One sunny spring afternoon our seven-year-old, Dicken, was playing in the alley outside our house in Kronenberg when a flight of four American jet planes came screaming over the town, circled it, and went away. They were the first planes of any sort we had seen or heard over Kronenberg and the first jets we had seen or heard anywhere. Everyone ran to the window. Down below we saw Dicken’s playmates, six-, seven-, eight-year-olds, transfixed, like him, with wonder. But there were bigger children, too, ten or eleven and older, playing in the alley, and they, the bigger ones, ran away howling with terror, their hands clasped on top of their heads. “Didja see the jets?” said Dicken, when he came in. We said “Yes,” and Dicken said, “Why did the big boys and girls run away?”
War, between 1939 and 1945, had come at last to the country of the “war men,” the Germans. And from 1943 on, after Hermann Göring (who had said in 1941, “If a single bomb drops on Germany, my name is Hermann Meyer”) had become Hermann Meyer, war came into the “war men’s” houses to live with them, to eat with them, to sleep in their beds, and to take over the teaching of their children, the care of their sick, and the burial of their living. On May 9, 1945, Germany was a world of broken stones.
On May 9, 1945, there were no more Nazis, non-Nazis, anti-Nazis. There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build.
Those stones were the houses—not the munitions plants or the switchyards, but the houses. In the city of Worms, the railroad roundhouse stood miraculously untouched; and a half-mile away stood a whole row of walls that were once apartment houses; and so it was in Frankfurt, where the I.G. Hochhaus, the headquarters of the world dye trust, was undamaged; and in Berlin, where the Patent Office was intact. And so it was everywhere in Germany, for the war was a war against houses. One raid knocked one-third of Freiburg over; Dresden was destroyed in twenty-four hours. And Hamburg! And Munich! And Rotterdam! Warsaw! Coventry! Stalingrad! How could Americans understand? They couldn’t.
Americans, one-fifth of whom change their abode every year; Americans, building a brand-new America every fifty years; Americans visiting Antietam battlefield, Gettysburg battlefield, Bull Run battlefield—how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. “Strategic bombing” was one of war’s little jokes; the strategy was to hit railroads and power plants and factories—and houses. Right up until the total collapse of steel fabrication at the end of 1944, the Germans had four rails in the yards for every rail in use; within two to six hours after a yard was hit, it was moving again. But sleepless workers weren’t moving so fast, and terrified workers were moving still slower, and workers whose homes were gone (and maybe a wife or child) weren’t moving fast at all.
Americans, visiting their Civil War battlefields, wouldn’t know that it isn’t a man’s life and his work that yields the bomb its big dividend but his accumulated reason for living and working. In the first case, he’s only a dead enemy. In the second, he’s a live ally. In the war that came—for the first time—to the “war men” of Germany, the parlor was the prime military installation and the pictures on the parlor wall the prime military objective. If the bomb hits the factory worker’s parlor, it can let the factory go. The way to win wars is to hit the pictures on the worker’s, the miner’s, the soldier’s parlor wall. And a bombardier who lets go from a mile or two up, or even five, can hardly miss over Berlin—or Kronenberg.
Words are worthless, and pictures, each of them worth a thousand words, are worthless. Seeing is not believing. Only having been there, having been hit or not hit running to or from it, and being bedeviled forever by what might have been done a half-hour before or a half-minute after is worth anything. A book might have been saved, or a pair of shoes, or a mother or a child. Or a passport. Or a child might have been saved if a pair of shoes had been let go, or a mother if a child had been let go.
And words and phrases like “hit,” “got it,” “kaput,” “knocked over,” talk about prize fights or three-balls-for-a-dime at an amusement park. All that words can say is that Stuttgart was “hit” or Bremen “hit hard” (or Coventry or Stalingrad—or Seoul). It’s like saying that Christ, in the course of his carpentering, got a nail through his hand. Better not say it at all.
Those houses against which the war was waged were built—even the tenement houses—of stone or Gargantuan timbers laced together and covered with a smooth, impermeable stucco. There were, in Germany, no rural slums, no bulging, leaning, or caving barns, no tar-paper or clapboard shanties, no abandoned homesites, rotten fences, great mountains of rusting automobiles, nothing left to oxidize and blow away. Everything had been built to endure to the last generation. Maybe this was the last generation.