The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer – an Introduction

My dearest grandkids,

My father wrote The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer (which focuses on 1945), in 1979, thirty-two years before he wrote The Rim of the Volcano (which focuses on the years between 1928 and 1945). In 1979, I was in my senior year of college and completely immersed in (what felt like) the complexity of my own life. I read Dad’s book immediately upon receiving it for Christmas and I was completely immersed for a few evenings – but I read it with the same third-person detachment with which it was written. I felt a deep connection to the character of Peter Bauer, but that connection didn’t necessarily translate into a deep emotional understanding that it was Thomas Heumann, my father, who experienced such profound chaos and trauma. And by writing the book in third-person, Dad, in a way, gave me permission to distance myself.

Or maybe that’s just generational trauma speaking!

(Our family, c 1978. Dad was deep into the writing of Longest Year. I was deep into… well, being me.)

Here are my father’s words:

I originally wrote what follows - about the end of 1944 and all of 1945 - about a fictional character named Peter Bauer. I chose that alias because “Peter” means “rock” in Greek (strong and solid) and “Bauer” means builder in German. I’d need to be strong and solid to build my future life after enduring the life-altering chaos of 1945 Germany. I wrote this book in third person because it’s easier to step outside and look in from a distance, and it allows more freedom to make the truth truer by adding some “retrospective imagination” to details, without having to feel guilty of lying. In 1979, when I began to write The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, I found third-person to be the best approach.

(Thomas at about 16, circa 1945, the age of Peter Bauer in Longest Year.)

I’m sure I wasn’t half as likable as I made Peter Bauer!

I wrote The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer for Michael, Stephan, Carol, and Christopher, and for their children. In my original Forward, I suggested that they had been “both spared and denied a 1945.”

“Spared” because their teenage lives in the U.S. were so much easier than my teenage life under persecution in a war environment. My kids never had to deal with forced exclusion from friends, with the loss of personal freedoms, or with persecution for their grandparents’ religion. Neither did they have to count on being exposed to death -- their own and that of others – at the sound of constant air raid sirens.

But my four children were also “denied” my greatest opportunity. They were not orphans, alone at the age of 16, in a most challenging world, nor were they faced with the necessity of growing up quickly, simply to survive. At the age of 17, I was solely responsible for every decision I made. My kids were rarely put to the test of having to find out for themselves “what one is made of” and to test the values they learned in childhood.

The Heumanns around 1974. We teenagers were both “spared and denied a 1945.” It hadn’t been said like that yet, but we definitely felt it.

We didn’t yet know Dad’s whole story, but we did know that, compared to him at our age, we lived a life of carefree luxury. And I believe that all four of us kids felt some guilt around that – but we wouldn’t have been able to identify or admit that at the time. I was so busy being a typical American teenager – friends, school, cheerleading, dates – that I had little time or incentive to even try to understand my father’s (and mother’s – she also experienced wartime in Germany!) perspective. Our family was different, and I hated it. My parents had strong German accents and listened to Mozart instead of Sinatra. Our lunch bags held liverwurst sandwiches on brown bread instead of PB & J sandwiches on white bread, and dinner consisted of Leberkäse or sauerbraten instead of tacos or hamburgers. Unlike my friends’ parents, who were active in PTA and in their kids’ social lives and friendships, my parents played very little role in my early school or social life – until, that is, my mother became a beloved German teacher at my high school, which I actually liked because she got to know my friends and had the opportunity to finally see what being an American teenager was like. My boyfriend was even in her class, and more than a few times my friends and I spent lunch hour in her classroom!

The 60s and 70s were tumultuous years in America, but they were peaceful and tranquil compared to Europe in 1945. Only a few years in all of history were as turbulent as 1945 in Europe. In Germany, especially, it was a year of death and birth, a year of demarcation of one age from another. All over the world, 1945 was a watershed year between old and new. It was the first year of the atomic age.

Whether my children and grandchildren know it or not, they, too, have much of 1945 in their veins because all of its terror and all of its beauty left such deep marks on my own life. The difference between the 1980’s in the US and 1945 in Europe might help explain some of my idiosyncrasies and maybe even excuse my being a bit of an embarrassment to my children by being (as they put it) “so ... so ... so different.”

In my next post, we’ll start in on The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, which my father basically “inserted” into The Rim of the Volcano, changing Peter’s words back to his own.