Defeat as Childhood Experience: WWII’s Shadow Remembered, Revisited, and Researched --- Excerpt fron Introduction

 

 Excerpts from the INTRODUCTION

The memories of which I speak are of the end of WWII and the reality of living within Germany’s defeat during the war’s shadow-years 1945 to 1955. When we fled Allied bombing, when my grandmother discovered the first question mark on my forehead, I was left in no doubt that we who fled were in the wrong. So, who and what I am—guarded and guided by those who survived or were favoured in my memory—goes back to that point and forward to the point that I am at this writing....

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 While this book can be seen as an autoethnography in the sense that I am a participant-observer who is “familiar with the inner features” of the people of my country at war, the term does not quite capture what is most important in this study, namely, the intimate interrelationship between memory and history. It means that it is better to characterize the book as a memoir that relied on two sets of academic tools: first, remembered childhood war experiences served as tools that initiated this study; and second, memories of vocabulary, addresses, towns, institutions, colors, and emotions served as research tools used to identify research sites and relevant archives where traces of our past were stored....

 

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In sum, as a child I was affected by and observed a defeat that had no name. One of the reasons was, of course, that I was not privy to the information about specific actors or actions that brought it about. Here a look at documents stored in archives was revealing. Documents did not so much correct memories; indeed, only small if significant aspects of some memories were corrected. Rather, archival research showed what the nature of the local political and material forces were that affected not only mother’s breakdowns, but also my frequent movement between the British and Soviet Zone.

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Excerpt Ch. 37 VOCABULARY from "Defeat as Childhood Experience:..."

 

37
Vocabulary

 

Before describing the new instability that I mentioned in the previous chapter, it is important to say something about the social environment that changed around us. It started with movement of people and new words. 

“Antifascists” shot-up from the dormant social milieu like aggressive sprouts from un-tilled soil. Last year’s wheat became this year’s chaff and vice versa. Returned “prisoners of war” were a sorry sight and aroused palpable psychological pain among women and children. But for Sovietized authorities, the primary issue was clothing. “Prisoners of war” were ordered to find civilian clothing immediately because the wearing of uniform pieces was forbidden. Curiously enough, the prohibition did not seem to have anything to do with political branding whereby a prisoner of war arriving in civilian clothing would be an “antifascist” while a prisoner of war wearing a piece of uniform a “Nazi”. Rather, it had to do with canceling the past, which included suppressing sadness. Since officials associated “sadness” with seeing defeated and demoralized people wearing military rags, the rags had to go. Sadness was material: wrap the man in new cloth, lift the mood.

The social landscape provided men and women with new social wrappings that raised the importance of those who joined in. Thus, the new people belonged to the People’s Solidarity (Volkssolidarität) and the Communist Women’s Association (Kommunistischer Frauenausschuss ). For us bystanders it raised questions. Did the new vocabulary like antifascists (Antifaschisten ), prisoners of war (Kriegsgefangene), and solidarity of the people (Volkssolidarität) usher in a new beginning or did they just blind us again to what was really going on? Did the new words merely favor other people or did new people really appear? The German words for Antifascist, Prisoner of War, and People’s Solidarity entered my vocabulary even when I did not voice them.

But I knew one thing. Around me, those words were as bad as had been the Nazi word Community of One People (Volksgemeinschaft). “Propaganda and hubris,” mother said years later, “all of it.” 

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"Defeat as Childhood Experience: WWII's Shadow Remembered, Revisited, and Researched" by Karla Poewe --- AVAILABLE AMAZON.COM

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