Hans-Ulrich Treichel

My brother squatted on a white blanket and laughed into the camera. That was during the war, my mother said, the last year of the war, at home. Home was the East, and my mother had been born in the East. As my mother spoke the words "at home" she began to cry, as she so often did when the subject of my brother came up. His name was Arnold, like my father's. Arnold was a happy child, said my mother, looking at the photograph. She didn't say any more, and I didn't say anything either, and looked at Arnold squatting on a white blanket and being happy. I don't know what was making him happy, it was the war after all, and besides that he was in the East, and he was still happy. I envied him his happiness, I envied him the white blanket, and I envied him his place in the photo album, too. Arnold was right at the front of the album, ahead even of my parents' wedding pictures and the portraits of the grandparents, while I was way at the back. And Arnold's picture was quite big, while most of the photos I was in were small, not to say tiny. Snapshots taken by my parents with what they called a Box Brownie, and apparently this box thing could only make little tiny photos. You had to look at the photos with me in them very carefully to recognize anything at all. For example, one of these tiny snapshots was of a pool with several children in it, and one of them was me. All you could see of me was my head, because I didn't know how to swim then, and I was sitting in the water, which came up almost to my chin. And my head was partly hidden, by a child standing in the water in front of me, so that the minuscule photo with me in it only showed part of my head right above the surface of the water. And what's more there was a shadow on the visible part of my head which was probably made by the child standing in front of me, so that the only bit of me you could really see was my right eye. While my brother Arnold looked not just happy but important even when he was a baby, in most of the photos from my childhood I am either only partly visible or sometimes not really visible at all. One of the times I was not really visible at all was in the photo of my christening. My mother held a white cushion on her arm, with a white coverlet over it. Under the coverlet was me, which you could tell because it had been pushed aside at the bottom of the cushion and the toes of a baby foot were peeking out. All subsequent photos taken of me in my childhood continued this tradition, one way or the other, except that in later photos the foot was replaced by a right arm, or half a profile, or an eye, as in the picture from the swimming pool. I would have accepted my truncated self in the family album, if my mother hadn't made a habit of reaching for the album to show me the pictures in it. Every time, the little tiny Box Brownie photos that showed me or rather various parts of me were leafed through hastily, while the photo of Arnold, which seemed life-size to me, was the object of endless contemplation. As a result I usually sat next to my mother on the sofa looking as miserable as I felt, and staring at cheerful and un-miserable Arnold, as my mother got more and more upset. I was still a small child when I became accustomed to my mother's tears, and I didn't spend any time wondering why Arnold's face made her cry so often. And the fact that although Arnold was my brother, I had never seen him in the flesh, didn't bother me in those first years, particularly because I was quite happy not having to share my room with him. At some point my mother explained what had happened to Arnold, inasmuch as she told me he had starved to death during their flight from the Russians. "Starved," said my mother, "starved in my arms." Because she herself had been more or less starving during the long trek from the East to the West, and she had no milk to feed the baby, and nothing else besides. When I asked if nobody else had had milk for the baby either, she said nothing, nor did she answer all my other, more detailed questions about the flight and my brother starving. So Arnold was dead, which was certainly very sad, but it made it easier for me to deal with his photo. Happy, easygoing Arnold even struck a chord in me, and I was proud to have a brother who was dead and still looked so happy and easygoing. I mourned Arnold and was proud of him, and I shared my room with him and wished him all the milk in the world. I had a dead brother and felt I had been singled out by fate. None of my playmates had a dead brother, let alone one who'd starved to death while fleeing the Russians.

Arnold had become my friend, and would have stayed my friend if my mother hadn't asked me one day for something she called a "discussion." She had never asked me to have a discussion before, and my father had never asked me to have one either. In my entire childhood and first teenage years, I was never asked to have a discussion or anything resembling one. My father communicated with brief orders and instructions on how to do things, and my mother did talk to me now and then, but mostly it was talk about my brother Arnold and it ended in tears or silence. The discussion began with my mother saying that I was old enough now to know the truth. "What kind of truth?" I asked her, because I was afraid it might be something to do with me. "It's about your brother Arnold," she said. In a way I was relieved that it had to do with Arnold again, but it upset me, too. "What about Arnold?" I said, and my mother looked on the verge of tears once again, which made me ask spontaneously, but unreflectively, whether anything had happened to him. My mother settled that one with an irritated glance. "Arnold," she said without further preamble, "Arnold isn't dead. He didn't starve either." Now I was irritated too, and also a little disappointed. I should have kept quiet, but I asked my mother, again without thinking, what Arnold had died of instead. "He didn't die," she said again, her voice flat. "He was lost." Then she told me the story of how Arnold got lost, some of which I understood and some of which I didn't. The story was of a piece with Arnold dead of starvation, and at the same time it was a completely new one. Arnold had in fact endured starvation on the trek from East to West, and my mother had in fact had neither milk nor anything else for the child. But Arnold hadn't starved to death, he'd got lost and my mother was finding it difficult to give a clear picture of the reason why Arnold had disappeared. At some point – this much I understood – during the flight from the Russians, something dreadful happened. My mother didn't say what it was, she just kept saying that something dreadful happened during their flight from the Russians and that not even my father had been able to help her, nobody had been able to help her. Thousands of people had made the trek toward the West, and for a long time it had looked as if they would get through it more or less unharmed and keep putting a little more distance between themselves and the Russians. But one day, when they had just left a little farming village west of Konigsberg, the Russians had suddenly appeared without warning out of the morning mist. They had neither seen nor heard anything all night long, no sound of engines, no sound of marching boots, no calls of "Dawai! Dawai!" Yet the Russians were suddenly there. Where there had been an empty field a moment ago, thirty or forty armed Russians were standing, and they broke into the moving column of fugitives to choose their victims exactly where my mother and father and Arnold were. They realized at once that something dreadful was going to happen, and as one of the Russians had already put his gun to my father's chest, my mother just had time to put her child in the arms of a passing woman, who luckily wasn't detained by any of the Russians. But the speed and panic of it all were such that she had no chance to exchange a single word with the woman, not even to call out little Arnold's name to her, and the woman disappeared immediately in the tide of refugees. The dreadful thing, said my mother, didn't exactly happen after all, since the Russians didn't shoot either her or my father. That had been the first thing they had feared, and that was why she had pushed little Arnold into the unknown woman's arms. But then, according to my mother, something dreadful did happen. "But something dreadful happened after all," she said. She started crying again when she said this, and I was sure that she was crying about Arnold, so to comfort her I told her that she'd really saved Arnold's life and she didn't have to cry, to which my mother said that Arnold's life had never been in danger. Neither had my father's, and neither had hers. Something dreadful had been done to her by the Russians, but they'd had no intention of taking her life or those of her family. They'd only been intent on one thing. But she'd been too quick in fearing for her life and the life of her child, and if she were honest, she'd been too quick to give the child away. She hadn't even been able to call out Arnold's name to the woman in the panic and confusion, and all the woman had been able to do was clutch the child to her and keep running. "Arnold's alive," said my mother, "but he has another name." "Maybe he was lucky," I said, "and they named him Arnold again," at which my mother looked at me with such incomprehension and sadness that the blood rushed to my head and I was ashamed. But I'd only said it because I was angry at Arnold. Because I was only just beginning to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, had the leading role in the family and had assigned me a supporting part. I also understood that Arnold was responsible from the very beginning for my growing up in an atmosphere poisoned with guilt and shame. From the day of my birth, guilt and shame had ruled the family, without my knowing why. All I knew was that whatever I did, I felt guilty and ashamed as I did it. For example, I always felt guilty and ashamed at meals, regardless of the food that was set in front of me. If I ate a piece of meat, I had a bad conscience, and it was just as bad if I ate a potato or dessert. I felt guilty to be eating, and ashamed to be eating. I absolutely knew that I felt guilty and ashamed, but I could not explain to myself why the innocent child that I was should be shamed by a piece of meat or a potato or should feel guilty. I was just as baffled about why I had to feel guilty when I listened to the radio, rode my bicycle, or went for a walk or an outing with my parents. Yet the walks or outings with my parents, which always took place on Sundays, weighed on my conscience and triggered a great sense of shame. When I walked along the main street of our town with my mother and father, I felt ashamed that I was walking along the main street of our town with them. When we drove out of town in the black limousine which my father had bought himself when the business was going well, to head for the Teutoburg Forest which lay nearby, I felt ashamed and guilty that we were heading for the Teutoburg Forest. When we'd finally got there and were walking along the same old path to the so-called Bismarck Tower, I felt ashamed and guilty that we always chose the same old path. And of course once we did finally get there and climbed the Bismarck Tower to take in the view of the plain and the distant spire of the church ill [of] my hometown, I felt ashamed and guilty all over again. The walks and outings I went on with my parents were regular penitential processions of shame and guilt. My parents also seemed depressed and tormented and I always had the sense that they dragged themselves out of the house every Sunday as if on orders. And yet they would never have considered giving up the Sunday outings, since the Sunday outings served first to replenish strength for the work week and second were required by Christian respect for the Sabbath. All the same, my parents were incapable of enjoying freedom or relaxation even in sudden bursts. At first I put this inability down to the combination of their Swabian-pietistic and East Prussian origins. For I knew from stories told me by my parents that neither the pietistic Swabian nor the East Prussian is in anyway equipped to actually enjoy either freedom or relaxation. But then I realized that their incapacity for freedom and relaxation was all tied up with my lost brother Arnold and the dreadful thing that the Russians had done to them, my mother in particular. And I imagined that the spoiled outings made me more miserable than my parents, since they were convinced that man was not put on earth to go on outings but to work, which meant that the outings were more or less spoiled to begin with. I, on the other hand, loved outings and would have been happiest if there was an outing every day.