Growing up also involved meeting other adults who could help their development when they showed real sympathy for children. Some encounters were pleasant, such as “a great friendship with a neighbor family,” which provided sociability on long winter evenings of roasting apples or playing cards. Others were scarier, such as errands to fetch a missing spice for mother in a grocery store, which involved overcoming shyness and dealing with money. For Gerhard Krapf, even dreaded music lessons could turn into the opposite: a kind teacher did an “excellent job of initiating [him] into the business of music making” so that he enjoyed it tremendously. When Erich Helmer met a neighbor who was a skilled shoemaker, he was inspired by the man’s “respect for his craft and regard for ordinary men.”47 While authoritarian adults could strike fear into children’s hearts, more positive contacts inspired deep friendships that created trust in the outside world.
Through comparisons of their own situation with those of their friends, children gradually became aware of the social class that set their family apart. Especially in poor circles, life was a daily struggle to make meager pay stretch enough to cover necessities until the end of the month. Whenever a child craved a treat, the first question was “Do we have any money” to pay for it? Even in middle-class families, financial limits were a constant bone of contention, when a husband drank his pay away or a wife “went on a buying spree” before a vacation, acquiring “a whole collection of summer dresses.” Upper-class sons like Tom Angress realized social distinctions when he tried to invite a classmate to his home who was not listed in the phone book; the boy’s parents “were poor and couldn’t afford a telephone.”48 While he was willing to ignore class lines, the awkwardness of the ensuing birthday party made it clear to him that such barriers were all too real.
Growing children also made contacts with their peers, gradually shifting their attention from their siblings to their own age group. Often inspired by acquaintances in school, such encounters ranged from playing impromptu street games to close friendships that might last an entire lifetime. Chatting about clothes or giggling at jokes, girls tended to express emotions in elaborate diaries (Poesiealben) in which they wrote verses to assure each other of undying amity. More inclined to roughhouse, boys often engaged in pranks that created bonds between them or shared technical interests such as experimenting with chemistry sets. Being invited to the homes of friends for parties also opened the door to lifestyles of different social strata. Children’s horizons expanded even further if they were taken along during holidays to the mountains or the shore as documented in Gisela Grothus’s vacation picture (image 7). Such “almost symbiotic friendships” provided boys and girls with diversion from schoolwork and support when picked on by bullies.49
Weimar children were especially impressed by technological innovations such as railroad trains, wireless radios, and movie theaters, which embodied the future. Young Erich Helmer was quite excited to ride the streetcar with his father across town to the train station, where “from afar, I saw the locomotive coming closer with much steam,” seeming like an unstoppable monster. Benno Schöffski was excited by the purchase of a radio, which required stringing an antenna and assembling the “small receiver set.” Hoping to hear “the first music from the headphones was a tremendous anticipation and joy.” As a reward for his improving grades, Karl Härtel was pleased to “be allowed to go to the movies with his mother on a rainy summer day” to see a film about skiing called The White Dream.50 Such amazing experiences left a deep imprint on growing minds, suggesting that technology had an unlimited potential to improve living conditions.
Sports also played an increasing role in older children’s lives, promoting both individual pride and group cohesion. Educators promoted team sports to develop the body and teach sportsmanship. For some children, physical education in school was a real trial; only a few, such as Tom Angress, were able to master difficult gymnastic exercises. More popular were swimming lessons, since they led to summer fun in pools or rivers or at the shore, even if not everyone became a club champion like Paul Frenzel. Upper-class children were expected to ride horseback, play tennis, or sail, although some, like Horst Grothus, “found riding not nice at all.”51 Lower-class boys would kick a soccer ball around on informal playgrounds without joining a sports club. Most families took their offspring hiking on weekends in the surrounding countryside or in the mountains during vacations because such outings cost little, if anything.
For older children, membership in a youth group became a way to organize their ample free time and meet with their peers. During the Empire, conservative circles who were worried about the radicalization of working-class youths had created organizations to reinforce a patriotic outlook. During the Weimar Republic, some middle-class girls such as Eva Peters joined the “German national” Queen Louise League, while her brothers became members of the militaristic nationalist “Scharnhorst Youth.” Gerhard Krapf and other religious youths instead chose the Christian Association of Young Men, a Protestant counterpart of the YMCA. Heinz Schultheis was interested in the Catholic branch of the Boy Scouts, imported from Great Britain. The key weakness of these religious or political organizations was that they were “not a ‘real’ youth group” because “they were not led by young leaders,” but rather controlled by adults.52
By contrast, the Youth Movement prided itself on creating autonomous spaces with “youth being led by youth.” Founded by progressive teachers in Berlin around the turn of the twentieth century, this Jugendbewegung was a diffuse expression of rebellion against adults that rejected the Wilhelmine lifestyle of smoking and drinking as decadent. During the 1920s, this self-organization was called Die Freischar and included a loose conglomeration of youth leagues of the Bündische Jugend. Attracted by the weekly meetings and especially by the weekend trips, Paul Frenzel joined the group because it promised a self-determined life. With the uniform of a “blue-grey shirt with a black bandana and grey shorts,” the Freischar was attractive because of its members’ belief in comradeship and claim to be a self-chosen elite. This Youth Movement embodied a romantic quest for adventure with its nature hikes, folk songs, and campfire conviviality. Many youths, such as Will Seelmann-Eggebert, were “decisively shaped” by it.53
These happy childhood years began to peter out with the Great Depression of October 1929, which threatened the survival of many families. With some delay, the Wall Street crash also came to Central Europe when short-term US loans were recalled. This bankrupted many a German business, such as the plumbing shop of the Mahlendorf family. Children felt its effect as the tightening of the family budget created disputes between their parents and forced them to spend vacations with their relatives. If one’s father was one of the six million unemployed, even food became scarce, for “conditions were bad [and] regular work was impossible to get.” To compensate, one’s mother might seek a job in a clothing store or hire herself out for housecleaning or washing of clothes. When the enormous out-of-work numbers overwhelmed the unemployment insurance system, jobless men were forced to go begging or “fall back on crisis and welfare charity.” For the unemployed, the result was “hunger and cold, growing pauperization and hopeless, dull despair.”54
The “economic problems and human distress” radicalized politics, heightening hostile emotions and triggering physical violence. Due to the “atmosphere of embittered passion,” some children began to notice heated discussions in their families between adherents of President Paul von Hindenburg, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and Communist stalwart Teddy Thälmann. Others overheard “martial speech fragments” on the radio or the street, as well as “rhythmic chants and songs, the thudding of running feet, wild shouts and sometimes even the sirens of the police.” During the many “parades and torchlight processions of the NS stormtroopers (SA) and the Communists,” children “were encouraged to shout ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Heil Moskau.’” Moreover, in bloody “beer hall battles” or street fights, Leftist militias such as the Reichsbanner and Rote Fron
tkämpferbund clashed with paramilitary groups of the Right such as the Stahlhelm and the Nazis. Though rarely understanding what the struggles were all about, many of the young were impressed by the songs and actions of the Nazi SA and SS because they were “the loudest and most militant.”55
This polarization also triggered an ugly wave of anti-Semitism, which blamed the Jews for the nation’s general misery. During the nineteenth century, right-wing agitators had turned religious prejudice into a quasi-scientific form of racism from which there was no escape by conversion. Even in assimilated Jewish households such as the Eycks’, children became aware of being somehow “different” from others without quite knowing why. When Tom Angress changed schools in Berlin, he had to register his religious affiliation as the “mosaic” confession, marking him as a member of a minority. Although decent classmates maintained their friendships, others began to pick on him: “This was, for me, the beginning of four years of gradual isolation, occasional hostilities, and almost daily small (and sometimes not so small) humiliations.”56 These radical racists were seeking to undo a century of Jewish acculturation to secular German culture.
The chaotic final years of the Weimar Republic politicized children who had been born in the early 1920s by forcing them to take an ideological stand. Catholic and Social Democratic youths could cling to their prior beliefs, but sons or daughters of liberal families, such as Fritz Klein, found themselves adrift due to the crumbling of middle-class democratic parties. Protestant nationalists such as Gerhard Krapf were able to rally behind the imposing figure of President Hindenburg as a guarantor of order and respectability. But if a father was an unemployed worker such as Hans Schirmer, whom “despair and anger” had made a Communist activist, his son might fail to understand the reasons for such radicalism. Ruth Bulwin was even more surprised when “one day father was wearing a brown uniform and was called party comrade which I could not comprehend.”57 The collapse of the Republic drew children into political struggles before they were ready to cope with them.
A HAPPY CHILDHOOD
The overthrow of the Weimar Republic largely dispelled “the carefree atmosphere of childhood.” Over seventy years later, Frank Eyck recalled that his “happy, sheltered childhood ended abruptly on the 30th January 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ ascent to power.” Twelve-year-old Tom Angress at first thought, “Wow, this will be interesting!” But cracking jokes about Hitler running around the chancellery in search of a “government program” failed to do justice to the gravity of the change. “The next day when I entered the classroom, I immediately felt the tension in the air.”58 Now Jews, Communists, and intellectuals could be persecuted with impunity, for the radical Right controlled the police and the courts. While life for the smaller children continued largely as before, the older ones now had to decide how to react. Not surprisingly, the vast majority were swept up in the propaganda-fed enthusiasm of the “national revolution.”
The autobiographies claim that, compared with World War I suffering and the subsequent dictatorial repression, “those years, just before Hitler came to power, were happy for us children.” In spite of the initial chaos and the final economic downturn, they remembered the Weimar Republic as having offered a civil space in which most families could provide a sheltered childhood for their offspring. Even if the working poor were struggling to obtain a minimum of food and shelter, they described their homes as stable places in which affectionate relationships flourished and infants could play with each other in peace. While corporal punishment was used to maintain discipline, schools did teach the classics and sciences in a competent fashion, giving children the tools to succeed. Moreover, streets and neighborhoods were still safe enough to let youths explore the world around them. Ruth Weigelt confirmed such positive recollections: “Hitherto I had a beautiful early childhood with neither sorrows nor cares.”59 All of this ended when the Nazis, in the name of saving the nation, imposed their radical ideology.
Only a minority of the children regretted the passing of the first German democracy, and even these failed to grasp its deadly implications. Though she was “politically disinterested,” the rebellious Gisela Grothus proudly “considered [her]self a Republican in [her]family.” Few of the boys were as politically aware as Tom Angress, whose Catholic friend Lorenz “snapped to attention, raised his hand in the Hitler salute and called out, ‘Wake up Germany, Hitler is making coffee!’” During the 1930 campaign, both youths went around “to remove NSDAP stickers from the house walls” that supported Hitler’s election. Around the same time, they called the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff and shouted obscenities into the telephone. At the other political extreme, Fritz Klein “hung the black-white-red flag out of the window” to demonstrate his imperial sympathies. Of course, those sporadic juvenile protests failed to stop the Nazi tide.60
In retrospect, the vast majority of the Weimar children hardly noticed the Nazi seizure of power, because they were too young to be interested in politics. Karl Härtel recalled that “we ordinary people only found out from the newspaper that a certain Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), was named the twenty-first Chancellor by our aged, popularly elected President Paul von Hindenburg.” Somewhat apologetically, he explained: “In 1932 I was only in my tenth year and knew about politics almost as much as a fish about flying.” Similarly, Hellmut Raschdorff remembered that “in 1933 we experienced the so-called seizure of power, which was to bring untold changes that were only feared by a few. In our daily routine at school hardly anything changed” except for having to memorize a few new dates and collect money for NS charity. Only gradually did most youths begin to realize that “a terrible time [had begun] when the Nazis gained power.”61
Many of the memoirists still struggle to explain their own response to the beginning of the Third Reich. Some apologists such as Karl Härtel resented “the accusations of especially younger people” born after World War II that “it was their generation that was responsible for Hitler having been able to precipitate half of the world into misfortune.” Instead, they blamed the victors of World War I for the lack of peace that enabled political dilettantes such as the Nazis to seize power. More self-critical spirits such as Heinz Schultheis cited insufficient age as a reason for their complicity: “For us children these circumstances were an unchangeable condition whose importance we completely failed to recognize; and especially because of that our generation automatically grew into the damned ‘Third Reich.’”62 Ironically, it was therefore their sunny Weimar childhoods that left most of these young Germans unprepared to resist the Nazis’ siren calls.
3
NAZI ADOLESCENTS
Many nationalists were elated when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933. But leftists already had a dark sense of foreboding about the Nazi seizure of power. On hearing the news, six-year-old Eka Assmus shouted excitedly, “Now it’s the turn of uncle Hans’ Führer.” As an SS member, her relative was already preparing for a torchlight parade to celebrate the victory, while a neighbor woman hurried to fly the swastika flag. Another “old fighter” was so overjoyed that his “enthusiasm brought tears to his eyes. Was this the new savior?” But in Leipzig, two young Communists “were surprised to see countless Nazis march by in endless columns.” Although they expected a call for violent resistance, “nobody came, nothing happened.” The young Jew Frank Eyck felt instinctively that from that day onward “my parents could no longer protect me. The carefree atmosphere of childhood had gone. Nothing could be taken for granted” any more.1
The subsequent Nazification of most German youths was no accident, but the result of a deliberate policy of the NSDAP. Proclaiming “whoever has the youth, has the future,” Hitler himself placed a high value on the younger generation as the vanguard of the Third Reich, since many adults were too set in their ways to embrace National Socialism completely. The party youth organization, called the Hitlerjugend (HJ or Hitler Y
outh), was therefore an essential tool for indoctrinating the young and forging the next generation of Nazi leaders, who would be even more committed to implementing the murky ideological aims of the movement. The HJ’s martial hymn appealed to youthful idealism by suggesting that it was the task of the young to restore the country’s unity and greatness: “Forward! Forward! Blare the bright fanfares / Forward! Forward! Youth knows no fear / Germany shall stand radiant / Even if we fall.”2
Nazism appealed especially to adolescents during their complicated passage from childhood into adulthood. In earlier centuries the transition, marked by religious rites such as confirmation, had been abrupt: as soon as a teenager entered the working world, he was considered grown up. But around the turn of the twentieth century, psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall and playwrights such as Frank Wedekind “discovered adolescence” as an extended life stage between childhood and adulthood.3 In this transformation, young people were supposed to construct an independent self, separate from their parents, and reorient themselves toward their peers. The Hitler Youth addressed all of these needs, giving the young a mission of their own, setting them apart from the home, and offering them companionship in their own age group. A psychohistorical analysis of the postwar cohort suggests that the Weimar children were quite vulnerable to this appeal.4
The sizable Hitler Youth literature written by former members therefore reflects a fundamental ambivalence about the Nazi experience. On the one hand, there are quite a few apologetic descriptions of the fun and games in the HJ. Former League of German Girls leader Eva Peters admitted, “I, too, was meant, spoken to and called upon to put my life into the service of a great and overpowering [ideal] called Germany.” On the other hand, the deadly consequences of this misplaced idealism later forced her to “seek an explanation of what actually caused for [me] and many other youths of the HJ generation that ‘great deception’” of believing in the Nazi message. Due to this ambivalence, the memory texts are paradoxical and unstable, drifting from evocative description of enjoyable activities to retrospective condemnation of their catastrophic effect. This mixture of emotions was particularly intense for Jewish victims such as Lucy Mandelstam, who wrote, “I feel nostalgia and sadness at the same time” for a youth cut short by ideology.5
Broken Lives Page 8
