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the post-war years a letdown. Helga subsequently endured a sadistic stepmother (what are the odds?) and an orphanage.
    Then as an adult, out of blasted hope, Helga takes her beautiful little son to meet the mother she has not seen since childhood. Mum ignores the child, fortunate boy, but makes a peace offering. She has handfuls of expensive jewellery, which Helga realizes instantly were stolen from Jewish and Romany women stripped as they entered the gas chamber. The reunion goes downhill from there, and later Helga visits her mother in a German old folks’ home, where everyone knows she was a Nazi torturer partly because she still behaves like one. At this point, it’s actually funny, because the staff and other patients show a saintly patience toward the hideously insane old woman who serves as a relic of an era for which Germans (and everyone else, I suppose) can’t forgive themselves. It made me think better of Germans.
    American Pain Memoir, Subset: Evil Mother writers aren’t like Helga Schneider. They don’t take any crap.They take notes. An American writer would have smothered that woman with a pillow in 1967. Pain Memoirs, Subset: War, are often very fine, because the pattern in the carpet is of the individual as well as the mass. One of the greatest war memoirs is Roman Frister’s
The Cap: The Price of a Life
, in which he explains the selfish human desire to survive, to the point of stealing a fellow prisoner’s cap in Auschwitz to replace the one stolen by the
kapo
who has just sodomized him. The
kapo
has taken the cap of his latest victim, knowing that all prisoners without caps are automatically shot. The next morning, Frister watches the capless man shot to death at roll call.
    Frister writes his memoir as he travels to a court where Wilhelm Kunde, the Nazi, is tried and sentenced. When he sees Kunde—the terrifying man who split the boy’s beautiful mother’s skull open with his pistol, in front of the child, her body falling to the polished wooden floor with a thud that Frister can still remember—he is numb and indifferent.
    Kunde looks like a little old man in a suit too big for him, a tiny human doll. He is convicted and sentenced to seven years.
    Frister thinks morality cannot be judged by one standard. It varies according to circumstance. He is right, but I notice that I have yet to meet anyone who has read Frister’s great book. And that is the point of the memoir, to study uncomfortable questions like that, things otherwise left unsaid. Readers aren’t happy with Frister’s shrug, so to speak. Very few Second World War memoirs—and I swam in them for years, out of a moralsense possibly, but more likely out of morbid fascination—are like this, like a broken arm. Frister offers his jagged limb; readers would prefer a nicely healed straight arm.
    Thanks to the Americans, there are a great many war memoirs, by soldiers, by little girls whose skin was burned off by napalm from the Dow “Better Living Through Chemicals” people, and by war photographers like Don McCullin who can’t shake their guilt.
    There’s a man named Andrew Neil who used to edit fine papers bought by Rupert Murdoch and inevitably bring them down to a low sour standard that would make the good journalists who used to staff them weep. This isn’t necessarily to denigrate Neil, who stole the journalistic notion of “Treat light things seriously and serious things lightly” from the
New Musical Express
staffed by Julie Burchill et al., and made newspapers interesting again. Worse, but interesting.
    But I hate Andrew Neil because he fired McCullin, one of the finest news photographers who ever lived. McCullin’s picture of a Biafran child, a boy, stooped over with such a look of hurt in his eyes, sits in McCullin’s own Pain Memoir on a shelf behind me as I write this. I’ve seen the picture twice, once as a child and once for the purposes of this book. I suppose we’ll call it Pain Memoir, Subset: Photos of