Recommended Reading – Children of the 30s and 40s tell their stories.

Barbara Halstenberg: “Alles schaukelt, der ganze Bunker schaukelt”. Die letzten Kriegskinder erzählen. (Translation: “Everything is rocking, the whole bunker is rocking. The last war children tell their stories”), 2021, Osburg Verlag, ISBN 978-3-95510-258-6

(De) Which was worse? The bombs or the hunger? The fear of the low-flying planes or of the rapists of the mothers and aunts? The sight of the mutilated dead in the streets or the destroyed home? The loss of family members or the loss of any security? A gruesome selection of painful experiences! But the worst, everyone agrees, is the war itself.

The childhood of this generation was marked by the aerial bombardment, flight and expulsion, witnessing the rape of their mothers or neighbours; also by experiences in the Hitler Youth and as child soldiers in the Volkssturm, education by Nazi parents or by persecutees, the presence of forced labourers, expulsion, the end of the war and occupation, unknown fathers and other war traumas.

The author devotes 16 chapters to these different focal points.

Some of the 100 contemporary witnesses who experienced the Nazi era, the Second World War and the post-war period in Germany as toddlers, schoolchildren or adolescents struggle in their memoirs to give some weight to their experiences. The abundance of terrible experiences, of horrors to which this generation was exposed in their childhood, can often only be endured in individual anecdotes, both for the narrator and for the reader.

In her book, Barbara Halstenberg lets these 80-year-old war children speak in their own words. Repetitions, stammering, sentences started and broken off, emotions in brackets…, all this creates images and consternation as experienced by the interviewer herself.

It is an authentic way of telling stories, as I know it from my childhood in the 50s and 60s. Reading it, I found myself sitting again with my grandmothers on the sofa in the kitchen living room, demanding, “Grandma, tell me about the old days!” I was born in 1953. My grandparents’ generation are the parents of war children. My parents, born in 1933, however, were war children.

Yes, the author’s interviewees are right. I, too, did not ask about my parents’ stories. Although I wanted to know everything about my grandparents’ experiences, I contented myself with a few thin anecdotes from my parents’ store of memories.

However, when I read how bad hunger was for the children to endure, my father’s sentence, “I was always hungry, always hungry!” takes on a completely different weight. I knew the phenomenon that my father was always hungry. It was nothing special. Now I know what is behind it. Now I would like to ask. But it’s too late.

I was also moved by many a story accompanied by incredulous laughter, even though the experience was horrific.

In my family, people laughed about many a story that was actually heartbreaking. Everyone regularly burst out laughing because my father had been buried as a 10-year-old, all alone, but was dug out, and the first thing my grandmother asked was, “Is your bike broken?”

While I can immediately recognise the trauma in the stories in the book despite the laughter, I couldn’t do so with my father because of the laughter.

Although my parents are dead, the eyewitnesses in this book give me a different perspective on the stories of my grandparents and parents. This is a tremendous unexpected impact for which I am very grateful.

Barbara Halstenberg’s book is an essential contemporary witness project. My generation needs these insights into the world of experience of our parents, whom we were highly critical of, at least in our youth. It is our last chance to understand how much our parents were shaped by their particular childhood and, in turn, shaped us. Whether we conformed or protested and strove for precisely the opposite is irrelevant. Our point of reference is the previous generation’s traumas and repressions.

And we should be aware that our generation, the post-war children, also has a task to fulfil as contemporary witnesses.

In the back of her book, Barbara Halstenberg has included instructions for interviews that are suitable for lifting the treasure chest of memories in families before it disappears forever. Much of this advice is suitable not only for war children but also for “children of the Cold War”. (TA)