When did the silence begin?
She walks through her hometown like a guest. It is a Thursday afternoon in August, over Plauen in the Vogtland, a small town with half-timbered houses, the late summer sun shines, the people sit with full shopping bags in the sidewalk cafes. Reglindis Rauca, 41, visits the St. John's Church, which she loves, the brook, whose murmur sounds like a song that has not been heard for a long time, she orders roulade with potato dumplings in a beer garden, enjoys the taste of the Vogtland kitchen as a child, feels arrived at home now and it is not. Being at home means being able to embrace your father and mother. Their door will not open their parents but they have written to her daughter in a letter. Four lines, with typewriter. One of them states: "As long as you are proud of this book, you do not have to look at it anymore."
Reglindis Rauca
This book. "Vuchelbeerbaamland", Vogtland for rowanberry trees, is on the cover. It is also about Plauen, about the province, about a region, with which the people here are very grown, but above all about a family in the east of Germany, which is silent with shame and horror. It is the family of the author. In the novel Reglindis Rauca is called Marie. She describes herself as a girl with red hair, small, slender, rebellious, unlike the other children around her. She lives with her siblings, her mother, a housewife, her father, a scientist, in an art nouveau house. A bourgeois façade behind which the family can escape from the outside, the real socialist life: "At dinner, mother announces solemnly: 'Children, tonight is cinema in the big salon' ... Does everyone have a glass of ice cold raspberry lemonade? hurries into the kitchen, plunders the mysterious pantry, and comes back, a little slower, with a large glass bowl full of cheese biscuits - Cheese biscuits from the west! That smells like a creamer between the teeth. "Rrr-n-knack.
What the family is watching on the screen this evening are slides that have come in the mail. "Mother speaks proudly:" There are pictures from far away, be attentive, children, here you can learn something, other people do not. "" The projector sends them to the screen, one after the other, photos of a man in bright windbreaker and trousers that stand in front of elks, motels or waterfalls. Snapshots showing grandfather living in Canada.
The mass murderer personally chose his victims
In the novel he is called Hartmut Albert. His real name is Rauca. Helmut Rauca. SS-Hauptscharführer Rauca, avowed and convinced Nazi, leading member of a Rollkommandos, that from August to October 1941 murdered the entire Jewish population of the Lithuanian rural communities. Gestapo representative for Jewish affairs in Kaunas ghetto, Lithuania, responsible for the deaths of 11,584 people, including more than 4,200 children. It is said that he stood on a hill of the ghetto before the shootings and personally selected the victims.
"The first time I heard these incredible numbers, the ground swayed below me, I ran to the bathroom and vomited," remembers Reglindis Rauca. That was five years ago. Until then, she says, she had only speculated that something had to have happened to the SS, something bigger and more serious, because otherwise Helmut Rauca would not have been handed over to the FRG. In 1983, he was charged, but not convicted, because Rauca died a year later, still in custody. There had been reports in West German media that could probably also be received in the GDR. However, at the Plauener Abendbrottisch they told their own story: "My parents have never revealed anything more, they just said: 'If anyone asks you, say, after delivery, the main charge has been dropped again.' Point, there was nothing more to be found out, there was a wall thicker than the Berlin Wall. "
The mass murderer Helmut Rauca at his wedding
At some point she stops pushing, she is 15, a young girl, busy with the future, which is just beginning and which she should carry far away, away from Plauen, out of the house of the parents. She wants to become an actress, but she does not know how, she first learns to be a nurse, creates admission to the drama school Ernst Busch in Berlin in 1989, plays on many German stages, moves to Düsseldorf, works at the Schauspielhaus. As the engagements fade, Reglindis Rauca recalls her talent for writing and earns her money as a copywriter.
In 2003, now 36 years old, she encounters the name of her grandfather on the internet."At a party somebody told me that he had googled his name and was surprised by the many hits, so I got curious," she says. When she enters her own name into the search engine, the name of her grandfather, Helmut Rauca, immediately appears as one of the top hits. He appears on a website published by a Canadian publisher who then presented a book by journalist Sol Littman on the prosecution and delivery of Rauca entitled "War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas." In the description also the number was called: 11584 victims.
"At first I was incredibly shocked, but later relieved, finally I knew what was going on with my family, there was always such pressure, as if there had been a shadow over everything," says Reglindis Rauca.
Life with guilt continues on and on
The horror, the shame, the life with the guilt of the parents and grandparents and the German history, continue from generation to generation, in innumerable German families. Does it ever stop? If Reglindis Rauca had children, then at some point she would have to explain to them why her parents, the grandparents of her children, had broken up with her. Then she would have to find the words.
Could her parents have and must find these words? What did you know before 1982, before the extradition Helmut Raucas? When did the silence begin? Already with the grandmother of Reglindis Rauca, who did not emigrate with her two sons to Canada and in 1956 submitted the divorce? What did she tell her sons? And was it ever possible for Reglindis Rauca's father to openly face his father's crime? In the GDR, a society in which there was no official processing of complicity in the Third Reich and had to give? The perpetrators eventually lived in the west. There were only victims in the GDR, nobody was guilty here.
These are questions that Reglindis Rauca has no answers for. Questions that she would like to ask her parents today. Now, on her first visit after the publication of the book, she does not spend the night at home, but in a Plauen pension. And it may not be the last time. The author, small and delicate, with bright, almost translucent skin and red hair, looks excited. Her hands accompany her sentences. She does not regret anything, she says. Not the book and not the break. "I do not blame my dad, it must be bad for him, but it affects me as well, since I've written the book, I'm feeling better, I'm calmer."
After searching the Internet for her name and stumbling upon her grandfather's crimes on a Canadian publishing site, Reglindis Rauca ordered Sol Littman's book, began translating it into German, and wrote him a letter. The Jewish author and director of the Simon-Wiesenthal Center in Canada responded that a regular exchange of e-mails began. In 2005, Littman even visited Dusseldorf. From him Reglindis Rauca finally got answers to their questions. Exploring the background, knowing the fates behind the numbers, talking about the unspeakable, she says, would have made it easier for her to deal with being the granddaughter of a mass murderer.
A novel in which the horror hovers between the lines
The pages in her computer filled in the next few years as if by themselves. There were already some biographical notes, especially about a red-haired girl, which is teased by the classmates and not taken seriously by the mother with his needs. Feeling isolated, torn between the worlds, the Christian-anti-Communist home and the state ideology it gets prescribed at school.
Why did it become a novel and not an autobiography? Why did not the author use a pseudonym? Much has only resulted in writing, explains Reglindis Rauca, the characters, dialogues, scenes. "The book is already very autobiographical, but I've sharpened and distorted some things, for example, there's a fourth child in the novel, but we were only three children, and I wanted my family to realize that they were not one-to-one I did not mean to expose her, but a pseudonym would not have been a solution for me, so hiding would not have stopped, "she says, almost breathless. It sounds as if she were holding a plea often made, as if she had to keep defending herself from herself.
The book finds a publisher, receives the Prize for Literature of the City of Dusseldorf, she announces it before publication with the parents, sends it with a letter from Dusseldorf to Plauen. She hopes, she says, that her mother did not just read a few passages to her father, but that he had the book in his own hands. Reglindis Rauca has written a novel in which the horror hovers between the lines. But it has also become a poetic text, peppered with quotes from poems by Christian Morgenstern. Lines she recited together with her father as a child. They are a declaration of love.
