Growing up in post-war Germany was a strange experience. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I remember gazing at bullet holes lodged in the walls of the small chapel around the corner. The ruins from the war remained, a good 20 years later. We kids were cautioned not to go into abandoned buildings because mines might still be hidden under dilapidated structures. We were told, “You could lose an arm or a leg.” My family had come from the “East,” those places which were now, after the war, Russia, Poland, or the DDR. We felt a lingering sense of being refugees, “not from here.” In muffled tones, memories of painful war experiences and loss were exchanged between family members and neighbors. So often I felt like hiding under a table so that I could escape the lingering sense of gloom.
In the beginning of the ‘70s, Willie Brand’s new social-democratic government swiftly and firmly tore the scabs off from the barely crusted-over wounds. As teens, we learned that we Germans had killed 6,000,000 Jews, and another million gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally ill people. Before that “end-solution,” as Nazis called it, there were years where Jews lived cooped up in designated areas, without sufficient food, medication, and sanitary conditions. Most had to abandon their homes and were forced to leave at a moment’s notice, just to be herded away. This dreadful information, shared by our teachers, was accompanied by movie presentations of concentration camps, and of brutal persecution.
Many of us as teens had not heard much about these terrible atrocities before. We all knew something horrible had happened, but we did not know exactly what it was. But there was this pervasive and terrible feeling of secrets, shame, and wrongness. As teens, we were even more confused when we went home to talk to our parents, and they often reacted with silence, frustration, and defensiveness. So many questions occupied our minds. Were we Germans basically bad and cruel people? Was something wrong with our genetic makeup? Was this a condition we would pass on to our children?