Almost Inbred

Almost Inbred

When the Nazis came to my mother's village to do their mandatory census, they were nearly overwhelmed by the task at hand. Not because there were so many people to account for: back then, Wolfshagen factually only had a population of around 2000 (and since then, it's only grown to around 2500). Rather, the Nazis were overwhelmed because the inhabitants of my mother's village, having been relatively self-contained since the 10th century or so in the Harz mountains of northern Germany, only had a grand total of 3 surnames in the entire village, which, not unlike a number of other limited resources (including, but not limited to, the family jewels), they all shared amongst themselves.

That made for approximately 666 individuals per last name. Which was only an unlucky number to begin with, but more importantly, a total administrative nightmare for the Nazis, whose task was to confirm every individual's status as an untainted Aryan by tracing their respective family trees at least 150 years back.

Technically, this should've been relatively simple, since everyone in the village seemed to have, by and large, the same family tree. However, the centuries of careful Aryan breeding had also taken their toll: a good percentage of the fish in that murky DNA cesspool that they'd called home for more than a millenium had developed receding brains, perhaps accounting for Darwin's law that the species will, over time, adapt to its environment.

From the stories I've been told and from my own observations when we'd visit, it seemed that few of the people in my mom's village could string a coherent sentence together, let alone spell or write. Sure, they were Aryan to the core, but proving it in writing would be another task altogether.

The village of Wolfshagen did manage to produce one world-famous name in its long history -- a name which, by the time the Nazi census was taken, had already disappeared from the town's public charters: Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, later to be known as Henry Steinway, founder of Steinway & Sons, was a native son of my mother's birthplace. However, after he secretly managed to build his first Steinway piano in his own kitchen (due to the strong proscriptions against such behavior by the organ builder's guild, of which he was an apprentice), he went on to emigrate to NYC, Americanize his name and change the course of piano history.

He had also been previously orphaned at the age of 15, which helps to explain why there were no Steinwegs left in Wolfshagen after he split for New York.

So the Nazis, who have since become well-known for their pragmatic approaches to world domination, racial genocide and other pesky political bugaboos, figured out a brilliant solution to the conundrum: they decided to give everyone in Wolfshagen free license to change their own last names to whatever they wanted. That way, they'd pass the "redundancy test" of having to fill out endless scores of meaningless paperwork that would all look eerily similar at the end of the day while avoiding the inevitable reductio ad absurdum conclusion that the irreducible minimum of racial purity fostered a culture of blonde-haired, blue-eyed inbreds.

I've thought about this many times: what if you could change your last name to whatever you wanted it to be? You could give yourself a regal-sounding surname; or you could opt for something simple yet effective, in terms of opening doors, such as "Kennedy" or "Onassis"; or you could make it rhyme with your first name, or you could name yourself after your animal totem or your hero or anything else you aspired to.

The people of Wolfshagen, in their own way, also gave free reign to their creativity in this unprecedented venture. Their choices reflected not only their deeply personal dreams and aspirations, but perhaps even more importantly, their own cultural Weltanschauung. One guy renamed himself "Alte Hose". That means "Old Pants". My mother's mother ended up marrying a guy who had renamed himself "Bauerochse". That means "Farmer's Ox". That means that my own mother's last name was, for a while, Farmer's Ox.

There's something to be said for divorce, after all.

The stories I grew up with are the stories of what I've come to associate with what's at the core of being German, of the German experience, if you will: stories of incredible, unspeakable violence and gruesomeness, counterbalanced by a present-day reality, their intrinsic orderliness, predictability and simplicity and "just so"-ness being the best concept I've ever had to symbolize security, a sense of place, and a sense of home.