Split

Following that weekend in Munich, father applied for and received a rotation back to the United States.  He never asked any of us our opinions, we would have all voted to stay in Germany!  So, knowing my father this meant there was another agenda running and that weekend in Munich was probably all it took for him to decide to run as far as possible away from Germany permanently.

Mother continued to be her weird self, father was away as much as possible, us kids just went to school and tried to avoid them both.

It was my birthday, 1972, when father had divorce papers served on mother.  His explanation as to why - was to wake her up that she was destroying her marriage.  You see mother had become a Southern Baptist.  She and father fought like cats and dogs over everything!  Food, religion, all aspects of marriage!  And us kids got to hear it all.

It was on my birthday, 1973, when the divorce became final in court.  So two birthdays utterly destroyed and neither of them cared - they just wanted their war to continue at all costs.

Of course, father then started dating the older sister of my girl friend and that made things very awkward!

Shortly after this, I became a Christian, having fallen in with a group of Hutterites.  Father was outraged that any son of his could be so stupid and did not talk to me for the next 32 years!

And so my tale of father now closes.  I know less about his other six marriages or him during this time.

November 1967

November was a hard month on me.  I was in seventh grade at the Canadian School and had a music class from hell.  Mr. Elliot, I have no doubt was a wonderful teacher and a gifted musician but he was unable to understand that there are people in this world whom have no sense of rhythm and can not play a musical instrument!  He literally drove me to a nervous breakdown.

At the same time, father found out that Heisenberg was living in Munich and was very agitated to have learned this.  When the doctor wrote my school a request for a few days off for me to just get away and recover, father threw me in the car and took me to Munich for a long holiday.

It was fun and I naturally assumed that father had gone to see his old professor, when he disappeared for so many hours one day.  Coincidentally, Mr. Elliot did have a nervous breakdown and we ran into each other at the same hotel!

Fast forward to 1984 and I received a letter from my grandmother, it had been written in 1968!  Unfortunately, I already knew she had died in 1974 - I had seen a letter in German laying on the table at my father's house announcing her death.  So, I now knew for sure that father had lied to me for the length of his life about his family.  So, I decided to run his family down and solve the mystery of my father.

At the end of three years, I now knew that father was not whom he claimed to be; I had his real birth certificate and a good piece of his real life's history.

I also discovered that the real man, whose name father had taken back in Wöbbelin - had work on the Italian train system following his release from Wöbbelin and retired to Munich in July of 1967.  He had been murdered the very weekend I was in Munich with my father recovering.

Yet another coincidence in father's life?  Or did father permanently silence the one man whom could unravel father's real identity ... ?

When you hide behind a wall of lies, well, there is no way you can be thought innocent.  Luckily for father, there was nothing ever to tie him and that man together - only in this day and age, with the abundance of information can such a coincidence be ferreted out.

Narcissus

The first time I read father's autobiography, I was struck at how father was a complete and total narcissus!  The entire 1,100 pages completely revolved around him.  I scored about three lines, my sister - the golden girl - managed half a page, but one of his step sons about three pages, any of his eight wives - almost not even a mention.  The rest a highly fictional story.

Since my last post, I have now reread father's tome a second time and I have been struck, yet again, at what a complete narcissus father was!  Not like it should now be a surprise, only it is, due to the level of narcissism we are discussing here!  We are discussing mental illness levels. So, if father was a narcissus, then I thought I would read up on this subject on the internet.....

I did not know that narcissism is a variant of being a sociopath.  Sociopath I understand very well, I was diagnosed as such at 17 by the US military - whom then wanted me rather badly.  But, my father?  I also learned that psychopathy is a genetic disorder.  Great.

Now I am seeing his family in a new light.  Either of his parents passed this trait on to him.

Now I can understand the man whom could walk away from his family in Switzerland to support Hitler, the man whom could be married eight times thinking he was in love and often with more than one bride at a time.  Social convention meant nothing to him.  I could understand how he could have worked on atomic and hydrogen weapons with no flick of regret or doubt.  How his work on the V-3 (A-9) rocket and its purposed mass destruction was completely without understanding.  The Reich was his god, Hitler its prophet, my father its worshiper.

And yet this man had seen the slaughter of the tens of thousands at Dora, as the SS cleaned up all of the scientific workers - leaving very few for the Russians to capture.  It touched him enough that he converted to Judaism at the end of war.  It touched him enough that even to the end, he was seeking if there was a God or not - but he could never equate his life with the existence of the kind of god he sought.

I still have to wonder at some of what I know about my father.  Not the least of which is why did he write an autobiography that would be largely a work of fiction ..... ?

Germany

Germany was a bit different than France, in almost all regards.  For instance, our forced removal from France was in December - we arrived at Kaiserslautern on a Sunday I believe.  Monday morning my sister and I were arrested for not being in school!  Yeah.  Just playing on the swing set at the hotel and boom! off to police holding.  As Germany was to prove, it was not the friendliest of places to live, unless you appreciate complete control freaks.

It was also the place where father changed radically.  In Portland, following the Cuban Missile Crisis, father was rarely to be found.  In France he was around the home a great deal of the time.  But, in Germany, he was gone for most of the time on Temporary Duty Assignments.  Yes the world was a crazy place in 1967 and 1968.  We knew where he was to be, we usually knew what was going on from the news, but his absences to those places often ran weeks longer than the actual news event.  It was mystifying to this young man.

On the plus side, mother suffered no more almost fatal "accidents".  But she did become the family control freak - attempting to micro-manage a teen male and that did not go very well - especially since she was barely twice my age as it was!  Of course, when father was home I would catch hell and he became increasingly physically abusive.

There had been times in Portland when I can remember he would come home and just beat the tar out of me, whip me until I bled, for some ill thought out prank.  But, there was once I could agree that I had that level of punishment coming.  That was the time I pulled a knife on him to protect myself from phase II of his abuse.  Bad idea, when you do not really know how to use a knife for defense.  In Germany, it became worse.  I swear if I opened my mouth, it was going to be filled with his fist.  That little arrest incident over playing on the hotel swings, brought on one of the most unjust of all beatings - especially since my sister received no punishment at all.  Somehow, I was to have known better than to play in a playground on a Monday morning.....  So I tried to stay away from him and the family as much as possible.  Oh yeah, I was beaten for that as well.

And honestly, I have no idea what our being in Germany had to do with his escalating violence towards me in particular.  But, even Germany itself was not exactly a great place back then either - as I will discuss later.

France - Further Strain

Heeding his friends wisdom, father applied for  and got a posting to France.  His hope was to get mother to become less of a control freak and more dependent upon him.  Best laid plans as they say.

At the time, for some unknown reason, father utterly freaked out when we landed in France.  He went from normal to completely unable to speak for many weeks!  And he spoke French fluently, but with having lost his voice, we were dead in the water.  Something in father's past I assume caused this but I have no idea what stressed him to that level, just by landing in Paris.

Mother really did not do very well in France.  She refused to learn French, speak anything other than English and began rapidly becoming very 'odd' - like yelling at the French in English so they could hear her better.  Little things like leaving the house were only done when she was to drive to the nearest NATO base for shopping.  She formed no relations with any of the neighbors, except one old couple whom would watch my sister and I after school.  Yeah, odd.

My parents marriage must have begun deteriorating badly as father did some mighty odd things himself.  There were a series of 'accidents' which almost killed mother.  Were they accidents?  Or were they planned?  Mother was convinced that father was trying to kill her - the NATO police did not agree.  But, the grilling father got only made him more angry with her.

Within a short period of time, a kerosene heater failed and almost killed her due to carbon-monoxide poisoning.  Father was affected too but not near as bad as mother was.  Mistake, equipment failure or by design?

Father set a trip wire on the stairs which went up to the attic where mother hung the clothes in winter time.  She darn near broke her neck coming back down the stairs!  I know father did that because I saw him setting it but was too naive at the time to figure that one out!  The police never talked to me about that and I was ultimately blamed for it!  That was one was by design, which makes me wonder at the other incidents!.

A short time later, mother was driving to the local NATO base and one of the wheels came off of the car.  The only reason mother survived the crash was a tractor had pulled out onto the road and she slowed down from 60 to 20 before the parting of the wheel from the car.  Again, another accident?  NATO police blamed the local communist party.  But, where did they get a non-metric lug wrench for a car?  American bolts do not match up with metric tools well and the nut heads were in good shape.  No, that had to be father or another American in the area.

But why do this at all? I can not believe that he was planning on returning to Monika.....

My first indication that mother had lost it was when we were vacationing in Spain in 1966.  One morning she, out of the blue, started screaming and hollering about how we had to return home that day, immediately!  It was all very unpleasant and father drove us non-stop all the way from the Spanish coast to northern France in one horrible 27 hour drive!  Mother screaming, no words, just screaming the entire time!  Father so angry he bit the stem of his pipe in half, us kids cowering in the back seat.  Lord only knew what would happen next!  It was that bad.

Definitely, whatever it was that set her off, she remained 'odd' for the rest of her life.  One would at this point suppose that another change might help.  As it was world politics were about to provide a change of scenery for her and massive trauma for father.  Us kids were just plain screwed.....

Control Freak

I have mentioned in the past that I was a very aware young man, much to my parents dismay.  I could see, hear, reason and then understand a great deal far in advance of my years.  One of my many observations revolved around my parents marriage.  All was not well.

Father could tolerate no dust, no disturbance in his life!  So he would hide nickels around the house and then upon returning home, inspect the house to be sure all of the nickels had been accounted for as well the house work done to his satisfaction!  This went so far as to the proper tautness of the blankets on our beds and both my sister and I were inspected every afternoon for having achieved this.  Failure to do so ended with increasingly painful punishments.

I was not allowed to wear tennis shoes and so my shoes had to be inspected every evening as well.  Apparently this one task I excelled in and so by the time I was eight, he had me doing his shoes every evening.  Mandatory spit shine.  Okay I will admit that on occasion I would blow my nose on his shoes.  He never knew the difference and it gave me pleasure not to spit on his shoe but give him a snot shine....

Father was not an native English speaker, mother was, and she was constantly correcting him.  It became a power point for her to hold over him.  Also, she would choose the worse possible foods - things she knew he hated.  Think rutabagas, turnips and parsnips!  I am violently made ill by even the smell of them ... father was merely irritated by them.  It was just one more of many points of contest between them.

And someone amongst father's friends suggested that he should put the shoe on the other foot and completely remove her from her comfort zone.  Oh yeah, that one is going to teach her a lesson, right?

Hiking

Outside of work and mathematics, father really did not have any interests.  But, he did love the out of doors.

When I was really young, we would go hiking as a family.  My earliest of the hikes being a drive up Sandia Mountain and then walking around.  I can remember father loving the view, mother fussing over my toddler sister and my thinking the dirt/sand/whatever it was, was most interesting.

Through the years in Portland, we did go on a great many hikes: on beaches, along the river, to parks, on the glacier at Mt. Hood, Mt. Bachelor area, etc.

My favorite hike was in a place we called "Mosquito Lakes", no idea what the real name was but those mosquitoes were sure memorable!  I had taught myself how to whistle and so father would be singing some opera and I would be whistling along. It was a great few days with him.

Sometimes he would see something which reminded him of hiking in the Bernese Oberland - a beautiful mountainous area of Switzerland, and then he would talk about his sister and hiking with her.  Things he thought I would never remember and yet those were the things which were the most important about him to me.  It was our one point of communication.  And to beour great point of dispute later in life.