when the influx of war refugees from the East bolstered its inhabitants to over 100,000, it is still the largest provincial city of Schleswig. Throughout its history the ancient city of Flensburg frequently transformed itself from being Denmark’s southernmost port to Germany’s northernmost harbour.
Three historical events may serve as illustration: 1848 to 1850 marks the so-called First German-Danish War, fought over Denmark’s intention to integrate Schleswig and Holstein into the Danish nation state; in 1864 the Second German-Danish War resulted in Denmark’s surrender of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria; in 1920 a plebiscite determined North Schleswig’s annexation to Denmark. Flensburg was immediately affected by these conflicts and changes. As a result its population always included either a strong Danish or German minority. The miracle was that whilst at certain times this sponsored a dualistic culture, it never led to a divided city. I believe that Denmark’s conciliatory foreign policy did much to foster this.
Flensburgers have a reputation for being quirky, cheerful and quick-witted. Many speak a jaunty, sassy Low German dialect characterised by an almost Anglo-Saxon irony and self-deprecation. The reference to Anglo-Saxon isn’t coincidental, for the province of Angeln south of Flensburg marks the Angles’ place of origin, the Angles being the North German tribe who settled in England in the fifth century. Which, by the way, means the English county of East Anglia clearly is a misnomer, as its geographical location is west of the original Anglia. Most daily conflicts in the town of Flensburg are resolved by exchanges of witty and disarming local expressions. Some local jokes may be a bit crude, yet their tenor can only be described as flirtatious and pacifying. As we’re both philologists, I’ve often suggested my colleague should write a study on the verbal culture of his place of birth. It might inspire others to adopt a similar resolution of divided loyalties.
Sorry about the intrusion. I merely wanted to put my friend’s thoughts and feelings into a biographical context. After all, it seems that’s what the staff of Humanitas is asking him to do: write a profile, a CV that might add up to his life story. Wasn’t it Disraeli who said: ‘Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’. I only hope the psychotherapists are familiar with this and if so, bear in mind the second part of the quotation.
On 26 March 1940 Adolf Hitler decided to invade Denmark and Norway in a Blitzkrieg he called ‘ Weserübung’. Average day temperatures in Flensburg were around 3° Celsius. A fortnight later German troops entered my place of birth and occupied Denmark without a declaration of war. The day before I was born, Easter Monday, the British Navy intercepted the Turkish passenger ship Satarya carrying 2000 Jews on its way to Palestine. On Easter Sunday 5000 Lithuanian Jews were settled in British colonies. These dates and events are verifiable historical incidents, but if coincidences can sometimes speak a symbolic sign language of their own, they functioned as powerful portents for my future life.
I’m reluctant to write this down. Anything you write can be held against you. I don’t trust shrinks as readers of literature, least of all memoirs. If Freud was right and childhood enlightens, perhaps even predetermines the lives of men, I prefer to remember mine on my own. Discretion is the ultimate luxury of trust. However, as I’m supposed to record (reveal, chronicle, list?) even the earliest events of my life (‘for my own good’!), I’ll do what I’m told and scribble it down on the expensive Humanitas stationery. It might keep my captors happy.
The child born on, before or after 26 March was of course blissfully unaware of history and the world. He didn’t know yet that his life would turn out to be different from that of other children, but he was aware that his birth was not so much a delivery as a rejection. The baby already felt a physical repulsion for the woman who’d carried him. He didn’t know he’d have two mothers, at least three fathers, two countries and at least one more sister than the girl who was born seven years after him and promptly referred to in the family, with its usual precision and sensitivity, as the ‘afterthought’.
The midnight war child is given a wet nurse named Marie. Although she’s a stranger, I immediately recognise her body in creature-like knowledge as part of me, or rather as a natural provider of my needs. We love each other so much, and when she later has a child of her own, she gives it my name. In truth, I don’t remember much of the earliest period of my life, except for one thing: my first memory, the overwhelming feeling that I’d come to the wrong place. No doubt the Swiss shrinks would read a fundamental existential angst into that certainty. You can see why I’m keeping certain things to myself. As far as I know, I was neither psychic nor retarded as a baby.
I’ve been told that after the birth of my younger brother Claus my mother suffered a mental breakdown. Shocked family members pitied her for the way she treated the baby. It wasn’t clear whether he was born deaf or had lost his hearing as a result of an illness. Throughout the remaining war years she sang to the toddler or spoke to him demonstratively in public, as if it were some kind of theatrical performance. People would point at them and make disparaging remarks. The young imitated my mother behind her back. It was not until much later I understood why she behaved in such an over-the-top embarrassing manner. To be born deaf was quite literally a fatal flaw in Nazi Germany and, despite the strong historical Danish minority, most of Flensburg’s inhabitants were at that time German. What made my mother’s situation even more precarious was that her own father, a small businessman running the local branch of a national tobacco franchise, was a prominent local Nazi group leader. I don’t really know the exact level and nature of his membership in the party. He once told me he had been, or still was and would forever remain, a so-called Ortsgruppenführer. The official title was in fact Ortsgruppenleiter, but my grandfather who was known to indulge in self-aggrandisement couldn’t resist the suffix führer, if only to declare his loyalty to the Überführer, Adolf Hitler. I think it more likely he was in fact a so-called Block — or Zellenleiter, not quite as significant in the hierarchy of evil, but bad enough. From our conversations over games of chess I know he believed he had risen well above that lowly station and had truly become one of the Führer’s Führers.
Allow me to cut in here once more. Humanitas kindly allowed me to read what my friend has written, but I was not supposed to alter the original text. In fact I’ve read my colleague’s submissions only shortly before you have. Nonetheless I managed to get in touch with Flensburg’s municipal archives in the hope of clarifying details of his grandfather’s Nazi past. Frankly, I was worried about the ambivalence of my friend’s description and a possible threat of defamation from his own family. However, I was informed by the archive that ‘it holds no documentation of local Nazi party membership. The reason for this was the late British occupation of the area (10 May 1945) which allowed enough time for any compromising documents to be destroyed.’
However, the Landesarchiv (state archives) of Schleswig-Holstein obtained records from Flensburg’s Entnazifizierungshauptausschuss (Central Commission of Denazification) verifying that Otto Bluschke joined the NSDAP very early, i.e. on 1 May 1933, and in his own words was appointed Zellenleiter in 1941-42. How much further he advanced during the war could not be established.
I’ve always considered the concept of original sin not only deeply offensive but also morally reprehensible. To condemn all mankind to absolute evil seems to me a violation of human nature. I do not see it as a religious dogma but a sin of theology. Nothing good would ever come of humanity if its genesis were evil. Yet despite my indignation I was presented with more and more evidence that much of my own origin was iniquitous. The discovery of my grandfather’s commitment to the Nazi Party all but destroyed my idealistic humanism. Going through the sixty pages of his denazification file I grew bitter. Already Otto Bluschke
