You ask why Germans have no sense of humour. I'll tell you. But first I will walk sideways, crablike, to the truth.

I need to settle my own historical accounts. I know I have messed up but it is sheer accident I am here at all, that mother - I cannot bring myself to use the possessive "my" - was nine months pregnant at the time.

It started when I bought a computer and started surfing the net. I flicked from chatroom to chatroom, listening to neo-Nazis, before I came to www.blutzeuge.de, the Comrades of Schwerin.

Two men. Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi landesgruppenleiter, and David Frankfurter, the Jew who killed him. Both had come alive in the chatroom. Gustloff had become a martyr when he was murdered on January 30, 1936, and the Nazis named a cruise ship after him. Mother and her parents had their best holiday on the Gustloff.

After the war, mother stayed on in the East. She never quite lost her love of the Nazis. She sent me to live in the West just before the wall went up. "Tell this man he's your father," she said. "He'll give you money." I got the money. I never discovered my father.

I became a journalist, a poor one. I met a woman called Gabi, we had a son, Konrad, and she left me. Mother adored Konrad.

I must go sideways once more. For mother, her defining event was the sinking of the Gustloff. She was just 18 and was fleeing on board the Gustloff, which had become a refugee ship. Nine thousand died when it was sunk by a Russian submarine. Only a few survived. "You were born as the ship sank," she used to tell me, though this was a lie. I was born on the rescue boat.

"Tell me," she would say. "Why have we destroyed the memorial to Gustloff that went up before the war? Why should we remember instead the Jew and the submarine commander?"

In the chatrooms, my suspicions grew. The voice of Wilhelm was Konrad, infected by his grandmother. This was confirmed when Konrad agreed to meet the voice of David in person. They visited the sites in Schwerin and then Konny killed him. "It is vengeance," he said.

The papers lost interest in the case when they discovered that David was not a Jew. He was Wolfgang Stremplin. "Maybe he wouldn't have been so passionate had we talked more of the Nazis at home," his parents told me. "Maybe Konny would not have been so full of hatred if I had been a better parent, too," I replied. Ach, German angst.

Konny was sent to prison. At first he showed no signs of repentance, then one day I visited him and saw he had thrown out all his Nazi cuttings. That night I went home and logged on. There was a site dedicated to Konrad, the hatred he had brought. It never ends.

The digested read...digested

The existential fulfilment of the 1000-year Reich