Culture Shock[1]

By Veronika Groke

When I got home after school on Friday, the flat was filled with the smell of bread baking. I dumped my bag in the hallway and went through to the living room. Mama was sitting at the table with Oma, who had freshly arrived from Linz, sipping coffee out of delicate porcelain cups.

“Servus, Lisa-Schatz,” Oma said, as I gave her a hug and kissed her cheek.

“Servus, Oma. Mmh, it smells good in here!”

Mama looked pleased at the compliment. “I thought I’d make some homemade bread for Oma. Besides, it was about time Blondi got used again.”

Blondi was Mama’s sourdough starter, which she’d inherited from her great-aunt. She was extremely proud of it. Normally festering away at the back of the fridge, it was taken out every week or so to reduce it in volume, feed it and, occasionally, to bake the most delicious crusty bread out of a fine-tuned mixture of rye and wheat flour. Mama liked to joke that it was similar to having a pet, and had even used this as an excuse whenever I used to push for a cat or a puppy as a child: “I’ve already got my hands full with looking after Blondi; besides, I’m afraid he’s the only pet there is room for in here!”

Despite this role Blondi had played in depriving me of a pet while growing up, I adored the bread Mama made from it. It always amazed me how something so rank and sticky could produce something so appetising. It wasn’t just the taste either, it was everything about it: the look of its rounded, earthy crust, furrowed like a freshly ploughed field; the homely smell that suffused our entire flat with images of brick ovens and flowery aprons and happy children munching thick slices smothered in butter and strawberry jam. On the strict hierarchy of breads my mother and grandmother subscribed to, home-baked bread occupied the top position, with other people’s home-made bread just below it, followed by baker’s bread and, at the very bottom, the kind of packaged, pre-sliced bread that was only deemed suitable for toasting, and which was, hence, exclusively referred to as “toast bread.”

Popping into the kitchen to fetch myself a cup of my own, I could feel the aroma of the bread make my stomach rumble, despite having eaten at school not that long ago. I pulled out the cup and saucer with the gold filigree pattern that was my favourite and joined Mama and Oma at the table, where a bowl of butter biscuits alleviated my fake hunger pangs for the moment. Dipping my biscuits in the coffee until they were nice and soggy, I nibbled away blissfully while half-listening to Oma and Mama talk.

“… too much to bring it all, so I packed a box with the most important bits to show you,” Oma was saying.

“So what is there?” Mama asked.

Oma exhaled forcefully. I pricked up my ears – this seemed to be more serious than the usual coffee-and-biscuits gossip.

“Well, pictures, of course,” Oma said. “More than anything, it’s pictures. But also some documents, newspaper cuttings and… Well, let’s just look at it.”

Oma got up.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Ach, Lisa,” Oma sighed, putting a hand on my shoulder. “These are old stories, old stories… Well, you’ll see.”

She went out to my room where she’d been put up for the duration of her stay while I’d volunteered to camp on an air mattress in the living room.

“What’s the matter, Mama?” I asked. “Oma seems kind of stressed.”

Mama raised her eyebrows at me. “Stressed, yes. You could say that. She’s just received a bit of an unwelcome inheritance. Remember your aunt Helene, Oma’s cousin?”

“Yeah, sort of. I think I met her maybe twice or so, when I was little. She was short and sort of grumpy-looking. I don’t remember much more about her.”

Mama waved her hand in front of her face. “Doesn’t matter. It’s not really about her – well, she died recently, but…” Mama took a breath and started again. “She died recently, and since she didn’t have any children, all her belongings went to Oma. And Oma—”

“Why did she die?”

“Just old age, I think. Oma says she’d been having heart problems for a while. But anyway – what I was going to say: Oma’s been sorting through her things, and among other things, she found an old suitcase in the attic with a bunch of old photographs – family photographs, but… also others, it seems.”

Before I could ask, Oma came back from my room carrying a red-and-white shoebox. Mama cleared a space, and Oma put the box on the table and opened the lid.

The box was stacked full of pictures: proud men posing with automobiles; glamorous women with wavy hair and thin, painted lips; families and groups of adults smiling out at us in black-and-white and sepia. Oma picked one up that showed a family in front of an apple tree: a woman and man in dark jackets squatting next to each other, and, on the woman’s knees, a very small, very serious-looking child in a short, white coat and with a big, white bow in her hair.

“There, that’s my cousin Helene, who died last month,” Oma said, pointing at the child. “And these two are her parents, my aunt Lise and my uncle Vinzenz.”

“Cute,” I said. “I’m sorry she died. Were you close?”

“Not really, no. She wasn’t very sociable.”

“Ah, okay.” I grabbed a handful of photographs, but as I picked them up, something small and metal fell out from between them. “What’s that?”

“Ah.” Again, Oma heaved a deep sigh. “This is… one of the things I wanted to show you.” She fished the object back out of the box and proffered it on the flat of her hand.

Mama took it off her, turning it over a few times. All I could see was that it was silver and blue. “You’re kidding me,” Mama said, looking at Oma. “Mami, where did this come from?”

“Let me see!” I snatched the thing off Mama. It was a stocky blue cross with silvery rays coming out from between its arms and a little loop at the top. In a circle at the middle was a silver eagle with wings spread wide and a swastika clutched in its talons. My heart stopped a little. “Oma,” I said, “whose is this?”

Oma gave me a dark look. “This, dear Lisa, is your great-great-uncle Vinzenz’s. Or better, it used to be his – I’m guessing it’s mine now.”

“But,” Mama butted in, “does that mean he would have been a member of the party?”

She didn’t need to say which party, we all knew. Oma nodded her head gravely. “It does indeed. And not just any member, an especially devoted one at that. But it gets even better. Have a look at this – where is it now?” She started rummaging in the box. “Aha! Now have a look at this photo.”

She put it down on the table. Mama and I edged closer. The photo showed two smiling men in uniform in front of a heavy door flanked by thick brick walls. Oma pointed at the one on the left. “There’s Onkel Vinzenz again, with his good friend Franz, apparently.”

“Who’s Franz?” I asked. “And where are they? Is that a castle?”

Oma shook her head. “It’s no castle, no. Quite the contrary.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the outer wall of a concentration camp,” Oma said. “I recognize it – it’s actually not far from Linz. I went there myself on a guided tour in the eighties.”

Mama was starting to look bewildered. “You’re kidding me,” she said again, with an edge of panicked outrage in her voice. “Give me that, let me see. And are you sure that is Onkel Vinzenz there?”

Oma nodded. “One hundred percent.”

I barely remembered Tante Helene, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever known anything about her parents at all, but Mama was clearly shocked. She turned the photo over. “With Franz P., 1943,” she read. “Who on Earth is Franz P.?”

“Did anyone know anything about this?” I asked.

“Well,” Oma replied, “my mother did sometimes say she thought Onkel Vinzenz had been a bit of a Nazi… But it looks like he was more than just a bit of one. Poor Helene, who knows if she even knew while he was alive – she had only just been born as the war came to an end, and it’s not like people went around advertising how and how much they’d been involved in any Nazi business afterwards…” She shook her head. “It’s hard to say. I only ever heard my mother comment on it, and whenever I asked her what she meant, she’d just hum and haw and say, ‘Let’s talk about something else’.”

Mama was still fiddling with the photo, and it looked like she was about to say something when all of a sudden she jumped up. “Jesus – the bread!” she exclaimed, running off to the kitchen to check on the precious sourdough loaf.

We didn’t discuss the case of Onkel Vinzenz much further after that; when Mama came back with the bread and some cold meat and cheese to put on it, Oma had put her box of evidence aside, and we all agreed it was better to leave its investigation for another day. The bread was oven-warm and just the right degree of sour. Luxuriating in its deliciousness, we gratefully moved on to happier topics.

 

I woke in the morning to a murmur of voices and the tapping of a keyboard. Oma and Mama, who were sitting in front of Mama’s desktop, turned when the air mattress creaked as I sat up.

“Sorry to wake you,” Mama said.

I yawned. “That’s okay. What are you doing on the computer in the middle of the night?”

“Very funny. It’s ten o’clock, you marmot.”

“We’ve been trying to find out about Franz P.,” Oma said. “On Goggle.”

It took me a moment. “Goggle… Franz P…? Oh.” I heaved myself off the mattress and joined the two of them. They were looking at a Wikipedia page adorned by a black-and-white mugshot of a grave-looking, dark-haired man in a plain military-style jacket. I read the introduction: born 1906… died 1945… SS-Offizier… Lagerkommandant… My stomach started to churn.

“That’s the guy?”

“Yes,” Mama said grimly, “we’re pretty sure that’s the guy. The one in the picture. With my great-uncle Vinzenz.”

 I skimmed some more of the text. Shop owner parents, no siblings, religious upbringing. An apprenticeship followed by a job as a bureaucrat, then a career in the SS that seemed kind of complicated. A wife, three children. Some minor trouble with the law, but after the Nazi takeover in thirty-three he was off, moving through leadership positions in various concentration camps, committing various atrocities along the way. The end was unimpressive: after the camps were freed, Franz went on the run, but was caught soon after and hanged himself before the authorities could do it.

“Did you find anything on Onkel Vinzenz?” I asked.

They both shook their heads.

“No,” Oma replied. “Nothing at all. Neither on him, nor on Tante Lise or Helene.”

“He probably just wasn’t that important,” Mama said.

“Still, if he was friends with that guy…” I didn’t finish the sentence, because I wasn’t sure myself what this meant. Meant for us; it was an oft-repeated truism that everyone had a Nazi in their family history somewhere, but knowing it as a general rule and actually having a face and a name somehow felt like very different things.

“Well, at least he wasn’t a blood relative,” Oma said.

Mama gave a humourless laugh. “And you think that Tante Lise wasn’t involved in any way? That seems to me—”

She broke off, staring in front of her like someone had hit the pause button on her. “Oh shit,” she mumbled.

“Hilde, what’s the matter?” Oma asked in alarm.

I shook her arm. “Mama?”

Slowly, she turned her head to face me. “The sourdough,” she said.

“What?”

“The sourdough… Blondi… I got Blondi from Tante Lise.”

I rolled my eyes. “So what?”

“What do you mean, so what?” Where she had seemed vacant a moment ago, Mama was now looking flustered. “That’s the bread I’ve been baking all these years… with that Nazi sourdough!”

I snorted, getting up. “Ah, come on! Nazi sourdough. The things you worry about! – I’m just going to the bathroom quickly, back in a moment. Don’t say anything important while I’m gone!”

Sitting on the toilet, I thought about what Mama had said, and the more I thought about it, the more unsettling it became. I tried spinning the thought further: would I still be thinking so what? if the sourdough had come from Franz P.? What about from Hitler? Would I eat bread if I knew Hitler had baked it? The idea was stupid, of course, but at the same time – hadn’t Blondi always been special to us precisely because it was a living thing that had endured through the generations? That made us feel connected to those who had gone before us?

I put my head in my hands. All those nice images I associated with the smell of the sourdough bread came back to me. Old-fashioned wholesomeness, happy mothers in flowery aprons, making food for happy children – the Nazis had used just this kind of thing in their propaganda. Not even to mention the brick ovens… Something hard was pressing against my throat; it felt like both the bread and my thoughts had been contaminated, like we as a family had been contaminated. Mama was right: we’d been eating Nazi food, putting it into our bodies, our minds, our souls.

After a while, I realized I’d been sitting there rather longer than necessary, so I washed my hands and went back to the living room. Mama and Oma were still sitting by the PC.

“I just had a thought,” I said. “Couldn’t it be that Tante Lise wasn’t the one who started the sourdough? It’s possible that she already inherited it from someone else.”

Mama put her hands in her hair. “No, I don’t believe that, not with that name it’s got.”

“Your mama looked on Goggle—”

“Google.”

“—and it says there that “Blondi” was the name of Hitler’s dog. It really would be a weird coincidence.”

“Whoa. But hang on – didn’t Opa have a favourite chicken called Blondi when he was little?”

“No, no, that was Blonderl, definitely not Blondi. Besides, that’s the wrong side of the family, nothing to do with Tante Lise.”

“Huh.”

For a long moment, we all just sat there, staring down at the keyboard.

“But…” I started eventually. “So what do we do with it? I mean…”

Mama huffed. “Ha! We’ll have to throw it out, I think! I can’t have Nazi sourdough in my house. I can’t be baking my bread with that…” She trailed off, covering her mouth with her hand. “And to think that we’ve been eating that the whole time…”

She got up and headed for the kitchen. “Those stupid Nazis really have to ruin everything.”

Oma and I followed. We watched as Mama took Blondi out from its corner in the fridge and resolutely took a couple of steps towards the bin; then she stopped. A doleful expression spread over her face as she looked at the gunky jam jar with the fizzy, greyish goop in it.

“Shit,” she mumbled again, then slowly carried Blondi out into the living room and set it down on the table. Wordlessly, Oma, Mama and I resumed our seats from the previous night.

“Hilde…” Oma began.

Mama covered her eyes with her hand. “This is so stupid,” she said, half laughing.

I thought I knew what was going through her head: for as long as I could remember, Blondi had been treated almost like a beloved animal – our pet. That had always been the joke. A joke, and yet… Looking at Blondi now, throwing it out felt somehow wrong. But so did keeping it. Everything felt wrong.

We sat there staring at the jar as if we expected Blondi to provide the answer, until Mama slapped her hands on the table, pushing herself up.

“Right,” she said and made a grab for Blondi.

“Hilde…” Oma said again, a little feebly, but Mama marched to the door with the jar. “Just let me do it quickly,” she said.

I was thinking how sick it was to have had a sourdough starter that was named after Hitler’s dog all this time, how I’d always thought of it as a funny nickname, when something else occurred to me. “Wait!” I called.

Mama turned back. “What is it?”

“Speaking of names…” I said. “What about me?”

Mama frowned. “What do you mean, what about you?”

But at the same time, Oma, who had clearly got it, started talking over her: “But that’s something completely different! You can’t compare your own name to that sourdough. You’re a person, and that’s sourdough, and that’s that!”

Realization dawned on my mother’s features. “Jesus!” she said. “You mean, because you’re named after Tante Lise?”

She sat back in her chair, Blondi forgotten for the moment. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “We would have never named you after her if we’d had any idea…”

“I know,” I said. It did feel a little weird, but at the same time it was clear that it had been nobody’s fault. Mama had always been particularly fond of Tante Lise, so she and Papa had named me after her, Elisabeth – a common-enough name, and not even one of the worst; I’d always been quite happy to be a Lisa.

“I was just thinking,” I said, “you wouldn’t think of throwing me out, just because I have a Nazi woman’s name.” I had to talk over Oma, who’d started protesting again, to continue. “And we wouldn’t have thrown Oma’s cousin out either, even if she did have Nazi parents. You know how you said that those stupid Nazis always ruin everything?” Mama nodded. “How about if we don’t let them?”

I looked back and forth between them, letting the thought sink in. A feeling of defiance was growing within me: Blondi was innocent, and we shouldn’t let the sins of its makers turn us against it.

I could see Mama was keen to come round to the idea; she was looking at Blondi longingly while she muttered, “Well…”

“You’re perfectly right,” Oma suddenly said. “Enough is enough. This is your sourdough, Hilde,” she continued to Mama, “and you don’t have to let anyone ruin it for you.”

“Besides…” I said; I’d had another thought. “Hang on just a minute.”

I went back over to the PC. It took a little more than a minute, but in the end I found what I was looking for: “So sourdough has cultures of lactic acid, bacteria and yeast, and depending on what kind of flour you feed them on, it has more or less of each, and it’ll change the taste. And if you look after it well, you can keep it going for, I don’t know, maybe hundreds of years. But—” I raised my finger to underline the importance of my discovery, “—the individual bacteria and yeast fungi only live a few days or so. So this Blondi is actually not the same Blondi as the one Tante Lise made at all, it’s more like its great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great… grand-child!”

Oma laughed and Mama smiled, and they both patted me on the back.

“Maybe you should become a lawyer,” Oma said.

“Yes, alright, I’m convinced,” Mama added. She tapped the lid of the jar. “Poor Blondi got awfully close to being murdered! Though I do think that it needs a different name.”

Oma and I nodded our approval.

“Yes.”

“Good idea.”

After brainstorming and rejecting various suggestions for being too soppy, too cringey or too similar to the old name, we finally settled on Fifi. It was perfectly unimaginative, one of the most stereotypical dog names we could think of, and one for little, yappy dogs at that; but we all agreed that stereotypical and unimaginative was just what we wanted in this case. (Though we did also check on “Goggle”, just to be sure.)

Once it was all settled, we solemnly regarded our old-new sourdough, its ever-regenerating cultures fizzing away obliviously.

“Now we just have the shoebox to work through to decide what we’re going to do with all the stuff in there,” Oma said with a sigh. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a quick task.

Mama stood and grabbed Fifi. “Okay – but first of all, I’m going to make some bread.”

There was still half a loaf left from the previous night, but somehow, it felt like an important thing to do, so I got up too. “I’ll help.”

We looked at Oma. She smiled, rising from her chair. “Yes, come on then, let the Nazis wait,” she said. “Let’s all go and make bread together.”

Notes

[1] I am grateful to Will Rollason for providing the initial inspiration for this story