In 2022, I began working with an extraordinary German teacher. She’s a cabaret singer. She brings a performer’s flair to her teaching, sometimes singing words or phrases to help me pronounce them. She can act out the difference between schwimmen and baden, and also between Angst and Weltschmerz. She effortlessly moves between four or five languages and suggests that we should think of languages as on a fluid continuum, so that speaking other languages is more like cross-dressing or going in drag—an adventure, not an ordeal. For her, intersectionality should be interlingual. Her father was an orchestra conductor; her husband, a mime; and her son, a documentary filmmaker. She likes to meet me late afternoon, Eastern Time, late in her European evening, saying it’s a time that those in the theater are accustomed to performing. She wears heavy eye-liner, perhaps like she wears on the stage, and she can make a lesson on Zoom feel like a Weimar cabaret.
She’s not exactly teaching me German. I’m studying Hungarian and don’t want to try to acquire two new languages at once. No, I’ve engaged her to help me with all the letters I found in the attic. Together, we’re reading everything that my grandfather in America received from his German family from the late-1920s through the early 1950s. The letters are handwritten in German, full of Bavarian regional dialect and antiquated linguistic and cultural references. My teacher is my guide through these letters. She reads them aloud to me and together we make meaning of what’s there. Her own mother was from the same region as my grandfather’s family, with similar linguistic and cultural ways. The letters remind her of her mother’s stories about life in the tumultuous twentieth century.
The main letter writer and the protagonist of the family story is Tante Clär, my grandfather’s sister and the matriarch of the Boss family in Germany. When she visited America, Tante Clär played a pivotal role in my mother’s childhood. My mother treasured her memory for the rest of her life. To this day, two or three generations later, Tante Clär inspires a reverence among her descendants on both sides of the Atlantic.
It was Clär’s 1946 letter that reported the war’s death toll to my grandfather: his mother, sister, two nephews, a niece, and two brothers-in-law. I nearly knew this letter by heart. It was the letter that I remembered on April 20th, 2020, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombing and Erev Yom HaShoah. Since reading the rest of her letters, I can better imagine the desperate circumstances surrounding Tante Clär when she wrote it—cold and hungry, her family in mourning and her town in rubble.
In the years immediately following the war, Clär sent her brother over seventy letters, totaling over thirty-five thousand words. Clär’s letters offer a window into life in postwar Germany. For me, reading them has been a revelation, helping me to understand not only life seven decades ago, but also more about the family we visited in Germany and about the family milieu that my mother grew up in. My German teacher and I usually read a letter or two per session, so it’s taken us a year to follow along with Clär as she passes from the war’s bitter end to the darkness of cold, hungry postwar winters, to the early glimmers of hope and normalcy, and finally to recovery as the forties become the fifties and life in Germany is like that of most of its Western European neighbors.
While none of the letters equal the drama of that first post-war letter from 1946, they offer a contemporaneous portrait of life during one of the most critical periods of modern German history. It’s a period that has inspired a remarkable literature, from Rossellini’s groundbreaking 1948 film, Germany, Year Zero, filmed on location in the rubble of Berlin, to Harald Jähner’s recent reconsideration of these years in his 2022 Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich. Clär’s letters could inspire a book in their own right, as they offer an intimate portrait in the quotidian life of middle aged German mother and her children alongside (mostly unmentioned) drama of life in the rubble, occupied by American soldiers, crowded by refugees, and facing constant hunger, deprivation, and cold.
Having read them all, Clär’s formula has become familiar: her letters all begin with an update about the latest package from America and what joy it has given them. Then they express effusive gratitude for the lifesaving bounty, occasionally despairing about how it will be impossible to ever reciprocate the kindness. After that, there are updates about the household: the children and other relations, as well as the refugees who live with them. Then there’s usually something about the conditions, ranging from the weather to the economy, and, finally, there is the occasional oblique request, usually for something simple (thread or coffee), and always to benefit the children, never anything for herself. She signs off with queries about the family in America and increasingly strong hints that they would appreciate a letter from my grandfather.
Mentions of their emotional state or the depths of their hardship are few and far between, often offered only in retrospect, sometimes years after the fact. Emotional introspection is almost nonexistent, and even less is said about politics or the war. Clär keeps her emotions on a tight leash, but as the years pass, she becomes more melancholy.
For raw drama, none rivals that first postwar letter, from January 1946. In it, she details the deaths of seven members of her immediate family and concludes in a tone that is singular among all the letters: “This is the lost war. All our men are regarded as criminals. One can only envy the dead.”
She will use that exact phrase—“One can only envy the dead”—on two more occasions over the years, which makes me think that it was something she thought about a lot. But she will never again mention how the war ended or the guilt or innocence of their men. In spite of being surrounded by destruction—and of her daughter Irmgard’s full-time work clearing the rubble—she rarely mentions it. Only in late 1946, when she sees Munich for the first time since the war does she exclaim, “Oh, what has become of our Munich? It’s all ruins and dust…And I think it will stay like this for years.” The train journey from Memmingen to Munich, a distance of about sixty miles, has become an arduous, day long affair. It upsets Clär, and she writes, “The war is over a year and a half now, but it is really worse now than before. But one can do nothing but hope that it will be better someday. For us, one thinks with a pained courage [wehmut] and melancholy,… about how it was before…” [edit translation, check original]. Even a year later, the despair remains: “Well, today, I have written enough about how it looks like in this terrible Germany. Everything is not beautiful. It’s hard to believe that I will live through it and that it will better. It is all so hopeless.” [“Es ist alles so hoftungslos.”] (17 September 1947).
The winter spanning 1946 and 1947 is cold and hungry. Clär rarely complains directly, but she describes the maladies her teenage son and daughter suffer and how they can’t work or heat the house for the lack of coal. More evocative of their desperate times are her descriptions of how they pass their days. In the late autumn, before the first snowfall, she describes foraging in farmers’ fields and orchards for any potatoes or apples that might have been overlooked in the harvest. Throughout the winter, they venture outside in the bitter cold to search the woods for firewood or scavenge wood from the rubble. They ration their meagre share of bread and coal to heat one room in the morning and cook one meal a day. Their pipes freeze. When Irmgard works cleaning rubble, she’s lucky and gets to eat in the refugee soup kitchens. They have no materials to mend their years-old shoes and go without adequate clothing. They get colds that last weeks and coughs that linger on for months. They shop at the black market, where the brutality of the economy is on stark display. Clär puts in plainly, “If you have nothing, you get nothing” [“Wer nicht hat, bringt nichts”] .
Yet Clär puts on a brave face. Her letters are full of a can-do spirit and a marked absence of self-pity. Her refrain, which she repeats in nearly every letter, is “Well, it will work somehow” [“Nun es wird auch gehen”]. It’s a phrase that describing everything from making a recipe without a key ingredient to sharing their small flat with three refugees. It simultaneously reflects an acceptance of their fate and a resilience that points to the way forward.
Facing constant shortages and poverty, she writes that “we Germans have become paupers.” They even invent a word to describe the way they scavenge for anything and hoard what little they have: they call it hamstering (hamstern), a self-depreciating nod to their rodent-like behavior (similar to the way we use “squirreling away” in English). Whether hamster or squirrel, these words put a cute face on this era of desperate scarcity. Perhaps the cute face can take the edge off the avarice that tore at the era’s social fabric.
The packages that my grandmother sent to Germany were a lifeline through this period. Years later, Clär’s son would tell my mother that the packages saved his mother’s life. Clär vividly describes the pleasure they take from every item of food—from her children’s first taste of canned pineapple to the amazing things boys will trade you for a single stick of chewing gum. But most of all, the sugar and fat allow them to satisfy their constant hunger, and the coffee even gives them something to offer guests when they visit. For sixteen-year-old Walter, who had outgrown his clothes and shoes during the war and could only wear what he found in his dead father’s closet, there were new clothes and shoes. One package brought all of them their first new underclothes in five years. The packages were such a lifeline that when I returned to Germany in 2016, my family there was still talking about them. No matter that no one in 2016 had been alive in 1946 to see them, they had taken on legendary proportions.
My German teacher is not only a cabaret performer but also a visual artist, and she will often pull a quote from a letter and make a quick pen and ink sketch, brushed with coffee, wine, or juice to give an effect not unlike watercolors. Memories of postwar packages from America featured prominently in her family, too, and Clär’s descriptions of the scarcity and the packages from America inspired her to paint this:
* * *
One of the most famous psychoanalytic works about postwar Germany was written by the husband and wife team of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. Their 1967 book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens was a bestseller in Germany (translated and published in the US as The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior). It argues that postwar Germany had failed to reckon with their past. They had been unable to mourn not only their own war dead, but also their moral standing and their identity itself. The argument would inspire the social movements of the ’68 generation and would be credited with influencing the change of Germany’s governing party in 1969.
I see the dynamics that the Mitscherlich’s describe in how Clär reckons with her losses. Her father died in 1938; her husband in 1942; and her mother in 1943. Her nephews were killed in 1941 and 1943. And her sister, brother-in-law, and niece, along with over six hundred of her townspeople, were killed in the April 20th 1945 Allied bombing. Yet among the thirty-five thousand words she writes, their memories occupy only a few sentences.
She writes that the first thing they did on Christmas 1947 was to go to the cemetery. And for several years, she writes a letter around the anniversary of the April 20th bombing and mentions her sister Lina and her family, the Scheffels.
21 April 1947
Yesterday it was two years that the Scheffels lost their lives in the air attack. If today you look back, you think of it completely differently [(Wenn Mann rückwärts shaut, denkt man ganz anders drüber [darüber] als damals.)]… You start to envy all the dead. But first of all to give them their well-earned peace from the bottom of our heart. If you think about it, at least they haven’t had to withstand all the troubles, the shame that we have…
[Gestern waren es nun schon 2 Jahre, daß Scheffels bein [?] Fliegerangriff ihr Leben lassen [umpten (??)]. Wenn man heute rückwärts schaut denkt man ganz anders drüber als damals. Man fängt an alle Toten zu beneiden, vor allem aber ihnen ihre Ruhe von Herzen zu gömen (?). Wenn man bedenkt was für ärger (?), Ferdruß (?) und wieviel Schrerein (?) ihnen erspart bleiben!]
* * *
Years pass, though, and recovery begins. Clär writes more about the constant hunger and cold of those first winters only years after the fact, from a safe distance. For her, it’s as if their rising fortunes allow her to look back and see just how desperate the past had been. She finally feels safe enough to reflect.
It does something for you to have these moments. We are yes relatively good and we are health now. But there is an unending feeling of misery. And you don’t know how to help … You ask yourself if life has any meaning
“Aber es gibt so unendlich viel Jammer und Eland … und wenn man da doch nicht recht zu helfen helfen kann, wie es notwendig wäre und man auch gern möchte, da frage man sich oft, ob das Leben Sinn und Zweck hat”
These moments of melancholy are rare, though, and typically followed by a dismissive, “Well, somehow it will work.” “Nun es wird auch gehen.”
* * *
But as I read about those winters—how they lacked coal and gas, how they had refugees cramped in their houses with them, how meager the rations and how scarce the basic necessities—I can’t help but make the comparison with my Jewish family. My father’s cousin Elmer was in the same winter temperatures, just over 200 miles away, left to die at Mauthausen concentration camp. At the same time, his father Lajos was dying at Buchenwald, less than three hundred miles away. They were colder and hungrier than any of the postwar Germans ever could be. They were without anyone in America sending them packages. Instead they were prisoners of a totalitarian regime hellbent on their murder and the genocide of their people, even up until the last hours of the war.
Somehow the most likable traits of my German relatives are the ones that make me tense with the comparison. The letters paint a vivid picture of the Germans resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. They are remarkable for their can-do attitude and acceptance of their circumstances (“Well, somehow it will work.” “Nun es wird auch gehen.”) They never once complain about the American occupiers. They never once defend Germany in the war. They have been through a catastrophe, losing millions of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Their body politic had been sickened by a totalitarian, genocidal evil; and their country had been flattened by bombs, occupied by its enemies, and flooded by millions of refugees. Yet the vast majority of the letters dealt with very practical matters—meals they make with the contents of the packages; how they celebrate Christmas and birthdays, even under great scarcity; how they share their home with refugees; etc. There are occasional memories of the departed and a bittersweet longing for a return to normalcy, but in general, they are remarkable for their equanimity.
What stands out most is the undaunted spirit of this German household: the can-do spirit of women making a life without any of the men in their lives, their elders gone, and any plans they had for their future, dashed. My German family doesn’t curse its fate even as they imagine my grandfather living prosperously in the land of the victors. They have nothing but gratitude for the packages, which both provide the necessities and also connect them to a world beyond the wreckage, to a life beyond the immediate task of getting by.
Yet the contrast with the Marmorstein’s is almost unbearable. Clär asked for wool to mend her son’s wool socks and sweater, to keep warm against the winter chill. Did Elemer, Erwin or Lajos have socks or a sweater? For Clär and her family, the coffee and American canned food can be the highlights of their entire season. What were the highlights of the year for the Marmorstein’s? In Germany, they saved lard to have enough for a Christmas cake to share with their family. The Marmorstein’s holidays were spent with war refugees, stateless and far from home, their past destroyed, their family slaughtered. While Clär sent several letters a month to her brother, my Boss grandfather, my Marmorstein grandfather waited anxiously in Cleveland, fearing the worst, as news of his brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews trickled in—some good, mostly bad—over the course of years, from refugee camps across Europe.
What gives the Germans the right to get up, dust themselves off, and get on with things? What about Lajos Marmorstein’s sons Erwin and Elmer? What about my father’s other cousins, fellow survivors Bundi, Gabi, Edith, Munci, Armin, and Erzie? What about a half million other Hungarian Jews, or three million other Polish Jews, or millions of others in Ukraine and Lithuania, Romania and Czechoslovakia? They had been gassed and incinerated, slaughtered in mass graves and burned alive. The Germans spent five years cleaning up the rubble of their flattened cities before the economic miracle of the 1950s returned them to the top of the heap. It’s taken Jews three generations just to get our numbers back to where they were before the Germans killed six million of us.
This is all obvious from our vantage point, eighty years later but how was Clär to know? There’s plenty of reason to give Clär the benefit of the doubt and assume she knew nothing of the Final Solution, at least until some years after the war. In fact, there was a Nazi POW camp near Memmingen where the POW’s were treated well; they were even permitted to leave the camp during the days to work for employers in Memmingen. Was this what she thought of when she heard about the camps?
Moreover, in their circumstances—cold and hungry, their traumatized lives made small by the daily struggle to survive; their vision extending no further than the next meal or the chill in their bones—even if she were confronted with the truth, how could there be a real reckoning? In her book Learning from the Germans, Susan Nieman relates a conversation she has with historian [?] Jan Philip, who tells her that, “I don’t think it [the ‘working off process’] could have happened earlier [than in the 90s, post-reunification]. [According to Adorno} they were psychologically overwhelmed. Between the bombs and the losses in the families, they were so focused on the horror as a whole, they could no longer distinguish between guilt and misery.” (Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman. Chapter 2, “Sins of the Fathers”, emphasis added).
It might have been too soon for Clär to recognize her responsibility. I’ve never been as hungry and as cold as she was during those winters, so if she couldn’t distinguish guilt from misery, how can I blame her? Yet if Clär didn’t bear responsible, who did? She lived in Bavaria, where Hitler found his earliest supporters and where his popularity never wavered. Her husband and brother-in-law had been Brown Shirts, her nephews fought in the Wehrmacht, her daughter served in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and her future son-in-law, in the SS. Kristalnacht, the well-organized pogram, had taken a particularly cruel form in Memmingen. Indeed, it had been extended into a second day, so that Memmingen’s synagogue could be destroyed without damaging the surrounding buildings, an effort which required the cooperation and coordination of the local population, not just a mob of hooligans. Was her husband involved? Her brother-in-law? Why wouldn’t they have been?
And what if they had been? What gives me the right to see myself as the heir of the Marmorstein righteous victimhood rather than bearing the burden of the Boss perpetrators?
I’m divided. Immersing myself in the letters opens my heart to empathy and fellow-feeling with Clär and her family. She’s an amazing woman, who had an enormous impact on my mother, and who is revered in the family memory. Yet when I hear the testimony of holocaust survivors, my heart hardens. Every story of atrocity, torture and cruelty inspires a determination in me to never normalize the “everyday Germans” who did nothing. And alongside my visceral horror comes a deep-seeded urge for vengeance.
After a lifetime of reading and hearing about the Holocaust, I feel like I’m familiar with the depths and varieties of the cruelty and savagery of the Final Solution. Perhaps we all have atrocities or tortures that get etched into our minds. Perhaps it’s the Jews locked in the synagogue and burned alive, or maybe the ones lined up at the edge of a pit and shot. Perhaps it’s the image of mothers in the gas chamber with their babies, or those kept alive to be raped and tortured or used in medical experiments. For me, it’s a brief excerpt I read quite recently from Edith Eger’s The Choice.
“Here in hell,… I have seen flesh defiled in unforgivable cruelty. A boy tied to a tree while the SS officers shot his foot, his hand, his arms, an ear—an innocent child used as target practice. Or the pregnant woman who somehow made it to Auschwitz without being killed outright. When she went into labor, the SS tied her legs together. I’ve never seen agony like hers.” (Chapter 6)
This paragraph of Eger’s memoir won’t let me go. Its only rival is one I read thirty years ago—I think it was in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism though when I go looking for it now, I can’t find it. It’s also nothing more than a brief vignette: a woman gives birth, this time in the medical facility at Auschwitz, and this time the baby was delivered alive, only to be killed in front of its mother, before she herself was shot.
I first read Arendt around the same time that I became a father, and I read Eger’s book in a year when both my daughters were pregnant with my grandchildren. Unlike the weight of the genocide as a whole, which fills me with despair at the loss, these incidents evoke a different feeling: these individual cruelties fill me with a vengeful bloodlust.
“Oh, you Germans,” a voice inside me says. “Look what you have done. Oh, poor Tante Clär, asking her brother for missing ingredients for Christmas dinner and a little yarn for knitting. You and your people turned the world into a death machine, you and your people set out to annihilate my people, for I am a Jew and you are a German. Go on then, whine on about your hunger and cold. Fuck yourself and your hamstering. Fuck you and your criminal men and your envying the dead. Fuck all of you.”
Yet what does it mean for me to suddenly be so sure of my own moral rectitude? Is this when I adopt a black-and-white conception of identity? Is this where I am suddenly so certain of my goodness and the evil of the other? Is this what happens when you imagine your back against the wall? Your vision narrows, complexities are erased, and you prepare to kill or be killed? Is this an atavistic fight-or-flight response, the legacy of centuries of Jewish persecution?
Sometimes I start to articulate my own identity and I trip over words. I feel compelled to repeat, for the dozenth time, that I’m Jewish. I was raised Jewish. I’ve always been nothing but Jewish. I first studied Judaism decades ago at Sunday school, and most recently just a week ago, at a weekly Talmud reading group. I’ve practiced some version of Judaism—belonging to a synagogue, attending services, observing the holidays—for my whole life. I’m Jewish, right? How could it be otherwise?
But of course I’m German, too. And not the progeny of German Jews, but the grandson of a Christian German, of a Bavarian whose brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews were Nazis. My great uncles were Nazis. My favorite relative, the warm and funny Karl in Munich, was in the SS. These were real Nazis. I can’t disown this part of my family, can I? Any more than today’s Germans can disown their ancestors.
My identity confusion may be unique to me, but the issues at hand are tearing our culture apart. How do we deal with the crimes of the past? How do we manage legacies of victimhood and perpetrator-hood (is it any wonder that there’s no such word?)? What stories do we tell our children? What books do we ban? How do we take—and deny—responsibility for the past?
These debates are tearing America apart. Nazi marches on Confederate Statues. There are bans on teaching Critical Race Theory and there is panic about gender identity. Suddenly everybody cares about which stories get told, from whose perspective, with what message—it’s nearly too much to bear.
Yet I’m sure of one thing: my own black-and-white thinking, my own certainty of my Judaism and my fiery rage at the Nazis isn’t the moral clarity we need, rather it’s the black-and-white thinking, the simplistic us-versus-them splitting, that’s part of the problem, not the solution. The constant back-and-forth in my own mind is a fractal of larger debates about guilt and innocence, victim and perpetrator. My constant questions: who deserves sympathy and who, scorn? Who gets mourned, and who is better forgotten? Who deserves an apology and who should apologize? If I’m not careful, I can become as polarized as our world.
It’s always tempting to judge—the good parts and the bad parts, the lovable and the hateable, the heroes and the scapegoats. Judging is one of life’s dirty little pleasures—from celebrity scandals to televangelist hypocrisy, from cancel-worthy speech to cell phone videos of appalling racism. We love it. And how can you judge anything if you can’t judge Nazis? At some point, judging the Nazi became an indulgence we could share. It’s secretly pleasurable, as we can enjoy feeling purified of our own sadistic urges, our own us-vs-them tendencies, and our own potential for cruelty. Instead, we can direct all these urges onto an enemy we can all agree deserves it. This isn’t some wild speculation; it’s simply how projection works. It’s how we’ve learned to use Nazis, at the level of the individual and the collective. They serve a purpose that nothing else can: they ease our individual and collective conscience. As Susan Neiman writes in Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, “To put the matter in psychoanalytic terms, the focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don’t want to know about our own national crimes.”
So I try not to judge myself, even my Nazi parts. If I were a judge determining guilt or innocence, or if I were a legislator passing laws, or even just a voter deciding how to cast my vote, then I would need to judge. But inside my own mind, all I need do is empathize—not only with the pain and suffering, but also the rage and hatred; not only with those who carry the painful truths, but also those who have had to forget them to survive. Who am I to judge? I know one thing for sure: it’s only hubris to believe that I would have done any differently in their shoes.
Jack-August 