Gert Krell

I had thought I knew your history well, yet your latest blog is so precise and compact that I can see your predicament even more clearly, and I deeply empathize with your fate. I understand how difficult it must have been and still must be for you to cope or to fight against what has been more or less invisible. It has been much easier for me and for many of my friends to come to grips with our own backgrounds. There may nonetheless be some psychological (NOT political or moral!) similarities, collectively and individually.

Alexandra Senfft

I may already have mentioned Alexandra Senfft, a writer and journalist. She is the grand-daughter of Hanns Ludin who was Hitler’s representative in Slovakia during the war and centrally involved in the murder of the Slovakian Jews. He was hanged in 1947. Ms. Senfft’s first book, Schweigen tut weh (Silence Hurts) is about her mother Erika, Hanns Ludin’s eldest daughter (born in 1933), and the destruction which the repression by the family of her grand-father’s real life and role wrought. Her mother sensed that something was wrong, particularly with her beloved father, but she never really found out. She led a life full of alcohol and pills, and at the end burned to death in a steaming-hot bathtub, into which she fell.

In the regular letters between mother and grand-mother, the husband and father is hardly ever mentioned, as if nothing had happened. The unbearable pain is never addressed. Erika’s general emotional needs remain unsatisfied, because her mother has buried her own needs in the hard shell of the honorable widow. Throughout her life, Erika longed for peace of her soul, which she would never find.

Fortunately, I have never had problems in any way comparable to those of Ms. Senfft’s mother and the Ludin family, to say nothing of your predicament. My family lost nobody in the war; none of my closer relations were in or near the center, on either side, of the Nazi murder machinery. (Otmar von Verschuer, the notorious racial biologist – Josef Mengele was his assistant –, is a very distant relative.) Both of my parents were fully convinced and active young Nazis, but they gave up most of their Nazi views after the war; other close relatives had been much more selective, indifferent or even hostile towards Nazism.

Yet I do not know how far my father went in his ideological fervor. Only two years ago, long after his death, did I learn that he had been an informer for the SD, the party’s security service. Did he report someone to the Gestapo, a colleague, a Jew? I don’t know and I never will. How deeply I regret that I did not have the chance, or was too young, or did not dare to ask him to tell me everything. Well, it seems he did not tell the full truth to my youngest half-brother Paul, who lived with him, while I only visited him occasionally. Paul even traveled to Peenemuende, the Nazi rocket basis, to find traces of my father’s past. There were none.

So in a way my generation was also up against part mystery, part wall. That is probably the reason why we fought against Nazism in the outer world and even saw it where there was none, before we discovered it in our own families and personal histories. Tilmann Moser, one of my favorite German writers and psychoanalysts, says that the surviving NS parents, in denying and repressing their own dark past, behaved parasitically towards their children, and that the vehemence of our political and in some cases physical attacks in the 1960s and 70s displayed the desperate attempt to break loose from a personal heritage and from transgenerational transmissions which we did not understand at the time.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Reading your blogs about your friends underscores the differences in our experiences. I’m continually struck by the fact that every German of your generation was shaped by the Holocaust. The descendants of those directly involved in the Holocaust must sort out his or her identity in relation to their parents’ acts at that time.

As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, I have been defined by the uniqueness of my experience. First, I am not technically a child of a survivor, if that word is strictly used as a label for one who survived the camps. I am the child of a child refugee. Since America saved only 1,000 children, this is a rare experience. I have only met other children of refugees at reunions for the 1,000 children. The children of survivors (a more common American experience) tend to dismiss my mother’s history, claiming that she was “lucky.” While I’m grateful that my mother was spared the devastating traumas of the camps, you know from what I have written here that she suffers with the same losses as the survivors.

It sounds to me like Germans of your generation have an understanding of your shared legacy. You can discuss your parents’ acts and how they shaped each of you. It’s perfectly understandable to separate and distance yourselves from parents and their personal histories. I can see from your last two blogs that this is a process that you openly discuss with your friends.

It has taken me decades to understand my personal history. Since my mother never spoke of her past, I have had to slowly investigate and uncover what happened to her in childhood and how it shaped her. This has been a particularly arduous task since few in my mother’s family survived and could offer perspective on my mother and her early life. My mother was determined to cut off her past and her own history partly because that’s how she coped with the trauma — by compartmentalizing it. But there’s more. Like most immigrants, she wanted to fit in. America offered her a fresh start where her history was less important than her ability to contribute and to be productive to society.

So two factors have produced a sense of isolation for me. First, I have no community of friends with similar experiences. Second, my mother had a strong desire to eradicate her past so that she could become an American.

But there’s a third factor as to why my legacy has been particularly difficult. Dr. Paul Valent, a psychotherapist for 35 years who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia explains that children of survivors experience what he calls “double trouble”. “Not only are they required to adjust to their parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they must copy with their own automatic survival responses to their parents.”

So the children are reacting to experiences they never had directly. They know that something horrific shaped their parents’ lives, but they can’t see what it was. They are completely defined by this indirect experience. I wrote in Motherland about the “moment in which I was made long before I was born, the experience I never had but couldn’t escape.”

The children have patterned themselves psychologically after their parents’ anxiety. For the children of survivors and refugees, that unseen experience and misunderstood reaction intensifies the terrible sense of alienation.

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Gert Krell

Another friend and former colleague is Bruno. His wife Birgit Schueller is a school teacher. They live in Moerfelden-Walldorf, a twinned town right to the south of Rhein-Main-Airport, where Birgit is connected with a group of people who have been active rediscovering a KZ, a camp over which “grass had grown”, figuratively and literally.

Birgit has been a member of the managing committee of the Margit Horvath Foundation since its inception in 2004. The Foundation provides money for projects, preferably by young people, which support, advertise, or teach tolerance, intercultural understanding, and the cou¬rage of one’s own convictions. Margit Horvath survived the KZs of Walldorf and Ravens¬brück and returned to Frankfurt. Her son used the compensation money, which his mother received shortly before her death in 2001, as starting capital for the foundation. A documentary film called “Die Rollbahn” (The Runway) tells the full story of the camp and its rediscovery. The DVD is available in German, English and French. (See my summary in our next blog on forced labor and German industry: Zöblin and Lufthansa.)

Birgit also accompanies, advises and helps pupils when they visit Holocaust memorials or meet survivors. She told me that young Germans often are overwhelmed by these experiences and go either into a state of resignation and depression or simply shut down emotionally. So Birgit is not only a teacher; she also has learned to be a therapist.

Klaus and Hanne Wiltsch are among our closest friends. Hanne studied education in the 1970s at the University in Kassel, where she became involved in a project on regional history. One of her professors had discovered a huge amount of documents on Breitenau, a former Prussian workhouse and correctional facility, which the Nazis had turned into a concentration camp in 1933-34 and later a “work education” camp. The camp, located 15 km to the south of Kassel, had been all but “forgotten” after the war:

The post-history of the work education camp Breitenau is less infernal than its proper history, but it also contains elements which make the reviewer shiver. There is the irritating quick and even nonchalant return to a highly contaminated “normality”, the irritating lack of self-reflection, the silence and the denial. At the site of the terror the traces gradually disappear, they are blurred deliberately or unconsciously. (…) the past (…) is disposed of. With few exceptions, the perpetrators escape unharmed (…) The buildings are being re-used as if nothing had happened (preface to Gunnar Richter, Das Arbeitserziehungslager Breitenau, my translation).

In 1980, Hanne, Gunnar Richter and other students established, with the help of Kassel University, the “Breitenau Memorial” at the site of the former camp. It provides detailed information and documentation on the Nazi machinery of oppression, and on the suffering and in many cases the deaths of its victims: mostly members from the German opposition or foreign workers, i.e. forced laborers, who were considered unreliable or had violated Nazi rules of work or behavior.

Breitenau also was used by the Nazis as a transition camp for a small number of Jews. One of the saddest stories is that of Lilli Jahn. Lilli and her husband, both doctors, had met as students, married soon afterwards and opened up a practice in the countryside. When the Nazis came to power, they put pressure on Lilli Jahn and her family, and in 1942 Dr. Jahn divorced his Jewish wife, and Lilli Jahn moved to Kassel with her children. She was soon handed over to the Gestapo and later taken into “custody” at Breitenau for six months, from where she was deported to Auschwitz. “Even her ashes never came back. When they asked for them, the children were told that the ashes of Jews were not given out” (quoted from Stephan von Borstel/Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, breitenau 1933-1945: bilder, texte, dokumente – images, texts, documents, Kassel University Press 2008, a very moving bilingual book).

Lilli Jahn wrote more than 200 letters to her children, trying to cheer them up, always hoping to be reunited with them one day. Her son, Gerhard Jahn, who was a member of the Bundes¬tag from 1957 until 1990 and Attorney General in the government of Willy Brandt 1969-1974, kept these letters without telling anybody, not even his four sisters. His nephew Martin Doerry published them in 2002 under the title “Mein verwundetes Herz” (My Wounded Heart).

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Gert Krell

"Best friends #3" Tony Karp

It is almost two weeks now that I celebrated my 65th birthday which I combined with an unofficial farewell party from my years at the University. It was a wonderful event, and not only because it began in the afternoon with “public viewing” (that’s the “German” term for it) under a huge nut-tree on the lawn of the University’s guest house: Germany beat Argentina in the world soccer championship 4:0. Irene had engaged two artists from an improvisation theater, who were ever so funny. They caught the atmosphere and the speeches well and presented us with a wonderfully witty and ironical mirror of myself and of peace research in general.

The next morning I woke up with a very deep and profound feeling of happiness, a sense of my life being accompanied and indeed carried along by so many dear good friends.

The feeling is still with me now that we are vacating in the rolling hills near Kassel in the north of Hesse.
Of course, the party had not been representative of my generation as a whole, but in a way typical of the left-of-center and politically aware intelligentsia, most of them, the spouses included, active or former school and university teachers. World War II, the burden of the Nazi past, the commitment to the radical student movement of the 1960s (and its errors), and in several cases the early loss of the father – these are strong experiences and themes binding us together psychologically. I would like to begin with two of my slightly older colleagues, R. and L., who are both around seventy now and who belong to the most gentle and diligent people I know.

In one of our previous blogs, I have mentioned my close friend R. already, whose father was killed on the very last day of the war. Before he left the family for his final deployment, he called his six-year old son, his eldest child, and confided him at the train station that he would have to look after Mother and his brother and his sisters, if he, Father, were not to return. So R. had to grow up quickly.

When R. was 17, his beloved school-teacher and “Ersatzvater” told him that his real father had been an ardent Nazi and a regional manager of the “Reichsbahn” (the national railway), where he had been involved in the organization of the trains which deported the Jews to “the East”. That was when he lost his father a second time, as R. has told me.
R.’s father was so fanatical that he originally did not want any children at all, because he had found a Jewish woman among his very distant ancestors, a grand-grand-grand-grand-mother or so. He also told his wife to commit suicide and to take the children with her, if and when “the Russians came”. Fortunately, when the occasion arose during their flight, R.’s mother asked her eldest whether they wanted to live, and he must have said yes.

R.’s younger brother is a film-maker. One of his films shows how the four brothers and sisters travel back so Silesia, where the family had lived during the war. They find the house and the garden, and the tracks where the deportation trains had run through. After a moment of hesitation, the Polish inhabitants let them in. In one of the many moving scenes, one of R.’s sisters asks two from the crew to stand in as her mother and father. Under tears she attacks them for having supported the Nazi regime which brought so much unhappiness over so many people, including her own loss of her youth and her “Heimat”. Throughout her life, she had this sense of being without roots.

In another scene, R. sits at the tracks and reads out the last letter which his mother received from her husband, a letter full of warmth and caring for his wife and children. R. adds that he was looking for every sign of humaneness in his father he could find, but that he always felt both: there was the love and there was the horror.

L.’s family is from Pomerania. When the Russians came, L.’s mother took her four small children and moved west. L.’s father, a baker, stayed behind. He thought, the Russians, too, needed bread. The Russians killed him, and in the camp in Denmark, where L.’s mother was in¬terned with her children, L.’ two little sisters died.
I have never heard a sharp word from L., he is gentle and charming; the students loved (and still love) him. Like R., L. has always been a tireless worker, doing research around the world. Some of his concerns, by no means his only ones, are development, international justice, and human rights. When I had my “burn-out” and couldn’t teach any more, L. would still do the full-time job in the department he did not have to do anymore, because he had retired already.

Sometimes, when friends voice concern about his over-commitment (he has had one acute hearing loss already and is hard of hearing on one ear), L. will admit that in some way he still feels “on the run” – from the War and from war.
We are very fond of each other, although we do not have a close everyday relationship. The lark is his favorite bird as well as mine.

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Gert Krell

I have engaged in a controversy with a former colleague and old friend about May 8, 1945. I had sent him my lecture, which we posted on our blog, and he sent me a paper which he had presented to his students. He thinks my lecture is too radical, I consider his too mild.

My friend builds his paper around the tension between “defeat versus liberation”. Of course, great majorities in the countries conquered, oppressed, or devastated by the German armies and their allies felt and actually were liberated, as were the survivors in the camps. In Germany, however, in contrast to those in the camps, in the prisons, in hiding or in exile, the great majority rather felt defeated, even though most of them were glad that the war had finally come to an end. They feared for their future, their freedom, or even their lives. Many became prisoners of war, others went to gaol, millions had to leave their homes and flee, and yes, very many died. For the great majority who survived, everyday-life was extremely harsh.

But these were not the only reasons why the concept of liberation was rejected by most Germans at the time. Even though almost everybody accepted that the mass murder of the Jews had been a monstrous crime and the attack on Russia at least a “mistake”, and even though many were critical of Nazis bosses, less of Hitler himself, their identification with the regime and much of its ideology and practice had been so great that they felt disillusioned at best, not liberated.

So one would think that the gradual acceptance of the term, over years, even decades represented progress and a growing disassociation from the Nazi past. In fact, our Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker said as much in his speech at the Bundestag on May 8, 1985: “(…) with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-socialist regime.” The old and the new Nazis did not like this speech at all and many conservatives had problems with it. Yet many Germans and many officials and common people among Germany’s allies and former enemies considered it one of the best speeches

Richard von Weizsaecker

ever given by a high-ranking German politician in the post-war years.

Well, use of the term liberation is neither unequivocal nor uniformly positive and Weizsaecker’s speech not as faultless as it may seem at first glance.
The Communists had quickly declared May 8, 1945 the “day of liberation of the German people from Hitler’s fascism”; in 1950 it became a public holiday in the German Democratic Republic. One of at least two bitter ironies in this was, of course, that they threw East Germany into another, although much less powerful dictatorship. The other was that they rejected any responsibility for the consequences of the Nazi regime and also denied the historical co-responsibility of the Soviet Union, the Communist International, and the German Communists for the destruction of the European order and German democracy between the wars. In 1975, the GDR even celebrated May 8 as the day of victory!

In his famous speech, Richard von Weizsaecker describes and analyzes (West) Germany’s moral, political, and historical place in the community of nations 40 years after May 8, 1945. The speech is well worded, very open, and very honest. (It is available in English under www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/weizsaecker_speech_may85/
weizsaecker_speech_may 85.pdf). He strongly connects May 8, 1945 with January 30, 1933, i.e. the defeat and the burdens which it brought on the German people with Hitler’s regime, and he lists all the damages and suffering which it caused, including not only the suffering of Russians and Poles and the mass murder of the Jews but also – which is rarely done – of Sinti and Roma, of homosexuals, of handicapped children and adults. He calls for remembering the victims of the resistance in territories occupied “by us” and he honors the victims of the resistance within Germany, including the Communist resistance, rarely acknowledged officially in West Germany.

He also states very clearly that every German, even if he or she had not been involved in the Holocaust directly, could have seen what happened to the Jews. Whoever wanted to know could easily find out that trains were deporting people: “When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.” So Weizsaecker acknowledges that the elder generation had left a grave legacy to the majority of the Germans of 1985, who were born during or after the war: “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it.”

There is much more which is valuable and important in Weizsaecker’s speech, but in a few places he was not honest enough or too timid, for whatever reasons. He says, for example, that Hitler made the entire German nation “a tool of (his) immeasurable hatred against our Jewish compatriots,” but that the genocide of the Jews, unparalleled in history, had been “in the hands of a few people”. He does call for everyone who directly experienced the Nazi era to “quietly ask himself about his involvement then”. The English translation is very generous here. Weizsaecker uses the term “Verstrickung”, which suggests much less agency than the term “involvement”; it might easily be translated as “becoming enmeshed in” or as “getting entangled or caught up in”.

Later in the speech, Weizsaecker says: “Along the road to disaster Hitler became the driving force. He wipped up and exploited mass hysteria. (…) The initiative for the war (…) came from Germany, not from the Soviet Union. It was Hitler who resorted to the use of force. (…) In the course of that war the Nazi regime tormented and defiled many nations.” So Hitler and the Nazi regime again become the central agents of the great European catastrophe. Where are the German elites, where the many rank and file who not only supported the regime but were its active participants? About half a million Germans alone had been involved, in different roles, in the murder of the Jews, and millions more in the German armies had fought a war of aggression, conquest, destruction and annihilation, particularly in the East. How could it be that “most Germans had believed that they were fighting and suffering for the good of their country”, as the Federal President says at the beginning. How could conquest, aggression, and war crimes have been regarded as a way of “fighting for the good of your country”?

Nowhere does Weizsaecker mention that too many of the active perpetrators had never been called to account for their deeds, or only in very limited ways. Too many of them had made easy fortunes again in the liberated Germany. Yes, of course we had been liberated on May 8, 1945, from a terrible regime and from the war. But liberation from Nazism in German hearts and minds took much, much longer, and it still has not been fully completed. And for many Germans, liberation became a way of liberating themselves from their responsibilities. Hitler and the Nazis had not come over Germany and fortunately been taken away again.

Toward the very end of his speech, Weizsaecker says: “We in the older generation owe to young people not the fulfilment of dreams but honesty. (…) We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not one-sidedly, without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance. (…) let us face up as well as we can to the truth.” But how can I – without moral arrogance – begin to forgive my father for his involvement, if he never told me the complete truth about it? What he told me was only part of the truth, and what he told my half-brother was at least partly a cover-up. Weizsaecker spoke big and important truths; his speech was a huge step forward. But even he did not tell the complete truth. Perhaps he made a deliberate decision that it would be imprudent, even counterproductive, to address more of the taboos in the German debate about the Nazi era and May 8, 1945 than he already had.

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Special travel blog by Gert Krell

We are back from a week in Leipzig, where we had never been before. One reason to go was this year’s Bach festival there. I had read “Bach und ich” by the famous Dutch novelist Marten t’Haart in spring. I had also heard a long interview with him on the radio, where he indicated to my surprise that he did not regard the Netherlands as enlightened and as liberal as it seemed to many Germans. He indicated that he might even emigrate, if things (i.e. right-wing populism) got worse. When asked where he might go, he answered: probably to Leipzig. I now understand why.

Today, after twenty years of continuous restoration, Leipzig is a beautiful city again. It has the largest concentration of “Gründerzeit” buildings in Germany, large rows of big apartment buildings from the second half of the 19th century with richly decorated facades, stately but never pompous. The whole atmosphere in the city is one of spacious generosity. Leipzig also has two of the most prominent Protestant churches in Germany: the Thomaskirche with the famous Thomas Choir, which will celebrate its 800th birthday next year; and the Nikolaikirche, which was the center of the peaceful revolution in the German Democratic Republic in 1989.

Leipzig once was the fourth largest German city, but it lost about one sixth of its population during the years of Communist rule; after the “Wende” (the “turning point”, i.e. the end of the Communist regime), another 30.000 left for the “golden West”. Today, many Saxons work in Austria’s and West Germany’s gastronomy, as bus drivers or conductors, or in the security services. Leipzig is only no. 12 in the list of major cities now, but it is growing again.

Leipzig used to be an important industrial and political center, it was the cradle of both the German workers’and the womens’ movements in the mid-nineteenth-century. Most of all, it was a cultural focal point. It housed many famous publishers of literature, including music publishers. In the course of the 19th century, it had more than 100 piano factories, at one time about 20 simultaneously. With few exceptions, that is all gone. Fortunately, Leipzig still is a center of musical performance and education, which it has almost always been since the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. It still has one of the best musical schools in Germany, founded by FMB in 1843 and still (or rather: again) carrying his name. And it has one of the world’s best orchestras, the famous “Gewandhausorchester”. There is music in the city everywhere.

The major reason why we went to Leipzig was that Lutz, one of our closest friends, had invited us to visit the city where he was born during the war and raised under the Communists. Lutz had been an active member of the Protestant Church then and showed this at school. His reports included the sentence: “Lutz does not show any willingness to join in the building of socialism.” This meant that he was not allowed to go to high school. All that was offered him was to become a cement mixer. The family then decided to leave their home and move to West Germany via Berlin, which was still possible in the late 1950s.

When I got to know Lutz in my student years, his lively and authentic discussion of “real socialism” was a very important corrective against my naïve illusions about the other German state. Well, there are still people all over my country who believe that the German Democratic Republic had been a “genuine alternative democratic experiment”. That is ridiculous, if you consider how the Communists treated any opposition to their total political control, including death sentences and strategies of personal psychological “Zersetzung”. That was the official term; it means something like “decomposition”! The Nazis had used the term widely to discredit non-conformism.

Some of the scars of our history are more visible than these stories of individual suffering. There are still many empty spaces in Leipzig’s built-up areas, gaps from the war which the GDR had not filled. In addition, the Communists let many of the old buildings which had survived go to rack and ruin; there was very little maintenance or renovation. Towards the end or the regime, much of the whole country looked dark and drab. You can still see many dilapidated houses in between which urgently need repair.

The greatest scar, however, is the destruction of the Jewish community. Until 1933, more than 12.000 Jews lived in Leipzig, which had 17 synagogues. Only about 2.400 Jews survived the Nazi terror, almost all of them in exile – Josef Burg, an important Israeli politician and Avraham Burg’s father, being one of them. Like in so many other places, the Jewish community in Leipzig had been one of the most active economically, socially, culturally, and intellectually. In 1988, only 35 Jews still lived there. Now the community is growing again, due to immigration from Russia.

140 empty bronze chairs at the place of the former main synagogue remind inhabitants and visitors of the more than 10.000 Jews deported and murdered by the Nazis. (I have seen figures between 11.000 and 14.000) The monument was built in 2001.

In 2008, a replica of the Mendelssohn monument was placed near the Thomaskirche. It was rebuilt as a faithful copy, with the help of computers on the basis of old photographs. The deputy mayor of Leizpig, who was a Nazi, had let the original be destroyed in November 1936, while Carl Goerdeler, the chief mayor of the city, was away. Goerdeler resigned in protest and later became a central figure in the resistance against Hitler. He was murdered by the Nazis after the failure of the coup in July 1944.

In 1997, 150 years after his early death, the house where Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy had lived with his family in his final years was reopened after restoration and renovation. The beletage now is a museum, where they often have concerts in the old music room. Since 2007, the Mendelssohn Foundation has awarded an International Mendelssohn Prize Leipzig every year to people who work in FMB’s tradition, either politically or culturally. This year, we joined the Gala concert and the presentation of the prizes to Lang Lang, the famous Chinese pianist and a great admirer of Mendelssohn, and Iris Berben, a well-known and courageous German actress who works for tolerance and understanding. After the concert, which ended with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s fifth, the “Reformation Symphony”, the whole audience rose in applause and enthusiasm, not only for a brilliant orchestral performance but also in reverence for FMB, I am sure. There has been a virtual Mendelssohn renaissance in recent years, and the prejudice against his music, which had outlived Wagner and the Nazis in some circles, seems finally to have been put to rest.

So some healing has been done. On Leipzig’s main street, the Grimmaische Straße, we met Alex Jacobowitz with his huge marimba. Alex, who was born in New York in 1960 and now lives in Jerusalem, is one of a handful of professional xylophone soloists in the world. In summertime, he travels Europe’s major cities to play Klezmer, traditional Jewish, and classical music and to talk to people, about music, tolerance, and humanism. When we heard him, he mostly played Bach, but also a Spanish classicist. It was then when he spoke about the old golden Spanish period of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim neighbourhood and intensive cultural exchange.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

1938- my grandmother, my mother, my grandfather. The last picture taken of my mother and her parents, just before she was sent to America.

Your comments about Kandel’s observation that people have the desire to destroy people outside the group to which they belong struck a chord with me.

What happened in Vienna in 1938 also occurred in my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, a village of 2,000 people and two Jewish families. My grandfather was a respected civic leader in town, which his family had helped settle in 1721. No farmer in the area could bring his crops to market without the services of my grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld. In addition, my grandfather introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. His family had the first telephone and the first car in the area. The family was assimilated into the town and he served as a trusted lender to many members of the community. In fact, most families in the town had borrowed money from my grandfather; that way, they could stay solvent and keep their farms afloat.

When Hitler came to power and, as Kandel puts it, “the successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews.” The townspeople of Stockstadt did nothing to defend or protect Westerfeld and his family. After all, how convenient it would be if the town lender would simply disappear and the loans would be eradicated.

A daughter of one of the townspeople who owed my grandfather money came to me about ten years ago and cried. “My father was indebted to your grandfather a great deal of money and I feel that his blood is on my family’s hands,” she said. She was trying to take responsibility for, as you wrote in your blog “what we do and who we are.”

Even though we cannot change the past, I deeply appreciated her candidness, just as I value your deep reflection on envy. Both of you examine your lives and contemplate possible scenarios, guarding against impulsively dangerous reactions. Interestingly, this daughter is a member of your generation who you say “must sort out the complicated relationship between guilt, innocence and responsibility.“

The children of survivors and refugees also struggle with issues of identity, but it seems to me that you and your generation face the fundamental question: If that is my mother or father, who am I? The inhumane and criminal acts of the Nazis make this question especially difficult and painful to evaluate and answer.

For the victim’s children, we struggle with our own issues of guilt and responsibility. How can I be a good daughter to this parent who has lost so much of her family and her self? What is my responsibility to her well-being? What are the boundaries of parent/child love? The answers to these questions are unclear since the victim/parent is so dependent upon the little family that remains.

Sadly, we, the victim’s children, often see ourselves as inadequate in the face of our parents’ distorted expectations. We carry a sense of guilt and we feel we come up short: We can never replace the basic nurturing that our parents should have received from their parents when they were children. In terms of our own identities, we never feel we are good-enough sons or daughters…because we were children and we could never fill the role of the victim’s parents.

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Gert Krell

Neurobiologist Eric Kandel

With one passage in Eric Kandel’s book,  In Search of Memory, I feel particularly uncomfortable. The desire to destroy people outside the group to which one belongs, may be an innate response and may thus be capable of being aroused in almost any cohesive group, he says (p. 30). But he quickly adds that such “quasi-genetic predisposition” would probably not operate in a vacuum. “One important reason for the actions of the Viennese in 1938 was sheer opportunism. The successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews, especially those in the university. Nazi party membership among university professors greatly exceeded that in the population at large (my emphasis).”

I asked myself how I would have reacted to the successes of the Jewish community, had I been a Viennese professor in the 1930s and not one in Frankfurt/Main in the 1990s. My questions became even stronger, when I read Kandel’s next chapter and really did feel envious, of his successes, his excellence, his (seemingly) happy family life, his (seemingly) uncomplicated relationship to the other sex, and his strong academic connections. I grew up in a broken family, with a loving but violent mother. I had no Mizzi to introduce me to the joys of eroticism; I was rather shy and had strong inhibitions towards girls. I was good at school, but not self-evidently excellent. I was a good and well-liked teacher, but I had few academic connections and was more of a “home-town professor”.

With my good senses I know that the relevance of such comparisons is highly doubtful, they may even be considered arrogant. I never experienced such a terrible year as Erich Kandel did in 1938, and compared to your mother’s fate, which you so caringly describe in Is It Night Or Day?, I grew up in heaven. I was a brave boy in the better sense of the term, but how brave was your mother as a girl – thrown out of her homeland, without her parents and soon to be orphaned, living with and depending on an aunt who did not love her. Nevertheless, if I can have such feelings today, how might I have felt had I received my education in an anti-Semitic academic climate!

You know how angry and sad, sometimes desperate, I often feel about the German Nazi past and the lack of atonement in the years after it. Part of the anger derives from the fact that responsibility was not accepted by many or even most of those who had committed the mass crimes or had supported the regime which ordered them, asked for them or allowed them to happen. A responsibility which many in my generation felt we had to bear and which we rejected at the same time. We wanted to be innocent and tried to put as much distance between ourselves and the Nazis and what we regarded as personal and structural continuities.

Another part of the anger, however, derives from the fact that we are not innocent by definition, nobody is. In the almost obsessive desire not to be anywhere near the perpetrators, some of my compatriots among the leftist students became perpetrators themselves. They fantasized themselves into a fascist state which was seen as planning a new Auschwitz, this time on them. Gudrun Ennslin, one of the leading figures in the RAF, once literally said so. Another leading figure, Horst Mahler, a lawyer by training, later became one of the leading Neo-Nazis. He is currently in jail because he publicly denied the Holocaust.

So it is important that the successors to a generation of murderers and racists or at least supporters and fellow-travelers of murderers and racists sort out complicated relationships between guilt, innocence, and responsibility. We are not guilty, but we are not innocent by definition. We cannot define ourselves by being the complete opposite to the perpetrators in every respect. It is highly unlikely that we ever become like them, but we are responsible for what we do and who we are.

I wonder, what kind of complications you see in the generation which succeeded the victims, how you define yourself, and what risks you see in your generation’s strife for identity.

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Wahnfried, once the center of anti-semitic ideas

Gert Krell

Yes, it is very important always to remember that groups of people and whole societies are capable of learning, and that new generations are willing to challenge the taboos which nations build around their histories. Knowing that there are so many Germans genuinely ashamed of our past and actively engaged in symbolical and also small material efforts to undo some of the vast furor Teutonicus which the Nazis brought over the world, is part of the breathing space which people like me and my wife need to feel o.k. in this country.

I saw a report the other day on German TV about Arabs who had saved Jews in North Africa during World War II. When a French general (!) from the Vichy regime presented the then King of Morocco with 20 000 Yellow Stars of David for the Jews in his country, the king said he needed 20 more, for his own family. I have ordered the book by Robert Sattlof “Among the Righteous”, who has more stories about Muslims who saved Jews. (The report was based on the book.)

On Friday, we visited an exhibition by the Folkwang Museum in Essen (my brother was born there and we still have relations in Essen) on paintings banned by the Nazis. Until 1933, this place had been considered one of the best collections of modern art, and they tried to present at least some of their old treasures. It was so crowded that we had to wait an hour to get in. The sheer number of painters banned from the museum in the 1930s – they were all listed near the exit and included so many well-known names – was mind-boggling. In a major book about “Verfemte Kunst” (Outlawed Art) I read that well into the war many art dealers still tried to present small collections of modern art and that they still had customers. The Nazis were angry that they did not seem to be able to control the Germans’ taste completely. The majority went along, of course.

Sometimes we feel helpless and overwhelmed by the amount of brutality and stupidity which Nazism represents. This also concerns the years after the war, when everything ought to have been different but wasn’t. To be sure, the Federal Republic never was a “fascist state”; in spite of many continuities it never came even near it. Compared to other countries, we have not done too badly in facing, coping with, and working through our dark past. But in relation to the dimensions of the crimes and idiocies of the Nazi period we certainly could have done better. I cannot and do not want to forgive stories such as the one I reported about the Flick family.

Currently I am reading another book by Brigitte Hamann, on Hitler’s Bayreuth and the Wagner family. “Wahnfried”, the house where Richard Wagner’s widow, his son Siegfried with his wife Winifred, and his daughter Eva Wagner with her husband and famous racist philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain lived, was a center of “völkisch” and anti-Semitic ideas and conversation, and it played a major part in the network of support for young Hitler and Nazism. They were all very close to the “Führer” until the end; Winifred felt so even until her own death decades later. If the Federal Republic had really wanted a new beginning and a clear cut from its past, it would have closed Bayreuth for at least 20 years.

In the 1920s, Siegfried wrote letters to Jews asking for financial support so that the Wagners could reopen their festivals. He tried to explain that he wasn’t really anti-Semitic, but his explanations were so tortuous that his vehement prejudice became all the more obvious. Siegfried Wagner was a minor composer and he blamed the lack of enthusiasm for his work on the “Jewish press”. This reminds me of his father, who once wrote an almost servile letter to Giacomo Meyerbeer, assuring him of his everlasting gratitude. Meyerbeer, whose operas were very successful in France in the 19th century, had supported young Richard Wagner financially and had helped him set foot in the business. We all know where Wagner’s gratitude led: to a vicious attack on the “Jewishness” in music.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Since the 1940s, one of the few ways that American Jews protested the Nazi regime was to avoid certain German products. High on the list was the Mercedes. (Volkswagon and German wine were other targets.) Evidently, the protest didn’t make a dent in Flick’s financial portfolio.

Still it was a matter of principle. When Chrysler Corporation bought a majority share of Mercedes manufacturer Daimler-Benz, some newspaper and magazines posed the question of whether some Jews would begin to boycott Chrysler. Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick said that, as a “private memorial” to the Nazis’ victims she would boycott Chrysler. But others say that mega-mergers and the global economy make it impossible to know who owns the product. Others think it’s simply time to move on.

If this is a conundrum for American Jews, I can’t begin to wrap my mind around the problem Flick and his company posed for generations in Germany. What a complicated legacy!

* * *
On a trip to Germany in 1999, my mother and I the guests of an organization called “The German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture.” In 1988, fifty years after Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass,” churches marked the mournful occasion by creating a “Night of Remembrance.” Services were held, candles lit, names of survivors and escapees read at memorials and churches. During those ceremonies, many church leaders asked elder members if they remembered the Jews who once lived in their towns.

A grass-roots movement emerged and Germans began to research the Jewish families who once lived in the area, restore the local synagogues, and
create organizations formed at that time to remember the Jews and their contributions in Germany.

This German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture brought back to Germany all the “children” in my mother’s religious class. Of the seven, all except my mother had gotten out of Germany with their parents (like Kandel).

“It is a very different experience to get out with parents,” one of my mother’s religious school classmates told me on that trip. “Yes, it’s traumatizing since they have lost the means of earning money, their home and homeland, but the family is still in tact.”

For my mother, as I described in my new book, Is It Night or Day?, to lose your parents as a child to genocide is devastating and incomprehensible. In addition, as I’ve described in this blog, the psychological consequences live on in the generations that follow.

On one of my trips to Germany, I came upon a metaphor for the effect of genocide on victim and perpetrator.

A 30-year-old man who worked in a nursing home in Crumstadt, Germany said he had only “encountered” Jews through the intrusive memories of his patients. Some had served in the SS. Sometimes, when disturbing memories flooded, they blurted out what they had done at that time. The caregiver said, “They are haunted.”

Interestingly, some concentration camps survivors living in American nursing homes also are plagued by persistent, painful memories. Uniquely challenging to the nursing home staff, survivors often refuse to take showers or do anything that triggers the memory of their traumas.

Sounds like Flick was so lacking in empathy and so well defended that he didn’t suffer with the consequences of his actions.

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