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,”