This is a tough book to review. Not because it's so bad but because it is so personal. I was asked about the book by a good old friend from my international book club. She wanted to know whether I knew the book at all and, if yes, what I thought about it.
I am twenty years older than Nora, so the questions she asks about her ancestors and World War II mean even more to me. My parents were five years old when A.H. was elected, my father had to serve in the army when he was just sixteen. Thankfully, he became a POW more or less right away and the war was over within a couple of months and he was released. I doubt I would be here otherwise.
Maybe my parents told me more about the war because they were directly affected, maybe they were willing to talk more about their youth because their families had been anti-nazis. I don't know. But I heard a lot. About my grandparents and their political views, how they had raised their kids without any affiliation to the party etc.
I read somewhere that "most Germans were guilty". If you could hear my grandparents' story and could see that many of them were like them, you wouldn't say that. Of course, many were guilty and many said afterwards they "didn't know anything about the cruelties or what happened". My parents always said, everyone saw that they picked up all the Jews and none of them returned. What did they think happened to them? Even if you had no contact to any of them, they must have noticed that shops were shut down (or changed ownership), doctors disappeared, farms were abandoned …
My grandfather on my father's side was considered a communist in his village, even though I don't believe he was in the party. He had read "My Struggle" (Mein Kampf) and warned people not to vote for that party because "all he wants is war". That and him helping an old Jewish couple whose kids had left to America with their farm got him on the watchlist and he had to hide in the bogland where they lived.
All my grandparents had to send their oldest sons into war. If the boys didn't go, the whole family would be picked up and transported, so it was either the boys getting killed in the war or the whole family. What would you choose? My father had four older brothers and two younger ones (only one of the eight children was a girl), the five oldest ones were drafted, including my father, as I mentioned above. The oldest two were killed in Russia (the siblings heard about the death of the second brother in 1999), the two next ones were heavily wounded and suffered from it for the rest of their lives. Only my father remained uninjured, mainly for the reason that he didn't take part for very long, though he had to fight his memories, of course. He never wanted to go back to the East, even after the wall came down.
My other grandfather worked as a farm labourer or landless cottager. His house and land belonged to the Freiherr, German aristocratic title between a knight and an earl. He owned most of the village and the people on his land had to work on his estate, even the small children. My mother was the fourth of six siblings, only one of the older ones a boy. He fell in Italy. None of my uncles who died was older than twenty.
My father used to say, as soon as the nazis took power, the greatest idiots in the village were in the party and shouted out loud what needed to be done. If I look at the right-wing party members today who tell us that the foreigners take our jobs and are dangerous etc., I can very well believe that, the louder they shout, the smaller their IQ.
Anyway, my grandfather had to work with Russian POWs. When they were liberated, they burned down half the village but left out my grandparents' house. I guess that shows something about how he treated them. My mother told us how they would listen to BBC radio and that they were not allowed to mention it to anybody because it was forbidden.
Even though it was "encouraged", well, more or less obligatory, none of my parents or their siblings were in the Hitler Youth or League of Girls. That was quite brave, I think. Many people just sent their kids there so they wouldn't get on the blacklist of the nazis.
Even decades later, my mother could still tell whether someone's family had been "brown" or not. As a child, I always wondered, how she could do that but now I think I know, if you grow up with that, you get a feeling for it.
Why do I still feel bad writing this? Do I have to defend myself? Even the descendants of people who were party members think it is bad if someone says my grandparents weren't. I have heard a lot of times that most of them lied, that we would only say that so we won't feel guilty, etc. Nobody believes there were people who didn't like the nazis from the beginning. Maybe I'm also a tad more sensitive about the subject because I lived abroad a lot and have been subject to anti-German feelings, especially during the twenty years I spent in the Netherlands.
In the description, they say that the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout the author's childhood. Indeed, it still does. When we lived in the Netherlands, kids in our street called my sons "nazis". They were born almost half a century after the war had ended, even their grandparents were too little to have voted for that regime. Who knows what the grandparents of those Dutch kids had been up to? There were plenty of nazis in the Netherlands. But no matter what your grandparents have been up to or not, if you're German, you're guilty forever, if you're not German, you're not.
The thing is, most countries have a skeleton in their closet. Our history is what it is, there is nothing we can do about it. But we can try to learn from it, we can work toward a better future, all together. If we just wallow in self pity, if we just keep blaming ourselves, no one will be helped. Especially if we only judge others by their story. I was in Israel many years ago. The people there wanted to talk to us, they wanted to get to know the new generation of Germans. That is the right attitude.
I could carry on writing a whole book about this, I guess. Maybe I will
come up with more here after I talked to my friend who recommended the
book.
From the back cover:
"Nora Krug's story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.
In her late thirties, after twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child and young adult. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier in Italy. Her quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation."
P.S. I know that the "nazis" are usually spelled with a capital N but I believe they don't deserve that recognition.
