ordained. His faith in Our Dear Führer was even greater than his faith in God. Hitler would work magic. He would give Germany back its dignity, burn the Versailles Treaty, get rid of our Communists and Jews and build an Aryan heaven on earth. You are really not bored?"
"How can you ask? I'm riveted!"
"But not so riveted that you will rush out and tell your ten best friends that after all I have a father, I hope. The Herr Pastor and his fellow Nazi Lutherans called themselves Deutsche Christen. How he survived the last years of the war is unclear to me, since to this day he refuses to discuss such matters. At some desperate moment he was sent to the Russian front and captured. That the Russians didn't shoot him is a dereliction of good sense that I have long held against them. Instead they sent him to prison in Siberia, and by the time he was released and returned to East Germany, Herr Pastor the Christian Nazi had become Herr Pastor the Christian Bolshevik. As a consequence of this conversion the East German Lutheran Church gave him a job curing Communist souls in Leipzig. I will confess to you that I greatly resented his return from captivity. He had no right to take my mother from me. He was a stranger, a violator. Other children had no father: why should I have one? This broken little coward of a man, sniffing a lot, preaching himself up to twice his size, with the words of Jesus and Lenin, was repulsive to me. To please my poor mother I was obliged to declare myself a convert. It is true that there were times when I was confused by the bond between the two deities, but since they both had beards it was possible to assume a symbiosis. In 1960, however, God was good enough to appear to the Herr Pastor in a dream and order him to take his family and everything he owned to the West while there was time. So we put our Bibles in our pockets and fled over the sector border, leaving Lenin behind."
"Did you have brothers and sisters? This is _really__ appalling, Sasha."
"An elder brother whom my parents greatly preferred to me. He died."
"At what age?"
"Sixteen."
"What of?"
"Pneumonia, complicated by respiratory problems. A long, slow dying. I envied Rolf because he was our mother's favourite, and loved him because he was a good brother to me. For seven months I visited him every day in the hospital and was present at his end. It was not a vigil I remember with pleasure."
"I'm sure not." He risks it. "So what happened to your body?"
"It appears that I was conceived while the Herr Pastor was on home leave, and subsequently born in a ditch while my mother was attempting to escape from the Russian advance. Her later information, probably inaccurate, was that I was deprived of oxygen in the womb. What my mother was deprived of, I can only imagine. It was not a salubrious ditch." He resumes. "The Herr Pastor made the spiritual transition from East to West with his customary agility. Having caught the eye of a Missouri missionary organization of dubious connections, he was flown to St. Louis for a course of religious instruction. He graduated summa cum laude and returned to West Germany an ardent Christian conservative of the seventeenth century and a devotee of free market Christian capitalism. Appropriately, a curacy was found for him in the old Nazi stamping ground of Schleswig-Holstein, where every Sunday, to the enchantment of his congregation, he may be heard singing the praises of Martin Luther and Wall Street from the pulpit."
"Sasha, this is truly terrible. Terrible and fantastic. Can we go up to Schleswig-Holstein and listen to him?"
"Never. I have disowned him totally. As far as my comrades are concerned he is totally dead. It is the one point on which the Herr Pastor and I have found common ground. He does not wish to acknowledge an atheist radical militant for a son, and I do not wish to acknowledge an aggressive hypocritical religious turncoat for a father. That is why, with the Herr Pastor's collusion, I have
"How can you ask? I'm riveted!"
"But not so riveted that you will rush out and tell your ten best friends that after all I have a father, I hope. The Herr Pastor and his fellow Nazi Lutherans called themselves Deutsche Christen. How he survived the last years of the war is unclear to me, since to this day he refuses to discuss such matters. At some desperate moment he was sent to the Russian front and captured. That the Russians didn't shoot him is a dereliction of good sense that I have long held against them. Instead they sent him to prison in Siberia, and by the time he was released and returned to East Germany, Herr Pastor the Christian Nazi had become Herr Pastor the Christian Bolshevik. As a consequence of this conversion the East German Lutheran Church gave him a job curing Communist souls in Leipzig. I will confess to you that I greatly resented his return from captivity. He had no right to take my mother from me. He was a stranger, a violator. Other children had no father: why should I have one? This broken little coward of a man, sniffing a lot, preaching himself up to twice his size, with the words of Jesus and Lenin, was repulsive to me. To please my poor mother I was obliged to declare myself a convert. It is true that there were times when I was confused by the bond between the two deities, but since they both had beards it was possible to assume a symbiosis. In 1960, however, God was good enough to appear to the Herr Pastor in a dream and order him to take his family and everything he owned to the West while there was time. So we put our Bibles in our pockets and fled over the sector border, leaving Lenin behind."
"Did you have brothers and sisters? This is _really__ appalling, Sasha."
"An elder brother whom my parents greatly preferred to me. He died."
"At what age?"
"Sixteen."
"What of?"
"Pneumonia, complicated by respiratory problems. A long, slow dying. I envied Rolf because he was our mother's favourite, and loved him because he was a good brother to me. For seven months I visited him every day in the hospital and was present at his end. It was not a vigil I remember with pleasure."
"I'm sure not." He risks it. "So what happened to your body?"
"It appears that I was conceived while the Herr Pastor was on home leave, and subsequently born in a ditch while my mother was attempting to escape from the Russian advance. Her later information, probably inaccurate, was that I was deprived of oxygen in the womb. What my mother was deprived of, I can only imagine. It was not a salubrious ditch." He resumes. "The Herr Pastor made the spiritual transition from East to West with his customary agility. Having caught the eye of a Missouri missionary organization of dubious connections, he was flown to St. Louis for a course of religious instruction. He graduated summa cum laude and returned to West Germany an ardent Christian conservative of the seventeenth century and a devotee of free market Christian capitalism. Appropriately, a curacy was found for him in the old Nazi stamping ground of Schleswig-Holstein, where every Sunday, to the enchantment of his congregation, he may be heard singing the praises of Martin Luther and Wall Street from the pulpit."
"Sasha, this is truly terrible. Terrible and fantastic. Can we go up to Schleswig-Holstein and listen to him?"
"Never. I have disowned him totally. As far as my comrades are concerned he is totally dead. It is the one point on which the Herr Pastor and I have found common ground. He does not wish to acknowledge an atheist radical militant for a son, and I do not wish to acknowledge an aggressive hypocritical religious turncoat for a father. That is why, with the Herr Pastor's collusion, I have
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