The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

as the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth. You could join the DJV at the age of ten, whereas the full Hitler Youth was from fourteen until whenever the army wanted you, which was still eighteen in 1941. The idea was horrifying to me. The DJV. The Hitler Youth. God forbid, the army. All of it — absolutely horrifying. The crowds of boys and men, marching, shouting, waving guns, wearing uniforms, following orders. It was impossible for me to picture myself as part of any of that.

Perhaps he read my look because he continued, “But whether you can fight them or not, you will win the war anyway. Such boys will eventually be in jail or drunk and unemployed or dead on the front. Not you. You are a Schott.”

A Schott. Family pride was a cornerstone of Papa’s life. He was not a fighter either. In fact, the idea is laugh-out-loud funny when you consider his stiff leg, thin frame and painfully formal mannerisms. A fighter with words, I suppose, but not with fists. At the time I thought he meant that a Schott wins with cleverness, that that was the root of his pride. And I am sure that is part of what he meant, but it later became clear to me that he also meant that a Schott wins by being intrinsically superior. What nonsense. I cannot tolerate arrogance.

Opa Flintzer, Mama’s father, had been a well-known artist in Weimar at the turn of the century. We owned many of his paintings, as well as painted portraits of many of my Schott forefathers. These paintings hung throughout the apartment, with the best ones, in ornate gilded frames, in the sitting room. Several others hung in the hallway and a few in Papa’s office. The oldest ancestral portrait is of a Johann Schott, one of several ancestors with that name, born in 1715 and died in 1791. He was a miller, and before him were five further generations of Schotts, for whom we did not have portraits. All those early Schotts before Johann were also millers, beginning with a Nicol Schott who suddenly appeared in the annals in 1593, listed as owner of the water mill in Ziegenburg, a hamlet in the dark forested hills of Franconia, maybe 200 kilometres south of Leipzig. After Johann there was just one more miller and then a pastor — a very severe-looking man with tight high collars and facial expression that says, “No dancing, no laughing, no living.” Perhaps I am being unfair to him. Probably I am being unfair to him. After the pastor was a theology professor and then another professor and then Papa, who was a lawyer.

At the age of seven I had no idea about any of this, but as I grew older, I developed more and more pride in those millers, who did honest, useful work in the villages. Papa, on the other hand, took his pride from the noble branch of the family. His paternal grandmother was the Baroness Frederike Clara von Scheurl. How she married into this family of millers and pastors and professors is a story for another time. But from her we could trace back fifteen generations to a Baron Konrad Tucher von Simmelsdorf who was born in 1260! Can you imagine! Fifteen generations of useless noblemen, probably heavily inbred.

Chapter Seven

June 22, 1941

Today something like 160 Russian divisions are standing at our frontiers. For weeks constant violations of this frontier have taken place, not only affecting us but from the far north down to Rumania. Russian airmen consider it sport nonchalantly to overlook these frontiers, presumably to prove to us that they already feel themselves masters of these territories. During the night of June 17 to June 18 Russian patrols again penetrated into the Reich’s territory and could only be driven back after prolonged firing. This has brought us to the hour when it is necessary for us to take steps against this plot devised by the Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers and equally the Jewish rulers of the Bolshevist centre in Moscow.

German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as regards extent, compares with the greatest the world hitherto has seen.

Formations of the German eastern front extend from East Prussia to the Carpathians. German and Rumanian soldiers are united under Chief of State Antonescu from the banks of the Pruth along the lower reaches of the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of Europe and thereby the salvation of all.

I therefore decided today again to lay the fate and future of the German Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God help us especially in this fight!

With those words, screamed at us from the Volksempfänger by our Führer, we learned that Germany had invaded our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Actually, those words were preceded by many, many other words as Hitler was notoriously incapable of making a short and simple statement, but it was approximately at that point that I came into the room and began to listen.

Mama sighed heavily and said, “That’s it then. Like Napoleon before him, our Herr Hitler will break his army and destroy his country in Russia. What foolishness.”

Theodor and I waited for Papa’s explosion in response, but it did not come. His expression was unreadable. He just sat there silently. Then he abruptly stood up, turned off the Volksempfänger and walked out of the room without saying a word. A minute later we heard him slam the door and leave the house.

Much as during the invasion of Poland almost two years prior there was visible military activity in the skies and on the roads, but children normalize extraordinary situations so quickly that we did not really take much notice of it this time. The war was simply the way things were. It was difficult to remember