Prologue

This isn’t a family memoir, but it could be — the collective family memoir of every single person who grew up in the old Federal Republic of Germany. There is still time left in which to ask questions. The last members of the Flakhelfer generation, the schoolboys conscripted as Luftwaffe (air force) assistants towards the end of World War II, are still alive. They are our fathers and grandfathers, and it is they who shaped the Federal Republic — as artists, academics, politicians, journalists, and lawyers.

So let’s begin with a family memoir, after all. The Flakhelfer and I are not too far removed. My father, Günter Herwig, born in 1927, was one of them. He’s 86 now, the same age as grandees of the old Federal Republic such as Günter Grass, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Martin Walser. My grandfather, Walter Herwig, was born in Kassel in 1880, almost a hundred years before me. As they both came late to fatherhood, the Herwigs skipped a generation, and I was born within earshot of the 19th century.

My father came into the world in the Weimar Republic, but his childhood home was rooted in the German Empire. And not just politically, for their grand five-bedroom apartment was located directly on Kaiserplatz in the Hohenzollern quarter of Kassel, the former imperial residence. My grandfather, however, could no longer refer to his shipping company as an ‘Imperial Carrier’ because, much to his regret, the German Kaiser — who had been fond of holding court in nearby Wilhelmshöhe Castle and the Kassel Staatstheater — was by then long gone. But the family business flourished nonetheless, not least thanks to its overseas links, which in 1929 earned Walter Herwig the title of honorary consul of Peru. Before swastika flags came into fashion, the consul used to adorn his Maybach limousine on the Peruvian national holiday with the standards of both Peru and the Weimar Republic.

It was a peaceful time. As a child, my father would listen from the third-floor window to the sound of the former military band playing ‘merry, light-hearted compositions’ in the concert pavilion in front of their building.1 They played on until 1934. Then the new ruling powers changed the tune. The National Socialists tore down the pavilion in order to make room for grandstands; from then on, parades were held there on Reich War Veterans’ Day. It was only fitting that, in 1938, the future warlords would rename Kaiserplatz after a battle; it became Skagerrakplatz, after the Battle of Jutland.

And so my father had one foot in the Kaiser era, yet had to march into the Third Reich with the other. A photograph from the 1930s shows little Günter Herwig on the street, smiling dutifully into the camera and raising his right arm in a Hitler salute. Beneath it in the photo album is a note written by my grandmother: ‘His first Heil Hitler.’ Did he know what the gesture meant?

On 1 December 1937, ten-year-old Günter became a member of the German Youth, the subdivision of the Hitler Youth for ten- to 14-year-olds. There, little boys were to be moulded into the future heroes of Hitler’s regime. But my father wasn’t hero material. He was too lazy and self-sufficient to take any interest in the Third Reich and its preoccupation with marching and indoctrination. In 1938, the school sent a blue warning letter to my grandmother, informing her that her son was idle and complacent, and that his sense of participatory spirit was profoundly lacking: ‘He spends most of the time sitting there on the bench, pink-cheeked and sated, and appears to be utterly content with the world around him. Admonitions have no impact whatsoever.’ Signed: ‘Heil Hitler! The class teacher.’2

Not that the young Günter felt any kind of inner conflict with the ruling ideology. He simply didn’t bother himself with it. He didn’t take any interest in marching, either, and was hauled up before a Hitler Youth court in 1943 for having gone AWOL after the roll call at the beginning of a march. He liked theatre, but not the theatre of the Brownshirts. According to the penalty ruling of the Kurhessen Hitler Youth, he had broken ranks with the march formation because he had sprained his ankle during an amateur dramatics performance. His unauthorised decampment was punished leniently: a warning ‘for the duration of the war’.

The war would have destroyed him, had it lasted any longer. After his Reich labour service and time as a Flakhelfer, my father received a letter in 1945 summoning him to an entrance examination for the navy in Vienna. The defeat of the German Reich was just a few months away, the German armies were retreating on all fronts, and Vienna wasn’t even on the coast. But even in the spring of 1945 at Marine Commando II, my father told me, the officers were still paying attention to the table manners of the young recruits who were expected to save the Reich.

In the end, when he was handed his marching orders in Vienna and ordered to report to the relevant office, my father did what seemed like the only sensible thing: he crumpled up the piece of paper and absconded.

Indifference is a powerful force that is often underestimated, even by dictatorships. If everyone had been like my father, the Volksstaat might soon have collapsed from a lack of interest on the part of those involved. But that wasn’t what happened, and the Third Reich needed more heroes than the few students, workers, and officers who lost their lives in the courageous struggle against injustice, and who have since had to act as an alibi for ‘the other Germany’. Brecht was right: ‘Unhappy the land that needs heroes.’

My father isn’t a very good example of the ‘practically ridiculous German longing for role models’ of which Margarete Mitscherlich once spoke — either before or after 1945. No, my father wasn’t a hero and didn’t want to be one, either for Hitler or for the resistance. Young Günter Herwig was not swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, or hard as Krupp’s steel — as Hitler Youth were expected to be. Instead, he was pink, soft, and complacent. So my father adopted a completely unheroic form of passive resistance in the Third Reich, and there was very little the powers that be could do about it. They met open rebellion with reprisals, concentration camps, and death sentences. But no state could be made with lazy ‘national comrades’ like him, let alone a ‘Thousand-Year Reich’.

My father didn’t like to trouble the past, but the past troubled him. Whenever there was something about Hitler or the Holocaust on television he would change channels. He preferred animal documentaries. He never had to experience war at the front. But he did witness the destruction of his hometown of Kassel, which was reduced to rubble by Allied bombs in 1943; the corpses in the street outside the bunker in the Weinberg part of the city; the sirens; the firestorm.

I often asked him about his memories of those times. When he was an adolescent, did he know what was happening to the Jews? ‘They lived in a different part of town,’ was his answer. But he also told me how surprised he was when his Jewish paediatrician disappeared one day.

Today, it seems to me that I was asking the wrong questions — or else I wasn’t asking the right ones. I was sceptical when my father told me that my grandfather had protected a Jewish employee at his haulage company. At school, such stories had been revealed to be self-serving lies all too often. So I sought out the man in question, and he confirmed that my grandfather really had saved him by letting him work for the family firm. The consul had been a really fine man, the employee told me shortly before he died, and he always thought of him with gratitude and respect.

Wrong question, right answer? Because what did I really know about my grandfather? No one in the Herwig household had held a high opinion of the Nazis, according to my father, and he always told me that his parents were bourgeois nationalist conservatives. I was 37 when I first asked whether my grandfather had actually been a member of the Nazi Party. The question had often lurked in the background of our conversations, and my father answered without further ado: Yes, Grandfather had been in the Nazi Party, because he had run the family business with his brother, who was a freemason, and therefore ineligible to join. ‘Someone had to join the party.’

Right question, wrong answer? I couldn’t ask my grandfather. He had died of a heart attack at home in Kassel in 1944. So I was late in learning that the old stories were far from being over. That everything we had learned at school about repression in the Adenauer period (1949–1963) had affected us, the generation swamped by history, even more directly than we thought.

Four weeks after my grandfather’s sudden death in August 1944, the sirens wailed over Kassel again. My grandmother was so inconsolable over the death of her husband that my father and his sister had to drag her into the air-raid shelter. ‘She wanted to die, and she would have if we hadn’t taken her with us,’ my father told me. A bomb fell into his nursery and destroyed the whole flat. Mother, sister, and son crept through a hole in the wall into the next-door cellar and survived.

‘Strange as it may sound, it was a stroke of luck for your grandmother that the house was bombed,’ my father said: ‘All the memories of her life beforehand were destroyed along with the house.’ My grandmother searched the rubble for days afterwards.

Then something happened that my father still describes as a miracle. Beneath the rubble and ashes, one piece of paper had survived the destruction. It was the last letter that Walter Herwig had written to his son. ‘All the best once again, my dear Günter, for this new year in your life. With love, your father.’