The New Yorker Radio Hour - Germany’s Traumatized Kriegskinder Speak Out

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

A troubling question looms over the Kriegskinder, Germans who were children during the Second World War: Was my father a mass murderer? These innocent Germans carried the guilt of their nation while their families often remained silent. The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger, whose grandfather was a Nazi, speaks with Sabine Bode, a journalist who encourages the now-elderly Kriegskinder to speak about their unacknowledged trauma. Bilger’s new book, “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” chronicles his years-long quest to understand the truth behind his family history.  This segment originally aired October 14, 2016. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Burkhard-Bilger's writing for The New Yorker has covered a wide, wide landscape from rodeos to cave exploration, from Mars to southern food, music, neuroscience, almost everything. On Burke's long list of stories, every page contains a kind of universe. But over the last few years, nearly a decade, Burke has been researching a subject much closer to home. He's been looking at the history of his own family. He grew up in Oklahoma, the child of German immigrants,

and his new book is about their generation. And it's called Fatherland, a memoir of war, conscience, and family secrets. Well, my parents are both what you call Kriegskenna, as you say. So they were born in 1935. What does that mean? Children of. That means children of war.

And that means that they're in an interesting spot psychologically. They were very young children during the war. And they carry, I think, the guilt of the war within them. And at the same time, they aren't responsible for anything. So this is kind of you're in between two. There's no question of agency. There's no question of agency. And so it was something they talked about, but they didn't really go into detail about.

My grandfather was in the Nazi party, and my mother would acknowledge that, but we would never really go into any detail about it. Burke, I have to tell you that even now, it's a startling thing. I remember when we were editing this piece and the pictures started appearing, there was a picture of your grandfather in the obvious uniform, and it was startling for me to put together this guy who I've worked with now for years, and I have great affection for and enormous regard for as a writer. And then there's his grandfather in a Nazi uniform. Tell me a little bit about him and how you think about him and how I should think about him. My grandfather was a schoolteacher in Alfing, a little village in Germany, and he was in his late 30s when the war started, and he was a fervent Nazi party member. And at a certain point, he was sent to a village in Al-Zez called Baltenheim as part of the German campaign to re-educated. these young French students and turn them into good Germans now that they were part of the German Reich.

But the fact that he was a Nazi didn't really come into our family conversations until I was late in my teen years. And my mother always talked about it as she had been sent there, but she never talked about what he did. And I think she herself, even though she had written her dissertation on the German occupation in France, She never looked into that history. And so it was kind of this blank spot. Because it was unbearable for her? I don't know if it was unbearable. I think she was scared about what she would find out.

She was scared to look into that hole. And then finally, late in the day after she'd handed in her dissertation, she went there. And she discovered actually that there was more to the story, that he had been a fervent Nazi party member, but then he had eventually collaborated with the head of the resistance in the village. And there'd been a trial or an investigation for a trial and eventually had been exonerated. And the villagers had kind of come forward to defend him. So it suddenly became a much more complicated story. And I went, I think, from having this guilty embarrassment in my family history

to having something that intrigued me and confused me. Like, how could a person be both those things? At what point did this taboo start breaking up in Germany? And he started talking about the war in traumatic terms. When did Germans feel that this was even possible? It's only been in the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, people often talk about how it really began with the work of Sabine Bordeaux, who did a lot of interviews with Kriegs-Kindan,

has written three books of oral history about them. She's a historian or psychologist? She's a journalist by trade and married to a psychiatrist and she put these books together and they kind of broke open the box. And I ask her how she got onto this big subject and what drove her to it. It started more than 20 years ago in the Balkan War. You know, TV showed the children suffering. And one day, as I'm a journalist, I ask myself, so what about the German war? children must be they're now getting pretty old or not. Why I never heard about them? Why did I never

hear how they coped with that fate? You know, what kind of silence is that? And at the beginning, I thought, well, that's an interesting story for me. I worked at the radio station at that time for the audience and nobody was interested. That's the journalist Sabina Bode, talking with our staff writer, Burkhart Bilger. will continue in a moment. Was there a fear? I mean, I know that there's a resistance to talking about German trauma and German suffering during the war, because, of course, the Germans inflicted so much suffering on the rest of the world during the war.

Is that why the radio station wasn't interested back then, do you think? Yes. And at that time, all the editors in the radio stations or in their newspapers or the people in charge, they were, they belonged to that age group. You know, so I had to wait for a change of generation that people said, oh, yeah, that's interesting. Why don't you make a piece for me? That's about my parents. Right, right.

So what was your first experience going out and trying to collect stories from Krikskinder, asking them about their experience during the war and so forth? Well, there was one thing, the way they spoke. It was either, oh, it was a funny time. We had a lot of good times, and it was a lot of advantage. and they told all those stories, actually some stories were really funny, I must say. Or it was completely without emotion. You know, like somebody is reading something in a telephone book.

The numbness remained for many of them until they got old. Right, right. I want to ask you a little bit about your own background. You had done some of your own research into your family history and war history as well, right? Was that one of the things that led you into this field? No, I had it already done when I did it. And it helped me because I had my personal piece with my family story.

Do you mind talking about that a little bit? How did you start your family research and what did you know when you started? Well, I knew my father was a Nazi. I knew my mother was a Nazi. everybody knew because they talked like Nazis almost until they died. There were these people who said, well, the way I talk about that time, everybody thinks like that, but they just don't dare to say that anymore. My father felt like a hero in a way that he was so courageous to say what he thought.

And yeah, nobody actually, nobody stopped him as a virus, I remember, as a teenager. It was very embarrassing for me, yes. I mean, what kind of things did he say, when you say the way he spoke, what kind of things would you say that were classic old Nazi thoughts? Yeah, well, what they all said. It wasn't all bad, you know, what Hitler did. He should have stopped earlier, something like that. He wasn't quite sure if the Holocaust happened or not, at least not to that extent, not with these millions. he just couldn't believe.

And so then you thought you wanted to look into his own history during the war or his father's history? What did you then research after that? Well, since it wasn't much, they told us, and after a while, but I was only able to do that after the fall of the Berlin War, because only then we had access to the archives we needed. Do you mind talking about what you found, what the background history was that you discovered? Well, he and my grandfather betrayed a Jewish relative. He was the husband of the wife.

Sorry, he was the husband of the sister of my grandfather. He tried to hide as a Jew and my father and my grandfather together helped the Gestapo to find him. He was murdered in Auschwitz. Right. So what was it like to discover that? Can you describe the moment when you found that evidence in the archives, how that felt? I tell you, it was a relief because I thought, oh, something like that in a way that he was not a mass murderer. So what it did, it did confirm me in what I always suspected and what I carried with me and said, well, listen, yeah, yeah, okay, that's the way it is. That was him. And all the relatives lied to me. That was really not nice.

That was not nice to think of that over. That he kept silent and my mother's, well, that is easily to understand. But all the relatives did the same. So you had always suspected that he had done a war crime, but you'd been afraid that it would be much something even more terrible than what he did. Yeah, yeah. My generation, born after the war and the end. end of the war or in the 50s, we all thought that was our main fear. My God, was my father a mass murderer?

I mean, when you say it's a relief, it's interesting. I know when I was looking, researching my own grandfather's history, which is ambivalent. I mean, there's evidence that he had almost courageous things during the war, and then obviously he was a Nazi party member. And, we're, we're Was in occupied France, he must have also countenance terrible things or allowed things to go by if not participated in. I don't know. You know, we all come from these families. Why do you always put questions? You don't know anything. Keep quiet.

Keep silent. Da-da-da-da-da. Yes. But your insight still has these questions. And then after a while you say, oh, I was right. That's a very good feeling. I was right. You and your brothers are very slightly apart.

I mean, they were alive during the war. You were not. Could you talk a little bit about that? What was the difference between being a Krikskind to being a Nakhkriekskind, as you would be called? I guess the main thing is when there were very small children, when they were just born in the first one, two, three years, they had parents and they had an environment of adults which felt stressed all the time, you know. Whereas me, I belong to the generations with the lowest rate of newborn.

I must say, my early remembers is, you know, I walk out the house and I'm maybe three years old or two and a half. And every adult which meets me, stop, says hello, how are you, Sabina? Nice to meet you. They were just so happy to have, see children. Yes, I was carrying the hope for a better life. You know, it's funny, that's very much my first memories, strong memories are being five years old. We moved to Germany to Karlsruhe when I was five in 1969. And my mother would take me on her shopping rounds every day.

And every store we went to, the shopkeepers were so kind, and they would give me a candy, a gummy bear, or they would give me a piece of German sausage. and it was that same. There did seem to be this hunger for youth and innocence and children in Germany, even later. Can you tell me a couple stories from people that really stuck out for you, that people told you about the kind of trauma they experienced or stories that might have, things that happened to them that might have traumatized them during the war?

The strongest one I had, and it's about a woman, and she, She practically, the whole war she was sitting in the airway center. She was, that was a harbor city, and it was bombed from the beginning to the end of the war. I mean, it was incredible what she said, that one day she missed the shelter because she wasn't fast enough running to school. And then the alarm came and she wasn't fast enough. And the doors of the bunker was closed. Then she was there alone, completely known. You can't believe it.

And in that bombing, and she said afterward, I never told anybody because I was scared they would tell me, why didn't you hurry up? And at the same time, her mother was a person she wanted her to be a happy child. And she said sometimes, why can't you be happy? And this woman had a handicap, developed a handicap, and only very late, I think she was more than 70, she realized that that came from her war childhood. She was so forgettable. She was so extremely forgettable. She forgot everything, good things, bad things.

It was her short-term memory that she, like her recent memory? And long-term, both. And then she started to reconstruct her childhood. And it was quite a process. And what happened, the long-term memory got better and the short-term memory got better. And she was enjoying her age then because she said, you know, I love learning. And it was always hard for me to learn because I couldn't keep things in mind so well. and now I'm learning all the time.

I mean, what do you think? I mean, there's certainly people who will say, why should we care about German suffering in the war? You know, again, there was so much terrible things to be, were done by Germans. Why should we care about the suffering of the Kriegskindle? What do you say to them? What do you feel about that?

I say, sorry, it is not only in Germany. I think we find the same stories in Poland. and in Russia, we find them in Cambodia, we find them in South America. That is an universal issue. Of course it varies from the history, from what happened, what kind of atrocities, how many victims, how many perpetrators. Okay, but parents cannot bear the thought that they were not able to protect their children. They're happy when children never mention that again.

You know, then they think everything is fine. We have a strong resilience. Everybody of us has, I guess, or most of us have. But when you don't know that you are traumatized, then it is hard to overcome. Right, right. Let's talk a little bit about familialaufstelon, this type of group therapy. I mean, it's, I was fascinated to discover how popular this type of group therapy is in Germany. And it seems to be a, I mean, I'll quickly describe it.

It's a type of group therapy that people often use to explore their family history. And what you do is you spend a day or two in a room with 10 other strangers. And each of you takes turns talking to the therapist for a while and talking about what you're feeling, what your problems are, and a bit about your family. history and then the patient chooses strangers from the room to represent family members from their history and those strangers then proceed to kind of almost channel the spirits of those people they've been asked to represent they have dialogues they suddenly have memories of things they did during the war and often new information arises that they'll say oh i can sense that that i was I was molested by Russian soldiers during the war, they might say,

or these new things come up. And it's become very popular in Germany, and it seems like a way in which people often explore the past when they can't discover the things they wanted to discover in the archives or their parents didn't tell them what happened. I don't know if it is a therapy. You know, it may be an initiation to start, yes? My mother, for instance, had a brother, and he died in the war the last day.

She hardly ever talked about him, and it was her dearest brother. That kind of thing is that I sometimes called the ghost of the death, yes? It is not something which you can solve, you know, with that. It can help you to start to get interested in your family story. I don't believe in healing by that. I believe in healing, I think, is a long process. I mean, war doesn't end when the weapons are silent, but war does, in fact, narrow relationships, you know. That is why so many people of your age group are visiting a familynaustelung.

And some of them wish that this is, you know, you get out and you are free. That doesn't work. Right. But it starts. I don't know if it's the one you attended. It was the same. There's a lot of crying. There's a lot of mourning. Yes.

And that is helpful. Sabina Bodei talking with the New Yorkers, Burkhart Bilker. Berk has just published the book, Fatherland, a memoir of war, conscience, and family secrets. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios. and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Frida Green, Adam Howard, Calalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline,

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