Bluschkes at least didn’t seem to suffer greatly while others, including members of their own family, were struggling to survive. In one of his letters my cousin remembers how, for Christmas 1944, their festive fare consisted of bouillon with two eggs, a potato fritter and apple sauce. The following day my grandparents enquired how their relatives had spent the festive season. After listening to an enthusiastic report of what my aunt, uncle and cousins considered a special wartime treat, my grandmother condescendingly replied: ‘How wonderful for you! We’ve had roast goose as always. Otto is such a good provider. With his position in the party he has little trouble organising these things, you know. We are truly blessed.’ The exchange gives some indication of the most painful border separating the family in good times and bad. There would not have been too many citizens of Flensburg enjoying goose shortly before the end of Hitler’s war.
We lived in a street called Castle Wall, high above the centre of the city with a glorious view across the harbour. My grandparents’ dwelling was located nearby at Castle’s Rest, and the primary school I attended from 1946 was in Castle Road. The curious thing was that no castle was to be seen anywhere. As so often in Europe, streets and monuments paid homage to times long gone by. Flensburg’s medieval Duburg castle, an ancient building of Viking origin restored in 1409 by Queen Margarethe of the Nordic Union, had in fact all but disappeared in 1719. It only survives in an entire network of streets bearing witness to its historical glory: Shield Bearer Street, Tiltyard, Tourney Square, Knights Street, Castle Square, Duburg Street, Horsemen’s Stable (the latter serving as the location of the local brothel). As always, what’s left of the past is language. One can only guess what effect verbal aggrandisement may have had on the local population.
In 1945, for reasons unknown to me, my mother and her children moved from Castle Wall to a hilly street closer to the heart of town. Its name was odd and controversial for historical reasons of a different kind: Toosbuystrasse. Only much later did I detect another thinly veiled portent reflecting the nature of our new home. Toosbuy was not only the name of a Flensburg burgomaster. It also had a very interesting etymology: the meaning of ‘büy’, corresponding to ‘by’ as in ‘by-law’, is ‘community’; the prefix ‘toos’ the ‘Angelish’ equivalent of ‘two’. Hence people who choose to live in Toosbuystrasse should by rights be proud to identify themselves with their city’s two different communities — the German and the Danish, or more precisely, the German majority and the Danish South Schleswig minority, corresponding to the Danish majority and the German minority across the border in North Schleswig, the country Hitler invaded the year I was born. The importance of such bilingual, bicultural relations was severely tested when Germany lost the war and Flensburg was occupied by British and Norwegian troops.
The concept of Toos-Büy wasn’t confined to etymological subtleties. It began to reflect the tense conflict raging in many local families, including my own. The cobblestone road leading from elevated Castle Square down to the low ground of the harbour featured beautiful turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Diagonally across from our new home was a Danish cultural centre called Ansgar (after the missionary Archbishop of Bremen [801-865] known as the ‘Apostle of the North’). Once a year, on the first of May, the Danes of Flensburg celebrated their cultural identity with a march through the city. On that occasion many Toosbuy locals displayed the Danebrog (Danish flag) in support of the march of their fellow countrymen. My mother had planted rows of tall vetch in our balcony flower boxes. On the day of Danish celebration she crowded them with dozens of German Schleswig-Holstein paper-flags. Two communities living in one street wasn’t quite the same as sharing one border. In the post-war years all kinds of new borders were drawn, and most of them proved too close for comfort.
It seems shame and defeat don’t necessarily lead to wisdom and contrition. Once Otto Bluschke had been ‘de-nazified’ he defiantly continued to wear his old mustard-coloured uniform in his home. ‘Now with a vengeance!’ my grandfather shouted at no one in particular. In the minds of some people reality and history are moveable feasts. While dressed in his favourite uniform my grandfather issued domestic orders. One of them was his demand that I should part my hair ‘like an officer’. In the afternoons and early evenings he ruled over a game of chess with one of his grandsons, either Claus or myself. Still clad in his outfit of ‘the glory years’ and smoking a Havana, he invariably suffered inglorious defeats at the hands of his unmilitary and generally unstable grandchildren. In my grandfather’s eyes all but Peacetime Holger were degenerates. Upon yet another defeat Otto Bluschke would frequently overturn the chessboard in a gesture of defiance. He really displayed all the hallmarks of a Nazi German general. My lasting memory of him became his peacock entrance one morning after he’d spent at least half an hour in the bathroom. Triumphantly he wore a ‘moustache band’ or gauze net that fastened comfortably around the waxed moustache so as to retain its shape during sleep. The contraption reached from the upper lip to the ears. It looked to me as if my grandfather was wearing a bra across his face.
Relocating to the new inner city address took my family to a large apartment that, despite its accommodating appearance, was to become a place of degradation and horror for me.
A number of events stand out from the mist of early childhood memories. One was my first attempt to run away from home when I was four years old. I made it down to the harbour and managed to hide in a deserted warehouse for over a day before I was discovered by a couple of unemployed dockers who took me to the police. They found me lying under dirty canvas covered in coaldust, tar and oil, with a tiny cracked valise by my side. Having eaten my provisions, an apple and a slice of dry bread, the night before, I had become increasingly weak and frightened in the damp, dark storehouse. After sobbing inconsolably I finally succumbed to sleep, overcome with dread and faintness. When the police asked me why I had run away and where I thought I was going I answered them quietly with one word: ‘Home.’ It didn’t work. I was brought back to a place where I didn’t want to be, where it became increasingly clear I wasn’t wanted. What others called my home wasn’t home. It was one of many early experiences discovering the unreliability of words.
Another memorable incident of those early years occurred in 1945 when Flensburg was inundated with refugees from the East. Germany was in the final throes of losing the war it had so arrogantly craved. Locals as well as those who had come to the Reich’s northernmost city on the run from the Russians were suffering terrible hardship. Food was so scarce people seized horse-drawn vehicles and even slaughtered the animals in the street. In spring public parks were raided for elderberries and rose hips; during summer and autumn a ragged band of the malnourished collected mushrooms, blackberries, raspberries, beechnuts and chestnuts in the surrounding woods. A new desperate kind of equality had come into force: the fear of starving did not discriminate. Stealing food even from children was soon a daily occurrence.
The town’s once popular local recreation area, St Mary’s Woods, turned into a no-go zone, as remnants of the army and deserters were on the lookout for each other. Learning to forage by myself at a very early age, I took to sneaking out of the house and going to St Mary’s Woods on my own. The small forest to the west of town held the promise of freedom and a threat of danger I found irresistible. The fear of the unknown added to my excitement. I took to the woods, as it were, in the full knowledge of where I was going. For all the perils, I knew I was out of reach of those closest to me who preferred not to acknowledge me, yet would not allow me to get away. At St Mary’s I felt released. I could breathe, laugh and talk, even if it was only to myself. Out here in the company of trees I was not beaten, screamed at or made to do things I didn’t want to do. My grandfather told me there’d been deer and stags here before the war, but now they’d disappeared, hunted for food. I became intoxicated by the aromatic smell of the trees and bushes, the chirping birds and the wind murmuring in the treetops. Longingly I watched squirrels race up and down trunks jumping from branch to branch at dizzy heights. Freedom! All my senses had come home. At St Mary’s no one would torment me for at least a couple of hours.
It
