Triumphantly, he dragged me through a dense throng of drunken comrades toward a speaker’s platform at the end of the hall. I felt nauseated from fear, the cacophony of rough male voices, and the stench of beer and tobacco smoke. With superhuman effort I managed to suppress an instinctive urge to vent my panic by screaming, sensing somehow that I could only expect more abuse—certainly not help—from this crowd. Fortunately for me, almost no one had become aware of the drama that was unfolding in their midst, mainly because of the din and their visible drunkenness. The SA trooper was about to lift me to the speaker’s platform, apparently as an exhibit of Rassenschande (racial defilement), when he found himself confronted by an enraged woman who was staring at him with hate-filled eyes.
Mutti had spent the Sunday morning enjoying a well-deserved respite from her hospital chores. Unlike me, she had paid little attention to the election activities in the neighborhood, except for an occasional glance out of the window in a futile effort to spot me in the crowd below. The heavy presence of brownshirts gave her a growing sense of foreboding as the hours went by. When she could no longer contain her anxiety, she started to look for me. She had barely reached the stairs when she ran into Tante Möller, who in breathless tones reported that she had just seen an SA man drag me into the beer hall next door. Mutti did not wait for the end of Tante Möller’s report. With the fury of a tigress protecting her cub, she dashed downstairs, raced through the crowd in the street and into the beer hall. Then, like an unstoppable force, she plowed a path through the drunken troopers who were blocking her way until she had reached the speaker’s platform and the man who had kidnapped me. Momentarily startled by this trembling, yet apparently fearless woman, the giant SA trooper loosened his grip. Before he, I, or anyone else could comprehend what was taking place, I was once again snatched and dragged through the carousing throng, but this time by my mother, who hauled me off to the relative safety of our home.
Although the experience in Zanoletti’s beer hall haunted me for months, perhaps years, at the time I was still reluctant to fully connect those raucous, drunken SA troopers and the man who was increasingly presented to us children as Germany’s messiah, the man who, our teachers told us, would restore Germany to its rightful place of dominance in the world. To me, as to virtually all of my peers, Hitler had taken on a near-godlike nimbus that placed him beyond blame or criticism. Thus, it never occurred to me that the brutality I—an eight-year-old boy—had experienced at the hands of a Nazi bully was merely a mild expression of the most brutal racist policies and that the mastermind of that policy was Adolf Hitler, the man I was being taught to worship.
But from that Sunday on, my unreserved admiration of Hitler and the Nazis changed into a strange mixture of fear and fascination. I began to sense that the brownshirts, the swastika, the martial music were harbingers of danger. Even so, it would take several years and numerous humiliations at the hands of Nazi-inspired racists before I could clearly see Hitler’s evil and the disastrous course he was charting.
PARADISE LOST
It took me a while to realize that the beer hall incident was not an isolated occurrence triggered by some rowdies in Nazi uniforms who had a few beers too many, but that I belonged to a group targeted by a government-directed conspiracy. I made that shattering discovery a few weeks later at a place where one would have least expected it—at a neighborhood public playground a few blocks from my home. As I had done many times before, I had gone to the playground after school for an afternoon of innocent play. My favorite attraction, like everybody else’s, was the seesaw, which meant that there was always a waiting line. After patiently awaiting our turn, a boy and I were about to mount when a mother with her young son in tow blocked my way. “Where do you think you are going?” she inquired, her voice shrill with aggravation. I had no idea why she was questioning me about the obvious and helplessly pointed to the seesaw where her son had already taken my seat.
“It’s my turn,” I said in feeble protest.
“What do you mean ‘my turn’?” she shrieked. “You people had your turn! Now it’s our turn. You aren’t even supposed to be in this playground. Can’t you read?” With that, she pointed to a painted sign near the playground’s entrance that I had never noticed before.
Several mothers had witnessed the woman’s outburst, and although they seemed to sympathize with me, none spoke up in my behalf.
Thoroughly embarrassed and crushed, I walked away. Before leaving the playground, I studied the sign with eyes blurred with suppressed tears. The sign read:
* * *
NICHTARIERN
IST DAS BETRETEN DIESES
SPIELPLATZES
STRENGSTENS
VERBOTEN
* * *
(Non-Aryans are sternly prohibited
from entering this playground)
Although I had heard the term non-Aryan before, I never felt that it had anything to do with me. But if the woman was right, Nichtariern meant me. I still didn’t comprehend the reason for her outburst, except that for some reason I could not yet fully fathom, I had been banished from a place where I had spent countless happy hours, a place I had always regarded as belonging to me as much as to all the other kids.
That evening after my mother had returned from work, I pointedly asked her, “Am I a non-Aryan?”
Taken totally by surprise, Mutti demanded to know what prompted my question. When I told her what had happened on the playground, she conceded that Africans were among several racial groups that had been classified non-Aryans by the Nazi government.
“Since your father is African and you are his son,” she explained, “you, too, are classified non-Aryan.”
“Are you a non-Aryan, too?” I kept pressing.
“No, I’m not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not African; I am European.”
“Then why am I a non-Aryan because I’m Dad’s son and not an Aryan like you when I’m your son also?” I tried to reason with her. “And why,” I added, “aren’t non-Aryans allowed to play in the playground?”
“I agree that it doesn’t make any sense,” Mutti conceded. “Tomorrow I’ll speak to the park warden. I’m sure he’ll make an exception and let you play in the park.”
“I don’t want you to talk to the warden,” I told her. “I don’t ever want to play in that park again.”
Despite my protest, my mother did have a talk with the warden and he told her that I shouldn’t pay any attention to the sign. But nothing Mutti said could make me break my vow never to set foot in that park again.
FAMILY FEUD
While I tried hard not to let my experience in the park ruin my life, I found it difficult to dismiss what had happened and its implications. One reason was that whenever Tante Möller’s grown sons were visiting her, they would inevitably wind up in a heated argument about politics. Otto, who was pro-Nazi although not a member of the party, almost came to blows with his younger brother Fritz, an avowed Communist, when the latter suggested that the Nazis were nothing but a bunch of thugs who would soon get their comeuppance. “I used to look up to you because I thought you were smart,” Fritz screamed, “but not anymore. How can you be so stupid and let these crooks pull the wool over your eyes?”
“I should report you and have them take you away for making such irresponsible remarks,” Otto screamed back.
As on many previous occasions, Tante Möller would tell them to stop fighting, especially in front of me, or leave since she had gotten sick and tired of hearing about both the Nazis and the Communists. Out of respect for their mother, they would hold their tongues, only to resume the arguments the next time they came around.
To Fritz’s chagrin, Willi, the oldest brother, had developed a strong anti-Communist bias while living in the United States during World War I, and since he knew very little about German party politics, he became more and more receptive to Otto’s arguments. To the utter delight of Otto, Willi, the chief steward of a Ham
burg-Amerika liner, announced that he had joined the Marine (Navy) SA, a branch of the storm troopers that was tailor-made for members of the merchant marines. I was all in favor, and he even took me along when he bought his uniform: a brown shirt, navy blue breeches and matching hat with visor, a brown belt and shoulder strap, as well as a pair of brown riding boots.
The first major event scheduled after Willi joined the Marine SA was a marathon Gepäckmarsch during which different units of the SA, SS, NSDAP, and Hitler Youth demonstrated their endurance while loaded down with heavy field packs. A strapping six-footer, Willi looked splendid in his new uniform when he stopped at his mother’s in the morning before joining his comrades-in-arms. Obviously pleased with his new military appearance, the always dapper man of the world stuck out his chest and strutted about as he looked approvingly at himself in the mirror. I could have burst with pride as I walked this magnificent specimen of a storm trooper to the corner where he caught a streetcar for a ride downtown. I only hoped that some of my cronies would see us, but as it turned out, they were not around. Before Willi left, he gave me the approximate time when his unit would reach Am Markt to give me a chance to watch him and his new Nazi buddies march by.
I spent most of the afternoon watching sweat-drenched formation after formation pass in review. When the first distinctly dressed Marine SA unit arrived, I concentrated on spotting Onkel Willi. But as hard as I looked, no Onkel Willi came in sight. Finally, when the last marcher had straggled by, I gave up and went home to tell Tante Möller that Onkel Willi was missing. Just as I was ready to join my mother upstairs, my hero limped in. Unlike the proud warrior of the morning, he was a pitiful sight, soaking wet with perspiration and moaning in agony with every step. To add insult to injury, Fritz dropped in just in time to witness his sibling’s unheroic return and to heckle him for letting Otto talk him into making a fool of himself.
According to Willi, his trouble started less than an hour after the march began. His brand-new boots, which he had never broken in, started to give him trouble. Both feet felt as if they were clamped by iron vises that tightened with every step. When he couldn’t stand the pain any longer, he said, he stepped out of formation while his comrades booed and laughed. This, he said, hurt him more than his feet.
When Fritz tried to pull off his brother’s boots through the time-tested method of straddling one boot while Willi gave him a kick in the rear, the boots would not budge. Willi winced in agony with every tug and pull. When Willi couldn’t take the pain any longer, he told Fritz to get their mother’s big scissors and cut the boots off. I couldn’t understand why anyone would ruin a pair of brand-new boots until I saw Willi’s feet, which were a swollen, gory mess of blood and blisters.
Within a few weeks Willi was able to wear regular footwear again and walk without pain. But the painful experience, plus being booed by his SA comrades, were enough for him to get the Nazis out of his system. Much to Otto’s chagrin, and to the delight of Fritz, he never went to another SA meeting and swore off activist politics for good.
SUNDAYS AT THE MOVIES
On Sundays, rain or shine, one of my favorite pastimes was going to the 1 P.M. matinee for children at the Europa Palast, an art deco theater just around the corner. The admission price was thirty pfennig and since, according to Mutti, money didn’t grow on trees, she tried to limit my attendance to one performance per month. But her plan was doomed to failure from the start, since she could rarely resist my pleading and begging, especially when I “reasoned” with her that all my friends were going, so why couldn’t I?
There was one movie star even Mutti couldn’t resist. Whenever a Shirley Temple movie was shown, my attendance was a foregone conclusion because Mutti not only wanted me to go, she insisted on coming along. Films featuring the curly-headed, dimple-cheeked moppet from America drew longer lines than any other stars’, foreign and domestic, and invariably resulted in a sold-out house. Practically all Germans went bananas over Shirley, and I was no exception. Since all American films were dubbed with German soundtracks, I was hardly aware of the fact that Shirley wasn’t German. Whether she played the intrepid little orphan in Lachende Augen (Bright Eyes) in which she popularized the song, “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” or the tap-dance partner of Bill Robinson in the Civil War epic Der Kleinste Rebel (The Littlest Rebel), when Shirley laughed, I laughed, and when Shirley cried, I cried. Had someone told me at the time that one day I would not only meet and talk with my little idol of my childhood years but even dance with her, I would have had that person declared mentally challenged. But that is exactly what happened. In 1975, I was dispatched by Ebony to Accra, Ghana, to interview the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, who was none other than Mrs. Shirley Temple Black (her married name), an appointee of President Gerald Ford. During the lengthy interview my childhood idol revealed to me how shocked she was as a child when she discovered that her black costar Bill Robinson, of whom she had become quite fond, couldn’t stay in the same Florida hotel where she stayed because of the strictly enforced Jim Crow laws. Later that evening, at a Ghanaian function in honor of the ambassador, the former child star invited me to dance with her. How I wished that my former cronies from the Stückenstrasse, who stood in line with me at the Europa Palast to see Shirley Temple movies, could have seen me then.
Just as intriguing as the main features were the weekly newsreels that preceded them. There would always be a hush of great expectation in the audience as the announcer intoned slowly in a voice dripping with gravity Fox’s signature opening of its newsreels, “We are bringing you the most interesting and most current news from all lands of the world, in picture and sound.” It was through the newsreels that I received my first, albeit lopsided, impression of the Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten (land of unlimited possibilities), as the United States was called. To justify that moniker, the shows focused on feats that ranged from the absurd or ludicrous to the outright insane, such as the crowning of a Miss America, an acrobat’s tightrope walk at a dizzying altitude between two skyscrapers without the benefit of a safety net, a daredevil’s plunge down Niagara Falls in a steel drum, or someone trying to set an endurance record perching on top of a flagpole. The American newsreels’ preoccupation with offbeat feats gave me an early impression of the United States as a country peopled largely by an assortment of trifling oddballs who took nothing very seriously except their unending pursuit of the sensational. An occasional sighting of President Franklin D. Roosevelt served only to deepen that impression. I felt that FDR, with his jutting chin, jaunty cigarette holder, and broad movie-star smile, was the personification of the devil-may-care spirit of America. Only now and then would there be a hard news account that let me know that not all was fun and games in the United States. Newsreel coverage of the sensational kidnapping and murder of international folk hero Charles Lindbergh’s two-year-old son in 1932 and the equally sensational trial that four years later resulted in the execution of Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant, for the crime were cases in point.
Even if the make-believe world to which I was introduced at the Europa Palast differed markedly from reality, I still cherish the memories of those Sunday afternoons when during two enchanted hours I would leave Stückenstrasse and Barmbek far behind and enter a magical realm populated with villains and heroes, gangsters and cops, cowboys and Indians, knights and knaves, and where the boundaries of time and space were as limitless as the human imagination.
JEWS
It wasn’t long after Hitler came to power that the words die Juden started cropping up around me with increasing frequency. As far as I knew, I had never seen a Jew, but on occasion I had heard my mother speak of Jews in hushed tones. Once, I overheard her and a friend discuss the firing of a doctor at the hospital because he was a Jew. “What a shame,” my mother had said. “He was such a fine person and such a good doctor.” This gave me the idea that Jews were nice people who, for some inexplicable reason, were being persecuted and thus deserved my sympathy. This view changed fairl
y quickly as my impressionable mind began to absorb more and more of the ideological poison that poured forth from the Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), headed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, via our teachers. To assure that we children got the right message, the Nazis ordered the summary dismissal of all teachers who were deemed “politically unreliable” and, therefore, unfit to teach. This included teachers with Jewish backgrounds, teachers who had been active in political parties that were hostile to the Nazis, such as the Communist and Social Democrat parties, and those teachers who openly refused to join the N.S. Lehrerbund (National Socialist Teachers Association). Among the first apparent victims of the purge was our kindly homeroom teacher, Fräulein Beyle. At the end of my second school year, we were simply told that she had been transferred to another school and that another teacher, Herr Grimmelshäuser, would take her place. I never found out what happened to her or whether she was indeed allowed to continue her teaching career. I sorely missed her, since she had been the first educator who had encouraged me to make the most of my potential.
Destined to Witness Page 7
