrush. I’m just like this when I travel on business — a robot, all I need is an oil change and a socket to plug in my electric razor. I arrive, do what I have to, go back to the hotel, pick up my things and head back to the airport. Now and then we let our hair down. With the Italians, the Spaniards and the Greeks, it happens all the time, it doesn’t matter whether business goes well or badly. Mediterraneans like to party, we can be crude, rude, tell each other anything — that’s how we relax. The Germans, the Austrians, the Swiss and the English are different, work is their religion and their hobby. We might take time off for a coffee break occasionally, talk about the weather. The most thrilling places to me are the former dictatorships still riddled with red tape, violence and corruption. I love the film-noir feel of these places, they still cling to the best of socialism, the conspiracy, the cloak and dagger politics, but have adopted the choicest parts of capitalism, its killer instinct. All these hopeless people who shuffle along, and the others who are constantly chasing some insistent rumour that will not let them rest until they’re dead. The murkiness, the mystery, the frenzy, the misery. And the joy when — by the purest fluke — you stumble on some nameless civil servant, some nondescript hanger-on who, with a magician’s flourish, makes one phone call and breaks the impasse in a public finance contract someone has just sworn would never be resolved. That’s when parties start, the endless round of formal ceremonies, not to commemorate a successful conclusion to an honest negotiation or the miraculous release of a bank transfer — that would be tasteless — no, to celebrate the friendship between our two great countries, the entente cordial between their great leaders. By the time you get home, you have lots of stories to tell your friends, and you can exaggerate as much as you like without the fear of overdoing it: a spy here, a hit man there, an assassination attempt in a hotel lobby, the minister who strangles his secretary in the middle of negotiations for leaving out a zero in a memo, the minister who pisses on lobbyists who are not from the same tribe as he is, the leader who gasses a rebel village then flies around in his Sunday best apologizing and proclaiming a new world order. You hear a lot more than you ever see. In these countries of constant mourning, rumor and gossip are the lifeblood of every day, every minute. I’ve never quite understood how our bosses manage to make any money out of these power-mad lunatics desperate to keep every penny to themselves, but then again, we sell pumping systems, something people can’t live without, and even if we’re motivated purely by greed, it will never be as big as their appetite. We’ve got pumps in all colours, to suit all tastes, horizontal and vertical, manual and remote, tiny pumps the size of a marble and vast installations you’d need to build a hangar to hide. We’re the market leader, we have something to tempt even the most difficult customers.

I miss Ophélie, even if she is the most difficult woman in the world. I want so much to be home, to go back to our boring suburban routine, anything for a quiet life. But she’s probably lying on the sofa over at her mother’s place right now, crying and ranting about me and about men in general, but especially Algerian and German men since we’re born stupid and cruel. I know how eloquent she can be on the subject, though not as eloquent as my mother-in-law. By now, the two of them will have flayed our relationship to the bone. God himself could not save us now. Ophélie and I don’t talk anymore, she sits in her corner sulking and I sit in mine thinking. We’re past the stage where some grand gesture could bring us back together more passionate than ever; and although we have both stopped digging, coldly, inexorably, the hole we are in just keeps getting bigger. The war is almost at an end, the silence of this phony ceasefire simply heralds the breakup. It’s probably for the best. I’ll never be a normal man, a dutiful husband again. I’ve left her the bedroom and the living room, now I sleep in a corner of the mezzanine and I spend my evenings in the garage. I’ve set up our camping stuff and a bookcase out there. Everything is in that bookcase, all thirty volumes of it, the extermination of the world and the glacial silence that followed. I don’t know why I haven’t told Ophélie about this. Shame, maybe, the fact that I don’t understand it myself, fear of the consequences. There is a difference between saying to yourself, “I am the son of a war criminal,” and hearing someone else say, “You’re the son of a war criminal, a man guilty of genocide!” Besides, we’ll only end up talking about me, about us, about our insignificant domestic problems, and I don’t want to talk about what we need to do to “sort things out” when in my head I’m trying to sort out something that is beyond me, beyond us, something that will always be beyond us. Ophélie has always been pretty good at substituting one problem for another, with no regard for the nature or gravity of the original problem. She flits from subject to subject like a butterfly and, in the end, everything always comes back to her. But right now I’m trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, something that would try the patience of God himself, and behind it all is the figure of my father.

While I was thinking about my work and my personal problems, the plane had landed and was now taxiing along the runway towards the terminal of Hamburg airport. I’ve been through this airport so often that I hardly notice it. It’s just another glass and steel box with flickering fluorescent lights. In the crowd, no one notices me, I’m just another passenger, just another German. If they do notice me it’s only because, like all Frenchmen abroad, I draw attention to myself. That’s how we are, we complain whenever things don’t go our way in foreign countries. Today, however, I felt tense, I felt scared, I shuffled forward in a daze. People jostled me, gave me strange looks, talked behind my back in German, in English, in Japanese, some of them frankly sneering, which should give you some idea of the state I was in. Until now, I’ve only ever travelled for work — where everything is pre-planned, every minute timetabled, I am met at every airport — or with Ophélie, who anticipates every problem before it happens. I am lost, searching for myself, I am travelling back through time, peering through shadows, exploring the greatest atrocity the world has ever known and trying to work out why I am carrying the weight of it on my shoulders. In fact, it is because I already know that what I am doing is so painful. It would be impossible for me to grasp the enormity of this tragedy and emerge unscathed. I am terribly afraid I will come face-to-face with my father in some place where no man can stand and still be a man. My very humanity is at stake.

Hamburg, it has to be said, is in rude health. A very Teutonic health. Behind the beautiful façades there is something substantial, there are pleasing depths. Compared to Germany, our beloved Frankreich looks like a badly run campsite. In France, we see healthiness as a sin, with all its connotation of money, monopolies, class struggle, and the exasperating exuberance of nouveau riche nonentities. If we spend so much time and money on our bodies it’s probably to purge our bourgeois sins. We have become overweight, chubby-faced, bright-eyed dyed-in-the-wool revolutionaries. With my haunted look, my deathly pallor, my face unshaven, I looked obviously French, something that clashed with my glaringly robust Nordic physique. I tried to make up for it, but I couldn’t: I’d forgotten how to be exhausted and hide it, how to get annoyed without losing my temper, how to be completely lost but walk as though I knew exactly where I was going. I rented a car and set out. All I wanted was to be alone. More alone than anyone in the world.

Deepest darkest Germany is really dark and deep, much more so than France, which is open to the four winds, bounded by the seas and the mountains, its last hidden beauty spots ruthlessly exploited by tour operators and estate agents. Tourism is a tragedy for any country. The hidden depths of a country need to stay silent and hidden; if not, they’re just cardboard sets for open-air theatre. In the hidden depths of Germany, which are vast and deep and Lutheran to boot, there is a mesmerizing stillness, a dread that harks back to earliest times where everything was in the mystery of stones and the contemplation of souls. What we see here seems set down for all eternity, and for those of us afraid to face tomorrow, that is the worst thing we can imagine. I drove through still suburbs, past still villages, still meadows, saw people standing motionless in their doorways, in their fields, hunched over motionless machines. I saw solemn black-frocked crows perched high in hieratic trees and, in the distance, through the mist, empty roads disappearing into the beyond. Movement is confined to the autobahn but the autobahn is obviously not a part of the country, it is a late addition, a concession to the foreigner and, above all, a means of keeping him at arm’s length. I had come to look deep into the eyes of Germany and already everything seemed infinitely remote, irrevocably secret.

Then, suddenly, I happened on people — people moving, talking, laughing loudly, eating heartily, walking briskly, scolding their sulky children or lecturing them in voices that were not bullying, but simply unequivocal. The German language lends itself to certainty and quickly oversteps the mark: “Befehl ist Befehl.” The scene seemed so alive, so familiar, so ordinary, so colourful, so utterly in keeping with the country I have visited so often. But hardly had I left the petrol station, the restaurants, the shops, when stillness and silence closed round me again. I felt obscurely angry that, for a while — the time it took me to eat lunch — these Krauts had made me believe everything was normal, mundane, predictable, when even they, with their bulbous beer-drinker’s noses, did not believe it. They sat at their tables, staring, wondering what this pretentious, pathetic Franzose was doing so far from home just as I was wondering how they could seem so cheery in this landscape heavy with significance. And then I realised: I carried the mystery inside me, my point of view was defined by my investigation, I was an investigation, the investigation. I was looking at this country through the eyes of a wounded man whose very existence was threatened by the history of their country. It was hardly surprising I seemed strange to them.

Hamburg, Harburg, Lüneberg, Soltau, Uelzen. Four short hops for an honest traveller but a yawning chasm for a broken, half-dead man, a man travelling back through time in search of his own humanity. Every mile was grueling, my breathing felt laboured. As I arrived in Uelzen, the town where papa was born, my heart was pounding in my chest. Since leaving Hamburg, I had been steeling myself for the shock, but when I arrived I realised once again that in life, the more you prepare yourself, the less prepared you really are. You conjure so many mental images that reality comes as a complete shock. When torn from our everyday routine, we’re like blind men deprived of our white sticks. Uelzen looks just like every other town in Germany, in Europe. A feeling of déjà vu follows me like my own shadow, whispering in my ear. Uniformity is the future — something business travellers like me have long known — it had been stupid to imagine things would be different, but I felt cheated that this town was so unlike what grief and distress had led me to expect. I’d been expecting a village out of the 1930s, all misery and rage, crushed under the weight of unemployment, tormented by primitive demons, hordes of officious, swastika-wearing party workers teeming through the streets, the Devil himself writhing at the heart of humanity. In reality, Uelzen is pristine, charming, welcoming, with every amenity a tourist could wish for, the people are warm, hospitable, the embodiment of cheerful artisans happy with their lot. The town that papa was born in is gone, swept away by the war, buried beneath the reconstruction. Everything I see speaks of the new world, a world of brilliance and soaring heights, a miracle of urban planning which has slowly grown to encompass new buildings and the great ideas of generations of town planners. Its suburbs are like any other suburbs, the pedestrianised town centre is like any other, but the beating heart of Uelzen is the financial district with its suited businessmen and hollow-eyed security guards. I was everywhere and nowhere, everything looks like everything else, the tsunami of globalization has swept away our heritage, erased individual traits such that we no longer recognise our own or those of others. Uelzen is a product of post-war urbanization. Millenstraße no longer exists and Landorf — which I had expected to be a patch of countryside in the town, or a scrap of town set in countryside — looks just like the Paris suburb I live in, though half the size and ten times as sturdy. We all live on the same quiet streets, with the same neatly trimmed hedges, in tidy little houses so similar we can barely tell ourselves from our neighbours. There is a vast Plexiglas shopping centre painted in bright colours to reassure the poor, the working classes, that they are on the right track, that wealth and happiness are waiting round the corner just as soon as the mortgage is paid off. How did Landorf look when papa pounded these streets? Was it all misery and rage or was it an idyll of bucolic tedium? I wandered the streets, sniffing the air in the hope that instinct might speak to me; I talked to strangers in the streets, the bars, especially to old people, who carried their memories around like libraries. Nothing. “Millenstraße? Never heard of it.” The name Schiller rang no bells either, except for those few who immediately thought of Friedrich Schiller. The Germans are an obliging race, too obliging, they feel frustrated and humiliated when they are unable to help. But they don’t give up easily: they direct the lost soul to someone who might know. “Try the post office,” they said, “they’ll know where it is,” or “Let’s ask the woman who runs the delicatessen, she knows everything.” Checkmate: at the post office, the woman asked me to submit my request in writing; at the deli, the woman suggested I might ask at the police station. This was something I had no intention of doing, talking to the authorities, since I would have to answer their questions and I simply did not have the strength. You wouldn’t risk it in France, life’s too short for regrets. I was looking for my father and no one could help me. I was a lost child.

It was pointless traipsing around here. Racing around all Germany. The terrible history I was looking for had been erased, forgotten, swept under the carpet. I was just about to turn back. I had come completely unprepared, I had nothing to guide me but grief and a battered military record. But I hadn’t reckoned on fate, which suddenly intervened. Taking the sandwich I bought at the delicatessen — my way of thanking the owner — I went and sat in a small park for the mothers and children of Landorf. It was empty. I was grateful. I needed to be alone. I already felt more alone than anyone else in the world. Then an old man in cap and slippers, unshaven, came over — the poor creature was just looking for some company. Old men are the same the world over, always looking for someone to talk to, always quick to spot a straggler. “Guten appetit!” He had his opening gambit prepared. “Danke,” I said in the same cheery tone, hoping he might leave me in peace. He sat down next to me and rolled a cigarette, slow as a wet weekend. By the time I finished my sandwich and he stubbed out his cigarette, we knew all there was to know about each other — by which I mean nothing. We looked like tramps sharing a park bench. We talked about the weather, about life, about the Franco-German alliance. His position was straightforward: he had never believed any of that rubbish. To him the French franc was just monopoly money, but he worried about the mighty Deutschmark, the bedrock of German power, and bitterly resented the rise of the European Union which was slowly but surely chipping away at it. “The only ones who make money out of it are conmen and feckless idlers,” he concluded. I was well used to this kind of right-wing diatribe, Ophélie’s mother comes out with this stuff all the time. “Not to mention all the illegal immigrants!” I egged him on. When I casually mentioned I was part German, part French and part Algerian, his mouth dropped open. What can you say to a chameleon without riling him? You talk about this and that, you chat as though you have all the time in the world. He’d been retired for years, he told me, his beloved Hilda had died in her sleep at seventy and his one dream was to see the Château de Versailles again before he died. I told him I had been in Hamburg on business and had come down because I’d always dreamed of seeing Uelzen, especially the beautiful suburb of Landorf where my father, Hans Schiller, had been born seventy-six years ago. Papa’s name clearly rang a bell. The old man’s face lit up. “Did you say Hans Schiller?” I believe that this man was sent by heaven just as surely as I believe that two plus two equals four. He had known papa, and papa’s family and his old friends. Best of all, his memory was perfect, accurate, encyclopedic. I could not let him get away. I took him to a café for some hot chocolate and bombarded him with questions. Actually, he asked most of the questions, I played it safe, I wasn’t about to wade in and start talking about papa’s past, I wanted to find out who this man was — was he a former Nazi, a victim of the Nazis or just some poor devil who had come through it all without knowing anything? I wanted to know what his politics were. I played the dutiful grandson listening wide-eyed to his grandfather’s stories. I let things roll. Nudging him gently, I managed to get him to reminisce, persuaded him to trust me. I painted him an idyllic picture of the Schiller family, the perfect blend of Germany, Algeria and France — three countries with a long history of mutual friendship and mutual slaughter — three countries which had produced my father, my mother, my wife and all the principles I held dear. I made it sound as poetic, as exotic, as I could. A quick brushstroke transformed my Paris suburb into a haven of tranquility, another transformed Aïn Deb into a glorious oasis where old men basked like lizards in the sun, listening to the song of the wind, watching the dance of the dragonflies. This was how I had imagined Aïn Deb before the massacre of 24 April 1994. “Hans Schiller’s son!” Over and over the old man clapped me on the back. “It’s a miracle. . ”

“The real miracle is meeting one of papa’s friends on a park bench. . Who would believe it?”

After this, and after another hot chocolate, we picked up the thread of our conversation.

“Good old Hans! What did he die of?”

“Oh. . you know, he was old. . he hadn’t been very well, but his death was very sudden.”

“Ach, das tut mir leid. . he should have stayed here in Germany. The fresh air here is like a fountain of youth. What was he doing over in Africa? Where did you say he lived?”

“Algeria. He was a weapons instructor, he trained soldiers. .”

“Ach. . that is not good. . these countries, they do not need armies, it sucks the blood from them. There is war in Algeria, nicht war?”

“Yes, a brutal war, but it is fought in the name of Allahu Akbar and His Holiness the Raïs, so that justifies the exterminations and the rest of it. Tell me what Landorf used to be like, tell me about you and my father and his friends.”

“Back when?”

“During the war. . ”

“Ach. . that’s all so long ago. They’re all gone now, I am the last and. . well, you can see for yourself, we don’t really lead an exciting life.”

Silence. His face clouded over. Selective amnesia. It seemed clear to me that he and his friends went the same way as papa. Or maybe the opposite. Boys are like that, they follow each other blindly, hopping on the first bandwagon without looking to see where it’s headed. The estate Malrich and I grew up on is just the same, it’s like a station where all the trains read Destination: Paradise and they go straight to hell. You have to dodge the fare to get off.

“You were saying. .?”

“Hans was a good boy, he was loyal, he did his duty, we all did. . that’s all there is to it.”

“Papa used to talk to us a lot abut his duty, he’d tell us stories about his time in the Hitlerjugends, the pranks he and his friends used to play, the parties and the torchlight processions. He talked about his time in the Wehrmacht, too, about the war. . all of it. In fact, when I was a boy, back in Aïn Deb, I was in the youth wing of the FLN, the FLNjugends, and I was a real activist. I miss it sometimes, we were obsessed with it, we were always arguing about this and that, we drilled morning, noon and night, we were passionate about purging the ranks and we celebrated our victories howling with the wolves. . ”

“The wolves?”

“Figure of speech.”

“What is this FLN?”

“The National Liberation Front, the National Socialist party of the great leader. . you haven’t heard of it? Anyway, we were talking about you, about the Reich.”

“There’s nothing to tell, Jugend, it’s ancient history. When the war came, we all went our separate ways, we all did our duty, that’s all there is to say.”

“That’s it?”

“I didn’t see your father after that. The last time I saw him was in Paris. . June 1941. We took some leave so we could spend time with our old friends, then we all went back to our units. When I came back here after the war, Uelzen was nothing but rubble. My family and your family and many other families had died in the bombings. . ”

“Just like Aïn Deb, the village I come from. And the war in Algeria is only just starting.”

“Hans is buried there?”

“Yes, with my mother and all our neighbours.”

Silence. A nod. The man was lost in memories of the past, now was the moment to strike.

“After the Wehrmacht, papa joined the SS, he was posted to Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz. . Did you know about that?”

The old man looked at me for a long time, then shrugged in what might have been a yes or a no. I whispered, “Were you one of them?”

Silence.

“Was that part of your duty?”

Silence.

“Please.”

Silence. A shrug of exasperation.

I don’t know why I did it, but I took papa’s military record out of my pocket and gave it to him. He didn’t know what to make of the gesture. He hesitated for a moment, then took it, turning it over and over in his hands, then he set it down on his lap, put on his glasses and leafed through it infinitely slowly. His hands were shaking, his lips quivering. I knew it had been a mistake, I knew that he wouldn’t say any more now.

I said again, “Please.”

Silence.

“You were talking about duty. . ”

“Duty. . duty is something that must be done, there’s nothing else.”

“Whatever the circumstances?”

He got up from the table, muttering to himself.

“It’s time I was going home.”

He looked out at the blue sky, out towards Germania as though looking for some answer, then he looked me in the eye again and said, “Your father was a soldier, that’s all there is to say. Never forget that, Jugend.”

And he left, shuffling away like an old man scared of his own shadow. I pitied him, picturing him going home, climbing into his lonely bed and dying of a sudden fever in the night. What had he meant when he invoked duty as the sole justification for the workings of the world? Was he talking about papa? About himself? Was he talking about me? The word “duty” can be made to hide a multitude of sins, whole peoples can be dragged into it and hurled into the abyss. That’s all there is to it.

I went down to the toilets and took a leak and washed my hands slowly. “You were right,” I said to my reflection in the mirror, “What you’ve been thinking since Aïn Deb, papa was just obeying orders, he was doing his duty.” To the bitter end. “Meine Ehre heißt Treue”—”My Honour is called Loyalty.” I felt like throwing up.