Although the texts under discussion differ in style, form, temporality and attentiveness to the social details of everyday lives under National Socialism they are a contribution to a more comprehensive story to be preserved for future generations in the “era of the witness” (Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel 2016, p. 418). All the narratives resonate with the topic of German victimhood and what they have in common is that all incorporate confessions as part of their testimony of victimhood.
Irmgard Powell and Irmgard Hunt were members of what Mary Fulbrook calls the second Hitler Youth generation, a generation that had “conscious awareness of little or nothing before their socialization under Hitler” (2011, p. 91). In Chapter Two I discuss Irmgard Powell’s memoir Don’t Let Them See You Cry: Overcoming a Nazi Childhood, which was published in 2008 by an independent publisher in the United States. The publisher describes the text as one written ‘by a controversial person’ (Swindler, 2012). Powell, who was born in Berlin in 1932, is the daughter of the Reichsgesundheitsführer, Leonardo Conti, who was responsible for the euthanasia program, and the granddaughter of Nanna Conti, the Reichshebammenführerin, who has been the subject of recent research on female perpetrators (Peters, 2014). I will argue that the text is not a quest to overcome “a Nazi childhood” as the
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title indicates but, rather, an attempt to recast the protagonist and her family as victims through the story of a family history that is essentially fraught with gaps and narrative silence. This chapter demonstrates how the trope of the innocent child stands in for the community of war children, which together with the confession of the protagonist’s identity enables a distancing from National Socialism in order to testify to the suffering of the protagonist and family. It investigates how the narrative obscures the protagonist’s own active participation and that of family members and minimizes culpability by providing only a superficial glimpse into their lives.
Chapter Three deals with an author of approximately the same age as Powell. It examines Irmgard Hunt’s narrative On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood, which was published in 2005 and was the most aggressively promoted and widely read of the four texts. Hunt was born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden into a middle-class family; her text examines her own personal history and that of her family in tracing Hitler’s rise to power, and discusses the influence of National Socialism on their daily lives. In this text, the trope of the innocent child stands in for the protagonist and German children of her age group generally as victims of Nazi ideological socialization, which she describes at length. I argue that, like Powell’s text, it is not a therapeutic tool to “overcome” the legacy of a childhood under Nazism, as the title might suggest, but in this case an attempt to represent Germans generally as manipulated and powerless victims of Hitler. My investigation of the text will focus on how the narrative constructs the protagonist and non-perpetrator Germans generally as victims by distinguishing between “fanatic” Nazis and so-called “ordinary citizens” whose identities are generalized by representing them in essentialist terms which obscures responsibility and enables a testimony to victimhood and powerlessness (Hunt, 2005, pp. 1- 2).
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Chapters Four and Five examine texts written by women who were both born in 1941, during what Fulbrook has termed the “baby boom years” of the Hitler regime, and who were small children at the end of the war (2011, p. 15). Chapter Four examines Maria Ritter’s narrative Return to Dresden (2004), which is framed as a physical journey to Germany, as the title indicates, as well as a psychological journey into the past. Ritter was born in Breslau into a deeply religious Methodist family that became refugees when the Red Army advanced into Silesia towards the end of the war. The narrator who constructs her childhood identity as a traumatized silenced war child, and a silent adult claims a need to unburden by confessing to shame and guilt. I argue that the text is primarily based on a need to testify that the protagonist and her family suffered during the war – also at the hands of the Allies (Ritter, 2004, p. xix). The trope of the child stands in for war children as survivors. It provides the narrator, who clearly states that she sees the past from the perspective of an American, with the authority to testify to the victimhood of her family and Germans generally. Her perspective as opposed to that of brother who lives in Germany is thematized in connection with German guilt. I discuss how the narrator seeks to incorporate Germans and the victims of the Nazi regime into a general group of war “survivors” which complicates the framework of culpability, blurs roles and results in ambiguous and conflicting constructions of her parents and Germans more generally.
Chapter Five examines Sabina de Werth Neu’s narrative A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child, 1941-1958, the most recent of the texts and published in 2011. De Werth Neu, a refugee like Maria Ritter, was born in Berlin and became a refugee after having been evacuated to East Prussia and then forced to flee when the Red Army advanced. The narrator constructs her identity as a traumatized refugee child and, similar to the other texts in this study, prominently thematizes guilt and shame, which function as a framework of
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culpability. In this chapter I will discuss hierarchies of silence together with forms of victimhood such as flight and rape. I argue that, despite seeking to retain a framework of culpability, the narrative distances the protagonist, family members and Germans generally from responsibility, focusing on victimhood instead and incorporating them into a universal group of war victims. The text devotes the most space of all the narratives in this study to the post-war years despite the reference in the title to memories up to 1958 and includes other sometimes traumatic personal stories up to the time of writing. Therefore, despite the focus on the memories of a child refugee, the title the text is also a therapeutic tool to work through other events and, in contrast to the other texts in this study, prominently thematizes the identity issues related to being a “reluctant German” (de Werth Neu, 2011, p. 15).
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