German Stories and the American Audience: a “mixed bag” and the Theme of Powerlessness

Anticipating interest on the part of the American readership, the narrator begins her story by noting that the public now welcomes German accounts of the events associated with the Second World War (p. 1). This mirrors a reviewer’s statement in Publishers Weekly Reviews noting that the memoir “is part of a literary and historical trend: examining the lives of

ordinary Germans during WWII” (Publishers Weekly, 2004). Hunt thus speaks to the

historical moment when other texts dealing with German suffering, such as Günter Grass’s Crabwalk (2004) and W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (2003), had already circulated and been debated transnationally when her own memoir was published in 2005. The narrator claims to seek answers to “what people thought, knew, and chose to do and how it was possible for Hitler to receive their silent cooperation and often enthusiastic support,” although she admits a “universal answer may never be found” (p. 2). As scholars have observed, “it seemed, the western world was willing to consider the plight of ordinary Germans during the Second World War” when these texts were published (Schmitz and Seidel-Arpaci, 2011, p. 2). Hunt lived in a relatively secure environment until the end of the war when Berchtesgaden was bombed and she describes the suffering of children sent to the area from larger cities due to bombing, refugee children who arrived later, and the rape of women in Berchtesgaden at the end of the war; she also touches on topics prominent in

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German discourse at the time of the publication of her text. Hunt’s narrator emphasizes that a “great urgency” led her to write her childhood memoir because the memories of her parents’ generation are already lost and first-hand accounts by “average, law-abiding, middle-class Germans” and “ordinary citizens” who had supported Hitler until the end are becoming scarce (p. 1). She maintains that enough time has now passed which “allows and even welcomes” what she terms “the German perspective” (p. 1). However, this perspective problematically excludes the perspectives of Jewish Germans and other social groupings and defines the “middle-class” in essentialist terms as representative of German national identity (p. 1; Woodward, 2002). Indeed, David F. Crew observes that electoral studies of the NSDAP have shown that “Nazism was a broadly based political movement, drawing from a wide range of German voters” and not, as previously believed, to have been supported only by the middle class (1994, p. 18). Although the narrator refers to ordinary Germans there is no such thing because people are “shaped by the time and places into which they were born” as Mary Fulbrook rightly observes (2011, p. 3).

The present narrator claims that the supposedly minor details of the everyday lives of Germans should be documented to illustrate how their attitudes changed through the years spanning the Weimar Republic, the Second World War and the post-war years. However, the narrator’s claim that not much is known about the war from “the German perspective” (p. 1) belies the fact that numerous memoirs have been published in Germany and the United States dealing with this chapter of German history since the 1990s (Stargardt 2006; Heinlein, 2010; Rothe, 2011). In defending her right to speak, she claims it is up to her, like others of her generation, to trace the events that led to Hitler’s success and thus she tells the story of her own family to contribute to a better understanding of the Nazi era. However, as Stargardt

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(2006), Heinlein (2010) and Fulbrook (2011) argue, all experiences of war children are different depending on location, age and social class, for example, as this study illustrates.

The adult narrator claims that: “Nazism was a mixed bag of enthusiasm” (p. 52). This “mixed bag” is what Mary Fulbrook refers to as sometimes: “Enactment, rather than commitment” and how people “learned how to play new roles” (2011, pp. 98-99). The situation within the protagonist’s own family is an example of this and is encapsulated in a short text immediately after the preface, entitled “On Hitler’s Knee: October 1937” (p. 5). This text, from which the title of the Dutch edition is taken, prominently introduces the main themes of the narrative. It describes a scene in which the three-year old protagonist is photographed sitting on Hitler’s knee. Together with the striking photograph on the cover, this particular scene emphasizes the main focus of the memoir – tracing the child’s socialization under National Socialism, and how “ordinary citizens” became supporters of Hitler and how they, together with those who did not support him, were all powerless once his regime was in place (p. 2). As Fulbrook argues, Germans’ lives at the time “were constrained, shaped and channeled by national policies, pressures, and norms” and “the penalties for transgressing the newly imposed boundaries of the racial state were severe” (2011, p. 165). This episode is included again later in the text, indicating its importance in highlighting the significance of children for the regime.30

The first version of the episode features a three-year old girl who is stereotypically described as the “perfect picture of a little German girl with blond braids and blue eyes, dressed […] in a blue dirndl dress patterned with white hearts under a white pinafore” reluctantly perched on Hitler’s knee (p. 5). The short scene is described from the perspective of a child who when called by Hitler to come to him hid behind her mother’s skirt. Hitler is described as a “strange man” with “sharp, hypnotic eyes and dark mustache who pulled her

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onto his knee and held her stiffly while the child “wanted to cry and run away” (p. 5). The little girl is characterized as instinctively afraid of him. Her proud parents, on the other hand, are described as having waved for her to sit still and smile for the photographer. In their eyes the child protagonist was a “star” because she had been chosen by the “great man they so admired” to sit on his knee (p. 5). While the crowd of onlookers applauded the child protagonist saw her grandfather Pöhlmann “turn away and strike the air with his cane” (p. 5). This short episode emphasizes the socialization of even small children into Nazi ideology and, more importantly, suggests a futility of speaking out against Hitler; epitomized by her openly critical grandfather in the midst of those who had already subscribed to Nazi ideology (p. 2). It also highlights a differentiation between attitudes towards Hitler even within the family unit. More importantly, the characterization of Hitler as having “hypnotic” eyes implies that Germans were under his spell, thus removing agency. The episode serves to set up the trope of powerlessness that appears frequently in the narrative.

In the second rendition of the story later in the text the family takes a walk up the Obersalzberg to look at the newly built Berghof. Leading up to the scene of meeting Hitler is an account of how the Nazis confiscated numerous properties on the Obersalzberg to build Hitler’s headquarters (pp. 75-76). A photograph of a house with the roof removed to force the inhabitants out is included to add credibility to the narrative. To further support a narrative of powerlessness, the present narrator recalls that years later she learned that the uncle of a school classmate had been sent to Dachau concentration camp for two years just for handing Hitler a written request asking to be allowed to keep his photography business open on the mountain. Apparently during this time “a decree by Nazi authorities in the local newspaper announced that anyone who spread gossip about an Obersalzberg affair would be declared an enemy of the state and sent to a concentration camp” (p. 77). As Fulbrook notes, such

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repressions in “a state ultimately ruled by force even while it still maintained a façade of the rule of law should never be underestimated” (2011, p. 165). Her parents, apparently oblivious to this, are described as having decided Hitler “deserved to have an impressive setting from which to represent Germany” despite such open threats and the opposition of grandfather Pöhlmann who saw this as a “radical takeover” (p. 77).