Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

184   SPEECHES | POLITICS AND SOCIETY Politics and Society ©Flossenbürg Memorial / T. Dashuber “Dark Present” Just six handwritten A4 pages – that is all we have of the diary kept by 18-year-old Ingeborg Bachmann between late summer 1944 and June 1945. The “Third Reich” was already faltering. Allied bombings shook the land. In these entries, we encounter a young woman who – un- like much of her Klagenfurt and Carinthian milieu – had no desire to become a Nazi. Deep in the provincial reaches of the “Ostmark”, where Austria melts into Italy and Slovenia, in an area steeped in nationalist fervour, this young student secretly picked up banned literature: Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. And when the war was finally over, she greeted freedom with infectious euphoria:“This is the most beautiful summer of my life. Even if I live to be a hundred, it will always be the most beautiful spring and summer. Every- one is saying you can hardly tell there’s peace, but for me there is peace, peace! People are so terribly stupid! Did they really expect such a catastrophe to give way to paradise overnight? My God, who would have thought just a few months ago that we would survive at all?!”. She met a British soldier, Jack Hamesh. He had managed to flee Vienna on a Kindertransport evacuation train headed for England in 1938 – even though he was already eighteen at the time. His parents, he writes, were murdered “in some gas chamber”. In May 1945, he returned to Austria via Italy, to the Gail Valley in Carinthia, where Ingeborg Bachmann’s mother had moved with her three children when the bombing of Klagenfurt began. Following the capitulation, Ingeborg Bachmann had to report to the Field Security Section. There she encountered Jack Hamesh. He was now in his mid-twenties and on the hunt for Nazis. It was his job to interrogate her.What an encounter: he, the man who had escaped but lost everything and everyone; and she, the daughter of aWehrmacht officer who had joined Rachel Salamander 77th anniversary  of the liberation of Flossenbürg  24 April 2022 the NSDAP as early as 1932. And yet it soon became clear that they were kindred spirits. In 1946, shortly before Easter, Jack Hamesh emigrated to Pales- tine. They stayed in touch. The wartime diary and these letters form a unique document of the human condition. Far more than simply bearing witness to an early encounter between a Nazi victim and someone raised within a Nazi environment, the writings also portray a remarkably determined young woman who – even under National Socialism – understood what was right and wrong and that becoming a Nazi was by no means inevitable. Everyone had a choice. Jack Hamesh’s letters, by contrast, provide a profoundly touching portrait of a man com- pletely uprooted, struggling to build a new life in Palestine. While reading Bachmann’s diary, a striking passage from Ruth Klüger’s memoir Still Alive kept returning to my mind. Klüger describes how, after escaping from Auschwitz with her camp number still etched into her arm, she found herself sitting next to a man named Christian at the University of Regensburg. A brief romance flickered. He looked past the number – and everything it signified – with chilling indifference, never utter- ing so much as a single question. That “Christian” was Martin Walser. Ingeborg Bachmann offers a stark contrast. In May 1948, she opened her soul to another figure scarred by history: the poet Paul Celan. Their love story began in Vienna and ended ten years later, in 1958, in Munich. Ruth Klüger writes that she and her mother survived purely by chance. Indeed, all who survived did so by chance or luck.   Jewish life was not meant to exist any longer. Ruth and her mother managed to escape during a death march. They ended up in Straubing, and Ruth describes their time there as a happy one. The second part of her memoir is entitled Lost on the Way. In it, she describes her life after survival. “All those who endured the camps live in a darker present than others”.