MemoirIn 1998 , Helga Schneider, a writer living in Italy, received word that her estranged mother was still alive and living in a nursing home in Vienna.
After much soul searching, Schneider decided to seek out the woman who had abandoned her at the age of four and whom she hadn't seen in nearly 30 years. This memoir is the record of this encounter between mother and daughter and the latter's attempt at reconciliation and understanding. However, Let Me Go is no ordinary tale of family fracture and reunion, the latest offering from the insatiable memoir/literary kiss-and-tell genre. Schneider's mother walked out on her two small children to pursue unhindered her fervent devotion to the Nazi Party, as an SS officer who later served in Birkenau and Auschwitz.
The memoir is a reconstructed account of the last visit of Schneider to her mother and the narrative is intercut with factual documentation about the torture and murder machine in which Schneider's mother participated with zeal. The chat-show subtitle of the book - 'My mother and the SS' - gives an initial clue to what's in store in the bad taste department. In fact, at times reading this distasteful book, it feels more like having a front-row seat at a particularly cringe-making Jerry Springer Show. Revelation, accusation, recrimination - the wheedling self serving mother and needy daughter routine played out against the backdrop of 20th century barbarity.
In a hideous cat-and mouse game Schneider and her mother circle one another in the claustrophobic confines of the old age home, taking turns to taunt and bait one another. Schneider uncovers in herself some diabolical need to hear the harrowing details of what her mother witnessed and did in Birkenau, and she deploys all kinds of ruses and emotional blackmail to elicit the sickening truth from her mother, alternatively cajoling and accusing her mother.
While the book evocatively portrays the deprivations of wartime Berlin and the devastating emotional impact of one evil individual, this does nothing to salvage it.
In terms of Shoah history, one can learn more from a clutch of other books. Or by watching Claude Lanzmann's magisterial film, Shoah. Lanzmann's film points up more powerfully and honestly the lack of remorse of many perpetrators, and their wheedling insistence that they were the ones hard done by. Helga Schneider's mother fits that profile perfectly. In the shabby genteel surrounds of the nursing home lounge, she spits out vitriolic accusations against Jews which fuelled her foul deeds almost in the same breath as she casually refers to some act of barbarity.
Lest we forget, she has had the luxury of a long life, whereas the victims whose horrific deaths she gloats over are long long dead. This is the kind of book that leaves a rotten taste in the mouth, not just because of the nature of what it describes but also because the author has tried to exploit her past and her own mother's evil in a most insidious manner. Applying the language of psychobabble and "closure" to the seismic events of the twentieth century makes for neither edifying, enlightening or good reading.
Katrina Goldstone is anti-racism officer for the Amnesty International Irish section, a critic and a researcher
Let Me Go: My Mother and the SS By Helga Schneider, translated by Shaun Whiteside Heinemann, pp149pp. £9.99