The Sins of the Pastor Visited Upon the Grandson

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The New York Sun

Do you believe in ghosts? Stephan Wackwitz does. For this overeducated literary critic and novelist, the dead appear more real than the living. So oppressive did he find the posthumous presence of his grandfather that Mr. Wackwitz, having wasted his 20s “rebelling” against the older generation, eventually saw the pointlessness of his protest and, as he puts it, promptly “lost his mind.”

Later, having recovered from his breakdown and made a career as head of a German cultural institute, his thoughts were constantly drawn back into the sinister ancestral world that has shaped his own, and he forced himself to confront the demon. Now he has written “An Invisible Country” (Paul Dry Books, 254 pages, $24.95), which he calls a “family novel,” seemingly in order to get the old gentleman out of his system. The result is a work that belongs to none of the familiar genres of biography, memoir, or fiction, but is an anatomy of a peculiarly German species of melancholy.

The Germans are, according to the foreword by Wendy Lesser, “a history-minded people.” It would be more accurate to say that they are a haunted people. Mr. Wackwitz’s generation (he was born in 1952) is incapable of uttering words like “history” or “the past” without an undertone of dread, or a reference, at some level, to the Third Reich. Yet the grandfather who mesmerizes and paralyzes his descendant from beyond the grave was not a Nazi or a war criminal; he was a Lutheran pastor.From 1921 to 1933, however, the Reverend Andreas Wackwitz and his family inhabited a baroque parsonage at Holdunow, in the Anhalt district of Upper Silesia, only a few miles from Auschwitz.

This disputed border territory then belonged to newly resurrected Poland, part of the price exacted from the defeated Germans after World War I. The fact that his father was born in close proximity to the most notorious place on earth only dawned on Mr. Wackwitz when he visited the village five years ago. It was then that he began obsessively rereading his grandfather’s unpublished but voluminous memoirs and realized that this geographical coincidence was not the only one.

Andreas Wackwitz had twice crossed the path of his most notorious contemporary, Adolf Hitler. Once, during World War I, they had served in the same trenches. Then, on the night of January 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the pastor had found himself in Berlin and witnessed the torch-lit parades hailing the new Fuhrer.Through the refracted medium of his grandson’s meditation on his own contemporaneous account, Andreas Wackwitz is depicted as an extra on the world-historical stage – a German version of Woody Allen’s Zelig.

Having been posted to the former German colony of Southwest Africa in 1933, the grandfather tried to bring his family back to Germany in 1939 only to be captured by the British after the ship on which they were sailing was scuttled. The pastor was eventually allowed to return home, but his teenage son (our author’s father) spent the war in Canada.

During the years when the crimes that weigh so heavily on his grandson’s conscience were being committed, the pastor was no longer near Auschwitz, but at Luckenwalde, a small town in what would later become East Germany. One of the boys growing up there during these years was Rudi Dutschke, who later became his grandson’s hero, the charismatic leader of the 1968 generation – who are running Germany today.

Like so many of the children and grandchildren of the Nazis, Mr. Wackwitz cannot forgive his grandfather, but it requires nearly 250 pages to explain precisely what he is supposed to have done. He appears to be guilty of failing to expunge the racist and authoritarian views common to most of his generation. These are freely exhibited in his memoirs, to the fascinated horror of his grandson. The passages quoted as examples of Nazi habits of thought are indeed embarrassing, but more for the moral cowardice they exhibit than anything more heinous.

Oddly, the most striking of these texts is quoted by the younger Mr. Wackwitz without judgment. In 1943 a Nazi policeman tells the pastor that his conscience is troubled by having taken part in mass shootings of Jews.The pastor comments: “I had heard hints of this, but had asked no questions.” He advises the man to refuse or call in sick, but this advice is rejected as too risky. The pastor explains that God will forgive him, but the mysterious visitor leaves “in a burdened frame of mind.”

Writing long after the event, the pastor concluded: “Now I knew, too, but I felt that I shouldn’t speak to anyone about it since the discussion had been a kind of confession.”This tortuous theological logic from a Lutheran (for whom there is no secrecy of the confessional) is suddenly illuminated by the following admission: “Very probably I would have put not only him but also myself in serious danger.”

Cowardly, yes, but also honest. The Gestapo was dangerous to all. A quarter-century later, the grandson persuaded himself that the federal republic was a police state akin to the Third Reich, and with his student friends acted as a “useful idiot” for the totalitarian state that still existed on the other side of the Berlin Wall. It is hard to decide who was more self-deluding.

It would, however, be wrong to give the impression that this book is obsessed with the Nazis to the exclusion of the rest of German history.There are marvelous chapters devoted to Mr. Wackwitz’s own and his country’s intellectual lineage – another of the previous residents at the parsonage in Anhalt was the great Romantic theologian Schleiermacher – and the result is a sumptuous tapestry of the culture that the Nazis so nearly annihilated.

Like the equally unclassifiable memoir-novels of the late W.G. Sebald, or Uwe Timm’s novel about his Waffen SS-serving brother – “In My Brother’s Shadow” – “An Invisible Country” belongs to the genre not so much of Holocaust literature as of exorcist literature: Books designed to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Those who want to understand the haunted politics of present-day Germany, and the often crippling inhibitions of its public figures, should read Mr. Wackwitz.

Mr. Johnson’s “London Letter” appears each Thursday. He is a frequent commentator on Germany.


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