Fascism, a family affair. My encounter with the writer Niklas Frank.

By Sarah Khan

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Niklas Frank as a child with father Hans Frank and mother Brigitte, Krakow 1942. Courtesy Niklas Frank.

What does Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion (1727) have to do with the legal expert Hersch Lauterpacht and with the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland during World War II? The two men met at the Nuremburg Trials organized by the Allies after 1945 to try major war criminals of the Nazi regime.

One as a prosecutor and legal expert who helped define the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’, the other as one of the main figures responsible for the killing of three million Jews and Poles on the territory of the ‘General Government’ (the Nazi term for occupied Poland). In 1946, Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and hanged. During their time in Nuremburg, both men also listened intensively to Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This strange coincidence prompted the jurist and human rights lawyer Phillipe Sands to work with the opera director Nina Brazier on the musical lecture A Song of Good and Evil that premiered at the end of November 2014 in London with a cast including Vanessa Redgrave (an additional performance is scheduled for 14 January 2015 in Stockholm, with shows in Nuremburg also planned).
During his research for this work, Sands met Frank’s youngest son, the writer Niklas Frank. From his books Der Vater. Eine Abrechnung (My Father. A Reckoning, 1987, published in English in 1990 as In The Shadow of The Reich) and Meine deutsche Mutter (My German Mother, 2005), we know that he was not able to love his parents and paint them as the victims of other prominent Nazis and of victor’s justice. Instead, he insulted them publicly, in drastic terms, not least as a way of countering the grotesque bombast of his father, who fancied himself as a sensitive art lover. This earned him enemies among those Germans who seek not so much reconciliation or forgiveness as forgetting. Anonymous threats can be pushed aside, but how does one deal with massive pressure and love-drunk hate from within one’s own family? Niklas Frank’s most recent book is about his eldest brother Norman, entitled Bruder Norman! „Mein Vater war ein Naziverbrecher, aber ich liebe ihn.“ (Brother Norman! ‘My father was a Nazi criminal, but I love him’, 2013). Aged 81, Norman paid an extra burial charge of 1150 Euro and donated his corpse to the institute of anatomy in Munich. In the winter semester of 2009/2010, he was dissected until all that remained was a bucketful of human material that was then cremated and, after a memorial service with the medical students, interred. Not long before, while Norman was still alive, Niklas Frank spent weeks talking to his brother, dissecting his mental anatomy, searching for the place where an unfailing love for his father and the knowledge of this man’s crimes against millions of innocents could peacefully coexist. According to Niklas Frank, his other siblings Sigrid, Gitti and Michael were all destroyed by this conflict: Sigrid killed herself with rat poison aged 46, not wanting to live to a greater age than her father; Gitti had been suicidal and addicted to pills since her early youth; Michael drank himself to death with a daily dose of 13 litres of milk, cycling cross country with a churn to fetch it from a farm. In the sessions with Norman that form the core of the book, Niklas Frank seems to have been fighting one last battle with his monstrous father: You won’t take my favourite brother into your Nazi hell! It is an attempt to save his soul. But is it possible to save a soul by confronting it with old letters, eye-witness accounts, photographs, memories and barefaced lies? Norman’s wish for his corpse to be dissected, to have a posthumous ‘academic career’ as he joked, may have been his way of escaping the notion of facing judgment in the afterlife. Born in 1928, Norman experienced Hans Frank’s reign of terror in occupied Poland as a teenager, emotionally neglected by his parents, supervised by SS guards and domestic staff, who claims not to have seen the violence against the population and the systematic destruction of the Jews from the bay window of his corner room in Kraków’s Wawel Castle – an icy cold luxury prison cell with leather wall hangings. Having happened to witness a shooting, it dawned on him ‘that we are the enemy here’ but ‘all I knew about the persecution of the Jews was what ordinary people knew: that the Jews were being excluded. And all I knew about the concentration camps was that they were where political prisoners were sent. To Auschwitz, for example. I would go right past there on the train. The huts didn’t surprise me. There were political prisoners in there, and people who had made themselves unwelcome, like the murderers of my Kraków drawing teacher Hoff.’ It is time, dear reader, for me to make a confession. For several years now, I have had an interest in the Frank family and the rose-tinted memories of the Germans in occupied Poland, although as someone born in 1971 I am far younger than the Frank children. This ‘drawing teacher Hoff’, named by Norman Frank as retrospective legitimization for incarcerations – ‘To Auschwitz, for example’ – was engaged to be married to my grandmother. She and Dr. Erwin Hoff lived for a few years in Kraków. He was an art historian at the Institute for German Work in the East (Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit, IDO), a pet project of Hans Frank who dreamed of how, after the war, he would turn Kraków into a great German university city. My grandma came from Hamburg and was employed as a writer on the Krakauer Zeitung, a German-language newspaper. She and Hoff belonged to a small circle of Germans not in military service, subjects at the court of Hans Frank. Following Hoff’s assassination and the evacuation of women and children from Kraków in the summer of 1944, my grandmother returned to Hamburg and married a pastor, my grandfather. She had five children and became such a trying person that to this day, her children imagine her Kraków time as a phase during which their mother led the jolly life of a working adventurer with a very busy schedule. She died of cancer in the 1970s. It was only a few years ago, when family talk returned to the lovely days in Kraków, that the penny finally dropped: I realized that Kraków had not been so lovely after all, and that the photograph of a woman in traditional dress with coiled braids showed my grandma standing not in Kraków’s beautiful Old Town outside St Mary’s Church, but on Adolf Hitler Square. My aunt gave me several boxes of photographs left behind by my grandmother. I almost fell over when I found an ID card authorizing her to work as a writer in the territory of the ‘General Government’, exempting her from the tight restrictions on journalists in the German Reich. I also found several portraits of Hans Frank, large handmade prints with a studied artiness about them. A world was ending all around them, all humanity vanishing, and she took pictures of park benches in the snow and of herself in traditional Goràl dress. There are ski meetings in the Carpathians, surrounded by swastika flags; interior shots of Wawel Castle and the IDO; rallies.

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In a picture dated 10 March 1944 and taken in Krynica (where the Franks had a country residence), she laughs as she talks to SS men and officials from the Treuhandstelle Ost (‘Main Trustee Office for the East’, a Nazi organization set up to loot and liquidate Jewish and Polish assets in occupied Poland). On the edge of the picture, a ragged woman gazes forlornly at these members of the ‘master race’. Is that Albert Hartl there beside her, in SS uniform, the man who murdered Polish priests? My grandma’s lovely time in Kraków was a terrible construction. In the post-war years, she is said to have mentioned Hitler only once: ‘During the war, Hitler killed six million Jews.’ I wish I could have corrected her: Hitler never set foot in your beloved ‘General Government’. You managed it all on your own.
I heard about Niklas Frank and read his books about his parents, and then I sent him some of the pictures as digitized lures. ‘What never fails to horrify me,’ he answered, ‘is laughing Germans in an invaded country where mass murder was taking place every day.’ We met and looked together at the pictures of Hoff’s funeral, my grandma sitting beside his father in the front row. There were violins and flowers and the mourners facing the coffin lifted their arms in a Hitler salute. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked, ‘that my grandma is not lifting her arm?’ We counted the number of arms and the number of persons present, but came to no conclusion. How ridiculous! Was I trying to make a resistance fighter out of her? I was surprised at the intensity and astonishment with which he looked at the photographs, at these people celebrating weddings in occupied Poland, posing alongside his father, people on skis, school children. Norman could have told us a thing or two about it all, but by then he was already dead. Not long after, we met again during an event at the Topography of Terror memorial in Berlin when the criminologist, historian and writer Dieter Schenk presented his book on the Nazi occupation of Poland (Krakauer Burg. Die Machtzentrale des Generalgouverneurs Hans Frank 1939-1945, Berlin: Ch. Links, 2010). Frank sat in the audience and said a few words during the discussion. Afterwards I saw how often he was approached, by a former legionary, by a feminist literary scholar (who was studying the use of the word ‘hole’ in his mother book), and by people who cannot be described in such clear terms. But it was quite obvious that he means a great deal to them. Because he expresses the dark, libidinous dimension of feelings of guilt. The huge strain this puts on him is concealed behind his incredible charm. But did the former Stern and Playboy journalist Niklas Frank save his brother Norman’s soul? Even after reading the book, we don’t know the answer. But we do learn that if you ask lots of questions, you have to provide plenty to eat. Niklas brought Norman schnapps and marzipan, sausage and cake, and he was rewarded with Norman’s willingness to talk about anything, protected by mountains of calories and awful puns. The old anti-Semitic rhymes, children’s songs and affronts that Norman knew by heart and would deploy for their shock effect were part of his defences against empathy, as was his role of the stupid know-it-all who always managed to stay out of things. Niklas Frank has written an emotional book that seeks to understand with feeling: What did fascism do to the family, and what did the family do to fascism? Sadly, Norman could not be coaxed into revealing where their mother sold off Raphael’s still missing Portrait of a Young Man – it seems she swapped it with a farmer for some bacon after the war.

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With some background knowledge about the occupation, Nazi terror and Polish resistance, the book is certainly a more rewarding read. Although Frank adds many counterarguments to his brother’s statements, he gives little explanation concerning places, institutions and events. Such added detail would probably have overburdened this finely structured book, however crude its language. When Norman mentions how German children in Kraków would break into a run as soon as they heard a group of Poles singing loudly, we are not told that Polish prisoners would sing their national anthem when they were about to be executed. For every German killed, dozens of Polish lives were taken. Much research remains to be done – the archive at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University still contains unseen material. Everything left behind in the institutions of the German occupiers on their sudden departure should be there. I spent three days in the city, reserving one day for a visit to Auschwitz. But once again I had fallen for my family’s version of my grandma as an ahistorical, apolitical figure who enjoyed life as a hardworking average girl. I only asked for the IDO files. One day I’ll go back and consult the staff files for the Krakauer Zeitung. In Niklas Frank’s book on Norman, I found lines penned by a certain Gerda Pelz, a colleague of my grandma’s at the Krakauer Zeitung who published a handbook for secretaries after the war, but who also wrote for the ‘women’s supplement’ of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In January 1945, two days before the liberation of Auschwitz, she sent her final greetings to Hans Frank, who had just left Kraków heading for Bavaria with five trucks full of furniture, wine and stolen art (including Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine). She asks him: ‘When will our sustaining and stimulating time in Kraków be revived?’ Weeks later, he answers: ‘I, too, often think back to the General Government and to beautiful, radiant Kraków, and I believe that all those who partook of our communion there gained something powerfully uplifting for the whole of their lives.’ It’s hard for me to disagree with that.

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