Daša Drndić - Trieste

I develop my first photographs as an elementary school student in the back room, in the makeshift darkroom of the Isabella Photo Studio, following the instructions and advice of its proprietress, Isabella, who tells me war stories, always in a whisper. While my parents seem to know nothing of the war, for Isabella the war never seems to have ended. Felix Rosenzweig dies in 1978, and Isabella leaves Austria and moves to Yugoslavia, to the little port of Rijeka. Why, for what reason, she never says, though I visit her at least once a year until 2000, when I learn that she has hanged herself in the attic of a building near the train station. My father Jürgen Traube, as set out in Felix Rosenzweig’s will, was “to send a quantity of chocolate truffles to Isabella on a regular basis, no matter where she was living, and if he, Jürgen Traube, should die before Isabella, then his son, Hans Traube, will assume responsibility for supplying the truffles”. So after my father dies in 1980 I send Isabella Fischer chocolates in numerous shapes and sizes made by the most famous chocolatiers. I send her confections from Manner, Lindt, Droste, Suchard, Nestlé, Milka, Neuhaus, Cardullos, La Patisserie, Asbach/Reber, Biffar (the only selection of candied fruit — the rest were all chocolates), Hacher, Underberg. I discover there are truffle balls called Joy of Life and Karl Marx Kugeln, so I send Isabella those, too. The most expensive chocolate truffles are, of course, the Austrian ones from Salzburg. By sending them I hope to delight Isabella. They are Strauss balls, actually praline cubes, and Constance und Amadeus balls by Reber, also previously co-owned by Felix Rosenzweig. I mention Isabella Fischer, because she is a source of key information about my possible origins.

“Lebensborn” means fount of life. As a registered society (Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) Lebensborn grew into a secret Third Reich project for preserving the racial purity of the German nation. It was S.S.-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler who designed the project and brought it to life. A shy and sensitive, restrained and modest man, not tall, he rather resembled a subservient, pedantic bank clerk than the head of the state police. Himmler suffered from migraines and stomach cramps, and nearly fainted when they killed some one hundred Jews in his honour at the Russian front. That was when he called for the use of “more humane methods” of execution, which meant introducing gas into special chambers fitted with showers.

For many, Lebensborn ended in a nightmare; some came out of Lebensborn decapitated, cloned. Founded in 1935, the Lebensborn Project was designed at first to care for “racially and biologically quintessential” pregnant women, who would give birth to racially and biologically quintessential sons of the homeland, perfect stallions at least one metre eighty centimetres tall, blonde and blue-eyed, muscles bulging, and sleek, disciplined Spartans.

There are absolute and unquestionable principles which every S.S. man must uphold , shrieks Himmler before his companions in Poznan in 1943. One basic principle must be an absolute rule for S.S. men: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, this is of no interest to me. Remember, we will be unfeeling and rough only as much as this is necessary. We Germans are the only people in the world who treat animals decently, and we will treat this human animal kind courteously and humanely.

Himmler opens the first Lebensborn home in Steinhöring near Munich in August 1936. At Steinhöring certified Aryan women can give birth to their illegal children in secrecy , most of them hand their children over to the S.S. officials after shedding a few tears, or simply abandon them. The children who are ill, who are mental or physical invalids, are sent off to the paediatric ward of the Leander Institut at Brandenburg-Gorden near Berlin, where under the guidance of Dr Hans Heinz, “expert in child euthanasia”, they are first killed, and then their brains are examined.

I was born at Steinhöring, Olaf told me. I met Olaf at one of the meetings to which people go looking for their lives. First they seek themselves, then they seek forgiveness for the sins of their fathers. Confused and angry people attend these meetings. The descendants of well-known and not so well-known Nazis attend, as do the descendants of those who disappeared in concentration camps. At these meetings the Nazi descendants vomit up hatred and impotence; they excavate long years of silence, feelings of guilt and a plea for forgiveness which ends in unthinkable embraces and timid friendships. At these meetings people try to heal wounds that, like cancer, invisibly take over the body and eat it from inside . These meetings are interesting meetings. Those who do not go to such meetings write books.

I was born at Steinhöring in 1942, said Olaf, who is taller than I am, and I am quite tall, 190 centimetres. I was very good looking, he said.

I was good looking, too, I said. When we stand next to each other, it’s as if we’ve stepped down off a macho billboard, as if we were Hollywood actors, although both of us are greying.

If Hitler were alive, Olaf said, he would be pleased. I was one of the 2,800 babies born at Steinhöring, he said, at the Hitler-Himmler fertility clinic, at the breeding ground of Nazi Aryans, he said. I haven’t told anyone about this, Olaf said at the meeting. At school they didn’t teach us about Lebensborn. It was never mentioned. When I turned five my mother told me I was special, Olaf said. You are absolutely exceptional, she said. You are Hitler’s boy, and as Hitler’s boy you were born at a special clinic, my mother told me, Olaf said. I worked at the hospital, she said. I asked for a job at the hospital so I could serve the Third Reich, my mother told me, Olaf said. I was a member of the Nazi Party. I was an aide to a very powerful man and I always wore the party badge on my chest, my mother said, and to this day I am a believer, and I will remain a Nazi until the day I die, my mother said. She died in 1976, Olaf said. And my father stayed a fervent Nazi to his death, Olaf said. They were both attractive, my mother and my father, but they didn’t live together. I saw my father only a dozen times. The Nazis had guards around the hospital, my mother said, because the local people of Steinhöring threw stones at the women from the centre and called them whores, she said. But we were serving Germany and Hitler, she told me, Olaf said. My mother hit me whenever I cried. Stand up straight! she shouted. Straighten up! You are a soldier of the homeland! One day you will rule the world! she said. The more she loved Nazism, the more I despised it. It’s a lucky thing that her dreams did not come true, Olaf said. When she realized Hitler was gone and there was no new Hitler in the offing any time soon, my mother came to despise me, she rejected me. It would be better if you’d never been born! she shouted, Olaf said. Then I joined the ballet, Olaf said. Then I became a homosexual, he said, but my mother said, If Hitler were alive, you would have ended up under the gas showers. I danced for three years in Paris, Olaf said. We toured Europe, he said, then I went to Israel. There I explained to people what had happened to me. They said, Don’t worry, it’s OK. My mother hates Jews, I said to the Jews in Israel. And my father hates Jews, I told them. When he came back from the Russian front, my father hid, changed his name, changed his identity, and he never worked, he just drank and took drugs. He died at the age of sixty-three, homeless, Olaf said. The last time I saw my father he was lying drunk on the pavement, he said. Many Lebensborn children live today in Canada, England, America, Australia, Norway, Sweden. They are everywhere, Olaf said, and we correspond, now that we’re old. Now that our parents are dead it is too late to disown them, or spit in their faces, Olaf said.