My Friends, my Generation

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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