Published in 2018, The German House is by Annette Hess, one of the creators of the Ku'damm series. An English translation came out in 2019, but my copy was the original German version (Deutsches Haus).

The German House of the highly symbolic title is a homely restaurant in Frankfurt, run by the kind, likeable, well-respected Ludwig und Edith Bruhns. Their two daughters have jobs (Annegret is a nurse, and Eva, our key protagonist, is a translator/interpreter). Nevertheless, money is tight, and the family's living arrangements are not luxurious. Completing the household is the son, the much younger Stefan.

It's December 1963, so Christmas preparations are in full swing. Much more portentously, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials are about to begin. They won't finish until August 1965.

Eva is employed to translate for some of the Polish-speaking witnesses, and in the process not only learns of the horrific procedures for which the camp became infamous, but also finds out that her father was in the SS, and served as a cook in the Auschwitz mess-hall. Indeed, Eva spent the first four years of her life there, and although most of those memories have been buried, they start to re-emerge over the course of the trial, as details of camp life come to light.


The pictures, taken in 2014, are of Timor Leste, the site of a different kind of effort to put things right. How well it worked remains an open question

The German House is a gripping read. As Eva begins to realize that the events the trial is dealing with are much closer to her than she had envisaged, you really want there to be some mitigating circumstances that somehow exonerate the genuinely nice Bruhns (there aren't, and we even find out that Edith at one point denounced the camp leader to the authorities of the day -- not for brutality but for expressing doubt about Nazi policy...).

It's well structured. We're never overloaded with information about the camps, but we're not spared either (it draws very convincingly on the trial records). And Hess keeps showing us the contrast between the nightmare that is being relived in the courtroom and the everyday events that now consume German citizens: pop music, romances, eating out, celebrating the seasons, and just getting on with life... Most people are just not particularly interested in determining war guilt. As far as they're concerned, the accused are harmless fathers and grandfathers, hard-working citizens, who have all gone through all the denazification processes without any issues. Tax-payers' money would have been better spent elsewhere... Edith initially expresses what many feel. She tells Eva: "It's bad what happened then. In the war. But people don't want to know about that any more." This is a fairly typical reaction. Partly it stems from inertia and indifference, but Hess also makes clear that anti-Semitism and xenophobia are still very much present among certain sectors of the population.

Eva, however, is increasingly bound up with the trial, for professional and family reasons. As the novel progresses, and her questions pursue Edith and Ludwig ever more insistently, their testimony starts to show many of the characteristics of the defendants' reactions: Contradiction, prevarication, self-justification (we didn't know until afterwards; Ludwig applied in vain for a transfer; we didn't do anyone any harm...). When Eva returns from a working visit to the camp, silent and completely incapable of carrying on as usual, Edith says to her: "It's 20 years ago... And we're not heroes, Eva, we were afraid, we had small children."

Even when Eva decides she can't live with her parents any more, they still don't really understand her horror-stricken reaction to their past. She asks her father why he didn't do anything -- he, who only the other day bravely ran into the burning building opposite to make sure the Italian migrant workers escaped. He replies: "You wouldn't believe how many there were of them. They were everywhere." Eva says: "They? Who are they? And you, what were you? You were a part of the whole thing. You were also they! You made that possible. You didn't murder, but you let it happen. I don't know which is worse."

Later, when Eva has moved out, and her little brother asks: "What did Mum and Dad do?", she answers: "Nothing." But she is unable to explain to Stefan the fateful accuracy of that answer.



The book ultimately brings out a spectrum of reactions. The accused stay shtum, incapable, as the attorney general puts it, of uttering the "human word" that would have cleared the air. David, a Canadian Jew, who has talked himself into a legal auxiliary role, demonstrates an interesting case of survivor remorse. He creates for himself a harrowing story of concentration camp suffering. But it's not true. Actually his family moved to Canada in 1937, with no problems; none of his relations had been caught up in the annihilation programme. He feels forsaken by God, and feels he doesn't belong in the Jewish community. He eventually goes missing in Poland.

And Eva desperately wants to make atonement... She tracks down the hairdresser who used to cut her family's hair while he was a prisoner in the camp. He's now in Warsaw. She says: "I want to ask for forgiveness. For what we did to you. To you and your daughter." Looking for a big gesture, she asks him to shave off her hair. But he refuses, saying: "You are not entitled to do this." Later, looking back on this scene, she understands that she has no idea of the lives, loves, and pain of others: "The people who had been on the right side of the fence would never understand what it meant to be imprisoned in this camp." She feels she wants to cry, but then thinks: "I am not entitled to cry either." Later, when the hairdresser's colleague asks him what the young woman wanted, he says: "Consolation. They want us to console them." It reminded me of White Tears...

So the book offers us no easy answers, which is a big recommendation.



It's also full of fascinating and poignant detail. There's the boy who, by inscribing a few words on a Birkenau barracks wall, became "the author of his own eulogy": "Andreas Rapaport -- lived sixteen years."

Or then there's the carol, Eva's favourite, which she sings to her would-be fiance at the beginning, and which she hears again, sung by an elderly couple, at the Christmas market in Berlin towards the end of the book: "Through the snow that's lightly falling we wander, we wander through the wide white world..." And yet that's the secular version, I discovered, of the original Christian song... It dates from 1939, when the text was stripped of its religious content by Paul Hermann. It's a classic example of the Nazi songwriters' methods of "contrafactum" (the substitution of one text for another, while retaining the original music)... Citing it is therefore a clever way of illustrating that the past is everywhere, and the most innocent things might not be that innocent...



On the minus-side, I'm always a little suspicious of buried-memory plots... Can you really forget so completely? I don't know... And aren't there a few too many coincidences?

But the novel's major flaw, I feel, is the plethora of side-plots: There's the strange behaviour of Annegret; and Eva's relationship with on-and-off-again fiance Juergen gets a lot of air-time. True, these plot-elements reinforce the idea that we all have our guilty secrets, but it's already an ideas-rich book, so the introduction of psychological factors and gender- and class-relations tends to stir a little too much into the mix.

On the other hand, unremitting emphasis on the trial story would have made a very heavy read, and this is a book that's definitely pitched at the general reader. The Economist's review of the English version also calls into question the plot-twists and soap-operatic elements, but concludes: "The German House belongs with popular calls to remembrance... rather than in the upper ranks of post-Holocaust fiction. Still, when Eva, the embodiment of everyone who lives 'on the right side of the fence', begins to grasp 'the pain of others', her awakening is moving. And, in a new age of willed oblivion and lies, her story still matters."

And it's true, isn't it? This stuff has really not gone away...

_*_*_

Of course, after reading a book like this, you itch to know more. Hess had already explained that the crimes of the Nazi era had to be judged by the law pertaining to that time. What was legal then can't be illegal in the 1960s. So, only those who had committed "excessive" violence or acted off their own bat could be given life sentences as murderers.

As this 2005 review of a book by Rebecca Wittmann makes clear, this led to some extraordinary results: "Guards could be charged with murder only as individuals, if they murdered on their own initiative. Hard as it may be to imagine, these Nazis were convicted for not following orders... This context made killing millions of Jews in the gas chambers a lesser crime than the murder of one person committed without proper direction from superiors. A guard who supervised gassings but never acted brutally toward a particular prisoner was convicted only of aiding and abetting murder."

There were unintended effects on public opinion, too: "In the newspapers the convicted murderers seemed not men but monsters, maniacs somehow let loose in the concentration camps. Reading about them created a sense of distance between the public and the crimes. As Martin Walser wrote in a newspaper article, the more horrible the news from the trial, 'the more pronounced our distance from Auschwitz becomes. We have nothing to do with these events, with these atrocities.' He argued that this helped the citizens feel comfortable: 'They got some satisfaction out of condemning the crimes of the SS guards while distancing themselves and considering the subject closed.'"



Hannah Arendt also elaborates on these themes in the introduction she wrote in 1966 for Bernd Naumann's report on the proceedings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.

Several comments are worth noting:

-- The way, for example, in which public opinion enabled and supported those on trial: "It was manifest in the behavior of the defendants -- in their laughing, smiling, smirking impertinence toward prosecution and witnesses, their lack of respect for the court, their 'disdainful and threatening' glances toward the public in the rare instances when gasps of horror were heard... It is, of course, because of this climate of public opinion that the defendants had been able to lead normal lives under their own names for many years before they were indicted... It would be quite unfair to blame the 'majority of the German people' for their lack of enthusiasm for legal proceedings against Nazi criminals without mentioning the facts of life during the Adenauer era. It is a secret to nobody that the West German administration on all levels is shot through with former Nazis..."

-- The default setting of denial among the accused: "These men had now probably been told by their lawyers that the safest course was to deny everything regardless of the most elementary credibility: 'I have yet to meet anyone who did anything in Auschwitz,' said Judge Hofmeyer. 'The commandant was not there, the officer in charge only happened to be present, the representative of the Political Section only carried lists, and still another one only came with the keys.'..."

-- The difficulty of formulating the indictment: "The defense lawyers to a man conducted the case as though they were dealing here, too, with desk murderers or with 'soldiers' who had obeyed their superiors. This was the big lie in their presentation of the cases. The prosecution had indicted for 'murder and complicity in murder of individuals,' together with 'mass murder and complicity in mass murder' -- that is, for two altogether different offenses. Only at the end of [Naumann's] book, when on the 182nd day of the proceedings Judge Hofmeyer pronounces the sentences and reads the opinion of the court, does one realize how much damage to justice was done -- and inevitably done -- because the distinctive line between these two different offenses had become blurred."

-- The difficulty of operating under the old law: "In the nearly hundred-year-old code, there was no article that covered organized murder as a governmental institution."

-- The weight of individual actions: "Innumerable individual crimes, one more horrible than the next, surrounded and created the atmosphere of the gigantic crime of extermination. And it was these 'circumstances' -- if this is the name for something that lacks a word in any language -- and the 'little men' responsible for and guilty of them, not the state crime and not the gentlemen in 'exalted' positions, that were fully illuminated in the Auschwitz trial... In any event, one thing is sure, and this one had not dared to believe any more -- namely, 'that everyone could decide for himself to be either good or evil in Auschwitz'."

_*_*_

While reading commentary on Hess's book, I also became aware of a 1966 play by Peter Weiss, called Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos). You can watch a (slightly abbreviated) version here, and the text is available for hourly "borrowing" from the invaluable Internet Archive.



Weiss drew extensively on the texts from the hearings, as reported in the newspapers of the day. He used a "collage method", shaping and cutting, but changing very little from the original. The text is arranged in short lines, without punctuation, so that it looks like poetry. The cantos take us progressively from the ramp, where the prisoners were triaged (this way for immediate death, that way for death in a few months after exhausting labour and too little food) right through to the furnaces, where obscene amounts of bodies were processed.

The goal of the play was not only to remind people of what had happened, but also to underline that the connections were still there: The people who were active in the concentration camps still had prominent roles in society at the time the play was written; companies that had supplied the camps were still benefiting from the money they had made, and the experience they had gained... Not surprisingly, it received plenty of critical reaction.

Many of the testimonies are familiar from Hess's novel. And the excuses of the accused pile up, just as she noted: It wasn't me. I only did this. I only did that. The witness is confused. I was always helpful to the detainees. I had nothing to do with it. It's not true. It's an invention. I only did what I had to do. I only want to live in peace...

For the prisoners, it was a case of the survival of the fittest. Only the smart could survive. (Arendt also refers to two groups of survivors: "Those who had survived by sheer luck, which in effect meant holding an inside job in office, hospital, or kitchen, and those who, in the words of one of them, had understood immediately that 'only a few could be saved and I was going to be among them.'")



It's a very, very powerful piece, and its effect derives as much as anything from its simplicity. There's no "action" beyond the changing of places as the witnesses relay one another, or the defendants rise and sit down. There's a lot of emphasis on the mechanics of the Auschwitz operation: How, where, how much? What is recounted still retains its power to shock. No amount of familiarity with this dreadful story can make its horror easier to stomach.

The plea for acquittal with which it ends hangs like a curse in the air: "our nation has worked its way up / after a devastating war / to a leading position in the world / we ought to concern ourselves / with other things / than blame and reproaches / that should be thought of / as long since atoned for"...

All of which, Oliver Keune argued just last year, makes it a useful educational tool to help combat the current rise of populism, and the increasing levels of approval that the far right has been enjoying in Germany.

_*_*_

So that was all in the early sixties: the trial, Weiss's play, and the setting for Hess's novel. Fast-forward two decades, and you get the absolutely extraordinary story of the faked Hitler diaries...

On 25 April 1983, the German magazine Stern held a press conference announcing the publication of Hitler's diaries (for which the magazine had paid in excess of DM 9 million). "History needs to be rewritten," they claimed, and the issue sold a record two million plus copies... Then it was discovered that the diaries were fakes, "clumsy" ones at that (even the initials on the front were wrong: FH, rather than AH, because the forger was not sufficiently familiar with the capitals of the Gothic script...).

A six-part TV series, called Faking Hitler, last year retold the story of renowned journalist Gerd Heidemann (Lars Eidinger) and the professional forger, one Konrad Kujau (Moritz Bleibtreu), who spectacularly pulled the wool over Heidemann's (unfortunately all too willing) eyes. It's not the first time the story has been immortalized on screen. Helmut Dietl used it as a basis for his 1992 movie Schtonk! By all accounts, that version opted for satirical exaggeration, and couched itself as farce (it was very well received, won awards, and became a cult film for some). This new series aims for a somewhat quieter approach, although it's also very funny. How could it not be, given the colossal snafu that lies at its heart...? (And Wolfgang Groos, one of the directors, testifies that "the funniest bits were usually the ones where I had to reassure my wife that that's essentially how it happened".)



One of the sources that the series draws on is the multi-episode podcast that Stern itself produced in 2019. I've dipped into a few of these, and they're very interesting, incorporating the original recordings that Heidemann made of his conversations with Kujau, interviews with Heidemann himself (nearly 90 now), and interviews with a range of experts who illuminate various facets of the story.

The Faking Hitler series was created by Tommy Wosch. On its origins, he has this to say: "I grew up in Bavaria in the early 1980s. Our pubs had pictures of SS soldiers on their walls with ‘Unsere Helden’ (Our Heroes) written underneath... In a society where even a left-liberal magazine [ie Stern] publishes historical revisionism, you basically have to expect right-wing radicalism everywhere... I was born in 1968 and we children often asked ourselves what our grandfathers did during the war. We asked our fathers whether they had asked their fathers. There were rarely any straightforward answers. They referred to the oath that the soldiers had to take; to the fact that there were a lot of things people didn’t know; and above all that it all happened such a long time ago."

In general, the series works well. Its exposition of the main plotline treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and its evocation of the characters is subtle. Heidemann has clearly lost all distance from his subject matter (he started out, after all, with way too intense an interest in Nazi memorabilia, had even bought Hermann Goering's former yacht, and had some sort of relationship with Goering's daughter). But he is not a monster figure. Kujau the directors found more difficult to fathom. Obviously, money was a key motivation, but "it is not possible to say exactly why he actually wrote the diaries in the way he did. It remains unclear whether he could only think up banal things to say, or whether he perhaps really had found Hitler so good."



Somewhat more controversial is the fictitious subplot involving a young Stern journalist, Elisabeth (Sinje Irslinger), who not only doubts the authenticity of the diaries from the get-go, but also discovers, in the course of researching another story, that her father (now a respected university professor) was not only a member of the SS, but also committed war crimes for which he has never been punished. Confronted with his daughter's wrath, he takes himself off to the jurisdiction where his offences were committed, and turns himself in. Leo (Daniel Donskoy), Elisabeth's nemesis-turned-boyfriend, is a Jew whose family includes concentration camp victims.

I can see why they included it (female element, younger demographic), but the subplot does come across as a bit thin. Emeli Glaser is scathing: "As is the case for almost all German film productions, no-one could muster the courage to simply let old Nazis, devotional fetishists, and money-hungry beneficiaries of the failed denazification stand as the ugly West German society of the 1980s to which they belonged. The left-wing Elisabeth has to serve as a 'good German' (because there were those too!), who gives absolution to her Nazi father on behalf of the audience when he faces his past. And then there's Jewish Leo. The victims of the concentration camp doctor Mengele have to serve as the backstory to his character. All so that he can in turn absolve the 'good German' Elisabeth of her German guilt while they eat falafel under strings of fairy-lights. If Faking Hitler hadn't digressed in order to meet some claim to completeness, and had instead stayed with the deep abysses that at its core the Stern affair tells us about, the series would have done more justice to the history of the Federal Republic."

I find it interesting that The German House and Faking Hitler, with their shared themes, came out within a few years of each other. In 2013, Harald Welzer, a social psychologist, is quoted as agreeing that the diary scandal "could only have happened in a period in which Germans had fixated on Hitler as a way of ignoring the fact that the German population was complicit in the horrors of the Nazi era." But he goes on to assert that the "Hitler fascination" was not carried through into the third and fourth generations: "We have the worst behind us."

Wosch, writing more than 10 years later, obviously disagrees: "I did not feel like I lived in a denazified country, and I still don’t feel that today. My whole life, I have asked myself questions like: How much National Socialism is there in our society? How many xenophobes and anti-semites live among us and, above all, where? Is right-wing radicalism really limited to fringe groups, or is there a deep-rooted right-wing radicalism in the middle of society?" Asked what he hopes viewers will take from the series, he replies: "I would be happy if more people in Germany were to develop a clear stance vis-a-vis right-wing radicalism. I’m thinking of something like disgust, simply an instinctive disgust towards intolerance and xenophobia."



_*_*_

All these pieces present us with uncomfortable questions.

What would I have done back then? How brave would I have been? And, with all these evils on the rise again -- feeding off the trouble in the world, and singing their siren songs to people ill equipped to choose uncomfortable grey over false but reassuring black-and-white -- what can we do now?

And what about the wider field? If we are people who have grown up in a privileged segment of a developed country, then we bear as part of our heritage the racism and colonialism and environmental destruction that made our world what it is. What do we say? Do we repeat the excuses of the accused in Frankfurt? "It wasn't me. I only did this. I only did that. The science is confused. I was always nice to people. I had nothing to do with it. It's not true. It's an invention. I only did what I had to do. I only want to live in peace..." There can be no cheap atonement, as Eva discovers. But does that mean there should be no atonement at all?