felt some kind of remorse, but we were excluded from this psychodrama. We had the dubious advantage of remaining exactly who we had always been, and so of once again being the odd ones out.
On top of all this, the chaos of the times had thrown up another problem: I had two fathers. One was the man of the 1930s, a product of the Hitler years, inclined to rage and a black wit; the other was the figure who returned from Russian captivity, physically worn out, his intellect and spirit contracted. His wit, which gave us pleasure in our younger years and, in part, also a kind of apprenticeship, only gradually reemerged, and then only for moments at a time. My father had always loved sayings with the brevity of aphorisms. I remember the phrase with which, during Hitler’s Reich, he had often commented on some arbitrary decision by insignificant people who had suddenly acquired power. It was “Endure the clowns!” and it soon became a motto with a proverbial force in our family. At any rate, given his propensity for formulas as signposts, Father recommended thephrase to us as a guiding principle for the coming years, perhaps for the rest of our lives. I once heard him draw to a close a discussion of an episode which had occurred during the Nazi years with the maxim “One sometimes has to keep one’s head down, but try not to look shorter as a result!”
It was a life full of privations, which, after a promising beginning, he had chosen in full awareness of the consequences; indeed, it had meant the sacrifice of any kind of future. Of the many heroic speechmakers who take the platform at commemorative ceremonies nowadays, I have often asked myself which of them would have done the same as my father? For compensation, my father had only the knowledge of meeting his own rigorous principles. And if this consideration did not make everything good and sometimes drove my mother, in particular, to despair, it nevertheless provided him with a significant degree of satisfaction.
My mother, on the other hand, though she held the same views as my father in political matters, had a much more difficult time dealing with day-to-day life. For her, family came before principles; only once did this imperceptibly smoldering difference of opinion burst out into the open. She got nothing but the burdens, caring for the pots, the washboards, and the tiled stove. And all the while, she wanted to get each one of us through those times, alive and at the same time “with decency.” Long after the war we heard her say, with a touch of bitterness, “He had his circles of friends, Hans Hausdorf, Dr. Gans, Dr. Meyer, and many more besides. I had the burden offive children. Not that I’m complaining. But it was a lopsided arrangement. I don’t think I was made for a life like that. But then who is? We paid a high price.”
At the end of the 1940s something else stood in the way of normality. We were young, enterprising, and, especially after the limitations of the Nazi years, susceptible to intellectual whims of one kind or another. Yet judgment, discernment, and common sense were also demanded of us. Inevitably there was friction as these two sets of demands came into conflict. Yet no one could give a convincing answer to historical questions in the narrow sense, how Hitler and all the havoc he had caused could have come about. It was certain that only a minority had wanted the war or had wanted to settle in Byelorussia and beyond that to the Ural Mountains, and no one had been keen to defend the heights of the Caucasus against Muslim mountain tribes. Nor did the simplistic faith in a Nordic race have more than a tiny number of supporters.
Altogether it was not abstruse arguments such as these that had brought Hitler to power; the motives deriving from the personal experiences of individuals were much more determining. These included inflation and the world economic crisis, together with the collapse of the middle classes on whom the stability of
On top of all this, the chaos of the times had thrown up another problem: I had two fathers. One was the man of the 1930s, a product of the Hitler years, inclined to rage and a black wit; the other was the figure who returned from Russian captivity, physically worn out, his intellect and spirit contracted. His wit, which gave us pleasure in our younger years and, in part, also a kind of apprenticeship, only gradually reemerged, and then only for moments at a time. My father had always loved sayings with the brevity of aphorisms. I remember the phrase with which, during Hitler’s Reich, he had often commented on some arbitrary decision by insignificant people who had suddenly acquired power. It was “Endure the clowns!” and it soon became a motto with a proverbial force in our family. At any rate, given his propensity for formulas as signposts, Father recommended thephrase to us as a guiding principle for the coming years, perhaps for the rest of our lives. I once heard him draw to a close a discussion of an episode which had occurred during the Nazi years with the maxim “One sometimes has to keep one’s head down, but try not to look shorter as a result!”
It was a life full of privations, which, after a promising beginning, he had chosen in full awareness of the consequences; indeed, it had meant the sacrifice of any kind of future. Of the many heroic speechmakers who take the platform at commemorative ceremonies nowadays, I have often asked myself which of them would have done the same as my father? For compensation, my father had only the knowledge of meeting his own rigorous principles. And if this consideration did not make everything good and sometimes drove my mother, in particular, to despair, it nevertheless provided him with a significant degree of satisfaction.
My mother, on the other hand, though she held the same views as my father in political matters, had a much more difficult time dealing with day-to-day life. For her, family came before principles; only once did this imperceptibly smoldering difference of opinion burst out into the open. She got nothing but the burdens, caring for the pots, the washboards, and the tiled stove. And all the while, she wanted to get each one of us through those times, alive and at the same time “with decency.” Long after the war we heard her say, with a touch of bitterness, “He had his circles of friends, Hans Hausdorf, Dr. Gans, Dr. Meyer, and many more besides. I had the burden offive children. Not that I’m complaining. But it was a lopsided arrangement. I don’t think I was made for a life like that. But then who is? We paid a high price.”
At the end of the 1940s something else stood in the way of normality. We were young, enterprising, and, especially after the limitations of the Nazi years, susceptible to intellectual whims of one kind or another. Yet judgment, discernment, and common sense were also demanded of us. Inevitably there was friction as these two sets of demands came into conflict. Yet no one could give a convincing answer to historical questions in the narrow sense, how Hitler and all the havoc he had caused could have come about. It was certain that only a minority had wanted the war or had wanted to settle in Byelorussia and beyond that to the Ural Mountains, and no one had been keen to defend the heights of the Caucasus against Muslim mountain tribes. Nor did the simplistic faith in a Nordic race have more than a tiny number of supporters.
Altogether it was not abstruse arguments such as these that had brought Hitler to power; the motives deriving from the personal experiences of individuals were much more determining. These included inflation and the world economic crisis, together with the collapse of the middle classes on whom the stability of
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