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

still hungry most of the time, but at least we were no longer actually starving. Mama still looked terrible though.

Through the year to this point we had been receiving short letters from Papa at the rate of about one per month. These were mostly of the “I am fine, how are you?” nature with a note about the weather or possibly a brief anecdote he thought we would find interesting. These were all stamped “inspected” but none bore any censorship black marks, which stood to reason, as what could be controversial about “It has been pleasantly sunny all week,” or “Heinz is teaching us some Italian, which he picked up while stationed near Florence”? We were happy to hear from him, but his life in denazification camp in the West (we were coming to refer to the British, U.S. and French zones of occupation collectively as “the West”) was as remote and abstract to us as the life of a yak herder in Tibet. I did wonder about this “denazification” though. Then as if he had read my mind from hundreds of kilometres away, one summer day a longer letter arrived. As always it was addressed to Mama and did not mention us except in passing, and as always Mama let us read it immediately after she was done.

Dear Luise,

I hope you and the children are well. I understand that conditions in the East may be more difficult than here. I hope that the worst stories are exaggerations.

Life here in camp is not without its own difficulties as we have to work hard, but our camp commander is a fair man and we are not abused or mistreated. As I have written before, work is one of the major features of camp life. They understand that it is not in their interest to have idle prisoners. We are mostly doing woodwork now and are building furniture.

I am now at the point where I can write about the other two specific things the British are doing to allow us to be able to return to society.

The first is that they are making us understand and believe what actually happened during the Hitler era. We were lied to by the men I most admired. This was perhaps the hardest thing to swallow. Not so much that they would lie, but that I would be gullible enough to believe those lies. We were shown the film of Göring’s trial in Nuremberg. He called us all simpletons for having followed him and Hitler and the rest of them into war. He said that we were easy to manipulate. They knew what they were doing. They knew how to persuade people like me by calling on our pride as Germans. I made such a terrible mistake and I feel very foolish now.

The other thing the British are doing shows how smart they are. They don’t try to humiliate us further. Perhaps they learned from the mistakes of 1919. They actually also call on our pride — not pride in military power or “ethnic purity” of course, but rather pride in the deeper German strengths of culture and science. They remind us of Beethoven and Goethe and Humboldt and Gauss, and they remind us of the spirit of the 1848 democratic revolutions. True liberal democracy is not alien to the German people.

I feel I have been asleep for a very long time and am now waking up. This makes one groggy and weak, but at least one is finally in the real world again.

Your Wilhelm

Theodor snorted. “He doesn’t accept any responsibility. He was just a dupe he says, an essentially innocent victim of smooth talk about pride.”

“But he did not do anything bad that he needs to accept responsibility for,” I said, feeling odd for defending my father, but Theodor’s superior tone always made me want to say something contrary.

“Being such an active Party member was bad enough. A machine needs many parts and he was one of them. It’s especially bad for a man who has the education and intelligence to know better.”

“Then an awful lot of people did something bad.”

“Yes, an awful lot of people did something bad.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Autumn 1946

At some point in the autumn of 1946 school began again. It was a struggle for the authorities because of the damaged buildings, the lack of basic school supplies, and especially because of the shortage of teachers. Primary school was not as bad, but in high school, where Theodor and I were supposed to go, most of the teachers had been men. Many of them had of course died in the war or were still in Siberia, and many of the remaining ones had enough association with the Nazi Party that the Russians refused to rehire them. A lowest-rank Mitlaeufer (simple Nazi follower) could be a baker or a streetcleaner, but certainly could not be entrusted with molding young minds to build that socialist future the posters and both Herr Rittmann and the gentleman on the train had referred to. Consequently only enough suitable live teachers were scraped together to staff one high school in Rochlitz to serve the entire region, and only the most gifted students would be able to attend.

This meant waking at five in the morning in order to catch the train. We did not have a clock or a watch in the house. All of these had been bartered away for food. Fortunately, however, we were only a few doors down from the town hall and its clock tower. As surprising as it sounds, our subconscious was immediately trained to tune into the five chimes. Four chimes and we would still be fast asleep, but five and we would wake up. This worked each and every time. We did not sleep in once. The train was of course another one of those windowless rattlers, but the discomfort was trivial compared to the excitement of going back to school. I did not count the classes