BLASTING THE HISTORICAL CONTINUUM: STORIES OF MY GRANDMOTHER

Madeleine Kasten

My grandmother was born in Antwerp in 1902. Her father, an over-enthusiastic amateur painter, died of chrome poisoning when she was eleven. During the First World War she and her mother, brother, and two sisters became war refugees. They fled to neutral Holland and eventually settled in Rotterdam, where my grandmother was lucky enough to find a job at a stylish department store. Here, in the course of the twenties, she also met a commercial traveller from Germany named Hermann Kasten. Hermann decided to put a stop to his wanderings and set up his own business in raw cotton. The couple married and had two children, my father Carl/Kelly (1931) and Gisela (1936).

The beginning of World War II found the family still living in Rotterdam, but not for long: massive German bombing on May 14, 1940, caused them to flee to the relative safety of nearby The Hague. What my grandparents had not foreseen was that from 1944 on the Germans were to use this city as a launching base for their V2 missiles, thereby exposing it to frequent air raids by the Allied Forces. The worst of these attacks took place on March 3, 1945, two months before the liberation of the northern Netherlands. That day the British bombers got their co-ordinates wrong: instead of destroying the launching system in the Haagse Bos they devastated the densely populated Bezuidenhout quarter.

My father still remembers the noise of windows breaking. “Out of the house, everyone!” my grandfather cried. At this signal all four grabbed their emergency bags packed in advance and ran out into the street. My grandmother and father stayed together. As they rounded the corner there was an explosion. My father ducked in time – my grandmother did not and died within minutes. In the chaos following the attack her body was recovered only days later, just as she was about to be interred in a mass grave.

In the home where I grew up my grandmother was hardly ever mentioned. As she was invariably referred to by her nickname, Maudy, nothing had prepared me for the shock I felt on first being taken to visit her tomb. I could barely read at the time, yet was able to make out my own three names on that grey headstone: Madeleine Jeanne Aldegonde. I demanded to see pictures, and – somewhat to my relief – was shown a dark-haired woman to whom I did not bear the slightest resemblance. The impact of this first encounter lasted for a long time, however, to be renewed when, years later, I was given a serviette ring carrying her and my own initials.

Today I have learned more about my grandmother, despite understandable inconsistencies between my father’s and my aunt’s memories of her. Beyond the bare outlines sketched above, however, the picture remains full of blanks. This very lack of detail may explain why her life impresses me as having been singularly dominated by fate. Thrice did history interfere with her existence, and on each occasion this interference resulted in her flight. Ironically, each of her successive escapes only propelled her towards the geographical place of her death– a realization which was brought home to me on discovering that her last house still stands intact.

Viewed under this aspect, Maudy’s story reminds me of P.N. van Eyck’s poem, “The Gardener and Death”. A Persian nobleman relates how he was accosted by his gardener in the morning. Frightened by the appearance of Death, whose hand he had seen pointing at him, the servant begged his master for a horse to flee to the city of Ispahan. A few hours after his departure the lord himself encounters Death in a cedar grove. What did you mean by upsetting my gardener, he wants to know?

Death smiles and says: ‘In truth, I meant no threat

By this gesture, at which your servant fled:

I was merely surprised to meet the man

I am to fetch this night at Ispahan.’[1]

In The Hague as in Ispahan, there is no escaping one’s destiny, although the gardener’s lot strikes me as particularly cruel: even while he is still alive his fate, long sealed, has already become a topic for philosophical conversation.

Yet this notion of my grandmother’s life as bearing the stamp of fateful necessity represents but one way of looking at it. On second thoughts her story may be seen to be as riddled by idiosyncrasies as it is marked by repetition. Take her father’s untimely death – not in the fields which were to take such an unprecedented toll only a year later but in bed, because he could never resist gnawing his paint brushes. Or her decision to marry a German following her family’s flight from the German occupation. What was it that attracted her to a husband whose ‘Prussian’ code of behaviour could still inspire his grandchildren with fear when he was old? Or did granddad’s insistence on discipline grow on him only after his loss, at a time when his adopted country turned on him with a fierceness that caused his own son, my father, to change his first name from Carl to Kelly?

Puzzling as these gaps and ill-assorted bits of information remain, yet I like to think that they prevent my grandmother’s story from being swallowed by any grand narrative of history. For such narratives tend to disavow the incongruous even where it does not go unnoticed, as was the case with the British attack on the Bezuidenhout. Not until many years after the war did the Dutch public learn the truth about this incident, although it turned out that Churchill’s Ministry of War had realized its mistake almost at once.

Here, another intertext presents itself: Harry Mulisch’ novel The Stone Bridal Bed. I am referring to the beginning of Part IV, where Norman Corinth, a dentist from Baltimore, stands overlooking the ruins of Dresden – the city which he helped to bomb thirteen years earlier. On showing him the view his unsuspecting German host, himself a survivor of this absolutely pointless attack, has told him how Napoleon gained his last puny victory here back in 1813. Not a word about the massacre of February 1945. Corinth reflects that there are two kinds of history: a ‘history of the mind’, which may be bloody but is still ruled by laws of cause and effect; and ‘anti-history’, which he imagines to be situated outside time. Shrouded in the silence of death, ‘anti-history’ comprises those acts which might as well not have been committed, incompatible as they are either with thought or the causality principle. If Hitler’s genocide of the Jews belongs to the unspeakable realm of ‘anti-history’, Corinth ponders, so does the Allied attack on Dresden.[2]

No doubt the guilty memories haunting Corinth relate to a different order of absurdity than the ‘accidents’ which killed my grandmother and so many others during the war. What these instances of the absurd have in common, however, is that neither could lay claim to a place in any ‘history of the mind’: in this sense both find themselves consigned to an eternity of silence.

Meanwhile it is worth noting the uncanny correspondence between Corinth’s conception of history and that of Walter Benjamin, himself an early and certainly not unintentional victim of the Second World War. In the ninth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Benjamin introduces his famous Engel der Geschichte, an image for which he drew inspiration from a drawing by Paul Klee. Unable to close its spread wings, the angel of history faces the past, its eyes and mouth opened wide in alarm. Where we mortals perceive a sequence of connected events, this spiritual creature sees but the steadily increasing debris of a single catastrophe. The angel would stay to revive the dead and rejoin the broken pieces, but for a storm blowing from paradise which continuously drives it backwards into the future. What we call progress, Benjamin comments cryptically, is really this storm.[3]

Like Corinth, Benjamin posits the co-existence of two radically different views of history. In both cases, the latter is made to appear as a logical continuum and as an accumulation of the absurd. Yet where Corinth – already on the verge of madness – presumes to command both viewpoints, Benjamin maintains a strict division of roles. For where man conjures up visions of historical coherence, only the angel is able to see (literally: face up to) the rubbish heaps of what has been.

We find Benjamin’s account of the human position in this scheme corroborated by the ‘narrativist’ argument, advanced with considerable success since the sixties of the last century, that every history is structured like a story and subject to particular forms of emplotment. Thus Roland Barthes characterizes the historian as “[…] not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series”.[4] This promise of meaning, he claims, finds its fulfilment in the reader, who, as “the space on which the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost”, cannot but impose a unifying perspective on the narrative offered.[5] Similarly, Paul Ricoeur, discussing the relationship between life and narrative, proposes that “the process of composition, of configuration, is not completed but in the reader and, under this condition, makes possible the reconfiguration of life by narrative”.[6]

Unfortunately this ubiquitous tendency towards unification threatens to frustrate any view of the past which, like that embodied by Benjamin’s angel, would stress its ‘anti-historical’ aspect as an accumulation of not necessarily related events and experiences. Despite Benjamin’s suggestion that it takes a superhuman eye to overcome this tendency, however, the third of his “Theses” points to an alternative understanding of the historiographer’s task. In this passage of his last completed text Benjamin commends the work of the chronicler, who records events without presuming to distinguish them according to their relative importance. Nothing that has ever happened, he emphasizes, should be regarded as lost for history; only thus is the hope preserved for a history that might cite the past in the fullness of all its moments (GS I.2, 694).

Not everyone might be able or even willing to share the messianic outlook sustaining Benjamin’s hope. Even so, I believe his appeal can be read as a plea for a pluralization of voices that need not, indeed should not await either the coming of Judgement Day or the return of the medieval chronicler. Once again, in this era of war on terrorism, political powers across the world are seen to embrace a rhetoric of spurious choices and barely disguised xenophobia. In doing so, they confirm the truth of Benjamin’s warning that not even the dead are safe from the struggle for the control of history (GS I.3, 695). At such a time, the countless stories of people who have experienced difference from the inside – like yourself, John, or my hapless grandmother – are an indispensable antidote. As long as these stories continue to be told, nothing may be lost for history indeed.

[1] P.N. van Eyck, “De tuinman en de dood”. Quoted from 19 / 20:De Nederlandse poëzie van de negentiende en twintigste eeuw in 1000 en enige gedichten, ed. Gerrit Komrij. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996, 533 (my translation).

[2] Harry Mulisch, The Stone Bridal Bed. Original title: Het stenen bruidsbed. English translation by Adrienne Dixon. London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1962 (1959).

[3] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I.2, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaüser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991 (1974), 697-98.

[4] Roland Barthes, “Historical Discourse”. Introduction to Structuralism, ed. M. Lane. New York: Basic Books, 1970, 153 (my italics).

[5] Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and translation Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977, 148.

[6] Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative”. Quoted from Philosophies of History: From Enlightenment to Postmodernity, eds. Robert M. Burns and Hugh Rayment-Pickard. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 (1991), 298.

HGA, Archief 1165 01 inventaris 152 EN OF 153 LBD 1945 Kaartsysteem bombardement 3 maart, Slachtofferkaart 031 VB

Het Vaderland 8 maart 1945

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