5 - “Under a False Name”: Peter Schneider's Vati and the Misnomer of Genre

Summary

Without his desire and knowledge, in a weaker form, he imitated the nature of his father.

— Christoph Meckel, Suchbild: Über meinen Vater (“Picture Puzzle: About My Father”)

Born Guilty

Peter Schneider's 1987 narrative Vati (“Daddy”) tells the story of the relationship between a notorious Nazi, in hiding to escape prosecution for atrocities he committed as a concentration camp doctor, and his adult son, who in the late 1970s secretly travels to Brazil to meet his father for the first time since his infancy. Written as a sort of letter from the son (who, like his father, remains unnamed in the story) to a childhood friend, the narrative documents the son's attempt to get to know his father and his struggle to come to terms with his father's culpability in the perpetration of the Holocaust. As the narrator-son endeavors to make clear to his friend, his father's legacy is not simply a matter of involvement in an event that lies in the past and is therefore no longer of relevance to the son's life. Rather, the son perceives his relationship to his father's crimes as an inheritance of both biblical proportion and genetic character that is fundamental to his own identity. Despite the fact that, as a child, he was unaware of both the existence of his father and the crimes of which he was accused, and thus was innocent in that he neither could be implicated in nor had any knowledge of his father's violation, he nevertheless felt a vague sense of culpability for an unknown transgression.