Mentioning The War

Funny lot the Germans.  I’ve only been there once and then only briefly, on a work-related visit to Dusseldorf (sans umlaut) – a largely unattractive city that reminded me of nowhere so much as Coventry, probably on account of the large amounts of concrete everywhere that seems to have been the default pan-European response to area-bombing.

‘What was it like?’ a pal asked me afterwards.

‘Even the barking dogs in the night-time sounded sinister,’ I told him.  Though this was untrue and I only said it for comic effect in the pub.  In truth, Dusseldorf and the Germans were blandly inoffensive, right down to the shady looking drunk who stopped me on the bank of the Rhine to ask for “cigarretten bitte”.

The only exception to this insipidity was on the flight over.  I thought it was a bad enough start when I traipsed out onto the apron at City Airport and saw that the aircraft that I was going to fly on had propellers.  I suppose you’re just as doomed plummeting from 20,000 feet in a jet, it’s just that it didn’t make me feel very safe and secure (though it  did provide me with another gag-line in the pub afterwards about Dorniers, Heinkels and Junkers).  As we flew across the night skies of Europe and I mused about Guy Gibson and his unmentionable dog, the stewardesses came round and asked what I wanted and I didn’t hear them properly and they had to repeat themselves.  All air stewardesses possess a nasty streak in my experience, except the Singaporean ones, but these ones had a really nasty flash in their eyes that could not help but bring the word Camp to mind.  And not in the, good, gay sense either.  After that I couldn’t rid myself of the fear of being met off the plane by the Gestapo.

My only youthful reading that really touched upon the home-front of the Third Reich was in those sections of the Sven Hassel books that saw the fictive members of the 27^th (Penal) Panzer Regiment either on duty or on drunken debaucherous leave back in the Fatherland.  At the time, I blithely bought into the anti-war/anti-Nazi aspects of the stories.  Now, although I haven’t picked one of them up in maybe twenty years, I rather suspect that this was done as a necessary leavening for what basically amounts to a whole load of gratuitous Gun-Porn.   At some point I got rid of the dozen or so Hassel books that I owned, probably on the very sensible grounds of sexual-aesthetics i.e. the sort of bookish girls that browse your bookshelf aren’t going to be too taken with a load of volumes titled Assignment Gestapo, OGPU Prison, SS General, and the like, and it might well have reflected poorly upon one’s chances, even with Pride and Prejudice sitting there alongside them in mute mitigation.

At university I read a great deal more about AH and National Socialism and all that went with it, more than enough to sate me on the subject for a number of years and too much for my peace of mind.  At the time the great debate was around Goldhagen and the extent to which, I paraphrase, The Germans Were Up For It. (And by “It” I mean the really big bad IT).  At the time I was also very taken with The Tin Drum, of which I’ve forgotten almost all of the details except for some nasty business with eels…

Since then I’ve tended to shy away from reading more of the same, though I’m sensible of the privilege of being able to read the Klemperer diaries and I wholeheartedly recommend Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, especially to anyone who still retains a lingering belief that the revolting Speer was basically a good chap who got caught up with the wrong crowd.

One fact that I did remember from my studies, and which came back to mind when recently reading the magnificent Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, was just how few, how thinly spread, the Gestapo were, and how much they relied upon the willingness of the German citizenry to denounce their erstwhile friends and colleagues and neighbours.  And willing they were, whether through fear or fervour, although all the evidence seems to suggest that this rings unfortunately true for all authoritarian/occupied states.

Against this pitiless background, where fear and avarice and bullying rule, and a single mistake could lead to torture and death, the dignity of the human spirit is redeemed by Otto and Anna Quangel’s campaign of dropping anonymous postcards across Berlin, denouncing the regime and its crimes.  Unable and unwilling to put it down, I read the book in two long sessions.  To be sure, it’s a bleak and harrowing read but also an extraordinary one, words which do not drop lightly from this ‘pen’ at least.  Read it.