Germany: Living with history

Like my father once confessed to me, I am not a traveller who likes to spend too much time in museums  or great landmarks.  My photographs, posted daily on Facebook are more impressions of these icons, given equal value with a vibrant purple houndstooth tulip potted on a doorstep, interesting shutters and gates, or a 19th Century cast-iron post box with a white dove in relief holding a long-awaited letter.

Who doesn't like getting a letter in these days of emails and tweets?

I was also chided by friends that we barely appeared in these photos, another weakness of mine - I am behind a fourth wall of sorts, the invisible observer, coming and leaving with barely a trace save for the images I capture.  In the foggy cold, hidden behind scarves and woolen hats, we may not have left much of an impression anyway, and that's the way I like it.  I'd rather live somewhere than visit, but often don't have the luxury of the time necessary to come in from behind the wall that separates tourists from reality.

Our trip to the Black Forest region of Germany came in the late, record-breaking cold of March, a foggy, grey, wintry landscape that slid even into April, with bedraggled but persistent shoots of spring bulbs forcing their way through snow just as we were decidedly undaunted by the lack of accommodating weather.  It hardly mattered because this journey was more about the connection we made to one family in the Medieval town of Freiburg than any great structure, no matter how many hundreds of toiling years it may have taken to present itself to us.  A family that came into our lives serendipitiously and created the impetus for the spring voyage to their homeland.  To Deutchland, the Fatherland.  The images and memories of war were never far from any of our thoughts and they flowed in and out of the conversations during long nights fueled by schnapps and mutual trust.

I am a postwar baby, distant enough from the two 20th Century world wars to not feel connected to them as a witness, but as I grew up and began the inevitable questioning nature of my life as a writer I began to get images and impressions from aunts, uncles and fathers who began, not unlike the spring bulbs too early in the season, to force their way out from under the wintry silence to talk about those years.  I learned that my father had never seen action - by quirk of fate he was too thin (and had grown three inches right before he became eligible to join) to be accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force.  Although the intervention of his father, a paymaster in the army, provided him with a last-minute chance to switch from his army regiment as they readied to ship to England, he declined.  He had already bonded with his buddies and this probably saved his life.  Instead he was stationed in England where he worked as a military hospital orderly.  Seeing the gut-wrenching violence inflicted by conflict in the wounded that came in waves for treatment was enough, but not enough to give him the kind of post-traumatic stress that eventually felled his older brother as he struggled with alcohol addiction for the rest of his life.  He told me not too long ago that he opted to train for the Pacific front after Germany was defeated.  Most others were too wearied and scarred from years of fighting and were content to wait until they were de-mobbed, but my father left England almost immediately and was set to travel to a U.S. Army base (Canadians were not in the Pacific conflict).  But the war ended there too before he could make his way down.

I did grow up with a continual moving image of the stories of war. From Hogan's Heroes, to The Great Escape, King Rat, Bridge on the River Kwaii, Kelly's Heroes, later overlaid with black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, revived every time I came to know a child of one of the survivors.  I met many sons and daughters of parents who had immigrated to Canada after the war and these were men and women with scars so deep they cut into the lives of the children who were born to them decades afterwards.

Coming to Germany brought with it so many images and stereotypes, it was difficult to find a blank space with which to begin. Our hosts in Freiburg were the first Germans we truly spent time with, and their warm and generous welcome contrasted vividly with the occasional chilly glances from some of the older generation toward our multi-national family as we passed them in our travels (a new experience for us as Angelenos).  Difficulty accepting anything 'different' is a human quality and I remember feeling the same way in rural Kansas when we visited my in-laws and I'm sure it would be a very different story in multi-national cities like Berlin. These strangers who passed us were only a small part of our experience very different than the many kind and helpful innkeepers, shopkeepers and guides we met along the way. When people asked us later if we found the national character to be distant, we could only really speak with any depth to our welcoming hosts, as they were the heart and soul of our visit there, the fabric of lasting memory.   In this regard we were so lucky: Our families were destined to meet  because we'd hosted their daughter, Christine, an exchange student the previous year and her grasp of English was so good that we spent many long hours talking over the dinner table.  It formed a lasting bond that motivated us to visit her in her home town of Freiburg.

Almost at once our newly formed group fell into an easy comradarie, and we found them to be  extraordinarily forward-thinking, generous, and candidly introspective as we compared our cultural differences.  But what struck me was how seamlessly the subject of the WWII came into conversation, a subject I never would have dared broach on my own.  The first time was when we were poring over a map of the city to map out our way to various points of interest when Seigfried, who was a child during the war, pointed out that most of the buildings had been rebuilt after the area was nearly decimated in a bombing raid by the RCAF.  Siegfried was born during the war years but had children later in life.  His son, just eighteen, looked a bit askance when his father brought it up, but we took it in stride.  What was there to say?  We were simply glad that he, and the beautiful historical buildings painstakingly reconstructed to their original grandeur, had survived somehow.

References continued to pepper our evening conversations, sometimes to the relationship between Germany and the U.S., still resonating with the gratitude felt by most due to the sense of forgiveness by the Allies after the war and the desire to get the country back on its feet, in stark contrast to the policies of the Soviet Union who wanted a weak post-war neighbor to assimilate into its empire.  I would hear these references and then at night in our hotel go online and educate myself - The Berlin Airlift to a starving a city trapped inside Soviet East Germany, the building and separation of the Wall, the terror of East Berliners escaping the checkpoints, a fractured nation trying to put itself back together.

There were other conversations that touched on Germany's cultural personality, disciplined, industrious, and a hearty disposition.  A constellation of traits that at the best of times brings it prosperity (as it does today as the strongest member of the EU), and then, as can happen with a healthy tree that grows unabated until it begins to dominate everything around it and block out the sun, was what Siegfried referred to as the fear by outsiders that Germans would become 'too strong'.  Our world history is made from the fabric of conflict - thousands of years of history between nations and tribes large and small, a century encompassing two major wars; so many millions dead, so many scars, and questions as to the mystery of  our human inability to temper and control the forces that can begin so productively.


But it was the last meal we had together, Easter lunch, where the worlds came together in ways that were so unexpected.  Siegfried's younger wife, Angela, a beautifully voluptuous doppleganger for my sister Peg, had invited her mother, sister, and brother-in-law to the feast and we sat at a long table laden with traditional holiday food prepared for us.  Not everyone spoke English at this meal and there was a lively interchange of both languages, translated and commented on, and it was nearing the end of the meal when Christine was scrolling through photos on her iPad and found several of her mother and father's ancestors.  These old photographs inevitably led to stories of the young men pictured who had been in the wars, and Siegfried then left for a moment and came back with a packet of letters tied in a string.  He explained they were from his relative who had been in the Russian Front in the latter part of the last war.  Written on onion skin, the envelopes bearing the familiar stamp of Hitler's Wehrmacht (Military), and written in orderly script with a fountain pen, Christine opened one and read the account of misery from a young soldier who would soon die, a lonely boy who despaired of ever seeing his family again, who railed against the empty promises of his superiors who told him they would soon be home - "they have said this for years", he wrote.  He seemed to have no answer for his purpose in a cold and desolate land where he was stranded, and there would never been a definitive one for the Germans who would inherit and grapple with his failure.

I happened to have on my iPhone, photographs of a diary that my aunt had given me last year to copy - a small pocket-size red-leather daily calendar carried by my grandfather during the first war, written in cramped pencil as he laboriously recorded the battles raging around him as he hunkered down in his trench, the accounts ending only when he was shot in the leg and removed to a hospital where he wrote pages and pages with the refrain - "today it is very bad, the pain is very bad."  Although he almost died from his wounds, an infection that was controlled by a miracle in pre-antibiotic days, he survived to go home though his brother, Townley, the handsome, cocky, and brave younger brother, did not. Townley was one of Lord Strathcona's Horse, a famous armored mounted unit that ended a centuries-old tradition with one last charge at Moreuil Wood in March, 1918.  Despite his assurances in a letter home that he felt invincible, he wasn't.

Siegfried then told me his father had also been in the Somme - and imagining as we had to, the men opposite each other in this desolate place, we sat in silence at the table considering the testament in these documents, an extraordinary connection of the pain and suffering brought on by war, the prices paid, the loss of innocence and purpose.

So many images of Germany remain, many of them magical, as we toured a wintry landscape filled with picture-book villages, and the cobbled streets of towns rich with history.  Some of them were unbidden, as the many times I would stare out into the forests and wonder if I had to flee would it be dark and silent enough to shield me.  I couldn't help it. I want to know my own true nature, what would I have done faced with surviving against such odds. My history is not yet written, not all of it, and these exercises are not limited to the Black Forest or the formidable winter Alps separating death from freedom.  We live in an uncertain world and madness bubbles up and reminds us that we are all called to be watchful.  Here, in the land of war and peace, we were by the grace of this family, linked to the history of a place still so fresh in the souls of all its inhabitants, whether they spoke to us of it or not.  We were so fortunate to be entrusted with the bridge where we could meet and feel out this connection.

This memory remains above all.