Title: Sport 22: Autumn 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1999

Part of: Sport

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Sport 22: Autumn 1999

Koenraad Kuiper

Koenraad Kuiper

page 58

Adolf Hitler's father was a bastard

but it's not that simple.

In fact young Hitler had a moustache
a real RAF job with waxed points
like von Hindenburg
(not the airship, the general).

He twiddled with them at night
in bed, frustrated.
He twiddled with them in the trenches
as the shells flew overhead.

I've got to have a Putsch, he thought.

And so he did. But it let him down.
The transmission was duff
and he ended up in the can
twiddling his moustache.

He wrote Mein Kampf there
and looked into the mirror often.
It was the moustache, he decided,
and the self-indulgent twiddling.

Germany needs young men of resolution.
So off came his points and the wax.
Gradually the razor moved inward
ever inward.

Hitler checked at each stroke.
It was a revelation with one inch to go.
There was the next chapter;
ein Land, ein Volk, ein Führer.

page 59

Why should I,

I ask you, sitting here
years later listening to Couperin,
care enough about you to write your name?

I think of my mentor, Paul Hoffmann,
80 years old and an Austrian like you
walking barefoot through the snow in Vienna

and then, years of exile later, to Deutschland
to teach lyric poetry. So a romantic
like you but much braver.

I could only talk to the local Gauleiter
when I was younger,
the pig farmer Rautenkranz.

He still wanted
Lebensraum for his pigs, hated Slavs
despite his Drang nach Osten.

Now
I'm afraid of crowds,
and parades,

of mass action,
and sirens.
I suspect enthusiasm.

Everywhere I go
I take you with me,
you bastard.