Topografie der Erinnerung by Martin Pollack (review)

This book is a fascinating collection of seventeen articles that Martin Pollack, former correspondent for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, wrote for journals or delivered as keynote speeches between 2008 and 2014 that are loosely connected to the topic of memory, particularly from the perspective of descendants of Nazis and even the Nazi perpetrators themselves. Two of the articles are published here for the first time: "Die Lehrer unserer Väter" and "Drei Kinder." The articles are grouped under three larger topics: "Erinnerung und Gedanken," "Bilder und Bildpolitiken," and "Europäische Regionen."

Pollack published Der Tote im Bunker: Bericht über meinen Vater (Zsolnay, 2004), which chronicles what he knew about his father Gerhart Bast, who was an SS-Sturmbannführer and Gestapo member as well as a leader for Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe responsible for several cases of genocidal mass murder. Martin Pollack was adopted by his stepfather Hans Pollack, a painter who was also a fervent believer in National Socialism, and it is this autobiographical context of Pollack being raised by Nazis who did not give up their beliefs after 1945 and who rejected any critical examination of the recent past that led Pollack to study the Polish language and history and learn more about the place, about which he knew that the Nazis had committed unspeakable crimes there. Pollack's very conscious break with his family's ideological leanings was an important step for him to distance himself from his country's terrible past, and this open reckoning is extremely instructive for understanding how this history should never be repeated.

While Pollack's father's crimes may be extraordinary for the average Austrian, being raised by family members who were unabashed Nazis after 1945 is not unusual for many Austrians, and this has shaped the memory that people have of their country's history as well as how they view neighboring countries, especially those to the east. National Socialism did not evolve out of a vacuum in Austria and Germany, and Pollack illustrates this in his essay "Die Lehrer unserer Väter," which deals with his father and uncles having been sent from their hometown of Amstetten all the way to Wels at the turn of the twentieth century to attend boarding school, even though there would have been closer schools. Wels offered a particularly German nationalist education; this was also a school that Hitler attended for a few years. Pollack emphasizes the roles of educators and families that sought out such educational paths in the promulgation of racism and hatred against others, particularly anti-Semitism and hatred against Slavs. This is further illustrated in the second original essay in this volume, "Drei Kinder," which examines two pictures the author found of three children seated out in a yard dressed in middle-class, if not upper middle-class, white summer clothes. Pollack does not know who the children are or where the picture was taken, as he simply found it in his great-uncle's estate. In one of the pictures the boy is raising his right arm for the Hitler salute, and in the other picture the boy is joined in the salute by two girls. The surprising fact about the picture is that it is dated as 1932, thus before Hitler rose to power, and it is clear that the three children are trying to impress the adults with this symbolic ideological display. He can only wonder what became of these children, but it is clear that they were fed a hateful ideology from very early on. Pollack wonders how many of such photographs lie in picture boxes with families in Austria, and how few people today would actually understand the context of these photographs. This leads the author to ponder some interesting thoughts about the difficulty of interpreting pictures, especially when there is not enough information to explain the circumstances under which the pictures came about.

In addition to covering questions by the first postwar generation of Austrians raised by unapologetic Nazis, in two essays, "Bilder aus Galizien" and...