The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,44

unjust sentence that ended [my father’s] life, and said it was so obvious that I, skinny little fellow, was now so bereft and impoverished, and when you think how the English had bombed Dresden, and that he himself had seen how two SS men had dragged a wounded American GI out of the line of fire at Monte Cassino and taken him to a German doctor, and that really the Jews were to blame for what happened to them because it was true that everything had been in the hands of the Jews, and just take a look at this marvelous autobahn we’re driving on, my friend—may I call you that? In memory of your father?—the Führer built this autobahn, and now I have to get some gas and you’re going to get a fine lunch on me. Only one person …, only one solitary postwar German automobile driver in all those years of hitchhiking (it was in 1953, near Osnabrück), turned onto the shoulder of the highway and without saying a single word, in silent disdain, let me out of the car. The memory of that still makes my ears burn. I wonder if he is still alive. Democrats usually die so young.

The very opposite of Magda’s fears! (Margaret took out a thimble, her finger already bleeding with rage and frustration.) Nazi children lived on, under the impression that it was democrats who died young. And young Frank’s experience was paralleled in the lives of the Bormann children; in the life of the medical technician, Edda Göring, in the life of the architect whose name is Albert Speer Jr., who even now, Margaret knew, was in the process of designing a stadium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Even the daughter of Heinrich Himmler—she, too, was smuggled, effortlessly snuggled, into everyday life. The actual retribution against the Nazis’ children, the penalty that would have been meted out to Goebbels’s offspring had their mother and father not murdered them, was a pair of shamed ears once a decade or so, and this was assuming they ever developed a sense of shame, which was not a given by any means. Margaret’s stitches picked up the exterior fabric. Her eyes rattled.

If the second version of Magda’s motivation were to be believed, then Magda was the only Nazi parent, indeed, the only tribunal in the world, to understand and confirm the Nazi crime—as a Nazi, for she was the only one to inflict upon her own family the Nazi penalty: death for the crime of evil-in-the-blood.

And now Margaret already knew what she thought. She threw down the heavy wool. She stood up. Magda was right.

It was right the Goebbels children died. Margaret wanted it by any means at all. She wanted it—not for the sake of vengeance, she told herself, her footsteps watery as she walked back toward the bedroom. She wanted it for the sake of equity. For the sake of the generations who will be born one day empty of all of us: who will have, from their ancestors, all genes and no memory.

If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything. The monster loose on the streets of Berlin would no longer be a symbol of fanatical evil, but a symbol of fanatical shame.

On the mattress on the floor of the bedroom, Margaret sat down. All she had to do was verify that Ello Quandt was a reliable source. It didn’t matter whether Magda’s action was out of fear or out of repentance; all that mattered was that she knew. Margaret only needed to verify that Magda killed her children thinking of the evil that ran in their bloodline, and Margaret would change the categorization of Magda’s crime for good. She would call the crime consistent. And consistency, after all, feels exactly like justice.

The verification was going to be difficult. According to the notes in the end pages of the Anja Klabunde biography, Ello’s testimony came not from an interview with Ello Quandt herself, but from another, earlier, biography of Magda Goebbels. This earlier biography was written by a contemporary of Joseph Goebbels who worked at the Propaganda Ministry, a certain Hans-Otto Meissner. When Margaret searched the Internet, she found the Meissner biography was available in France, America, and the UK, but not in Germany.

But she did not lose heart.

The flea market at Ostbahnhof occurred to her. At Ostbahnhof, the blustering men with their long mustaches, the military history buffs, selling books about bunker engineering, FlaK guns,