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TWO

“WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DIG AROUND IN THE PAST?”

Conversations about World War II in German Families

HOLGER, BORN IN 1970, said: “In my family no one ever talked about the war. My grandfather was at the front and my grandmother was alone at home in Berlin with three small children. Half the house was destroyed, and they lived in what was left of it. It is just not possible that they did not have anything to talk about. But it was never, never, ever a topic at home.”

Chapter 1 focused on the shifting public narratives about World War II. Chapter 2 now zooms into the private space of the German family. Some historians argue that, in contrast to dominant public discourses, stories of wartime suffering and hardship were very much part of everyday conversations in many German households, even during the years of public silencing (for example, Assmann 2006b; Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 2002; Wierling 2010). This implies that two parallel narratives existed in the public and in the private domain, shaped by distinctly different norms around what could be shared and what was considered taboo. While this may have been true for families with a more open culture of communication, my research suggests that in the majority of German families the war was not much of a topic at all. German psychiatrist Hartmut Radebold also estimates that in around 80 percent of all families the war was “never talked about” at home, and in the remaining 20 percent either “a bit” or “too much,” with parents overwhelming their children with their memories (Radebold 2012). At first glance, this is in line with the responses I received; 81 percent of my interviewees said that their family had remained silent about the war. However, this chapter will show that, beyond initial appearances, what people meant was not “complete silence” but rather “not enough talk.”

Instead of dividing families into two distinctive groups of “those who talked” and “those who did not,” I suggest a spectrum of family communication about World War II with varying degrees of silence and sharing. At one end of this spectrum are parents and grandparents who categorically brushed aside all curious questions about the war or who would casually drop a few emotionally charged lines into a conversation without further explanation. Or they volunteered a limited number of habitually repeated anecdotes of wartime hardship and everyday survival. Then there was the middle ground of open sharing of personal wartime stories, with incessant talking at the other end of the scale. At the core of this chapter lies a detailed mapping out of the patterns of family communication along this spectrum, seen through the eyes of the Kriegsenkel generation. For this, I enlist the help of Ruth Wajnryb’s (2001) book Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Wajnryb, an Australian linguist and daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, systematized the communication patterns in survivor families from the perspectives of the children. She comes to a similar conclusion that a binary division into “homes with talk, homes without talk” cannot adequately express the complexity of the intergenerational communication. She suggests that “Holocaust narrative might be placed on the continuum, from homes where communication was explicit and direct to homes where the past was hermetically sealed off” (Wajnryb 2001, 170). I am very conscious that drawing on this (and other) Holocaust research in the context of non-Jewish German families is difficult and may be offensive to some readers. I share this unease and would like to reiterate that it is in no way my intention to compare or weigh up the different experiences of suffering or to relativize the trauma of the Holocaust victims and their descendants. I do believe, at the same time, that the extensive body of research on Holocaust survivors and their families provides important analytical tools and lenses that can be applied more broadly.

The main purpose of this chapter is to give the reader an impression of how communication about World War II was (and often still is) structured in German families, what was talked about at home and how, and what was silenced and why. We will find that silences and taboos were not only established by the parents and grandparents but also often accepted and sometimes even reinforced by the younger generation, showing the latter as active players rather than passive victims in the family dynamic. The chapter also illustrates that the public culture of commemoration did in fact reach into the private sphere, shaping the dynamic between the generations and substantially influencing the dialogue about the past. Denial of responsibility from the older generation and judgment and grueling questions from the younger were not conducive to an atmosphere of trust and openness, in which difficult memories of the war could have been shared freely. Those attitudes also led to the creation of blind spots around experiences of wartime suffering, a topic that often remained absent from conversations or that was blocked from fully entering the younger generation’s consciousness.

FROM CATEGORICAL SILENCE TO INCESSANT TALK: THE SPECTRUM OF FAMILY COMMUNICATION ABOUT WORLD WAR II

Three familial generations were typically involved in family conversations about World War II. The grandparents, born around 1900, who experienced the war as adults. The grandmothers were generally the main carers of the family, and the grandfathers were Wehrmacht soldiers and later prisoners of war in Russian or Allied POW camps. Secondly there were the parents, who were children or young teenagers at the time. Lastly the Kriegsenkel themselves, the grandchildren, born predominantly in the 1960s and 1970s.

After the heavy destruction of the war, life in both parts of Germany focused on rebuilding the country and securing a better future for present and future generations. In the West, many were grasping the opportunities presented by the “economic miracle.” All their efforts went into working hard and creating wealth and financial stability. In the East, the focus was similarly on work. However, with the economic recovery coming much more slowly than in the West, people also focused on managing everyday life with scarce material resources. While the physical scars of the war were still visible, as gaps in cityscapes, dilapidated buildings, and overgrowing heaps of rubble, all hopes were set on the future, and little time was set aside for reflecting on the past.

The dominant family structure of the time was the “deutsche Normalfamilie” (Peuckert 2002), a nuclear family with parents and their underage children living together in the same household. In the West that mostly entailed the traditional role distribution with the father working as the main breadwinner and the mother looking after the children. In East Germany mothers commonly worked outside the home (Schneider 1994). Almost all of my interviewees grew up in these types of families; only a handful lived with a single parent after a divorce or the early death of the father. The households typically did not extend beyond two generations, with the grandparents living in separate houses and often in different cities. However, many Kriegsenkel regularly visited at least one set of grandparents or spent their school holidays with them. Having all four grandparents alive and close by was an exception. Many grandfathers had not returned from the war, and the German division had torn families apart, placing them on opposite sides of the wall, which made frequent visits difficult. Initially, the grandparents were often the main source of information about the family’s past, in particular in situations where the parents were born toward the end of the war and had few memories of their own to share. In the 1980s and 1990s, the older generation had mostly passed away, and the Kriegsenkel had finished high school and left home. Opportunities to talk about the family history were limited to occasional visits, Christmas get-togethers, and other family events.

While these characteristics applied to most of the families of my interviewees, when it came to the patterns and dynamics of intergenerational communication, no two families were alike. Each one had its own unique way to negotiate the dialogue between the generations, and although I found a number of common styles and patterns, there was diversity in the individual mix. In many cases more than just one communication style was described, and some members of the family were more open than others. The younger generation’s responses to what was shared and what was taboo also differed, as did perceptions among siblings.

In addition, the family dynamic sometimes changed over time and in accordance with different life cycles. Some Kriegsenkel had tried to query their parents and grandparents from childhood. Often the interest in the family history only emerged in their teenage years, when questions around identity and belonging gained in importance and a phase of intense probing began. Then the topic often withdrew into the background and other concerns—first love, education, career, marriage, and children—took center stage. In 2012, in the middle of their lives, many of my interviewees returned to the topic, while others were asking questions for the first time. This new or renewed interest was spurred by the Kriegsenkel books, by midlife crises and their associated reflections on life, or by the questions of my interviewees’ own teenage children. In some cases, the parents, now in their seventies and eighties, were taking stock at the end of their lives and were a bit more willing to open up and share memories of their war childhoods with their sons and daughters.

“In My Family No One Ever Talked about the War”: Silence(s)

When I asked my interviewees “Did your family talk about the war?” in more than 80 percent of all cases the answer was a definite “Nein, sie haben geschwiegen”: “No, they remained silent.” The way they used the German verb schweigen implied a conscious decision not to share certain experiences. It was judged to be a deliberate choice to withhold information. Therefore, silence was not seen as synonymous with forgetting, nor was it passive, because “the things we are silent about are in fact actively avoided” (Zerubavel 2010, 33).

However, when I probed further, it quickly became clear that the wall of silence was not as impermeable as initially asserted. Even in the case of Holger (quoted at the beginning of this chapter), who was most adamant that there was no conversation about the family history whatsoever, the past still seeped through the cracks in obscure remarks, charged reactions, and inexplicable behaviors. What many Kriegsenkel were referring to was not a complete absence of any form of communication. It was an atmosphere of secrecy, taboos, and hushed voices, of fragmented stories and disjointed anecdotes, surrounded by a conspicuous lack of willingness to share family stories and respond to questions openly and in ways that my interviewees would have found acceptable. Silence simply meant not enough talk. In English, this schweigen is more appropriately captured by using the term in its plural form—silences—to express those aspects of the past that were excluded from conversation (see Winter 2010).

“You Don’t Know What Happened to Us”: Obscure Remarks, Throwaway Lines, and Story Fragments

A common way to relay information about World War II in German families came in the form of obscure remarks or throwaway lines. About half (48%) of my interviewees mentioned that their parents or grandparents made sporadic and fragmentary references to the war, often weaving them into everyday conversations without any further explanation or broader context. Charlotte, born in 1966, whose story will be told in detail in chapter 6, recalled hearing her grandmother sigh that “everything used to be different and better in the past” and that “families had to flee,” but as a child she had no idea what exactly that meant. Later, when she found out more about the family history, she was able to interpret these comments in light of her grandmother’s flight from the Czech Republic and the fact that she had to leave her house and belongings behind to start from scratch as a penniless refugee in Germany in 1945. Reto (born in 1969) recalled remarks that “there was not enough bread,” which puzzled him and left him feeling that there was more behind the story, something that his parents did not want to say. There was often an underlying emotional charge, clearly perceived behind those short and seemingly unspectacular comments, which made them stand out from the ebb and flow of mundane everyday conversations. It burned them into a person’s memory so that they could still easily be recalled thirty years later. Karoline (born in 1967) articulated this particularly well:

When my grandma was still alive, she used to rant about the Russians a lot. She must have had some terrible memories, but that all remained very foggy. We never found out what actually happened. But Grandma could never understand that we had Russian friends. Every time she heard about that, she got really upset and kept repeating, “You just don’t know what happened to us.” These moments when she said that stuck in my memory, because she said it so many times, but also because she seemed so different from her normal self, and that made me listen very carefully. She used to grumble a lot, and I never really paid much attention, but when she ranted about the Russians and how terrible it all had been, I knew I had to perk up my ears. Every time we talked about school and that we had Russian pen pals, the same tirades: “You don’t know how horrible they are.” But how? She would not say.

Karoline clearly felt that there was a painful story hidden behind her grandmother’s outbursts, but without a context she could not make sense of them. According to Ruth Wajnryb (2001, 175–76), throwaway lines, obscure remarks, and cued messages belong to the realm of indirect communication. Meaning is construed to large extent by the listeners, who calibrate what they hear against what they know, looking for a fitting interpretation. For Karoline, who was born in East Germany, it was not until after the fall of the GDR in the 1990s, when more information about the violence inflicted by Soviet occupying forces became publicly available, that she finally found a plausible explanation for her grandmother’s behavior. Boris (born in 1966) told how his parents only hinted at what he now thinks of as traumatic wartime experiences, providing fragments of stories without ever sharing them in their entirety. His mother would offer glimpses of her childhood memories in short sentences such as “There was an air raid alarm, and we went into a tunnel,” but there the story ended. When he asked his father about his time as a fifteen-year-old Flakhelfer (antiaircraft helper or flak helper), his father would only disclose, “We were stationed in front of the Cologne Cathedral.” Boris could not extract any more details of how these situations unfolded or how his parents had felt at the time. “It was like an extremely shortened witness statement,” the trained lawyer said to me, his face revealing his lifelong frustration. Like Karoline, he also clearly picked up on the atmosphere behind these story fragments. Feelings of danger, panic, and fear of death lurked behind the silences that his parents fiercely defended all through Boris’s childhood and adult years.

Attempts to probe deeper into the family history were typically brushed off with sentences such as “You children don’t understand,” or “Why do you need to dig around in the past?” Elise (born in 1961) wanted to know more about her parents’ biography, but her curiosity was smothered with the categorical statement “You are much too small to understand these things.” She was amazed that, even at fifteen or sixteen, she was still considered “too small” to be trusted with a more elaborate response. At some point, she just stopped asking. Similar to Wajnryb’s (2001) findings among second-generation Holocaust survivors, information about World War II in non-Jewish German families often remained fragmented, patchy, and disjointed. Stories were “leaking out” (Wajnryb 2001, 178) over time, pieced together bit by bit over years of tedious questioning or inferred from obscure remarks and charged reactions. The piecemeal nature of the available information and the remaining gaps meant that in many cases these fragments never amounted to a complete story. Many of my interviewees expressed a deeply felt frustration about their families’ unwillingness to share stories from the past. The process of continuous questioning was experienced as tiresome and aggravating. Some people felt that family secrets and taboos swallowed up their life-force like black holes and prevented them from letting go of the past and focusing on their own lives.¹

“Eat Up, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are”: Dicta and Life Lessons

Another common way to refer to the war came in the form of dicta and life lessons. More than 40 percent of my interviewees remembered their parents and grandparents making selective references to past times of hardship when disciplining their children or attempting to impart to them certain moral values and behaviors. Members of the war generation tended to display certain fixations that showed in everyday life. They often compulsively hoarded food and other household items like candles and oil in preparation for a possible crisis. Many refused to throw out food even long after the expiration date and forced their children to eat everything on their plates. “Food cannot be wasted” was the abiding truth. Anna’s father went to the extreme to force his children to eat apple cores he had pulled out from the garbage to teach them that they “don’t know what it means to go hungry.” The past was woven into daily family life through those short references, purposely invoked whenever the situation called for it. “We always had to be grateful,” Brigitta said, “because we had so much more than they did at the time.” Complaints about what parents saw as minor inconveniences of a comfortable childhood in times of peace and prosperity were often not tolerated. Most Kriegsenkel recalled their parents telling them to “stop whining” and get on with whatever was expected of them.

Another set of common and very powerful dicta specific to German families revolved around the horrors of war. Statements like “Nie wieder Krieg” (“No more war”) and “War is the worst thing that can happen to people” were repeated over and over again. All through their childhood and adolescence, the Kriegsenkel witnessed their parents being terrified of a third world war, from the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s to the nuclear arms race of the 1980s. It deeply affected their developing psyches. Brigitta is a typical example. She and her siblings were raised in a strictly pacifist spirit, not allowed to play cowboys and Indians or have toy weapons. She vividly remembered her mother’s uncharacteristic bout of rage and scolding when she once caught her kids aiming at each other with the neighboring children’s water guns. The fear of another war shaped the political views of both generations. Many Kriegsenkel objected to joining the Bundeswehr (the German Army), which was still compulsory at the time they finished school. A strong antiwar movement culminated at the time of the first Iraq war in the early 1990s and extended to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, which 70 percent of all Germans opposed (Bode 2006, 119–22). The generation who had lived through the hardship and horrors of war imparted peace as the highest ideal, and many Kriegsenkel I spoke to still adhered to this belief.