The
Dancing Goblin
Helga
Schneider, The Bonfire of Berlin: A Lost
Childhood in Wartime Germany, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Vintage
Books, 2006. Originally Il Rogo de
Berlino, 1995. 220 pp.
Reviewed
by Norman Simms
We
read through the Italian translation to the German-conceived history of a
little girl trapped in a doomed Berlin, where around her surviving family and
neighbours speak in the local dialect, and the narrative voice of a mature
adult many years later tries both to reproduce the feelings of the frightened
child and the retrospective understanding of the cruelties and distortions of
the Nazi regime on the lives of ordinary people. Born in 1937, Helga provides
the primary point out of which perspectives are drawn and into which fear, anxiety
and desperate rage pour in as the years go by, culminating in the bombing and
eventual surrender of Berlin, and concluding when the war is finally over,
after the return of her father from the Eastern Front in his departure for
Vienna, the place where the daughter is taken by her step-mother to recreate a
supposedly normal family in 1947. First
abandoned by her biological mother who goes off to join the SS, putting her
Nazi zeal before love of husband and children, Helga’s life is further marked
by all the classical disruptions of a neglected child. When Stephan remarries,
the little girl finds that her step-mother, Irena, has hardly any patience for
her and sends her off to various institutions for troubled children, only to be
sent home again as incorrigible, and thus to find her baby brother, Peter,
whose infantile egotism plagues everyone, and draws whatever attention that
given be turned away from the relentless search for food, water and shelter to
his bratty rebellion against everything. Peter also serves as a foil to his big
sister’s sensitivity and search for meaning in life. Her one guardian angel, as
it were, is her grandfather, Opa, though he is too old and sickly to cushion
the blows of external degradation. As the Allied aerial bombardment and later
Russian artillery attacks on Berlin grow stronger, what is left of Helga’s
family is forced to live in a basement shelter along with other occupants of
their apartment block. Collectively, this group of neighbours attempt to save
each other, with most expressing increasingly negative views towards Hitler and
his gang of ruthless thugs. While they receive some news through a secret radio
from the BBC on the real course of the warm contradicting the propaganda
broadcast through the national broadcasts, what they want more than anything,
is not just that the Russian troops—Bolsheviks, Mongol hordes, drunken rapists—will
murder and pillage indiscriminately upon arrival, but that the war will end as
quickly as possible.
Translated
from Italian, where the author has lived after self-exile from her land of
birth and childhood, Germany, the title was originally Il Rogo de Berlino, with rogo
a pyre or a stake, a place of execution and torment, whereas bonfire calls to
mind Tom Wolfe’s satirical and futuristic novel Bonfire of the Vanities and the film adaptation. Rather than in New
York City, however, Schneider sets her childhood recollections in Nazi Berlin,
and its scenes of poverty and dinginess recall the Netflix series Babylon Berlin itself based on Volker
Kutscher’s police-crime novels about Weimar Germany in the late 1920s.
This
personal history is a child’s view of life in Germany during World War Two, and
the child narrator is a little girl whose mother abandons her to join the SS,
leaving her with a rather incompetent step-mother, and other characters who
people a very grubby down-and-out section of Berlin, and the Nazis are nasty
people (like the girl’s mother, sometimes known as the “Nazi whore’) who seem
to be crude, rough and incompetent for the most part. For the first part of the
autobiography, the war consists of missing men, food shortages and noises off
on the horizon. And there is an occasional glimpse of the National Socialist
leaders who seem to make everyone’s life a misery. The child herself is naïve
and rebellious, long-suffering and lonely, sent out to institutions where she
is starved, beaten and unable to adjust, so much so that she is sent home to
her step-mother as a hopeless case. Unlike the story of Ursula Mahlendorf in The Shame of Survival: Working through a
Nazi Childhood (2009), where the experience is of a girl born in 1929 and
thus coming into consciousness precisely at the time of the Third Reich’s
advent to power, Helga grows up seven years
later—a crucial difference in age for a very young child—and suffers personal
abandonment and neglect first and then the ordeal of life under wartime
conditions. Ursula is old enough to be susceptible
to the propaganda fed to German children and adolescents and thus to grow to
maturity, afterwards, with a sense of guilt for her participation in the regime
responsible for the Shoah. What he see in Helga’s life is both a child’s
perspective on terror and horror, yet informed as we shall discuss, by an
incipient awareness of wrong the adult world is.
At
first, the cruelties of National Socialism are peripheral to her life. But once
Helga’s narrative travels past the first sixty pages of her family’s life, the
Nazis are there in full force, even to the point where the narrator and her
little brother Peter spend a week in the bunker next to the chancellery and
Hitler comes to visit the children. While Peter is in awe of the Fűhrer, who
seems to represent the missing father-figure in his childhood, Helga notes his
flaws in character as well as in appearance, and is able to pick up the wrongs
being committed by the National Socialist leader which cause suffering to all
the German people—and even, something she at first, does not quite understand,
to the Jews. But as journalist Sebastien Heffner sees it in his
psycho-political exposée of Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (1940), the
true essence of the Nazi personality is an all-absorbing hatred of Jews, just
as the strategic plans for the battles of World War Two gave way by 1942 to counter-strategic
actions: the capture, concentration and extermination of Jews. So it is not for
little Helga to experience any more than the inveterate anti-Semitism of her
biological mother and a few other characters’ harsh words to distinguish real Nazis from those who merely played
along, who compromised their integrity and pretended to be members of the Party
in order to keep alive. Yet somehow she does know more.
To
present a literate memoir though through the eyes, feelings and vocabulary of a
child between the ages of three or four up to eight or nine presents a special
difficulty to anyone seeking to use the text as a first-hand piece of evidence
in the study of the war years—or even of the Holocaust. Moments of reflection,
formal conceptualization and moral evaluation of Helga’s experiences and those
of her not very educated relatives and neighbours requires special sensitivity
to language. Since no Jewish persons appear in the scenes represented (except
the ambiguous Herr Schact who protests too much when accused of being a Jew,
p. 113) and news of what happens to
those who have been “disappeared,” particularly the genocidal murders carried
out in the East, what young Helga says cannot be taken at face value. Sometimes
she credits her knowledge to teachers in one of the educational institutes she
is sent to between 1942 and 1944, sometimes to conversations among grown-ups
whispering within her hearing particularly when living in the crowded basement
shelter during 1944 and 1945 (pp. 83-84), quite often to what she dreams or
imagines, and now and then as simple statements of fact that she could know
through hindsight and later reading. Her prime source is the headmistress at
the Eden Boarding School:
We had an open, devoted relationship
with the headmistress, who was a passionate anti-Nazi and made no secret of the
fact. She despised Hitler for his fanaticism, his racial hatred, his crazed
anti-Semitism. (p. 39)
It
is hard to tell if this is a genuine memory or an idealized reconstruction.
After all, Helga is not only very young and impressionable, but also in a state
of confusion and anxiety—as children are who are abandoned by one parent,
neglected by another, moved out of their familiar surroundings and placed in
conditions of danger. She will say “I became frightened” in many instances, and
then “I imagined I was surrounded by goblins that were spying on me…” Terror or horror and their adjectival forms terrible and horrible
form the usual texture of her remarks.
But
she comes back to the lessons inculcated at Eden through the headmistress’s
words and example, and which I suspect
is largely recollected later in a much doctored form to fit with Helga’s
eventual adult understanding of the Holocaust:
The headmistress said that Hitler was
persecuting the Jews even outside of Germany, that he was having the Gestapo
arrest them along with their children before taking them to concentration
camps. The same thing had happened to her sister. A widow, she had been
arrested with her two daughters, twins barely three years old, and deported to
a concentration camp in Poland, accused of polluting the Aryan race by marrying
a Jew. (p. 57)
It
is unlikely that anyone in Berlin before the very last months of the war would
have been able to assemble and analyse information sufficiently to create such
an accurate account of the Final Solution, and such a person is unlikely to be
running a school for troubled children under the Nazi regime and articulating
such subversive ideas to immature and agitated boys and girls in her care, or
that one of those children could have absorbed these attitudes, ideas and
historical understanding in such a dispassionate way. Nevertheless, such
statements appearing periodically through this autobiography provide a moral
context to the experiences of Helga and the others. Yet no one in the main
narrative, let alone the narrator herself, raises the question of whether or
not there is commensurability between what the Jews underwent during the Shoah
and the suffering the German brought upon themselves by their tacit support of
Hitler, not until a single brief sentence we shall discuss at the end of this
review. The closest the book comes towards framing such a discussion occurs
during May 1945 when there is a sort of Socratic dialogue between Helga and her
grandfather. First the nine-year-old asks: “So who’s worse, the Russians or the
Germans”, to which her Opa then replies “benignly”:
“Every nation has its good and its bad people;
perhaps there is a tendency in the German nation that seems less pronounced
among the Russians. You might call it fanaticism.”
“What is fanaticism?”
“Fanaticism is when you do things with
such exaggerated that you become blind and dead and uncritical.”
“What’s uncritical?”
“That’s when you give up judging,
interpreting or evaluating the results of your work or your activities, or even
other people’s attitudes…” (p. 182)
And
so on and on it goes, with Helga contributing her perceptive own views and cogent
quotations from her former headmistress. Again, it is hard to accept that such
a conversation actually took part or that either the old man or the young girl
framed their comments in such logical terms. This sounds more like something
the author as a grown-up woman in Italy and writing in a language not her own
wishes had been said in her childhood. Yet, after all, perhaps she as a child
did have an understanding beyond her years. In 1945 she says: “I feel an urgent
and irrepressible need to understand what has been happening elsewhere. But what
I see horrifies me” (p. 70). Later she asks herself, “What sort of a world am I
living in?” (p. 71). She spends a week in the chancellery bunker and gets to
see and speak with Hitler himself, and she notes the contradiction in his
appearance of charismatic power and his wrinkled, weak and insecure posture. If
she sees that emperor has no clothes, she is already too sensible to shout out
the truth.
Adolf Hitler holds out his hand to me and
stares into my eyes. He has a penetrating gaze that makes me very uneasy. His
pupils gleam strangely, as through there is a goblin dancing inside them.
The Fűherer’s grip is weak, and I am
perplexed. Can this really be the hand of the man guiding the fate of Germany? ….
(p. 79)
Nevertheless,
what this narrative of a young German girl’s growing up in the midst of
brutality and cruelty does show—however farfetched the validity of the personal
reminiscences stand up to strict historical analysis—is that there is no way
ordinary people in Berlin and elsewhere in the Reich could then or now say they
“didn’t know” what was happening or what the fighting was about. Although set
sometime in the autumn of 1944, the following paragraph stands out as the
underlying truth and organizing motif of The
Bonfire of Berlin:
Our childhood was haunted by brutal
anti-Jewish propaganda, and we witnessed expressions of anti-Semitism every
day. Even as very small children, we had seen the shattered windows of Jewish
shops, the shutters scrawled with the word Jude.
People uttered this word cautiously, timidly, with embarrassment or fear, as
though it referred to a contagious disease; sometimes they said it with
contempt, the product of a propaganda campaign which maintained that “the
poisoner of all nations is international Jewry.” We all knew that the Jews are
forced to wear a star pinned to their chests, that Hitler has had the
synagogues burned down, that Jews had been forbidden to grow their beards. Everyone
is vaguely aware that the Gestapo seeks out Jews wherever they may be, to
arrest them and deport them to concentration camps, and everyone has been given
ample warning that those who hide Jews will be shot, while denouncing them may
bring great benefits…. (p. 62)
What she actually experiences and is
able to understand are two different things. One instance stands out, when some
Russian soldiers rape an adolescent girl in the crowded basement while Helga is
present.
I tried to take my eyes off the horrible
spectacle, but I couldn’t. What I saw was unimaginable, cruel, unjust. When I
was able to cry, I buried my face in Opa’s jacket. (p. 162)
Soon after, when no medical help comes
to treat Erika, the raped girl, Helga begins to internalize and store up the
traumatic moment of such stark brutality and injustice. Not just that the pain,
humiliation and death of Erika has happened before her very eyes, but that the
unimaginable has given strength to her imagination to work out an understanding
many years later, while the inconceivable horror also returns in Helga’s
maturity to provide an intellectual ability to put together the scattered
sensations and the incoherent ideas she took into her immature mind:
Someone went upstairs to find out whether
there was any kind of first-aid service for rape victims, but there wasn’t. No
such thing existed. Nothing existed now. Nothing but horror. The mood in the
cellar was one of impotent fury and important compassion.
On Erika’s mattress was a patch of blood
the size of an apple. I stared at it in astonishment; it was as though what had
happened somehow involved me, too. I decided that no man would ever touch me;
men were nothing but ferocious beasts, apart from the ones in our cellar. (p.
163)
This
is a particularly intense moment for Helga and its memory is long-lasting and traumatic.
Through what Freud calls Nachträglichkeit,
the process by which subsequent traumas recreate and develop the implications
of earlier moments of unendurable pain and humiliation, she eventually frames
her thoughts to a more historical awareness of her life as a German child—and
why she not only had to leave Vienna, after being taken there by her stepmother
to re-unite with her long missing father, but then, as an independent woman, to
emigrate from the German-speaking lands (Germany and Austria) where Nazi hatred
still lingers. The question is who constitutes the “we” and “our” of this
statement and when this later understanding became possible, perhaps only in
Italy and after being able to cut her emotional ties with her biological mother
still wedded to Nazi racist and nationalist fanaticism, her hostile and
non-comprehending step-mother and her indifferent father.
Yet we were to learn that our suffering
was nothing compared with what had happened to the Jews in the concentration
camps. (p. 175)
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