"Defeat as Childhood Experience" + Chapter 29 "I Seek to Last" -- The Man who Saved 3 million books

 Chapter 29

This chapter was by far the hardest to write and I agonized over it for months. What evidence there is, points to the fact that the marriage of my parents and our survival after the 1944 bombing of Königsberg depended on help from Wilhelm Poewe. His wife accompanied us briefly as we fled, and I saw her name on a worn document of arrival in Saxony near the place of her parents. Then she vanished and was forgotten forever and so was he.

It was only after an American conductor and scholar, Ray Robinson (1932–2015), sent me a copy of an article he had written mentioning Dr. Wilhelm Poewe that I became curious. At the time, Dr. Robinson was on sabbatical leave in Europe collecting data about the musical manuscripts of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847) for a book he intended to write on the topic. About Berlin, where Wilhelm had been a senior librarian at the Prussian State Library, Robinson told the following story:

While the Luftwaffe (the German air force) had been bombing London on nearly a daily basis beginning in 1939, the first attack of Berlin by British aircraft did not occur until 9 April 1941. The library itself was not damaged in this initial raid, but the bombs did destroy the Berlin State Opera, located only a few blocks east of the Prussian State Library on Unter den Linden. This worried Georg Schünemann, Head of the Music Division, and he suggested to Hugo Krüss, Director General of the Library, that the most valuable holdings should be evacuated. Krüss agreed and named Dr. Wilhelm Poewe as coordinator of the evacuation. A Nazi Party member, Poewe turned out to be an excellent organizer and the ideal choice for the assignment.

At the time, I too was preoccupied with finishing a book and forgot about this story. Only some years later when Irving and I were in Berlin, I said to him on a whim and as we were walking down Charlottenstraße toward Unter den Linden, “Let us check the Wilhelm Poewe story with a librarian at the Humboldt University.” That was indeed a bad idea, especially since I had forgotten what exactly Robinson had said.

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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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