'I HAVE BEEN ARGUING WITH HITLER'S MOTHER FOR YEARS'

'I Have Been Arguing With Hitler's Mother for Years'

'Did Adolf breastfeed?': Of all the women in the world, Israeli psychotherapist Biri Rottenberg chose Klara Hitler as an imaginary friend for the main character in her new novel. The same imaginary friend she herself has had for years

May 05th, 18PM May 05th, 18PM

How does a person grow up to become a monster, and how responsible is a mother to her son's evil? These questions lie at the heart of Biri Rottenberg's debut novel, "My Klara," published by the Israeli 2Sfarim publishing house.

The novel's protagonist is a mother to a newborn who is conducting a continuous internal dialogue with Hitler's mother. The shock of becoming a mother, her stormy marriage and her family background – the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who lost her mother during her adolescence – intensify this dialogue, and as the book progresses, Klara Hitler changes from internal voice to imaginary friend, whose presence in the protagonist's life threatens her sanity, but also comforts and saves her from her own loneliness.

"Did Adolf breastfeed?" the protagonist asks her eternal correspondent, Klara. "Was he the kind of baby that empties a breast in one long drain, or the kind that makes do with a gentle trickle from the corners of his mouth, high on satisfaction and fullness? You must have been flooded with oxytocin when you nursed him. Your heart must have burst with love and pride, too, whenever he made a new movement."

'I have lain on the couch for a few years, listening to my internal speech. I began to hear a plane of consciousness in which I was speaking to various feminine, maternal figures.'

As with the nameless protagonist, the focus on Hitler's mother came to Rottenberg, a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist with her own clinic and a lecturer at the Reichman University school of psychology, with motherhood. Sixteen years ago, when her firstborn, Itamar, was born, she was flooded with an intense mix of love and panic. "It suddenly occurred to me that Hitler's mother may have also felt that way," she recalls.

Why Hitler's, of all mothers? Perhaps because, like her protagonist, Rottenberg's father is also a Holocaust survivor. Indeed, stories of the Holocaust surrounded her from all directions. A lot of survivors lived on the street where she grew up in Ashdod.

"I don't know how it came together like that," she says. "The neighbor on the right was hidden in a nunnery. She wore a cross around her neck in gratitude to the nuns who saved her. The neighbor on the left survived in Berlin's sewage system throughout the war. I grew up with these stories, and on the other hand, at home there was a firm prohibition – of talking about Germans, of buying German products," she says.

These prohibitions, she believes, had a magnetic power, and as talking out loud was forbidden, she developed an internal discourse about these issues, "a discourse in the dark."

American psychoanalyst Walter Charles Langer, who in 1943 wrote a detailed psychological analysis of Adolf Hitler's personality (later published in book form), described her as an energetic, conscientious woman.

Six years ago, when attending a creative writing workshop with author and journalist Miri Hanoch, these thoughts found their way to the page. "Miri asked me to write a letter to some figure who wasn't alive anymore, and I found myself writing to Klara," she says. At the time, Rottenberg was also undergoing psychoanalysis.

"I have lain on the couch for a few years, listening to my internal speech. I began to hear a plane of consciousness in which I was speaking to various feminine, maternal figures. As Virginia Woolf said, if we are women, we think back through our mothers, and I noticed that Hitler's mother was one of the figures I was arguing with in my head for years, proving to her in my mind that I was better than her. Psychoanalysis, together with the writing workshop, created an envelope which allowed me to address ideas that were terribly frightening and dangerous, that evoke a lot of guilt."

From rage to compassion

Klara Hitler (née Pölzl), born 1860 at the Austrian village of Spital, raised her son lovingly. She was a devout Christian and attended church regularly. American psychoanalyst Walter Charles Langer, who in 1943 wrote a detailed psychological analysis of Adolf Hitler's personality (later published in book form), described her as an energetic, conscientious woman. The book quotes her Jewish family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch, who described her as "very quiet, sweet and affectionate."

When she was 16, she was hired as a household servant by her maternal uncle, Alois Hitler, 23 years her senior. After the death of his second wife, Alois married Klara. She bore six children, of which only two – Adolf and Paula – survived to maturity. She spent her adult life taking care of the home, her two children and Alois' two children from a previous marriage.

Adolf was a sickly child, and his mother doted on him. Alois, in contrast, did not take any special interest in his children. He worked as a customs official (later as inspector), and preferred to spend his time at the gasthaus and in pursuit of his hobby, beekeeping. According to historians, he used to beat his children, his wife and his dog, and has been described as "authoritarian, domineering, stiff and ill tempered. A patriarch who demanded respect and obedience from his family."

Despite the popular conjecture, that attributed his hatred of Jews to the futile, agonizing treatments given to his mother by Bloch, Hitler showed gratitude to her doctor and allowed him to emigrate to the United States with his wife in 1940.

In 1903, Alois suddenly died and a few years later, Klara was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, medicine had little to offer. Following mastectomy, she was treated with iodoform, at the time considered an experimental chemotherapeutic treatment. The last weeks of her life were agonizing, and she died at home in 1907, from her treatment's side effects.

According to reports, Hitler was devastated by his mother's death. Her doctor, Bloch, later said that "in my entire career, I have never seen anybody so grief stricken as Adolf Hitler." In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that "he respected his father, but loved his mother." Despite the popular conjecture, that attributed his hatred of Jews to the futile, agonizing treatments given to his mother by Bloch, Hitler showed gratitude to her doctor and allowed him to emigrate to the United States with his wife in 1940.

Questioned later in the U.S., the doctor related that Hitler's relationship with his mother was close and loving, that she adored his watercolor paintings and supported his artistic ambitions, unlike his father, who vehemently objected to them. Bloch denied that Hitler's love to his mother was pathological. Klara, Bloch said, "would have turned in her grave, had she known of her son's doings."

The history of psychology is rife with blaming mothers. Autism had been associated with "cold mothering," for instance. Isn't engaging with Hitler's mother a continuation of that tendency?

"The preoccupation with Hitler's mother came to me through my own motherhood and from my research into the construction of the maternal identity," she explains. "Before submerging myself into the research about Klara, I just felt she was guilty, and that's that. In previous drafts of the novel, she was really my punching bag, I worked out a lot of rage on her. But as I was writing, I realized that looking for guilt in mothers is really very limiting and is predicated on a dichotomy between good and evil. With time, my preoccupation with her was directed, rather, to finding compassion for her; some light in all this evil, and wishing for her to become witness to the protagonist, the one which enables her to tell an unbearable story of intergenerational emotional pain. Klara's character in the book is based on Hitler's real mother's biography, but she is fictionalized, and I may have invented her with more compassion, like someone looking for redemption."

'The transition into motherhood is radical. It affects consciousness through the body and the mind, in ways which are hard to put into words.'

Reading your book, I realized I had never given much thought to Hitler's childhood. I then wondered if this was by chance, or whether this is typical to many Israelis, who've grown accustomed to not thinking of Hitler as human.

"That's true. In Europe, for example, everyone knows of the story of his half-niece, Geli Raubal, with whom he seems to have been intimate, while in Israel it is less well known. I believe artistic representations open up the possibility to think what we learned not to think of. This is what Roee Rosen did in his exhibit about Evan Braun, Wisława Szymborska with her poem of baby Hitler, and also the artist Dov Or Ner, who addressed Hitler's figure."

From adolescence to motherhood

Biri (real name Bruria) Rottenberg is also a mother of sons: Itamar, 16 and Uri, 13 from her first marriage, and she and her partner also raise his three sons from a previous marriage. "One house full of boys," she says, smiling. "We brought a female dog, to balance it a little towards the feminine side."

How would you characterize the experience of being a mother of sons?

"I think, in Israel, being a mother of sons has to involve thinking, from the start, about them going to the army. You hold your baby, you breastfeed him, you take care of him and you know he's going to become a soldier. That's a very deep dissonance in the maternal identity, which I am still trying to contain, just as Itamar received his first callup notice. There's also the question of how to raise to be one of the good guys, to not be Hitler, to be sensitive and empathic. Those are two fears that shape both motherhood and the dialogue with the child."

'Before submerging myself into the research about Klara, I just felt she was guilty, and that's that. In previous drafts of the novel, she was really my punching bag.'

She was born in 1976 in Ashdod to a family of five. Her father had gone through the Holocaust at a young age, which he only learned – like the protagonist's father – at age 72. Until then he thought he was born in Russia, where his parents escaped at the beginning of the war. Having discovered his name and picture at the Lohamei HaGeta'ot archive, the story turned out to be much more complex, full of holes and obscurities.

Rottenberg's mother is Baghdad born, a Farhud survivor who made Aliyah to an immigrant camp near Be'er Sheva at age 10. "My grandmothers, Bella and Selima, never exchanged a single word, because neither of them spoke Hebrew. They shared a wordless dialogue, connected only through love," she recalls.

Being half Iraqi and half Polish made her special, she says, in 1970s Ashdod. "I think growing up half and half means growing up with an internal search engine. I was constantly looking for who I was," she says.

As a teenager she studied poetry with poet Ronny Someck. She did her military service as a member of a Nahal unit and, after her service, went on a trip to the Far East. In Tibet, she met a blind German woman named Saveria (who is mentioned in the novel). "This was the first time I talked to a German woman about WWII, and it was a shocking experience," she says.

Saveria arrived in Tibet to locate blind and sight-impaired children in order to assist them. According to local belief, blindness is punishment for things they did in previous incarnations – and these children therefore often remained without assistance from their own communities. Rottenberg joined her on her journey. Later, she says, Saveria and opened a network of schools for blind children in India and Tibet, and even developed a Tibetan Braille writing system. "Because of her blindness, she saw no limitations," the novel's protagonist tells of Saveria. "You see, Klari, evil doesn't pay."

Upon returning to Israel, Rottenberg enrolled at the Hebrew University, to study psychology and art history. From there she went on to complete her graduate and doctoral studies in bibliotherapy.

During graduate studies, she researched adolescent diary writing, which focused on the therapeutic processes of writing at that age. In her doctorate, which she began to write while becoming a mother herself, she turned to a psychoanalytical study of blogs about motherhood.

"I was preoccupied with the development of maternal identity, as a stand-alone state of the self," she says. "The transition into motherhood is radical. It affects consciousness through the body and the mind, in ways which are hard to put into words. Writing helps weave this identity and integrate it with previous identities. It is also an identity that constantly challenges itself, because motherhood to any child at any age is different."

For her, says Rottenberg, the research was also therapeutic. "I believe writing calmed my fears. I could read feminist literature and blogs about motherhood and teach myself the craft of motherhood at the same time. For some of the blog writers, too, the writing process was therapeutic. "

For others, however, writing was an indication, rather, of self-injury. "There was also an addiction to writing there, and some women felt they must create drama in their life in order to have what to write about. Some underwent psychological treatment at the time, and their therapists recommended they stop writing."

In her post-doctorate work, at Kansas University, Rottenberg pursued this line further, examining the ability to tell our story and our children's story simultaneously. "This is a very complex narrative," she says, "it could become a dichotomic 'good' and 'evil' narrative, but it also has great potential for development."

What does it mean, actually, also in reference to Klara and Hitler?

"In my post-doc, I was preoccupied with the notion of the capacity to narrate – our emotional ability to tell a story. I believe that parenthood severely challenges this capacity, because one moment after birth, the mother or father begin to tell a complex story, simultaneously similar and different, about themselves and their child. Babies are born helpless in the narrative sense too, completely dependent on the story their parent tells them and about them. A parent could tell a complex, three-dimensional story, a story that contains a spectrum of emotions and has both sadness and joy, evil and good. But parents may also tell a defensive, split, black and white story about good and evil, a story that is created due to emotional pain and unprocessed intergenerational traumas. The split here is a sort of defense mechanism, intended to avoid any contact with all the pain, evil, disappointment, frustration, fear and shame, and the split story leaves precious little air to breathe, and leaves children and parents no room for development.

"In reference to Klara, before I knew her story I also thought in terms of good guys and bad guys. Perhaps the curiosity which led to my research and search for who she was, was actually motivated by wanting to understand whether there is a complex story here. In a complex story there is hope to feel more emotions. Of course, I couldn't think of that while I was writing."

From blankie to God

This capacity to tell our own story doesn't have to find expression in writing. It sometimes finds expression in an internal conversation. In childhood it often manifests itself in the existence of imaginary friends – the second major theme at the heart of Rottenberg's novel. "Imaginary friends produce the possibility of talking to somebody else in our mind, which is a great help in understanding ourselves, in containing complex situations and in thinking of various options for problem solving. We all need somebody to talk to inside our head. I believe therapy is actually a sophisticated variation on this imaginary friend."

What typifies children who have such an imaginary friend, as opposed to those who don't have one?

"An imaginary friend is an expression of the facility for play, which we all have. This is a very important facility, which allows us to touch materials that are sometimes scary, disgusting and yet attractive, in an interim space, which is not reality and is easier to process complex things in. The question whether a child will continue to develop this play-space into an imaginary friend depends on a lot of factors in his environment, but this exists in all of us, and the more we develop it, the better it will serve us. We have a neurological impulse to play, and in the hierarchy of such impulses it is the topmost one, it activates the most brain regions."

You said "imaginary friend," and immediately brought to mind the film Jojo Rabbit, with the imaginary friend named Hitler. Are there outlines to such a friend?

"A transitional object is a sort of primary imaginary friend – the teddy bear or the blanket the child carries to kindergarten and holds onto – and writing a diary is also a sort of imaginary friend. In my research I discovered that for many people, not necessarily religious people, god was the imaginary friend."

So maybe imaginary friends are remnants of the religiosity we all share, even if we are non-believers?

"Yes, I believe there is a deep connection between faith and the capacity for playing. It does not have to be a religious faith, it could be faith in people, in their kindness, or faith in their helping me. This is what therapy relies on. This capacity for faith lies at the heart of all our relationships and at the heart of other capacities – to play, to tell a story, to make contact. I believe that, as mothers, we have a vested interest in maintaining the environmental conditions which facilitate the development of these capacities."

Which brings me back to Hitler's mother. Why choose her, of all people?

"Because I grew up knowing that Hitler is human evil incarnate, and is guilty of the murder of our family, of the Holocaust having happened, I couldn't really talk or think with him. The source of human evil is beyond what you can think about, or through. And perhaps my subconscious didn't give up and tried to think and talk with his mother. I summoned for myself parental guidance from the mother of all human evils.

"On October 7 I heard of the terrible things perpetrated by the terrorists, of the cruelty and the evil, and I noticed I immediately went into thinking in my consciousness, wait, who is their mother, who brought them up, who took care of them, how do you raise such monsters. This is a kind of automatic, scary question which exists within me as a woman, a daughter and a mother who thinks back through the world's mothers. Perhaps the question hides a desire for deep human redemption, because if we know how they were raised into human evil incarnate, perhaps there is knowledge there that will allow us to raise children differently.

From ruins to reconstruction

In her novel, Rottenberg had to also address the mother of all human evils: October 7. She wrote the epilogue to "My Klara" after that date. "Thinking of evil again brings you back into my life on a terrifying scale," the protagonist writes to Klara. "You know me, whenever someone is born to me or dies on me, I summon you."

For her part, since October 7 Rottenberg has been doing volunteer work as a therapist in several projects which aid survivors of the massacre and displaced families. One of those offers support for parents of toddlers. Another, called "transitional objects," provides families from the Gaza Envelope with an opportunity to restore objects precious to them that got left behind. This is a joint project of therapists and artists, who arrive every week to the communities and, together with the families, collect objects from within the ruins, photograph them, restore them – sometimes in cooperation with the families – and meet the family members for talks.

"Through the object, people tell the story of their family – of life before the trauma, of what happened on October 7 and of life now. It is also a way to restore a sense of control in this terrible trauma," she says, "and I hope this project helps families to tell, through existing objects – what was lost and provide them, while going through their ordeal, with continuity from their previous to their current lives.

"Studies show that people who have gone through the Holocaust as children, and had imaginary friends or even objects that they carried with them from their previous lives, were more likely to survive. Because as long as in my head I have a conversation with a character that cares for me, with whom I can share what I'm going through – this protects me."

And also extricates from loneliness, I guess.

"Just so. Winnicott, who is another sort of imaginary friend with whom I talk in my head all the time, said that the ability to be alone is an important part of the development of this capacity for play. It is a capacity which develops after there is a safe basis and relations of trust with the environment, and is differentiated from the experience of loneliness, which is an involuntary, painful experience. Winnicott said that, in fact, throughout our lives, we are dependent on somebody, we need somebody else; there is no age in which we are truly independent, so imaginary friends in their various guises keep us safe. This is also why it is so terribly important in life to maintain your capacity to be alone, so as to preserve the capacity for play – not an easy thing in the age of social networks.

Your protagonist writes to Klara that the preoccupation with evil brings her back to her life. October 7 reintroduced the preoccupation with evil into life for many of us. How can one try and understand it?

"Part of the attempt to understand the sources of evil is part of us, that it is human. We have a potential for evil, and our development will determine whether or not it will materialize. Motherhood is another meeting with this potential, which is part of human vulnerability, and as a society, we must make an effort to provide children and parents with the conditions that prevent it from developing. That is, to provide the conditions for the development of the capacity to play and the capacity to be alone and the capacity to tell stories, because these things lead to the development of empathy, and therein lies a lot of hope."

2024-05-05T15:21:39Z dg43tfdfdgfd