Preface by the Publisher In autumn 2017 I had a telephone call from my good old friend Eckart Koellreutter. He told me about his excellent idea to write about his relatives’ involvement in the terrible World Wars of the last century. I instantly found his suggestion exiting because I myself had had the same thoughts years earlier but never found enough courage to realize them. So we started to write down some kind of reflections about what had been on our minds for so long. My dear mother Gisela Guss (Wichmann by maiden name) had often told me about her friend Lieselotte Tuengerthal who was “picked up” one day by the Nazis – “abgeholt”, what a terrible word! I came 12 across a picture of a woman who I assumed was Lieselotte Tuengerthal and thought about visiting a synagogue, simply holding her picture in my hand, praying for her and asking forgiveness for the atrocities my nation had committed. Eckart supported my plan. I looked for a synagogue and found one in the city of Paderborn. There I met a friendly man called Alexander Kogan. He told me a lot about the history of the Jews in Paderborn and asked me to read a poem titled “The number on Grandmother’s arm” which had been written by his cousin Ella Dor-On. Later, he sent me all the other poems written by the poetess. I was convinced: I had to get them published! 13 My father Kurt Guss, a “Kriegsfreiwilliger” (war volunteer), was killed in action in Russia two months before my birth. My mother’s brother, Berthold Wichmann, was put into “Frontbewährung” (service on the front) and never returned. My mother’s heart was broken by these events and she never really recovered since. My own life was indeed deeply affected by her suffering and her subsequent untimely death. No day goes by without thinking of her and the tragic history of my family. I cannot forget. Why did all that happen? And: will we ever be allowed to forget these terrible events – to let the past be the past? “One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been 14 brought in a cattle-train to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dust of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood. According to the investigator, Pnin had happened to talk to in Washington, the only certain thing was that being too weak to work (though still smiling, still able to help other Jewish women), she was selected to die and was cremated only a few days after her arrival in Buchenwald, in the 15 beautiful wooded 'Grosser Ettersberg', as the region is resoundingly called. It is an hour’s stroll from Weimar, where Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland, the inimitable Kotzebue and others used to walk.”1 Nabokow starts with “One had to forget”. Nabokow’s “One had to forget”, obviously means: “One would like to forget but one must not forget!”. This also reminds me of the last sentences of Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: „I can't go on. I'll go on.”2 Precisely the same attitude was the reason for publishing this book. I wish to express my gratitude to my friend Alexander Kogan who encouraged me to publish this book and to my friend Ella Dor-On 1 W. Nabokow, Pnin, Penguin, London 2016, p. 117 f. [1957.] 2 S. Beckett, The Unnamable, Olympia Press, Paris 1958. 16 for her permission to do so. I would like to say Thank you to Gerlind Koellreutter and her daughter Friederike Schoonhoven, who were a great help with the correction work. G-d bless them and G-d bless Eckart Koellreutter and all the other friends listed above, who contributed with donations to always remember those events that we must never forget although one had to forget. Bühne, Spring 2019 Prof. Dr. mult. Kurt Gussweiterlesen