Mijn Vader’s Land

Zoals eerder vermeld, verblijf ik sinds kort voor een zondagsverlof in Berlijn. In het kader daarvan verdiep ik mij in de Duitse Kultur. Geinspireerd door Dominee Schilder’s post een boekkritiek. Een bestseller in de Duitse boekenzaken op dit moment is het boek van voormalig nieuwlezeres Wibke Bruhns ‘Meines Vaters Land.’ Hans Georg Klamroth, de vader van Wibke Bruhns, is een van de mannen die terechtgesteld werd als medeplegers van de staatsgreep tegen Hitler op 20 Juli 1944, onder leiding van Generaal Stauffenberg. Destijds was Bruhns 6 jaar oud, zonder herinnering aan haar vader. Wie was dus haar vader ‘HG’ die verantwoordelijk was voor de geheimhouding van het V2 project van de Nazis eigenlijk? Een persoonlijke reconstructie van het leven van haar vader, die aantoont hoe een generatie Duitsers zich overleverde aan haar ondergang. De moeite waard voor diegenen voor wie de Duitse ziel een beerput is.

Link:
Wibke Bruhns, Meines Vaters Land (2004)
Das Attentat auf Adolf Hitler

Book Review:
The material that Bruhns had at hand was a uniquely rich combination of sources of interest. Not only is the plot of July 20th to assassinate Adolf Hitler well known as mistaken, but she also had to her disposal a well documented family archive, containing among others a genealogy (of doubtful veracity) and private letters, and her own and her family’s first hand memories. All these sources are of course, not only unique but for the real scientific historian also ambiguous.
That Bruhns is no historian, be her forgiven, in the first place since she does not claim to write a historic account, but she is set to reconstruct a man’s life and a child’s youth and memories. This search for a lost childhood through the reconstruction of a German family, contains all the shortcomings and richness that is to be expected of such an attempt.

The author tells vividly about the 19th and early 20th century culture of the Wilhelminian formalism and the insecurity of Weimar, the old German family traditions, and the Romantic heroism, the early signs of modernism with a liberated individualism and the the pre-Nazi anti-semitism. To some point she places critical notes to the character that comes forward from the letters and diaries, but she fails to reconstruct or tell the dark side of Hans-Georg, her father, or Kurt, Hans-Georg’s father and her grandfather. To a large extend, Meines Vaters Land, is a romantic reconstruction of Bruhns’ noble heritage, in which even the alleged role of Hans-Georg in the assassination plot serves a proper role: Bruhns’ father may have been like all Germans a follower of Hitler, but in the end he was one of the few that resisted the destructive nature of German culture, he, Hans-Georg, HG, came at least to his senses. While throughout the book, she hints at the ambiguous attitude of her father towards the National Socialists, his ‘resistance’ in the end is revealed as nothing more than having known about the plot.
So, also the family plays a role in the noble sage of Bruhns’ “Recherche.” The family though they were of wealth, always were the warmhearted patriarch to their laborers, cherishing a care for their employees no smaller than for their own family.

Nevertheless, the book also offers a true insight back in time. The personal restraints of Prussian formalism, the world ignorance of a patrician’s family, both are described well and catchy through literal quotes from letters and diaries. This method works really well in order to create an evocative story plot, and quickly the reader is eager to finish the chapter and hurry into the next phase in their lives. Never does Bruhns linger around for too long at any event in HG’s or Kurt’s life, but she quickly resolves the matter and recreates the next event. Never does she overwhelm the reader with detail, yet never does she provide only scarce description.

She overemphasized the sense of family, the closeness of the family, while this is highly doubtful, given the scandals, the psychological repression of the time, the affairs, and common sense interpreting the circumstances. She can’t resist summing up every single detail of the dinner, and the luscious list of courses, every year again the author repeats this ritual. Of course, she tries to reconstruct a normal family life, and hopes to humanize the time, that is her father and her ancestors. After all, the following of Hitler in Germany was overwhelming, the system depended upon the massive collaboration of the population, ordinary people like you, me or one’s neighbors.

The ending is somewhat the saving grace of the book. Here, all the prior faults of a historic reconstruction are justified. After all, it is not in the first place a historic work, it is the account of a German daughter, reconstructing a father’s choices, trying to reconcile the terror of a time and its temptations, to discover the immense cruelty of a man who loved her with whole his life, and the fatherly love that shielded his dark sides. The fathers of National Socialism ran after an ideal, albeit the most deceiving and vicious ideal, with no other purpose than to pass on to their children a better world. The crimes they committed along their dark paths now form the horrific examples that prevent us from making the same errors ever again. The author’s gratitude is there ambiguous, but it is the only gratitude she found for a man who was foremost her father.

The book is a great example, given its shortcomings, of a post-war generation of Germans, having to reconcile the love of each child for their parents, with the cruel horrors a generation was capable of. The moral dilemma of every German, the burden of shame that every German carries with them, while visiting their neighboring countries in Europe, is well portrayed. The book however, fails to portray how horrific the times and crimes of the parents were. But in holding a mirror before a German generation, is a subtle attempt to balance between opening up an historic trauma in the German psyche and finding a way to heal it without offense.

It may have been too pathetic and showing insensitivity toward the inhumanity of the system, to end the book with the sentence: Ich liebe Dich. Bruhns’ father was not an anonymous soldier, fighting for his country, he was a high ranking Nazi officer who actively participated in the oppressive and cruel regime, may be it for his own gain. He was a man whose own gain meant more than the suffering of others, and this suffering has been unimaginable. The sentence ‘I love you’ does not express the correct conclusion for a chronicle of such a man’s life, not without restriction. On the other hand, it shows that the deepest intention of Bruhns’ chronicle was to create a father image, in this perhaps she goes after her father: in the end her own desire to reconcile with her father has become more important than the historical correctness.