LITMIR.BIZ

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      I took it all in and was fascinated by the excitement that the outside world caused in our household. Because I was good at mimicking people, I was frequently asked to imitate Hitler or the Protestant parson of the village, Pfarrer Wagner, for the amusement of the assembled family members. I had a keen eye for personal mannerisms, and everyone in our house, monarchist, Nazi, or communist, would break up over my Hitlerian speech or my version of a pastoral sermon. But I was under strict orders never to reveal this skill outside our four walls. Once I broke the rule, causing my father great distress. On a visit to my father s sister, my aunt Gretel in Nuremberg, my father took me for a walk through the Reichsparteitagsgelände, the Nazi Party parade grounds, where he pointed out to me the concrete podium from which Hitler spoke during the rallies. It was too great a temptation for a small boy. I dashed up the steps and started my Hitler imitation. My father bounded up after me, yanked me away, and disappeared with me in the Sunday crowd that was strolling through the arena.

      Many village men ran around in uniform, alternately angry or elated for reasons I could not understand, but their actions had an aura of importance. At one point, meek Uncle Ludwig had the opportunity to participate in the main Nazi Party rally held every year in Nuremberg, and I remember how he returned home glowing, transported by an enthusiasm quite uncharacteristic for his timid nature. The entire family joked about Ludwig's innerer Reichsparteitag (internal party rally), a phrase that gained widespread use during that period to designate any happy experience or emotion. Although my father worked for the party, he was disdainful of Ludwig's temporary transformation and ridiculed him for it. In fact, he had a keen eye for Nazi bathos and enjoyed making fun of it, from goose-stepping soldiers to Hitler's theatrical antics. My father once happened to meet Julius Streicher, the Nazi leader of the province of Franconia and editor of Der Sturmer, at a meeting in Nuremberg. At one point in the evening, Streicher spread a map of the moon out on a table and in all seriousness discussed its eventual colonization by Germany. My father found this hilarious and thought that his superior was crazy.

      My father had lived a musician's life in the big open world of the 1920s and early 1930s in America and enjoyed telling everyone how considerate Americans were. He wanted to please his Nazi superiors for the sake of his own advancement, but he also liked to impress those around him with his savvy cosmopolitanism.

      While the men tended to fluctuate in peculiar ways, my grandmother remained steady, always the same, always kind. My grandparents' house was the most stable element in my young life, as long as my grandmother was inside it. When she left the house for even a short trip, I felt lost and uncomfortable. To reassure myself, I would stare at the huge photograph of her as a beautiful young woman that hung in the living room. When I left the house, I loved to hear her voice ring out, calling me home for a snack. I knew I would get my favorite liverwurst sandwich if I begged. When I had a toothache, she would grind up some nutmeg to apply to the painful spot. One day during one of the endless, hot summers of my childhood, I saw her approach rapidly up an unpaved street that accentuated her stumbling gait. With her hand she shielded something from the sun, and when she approached, gave me the melting vanilla ice-cream cone she had carried home for me. If she had a personal fault, it was that she loved to buy fine clothes, to the consternation of my grandfather.

      The few trips I took with her, proposed to me as an adventure, in actuality frightened me, especially because the first one turned into a mishap. On our way to her father's village near Wiirzburg—Königshofen, where he had been mayor—we took the wrong train and ended up in Walldürn, a well-known site for Catholic pilgrimages. After an hour of negotiation with the railway authorities, we were put onto one of the stifling pilgrimage trains, crowded with hundreds of people reciting Catholic prayers. I was forced to stand among the praying strangers, unable to move even as far as the WC at the end of the car, while outside a landscape moved by that was alien to me. Only after several transfers did we finally arrive, shaken and exhausted, in her native village. I much preferred her to stay home, and to stay home with her, where things were familiar and safe.

      My grandparents' house was close to the railroad station, a marvelous and forbidden playground. Surrounded by shrubs, trees, and tall grasses, the station grounds provided ample hiding places from the station master, who would emerge from time to time to chase me and my small friends away. My grandfather had been a railroad engineer, and he told me stories of troop trains he conducted to Russia during World War I. A head-on collision with another train ended his career and left him nearly blind. One day he took me to see a locomotive that had stopped on one of the side tracks of the station. I was allowed onto the conductor's platform, where the engineer opened the heavy metal door to let me peek inside the roaring furnace in the belly of the engine.

      The sound of steam engines starting off from the train station was as much a part of my everyday life as was the ticking and chiming of the grandfather clock in the living room, or the cackling of chickens in the backyard. In contrast to Tab, all kinds of trains stopped at Kleinheubach —not just passenger trains but also trains filled with Catholic pilgrims on their way to Kloster Engelberg, the monastery on the other side of the river, or trains organized by the Nazi Workers' Party for outings. Some of these latter trains were festooned with flags and swastikas and carried workers from the industrial regions of Germany to the Main Valley for a few days of parading, speeches, and relaxing in the countryside.

      Music played an important role in our household. In 1900 my grandfather had founded a men's choir in the city of Mannheim. One of his brothers, my godfather and namesake, was a violinist who played his way from the resort town of Baden-Baden to the movie house orchestra of the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco during the 1920s. It was he whom my father had followed to San Francisco, where they both played violin in the same orchestra, as well as in the Paramount Theater Orchestra in Oakland. My cousin Lore was a brilliant piano and harpsichord student at the conservatory in Nuremberg. I was pitted against her during one of our dreaded competitive family recitals. She played Chopin's “Minute Waltz” with ease, while I managed only a halting version of Mozart's “Rondo alla turca.” Enraged at my incompetence, my father told me that I had embarrassed both of us in front of the entire family. After that I came to detest piano practice even more than I had before.

      Though he was usually absent, my father loomed large in my mind. He was not just another peasant villager huddled at the radio listening passively to the happenings of the outside world. Rather, he was an active participant in “important events,” organizing visits of workers to our rural region in his KDF capacity. He came home on weekends and tried to make up for his lack of paternal presence during the rest of the week by intensifying his surveillance of my progress in grade school. I usually fell far short of his expectations without ever really understanding what he wanted of me. There were so many things I did not understand, and no one, including my father, bothered to explain them to me. I couldn't understand, for example, why the letter q was not independent like the other letters and always had to be accompanied by a u. When I was told to sing zweite Stimme (second voice), I thought I was to somehow split my voice and sing two different tones at the same time. My teachers couldn't understand why a musician's son was so lacking in talent.

      I remember once misspelling the German word for “little tree”—Bäumchen—three times, and my father began to rave that I would never amount to anything. Lessons with my father very often ended up in a beating. When I finally began to read a little, he arranged for my second-grade teacher, a friend of his, to give me a primer full of anti-Semitic stories. By the time I was seven I could read enough to see that all twelve verses —one for each month of the year—on our sentimental kitchen calendar began with the word “Deutschland.” When I asked my grandmother why none of the verses began with “England” or “Frankreich” or “Italien,” she replied, “Das kannst Du nicht verstehen” (You can't understand that). As I had already done in relation to music, now, in relation to my schoolwork, I withdrew into my own fantasy world where I could control what happened.

      When I was nine years old, six years after my mother died, my father decided to remarry. He discovered that the respected village blacksmith, Heinrich Zink, had an unmarried daughter. When he married Maria Zink in 1939, the comfortable intimacy I had enjoyed with the kind grandmother who had raised me for six years came to an end.

      For about nine

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