Preface
This memoir of my childhood finally does what I delayed doing for many decades; namely, pierce the fog of defeat that I experienced between the ages of four and fourteen in the aftermath of World War II Germany. Though the war ended in 1945, it had a long shadow that followed me even to Canada in 1955 and to Africa thereafter. As among many a war-child, it resulted in the phenomenon whereby my academic research, on one hand, and personal research of my past, on the other, became parallel activities.
By the fog of defeat I mean, for example, the constant anxious movements of a child’s mind and body as it maneuvers to remain near a familiar hand because its disappearance means utter terror. What the child experienced, the adult remembered, but it was the need to ground these memories that resulted in a book of two parts. Here is how it works.
I remember the first years of defeat as having been more than being bombed or lacking food and shelter. They became years during which grandmother (Oma), Mother, and Aunt Luzi moved me hither and thither between the Soviet and British Zones of Occupation as if I were their guarantee to hold onto a single room. Oma’s stories pardoned my mistakes, her songs helped me eat, and her explanations banned hate. Only a waiting mother, an absent father, and streets filled with men in rags or foreign uniforms remained a puzzle.
Decades later as an adult and with my husband, we returned to various German towns, especially Werdau and Netzschkau, where we found archived documents and people that threw light on the material forces that solved more than the puzzle centered on my mother and our family. Records described quarrels over refugees among remaining supporters of the SS (Schutzstaffel), regional bureaucrats, and Nazi party officials as they departed the scene.
In short, answering ever more questions, and coming to understand the machinations of leaving Nazis, remaining locals, and arriving Communists in what became the Soviet Zone, had the unexpected consequence of helping me understand the source of my lifelong curiosity in people and their maneuverings. Thus, my past inclined me toward the study of anthropology. Memory episodes emerged during fieldwork in Zambia. Memories in the form of addresses, names of towns, as well as moods and colours became tools that led to the discovery of documents and knowledgeable people. Finally, research became real when my husband, a historian, joined me in this endeavour. While this conglomeration of functions and tools is not teleology, it is as we shall see having a history. And what this means, readers will find as they proceed through the book.
---
I am enormously grateful for the comments and encouragements from Haijo Westra in Classics and Religion of the University of Calgary. I thank Carson Pue for a long conversation about the manuscript, especially his recognition of the importance that Christianity played in the chaotic circumstances of that time. I thank Justice Dallas Miller for reminding me that the Free Law Movement is still being discussed now.
In the Netherlands, André Droogers, well-known anthropologist and colleague, must be thanked for his very helpful critique as well as solid encouragement. In Germany, I especially thank Professor Dr. Uwe Backes, Deputy Director of the Hannah Arendt Institute, for reaching beyond our common topic of totalitarianism to inform me—for example—about scholars or scientists belonging to the war-child-generation who have also come to be understood as contemporary witnesses. Likewise in Germany, I am grateful for the interest taken, including in this childhood book, by the competent and versatile archivist Gregor Pickro. This passionate archivist did not just open the doors, so to speak, to German archival resources, but year after year graced us with profound letters of encouragement. Likewise, I thank Ulrich van der Heyden, a well-known historian, who introduced us to the Berlin Society for Mission History. Born in the former German Democratic Republic, he shared with me the sense of parallelism between academic and personal research.
And here I must also thank the archivists Frau Fleischer of the City Archive (Stadtarchiv) Netzschkau and Frau Bauer of the Stadtarchiv Werdau for their competence in finding material that contained the Poewe name.
I thank my lifelong friend Gundi Karbe (b. Gundula Komossa) who kept letters I wrote her in the 1950s from Canada and returned them to me from Berlin, thus some excerpts are found in this book. Gisela Gutsche, Hella Berthold, Gundula Komassa, and Anke Peper were four early friends whose names I never forgot. Their name sequence functions like a rhyme. I met all but one of them on a revisit to Buxtehude and Berlin. Together they represent the healing of our postwar community from being torn between locals and refugees.
Because they appear in the book, I mention but briefly my deep appreciation for my primary and high school teachers, for example, such soul-changing men like Herr Kurt Deckwerth of Buxtehude, Germany, and Mr. A.W. Blakeley of Toronto, Canada. They brought me forward.I am particularly grateful that Irving Hexham, a British historian and my husband, accompanied me on all trips to Germany where we jointly researched my past in various city archives and met to talk with various people. His good humour and encouraging words freed me of many a doubt and mood swing.
Finally, I thank our gifted and competent member of the Vogelstein team, namely, Trish Kotow for the editorial and technical work of this book.
AVAILABLE AMAZON.COM + name of AUTHOR, KARLA POEWE
.jpg){kind=link}