I've just read a nice articel reviewing a couple of books in German, of course, about the generation of the "childern of WWII" ... and even the grandchildren. I'll have to read them all, as it looks!
The article has been published in "Die Zeit": "Die Kriegskinder sind unter uns", fomr Die Zeit Nr 20 / 2009. ... it seems as if the Germans now have reached a point at which we can speak about ourselves without blaming one another. And it seems there is another abyss opening under the "German surface". The damage we have done to Europe an ourselves is even bigger than we thought!
It is true thought that if you ask any German now alive about his grandparents or great grandparents, none of them has ever been in the SS or the NSDAP. Most of them fought in the war, but nobody was really a Nazi. All this has been covered up and there has been absolute silence about the issue. Many of the "war children" have been traumatized by silence and compensated silence and their parents errors with achievements and work - is one of the theories in the article. Now after retiring or just about to the old wounds crack open and we are infront of a generation of old, suffering people, without being able to do anything, as us, "the war's grandchildren" are the least entitled to try and heal exactly those who passed on the values and habits of their parents'.
My grandfather on my fathers' side, supposedly always was a "social democrat", working class, but we never went deeper on this topic. I was too young by the time and when I had reached the age decided to stay away from my family ... maybe it has something to do with this trauma, passed on from my father to me.
Nevertheless, my grandmother had been in the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen) the Nazi-organization for girls, for them to do sports and to lear how to be good wives and mothers. And she admitted liking it and backing "the little bit she understood of politics". ... but here again, it never went beyond that, as she said that she did not understand anything about politics.
Some of the loudest years in our history will be the most silenced ones. Just as it happened with the dictatorships in South America. It's a pitty there will be no "oral history" to this saddest part of recent history. We leave it all to scientists who will hardly grasp the "feeling of the time".
... if we bury it in silence there's no need to write anymore about it.
