Letters from the Past

My father was a letter writer.   Sometime during every weekend, he would disappear into his study, sit down behind his large blonde wood desk ( one of the few pieces of furniture that made the move from Germany), and insert sheets of personalized stationery into his portable olive green Olivetti.  The keys began to clatter at a jerky pace.  My father had never taken a typing course, rather he hunted and pecked, but rapidly since he had lots of practice.  He didn’t handwrite his letters because his handwriting was famously illegible.  The letters went home.  To his mother in Gera, who would pass them around to his siblings that remained there, and to his sister Marianne who lived in West Germany.  

I rarely got a letter from my father.  One of the letters I do have is one he sent when I first began writing.  My original concept for the book was less personal and more historical.  I wanted to tell the story of recent German history through my grandparents’ and parents’ biographies.  One reason this letter is precious is that in recent years, my father lost his verbal skills to the degree that I couldn’t remember them.  The letter brings his manners of speech back vividly, and also illustrates a thing or two about his character.  I had asked him to describe an encounter he’d had with an SS recruiter.

My father had just graduated from boarding school, had enlisted in the German army and was at home in Gera waiting to be called up. The year was 1943.  He wrote in German, and I’ve translated this as well as I am able.  

“One day, I was summoned to the Police where those guys had made themselves at home. At that point in time, lots of rumors where already floating around that the SS who considered themselves elite troops and expected to acquire only the best, were having greater and greater difficulties filling their ranks and were using all possible methods of pressure to recruit sufficient “volunteers.”  One story had it that they enlisted young women for their interviews who accused unwilling candidates of cowardice and tried to appeal to their honor, working every possible patriotic register that governments, and not just dictatorships, use when they require people for something that’s not so very popular.  With this knowledge, I sat across from this blonde, highly decorated SS officer, and was looking forward to the game that would develop.  I let him go on for quite a while trying to work all angles in the full knowledge that I would be able to confront him in the end with the reality that the competition already had me in their pocket, which he would finally have to indignantly accept, but not without lecturing me harshly for wasting his time.  Those were the pleasures of the little people during this segment of German history.”

My father (in his German army uniform) with his Dad