Wrestling with the past is always fraught with emotion, even in the best of times.  How much more so when the struggle is conducted in the shadow of war and crimes against humanity, when sons confront fathers who have authored horrendous, often genocidal acts.  For a generation of post-war Germans – the children of Nazi killers and their collaborators – who are willing to look honestly at the Gorgon face of history, the wages of guilt are legion.

Traces of My Father by Sigfrid Gauch, a classic tale of a young German attempting to come to terms with his father’s Nazi past, was one of the first in a series of books by a generation whose parents engaged in or abetted the destruction of an entire people.  Originally published in German under the title Vaterspuren, it now appears in English, shedding a steady light on the emotional murk and mayhem of a childhood burdened by the grim weight of the past.  In its attempt to break the silence and to take a moral account of deeds that defy enumeration, it serves as a family chronicle that examines by proxy and measures the competing claims of filial loyalty and historical rectitude.

Sigfrid Gauch, who was born in 1945 in Offenbach am Glan and currently and currently resides in Mainz where he serves as the director of the literature department of the Ministry of Culture, writes probingly of a physician father who was a Nazi of the first hour.  Herman Gauch signed on with Hitler in Munich as early as November 1922 while pursuing a parallel career as a doctor in Kaiserslautern and Augsberg.  His crude ideas about eugenics and Teutonic racial supremacy led him into a maze of crackpot theories of German origin and national purpose.  His idealized vision of a pre-Roman Saxon peasantry beholden to collective land ownership drew him to fellow demented dreamer, Walter Darré, the Argentine-born, English educated German Nazi who sought a new neo-pagan peasant aristocracy with its twin adoration of blood and soil.

In time, Gauch became adjutant to Himmler, the former chicken farmer who headed the SS and oversaw the death camps.  Although he never climbed to the top of the Nazi bureaucratic ladder, it was not from lack of trying.  His enthusiasm was never in question and even after the war he remained an unrepentant fascist and open Auschwitz denier.  In his insightful preface to this work, Anthony Copley, a British historian at the University of Kent, writes: “Whatever Gauch knew or did not know about the emerging Holocaust – and he must have been aware of the beginnings of genocide against both the Serbs and Jews in Croatia – he wanted to be part of it.”  After the war, the French issued a warrant for Gauch’s arrest but he cleverly sought haven in the far more lenient British zone.  At the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem he was branded a desk murderer and supposedly lived in fear of the Mossad.

His son begins Traces of My Father with the death of Herman, an existential crossroad which brings him face to face with his dual role of faithful son and truth seeker.  He sees through his father’s posturing as an ill-conceived attempt to put a good face on a dastardly life.  He accuses his father of being a shirker, a ne’er-do-well, of even failing at evil.  “You never brought anything to fruition.  Your whole life long you fought, but you never carried any battle through; you were not a fighter by nature.  You never accepted a compromise, but you never pursued anything uncompromisingly to the end either.  You repeatedly put your life into play but never made real sacrifice.”

Unlike some other children of Nazis who have put their thoughts to paper, Gauch neither exculpates nor rages against his father but sizes him up in the retrospective light of memory.  While he never broke with Herman Gauch and waited until after his death to write this book, in the end he broke free of his influence and of the ravings of an unregenerate Nazi.  And yet the past, which cannot be put to rest, worms its way into the present, forging links between generations that time itself cannot sunder.  Sigfrid’s daughter falls victim to extremist political ideas of both left and right, succumbs to drugs and takes her own life.  And so the past cannot be retired, the sins of the grandfathers are visited upon the grandchildren who cannot be insulated against history and who suffer the inevitable degradation attendant upon lies and duplicity.