Brain of an engineer, soul of a poet

Dear grandchildren,

This entry from my father has been difficult to edit, as he jumps all over the place, from 1946-1947, back to 1945, and forward to 1948 and 1950! Try as I might, I can’t edit it to make chronological sense and still maintain his story. I’m leaving the chronology as is because I believe that it reflects Dad’s inner turmoil at the time, as well as his emotions when he deeply immersed himself in writing his memoir.

Whereas his storytelling of the war years focused on details of what happened in his physical world, his memoir at this point transitions to a focus on what was going on inside – his emotions, his sentiments, his fears, and his dreams.

I remember my mother (the original “Omi”!) complaining that when Dad wrote, he was “gone” to her. He would disappear into his office for hours at a time, deep into his writing and unavailable to the 21st century. I sensed this even from hundreds of miles away. NOW I finally get it, as I find myself doing the same thing – escaping from the real world of a global pandemic, insane and illogical people and politics, and an earth that is gasping and choking, choosing to focus instead on the past - and not even my own past, instead getting to know my grandfather and understanding my own father better, as I sit within the walls of my own office, deep into my own writing, unavailable to my own world.

Today is one of those days when I desperately want Dad back. I want to understand the young man who wrote this entry, the young man who lived so deep in my father, even to his dying day, but who so few people in his life since 1947 – including me – actually knew. His sister Ulli, my beloved aunt, is the only person still living who knew Dad back then, but she is trapped in her own world, one plagued by Alzheimer’s. I believe that her memories of those days in the distant past are still vivid and strong (because Alzheimer’s allows at least that one grace), but locked inside. I’ve encouraged her daughter, my favorite cousin, Claudia, to read some of this blog to Ulli, hoping to elicit some memories for her, but I fear that all these memories are left only in writings – and that breaks my heart. At the same time, I’m so grateful for my father’s prolific writings and for Ulli’s hunderds upon hundreds of pages of translations- letters to and from hers and Thomas’ parents, letters to and from friends in the 50s and 60s, and stories written in German, that we can now enjoy. My plan is to include some of Ulli’s translations on this blog.

I love Dad’s last line in this entry: “Starting with my mother, my most lasting lessons in life have always come from women.” 

While Dad was a bit of a chauvinist in some old-world ways, he had a respect for and appreciation of women unlike most men I’ve known. I believe that he always turned to wise women – including, and especially his mother and my mother -  for love, counsel, strength, and wisdom, and he mentioned a few times, when men were screwing things up politically, that if they would just step aside and let women run things, we’d all be better off.

Then he’d ask what’s for dinner.

Here are my father’s heartfelt words:

Wie kann das sein, daß diese nahen Tage

Fort sind, für immer fort, und ganz vergangen?

Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,

Und viel zu grauenhaft, als daß man klage:

Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt...

- Hugo von Hoffmannsthal

-

How can this be, that those still-vivid days

Are gone, forever gone, and vanished all?

No-one can fully fathom this,

This thing too horrible that one could fret:

Everything flows and glides away from us ...

 

Writing about the immediate post-war years will be an intensely emotional experience for me. Bittersweet melancholy and great excitement are competing for my attention as I thumb through crumbling papers dated 1946 and 1947.

I entered those turbulent years during the last few days of 1945, when I arrived in München, exhausted, scared and confused, but full of wide-eyed expectations.

The mid-1940s were years of searching and defining. Where before there had been the external chaos of war, allowing only the energy needed to survive, now there was the internal turmoil of deciding who I was to become, requiring great emotional concentration. Now, things were happening much more in me than to me, and I began to realize that I had the soul of a poet, even as I prepared for life as an engineer – mostly because that’s what others expected of me.

Those years were the most wonderful time, when the war was finally over, when life lay open before me, and when love offered the purest happiness. But they were also the most terrifying time, when the pressures to somehow finish Gymnasium (high school) felt unbearable, when two eggs or a half a sack of coal were rare and coveted treasures, and when my heart felt like it could break in utter despair. My emotions felt raw and honest, turbulent and powerful. It was a time when hormones raged and discussions lasted deep into the night – discussions about what life was all about, what was to become of Germany, and who we ourselves would be.

I began to study engineering in 1948. I’m planning to end this narrative at that time, but the era didn’t really end until 1950, when I wrote: “My life has closed its circle. I have experienced all that life has to offer - all the triumphs of achievement and pains of failure, all the joys and all the pains of love. I have brought great happiness to some people and have received endless warmth from them. I have lost everything, and I have gained everything. If I die tomorrow, I will have had a full life.” I did not know then what riches lay before me, and I was fully satisfied with the wealth of the experiences I had already had because they felt so intense.

I write this memoir from the perspective of some sixty years later, no wiser, only more cynical.

In places I will quote from a wealth of letters, written at a time when we were fortunate to use pens and paper, not email, texts, or even telephones, as our main means of communication. I’m now very glad that I kept those letters through a dozen moves halfway around the world. In some cases, I even asked the recipients to return my own letters because nothing elicit images like words we, ourselves have written. Unfortunately, even letters don’t often reflect the little everyday tidbits, things that are the communal knowledge shared by all contemporaries, writers and recipients alike. Those significant details are often only found between the lines.

Poems were an integral part of my life, of my emotions, and of my outlook on the world. I will quote poems where they belong and will attempt to translate them in such a way that at least the meaning and the rhythm come across. It is very difficult to translate poetry, but I will try anyway so that someone with some knowledge of German can read the original aloud, hear the “melody,” and sense what it means. I read aloud and learned many of these poems by heart in those days, and they have retained their magnetism and power over the years. Even now, while weeding in the garden or walking on a hike, I find myself recalling them and trying to silently translate, coming up with different translations as I mull over what the original words and meanings.

I could not write about my life in those years without also talking about the women who crossed my path, and even walked it with me for a stretch. Some seemed temporary at the time, some did not. They were all significant to me, as they all helped who I am today.

Starting with my mother, my most lasting lessons in life have always come from women.