P.I.G. [Petrified Intestinal Gas]

About the Book

Upon opening this book, the reader is to encounter this story’s  principal character at the age of ten in mid-war Berlin under cicumstances which may explain the development of an idiosyncrasy in handling stressful situations by building up internal gas pressure so as to give rise to his nickname Pupenfass (barrel of farts) as well as to the title of this book, P.I.G. which stands for Petrified Intestinal Gas.

Felipe Papenfuss gets involved in his dad’s intricate spiel at a premature age by doing deliveries to an underground shelter for Jewish refugees, the so-called ‘bombcrater’ in Berliner lingo. Dad Oskar Papenfuss, a high-ranking nazi party official, doubles as eastern Jew by the name of Schmuhl Katzenellenbogen who has been successful in planting his own Aryan family tree and is married to Ingrid Milchreis whose greater family clan consists of freedom fighters. Therefore,  ambiguity prevails at the Papenfuss homestead.

With increased bombing raids on Berlin,  Hermann Goering orders families to evacuate the city,  taking Ingrid and her two children to the Harz highlands region in Northern Germany. Felix is forced to leave his good friend, an older matron by the name of Godehusen behind, but is compensated with a valve trombone and a membership in a marching band. This turns out to be a rewarding experience for the lad, but ultimately leads to his arrest because he entices his fellow buglers to listen to ‘decadent’ jazz. His death sentence is commuted to serving in a guerilla troop a week prior to the collapse of  Hitler’s ‘thousand-year’ empire. After his capture he becomes good friends with Wacek, a Polish guard with plenty of stored flatus to measure against Felipe’s.

Felipe’s teenage years in a Harz resort town make him become more aware of his Jewish roots, owing to the frequent encounter with dormant antisemitism in post-war Germany, reaching even into the age of goodwill towards the Jewish cause. He also has some involuntary encounters with the medical establishment with tonsil-doctor Rachhals and fart-expert  Dr. Isidor Sauerteig taking the cake. Upon his highschool graduation , the family moves to Hannover where his dad, highly adaptable former harnessmaker  Oskar, now works as  lawschool graduate Schmuhl  for the state government.

With a lot of musical experience in his backpocket as a member of  several bands, Felipe graduates as  a diplomate in chemistry in the early 1960’s, but has failed to corner his dreamwoman. Instead, his choice of life-coordinates results in picking a nightmare-come-true, a Swiss-born likely victim of incest and an addict. A good portion of  this segment of his life-story, unfolding upon his move from Zurich to Philly and then Boston, deals with Irene Papenfuss, née Angst, and her offspring. His stunted professional career in the chemical arena and the desciption of the leading characters in this tragic comedy is also paid attention to in this narration, as is his successful fight in conquering a back problem which had been triggered way back by a negligent nanny in pre-war Berlin.

Seven years after  Irene’s   potential suicide through torching at age 48,  Felipe, a.k.a. Felix, Fell and Philippe, decides to retire and resettle in Southern California where he has the opportunity to meet an eldery distant relative and Auschwitz survivor and record her story. His time is full of fun with living his life at its fullest with swimming, running, giving musical performances, topped by a hightened awareness of  the beauty of life as a gift in itself, not related to a deity or other religious entity, thus creating his own form of ‘religious’ atheism. A tragic surfing accident  happens to cut his joy of life short.

About the Author

Even though three years younger than the hero of this story, the author himself has gone through similar stages in his personal development and has been able to gather pertinent information on the case so as to be considered an authority for writing this book. Jurgen Grasshoff was born on May 7, 1936, in Berlin as the son of a Catholic lawyer and a Jewish concert pianist with a forged Aryan birth certificate. In 1943, his family resettled in Bad Harzburg, a picturesque town on the northern edge of the Harz highlands. He spent his high school years in that town, relocated to Hannover in 1956 where he attended college and graduated in 1961with a diploma in chemistry. In 1965, he received a doctorate in chemistry from the ETH Zurich. His professional career brought him to the Northeast of the USA. He is now retired and lives in California.