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Postwar Germany

~ 1945-1949

Postwar Germany

Category Archives: general

Free book: The German Heiress

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by Anika in Books, Crime, Culture, general, Hunger, Media, postwar, Women

≈ 10 Comments

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Anika Scott, germany, Goodreads giveaway, postwar, The German Heiress

Final Cover_German Heiress

Published by HarperCollins in April 2020

If you’re in the United States and like free stuff, especially stuff related to postwar Germany, head over to Goodreads and enter a chance to win one of 100 advanced reader copies of my debut novel The German Heiress.  (It’s called Finding Clara in the UK).

It’s set in the ruins of Essen, Germany in December 1946 at the start of what the Germans call the “Hunger Winter,” one of the hardest on record. It stars Clara, a woman on the run and struggling with her conscience; Jakob, a black marketer determined to get his family through the winter; and Willy, a boy soldier who refuses to believe the war is over.

You can learn more at my author website.

A lot of information on this blog sprang from my research as I wrote this book. It’s been a labor of love, and I’m excited for it to get into the hands of readers.

Good luck!

My Child Lebensborn

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by Anika in Children, Culture, Everyday life, general, postwar, Uncategorized

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app google play, games

Discover how hatred of our enemies continues to create victims, even after the victory.

That’s how the Norwegian developers described the theme of their app game My Child Lebensborn. Right after World War II, you adopt a child, Klaus or Karin, and must survive in a small Norwegian town. I couldn’t resist taking a look, and downloaded the app on my tablet.

Two hours later, I was still playing, and on the edge of tears.

The artwork and gameplay are simple and wonderful, and the music a perfect soundtrack to the bittersweet story that unfolds. You’re a single parent raising your adoptive child; I chose the girl Karin, because I have a daughter the same age. It’s a hard life. I had to work hard to feed her, and Karin often went hungry, or was alone at home. The basic tasks of feeding and clothing and washing Karin would’ve been overwhelming on their own, but worse things happened.

Karin turned 7 and wanted to know who her parents were. And why was she so bullied at school? Why was she called a “Nazi-kid?” Why did the others call her a German as if it was the worst thing one could be? I had to help Karin struggle with these questions, and watched how she suffered under them.

That’s the lesson of this game, the power of adult prejudices to destroy an innocent, delivered in a powerful, interactive way. As Karin’s adoptive parent, I had to set out to find the answers to her questions about who she was. There are some heartbreaking scenes and situations, and you don’t have to be a parent to be moved by them.

When the game was done, I wanted it to keep going, as painful as some of it was. I didn’t want to let go of Karin.

The game pointed me to the existence of the research group Children Born of War, which studies the effects of war on children, particularly children of foreign soldiers and local mothers. This is a crucial and heart-rending postwar issue, and not just in Germany, as I saw and lived in My Child Lebensborn.

Slave labor and living history

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Anika in Crime, general, Soviets

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

germany, history, nazi, postwar, Russians, slaves, students

Here in Germany, my kids aren’t old enough to learn about the Nazi era in school yet. So I recently jumped at the chance to see what high school-age students were doing. It’s hard enough getting young people interested in all that old stuff. And anything short of virtual reality probably wouldn’t impress them, right?

So off I went to what the press was calling a “lecture performance” of 12th graders from the Burggymnasium in Essen. The venue piqued my interest too; the performance took place in the wartime air raid bunker under the city archive.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Soviets deported to Germany, June 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

But first we crowded into the archive’s foyer in front of a table where two students in blouses and braided hair sat working. Cheerful period music was echoing in the hall, and it made me feel a little uneasy. We were there to learn about forced labor in wartime Germany – hardly cheerful. In clipped tones, the students called for us to get in line. It was dawning on some of us that the performance had already started.

When we entered the building, we were handed a card with a number and had been told it would be used to divide up the groups since the bunker space was so small. But once we got to the table in the foyer, we gave up the first number and were given another — mine was 721 — written on white tape. “Wear it in a visible place,” they told us. I slapped mine on my coat without asking what the number was for. I had a pretty good idea.

Numbered, I had to walk alone between two students in white shirts and dark pants. They stood at the foot of the stairway leading down to the basement. They held file folders, and as each of us walked by, they said in a bland tone, “Follow the directions.” Always this firm, impersonal tone. I was impressed and a little uneasy the students managed it so well.

In the narrow basement hallway, more students in white ordered us to go right or left. I joined the group waiting quietly in the right-hand hall. Maybe the others felt the same way I did, caught off balance by how quickly we obeyed what seemed like random orders.

Ukrainian women examined by German officials for work. May 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B19880 / Knödler / CC-BY-SA 3.0

A door opened. This wasn’t the bunker yet, but a medium-sized room where thirty of us crowded inside. The windows were covered for the blackout. There were students in white shirts at a table with a scale, some bread and a cooking pot. There were students in baggy or shabby clothes lined up, their heads bowed. The “man in charge” talked to us then, complained about how hard it was to feed these people — the shabby ones, the Ukrainians dragged to Germany to work. When he had a question for us, he barked, “How much did a slave worker eat per day, number 721?” We looked down at the numbers on our coats, trying to remember who (what?!) we were. He talked about duty, and how if he wasn’t firm, if he failed in his duty, his own family would suffer. At which point he gave one of the student-slaves a mock kick and walked off.

The slaves spoke too — at first about home. How much they missed it, how their home gave them strength to endure. One scrubbed the floor as she talked about her fear of getting sick, of not being able to work anymore. It was uncomfortable having to look down on her the whole time. An air raid and sudden darkness, and we were evacuated out of the room.

To the bunker. Through a narrow door, we climbed into a nest of rooms with bare and dusty walls. Here and there, someone had stenciled the capacity the rooms had — 25 people, for instance, in a space too small to be comfortable. As we wandered from room to room, students acting as slaves told their stories of being snatched from their villages in the Ukraine or Russia. The journey to Germany in freight trains and the yearning for fresh air, space and freedom. Their work — sometimes with German families who treated them kindly; more often in factories, especially in Essen, where they were worked to exhaustion or death. Two students were closed into a replica of the famous steel locker used as an isolation cell and punishment for forced labor. There was poetry and artwork and period photos beamed on the walls. A group of students sang about home in German and Russian to a guitar accompaniment.

When we left the claustrophobic nooks and crannies of the bunker, the performance was over. My first thought was — these 12th graders put together one of the most informative and moving bit of living history I’d ever experienced. They had studied the testimony of forced labor and the Germans in charge of them to understand what went on in their own words. Students who spoke Russian translated some documents fully into German for the first time. But it was the performance itself, creating it, writing it and performing, that brought the students closer to the tens of thousands of slave workers forced to come to Essen more than 70 years ago.

An excellent performance and a great experience. Bravo.

 

Postwar or post-war?

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Anika in general, postwar

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american, british, language, post-war, postwar, spelling

Maybe you’ve noticed. I don’t hyphenate. To me, it’s postwar. Just why and how Americans eliminated the hyphen and scrunched the words together, I have no idea. It may come from the American habit of simplifying usage whenever we can.

The Oxford Dictionary tells me the British way is post-war. That’s fine, except that I don’t like hyphens if you can get rid of them and the word flows better. A hyphen is like a stutter in the middle of a word. In this case, it’s not needed.

But I’m not British, and I can do what feels natural. Many of you readers out there are British or use British spellings. I just wanted to let you know I’m not doing it wrong, and neither are you.

Forgotten years?

06 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by Anika in general

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

germany, history, postwar

They’re not forgotten by the people who lived them. But when it comes to German history, 1945-1948 are generally known for:

1) Ruins (usually of Berlin)
2) 4-power bickering that lead to a divided Germany and eventually, the Wall
3) Berlin Airlift

Until a few years ago, that’s pretty much all I knew about the time between World War 2 and the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s. Somewhere in there, the Deutschmark was born, okay (1948). Germany was bombed to oblivion, you could say, and I had a hard time imagining how it went from that to a successful, modern economy. The Marshall Plan helped, but we know from many parts of the world today that funneling money at people doesn’t mean they’re going to prosper.

I got interested in how people lived in postwar Germany. In the first few years, people from a modern, industrial nation were thrown back to the stone ages. By people, I often mean women and children. Their men were dead, missing, imprisoned, and if the soldiers went home, they weren’t the same men who left. In general, the Germans had to cope with what they saw as the shame of defeat, and the deeper shame of individual (and some say, collective,) guilt. How did they live under those circumstances? What was it like for a child to carry a brick to school every day so that the walls could be rebuilt? What kind of change happens in a mother who silently lets her daughter slip away to be with an Allied soldier in exchange for food? From the Allied side, what were the differences between the Soviet, British and American treatment of Germans in their zones? What was it like for an Allied soldier, often a young man with little life experience besides war, to suddenly be a victor walking around a defeated people?

These are some of the issues I’m interested in. I want to share some of the info and sources I’ve found the past couple of years.

A caveat: I know how delicate some of the topics can be. I’ll try to put “difficult” material in as much context as I can, especially if I quote something from a period source that seems strange or offensive today. I do not in any way support revisionist history that denies Nazi Germany’s atrocities, and I’m not here to make people feel sorry for the Germans of the time. I’m interested in how people lived, what they thought and felt, how they survived. Part of their survival technique was to stay silent. The flood of information about the postwar years came only in the last few decades. I want to show flashes of that unique moment in German history as well as I can.

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