Endpapers, page 14
To hear Ohler tell it, my ancestors not only contributed to Hitler’s descent into that psychological bunker of madness and delusion. They also profited from it. Some truly awful shit indeed.
Nine
Blood and Shame
Kurt and Niko, 1945 to 1948
With America’s entry into the war in late 1941, mail service between New York and the Reich ceased. Kurt and Helen could no longer reach my father, aunt, or grandmother, and vice versa. “Tell [Niko] that I always think of him with a love that’s great and deep, that I hope for a future for him in which he will be able to live out his true purpose, and I hope at that time to be a good, helpful, and supportive friend,” Kurt wrote his ex-wife in one of the last letters between New York and Munich before Pearl Harbor shut down the mails. “Please do not forget to tell him this—I would like him to know how much I, and Helen too, hold him in our thoughts, how very dear he is to us.”
Soon afterward Maria wrote Kurt: “You must not dwell on how Niko is doing; he is protected, protected by his nature, and he will surely return undisturbed from all the horror to the life he knew before. From his letters one gets the feeling that he has become much more mature, more mature in his heart, and has learned to appreciate things which until now have seemed to him immaterial, things besides ravioli and technology.”
With peace came a flurry of letters filled with three and a half years of pent-up news and sentiments. In the fall of 1945 Kurt finally reached Elisabeth again, writing this time in English, a choice of language that seemed to acknowledge the new order that would prevail for the rest of his life.
Now, at last, we hear through a letter from [Helen’s sister] Liesl that Niko has come home to you. I can imagine what this must have meant for you, and I am immeasurably happy for us both that he is safe. . . . Embrasse-lui de ma part, très tendrement. And tell him to learn English; seriously, I mean it. Perhaps, one day, I may be able to do something for him and his future.
The memory of the past makes the bitterness fade and whatever beautiful days and things were shared stand out brightly. As time advances, I often feel the ghostliness of existence. We become houses inhabited by shadows and echoes, which co-exist hauntingly with the near and bright reality. . . .
I have tried to send parcels to various addresses, in the hope that one or the other may reach you, though this is like throwing one’s bread upon the water. (Each time we sit down to a good meal we say, How much rather would we send this to Europe.)
Maria was living with her toddler son, Jon, in Freiburg, a university town of little strategic importance whose medieval center had been flattened one night in November 1944. Late in January 1946, she wrote Kurt in New York about my father:
I’ve got a beautiful photo of Niko, but I don’t dare send it, as he’s in uniform, looking like a medieval knight with his casque de fer. Niko looks very much like you now, only he’s much smaller, smaller than I am, in fact, and very fragile. His face looks quite transparent sometimes, and he has beautiful eyes and a lovely forehead. You would find him changed a lot after all he went through. When he came for his first leave from the east, having been away for twenty-two months, I was so startled at the sight that I nearly cried. He came late at night, quite unexpectedly. I opened the door and found a strange, tired, grown-up man, and he had left as a boy, fresh from Schondorf. I can’t imagine what I would have done if something had happened to him. I used to dream about it and wake up with a terrible fright. And the last months of the war were pure agony.
These letters were written and read in wildly divergent contexts. Those whose war consisted of one set of experiences could only imagine what other family members lived through. For all of the Franco-Prussian War, which it won, and even World War I, which it lost, Germany kept the conflict confined mostly to foreign stages. Now death and destruction had come home. Half of the country’s military casualties—up to four hundred thousand each month—occurred over the final ten months of the war. Almost unique among losers of a major conflict, the Third Reich never surrendered, which left the Allies to prosecute their victory by destroying whatever Hitler hadn’t, from Germany’s armed forces to its sovereignty.
As evidence emerged of the death camps, the suffering of German civilians rightly took a back seat to a full airing of Nazi atrocities. But the German people had suffered too. British and American bombs had leveled German cities. The advancing Red Army had plundered German homes and raped German women. Some twelve million Germans had been driven from their ancestral lands in eastern Europe, the expellees condemned to survive amidst the rubble alongside their ethnic brethren in the west. The world could muster little sympathy, for so many had cheered Hitler on. But that didn’t diminish the scale of the misery—some twenty-six million Germans made homeless from destruction, expulsion, or flight.
Only scattered voices objected to the suffering, an oversight the novelist W. G. Sebald, writing decades later, would call a “scandalous deficiency.” During the war Victor Gollancz, a Jewish publisher in London, had been among the first figures in the Allied lands to amplify early reports of the Holocaust; now he warned that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians had imperiled “the values of the West.” Gollancz would be joined by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman. “Deserved suffering is just as heavy to bear as undeserved suffering,” Dagerman wrote, after touring a defeated Germany in late 1945. “It is felt just as much in the stomach, in the chest, in the feet, and these three very concrete pains should not be forgotten in the raw draft of bitterness blowing from a rainy post-war German autumn.”
My family in Germany had not escaped that unrelenting aerial bombardment, from the Americans by day and the British by night. The Allies began steady raids in 1943, attacks that would target 131 German cities and towns and continue almost daily until the end of the war. The bombings wound up killing six hundred thousand German civilians, more than twice the number of military casualties suffered by US forces in Europe. But the Allied calculus—that death, injury, and homelessness would demoralize German civilians and turn them against the regime—failed to prove true. People the raids failed to kill were likely to be left too traumatized to function, much less take up sedition. One night, back in Munich on leave, Niko had joined his mother and sister in the cellar during an air raid. “Never again,” he told Maria afterward. “We’re like rats in a trap. I’d rather die at the front.”
Among my ancestors, these radically different wartime experiences—Kurt and Helen’s flight and exile, Maria and Elisabeth’s fate to be “rats in a trap,” Niko’s service on two fronts—played out in their letters.
As Maria awaited the return of her husband Hans Baumhauer from a POW camp in France, she held down a job in Freiburg as a secretary and interpreter with the French Occupation Authority. In mid-February 1946 she wrote Kurt from that office.
What’s still hardest to bear is absolute silence. Over the past few years, during which there never was any real silence, moments of relative quiet were in fact filled with a horribly intense kind of waiting, which made those “silent” moments seem much more enlivened than the so-called animated ones. The silence we sometimes have now seems alien and horrible. It crackles, bearing strange thoughts, an impenetrable mass loaded with unknown elements of what’s to come, like the electrified air just before a heavy thunderstorm. Which leads you into a strange state, full of disquiet and a sense of the surreal. . . .
Imagine being afraid to be among people from your former life, because all that has transpired, and can never be adequately explained even to those closest to you, stands like some impassable wall between yourself and those who weren’t there. . . .
The charge now being lodged at us by outsiders—that what happened behind the iron curtain that separated Germany from the rest of the world is our fault—can only be brought by someone who was behind that curtain at the time and knows how it was. . . .
Determining guilt or innocence can only be done by those who have thoroughly tasted the bitterness of the past twelve years—all the way, to the end.
Maria is no longer an insecure adolescent. She now courts her father’s empathy rather than his approval, sharing what it’s like to be a rat in a trap:
No one who hasn’t actually experienced it can imagine that feeling of helplessness and vulnerability. No one can fathom the sensations packed between the sound of the air-raid sirens and the “all clear,” and no one knows how it is for someone who must swallow those emotions not once, but day after day, night after night. Until your first big air raid, you still have the courage of the clueless. . . .
Tired and sleep-deprived, you tumble down the stone cellar steps into a dank darkness. Into an illusion of safety. No light. A candle stump in a bottle. On the ground, crouching figures in grotesque guises. Light carves out tired, dull faces in the blackness, as if making an etching by Rembrandt or Goya.
The air begins to tremble faintly from the vibrations of the airplane engines. The quaking extends into the walls, creeps over the cellar floor, continues into the crouching bodies. The barking of the flak begins, a barrage of artillery fire from the heavy batteries. Through the trap door of the cellar “escape hatch” you can see a rectangle of velvety night sky split by searchlights. Suddenly, flares: the city is being target-marked—“Christmas trees” have been deployed. The “escape hatch” slaps shut. And so it begins.
In cellars all over Germany, the courage of the clueless went to die.
We lie flat on the basement floor so as not to be knocked over by the force of a blast. The damp, icy cold slowly creeps through thick clothes and coats down to the bone. Yet you don’t freeze: your glowing, hot face is pressed against the dank floor.
You sense a strange, wavelike tremor, eerily silent and threatening. The first “carpet.” Now it comes: a rushing blast of air pressure, and you swear your eardrums will burst. The house sways, as if a huge hand is squeezing it from above. Within the walls, plaster rains down. The tinkling of glass. The smell of rubble and fire. Then quiet. After a few seconds it begins all over again. In between, the heavy-caliber weaponry, howling. You crouch there like a target with an arrow trained at it, an arrow that bores into your heart. . . .
Suddenly, silence. Still unbelieving, no one moves. Then consciousness gradually returns, life slowly flows back into your shocked body to shake it loose from its torpor. Tired and battered, you crawl up the cellar steps. . . . The sky is red from fire. The house is filled with cold air and the acrid smell of smoke pouring through broken windows. The walls are cracked, and plaster lies in shards on the ground. . . .
Drained, shivering, and deathly exhausted, you dump yourself back into bed and sink into an abyss of confused sleep and restless dreams.
Maria deploys this description in service of the main points she wants to make to her father: that “we’re not the same people you left behind in 1939 . . . those versions of ourselves are buried beneath the rubble”; and that Thomas Mann has no grounds to “cast stones at us and claim we’re all implicated in blood and shame.”
Maria fingers Mann, the exiled novelist who lived out the war in Princeton and Pacific Palisades, for having asserted, “It is impossible to demand of the abused nations of Europe, of the world, that they shall draw a neat dividing line between ‘Nazism’ and the German people.”
Kurt tries to comfort his daughter in a carefully scripted reply. But he winds up confirming Maria’s charge that an “impassable wall” has gone up between them.
Your letter of February 17th moved me very much and weighs on me still. I answer you with hesitation, as two things make it difficult: One, I feel that you all must be treated very tenderly and gently after the horrific experiences of recent years and in light of all that you’re now going through; thus I must avoid saying anything that could further hurt you in your fragile state. And the other reason is that I hate nothing more than to play the role of judge or Pharisee. But I think there’s no danger of the latter, for I feel one with you as a native German. We Germans begat Hitler, not Hitler the Germans. I had already cut the cord with Germany as early as 1930, as you know, but no one can absolve oneself of one’s responsibilities simply by booking passage to another country. After all, I lived in Germany into my forty-third year and have as much responsibility as anyone to answer for this country by dint of my ancestry and past. “We are our brother’s keeper.”
Kurt nonetheless calls out her description of “the bitterness of the past twelve years.”
Oh, Maria, you should know better. You and the majority of Germans had it only too good until 1939. . . . There were no martyrs then, and during those same years, which we spent serenely, there was suffering, pain, and horror within Germany that we failed to recognize and take seriously. . . . And from 1939 on, you and I saw things through different eyes—or rather you, nearly all of you, didn’t see them, didn’t want to see things as they were.
In France, I crossed paths with many victims of the German concentration camps, people with shattered bones, men who had been emasculated, turned into physical and psychological wrecks. . . . And as the dear German soldiers were sending you silk stockings and chocolates from Paris, French civilians had taken to back roads to flee the taunting of German dive-bombers, and I, your father, ragged and harried, with a heart filled with fear, was escaping on foot, marching all day, so as not to fall into the hands of those same dear German soldiers. . . .
Oh, Maria, you describe the hell of 1944 and ’45. Where was your conscience between 1939 and ’43? Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, Lidice, the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Czechs, Jews, Russians, you didn’t lose any sleep over that. . . . It took more than three years for the boomerang to return, for Germany to become one of the victims. In a metaphysical sense, the Germans brought their suffering upon themselves. . . .
In this ash heap, people now talk of guilt. And you confront the dead, who tell old tales as they climb from their graves. My child, no one can absolve oneself through suffering unless suffering is freely chosen.
Kurt then turns to the German roots he and Maria share:
The guilt you refer to is an old guilt, much older than the war. The Germans will only reconcile with themselves and the world if, out of their own fear and suffering, they recognize the suffering of others—those whose mortal fear was no less than yours, only more senseless, more hopeless, thanks to the capriciousness of their tormentors, tormentors who were Germans. No one can absolve us of this, not you, not me.
How cowardly the Germans were. To understand, consider the behavior of others: Brave Italians and Frenchmen hid and saved many of their Jews, protected them from their own secret police and the Gestapo, and thousands of others saved and fed German, Austrian, and Polish Jews, fed them throughout, putting their own lives at risk to do so. . . . The Germans in Germany looked the other way when their friends committed suicide, when they disappeared into the camps—they didn’t know anything or didn’t want to know. But, again, we are our brother’s keeper. “The tormentor and the tormented are one and the same. The former is mistaken in thinking he’s not party to the torment; the latter in thinking he’s not party to the guilt,” says Schopenhauer. . . .
For goodness sake, don’t think I see all Germans as black and guilty, and others as all white and innocent. . . . In the main, however, I believe that we Germans are complicit in any injustice that others now commit. For the Germans unleashed the dogs of hell upon the world—hatred, wickedness, evil, cruelty—so that all of Europe is infected and sick, and another boomerang lands back whence this plague came.
Ultimately, Kurt sides with Thomas Mann.
A fresh start for the Germans is possible only by acknowledging our immense guilt. Thomas Mann is right: all of us are covered in blood and shame. We must acknowledge this fact, no ifs, ands, or buts, and accept it unreservedly. This is the task for the present and the future. God has kept us alive to address this problem, and only the prospect of its solution gives the next generation hope for a life worth living. Whether someone is as young as you or as old as I, our lives will hardly be long enough to complete this task, and how long we get to engage it is up to God’s grace. Change in the world will not come through the United Nations, nor from the outside; individuals, you and I, we must transform ourselves until it leads to wisdom and enlightenment in us. In this light, children will grow up to be better, more responsible people. (“The child learns not from what parents say, but how they live.”—C. G. Jung.)
I’ve been trying to show you that we see through different eyes, because you were on the inside and I was on the outside. This geographical difference should cease to exist. We should now see through the same eyes. We are bound by fate with the same task before us.
Father and daughter have each staked a claim to the truth as he or she lived it. Maria gave birth during an air raid, and her son, Jon, wasn’t yet ten months old when another night’s bombardment left their apartment uninhabitable. In believing in the singularity of a still-fresh “end with horror,” she shared the perspective of millions of shell-shocked Germans. At the same time, Maria was only beginning to learn the particulars of Kurt and Helen’s flight with Christian from France—a trauma that led seven-year-old Christian, after the separation and escapes of 1940 and ’41, to tell his parents, “All I hope for is that the whole family perishes in the same catastrophe.”
Any extended back-and-forth over guilt and shame, or pleas for empathy or self-criticism, would be cut short. Maria pushed back only feebly in a subsequent letter, and both she and Kurt signaled that some things were best taken up face-to-face. After engaging in a similar exchange with her sister back in Bavaria, Helen too concluded that this wasn’t a subject to be pressed, not from afar, not with the memories of war so raw.
