Hindutva and The Restless Ghosts of Baiersdorf

by Guest Fri Mar 17, 2017 3:10 pm

As a teenager I continued to probe my paternal grandmother. A typical conversation would go something like this:

“How come you supported Hitler?” I would ask.

“It was simply the best time of my life!” She responded.

Together with friends and family, she would hop on a horse-drawn carriage and travel to Hitler’s annual Nuremberg rallies. “So much fun!” She exclaimed.

“But what about the millions of Jews who were killed?” I would demand.

“We didn’t know what they did with the Jews! There were no Jews in Baiersdorf.” She defended herself from her armchair by the window, her stern gaze turning away from me and out onto Main Street.

“Besides, they had it coming,” she said, averting her eyes from me. I came to understand that, in my grandmother’s narrow mind, the Heinleins belonged to Baiersdorf; the Jews didn’t....

For hundreds of years Baiersdorf has cultivated horseradish, and was quick to put it in use to celebrate the Führer. For the harvest festival peasants made swastikas out of horseradish stalks. Soon, Main Street was renamed Adolf Hitler Street and Seligmann Street became Horst-Wessel Street (after a leader of Berlin’s Nazi Party’s “stormtroopers,” who wrote a famous Nazi song). The little park in the center of town became Adolf Hitler Park, and its big oak tree the Hitler Oak.

It was from this oak, right across from his home, that Joseph Gründonner was hanged on Christmas day 1935.

At 34, Joseph Gründonner was married with a child. One of his contemporaries described the house painter as “sweet-tempered” and “incapable of harming a fly.”

One snowy winter night, after a few beers in a local tavern, Gründonner spoke up against Hitler. A fight ensued.

“He was beaten with a stein at the Muggle,” the now deceased florist Brigitte Kogler told Wilhelm Schoner, a hobby historian whose grandfather was mayor of Baiersdorf at the time of Gründonner’s murder. Emboldened by Hitler’s hate speech, the offenders locked up the dead—or dying—man in the tavern’s bathroom before dragging him through the snow to the park. Hidden behind a bush, Kogler’s father observed and photographed several men working together to hang Gründonner from the oak tree.

When the murderers noticed Kogler’s father in his hiding spot, they forced him to hand over the film. Some people in town knew who the lynchers were, but no one spoke up. No autopsy was conducted, and Gründonner was quickly buried. His obituary read: “The 34-year-old master painter Joseph Gründonner ended his life by hanging himself close to his home.”...

My paternal grandmother, who was 23 when Hitler took power, was tight-lipped when it came to the Third Reich. Otherwise, she liked to gossip as much as the neighbor next door. I find it unlikely that her little town’s burgeoning anti-Semitism and its role in propping up Hitler’s regime escaped her.

https://longreads.com/2017/03/15/the-restless-ghosts-of-baiersdorf/