One of the versions of my now published book "Defeat as Childhood Experience:..." (2024) started with a citation of Joseph Ratzinger (2007) "Jesus von Nazareth" (German) Freiburg: Herder p. 101,102.
We are the poor, the
hungry, the weeping, the hated and excluded.
We are harmed, and yet at all times we are cheerful. We are the dying, and
look: we live.
I tried this citation because Ratzinger is a good thought companion. He has a profound understanding of the complexity of life and a great respect for the embodiment of the person in the pursuit of knowledge. But because Joseph Ratzinger, born 1927, was a teenager at the end of World War II, I start here with his perspective of the war experience. His and my generation is related; it is the sliver of a contrast between us that matters.
According to Joseph Ratzinger, the beatitudes (italicized above) describe, in the first instance, the paradoxical state of being of the Apostles. And in the German version of his book, when he turns to the general human condition, he sees the second beatitude about sadness, for example, as something positive because it is a counterweight against the power of evil. His interpretation of this beatitude is a direct reference to the condition of many German teenagers, including himself, at the end of World War II, when they were pressed to follow orders that they understood to be futile and indeed evil. Their Ohnmacht (powerlessness) and sense of being overcome by sadness (Traurigkeit) was a form of passive resistance.
Over the last two or three decades, this generation, also called the “45ers,” meaning that they were teenagers at the end of the war, received a lot of attention because they are seen to be the last witnesses of the Nazi years. The historian, Rolf Schörken, wrote a particularly sensitive book about this generation.[3] He used his own experiences and other published autobiographies to analyze his and their memories of that time and their postwar political inclinations. Some of them had participated in Nazi youth groups, but they were not educated in the Nazi way and were never in positions of power. Their major memory was that of having experienced the promise of a great future that vanished with defeat and its aftermath. What defined them as sixteen‐year-old was war and finding food, not Nazism. Their development is most interesting; but it is not quite mine. I say “not quite” because it was the experience of my older siblings so that I became aware and part of it.
My generation, those born between 1939 and 1945, are war children. This generation tends to be overlooked for three reasons. First, they fall between the “45s” and the “68s,” meaning that only those young were worthy of generational recognition who witnessed consciously decisive events: either the end of the Nazi era 1945 or the rebellion against their “Nazi” parents 1968. By contrast, war children witnessed both, but in ’45 did not fully realize what it was that they experienced and in ’68 had not the hate for their parental generation. Their memories did not incline them to hate.
Second, there was little intellectual interest in the war children generation because they experienced the generally embarrassing shadow years. I mean, on the one hand, the years of sociopolitical meltdown including the continuous loss of family members; on the other, the time of occupation by victors who for several years preferred to rape, plunder, punish, re-educate, and generally flounder before they helped—and the latter differentially so.
Third, interest in war children was low because intellectuals saw and still see us as potentially dangerous. Having experienced disaster on two fronts, flight from or bombing of home and occupation by strangers, it is feared that these war children might separate wartime from Nazi-time and fall prey to stylizing the Germans as victims thereby relativizing the Holocaust about which they knew nothing. War children are aware of the danger. And indeed, research by the German journalist Sabine Bode shows just how far a war child will go to prevent being accused of Holocaust denial.
@ Karla Poewe
Defeat as Childhood Experience: WWII's Shadow Remembered, Revisited, and Researched. 2004, Vogelstein Press. Available Amazon.com
[1] Ratzinger 2007: ibid.
[2] Those born between 1926 and 1932.
[3] Rolf Schörken (2004) “Die Niederlage als Generationserfahrung: Jugendliche nach dem Zusammenbruch der NS-Herrschaft.“ Weinheim und München: Juventa Verlag. Born 1928, Schörken taught recent history and history of didactics. He was Chairman of the Political Education Guideline Commission for Political Education in North Rhine-Westphalia.
