The post-war political background

Dear grandchildren,

Each chapter in my father’s book, The Rim of the Volcano, begins with a description of the political climate in Germany at the time. This one disturbs me the most.

Can you imagine your entire country – every city and most towns, as well as all infrastructure and all cultural, educational, and municipal entities – being completely destroyed? The thought of it feels hopeless to me; I can’t even imagine what the reality must have been like for my father, his siblings, and every single German, from the most destitute DPs (displaced persons) to common townspeople, to the elite. Everyone in Germany lost the war. Everyone.

Although my oldest brother was born in Germany, my siblings and I grew up in middle class America in the 50s and 60s. We never knew real loss, we never knew hunger, we never lost a home or a loved one to war, and we never feared for our safety. By the age of 17, my father had lost so much – both parents, his home, and his country. Then he emigrated to America in 1953 and raised his kids in a privileged, peaceful, and prosperous society – yet I believe that he somehow (irrationally, of course) expected us to understand what he had previously gone through in Germany. His experiences shaped every aspect of who he had become and I believe that he (and our mother) raised us four American children with German WWII experiences behind every decision, every belief, and every move they made. We children didn’t understand it, but we sure felt it.

A few years ago, my son Alex took a class on “generational trauma” at the University of Washington. He explained to me that many things get passed down through families, like heirlooms, genetic conditions, and physical characteristics, but  trauma can be inherited, too. Generational trauma is trauma that isn’t just experienced by one person but extends from one generation to the next.

All of a sudden, it all made sense to me. My siblings and I grew up experiencing generational trauma. In some unexplainable way, we were feeling remnants of our parents’ lives in WWII Germany before we were even born. We were American children, but we were raised in a very German household with parents who had experienced vast amounts of trauma. (This blog is about my father’s experiences, but my mother experienced trauma as well, such as her mother’s death during an Allied air raid, dying much the way Carl did. I should write about my mother’s experiences, too. Maybe I’ll add some of her writings to this blog!)

For me, generational trauma manifests in my issues with food – being told to eat everything on my plate with the reminder that my parents experienced severe hunger during WWII… and then also being asked whether I “really need to eat that.” I’m sure my three brothers experience generational trauma as well. I wonder whether my children do. Hopefully this blog will help you, my grandchildren, should you ever wonder whether your great-grandparents’ experiences so long ago still influence you in some way.

Here are my father’s words:

Nothing could illustrate the conditions in Germany in 1946 and 1947 better than these photos showing utter destruction which illustrate not only the physical destruction of some major German cities, but also the mental and emotional state of the population as a whole. There was hardly a single German city of any size, or in any part of the country, that had been spared from destruction by air. The deadliest and most destructive war in world history had eventually rolled over almost every German town. The mountains of rubble were nothing short of overwhelming, and burned-out minds and souls added to the sense of despair.

Dresden

Berlin

Cologne

Dresden

Nurnberg

Germany was reduced to almost nothing. Where the country was not limited by the ocean’s edge, it was occupied by the victors. The entire area to the east became part of Poland or the USSR, Czechoslovakia incorporated the Sudetenland again, Austria again became a separate country, France incorporated again areas like Alsace-Lorraine that had been fought over for centuries. And the rest of Germany was divided into four Occupation Zones, the eastern one Russian, the southern one USA, the northern British, and two sections in the west French.

Practically the entire populations of Silesia and East Prussia had to find room in a much-smaller country in which millions of residences were destroyed. The roads and rail lines were largely unusable. The food supply situation was disastrous, even in the much better-off Western Zones. When the food ration coupons were raised to 1500 calories per person per day, thanks to food from America, it became an occasion for much celebration and praise. Coal for heating homes that were still standing was so scarce that a bucket of coal was a desired black-market commodity, as was an overcoat that during the especially harsh winter of 1946–1947. The most common everyday needs like underwear, toothpaste, paper, pencils, shoelaces, nails, and soap were not obtainable except by barter on the black market - if you were lucky.

Two things began to lift the Germany out of its misery: Germans simply being German: organized, efficient, inventive, and industrious, and the United States’ Marshall Plan which provided funds to rebuild the allied countries of Europe after the war. Although it didn’t really take effect until 1948, it was most instrumental in Europe becoming a viable market again in the face of an increasing East-West tension and was instituted primarily to stop communism.