And around this time, while Marinesko remained at the mercy of the Siberian climate and conditions in the Soviet penal camps, while Mother kept faith with Stalin, and I took pride in my Young Pioneers' neckerchief,
David Frankfurter, cured in the penitentiary of his supposedly chronic osteomyelitis, was making himself useful as an official in Israel s defense ministry. In the meantime he had married. Later two children came along.
And something else happened during these years: Hedwig Gustloff, the widow of the murdered Wilhelm, left Schwerin. From then on she lived west of the border separating the two Germanys, in Lübeck. The glazed-brick house at 14 Sebastian-Bach-Strasse, which the couple built shortly before the murder, had been expropriated soon after the war. I saw a picture of the building, a typical solid single-family house, on the Internet. My son went so far as to post on his Web site the demand that the illegally expropriated house be turned into a “Gustloff Museum” and opened to the interested public. Far beyond Schwerin the need existed for expertly displayed factual information. For all he cared, a bronze plaque could be mounted to the left of the window of the enclosed balcony, announcing that from 1945 to 1951 the first prime minister of Mecklenburg, a certain Wilhelm Höcker, had lived in the expropriated house. He would have no objection to including wording such as “after the crushing of Hitler-fascism.” That was a fact, after all, as the martyrs murder remained a fact.
My son was clever at positioning pictures and icons, tables and documents. Thus one could view on his Web site not only the front but also the back of the mighty granite boulder erected on the southern shore of Lake Schwerin. He had gone to the trouble of providing an enlargement of the chiseled inscription that was barely legible on the photograph showing the entire stone from the rear. Three lines, one above the other: lived for the movement — murdered by a jew — died for germany.
Since the middle line not only suppressed the name of the perpetrator but explicitly characterized Jews generically as murderers, it could be assumed that in zeroing in on this detail — the interpretation offered later — Konny revealed that he had overcome his fixation on the historical David Frankfurter and wanted to demonstrate his hatred for “Jewry in toto.”
Yet this explanation, as well as further searches for a motive, hardly shed any light on what occurred on the afternoon of 20 April 1997. In front of the youth hostel, closed at this time of year and seemingly lifeless, something happened that was not predestined yet played itself out on the mossy foundation of the former memorial hall as if rehearsed.
Whatever had induced the virtual David to respond to a vague invitation and travel, in the flesh, by train all the way from Karlsruhe, where the eighteen-year-old schoolboy lived with his parents, the eldest of three sons? And what had got into Konny to make him seek an actual encounter that would convert into a reality a bosom-enemy relationship that had developed over the Internet and was essentially a fiction? The invitation to the meeting had been slipped so surreptitiously into the rubbish that constituted their communication that it could have been picked up only by the intimate adversary who signed himself David.
Once the youth hostel was rejected as a meeting place, the two of them accepted a compromise. They would meet where the martyr had been born. A good question for a quiz, because my son's Web site named neither a city, nor a street, nor a house number. Nonetheless, the reference presented no problem to someone familiar with the material; and David, like Konny, who called himself Wilhelm online, knew even the most banal details of the damned Gustloff story. As would become apparent during the visit, he even knew that the secondary school Wilhelm Gustloff had attended and that had been named for him after his death was called Peace School since GDR times. My son not only respected his adversary's comprehensive expertise; he also admired him for being a “perfectionist.”
And so they met, on a beautiful spring day, on Martinstrasse, in front of number 2, at the corner of Wismarsche Strasse. David had accepted without comment the particular date Wilhelm chose. Their meeting took place in front of a recently restored stucco facade, intended to make one forget the years and years of decay. They are said to have greeted each other with a handshake, after which David introduced himself to the tall, lanky Konrad Pokriefke as David Stremplin.
The next item on the agenda was a stroll through the town, on Konny s suggestion. During their visit to the Schelfstadt, whose name recalls the reeds that once grew thickly along the banks of the lake on which it borders, the visitor was even shown, as if it were a special attraction, the brick shack with a tar-paper roof, located in a rear courtyard on Lehmstrasse, where Mother and I lived after the war; he was also shown the still crumbling and the already renovated half-timber houses in that picturesque quarter. Konny led David to all the sites and secret hiding places of my youth, as unerringly as though they had been his own.
After St. Nicholas's, the Schelfstadt church, which they viewed from the inside and outside, they of course had to take in the castle on Castle Island. There was no rush. My son made no attempt to hurry things along. He even suggested that they visit the museum next to the castle, but his guest showed no interest, grew impatient, was now intent on seeing the site in front of the youth hostel.
Nonetheless they took a break during their stroll through the town. At a Italian ice cream cafe each of them downed a good-sized portion of gelato. As the host, Konny picked up the tab. And David Stremplin is said to have talked amiably, but with ironic detachment, about his parents, a nuclear physicist and a music teacher. I am willing to bet that my son said not a word about his father and mother; but no doubt the tale of his grandmother's miraculous survival was important enough to be brought up.
Then the two bosom enemies, unequal in height — David tended more toward the horizontal, and was a head shorter — made their way through the castle park, passed the grinding mill, walked along Schlossgarten-allee, which had become an exclusive address, with villas spruced up in gleaming white, and then by way of Waldschulweg approached the scene of the crime, a fairly level area under trees. Initially there was no tension. David Stremplin is said to have praised the view of the lake. If a ball and rackets had been lying on the Ping-Pong table in front of the youth hostel, they might have played; Konny and David were both passionate about table tennis and would hardly have missed such an opportunity. Perhaps a quick volley over the net would have proved relaxing, and the afternoon might have taken a different course.
Then they were standing on historic ground, so to speak. Yet even the moss-covered blocks of granite and the fragment of the boulder with the chiseled rune and traces of a name did not provide sufficient pretext for a quarrel. The two even laughed in two-part harmony at a squirrel leaping from beech tree to beech tree. Not until they were standing on the foundation of the old hall of honor, and my son explained to his guest exactly where the large memorial stone had stood — behind the youth hostel, which had not been there in those days — only then, when he indicated the sight line for the granite boulder, and recited the martyrs name on the front of the stone and then, word for word, the three lines inscribed on the back, did David Stremplin allegedly say, “As a Jew, I have only this to say,” whereupon he spat three times on the mossy foundation — thereby, as my son later testified, “desecrating” the memorial site.
Right after that, shots were fired. In spite of the sunny day, Konny was wearing a parka. From one of its roomy pockets, the one on the right, he pulled the weapon and fired four times. It was a Russian-made pistol. The first shot struck the stomach, the following ones the head. David Stremplin tumbled backward without a word. Later my son made a point of saying that he had struck his victim as many times as the Jew Frankfurter, long ago in Davos. And like him, he went to the nearest telephone booth, dialed the emergency number, and reported his crime. Without returning to the scene, he set out for the police station, where he turned himself in with the words, “I fired because I am a German.”
On his way there, he saw a patrol car and an ambulance approaching, blue lights flashing. But help arrived too late for David Stremplin.
He, who claims to know me, contends that I don't know my own flesh and blood. Maybe it is true that I had no access to his innermost torture chambers. That I was not smart enough to decipher my son's secrets. Not until the trial began did I get closer to Konny — if not an arm's length away, at least within shouting distance — but I couldn't bring myself to call out to him on the witness stand helpful things like, “Your father stands by you!” or, “Don't lecture them, son. Cut it short!”
That's probably why a certain someone insists on calling me a “Johnny-come-lately father.” Everything that I try to crabwalk away from, or admit to in relative proximity to the truth, or reveal as if under duress, comes out, as he sees it, “after the fact and from a guilty conscience.”
And now that all my efforts have been stamped too late, he is combing through my messy piles of documents, this hodgepodge of note cards, and wants to know what became of Mother's fox stole. This postscript I still owe him seems particularly important to him, the boss; he tells me not to withhold any of the details I know, but to tell the story of Tulla's fox blow by blow, no matter how I hate that now unfashionable piece of clothing.
It's true. Mother owned one from the beginning, and still wears it. She was about sixteen, a streetcar conductor with a two-pointed cap and a block of tickets, doing her shift on lines 5 and 2, when, at the Hochstriess stop, she received a gift from a corporal who is another of my possible fathers: the complete fox pelt, already prepared by the furrier. “He came back wounded from the Arctic front, and now he was in Oliva on leave to recuperate,” was and is her shorthand depiction of the man who may have fathered me, for neither the sinister Harry Liebe-nau nor some immature Luftwaffe auxiliary could have come up with the idea of giving Mother a fox stole.
It was with this warm stole around her neck that she boarded the Gustloff when the Pokriefkes were allowed to get on. Shortly after the ship cast off, when the pregnant girl, leaning on a dreadfully young naval recruit, ventured onto the ice-coated sundeck, taking one step at a time, she was wearing the fur. The fox was close at hand, next to the life jacket, as she lay in the maternity ward and Dr. Richter gave her an injection, right after the third torpedo struck and the contractions began. And with nothing else — the rucksack was left behind — but the life jacket buckled on and the fox around her neck, Mother — who wasn't Mother yet — scrambled into the lifeboat and claims she had reached for the fox before the life jacket.
That was how she came on board the torpedo boat Löwe, shoeless but warmed by the fur. And only during the birth, which began soon afterward, that is, at the very minute when the Gustloff sank, first the bow and then capsizing to the port side, whereupon the cry of the countless thousands blended with my first cry, only then did the fur again lie next to her, rolled up. But when she left the torpedo boat in Kolberg, her hair having turned white at one blow, Mother might have been wearing only stockings as she carried her baby, but she had the fox, which no shock had bleached, wound around her neck like a choker.
She claims that during the long flight from the Russians she wrapped me in the fur to protect me against the bitter cold. Without the fox I would certainly have frozen to death in the horde of refugees backed up at the bridge over the Oder. I owe my life to the fox alone — not to the women with surplus milk. “Without that there you'd've been a lump of ice…” And the corporal who had conferred the fur on her — allegedly the work of a furrier in Warsaw — is said to have remarked in parting, “Who knows what it'll be good for someday, girl.”
In peacetime, however, when we no longer had to freeze, the fox-red fur belonged only to her, lay in the wardrobe in a shoe box. She wore it on suitable and unsuitable occasions. For instance, when she received her masters diploma, then when she earned recognition as a “deserving activist,” even at company celebrations, when “evening entertainment” was on the schedule. And when I had had my fill of the Workers' and Peasants' State and wanted to go to the West by way of East Berlin, she came with me to the station with the fox around her neck. Later, much later, when, after a small eternity, the border was gone and Mother was receiving her pension, she appeared at the survivors' reunion in the Baltic coastal resort of Damp with her always-well-cared-for fox; she certainly looked unusual among the other women her age, who were rigged out in the latest styles.
And on the first day of the trial, when all that happened was that the charges were read and my son admitted everything without reservation, but saw himself as beyond guilt — ”I did what I had to do!” — and Mother did not join Gabi and me, who had to sit together, willy-nilly, but made a show of going to sit with the parents of David, mortally wounded by four shots, she was of course wearing the fox nestled around her neck like a noose. Its pointed little snout had its teeth buried in the skin above the root of the tail, and the deceptively real glass eyes, one of which had been lost during the flight and had to be replaced, lay at an oblique angle to Mothers light gray eyes, with the result that a double gaze fastened on the accused or the judge's bench.
It always embarrassed me to see her in this old-fashioned getup, the more so because the fox did not smell of Mothers favorite perfume, Tosca, but insistently and at all seasons of mothballs; and by now the creature looked fairly scruffy, too. But when she was called on the second day as a witness for the defense and stepped up to the witness stand, even I was impressed: like an anorexic diva, she wore the colorful fur to contrast with her blazing white hair, and introduced her first answers with the formula “I swear…,” even though she had not been put under oath, after which she said everything she had to say with seeming effortlessness, if a bit stiltedly, in High German.
In contrast to Gabi and me, who took advantage of our right as parents to refuse to provide any information, Mother had plenty to say. Before the entire court — that is, before three judges — the presiding judge and the associate judges — as well as the two juvenile court magistrates, she spoke as if she were at a religious revival. People listened to her as she crucified the state s attorney for juvenile cases. Basically, this terrible deed had hit her hard, too. Since it occurred, her heart had been torn asunder. A fiery sword had sliced through her. She had been crushed by a mighty fist.
On Demmlerplatz, where the trial was taking place in the regional courthouses large juvenile courtroom, Mother presented herself as emotionally and spiritually devastated. After cursing fate, she generously dispensed praise and blame. She blamed the parents for being incapable of loving their child, and praised her grandson, misled by forces of evil and that devilish invention, “that computer thingamabob,” as hardworking and polite, cleaner than clean, always helpful and remarkably punctual, and not only when it was a question of coming to supper. She swore that since her grandson Konrad had been around — and she had had this joy since his fifteenth year — even she had taken to organizing her day down to the minute. Yes, she had to admit it: she had been the one who gave him the computer thingamabob, with all the bells and whistles. Not that the boy had been spoiled by his grandmother, on the contrary. It was because he had turned out to be so exceptionally undemanding that she had been glad to fulfill his desire for this “modern contraption.” “He never asked for anything else!” she exclaimed, and recalled, “My Konradchen could keep himself entertained for hours with that thing.”
Then, after she had cursed all that seductive modern stuff, she came to her real topic. The ship, that is, which not a soul had wanted to hear about, had inspired her grandson to ask countless questions. But “Konradchen” had not merely shown an interest in the sinking “of the beautiful KDF steamer full of women and little children,” and it was not about that alone that he had interrogated his grandmother, the survivor; rather he had been eager, and not least in response to her expressed desire, to spread his vast knowledge, “the whole kit and caboodle,” by means of the computer she had given him, all the way to Australia and Alaska. “That is not prohibited, Your Honor, is it?” Mother exclaimed, and jerked the fox's head to the middle of her chest.
Then she got around to speaking of the victim, almost in passing. It had pleased her that her “Konradchen” had made friends this way — ”through that computer thingamabob, I mean” — with another boy, without knowing him personally, even if the two often disagreed, because otherwise her beloved grandchild was generally considered a loner. And that's what he was. Even his relationship with his little girlfriend from Ratzeburg — “she helps out at a dentists” — had to be seen as not too serious — ”There hasn't been any sex and such,” of that she was sure.
All that and more Mother said in fairly correct High German as a witness for the defense, making an obvious effort to sound refined. Konrad’s “sensitive approach to questions of conscience,” his “unbending love of the truth,” and his “unswerving pride in Germany” were lauded to the court. But when Mother affirmed how little it mattered to her that Konrad’s computer friend had been a Jewish boy, the states attorney for juvenile cases assured her that it had been known for quite a while, and documented as well, that the murdered boy's parents had no Jewish blood; rather, Father Stremplin's father had been a pastor in Württemberg and his wife came from a farm family that had had roots in Baden for generations. At that Mother became visibly agitated. She plucked at the fur, displayed for a few seconds her “I'm-not-home” look, then abandoned all efforts to speak High German, shouting, “What a swindle! How was my Konradchen supposed to know that this David was a fake Yid? So he was fooling himself and other folks, presenting himself all the time as a real Yid and going on and on about our guilt…”
When she castigated the murder victim as a “common liar” and “like one of them phonies from the fifties,” the presiding judge ordered her to step down. Of course Konny, who up to that point had been listening to Mothers foxy affirmations with a delicate smile, seemed by no means startled, though possibly disappointed, when the juvenile prosecutor presented for Wolfgang Stremplin — who had called himself David online — “proof of Aryan lineage,” as he put it, assuming an ironic air. My son commented with calm confidence on what he already knew: “That doesn't change the situation in the least. It was up to me to decide whether the person known to me as David was speaking as a Jew and behaving as such.” When the presiding judge asked him whether he had ever met a real Jew, in Mölln or in Schwerin, he replied with a clear no, but added, “That wasn't relevant to my decision. I fired as a matter of principle.”
After that the questioning focused on the pistol, which after the deed my son had hurled down the steep bank into Lake Schwerin; on this subject Mother commented only briefly: “How could I have found the thing, Herr Staatsanwalt? My Konradchen always cleaned his own room. That was a point of pride with him.”
Asked about the murder weapon, my son said that he had had the gun available — it was a 7-mm Tokarev, Soviet army surplus — for a year and a half. That had been necessary because radical right-wing youths from the surrounding Mecklenburg countryside had threatened him. No, he didn't want to and wouldn't name any names. “I refuse to betray former comrades!” The occasion for the threats had been a lecture that he gave on the invitation of a nationalist solidarity organization. The topic, “The Fate of the KDF Ship Wilhelm Gustloff from the Laying of the Keel to the Sinking,” had presumably been pitched too high for some in the audience, “among them some dumbskulls excessively fond of beer drinking.” The baldies had been particularly outraged when he objectively acknowledged the military achievement of the Soviet U-boat commander, who had torpedoed the boat from a risky position. He was later harassed in public by various tough guys as a “Russian-lover,” and even physically attacked. “From then on, it was clear to me that you couldn't confront these types, with their primitive Nazism, without being armed. Arguing with them got you nowhere.”
The lecture, which was delivered one weekend early in '96 in a Schwerin restaurant, the meeting place for the aforementioned solidarity organization, and two further lectures he was not given permission to deliver, but which were provided to the court in hard copy, would play a role in the further course of the hearing.
As for his oral report, both of us had failed him. Gabi and I should have been aware of what had happened in Mölln, but we had both been looking the other way. Even though she taught at another school, word had to have reached Gabi that her son had been forbidden to give a report on a controversial topic because the subject matter was deemed “inappropriate.” Admittedly, I too should have taken a greater interest in my son.
For instance, it would have been possible for me to schedule my visits to Mölln — which were unfortunately irregular, due to my professional obligations — so that I could have asked questions on parents' night, even if that had resulted in a confrontation with one of these narrow-minded pedants. I could have interjected, “What's this about banning a report? Don't you believe in free speech?” or something of the sort. Perhaps Konny s report, subtitled “The Positive Aspects of the Nazi Organization Strength through Joy,” might have added some spice to the bland social studies curriculum. But I didn't make it to any parents' nights, and Gabi felt it would be wrong to complicate her colleagues' already difficult situation further by interfering, in her subjective role as a mother, the more so since she had declared herself “strictly opposed to any attempt to portray the Nazi pseudo-ideology as innocuous,” and had always defended her leftist position to her son, often too impatiently, as she conceded.
Nothing absolves us. One can't blame everything on Mother or on the teachers' moralistic rigidity. During the proceedings, my ex and I — she rather hesitantly, and constantly invoking the limits of what can be expected of education — had to admit to our mutual failure. Oh, if only I, born fatherless, had never become a father!
It turned out that the parents of poor David — whose real name was Wolfgang and whose philo-Semitic posturing had apparently provoked our Konny — were reproaching themselves in much the same terms. At any rate, during a recess, when Gabi and I had an initially awkward but then fairly frank conversation with the couple, Herr Stremplin told me that it had probably been his purely theoretical scientific work at the nuclear research center and certainly also his overly detached attitude toward certain historical events that had resulted in the alienation between him and his son — which had reached the point that they stopped speaking to one another. In particular, his relatively dispassionate view of the period of National Socialist rule had been beyond his son's comprehension. “Well, the result was increasing distance between us.”
And Frau Stremplin expressed the opinion that Wolfgang had always been an oddball. His only contact with boys his own age had come through Ping-Pong. She had never picked up any indication of relationships with girls. But relatively early, at the age of fourteen, her son adopted the name David and became so obsessed with thoughts of atonement for the wartime atrocities and mass killings, which, God knows, were constantly harped on in our society, that eventually everything Jewish became somehow sacred to him. Last year for Christmas he asked for a menorah, of all things. And it had been somehow off-putting to see him sitting in his room at his one and only love, the computer, wearing one of those little caps religious Jews wore. “He kept asking me to cook kosher!” That, at any rate, was her explanation as to why Wolfgang had represented himself in his computer games as a person of the Mosaic faith. When she objected that at some point there somehow had to be an end to these neverending accusations, she was ignored. “In the last few months our boy became unreachable.” For that reason she had no idea how her son had come upon this dreadful Nazi functionary and his murderer, a medical student named Frankfurter. “Did we give up trying to have an influence on him too soon?”
Frau Stremplin spoke in bursts. Her husband nodded by way of confirmation. Wolfgang had worshipped this David Frankfurter, he said. His endless talk of David and Goliath had been silly, but apparently it was a serious matter to him. His younger brothers, Jobst and Tobias, teased him for this cult he had created. On his desk he even had a framed photo of the young man, taken shortly before the murder in Davos. And then those books, newspaper clippings, and computer printouts. Apparently it was all connected with that man Gustloff and the ship named after him. “It was somehow dreadful what happened when that ship went down. All those children. We didn't know anything about it. Not even my husband, and his hobby is research on recent German history. Even he didn't have any information on the Gustloff case, unfortunately, until…”
She cried. Gabi cried, too, and in her helplessness put her hand on Frau Stremplin's shoulder. I could have wailed, too, but the fathers made do with exchanging glances intended to signal mutual understanding. We got together with Wolfgang's parents several more times, outside the courthouse as well. Decent liberals who reproached themselves rather than us. Always making an effort to understand. It seemed to me that during the trial they listened intently to Konny s usually long-winded speeches, as if they were hoping to gain some insight from him, their son's murderer.
I found the Stremplins quite likable. He, around fifty, with glasses and well-groomed gray hair, looked like the type who sees everything as relative, even hard and fast facts. She, in her mid-forties but looking younger than that, tended to find things somehow inexplicable. When the conversation came around to Mother, she said, “Your son's grandmother is certainly a remarkable person, but she makes an uncanny impression on me, somehow…”
We learned that Wolfgangs younger brothers were cut from a different cloth. And she was still worrying about her eldest son's performance in school, specifically his weakness in mathematics and physics, as if he were still alive, “somehow,” and would soon be taking the university qualifying exams.
We sat in one of Schwerins new upscale cafes, on bar stools at a round table that was a little too high. As if by prearrangement, we had all ordered cappuccinos. No pastry to go with them. Sometimes we drifted away from the topic, for instance when we felt we had to admit to the Stremplins, who were about our age, the reasons for our early divorce. Gabi maintained that it was normal nowadays for people to separate when things didn't work out, and there was no need to assign blame. I held back and let my ex deal with everything halfway explicable, but then I changed the subject, bringing up in a fairly confused fashion the oral reports that had been banned in Konny s schools in Mölln and Schwerin. Immediately Gabi and I were fighting again, just we had eons ago during our marriage. I argued that our son's unhappiness — and its dreadful consequences — started when he was prohibited from presenting his view of 30 January 1933 and also the social significance of the Nazi organization Strength through Joy, but Gabi interrupted me: “Perfectly understandable that the teacher had to put a stop to it. After all, in terms of that date, its real significance was that it was the day of Hitlers takeover, not that it happened to be the birthday of a minor figure, about whose importance our son wanted to go on and on, especially in conjunction with his subtopic, 'The Neglect of Monuments'…”
In court, this is what happened: the reports that were never given in Mölln and Schwerin were dealt with in the testimony of two teachers, both of whom confirmed that the defendant had been an excellent student. Unanimously — and in this respect in pan-German agreement — the two educators said that the banned reports had been severely infected with National Socialist thinking, which, to be sure, had been expressed with intelligent subtlety, for instance in the advocacy for a “classless Volk community,” but also in the demand for an “ideology-free preservation of monuments,” which he skillfully slipped in, mentioning the eliminated grave marker of the former Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff, whom the schoolboy Konrad Pokriefke had planned to introduce in his second, also banned, presentation as a “great son of the city of Schwerin.” For reasons of educational responsibility it had been necessary to prevent the spread of such dangerous nonsense, the more so because there was a growing number of boys and girls, in both schools, with radical right-wing tendencies. The East German teacher emphasized in his concluding remarks his schools “antifascist tradition,” while all that occurred to the West German teacher was the fairly overused Ovid quotation, “Principiis obsta! — Beware the beginnings!”
All in all, the hearing of witnesses went smoothly, with the exception of Mother s outbursts, as well as those of the witness Rosi, who tearfully affirmed again and again that she would remain true to her “comrade, Konrad Pokriefke.” Because proceedings in juvenile court are closed to the public, they were not held in chambers where effective speeches could be delivered. But then the presiding judge, who sometimes allowed himself little jokes, as if he wanted to introduce some levity into the deadly earnest background of this trial, gave my son an opportunity to illuminate the motivation for his deed, which Konny was all too glad to do, and at length, in an impromptu speech.
He began, of course, at the beginning, that is, with the birth of the later Landesgruppenleiter of the Nazi Party. Highlighting his organizational accomplishments in Switzerland and declaring his victory over tuberculosis “a victory of strength over weakness,” he proceeded to sculpt a likeness of a hero. Thus he found an opportunity to celebrate, at long last, the “great son of the capital city of Schwerin.” If the public had been admitted, approving murmurs might have been heard from the back rows.
When he reached the point where he dealt with the preparation and execution of the murder in Davos — Konrad soon abandoned his notes and quoted materials — he stressed the legal acquisition of the weapon and the number of shots that had been fired: “Like me, David Frankfurter scored four hits.” My son also established a parallel to the motive that Frankfurter had articulated in the cantonal court, but expanded the statement: “I shot because I am a German — and because the eternal Jew spoke through David.”