Dearest grandchildren.
I wish you could have met my father, Thomas, known to your parents as their beloved "Opa." He truly was "an engineer with the soul of a poet." Somehow, deep in my core, I always knew this, but to us he was just "Dad." It's only now, years after his death, as I go through his materials, that I realize what a romantic he was.
Unlike my siblings and I, unlike your parents, and (hopefully) unlike you, Thomas wasn't able to make many real choices of his own in his early years. The circumstances all around him made those choices for him. War, survival, and just making his way in a very unstable Germany. He made the best of what he was given and, in this case, at least, even found love and a sense of belonging.
I believe now that my father always lived a secret "parallel life" from the one he lived with us. Only now do I understand that he left much of his inner life, his romantic soul, in Germany. He and my mother Edith had a solid 53-year marriage (happy at times, but also often fraught with difficulty), but even there he didn't feel free to make his own choices, as Mom was pregnant with my brother Michael and, well, as anyone who knew Thomas knows, he always, always did the right thing.
I wish I'd known more of the man who wrote this!
In December 1946, I was eighteen. I went "home" to Rainer's family in München for Christmas where a letter from Gisela was waiting for me. "Everything,” she wrote, “that I had so carefully dammed up is now back again, only with even greater force. And worst of all, I am completely helpless!" The next day, a letter arrived from Ingrid. "All my thoughts are seeking you,” she wrote. “It is so wonderful that they have a place to go again and don't have to go 'round in circles anymore. I have so much to thank you for! I had lost everything in my life, and in my profound loneliness I cried to God for a human being who would say 'I am here — for you!’”
My plan was to emigrate to America in a few months. Would I leave two unhappy people behind? My Christmas and New Years thoughts were deeply confused. Last Christmas I was in the refugee camp, transitioning from the Russian zone to the American zone. The Christmas before had been the last one with my father in my childhood home in Chemnitz. Each Christmas during these turbulent years, my hopes and fears had been vastly different, going from the hope for mere survival to excited anticipation of a new life. I had plenty to be thankful for this year, as I was making good headway into adulthood and emigration to America was on the near horizon. But I was deeply torn by my loves of 1946. Three women had loved me, each in her own way. All three had written to me at one time that they were listening to Mozart, and they wished I was with them. I loved each of them honestly — as I understood love — and had given to each and taken from each. At that moment, my life was deeply entwined with Ingrid's, and becoming so with Gisela's. I could sense their different loves enveloping me with the same warmth, but I could not feel good and right about it. I didn't want to hurt either of them, but I knew it was inevitable. Ingrid asked me in a letter to München; “Can you still pray?” If I did, it must have been for help to resolve the tug-of-war in my soul between my "heavenly love,” Gisela, and my “earthly love,” Ingrid. I had dropped into Ingrid’s life as the support that she so desperately needed, and in giving her that support I found my own direction, with her help. At the end of 1946, when I was in München with Rainer, Ingrid wrote to me, “A letter from Gisela just arrived; I’ll send it to you. If it were from Nora I wouldn’t send it. I don’t like her. She’s hiding something, she’s not genuine. Watch out for her!”
Rainer called me a "widow comforter, “but that's all I remember of that Christmas in Solln with with Ulli, baby Andreas, and his parents, ready to get divorced. I was too self-absorbed in my own torments and elations, my own longings and my fears. I only remember Rainer’s cynicism.
Winter 1946/1947 was bitterly cold. My first duty upon return to Ingolstadt was to split the half-yard of wood that Ingrid had managed to "organize,” meaning to find, steal, trade, or barter. In this case, the wood was as a Christmas present from one of her massage patients. It would heat the kitchen for a while, but the heat didn’t reach the other rooms of the apartment. The kitchen faced south and during the early afternoon it sometimes felt like spring in there, even though the fire had gone out. It was a peaceful and quiet hour, "our sun hour,” as Ingrid called it, when we were alone in the kitchen with its couch.
I did have a bedroom on the north side of the house, but it wasn’t usable in winter except for quickly crawling under the blanket and waiting for cold feet to heat the even colder bed. I remember waking up many a morning with a crackling crust of ice that had formed on my blanket where my breath escaped out into the frozen air. The only warm evenings were the ones when Ingrid could convince her mother to go see a movie, so we could keep each other warm. At least we had electric light most of the time, albeit very strictly rationed, so electric heating was out of the question.
Gisela wrote from "Russian" Adelsberg: "We have a candle on our table every night this week, because we have evening electricity one week, and morning electricity the next. All the images from the bombing nights are rising up in my mind again, images that were just beginning to fade… along with the happier ones. Maybe, just maybe we could see each other once more before "that ugly America would swallow you up for good,” as she put it. There was some hope, because just then a fateful meeting was taking place in Moscow which would decide whether the borders between the two halves of Germany would ever open again. I was lucky: Gisela had left the back of her letter blank, so I could use it for notes on a history lesson — I had probably used up my ration of school note paper for letters to her!
Rumors were flying around Ingolstadt about Ingrid and me. We were seen in town together, arm in arm, together picking Pitti up from school. I felt very adult, and Ingrid felt very secure. Life was normalizing. For us in the West it was so much better than in the East, where Gisela walked two hours to school through the snow in the morning and two hours home at night. There were no trolleys or buses due to lack of power, gas, tires — lack of everything over there - except ideology.
I decided then that after graduation I would sit down and write the "Life Memoirs of a Nineteen-Year-Old.” Much later, when I would be old, say in twenty or forty years, I would probably enjoy reading them, I said to myself.
Oh yes - after graduation, that's when life would start for real. By then I was back to wanting to become a bridge builder. I decided that I would start working on the Donau Bridge project, getting some of my practical work out of the way by helping to rebuild the bridge that the Nazis had blown up at the end of the war. I don't quite know what "practical work" I imagined, but it didn’t matter, as nothing ever came of it, probably because I found out that it would have consisted of mixing and carrying concrete buckets (no cranes in those days)!
In the last few weeks before the final high school exam, I crammed very hard, and tried to move heaven and earth to pass the exam, having both a heavenly love and an earthly love crossing their fingers for me: a deeply innocent and esoteric love from one, and a womanly, equally profound love from the other. The double-pull must have worked, as I did so well that I didn't even have to take the oral exam. And my math test was the best in class! In retrospect, that wasn't so good. It was a fluke that went straight to my head and lodged there, convincing me that engineering must be my calling.
The year 1946 was a year of intense confusion for me, though I didn’t fully recognize it at the time. Externally, I was totally wrapped up in getting my life plans in order, but internally it was a year of dealing with three women (all of them older than I) who loved me — and whom I loved. I suppose I was mature beyond my years, having lost both parents the year before, and having survived the Holocaust. But the women who occupied my heart were mature in a different, uniquely feminine way.
If those were my defining years, I still had a lot of defining to do in 1947. My letters bespeak a person I don't really know any more - or want to know, to be honest.
What speaks from my letters is a self-important kid who had acquired mannerisms from his father that today, to an American, are terribly German and rather unlikable. I must have thought at the time — assuming I even consciously thought about it — that my reputed "maturity" obligated me to be a stiltedly rational, rigid, morally impeccable guiding light to those around me. That was my father’s influence on me, with all the annoyances that go with it. When my mother called someone a “Schulmeister” (a schoolmaster), she used the term with an inflection in her voice that told even us kids that she was talking about one of my father’s less likable traits.
Today, a good deal of that rigidity remains, but in encountering myself in those letters of sixty years ago, I realize how grateful I am that America rescued me from staying either too firmly on the path of a German schoolmaster's righteousness or on the path of the German other-worldly sentimentalist. I do try, but I have never be able to shed a certain German heaviness that I acquired not only from my parents but from the entirety of all German culture.
It’s interesting to read between the lines of my 60-year-old letters. Already then there was conflict between the poetic and the technical, a conflict I haven't resolved to this day. The reason is that it's really the story of my life, and that of many immigrants - the desire to be the easy-going, can-do, uncomplicated and practical American, with the realization that just barely under that surface sits the inflexible, ultra-organized, somewhat arrogant and elitist German.
Many Germans can be defined by where they fit on a two-dimensional rational-sentimental coordinate system. When you add to that the third dimension of leading a life in a pragmatic, materialistic, and money-dominated society, the potential for life-long internal skirmishes becomes apparent. The stool I'm sitting on today has three supporting legs, each supplied by one of the long-term influences in my life: a meticulous father, a romantic mother, and a strong wife of fifty-some years.
 |
| Carl and Irmgard Heumann, Thomas' parents, before his birth - likely around the time of their marriage in 1919. |
 | |
| Thomas and Edith Heumann (my parents), around 1995 or 2000. |
The three legs are not, and have never been, equal in length or in strength. The ups and downs and imbalances in my life were in large part due to the constant shifting of that tripod. It's a good thing that a tripod never wobbles or rocks; it can slant, it can teeter, it can be firm or precarious, but it can never wobble.
My letters of the late 1940s preached and kvetched of self-importance, only to suddenly flip into the warm and thoughtful ponderings of a poet. How could Gisela, with her dreamy, unrealistic flights of fancy and optimism, love me? How could warm and down-to-earth Ingrid love me? They both did, and both must have been more accepting and forgiving than I gave them credit for. They were mature enough to make the allowances I wasn't willing to make.
