Fictional Thursday prose for Nigerian scammers
It's not widely known that Hitler didn't commit suicide but escaped to the spas of Baden-Baden where he taught German as a second language to American ex-pats.
I lived there briefly in the '60s, attracted by the nearby Black Forest which had fascinated me from my youth because of its depiction in Disney's "Snow White". I was also there because of a family rumor that my great-grandmother had emigrated from Baden-Baden. I wanted to find ancestors and distant cousins to see how the family tree branched in the Old Country, to try and discover how geography affected our psychic and spiritual landscapes. I also wanted to know why it wasn't just called Baden.
I sat in on one of Hitler's classes on a tip from a friend who'd already been there awhile; I sat in the back of the room expecting an explosion of rage at some point, perhaps over a split infinitive. I reminded myself the camps were no longer in use. It didn't take him long to mention his past.
"And then I took over the north countries. Which countries are those? Does anyone know?"
A young girl raised her hand.
"Denmark?"
"Ja, sehr gut."
"Norway?"
"Nar-vy, ja."
He hadn't aged well and seemed a pathetic figure. He also didn't seem repentant. He boasted of taking countries as if they were fraternity pranks of a misspent youth. The deaths of so many people - did he not realize what he had done or would the knowledge have been too much to take?
"Don't you feel responsibility for the millions killed?"
"I feel responsibility for teaching you Deutsch."
The banality of evil.
I visited Baden-Baden and found my relatives, who were smoking pot and listening to John Travolta records. I wondered at their musical taste until I realized they were laughing at him, although it might've just been that the pot made you laugh at everything.
I asked them about great-grandmother and how it was said in America that she escaped Germany because of Bismarck's Kulturkampf and persecution of Catholics.
I had trouble making out their English but the phrase that jumped out was disturbing: "actresses could make more money in the States..."
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