(Oxford University crest, England)

This we had in common with Sask, that we seemed to belong both to these poor reminders of forgotten glories, whose family roots get lost in time and who seem not to find an adequate place among people who usually do hardly remember their grandparents. Sask was very proud. So proud, that she did hardly talk, as if she esteemed it to lower herself to levels she did not merit. And though it was not exactly that: a banker does certainly have in mind (if he is serious) thousands and millions of informations he has to organize in very abstract blocks in order to deal correctly with heavy problems that do always appear whenever something is linked to money. Logically, Sask had been educated in an environment that was used to talk this kind of very synthetic language, without ever finding an appropriated place where to express herself, as her nearest environment was not adequate to her education. She looked quite snob, perhaps she wasn’t. In any case she kept those kind of singular atavisms that are common to empoverished families, as if the fact of keeping one or another very expensive object did lower the stress of finding oneself in a foreign environment. Thus, she had a certain number of quite expensive things around her, probably something like a pen, a French parfum, and some silk clothes, somewhere. What had really happened, I never learned about, because she was quite discreet about these subjects and although I managed to guess that there had been a crash between two banks with different views, her family had lost, I was not even extremely sure about the latter. In any case, she seemed to share my visceral hatred for the Rothschild family, abstract hatred linked to the financing ofNapoleon’s campaign to Russia by this family, that became very concrete the day I learned something more about Hannah’s death. (Sorry for the Rothschild’s: fame and money does attract enemies you have to deal with, if you can.) Why Sask did hate them, too, I don’t really know why.

Origins are as diffuse as vague references. Although we use to believe what we are told, there is no warrant that this be true, except for some details fixed in documents. In fact families do build up some kind of fairy tale about themselves, resuming the way of dealing with reality: things importance is given to, or taken away from, things that are said, others kept silent, borders and lines determining friends, enemies, allies through frozen silences or accidental references. There is thus a difference between what I’m said and what there really is, but both are relevant because if the one says facts ordering social belonging, the other does resume the families ideology.

What I know about my family is mostly a myth that I built up myself. My family was quite gripped what information was concerned, what always made me think they had many things to hide. Who knows. Something like the book ‘Panic’, Elizabeth was reading, where someone discovers finally that his family was completely different to what they pretended to be.

Facts are quite little: the German branch composed Kasten (grandfather) and von Speth Schülzburg (grandmother) lived somewhere in Mecklenburg, north from Prussia, next to the see, in a so called ‘gepachtet’ property.  

(Hans Erich Kasten, Elisabeth von Speth Schülzburg and their 5 children, Jochen, Arne, Peter, Fried and Ingrid in German property)

The Kasten were supposed to be very rich, and although most of the property got lost after the war (‘when the Russian came’, my aunt used to say), my grandfather’s brother Otto still managed to make of his business ‘Besucherring’ a national entreprise. Part of the family was linked to agriculture, but also quite interested in cultural aspects as theatre, opera and ballet. Actually, my uncle Peter got married to the first ballerina of the Dortmund ballet. (At that time, and it was not a happy marriage.) After war, the family moved to Lübeck. The family of my grandmother was one of the oldest aristocratic German families of the south, the von Speth. The genealogy goes back to the 12th Century, and they were ‘Freiherren’, title that was given directly by the emperor at that time and assured extreme autonomy in their own property. This title became later the lowest rank of aristocratic hierarchy, the barons. The Barons von Speth Schülzburg do still exist and have there property in Schwaben, I think, actual Bavaria. Their territory gave one of the most famous emperor’s families, whose name I may remember later. They were not very powerful in the XIXth and XXth (shifts of power to the north of Germany) and my grandfather (‘ausbezahlt’: in order not to loose the unity of territory, only the oldest son kept it, the others were given a part in money), went to Afrika (Ivory Coast) where he lost all his money in bad investments so that the daughters, almost without resources, had to favour mariage for money even if this implied the loss of the title. Southern Von Speth got thus married to northern Kasten.

The story though has quite a lot of gaps. It looks quite coherent, but it always seems as if there was too much of a silence concerning different points. Where did the Kasten come from? It is said, originally from Hamburg, and were clerks, low military and in general, low middle class (from the point of view of administration). Where did they get the money from and the political influence in order to be allowed to take ground through the modality of ‘Pachten’ (you pay a percentage of income to the state for a number of years until you have payed off a given price), which meant great investments in machinery and animals? My aunt said, the whole village was working for them, and in the not negligeable house (about 20 rooms) they still used to eat with Rosenthal dishes. How? On top of that, little is said about the Kasten family, as if the Baron von Speth had eliminated this ‘low class specimen’ from the familiar education.

What my particular hypothesis are concerning these contradictions I will talk about later, after having had a look at the Spanish side.

Here, the story is as full of gaps as the former. My grandmother born in Seville, became, as it is said, an orphan very young after her parents died in an accident. Nothing is mentioned about social situation, origins, anything of this common ‘Molina’ branch.  

(Joaquina Molina de Checa with Elisabeth von Speth Schülzburg during the marriage of my mother, Marina Checa y Molina)

My grandfather Checa, originally from a village of the province of Cuenca, came from a wealthy landowner family. Probable descendants of the most noble de Checa family, as the name is quite rare, they are supposed to have been visigoths asking for noble title in the 12th Century, too, and given title and the name of the village Checa at that time in the region of Aragon, where it still is. Conditions for nobility in Aragon where even worse than in Germany: the first son enherited property and title, the second was sent to the church and the others, as it is still commonly said ‘could become shepherds for the elder brother’, what is to say, they had nothing. Most of them did thus migrate to more favorable countries, which explains there appearance in Cuenca. My grandmother got to know my grandfather through a Spanish tradition that made that young unmarried women did knit sockets for young men doing their military service. They got married, moved to Madrid were they lived in the quite privileged barrio de Salamanca just in front of the place where general Carrero Blanco (who was supposed to succeed Franco) was blown up by ETA while going to the church in 1974. My grandmother became modist for the upper and aristocratic classes, while my grandfather made bad investments in textile in Barcelona and lost everything. (Men were no good business people in both families, as it seems.) Of their children, three got married to foreigners: Marisa to a French, Meyi to a Pakistani she knew while working in London, and my mother to a German. One of them got married to a soldier of career, Maribel. Women were not allowed to sudy at that time and both my uncles specialized in something more or less technological (computering and plane ingeneer).

My father left Germany when he was about to do his military service. Having been offered a post as English teacher he left for Spain about 1959. My mother, who had learned English during a one year au pair stay in Dublin, was teaching at the same school, called Briam (british/american). The director of this school was a former minister of propaganda of the Vichy government, François Gaucher, which linked the school to currents of the right to extreme right. They got married in 1963 and had five children: Karen, me, Arne, Ana and Jorge.

(Arne Kasten and Marina Checa de Kasten)

The strange thing concerning my mother’s family is the registration of her name. She does not appear in official papers as Checa Molina (father’s and mother’s name), but as Checa y Molina, the ‘y’ indicating something that needs further study as it is usually linked to aristocratic descendance.

From left to right: Arne, my mother, (behind) director of Castillo de la Mota where my mother did the ‘military service’, Jorge, (behind) myself, Ana and Karen

The hypothetical reconstruction I finish by making of my family is that the Checa are original slavs. This strange name, actually founding the Tschech Republic, is the same given to soviet prisons, called ‘tscheka’. The name does thus seem to be linked to populations related to the slavs (same root than Tschetsche -nian). That they are assimilated to visigoths is related to the fact that populations coming down from the north were usually called ‘goths’ and differences were not made whether they were slavs or other. Further, much more hypothetical constructions did lead me to the thought that it could be very old jewish populations having gone up to the north during or after the babylonian exile, making the link between northern commerce (mostly leather and similar as through the bridge-town at the macedonian river Strymon, Amfipolis). These populations, separated from original slavs, must have had proper territories with own national population, which would explain the appearance of both tschech and tschetschian, as atavism of older historical realities. I do presume they did often had the function of ‘messager, translator, link’, reason why they could have been sent with barbarian goth to see what was going on beyond the Pyrenees. At least, this is what I can generally conclude from basic principles in behavior of my mother and aunts. I realized much after that jew populations even integrated in other, would maintain a certain number of recognizable characteristics: families that were obviously of jewish origin in Greece (Abramoudis, Manafis) were extremely familiar to my own memories, and others I found the same familiarity with I suspected to be originally jews, such as Nicolas and Lassègue in France, and another one told me after 20 years, that his father was a jew (Robert Risch). As if jews had maintained their origin through distinctive signs even when integrated in another nation, so that they could recognize each other even hundreds of years later or with thousands of kilometers distance in between. Similarity in character will even determine likings: my mother liked Santa Teresa de Jesús very much and Fernando Rojas, both of jewish origins. She disliked the foundator of extreme nationalist movement and ideologist of the right (?), because she said: he was too agressive against jews and other populations. And even said this is the reason Franco put him to death (I could never verify the latter.)

What concerns my grandmother I always suspected she was a ‘bastard’ of a noble family member. Features do show extreme similarity with the ducs of Alba or related, and it is difficult to explain how a poor orphan of the south did have such an extraordinary social ascension in so little years. Her sister did even become the director of the women’s prison of Madrid and her son Jose made the military service together with the King of Spain (he was not yet.) All seems to indicate that some strong protecting lines were keeping the family in some kind of distant security.

Now, for what is of the German, except that they were obvious descendants of Goth (Gotha, the nobility book of Germany, is the record of the authentic descendants of the population that had invaded Germany around the third to the fourth Century) in what concerns my grandmother, and thus obviously hit by the ravages coming from blood mixture and other general misbehaviors, they seem to be attached to Judaism, too, in a way or another. The Kasten, rich and wealthy family, linked to arts and culture, could it really be descending from low middle class clerks? As jews were forbidden work in administration, many jews did convert in order to have acces to these posts in the XIXth Century, such as the family of poet Heinrich Heine from Hamburg. The nazi ideologist Rudolf Hess was of jewish origin, too. As administration was something forbidden to these people, it must have seemed something very desirable to them, and thus be proud of what a German would never have been proud of: low rank in Army or Administration. On the other hand, they would not give extreme importance to what they already had, wealth. This ambiguity seems to be an indication for the fact they could really have been jews. The name Kasten appears in the US as linked to Judaism.

There is nothing worse than a jew denying his origins, I always said: the Kasten family was certainly linked to extreme right activism before the second war, although my father never talked about it saying that … he wasn’t a soldier because he had some problem with his heart. Perhaps I’m wrong.