When Martin Puchner was a child, tramps would turn up at his family home in Nuremberg to be fed by his mother. His father explained that they were drawn by a zinken (sign) associated with Rotwelsch, a language spoken by vagrants and criminals whose name is derived from two terms: Rot (beggar) and Welsch (incomprehensible). The zinken, a cross within a circle carved into the house’s foundation stone, told them that lechem (bread) could be had there. Rotwelsch became Puchner’s key to unlocking a cupboard of family skeletons.
His grandfather, Karl, the director of the Bavarian State Archive, was one of many unrepentant Nazis who benefitted from the swift changes in the status quo that followed Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the new threat from Soviet Russia. He was not personally involved in the Final Solution but he was an enthusiastic Nazi and a rabid anti-Semite.
In his article ‘Family Names as Racial Markers’, published in Writings of the Bavarian State Association for Family Studies in 1934, Karl argued that ‘language experts such as himself should distinguish between Jewish-sounding German names and German-sounding Jewish names’.
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