Haas is the son and grandson of Nazis, and all his music grows out of the survival instinct born from what he describes in his memoir as the inherited horror of a childhood marked by physical and sexual abuse. My parents were criminals, he says calmly. I reached that conclusion after a long process of coming to terms with it, shaped by shame and fear. I could not speak about this in words, but I could speak about this in music.
I felt like a pressure cooker, he recalls. My children had never seen me like that. I wasn't myself. Lenkeit explains that, at age 47, he had just discovered by chance and in horror that his maternal grandmother, Hedwig Potthast (1912-1994) had been the lover of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo, and one of the architects of the murder of six million Jews during Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.