2. For a brief summary of the “historians’ debate” and its different positions, see Fischer and Lorenz, 2007, 238–40.
3. Gymnasium is a form of secondary school, which students attend from the age of ten to around nineteen, and which academically prepares students for university.
4. For an overview of the West German education system, see Jürgen Baumert, Kai S. Cortina, Achim Leschinsky, and Karl Ulrich Mayer, Das Bildungswesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Strukturen und Entwicklungen im Überblick (2003).
5. Jurek Becker’s book follows the story of Jacob Heym in the ghetto of Łódź. He lies to his fellow inmates by pretending to possess a forbidden radio, which allegedly broadcasts information about the advancing Soviet Army, helping them to keep their hopes alive. In Kindheitsmuster Christa Wolf travels back to the small town in Poland where she grew up as part of a large family during World War II. From her memories, she pieces together the everyday life of a typical German family during the war, and she deconstructs the often-repeated myth that the population did not know anything about the Holocaust.
6. For an overview of the education system of the GDR, see Hubert Hettwer, Das Bildungswesen in der DDR: Strukturelle und inhaltliche Entwicklung seit 1945 (1976).
7. Martin suspected that his father might have had connections to the East German Ministry for State Security, the Staatssicherheit (commonly known as the Stasi), which could explain his privileged access to otherwise restricted information.
8. See Fischer and Lorenz, Lexikon der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Deutschland (2007, 288–90), for a brief introduction to the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition and the same source, 295–97, for a summary of the Goldhagen debate.
9. Interview with Merle Hilbk, January 22, 2013.
10. See Operation: Last Chance. Accessed November 9, 2019. http://www.operationlastchance.org.
“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.”