A GERMAN CHILDHOOD
THREE WEEKS AFTER my birth, Hitler entered Prague. In Berlin, my father calmly put away the pencils he used in his job at an insurance company. He kissed my mother, Hélène, and his only daughter, Beate-Auguste, then left the Hohenzollerndamm—the residential district that still contained a few working-class houses, including ours—and set off on a long journey. After joining up with his regiment, Infantryman Kurt Künzel spent the summer of 1939 on maneuvers, and the following summer he was somewhere in Belgium.
I have a photograph of him smiling as he stands guard outside a military headquarters. In the summer of 1941, his regiment moved east toward Russia. That winter, he was lucky enough to catch double pneumonia, meaning that he was sent back to Germany, where he became an army accountant. After the liberation in 1945, he rejoined his family in the village of Sandau, where my mother and I had reluctantly taken refuge with relatives. Here, in a barn, surrounded by terrified women, children, and old people, we witnessed the arrival of the Mongols. Polish laborers invaded our cousin’s house and took our belongings. This was poetic justice, as in 1943 we spent several months living a life of ease with my godfather, a high-ranking Nazi in Lodz.
For those who believe that childhood impressions are a critical factor in decisions made later in life, I should point out that the Soviet Mongols never hurt or sexually abused us.
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IN LATE 1945, we returned to Berlin, where the three of us and a kitchen worker shared a room for the next eight years. The apartment belonged to an opera singer who could now only find work singing at funerals and who was forced by the Allies—like many other German property owners—to sublet his home to refugees. This was a strange period for me as a little girl. There might seem something enjoyable about such a nomadic, unpredictable existence, but my parents’ anxiety and sadness, added to the general atmosphere of confusion and bitterness, had a negative effect on my morale. My parents found it very difficult to live among strangers.
I grew older—seven, eight, nine years old—but my family’s situation did not improve. Some of my friends’ families were living in their own apartments by now, with a kitchen and bathroom just for them, but we remained at the mercy of our landlords’ whims. Being a child, however, I found it easier to adapt to this reality than an adult or a teenager would. Without realizing it, I became hardened. Not in a bad way. I simply mean that I didn’t whine or curse my misfortune or envy those who were luckier than me. I see this part of my life as formative for my character: it taught me to deal with adversity. Besides, I knew there were people worse off than me. Some of the girls I went to school with had lost their fathers during the war, while others waited endlessly for them to return from Soviet POW camps.
At the local school, I was a quiet and conscientious student. There weren’t enough places, so half the students attended in the morning, the others in the afternoon. And in winter, there wasn’t enough coal to heat the building, so we were completely free. My mother worked as a housecleaner, while my father salvaged bricks from the city’s ruins for its reconstruction, before being employed at the courtroom in Spandau. It was in those ruins that I spent whole days with my friends, playing hide-and-seek, climbing up to the roofs of damaged houses, and—best of all—searching for buried treasure.
The school was located in an imposing building, a five-minute walk from where we lived, its white façade riddled with bullet holes. I loved going to school. Our teachers were kind and attentive, we were given chocolate and warm milk every day, and I also got to see my best friend there. Her name was Margit Mücke.
In the mornings, I would leave for school with my lunch in a mess tin. I don’t remember ever going hungry. On the other hand, I do remember eating an awful lot of potatoes, rarely accompanied by any meat. Our meals became slightly more varied when my mother started bringing back gifts from the houses where she worked. There was a sort of lard, which we used instead of butter and which my mother would keep cool by storing it in the space between the double-glazed windows. But the outer pane was broken, and birds sometimes flew in. I would watch, rapt, from the other end of the room as they pecked at the lard.
Occasionally, for a treat, my father would buy me an ice cream; that was the only way my parents had of spoiling me. I remember women taking the train to the countryside and returning with bags over their shoulders containing eggs and vegetables. I remember the wooden soles on my shoes. I remember the fabric that my mother would receive in exchange for coupons that were much like ration cards and that she would use to make our clothes. I remember how the women of Berlin were able to transform a too-small coat into a dress, how they made “getting by” into an art form.
We avoided speaking about Hitler. Prior to 1945, I used to recite little poems for the Führer at my kindergarten. I lived in the ruins, but I didn’t know why Berlin had been destroyed and divided into four occupied sectors. The world where I grew up was never explained to me beyond the simple formulation: “We lost a war, now we must work.” My father was not very talkative, and my mother didn’t say much, either, except when she was scolding my father, which was pretty often.
When I reached the age of ingratitude, at about fourteen, my parents grew closer again, and I became the object of their disapproval. They had neither learned nor forgotten anything from the epochal events they had sleepwalked through. They weren’t Nazis, but they had voted for Hitler like everyone else, and they did not feel any responsibility for what had occurred under Nazism. When my mother and her neighbors chatted, they always ended up whining about the injustice of what had happened to them, waxing nostalgic over beloved objects they had lost amid the turmoil. There was never a word of pity or compassion for the people of other countries—least of all the Russians, whom they criticized bitterly.
Berlin echoed with the roar of airplanes bringing us supplies because it was the time of the blockade. I never asked questions, whether of others or myself. I merely walked along the path that had been prepared for me: in 1954, I was confirmed at the Evangelical Lutheran church in Hohenzollernplatz, but I had already lost my faith; even today, I do not believe in God. Back then, however, Providence finally came to our rescue. We moved to a bigger apartment, and at last I had my own bedroom.
It is difficult to describe the joy I felt. For the first time in my life, I was going to live in a normal home with my parents. Number 9 Ahrweilerstrasse was a rather plain-looking building, but to my eyes it was wonderful—a home, belonging just to us, and it was located in my beloved Wilmersdorf neighborhood. The apartment’s windows looked out at both the courtyard and a quiet, tree-lined street filled with houses similar to ours.
It had a kitchen and a bathroom, hot water, and central heating; my room, like my parents’, had a sofa bed, which we unfolded every night before going to sleep. It felt so luxurious to have radiators that actually heated the apartment—before this, the places we lived in had been freezing cold in winter. I remember the tiny stove we would huddle around—and we owed this dramatic improvement in our existence to Aunt Ella, who was infinitely more resourceful than my parents. I spent seven years in that apartment, remaining there until I left Berlin in 1960.
Very close to where we lived was Rüdesheimer Platz, a square where the people of the neighborhood would come with their children during the summer months to have picnics, play games, and chat with one another. I used to go for walks there with my new friend—a basset hound belonging to a Jewish woman for whom my mother worked as a cleaner. She would let me look after him when I got home from school or after I had done my homework. She lived next door at number 7 Ahrweilerstrasse and was now the only Jew in that neighborhood. Before 1933, I was told, there used to be so many of them.
At sixteen, I left the high school and enrolled in Höhere Wirtschaftsschule in Schöneberg, a technical college that I hoped to use as a springboard into working life. I had been so bored in high school. I wanted to learn a trade so I could free myself from my parents. Because life as a teenager was no fun at all. My father drank and always seemed to be sick, which only aggravated my mother’s irritability. (He would die of cancer in 1966, at the age of fifty-eight.) Their daily arguments made the atmosphere tense and unbearable. Day after day, I felt like I was suffocating.
I didn’t know myself and I didn’t try to know myself. But simply from waiting—for what?—and seeing nothing happen, I must have felt some kind of dissatisfaction. I expressed it through a total lack of enthusiasm for the future that my mother was planning for me: a savings account, the preparation of my trousseau, and a suitable marriage like my cousin Christa’s. The family called me ungrateful, but in all probability I saved myself. I held firm, and never again did I follow that “straight path” that led, from what I could see, to anything but happiness.
As soon as I turned twenty-one—on February 13, 1960—I had only one idea in mind: to leave this city, despite the deep if inexplicable attachment I felt for it. I often traveled into East Berlin, particularly on Sundays, and for me the city did not end at the Brandenburg Gate; it continued on through Unter den Linden, which belonged to me just as much as the Tiergarten did. Politics and history did not enter my mind, only an indefinable feeling that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, Berlin was one city, not two.
In fact, I preferred the eastern zone. It was so dark and poor, but I was drawn by its unknown past. In the course of those dreamy wanderings, I belatedly forged the surprising certainty that my country was united. I was solitary, but my roots clung deeply to German soil.
Copyright © 2015 by Flammarion/Librairie Arthème Fayard
Translation copyright © 2018 by Sam Taylor
