Broken Lives Read online

  The impact of parental religion on growing children ranged all the way from enthusiastic commitment to total disinterest. Members of Adventist sects such as the New Apostolic Church “were very active in their faith,” for they expected the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Against outside skeptics, the congregation rallied around their apostles, generating a close community in which parishioners such as the parents of Edith Schöffski married.47 More frequent by far were the cultural Protestants or Catholics who continued a nominal affiliation, baptized their children, and celebrated church holidays, but no longer attended services. At the other extreme were the totally secular Liberals or Socialists who no longer had any connection to an organized faith. They tended to transmit a humanist morality based on the German classics.

  Yet another significant division among Germans was their regional origin. The bond to landscape and dynasty produced different identities. Benno Schöffski’s family, for instance, hailed from East Prussia, “the land of the dark forests and crystal clear lakes.” Their farm was located in the Samland, famous for its steep cliffs towering above the Baltic beaches. Living at the Reich’s Eastern border, the East Prussians were a heavyset people, slow and ponderous, who rolled their r’s and used Slavic terms. The seashore was a tourist magnet, with famous resorts such as Cranz, to which steamers came from afar. After Herr Schöffski’s promotion to higher rank in the post office, the family moved to the regional capital, Königsberg, the proud trading city of Immanuel Kant. The shock of their 1945 expulsion from East Prussia cast a nostalgic glow on later memories: “The love of one’s home becomes powerful and conscious only when one sees and feels what one has lost.”48

  A special East German region was Silesia, located between Poland and Czechoslovakia and contested between Austria and Prussia. Containing important coal mines along the Oder River and providing many immigrants for Berlin, this province had a strong regional identity. Moreover, its Riesengebirge mountain range was a favorite tourist destination for hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. Ruth Weigelt grew up in one of the mountain huts on top of the Hochstein peak, while Ursula Mahlendorf hailed from the small town of Strehlen and Fritz Stern from the cosmopolitan city of Breslau, in which Catholics, Protestants, and Jews tolerated each other. It was a region of mountain myths around the willful giant Rübezahl, celebrated by the poet Gerhard Hauptmann. Having held out until the bitter end in 1945, Silesia was an important source of postwar refugees and home to a minority of ethnic Germans, even after its incorporation into Poland.49

  In the West was “a quite marvelous place of home,” the university city of Giessen, located in Hesse on the Lahn River. Around 1900, it was still a traditional town with a gothic city hall, a market square, and an urban church towering over half-timbered houses that lined narrow cobblestone streets. The Schultheis family owned a “very cozy old house” on the market street that provided “a rare refuge which comprised the entire scope of life, such as living quarters and kitchen, a fur store and workshop, storerooms, and attic under one roof.” Though also predominantly Protestant, the Hessians were a more lively bunch, open to novelties, adept at trade, and interested in scientific discoveries. Heinz Schultheis later recalled, “For us boys the many sheds and storehouses were an El Dorado of mysterious labyrinthine corners, steps, ladders, walls of boards, dark passages, where one could build hiding places and castles from discarded cartons and slats.”50

  Typical of more Catholic regions was the valley of the Rhine, celebrated by the Romantics for its castles and wine but politically embattled with the French. The Debus family lived on a succession of barges, ships about three hundred feet long that were towed by a tug between the Ruhr Basin and the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The usual crew were the captain and his wife, two sailors, and one ship’s boy, for whom landing in a foreign city created “an indescribably exciting atmosphere.” Several barges were tied onto a tug in order to carry coal to Holland and iron ore to the forges of the Ruhr. Loading was hard physical work, piloting extended to all daylight hours, and accidents were frequent, allowing little time to enjoy the picturesque scenery. On shore, the family made its home in Kaub, known for its medieval midriver custom station. Living on the water left the Debus children little time for formal schooling; their attendance was limited to the winter, when the river was frozen.51

  By contrast, rural Swabia in the South still had many quaint farming villages, dominated by hidebound traditions. Agnes Moosmann was born into a cooperative cheese-dairy family in Bodnegg, close to Lake Constance. Her parents collected the milk in heavy fifty-liter cans from local farmers who had a handful of cows, separated the fat, and made butter and various kinds of soft and hard cheeses. As long as “the milk was clean and cool,” it could be turned into a superior product, which was sold in market towns like Ravensburg. This endless work was governed by the seasons and centered on religious holidays, organized by the local parish priest. Even without elaborate toys, the children played with the farm animals and did their chores from an early age. In the winter, they sledded down hills. In the summer, they swam in the farm ponds. School concentrated on the “three R’s.” Only singing provided some entertainment.52 This was a stable world into which machines such as centrifuges, telephones, and cars were only beginning to intrude.

  The most exciting place to grow up in was Berlin. The rapidly expanding city had many faces: It was the capital of the Empire, the seat of the Hohenzollern court, an international metropolis, and a hub of manufacturing, all at the same time. Hence, Transylvanian journalist Fritz Klein was happy to move there as editor in chief of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, an industry-subsidized newspaper of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s German People’s Party. During the receptions in his “grand apartment,” Klein could hobnob with the Weimar establishment and campaign for the overthrow of “the shameful treaty of Versailles.” While he welcomed his guests in a tailcoat bedecked with his World War I medals, his wife “wore her long evening dress with quiet and self-assured elegance.” But less-fortunate lower-middle-class families also loved the city due to its amusement parks, movie houses, and leading department stores.53

  Social class, religious affiliation, and regional residence combined to form four distinctive political camps, which propagated competing visions of what Germans should be like. Eberhard Scholz-Eule, a Silesian refugee, characterized the politics of his father’s milieu: “In our family a German national outlook prevailed as with most estate owners.” In practice, that meant being a Hohenzollern loyalist, belonging to the Protestant church, admiring the military, and coming from east of the Elbe River. Scholz-Eule’s grandfather was addressed only as “captain of the cavalry.” The boys “played with wooden swords and a black-white-red flag,” indicating their loyalty to the Prussian king.54 This nationalist outlook idolized Prince Bismarck and opposed many aspects of industrialization. The conservatism of the German National People’s Party appealed especially to landowners, officers, public officials, traditional Protestants, and even some farmers and artisans.

  The party’s chief antagonists were the Liberals, drawn largely from the educated and commercial segments of the urban middle class. These professionals and businessmen believed in the necessity of progress through education, self-help, and individual responsibility—traits to which they owed their own success in life. Erich Eyck, for instance, was a lawyer and journalist who spent his energy “on the general defense of the rule of law and of the parliamentary and democratic system” of government. In order to practice these convictions, he joined the left-liberal German Democratic Party, was elected to the Berlin-Charlottenburg city council, and often gave speeches in the Democratic Club. Like other assimilated Jews, he “identified himself with Germany and culturally felt a deep bond to her.”55 These moderate progressives were convinced that they were entitled to a leadership role—but unfortunately they lacked the mass following that was necessary to prevail in elections.

  A third camp comprised the Catholic subculture t
hat rallied around the Church in order to defend its faith in an increasingly secular society. Its regional centers were in the Rhineland and Bavaria, but Catholics formed a sizable diaspora in other areas as well. In the Swabian countryside of Agnes Moosmann, life centered around the church and the priest, especially during the many religious holidays. Bismarck’s charge of national unreliability in the Kulturkampf led to the formation of a Center Party that used shifting parliamentary allegiances to uphold the organizational autonomy of the Church hierarchy, the sanctity of religious marriage, and the educational independence of parochial schools. Through a dense network of civic associations and colorful holiday celebrations, educated Catholics such as Joachim Fest’s father created a cohesive identity in a modernizing world. One cultural battleground was Protestant-Catholic intermarriage. The Church refused to give its blessing to such unions, claiming that couples “lived in sin” unless the Protestant partner was willing to convert.56

  A final grouping was the labor movement, represented by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was still considered subversive by the imperial authorities. Many industrial workers found the shift from farm to factory labor and from village to city life quite difficult. They were paid too little and often laid off. Resenting such deplorable conditions, a worker named Hans Schirmer developed “a hope for a better socialist society with more solidarity and transnational” understanding. While the trade unions struggled with employers for better pay and working conditions, the SPD grew into the largest party in the Reichstag in spite of Bismarck’s efforts to suppress it with anti-Socialist laws and a social insurance scheme. Due to its persecution, the labor movement also developed an independent subculture, ranging from public lectures to sports clubs and singing societies.57 But it was internally divided between moderate reformers and radical revolutionaries who split into competing Social Democratic and Communist parties in 1918.

  Because most of the parents of this book’s subjects were born during the 1890s, they grew up in the Wilhelmine Empire and experienced the prewar years as the high point of German success. In spite of all the social, religious, regional, and political cleavages, the bulk of ordinary citizens were “loyal to the Kaiser,” seeing the ostentatious Wilhelm II as an incarnation of the new nation’s progress. In their daily lives, they could observe a real improvement of their living conditions through increased pay, more leisure time, and better housing. In spite of rapid urbanization, the Empire stood for “peace, security and order,” a world of fixed hierarchies challenged only by the disadvantaged from below.58 While they might argue vociferously about politics, most people were proud of Germany’s growing reputation abroad and ready to support its imperialist efforts to secure a “place in the sun.” As a result, most of the Wilhelmine cohort adopted a cheerful optimism, even if workers such as Gertrud Koch’s father continued to struggle “for a better world.”59

  In spite of initial enthusiasm, the First World War turned into an awful nightmare when the magnitude of suffering at the front and at home became clear. Regardless of class or creed, young men volunteered for military service, feeling somehow left out if not accepted. At the tender age of seventeen, Edith Schöffski’s father “went to war out of a spirit of adventure. He was a courageous, brave, and companionable soldier, was promoted to sergeant, and received the Iron Cross first class.” But when “seeking to help a severely wounded comrade, he was buried in a trench.” Though eventually found and dug out, he was never quite the same afterward. In millions of families, sons were killed, while survivors were maimed or disease-ridden. During the British “hunger blockade,” many women desperately sought to keep the home fires burning, trying to avert starvation by eating sugar beets and making do with roasted grain as coffee.60 Due to military censorship, the loss of the long struggle came as a profound shock.

  Defeat and revolution hardly brought the kind of peace for which Germans had so intensely longed during four years of fighting. In November 1918 a naval revolt chased away the Kaiser and installed the democratic Weimar Republic rather than a more radical Communist regime. But “even after the war was long over, there was hunger and need.” According to Karl Härtel, the economic conditions were “so miserable” that they could hardly have been worse. “Germany was on course to become ungovernable and moved inexorably toward chaos.” Moreover, the Allied peace conditions seemed inspired by hatred and revenge. “Newspapers of all political stripes wrote about the dictated [peace] of Versailles which was bound to lead to the total collapse of the largest economic power in Europe.”61 Moreover, the occupation of the Rhineland by French troops triggered widespread resentment. The transition to a peaceful life was therefore a difficult struggle for young parents under conditions of hyperinflation and intermittent civil war.

  Gradually the effort to “revive the good old days” and get back to normal took hold, even if the circumstances were more difficult than before. All the talk about “the lost war” and the harsh peace only “reinforced the defiance of middle-class Germans.” But life went on. People made do with fewer resources, inventing ingenious survival strategies. They grew vegetables in every available plot of land, even raising tobacco plants on balconies and windowsills. Women also went to work to add a bit of extra income, either sewing things at home or accepting menial jobs outside the home. Even if they had to work hard, most people “still got by.” Looking for romance, young couples tried to make up for the lost years of their youth by enjoying life in dancehalls. Ignoring the advice of their elders, many also married. Birth-control devices were rarely used, so babies also began to appear with some regularity.62 In spite of the postwar chaos, life went on in the hope that better days were bound to come.

  AMBIVALENT LEGACIES

  Though their family legacies often “lay deeply buried in memory,” they constrained the lives of the children born in the 1920s for decades to come. Most people had only vague recollections of their distant ancestors and were aware, at best, of a general frame of reference within which they had developed as their descendants. But those who got to know them recalled the impact of their grandparents more directly, having “highly admired them” for their loving interest and frequent presents. Most obvious was the memory of their parents’ efforts to guide their educational development by offering support and advice. Partly by persuasion and partly by compulsion, fathers and mothers sought to instill essential lessons in their children as rules to follow. The sons’ and daughters’ autobiographies reveal that they viewed this effort at intergenerational socialization with fundamental ambivalence.63

  In retrospect, the legacies bequeathed by the imperial ancestors to the post–World War I children in Germany were a rather mixed lot, consisting of positive potentials and negative impediments. The list of indubitable advantages was long and impressive. During the Empire, the health of the population had improved dramatically due to sanitation and social medicine, lengthening life expectancy considerably. At the same time, scientific discoveries and technical inventions had developed entire new fields such as electricity and chemistry, not to mention machines such as automobiles, all of which improved the quality of life. In literacy and education, Prussia was also in the forefront. In urban reform and the development of the welfare state, the Germans were considered leaders among the civilized world. Even American visitors such as Mark Twain praised Imperial Germany as a country at the cutting edge of modernity.64

  But the memoirs of the 1920s cohort also reveal considerable problems that would trouble their young lives. The surprising loss of the First World War and the hyperinflation of 1923 impoverished wide circles of the middle class and threatened the survival of much of the proletariat. The draconian conditions of the peace treaty of Versailles had generated great resentment against the victors from which nationalist parties could draw in order to justify a revanchist foreign policy. The suspension of partisan politics with the “truce within the castle” during the military struggle had only papered over the many ideological divisions of German so
ciety, which broke out again with a vengeance during the collapse and revolution of November 1918. The ensuing near–civil war between the leftist Red Brigades and rightist Freikorps postponed consolidation for almost half a decade. Caught between nationalist, liberal, Social Democratic, and Communist fathers, the postwar children faced a bleak future that would test their resolve.65

  Weimar children hence became a key battleground for the allegiance of competing ideological visions of modernity. The military defeat discredited the Imperial German versions of scientific advance, economic growth, bureaucratic order, military power, and welfare state. From the East beckoned the Soviet blueprint of an egalitarian social revolution that promised international peace, social welfare, and technical progress to the working class. From the West came a more moderate US message of liberal democracy that suggested prosperity and freedom to the middle classes. Initially, the majority of Germans gravitated to President Woodrow Wilson rather than to Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin. But in the early 1920s large segments of the disgruntled Right began to look to the South and the talented journalist Benito Mussolini in Italy, who was concocting a new brew of radical nationalism called Fascism.66