They would have no effect on my mother; she would just turn around and laugh. ‘That’s a good one, you old witch. I love the audacity you have to talk to me about responsibility.’
I have reread Der Tropfen der das Fass zum Überlaufen brachte recently and now I can see that it is indeed a marvellous book, written with that stupendous combination of arrogance and self-revelation that makes the first work of any writer with genuine talent such an electric experience to read. It is also undisciplined: the best writing in it is about drink, about chasing drink, about the euphoria that comes with drinking. But there are also rants in it, ill-informed condemnations of West German politicians and artists, long patches of repetitive exploits. There is righteous fury in it as welclass="underline" her character Maria would gladly incinerate the whole of Western Europe for the inhumanity of the Holocaust and the cowardice of collaboration — but there is not one scrap of genuine kindness.
Victor thinks me too critical. He says that though the writing is sometimes incoherent, he admires the avenging urgency of my mother’s tone. ‘What else could her generation do?’ he asks, always rhetorically. ‘They had to create an art that punished the poisonous legacy of National Socialism.’
I don’t bother arguing with him. He is an Australian, of European heritage admittedly, but his knowledge of European history is limited to the broad brushstrokes of a television documentary. I have learned not to labour the point with him; he gets childishly irritable and offended when I counter that he wants history to be written at the level of good guys versus bad guys, when I reproach him for not being subtle in his thinking. I once accused him of thinking like an American and, my God, was that a mistake. He refused to speak to me for a week.
It is not only with him: I have learned that discretion is necessary here in my adopted country when it comes to politics. But occasionally I will meet a German traveller to Melbourne and it is blissful to talk our language for an hour, to give vent to all my dissatisfaction and annoyance with Australia.
But always the traveller will ask, ‘So, do you want to come back home?’ and I’ll answer, Nein. Nein nein nein.
I wish that Victor had met my Oma.
•
My mother adored Victor. ‘He’s such a beautiful man,’ she would say to me in German, loudly, so he could hear. ‘He is a god.’
She flirted with him and he basked in her admiration. And of course he loved her notoriety; I’m sure that he was writing letters back home nonchalantly mentioning that his German lover’s mother had sucked off Paul McCartney and was a celebrated cult writer. But he also saw how mean alcohol could make her. One terrible night, in a bar on the Dudenstrasse, my mother flayed me viciously, insulting my looks, my intelligence, my beliefs, my hopes, my dreams.
‘You are a nothing,’ she accused. She prided herself on being non-violent — oh yes, she was all peace and fucking love — but I’d rather she had smacked me or punched me or scratched my face. It would have been easier to bear.
Victor shouted at her, I had never seen him so furious, and he led me away as I wept, my eyes swollen, everyone staring at us.
It was a bitterly cold night. That ruthless Berlin wind was carving right through us and I just kept saying to him, ‘Take me to Australia, please take me away from here, please take me to your home.’
And Victor, who had been dreaming about the romance of Europe since adolescence, who had read across philosophy and philology in order to be an intellectual in Europe, agreed. He held me in his arms that night on a bench in the Britzer Garten, and told me about swimming in the savage ocean, about the smells of the desert, about crocodiles and wombats and kangaroos.
It was February and I worked double shifts at the bar to save money. In April, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I bought my one-way ticket to Australia.
•
My mother’s second book is called Brüderchen und Schwesterchen — Brother and Sister. It is a dark, unsettling fable, pornographic and compelling. It begins with two adolescent siblings discovering that their mother has disappeared. The father is long dead and there seems to be no one else in the village they trust or who shares any kinship with them. No location is named, nor a year, but through some carefully placed clues — the styling of the boy’s collar; a film magazine with Fredric March on the cover — we know it takes place in the early 1930s. Left alone, Rolf and Lisbeth, the brother and sister, begin to play at marriage, first cautiously, then passionately, and finally, desperately. The danger and release of their fucking is intoxicating but very soon they begin to tear at each other, wanting to destroy one another. By the end they have starved to death, Rolf expiring first as Lisbeth lies next to him. She hears his final breath and she also believes she can hear the first soft murmurings of their child’s heartbeat deep inside her.
It is, of course, perverse; the unrepentant eroticism of her portrayal of incest was deemed outrageous, but by the end of the twentieth century, scandal no longer necessarily meant being an outcast. The book was a tremendous critical success. And that is how it should be. Brother and Sister gets under your skin and remains there; after reading it you want to raise your head and gulp for air, so entirely has her writing seduced you and dragged you into the siblings’ squalid, hermetic world.
Many critics wrote of the novel as some kind of allegory of German history, sifting through the text to uncover metaphors for Weimar or for the divided Germanys of the Cold War. Undoubtedly such readings are accurate, but I am not a critic. My mother always had too much to say about history. But I think that novel is her finest work not because of the ferocity of her writing but because it is not a story about herself. I can read it without seeing her, something I cannot do with the memoir. I wonder too about the dead father in the novel. By the fogginess of the children’s recollections of him it is clear that he died in the Great War. Their memories of him are tender. We understand that the mother’s desertion of her children may have arisen from her inability to come to terms with the loss of her husband.
The story is oblique but, as it was written after my grandmother’s death, I’d like to believe that Brother and Sister was also a rapprochement with my Oma’s ghost, that for the first time my mother could look at her personal past with some tenderness and could admit to her own mother’s suffering.
We never really had the chance to have that conversation. I didn’t return to Germany for the publication of the second book, though I sent her a long lauding letter when I read it, and when I started to speak about it that last time in Hamburg, she dismissed my question with an exaggerated groan. ‘Mein Gott! It’s just a fucking book, don’t take it too seriously.’
Victor, of course, who desires happy endings in reality if not in fiction, remains convinced that the novel proves that my mother had forgiven her own mother. All I know is that the morning we had agreed to visit my Oma’s grave, my mother rang, off her face, incoherent, to say she couldn’t make it.
Unlike Victor, I am sceptical of happy endings.
•
My mother died just after her last book was published. It is a self-lacerating story, another memoir, about the destruction of age. It is merciless and very funny. She describes what it is like to try and masturbate when your cunt has become so dry that even poking one little finger up there causes unbearable pain, how the smells her body emits disgust her, what it is like to wake up after a night of boozing with excrement caking your buttocks and your thighs. She describes hiring a young Turkish man to touch her, to just run his fingers across her tits, her stomach, her cunt; how she witnessed the grim concentration in his eyes as he fought back his aversion to her body. The author is aware of the great cosmic joke time has played on her, leaving her lust and her fantasies sharp, youthful and intact, while deracinating and drying up the ageing body. And that is its title, Zeitlich. Time.