Vanessa Springora. “My Father and Grandfather Male Figures Explain Why I Turned to Gabriel Matznef at 13”

In Surname:Vanessa Springora relies as much on Zweig or Kundera as on archives unearthed after the death of her mythical and toxic father, whom she hadn’t seen for ten years, and on pictures of her grandfather wearing Nazi insignia… a real archeology of the men in her family, and more specifically about his inherited name.

Realizing that the tender grandfather who had taken care of him, replacing his father unable to do so, was not who he believed, the author; Agreement embarked on a Russian puppet investigation. Or how the name can contain not only the history of the father and grandfather, but the trajectory of the last century and the rugged geography of an entire continent.

Madame Figaro . – How much? Surname: And Agreement Are they related to you?
Vanessa Springora: I insisted when Agreementabout the need to recover my history, but there was my encounter with Matznef “before.” The imprint left on my life by the male figures who were my father and my paternal grandfather partly explains why I turned to Gabriel Matznef. At the age of 13… The image of a rapist and a fascist is very familiar to me. Hannah Arendt was widely cited as the “intelligence of evil,” the “ordinary” oppressors; In Surname:I am also talking about these ordinary people and these choices that are made against themselves, without their own reflection, this time in a different context, a political one. teenagers, and completely denying the suffering he inflicted until he shows it in his books, I see the same denial of the other that we find. Nazi murderers and torturers, unable to see among the displaced and slaughtered population, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, the like; that we are in the process of destruction. In this sense, Surname: continues the exploration of the executioner’s psyche.

Your grandfather and your father have one thing in common, that they lied, one to hide what he did during the war, the other, pathologically. Isn’t writing for you a way to eliminate these lies?
This is just the other connection Agreementwhere, in fact, it was about eliminating the lies of Gabriel Matznef’s books, his unequivocal way of telling what happened, imposing a version of things. A lie of omission destroyed my father, who from his early childhood had to live with an unspoken family secret that he hid under the assumed name of Springora. which should have been repressed. My grandfather was presented as a hero who was forced into the German army and then sent away Normandy, where he left, then my grandmother hid in Rouen, before settling in France to escape to his native country, Czechoslovakia. In fact, although he had Czechoslovak citizenship, he belonged to the Sudeten German-speaking community, which sided with Hitler and forced the Munich Conference of 1938, at the end of which Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland and then all of Czechoslovakia. My grandfather was not only drafted into the German army. he joined the Berlin police, joined the Nazi party… These repressions weighed heavily on my father and explain his mythicism in my eyes. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I adopted one of the etymologies of the name Springer, my grandfather’s real name, “Spread the Word.” therefore breaking the silence, subverting the fiction.

Can you tell us a word about this title? Surname: and the question of the name?
It structures the book, which is divided into four chapters: the surname, the patronymic, the assumed name, and the “proper” name, taken in its dual meaning, that is, as “name in itself,” etc. name without blemish, spotless. My grandfather allowed himself to whitewash his past with the name he gave himself. Therefore, the name is the beginning of fiction, it is the beginning of history, myth, legend. Our name often determines our choices, our belonging and sometimes conflicts of loyalty. Identity starts there, and when you have a fake name like my father and you discover it late, it is very difficult to overcome this flaw. The name is also the heritage of our fathers. we women don’t have our own name. Tradition dictates that we inherit our father and then take our husband. Sometimes I wish we could go back to the older rites where we could be baptized as adults. For example, a person changes their name four times in a lifetime: depending on the symbolic age.This seems to me a way of regaining control over his story.

I insisted when Agreementabout my need to reclaim my history

Vanessa Springora

Your grandfather changed his name to something else and you “made a name” with it. Agreement as someone told you…
When you are young, born in a German-speaking community in 1912, shortly before the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is very difficult to position yourself outside of your immediate circle also have the opportunity to break away from it, to exercise our critical thinking, to clarify our own consent, in this case, to barbarism. To tell ourselves that even if we are determined by our origin, we must preserve this space of freedom that allows us to act in our soul and conscience, regardless of our membership in the community we create for ourselves, our “proper name”. As for me, I am not interested in fame, but in the fact of renaming yourself, giving a name again. The impossibility of explaining where the name bearing my name came from made me feel cheated and illegitimate because I had no roots to cling to. Today, when I know what this name hides, I believe it Surname: It was also a way for me to come to terms with this father who was never able to be that for me. Perhaps this is what we still lack today, the ability to understand the person we designate as an enemy.