Had you asked me months ago, what makes my memoir Api’s Berlin Diaries interesting for today, I would have said that it was the discovery of my grandfather’s journal written during the fall of Berlin 1945, followed by a second discovery that my beloved grandfather had been a Nazi. Proofreading the book as the corona virus rages across our world, I find his message from the ruined city even more visceral and unbearable, and the question of his guilt yet unanswered. Now however, I also discover an unexpected perspective in the midst of Covid19.
Api served as doctor in overcrowded medical cellars in the center of Berlin where everyone worked frantically without water, light, or bandages. The dead were stacked outside. The air was heavy with smoke and the stench of corpses, making it hard to breathe. As Berlin was cut off from the world, Api was at the brink of collapse, wishing only for an end. He was not alone in this. At one point the gas had to be turned off because too many used it to kill themselves.
“People die in the streets without there being any way of carrying them anywhere. Dead horses are cut up in the midst of bombardment, the meat eaten almost raw. Towards evening the sky to the east is a ghastly sea of smoke. I creep out at 10 o’clock at night to the clinic under whistling grenades and bombs, a wilderness of fire and dust, behind it, although already high in sky, the blood red moon.”
Before the pandemic, I focused on my grandfather’s ever more desperate struggle, while many questions haunted me: Why had he joined the Nazi Party in 1933? How can I assess his guilt and what collective guilt do the German people bear? Have I a right to tell his story in light of the millions of innocent victims of the Nazi regime? I wondered what I would have done if I had lived in the Third Reich? What is our political responsibility? These still remain crucial issues, but for the moment they recede in light of our own panic.
Today I focus on clues how we can survive in our life and death crisis. One motivation that kept Api going was how much the sick needed care, which was the reason he had stayed in Berlin after my mother, grandmother and I had fled. He worked tirelessly throughout the day and night bombing and then through the inevitable epidemics in a city without food, medications, and sanitation, especially typhoid, dysentery, and tuberculosis. Api treated the sick and inoculated others. The same spirit reigns in our current pandemic. People are eager to support each other, and we witness the heroic self-sacrifice of health care workers. My South Bend neighborhood created playful ways to connect by placing teddy bears in windows, but also set up a food pantry and a network of helpers for those in need.
Another of Api’s life lines was his journal, written in the form of letters to us, “one of my dearest hours in the day!” Although he feared that his words might already meet emptiness, not knowing whether we were alive, he acknowledged that “the heart that does not want to, and cannot, unlearn hope, rejoices to have come one little step closer to our reunion in a world at peace.”
Today many of us are fortunate to have multiple ways of talking with each other. I enjoy Zoom meetings about writing, yoga, and chats with family. Even our knit group gets together virtually as we did in coffee houses before. Such communications nourish our hearts, even though I also have moments of panic when I don’t get an immediate response from my son in Brooklyn.
Nature was one of Api’s most powerful consolations. He had always loved to be out in woods and fields and written poems. Now he was restricted to what he saw from his attic window above a sea of grey ruins. He keenly observed sky, clouds, and birds. “A sky full of peace and infinity in which a few delicate feather clouds drift silently together with an early swallow.” For Api the beauty of nature was linked to the consolations of his faith. He recorded the gist of a sermon he heard at the time: “Instead of using all the treasures of His wonderful earth for love, we have perverted everything to hate, murder, and war. But now we all need to become God’s co-workers.” If all else failed him, he was left at the last with his faith that “we were all united in God and that we would be granted a blessed reunion in His kingdom, where there was no separation, no worry, no anxiety, no misery.”
Even though I cannot follow Api on his path of religious faith, I do believe in nature and all living things. I believe in their restorative powers where trees communicate and help each other, shooting nutrients to their sick companions or warning them of an infestation. I take refuge in daily outings where I eagerly watch for the buds of spring, listen to the throated calls of a wren, and admire the golden glow of the first marsh marigolds by the river.
No matter how desperate he was, Api reminded himself that he was fortunate compared with the misery all around. Tens of thousands were homeless, three million refugees streamed into Berlin from the east, people died in the streets. In our world where inequality has grown into an abyss, Covid19 seems to have made us more aware of so many of our fellow citizens without health insurance, a living wage, or any employment at all. They keep us provided with basic needs and we must not forget them after the pandemic has passed.
These lifelines from 1945 can then serve us in 2020. Under attack from the virus, we see how inextricably we are bound together across continents. We need to have faith in our common humanity and embrace it with love and compassion. And this brings me back to the question of our political responsibility or even guilt. We need to foster love and tolerance and reject bigoted, discriminatory thoughts and actions wherever we see them. Then, as we move past this pandemic, we will not forget the many who have suffered injustice. Our faith will extend to all living things so that we treasure and protect our environment to make it livable for future generations.
