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

the Yukon from Frankfurt or Dusseldorf but not from Winnipeg or Toronto. My father was one of the lucky few who made his escape permanent, not just a fleeting holiday fantasy.

He wrote to his mother regularly but did not stay in close contact with the rest of the family. One of the few times he went back to Germany was for Luise’s funeral in 1992. This was also his last visit. Two years later he developed an aggressive brain cancer and was dead in six months. He continued to tell stories about his early years right up to the end. Despite the tenuous nature of their contact over the years, Theodor, Clara, Johann and Oskar all came from Germany to visit him while he was dying. (Paul had an intense fear of flying.) Oskar had never left Europe before but said that he felt duty bound to come because he owed my father such a debt of gratitude.

To backtrack a little, Luise, my grandmother, settled into life in Worpswede after 1949 and stayed there with Wilhelm until she died. Many wondered why she didn’t divorce him because he continued to be unfaithful to her, sometimes quite flagrantly, for many more years. In fact, in 1950 Wilhelm took a job in Luedenscheid, 300 kilometres south of Worpswede, that had him away from home for three weeks at a time. It was an open secret that he lived there with yet another woman, more or less as husband and wife. Also well into his sixties he continued to go to the discos in Bremen, until the pretty young things he was chatting up laughed at him and called him grandpa. I think there is more than one answer to the question of why she stayed. The obvious answer was that Wilhelm provided financial security. For all his failings he was very attentive to a specific notion of duty. My grandmother may have been a proud woman, but that pride was brittle, and beneath it lay deep pools of self-doubt. The more subtle answer is that by staying with him she could exact her revenge in a hundred little ways over the course of decades, which was more satisfying than a single dramatic move. Theirs was an odd relationship that underlined Tolstoy’s dictum regarding the dissimilarity of unhappy families.

The last of the three principal players in the story to pass away was my grandfather. I saw him for the final time in the late summer of 1995 as my wife, Lorraine, and I passed through Germany on our way to our honeymoon in Italy. Perhaps my father’s death had emboldened me, or perhaps it was the fact that I was then thirty years old and no longer so easily impressed by my grandfather’s wisdom, charm and worldly ways, but I resolved to raise the subject of his past with him for the first time. It had been the proverbial elephant in the room for as long as I could remember, and I knew that there would not likely be another chance. He represented so many confusing contradictions. I was not, however, going to address the cognitive dissonance of him being a serial philanderer at the same time as presenting himself as the grand pater familias of the Schott clan. That was too private and well beyond the pale for grandfather-grandson chats. But the contrast between his warmth, humour and generosity as my beloved grandfather and his hard-core Nazi past was something I wanted to try to understand. If handled carefully and respectfully, I felt it could make for a positive conversation, for both of us. Perhaps he was ready to talk about it and just hadn’t been asked.

Was he really an entirely different person at different times in his life, or were the two sides of him interwoven all along? How does a sophisticated, cultured and intelligent man not only join the Nazi Party but also join the SA Brownshirts, become an Ortsgruppenleiter and plan to kill himself because he cannot bear the collapse of the Third Reich?

It was a quiet and sunny afternoon. The only sound was the ticking of an antique clock in my grandfather’s living room. Lorraine was napping and we were leaving that evening, so it was now or never. I planned to open the conversation gently with some softball questions about political and economic conditions in the 1920s. Opa had always been energetic and youthful for his age, but that day I could see every one of his ninety-two years on him. He was still a snappy dresser, but he was skeletally thin, his skin was almost translucent and his blue eyes had become very pale. First we made light chit-chat about my travel plans and we shared some family news. Then there was a lull in the conversation. He lit a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring that caught the sunlight and hung in the air for a very long moment. Opa looked down at his lap and then looked straight ahead, towards some unseen spot in the shadows on the far side of the room. The moment seemed right. I swallowed hard and was just about to start asking my questions when he began to speak.

“Philipp,” he said slowly, “I have seen so much in my long life, but now I think it has been too long. Of everything that has happened to me, the very worst has been to have my own son die before me.” He turned to look at me. His eyes were red rimmed and moist.

My courage failed me.

He died the next year at the age of ninety-three. He was still living at home. He had a small heart attack and the house-call doctor recommended that he be taken to the hospital. He refused. He asked the doctor to call the three of his children who lived nearby and tell them to come. When they had gathered at his bedside Opa asked for a cigarette and a glass of