When she turned 18, Julia Gilfert dreamed of her grandfather Walter for the first time – a man she never met and who wasn’t talked about in her family. In the beginning of her 20s she starts asking questions and doing research. She learns that Walter is one of more than 300.000 victims of the Nazi “euthanasia” murders. Julia lays a stumbling stone for him, and she begins to write down his story. Her book “Himmel voller Schweigen” (Heaven Full of Silence) gets published in 2021. Today Walter is not only a part of her life, but a part of the whole family’s memory. And he kind of shaped Julia’s further way of life: In summer 2025, she submitted her doctoral thesis on dealing with right-wing extremism at Nazi memorial sites. The following text is based on an interview she guided with her father in 2019.
It’s December 23rd and we’re sitting in my parents’ living room. Dad is sitting in one of the armchairs, I’m sitting in the other one. During the whole conversation he avoids looking at me. He’s staring into space instead, nervously rubbing his fingers together – even though this is not the first time we talk about his father. Born in 1908, Walter Frick became a victim of Nazi “euthanasia” murders in 1941. Dad was still a baby back then. Walter had an older sister named Hedwig. It was her husband, Armin, who had Walter taken into a ‘mental hospital’. He was the one who reported his brother-in-law’s death to the registry office. He was the one who said he died of ‘sadness, depression and exhaustion’. In 1942, Armin was transferred to the Russian front, where he was killed by a mine explosion in 1943.
© Julia Gilfert
All sources used to reconstruct a family history are fragments, whether they are diaries, photographs or conversations with family members. Memory is a “constructive system […], it not only pictures reality, but it filters and interprets it according to various functions”, sociologist Harald Welzer (2000: 248) writes. Cultural anthropologist Albrecht Lehmann (2001: 235) even says that differentiating between memory and fiction is “almost impossible”, because human conscience always remains “biased” (ibid.: 238).
I ask my dad how it felt growing up without a father.
“Well … what comes to my mind at first is of course that my uncle always said: I am in your father’s place. But there was a huge problem with this uncle – he had never been the kind of father I would have wanted. He was strict and he completely dominated me with what he called ‘care’. […] So, I didn’t know how it felt to not have a father in the first place.”
Words like “at first” and “of course” kind of affirm my dad’s statement. His mother’s older brother replaced his absent father. After Walter’s death, Luise and her two children stayed at her brother’s house. For my dad, his uncle’s presence was overwhelming.
“Looking back, I remember that they all avoided talking about it. My mother never sat down and said: Now I’m going to tell you about your dad. Something like this never happened. She only told us stories about their artistic work at the opera from time to time. But apart from that, I’d say, she behaved like he had never existed.”
As we talk, it becomes increasingly clear that Walter did play a role in dad’s childhood. On the one hand he was present through certain objects like a portrait hanging near Luise’s piano. And on the other hand there was this one thing my dad knew about his father: He had been a conductor. Since Luise had the opportunity to work as a music and singing teacher after the end of the war, classical music was omnipresent during my dad’s childhood – and so was his father.
But yet nobody talked about him – “Something like this never happened”. A statement that seems to be obvious at first, but I think this is only one part of my dad’s experience. Maybe “something like this” did not happen, but what if it happened in another way? With their book “Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern” (The Inability to Mourn) published in 1967, psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich tried to explain why Germany’s post war society behaved the way it did. They called it displacement, which is an unconscious process. Philosopher Hermann Lübbe (2007), though, named it intentional silencing. Discussing his thesis, literary scholar Aleida Assmann summarises: “The personal past of the millions of Germans who were affirmatively integrated into the Third Reich [was] excluded from communication” (Assmann 2016: 44).
Using the words of psychoanalyst Kurt Grünberg, the question is, however, “whether the verbal actually constitutes the core of tradition” or whether “the actual discourse might be formed of nonverbal relationships […] and concrete societal conditions instead” (Grünberg 2002: 60). Anyway, after a failed marriage in the 1970s my dad decided to start a new life. He underwent a psychoanalysis. And the more he understood that the problems he’d had with his former wife were connected to his relationship with his mother, the more he realized what was missing: Walter, the unknown father.
“There was a permanent and increasing discomfort. Suddenly I noticed: Why isn’t anybody talking about it? Why is there so little known? These questions were accompanied by an awful feeling in my stomach.”
My dad tells me how he started to ask family members and former companions about his father. His mother Luise said in a quite “displeased manner” that his father had been brought to a ‘mental hospital’ where he died. When my dad went to see their former housemaid, her husband chose him from the yard when he realized that Walter was the reason for his unexpected visit. Finally, it was my dad’s aunt, Walter’s sister Hedwig, who told him what happened. Reluctantly she explained that Walter would have had a “nervous breakdown” at her’s and Armin’s house back then. Armin would have called some of his SS colleagues who captured Walter and brought him to a ‘mental hospital’. “There they must have given him an injection”, he quotes her word for word.
© Julia Gilfert
“When we found Hedwig’s diaries and you started your meticulous research it was like my father’s genesis. He kind of awoke in my imagination. I guess he has been shaped by me in a way, though, but he became present for me as if I’d known him. As if he had been closer to me in my life than he was in my childhood. Well … how would we have met?”
“Genesis” means that something new has been shaped. But someone who “awakes” has already been there before. Walter’s place in my dad’s perception must have been somewhere in between for a long time, somewhere between presence and absence.
When the temporal distance grows the vocabulary increases either, I guess. Historian Alfred Fleßner confirms this perception. Research by later generations can help those who have experienced war and loss to build a relationship with their murdered relatives, he says. Maybe this is the reason why it’s me, dad’s youngest child by far, who became the “protagonist” (Fleßner 2011: 200) of our family history’s rehabilitation. Literary scholar Hans-Heino Ewers claims that the task of facing one’s family history can be perceived as “flattering” (Ewers 2009: 131) by those protagonists. I have to admit, he’s right. Beside all the grief and pain I did feel flattered in a way because I would be the one to tell Walter’s story. Starting as a documentary about him, my work soon would turn into a deep identification with him. Everything I did, I did for him. Today I know that I did it for me as well. While I sincerely hope that I have done him justice with the picture I drew of him, I no less sincerely wish that he really was the way I imagine.
During the talk we had back then, one day before Christmas, my dad expressed what I refused to know for a long time. He said that he realized that Walter has been shaped by him in a way. However, no matter how close we came to our father and grandfather, we still have to live with the fact that this one question will remain open: “How would we have met?”
Literature:
Assmann, Aleida: Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention. München 2016.
Fleßner, Alfred: Zur Aufarbeitung der NS-„Euthanasie“ in den Familien der Opfer. In: Westermann, Stefanie, Richard Kühl und Tim Ohnhäuser (eds.): NS-„Euthanasie“ und Erinnerung. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung – Gedenkformen – Betroffenenperspektiven. Berlin 2011. p. 195-207.
Gilfert, Julia: Himmel voller Schweigen. Fragmente einer Familiengeschichte. Dresden 2021.
Grünberg, Kurt: Tradierung des Nazi-Traumas und Schweigen. In: Özkan, Ibrahim, Annette Streeck-Fischer und Ulrich Sachsse (eds.): Trauma und Gesellschaft. Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart. Göttingen 2002. p. 34-63.
Lehmann, Albrecht: Bewusstseinsanalyse. In: Göttsch, Silke und Albrecht Lehmann (eds.): Methoden der Volkskunde. Positionen, Quellen, Arbeitsweisen der Europäischen Ethnologie. Berlin 2001. p. 233-249.
Lübbe, Hermann: Vom Parteigenossen zum Bundesbürger. Über beschwiegene und historisierte Vergangenheiten. München 2007.
Mitscherlich, Alexander und Margarete: Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. München 1967.
Welzer, Harald: Das Interview als Artefakt. Zur Kritik der Zeitzeugenforschung, in: BIOS – Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History, 13, 2000. p. 51-63.
