For my generation at least, history inhabits and haunts every corner of Germany. So many places we visited--Potsdam, Wannsee, Dresden, Nuernberg, Berlin, The Wall and Checkpoint Charlie--are fixed in our collective memory as That Time of world war, horror, starvation, extermination, and finally liberation and the Iron Curtain (what an image that is!).
That Time I was born into, when My People were at war with My People.
A time, as Jim likes to remind me, as far removed from our children's experience as WWI was from us at their age.
As the daughter of German immigrant families, I have been reluctant to consider certain questions from this close up. Were my cousins, those whose grandparents did not emigrate to America, whose fathers and brothers were drafted into the German rather than the U.S. army, whose mothers tilled the land while their husbands and sons were off being wounded, dying--were these German-speaking cousins my enemy? Did they know about the camps? Did they point guns at the fathers of my friends? Was something in me tainted by association? Did I have a special responsibility to make sure this never happened again?
These were some of the questions I hoped to exam during the two weeks I drove and walked and listened and talked and ate and drank late into the night over glasses of good German wine with my lovely, kind and generous cousin Frauke Rademacher-Heidemann. Frauke was also born into war, two years before me, 1939. She also grew up asking questions, determined to do what she could with her life to bring peace and understanding among the world's peoples.
Frauke showed me not only all these places in Germany familiar to you, but also places you've probably never heard of, familiar to Frauke and me because we share an ancestor, our great-grandfather Garrelt Antons Fecht.
We visited family in Wiesens and Aurich in Ostfriesland--farm villages too unimportant to be fixed in imaginations much beyond our own, a region so far north and west toward Holland that it claims its own language, Fresen. Together we recalled names--Anna and Anton, Jacob and Jans. And especially my father's name Fecht--rare in both our countries, yet appearing over and over in the little cemetery surrounding the church (c.1500) where our great grandfather is buried.
And we shared stories about what life was like here and there--as children, as young adults and now as older women--looking back at Germany and the lives of two of her descendants. Two weeks to change that impersonal label "second cousin" into something more like "sister."
Thank for these thoughts and questions Anita ... sometime you will want to talk with Jessica who in her poetry has sometimes described that she has her people at war with her people in her own body ... her Jewish father and her German mother.
ReplyDeleteMan's inhumanity toward other men seems boundless and endless. I get so discouraged about the world when I see the lack of civil discourse in our Presidential elections - models for the rest of us - and in my own so very small community where people generally feel free to speak hatefully about others whom they know little about.
I do hope that you return from this trip rejuvenated and joyful and perhaps understanding humans and human nature better than before you went.
Love
Thanks for the comment, Sallie. I have been thinking about you during this journey, having various insights regarding the distinction I make in my mind between my father's Germanness and my mother's. In fact, I often have to remind myself that I am of German heritage on both "sides." I was reminded in my conversations with Frauke that I know very little about the Schmitt family history (have no idea, for example, from what part of Germany our Schmitt ancestors immigrated). And I have wondered as well if you have felt any impulse to look back into the Schmitt family history and whether you might at some point want to do some of this together. I can't remember if your father included any of this kind of information in his brief autobiography.
DeleteThat's what has come to mind; what was surprising, and moving, was to learn that this theme of inheritance has appeared in Jessica's poetry. I look forward very much to more conversation with both of you about all of this.
Much love, A.