Looking constructively at histories of our fathers

Summary of story from the BBC, March 29, 2011

Inge was only two when her father died in the siege of Leningrad.

Her mother would read his letters to her on Sundays so she would know how wonderful he was.

Parts of his letters.

When she was 40 she asked to read the other parts.

A committed Nazi officer on the Russian front it was clear he had been implicated in terrible things.

Questioned, her mother said she hadn’t wanted her to read all of them ‘because it was terrible’.

For, over the years, Inge’s mother, herself, had undergone a rebirth.

When war broke out, she and her husband were both staunch Nazis, and when her husband died she had grieved with pride.

She had a certificate from the Nazi authorities telling her that her husband had died a hero “in the struggle for the freedom of Greater Germany”.

She kept photographs of him taken in uniform on the Russian front, his chest puffed out in pride.

And, then, with total defeat at the end of the war, she found she had lost everything – her home, her husband and her ideology.

And shame gradually came to her,

So when Inge asked her about the events in the letters, her mother was very ashamed.

Inge has called a family meeting for this summer.

“In my family it was a long time before we could talk about the family history because a lot of the family have been Nazis,” she said.

Will it be an easy, amicable meeting?

“No,” she said. “People my age say: ‘Why are we talking about it? Everybody knows what happened in the family’.

And then the next generation says: ‘Father, you never told me. I knew nothing about the family background’.

The gaps in the letters prompted Inge, now 70, to help the descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims to find their history, and also to talk in schools.

Throughout Germany, there are people like Inge, seeking out the painful past – tending cemeteries and synagogues, creating museums, simply documenting.

She shows a class a photograph of two young boys – they can barely be 10 – who pose in Nazi regalia, and she waits for a reaction.

One has his chest puffed out in pride, the other seems reluctant and shame-faced. It is for today’s children to decide which they would rather be.

And if the school visit goes well, she says, a child will say that she or he is going home to ask the parents and grandparents what happened in the war in their family.

It makes Inge feel that she has set people thinking and asking.