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WEDNESDAY AUGUST 29 2001
Gitta Sereny has spent a lifetimes exploring the worst aspects of humanity,
and has faced many terrible truths. Yet she has never lost her belief in the
possibility of redemption. She talks to Erica Wagner
The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001
By Gitta Sereny
Penguin, £8.99; 416 pp
ISBN 0140292632
Times offer: £7.99 (p&p 99p) 0870 160 80 80
Buy the book
The girl is 11 years old. One day in 1934, she is travelling from her boarding
school in Kent back to her home in Vienna when her train breaks down in
Nuremberg. The German Red Cross, perhaps thinking to entertain her, finds
her a seat at the Nazi Party Congress, and she is swept away by its
fearsome pageantry: when she returns to school she writes an essay, “The
happiest day of my holiday”, describing it. Four years later, one night in a
Viennese park in March, 1938, she hears her best friend Elfie reveal that her
father is a member of the Nazi Party — which had been illegal — that he
says Austria will be “disinfected” of Jews, while all around them in the dark
she hears shouts: Germany awake! Jewry perish! Later, she stands beneath
the balcony of the Imperial Hotel and hears Hitler speak. Later still, she sees
the paediatrician who saved her life made to scrub the pavements with a
toothbrush. Yet it would be some time before that girl, Gitta Sereny, rejected
what she had seen.
Over 60 years later, in the comfortable sitting room of a book-lined flat in
Kensington, Sereny is clearly still affected by what she saw as a girl — by what she
failed to understand. “I remember extremely well sitting hi
gh up in this huge arena and these men — and Hitler of course — were tiny, far away
and tiny. But their voices were huge — they had what must have been the most
sophisticated sound system there was, even now it seems extr
emely well done. And it was just so beautiful. It was beautiful. And I am sure that
all the children around me responded as I had done. What is more frightening is that
in 1938, when the Nazis came into Austria, I would h
ave thought that I would have known better, and I was again overcome. That is really
strange. That was after I knew of my friend Elfie’s horror that her father had been an
illegal, that she must never speak to any Jew aga
in; had heard the terrible chorus of Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke! Listening to
that was probably was more frightening than anything else. Standing in that dark park
in Vienna, where I had played my whole childhood.
. . It was the most peaceful place on earth for me. And there we stood, just below
the statue of Johann Strauss, and we heard these terrible words. All right, so I had
all that — and then the encounter with my paediatric
ian. . . so I knew. For God’s sake, I was 15 years old, I knew. And I think this is
the question that we need to ask ourselves very seriously. Why do we succumb? Why do
the Africans succumb to Mugabe? What is it? What is
it in these individuals who have this hellish gift — which Hitler had — that pulls us?
Because it persuades us. I swear to you, I think of this now very, very often.”
That Sereny knew — as she says — and was still persuaded, is perhaps what has enabled
her to do what she does: to explore what it is that makes what we might call monsters.
Into That Darkness was her account of Franz Stan
gl, commandant of Treblinka; Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth looked into the soul
of Speer, Hitler’s cultured Minister of Munitions and who, as Sereny wrote, “I knew
well and grew to like”; Cries Unheard was her secon
d book about Mary Bell, who, in 1968, killed two little boys when she was the same age
as the Sereny who sat in the arena at Nuremberg.
Now comes the paperback publication of The German Trauma, a collection of essays — in
one of which she tells the story of her childhood experience of the Nazi Party
Congress and the Anschluss — that reflects her life’s wo
rk in connection with that country, a country she believes has now changed out of all
recognition. “This book is supposed to show that the German personality has really
changed, which is an admirable thing. It is the only
country in the world that has taken issue with its past. Don’t you think that’s
extraordinary? Given the awful things their grandfathers did. The German young are
really so different now.”
Sereny, now at work on a history of Vienna in the 20th century, believes in redemption
— which is remarkable, given what she has seen. Born in the Austrian capital to an
actress mother and a Hungarian father who died when
she was two, at 16 she fled finishing school for Paris, and worked as a volunteer
nurse when France was occupied. After the war she joined the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration as a child welfare of
ficer to work in the displaced persons camps in what became the American zone of
Germany. From this stems the two aspects of her work: her interest in children and her
interest in the Third Reich. In 1946 she attended the
Nuremberg trials, and caught her first glimpse of the “startlingly handsome” Albert
Speer. To the discomfiture of many, she has worked all her life to understand what
makes such men as they are. It is that understanding,
she believes, that can lead to change.
“I am interested in perpetrators,” she says. “It is not that I am not interested in
victims. I am sad for the victims. But what can we learn from them? That’s really the
question. Writing about the perpetrators, I really
feel that one does learn from it. I wish I could say that we learn enough to prevent.
But I don’t think so. I don’t think any one experience or work or any two or any
three, can make it so, but a collection of works — by
other people, too — which investigate people such as those I write about — I do think
it has an effect. I know it does. I’ve had thousands of letters. There is barely a day
when I don’t get letters from young people who h
ave read my books and who say God, you showed me this and I know this now. Of course,”
she laughs, “they all want to come and talk more — it really is rather difficult! What
more can I say?” Sereny’s laugh is warm and gen
erous, and it comes often in our conversation, despite its serious subject. It comes
often too, when we speak on the phone about the pieces she writes for The Times’s
books pages, when she pleads for more space and I usua
lly give in. When I think of her, it is her laugh that comes to mind. Nearly a
lifetime of considering the worst of which humankind is capable appears to have left
her unscarred, and never dented her belief that change is
possible: if some good can come of investigating evil, then there is still the space
for laughter.
I am not surprised that her correspondents want to talk further with her — her books
are powerful in that they are dialogues not only with her subjects but with her
readers and herself. If she appears to have a high opini
on of herself, she has the same opinion of her readers — but her trust that they will
be able to be as intelligent and thoughtful as she is has not always been justified,
especially in the case of Mary Bell. Her evident s
ympathy with the woman Bell had become (and her publishers’ payment of Bell for her
time) gained her much opprobrium. Her ruthless desire to stick to the facts — that,
say, Auschwitz was not a “death camp” — has not alway
s won her friends. She is particularly scathing about the identification of Hitler’s
evil with the death of the Jews and only the Jews. She deplores the use of the word
“holocaust”, she says.
I deplore it because what happened to the Jews was the worst thing that was done — but
it has now become the only thing. And that is totally wrong. If one wants to be
disgustingly numerical, one would have to say that Hit
ler killed more Christians than Jews. But we don’t want to be like that. It’s all
wrong. But if we concentrate entirely on what happened to the Jews, we cannot see its
parallels — and you know many in the Jewish community
refuse to see such parallels because they think it diminishes their suffering. But
it’s not just terrible to kill Jews — it’s terrible to kill anybody. This whole thing
of the murder of the Jews — we must never forget it
, it is part of history, children as long as the world lasts must know that this
happened — but we badly need to accept it now as part of a terrible history, not the
terrible history. I don’t want anyone to think that I d
iminish it, I don’t diminish it. It was the worst thing. But it was not the only
thing.”
Sticking to the facts is the only way to avoid playing into the hands of people such
as David Irving. “Untruth always matters,” she writes, “and not just because it is
unnecessary to lie when so much terrible truth is ava
ilable. Every falsification, every error, every slick rewrite job is an advantage to
the neo-Nazis.” She is puzzled, too, by what she perceives as a reluctance to confront
the truth by those who seem to have the most inte
rest in it: “Why on earth have all these people who made Auschwitz into a sacred cow.
. . why didn’t they go and look at Treblinka (which was an extermination camp)? It was
possible. There were survivors alive when all th
is started. Nobody did. It was an almost pathological concentration on this one place.
A terrible place — but it was not an extermination camp.” Then she sighs; and suddenly
the fierceness leaves her. “The distinctions ar
e important,” she says more quietly. “But — death is death.”
If her subject, Albert Speer, battled with truth, Sereny battles for truth. In this
good fight, she has been supported for over 50 years by her husband, the American
photographer Don Honeyman, who appears at intervals dur
ing our talk, fetching this, copying that, pouring drinks, making coffee. Watching
them together I say that the work she has done must have come at some personal cost —
she has two children, long grown up, and grandchildr
en too.
She is reluctant to bring her private self into our discussion. Earlier I had asked
her, as a friend once asked her with reference to her book on Stangl, why you? She
answered with seeming lightness: “Why not me?” And the
n gave me a list of perfectly practical reasons (her perfect German, her social class,
her not being Jewish) as to why she was suited to this particular project. “I don’t
understand the question,” she said, or, “it is imp
ossible to answer”. But, having eluded that, she admits that yes, there has been a
cost — and that what she has undertaken would have been impossible without the support
of her family. The emotional strain of writing Crie
s Unheard was great: “Sometimes, at the end of the day with her, Don and I would just
lie in our beds, unable to speak or do anything.” And there was, too, the price that
all women with families pay. Recently her son’s da
ughter came to stay, and asked to see pictures of her father when he was a boy. When
she saw the pictures — of Gitta playing with her little son — she was amazed. “What
did you expect?” Gitta said, astonished. “He just to
ld me about the nannies,” said her granddaughter.
What is extraordinary about Gitta Sereny is not only her understanding of evil: it is
her faith in goodness. Perhaps this remains in her because she knows, from her own
experience, that it is possible to refuse evil. I as
k whether her early experiences might not have offered her a kind of inoculation
against it. “It’s interesting what you say, it may be true,” she says. “The advantage
is to reach this age and to have this continuity of th
inking on these subjects, so that despite having had a perfectly normal life with a
husband, children, love and friends — there hasn’t been an interruption in the sense
of concentration. So the inoculation, if that happen
ed — and it may have — carried me, helping me to have the detachment that
I needed. Gave me understanding and protection. I hesitated to put that story
of my 11-year-old self into the book, but I was determined to get across to
myself and to the reader that I thought this spectacle was wonderful. I think
that is important, at least to me. Somebody younger would perhaps feel, oh,
I can’t say that. But at this point, there’s no reason why I can’t say that I
thought this was extraordinary. And that I, knowing how awful it was, stood
in front of the Imperial Hotel and shouted Heil! It’s incredible. Can you
imagine me, shouting Heil?”
And she throws her head back and laughs.
The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001 is published
on September 6
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
End<{{
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
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