The Dead Man in the Bunker: Discovering my Father by Martin Pollack, translated by William Hobson
London: Faber and Faber, 2007 ISBN 9780571228010
What a fascinating book, on so many levels. Martin Pollack has written an account of trying to track down the story of his father, an Austrian SS man who was murdered trying to cross the Brenner Pass in 1947. He takes us on a journey into the borderlands of the German people, the beginnings of the German nationalism that fed the growth of Nazism, and the forgetting that occurred after the War.
Pollack begins the story by finding the spot in a bunker on the Pass where his father's body was found. He then winds back through history, to the late Nineteenth Century when his family lived in Styria, on the "border" between Slovene and German people. Pollacks father's family, the Bast family were upstanding Germans, members of German nationalist groups, anti-Semitic, and early converts to Nazism. Pollack well describes the increasing tension on the "German language border" which only increased after World War I, when new borders exacerbated the tension. The Basts soon joined the Nazi party, which was a provocative and illegal act in Austria at that time. Gerhard, Pollack's father, risked prison as he rose further in the Party, and joined the SS. After the Anschluss, Gerhard's father rose in the Nazi bureaucracy as his son rose higher in the SS.
Pollack takes us further into the history of his family - he explains that Bast was not married to his mother, and in fact his mother was married to another man and had two children already. His mother divorced and married Bast in April 1945. When the war ended Bast was on the run, and so Pollack's mother re-married her first husband...and yet his mother sent him on holidays to the Bast grandparents. A very tangled story, but one he could never really talk about at the time to any of his family.
Getting information about what his father did in the War is also tangled. As Pollack explains, records for German forces, the SS in particular, are patchy owing to how many were destroyed at the end of the War, and the difficulty in tracking one person through a multitude of files in a multitude of cities and countries.
And so this book is just as much about what is not known, as it is about the facts. Pollack, naturally wants to believe that his father was - as his grandmother tells him - a good man, but he knows that would be too good to be true. He was right.
Gerhard Bast had many phases to his SS career... one of which was commanding Sonderkommando 7a toward the end of the war, where he was definitely involved in the execution of innocents. There is no doubt that Bast was a committed Nazi. There is no doubt in Pollack's mind that his grandparents, Bast's parents remained Nazis even after the War, as did his mother and step-father...their views of the world, of Jews in particular, did not change. Pollack is unflinching in the way he describes how his views clashed with those of his family, and it is painful to read how the trauma of the experience of war, what his family suffered and the suffering it caused, throws ripples through history forever.
The Dead Man in the Bunker is one man's attempt to understand those ripples and what his family history means for him. A forceful, moving and painful book.
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