My New Year's Day 2024

Light snow mixed with sleet seemed perfect for a New Year’s Day walk. I enjoyed the quiet of the empty streets by the river when I noticed an old man coming towards me. He looked jaunty with his red tartan scarf and was far less wrapped up than I in my many layered outfit that I had struggled to put on. We smiled and greeted each other. “I am John,” he introduced himself. “What’s your name?” He had a bit of trouble with my German accent and my name. We fell into easy conversation. He said his daily walks kept him in shape and away from the doctors. We tried to figure out where each of us lived. As I described my yellow house at the bend of Riverside, he said “My eyesight is very poor. I’ll have to work out a map in my mind.” At some point I told him that I was eighty-one. “How old do you think I am?” he asked. I noticed his drawn in mouth, perhaps because of missing teeth, but also his lively eyes despite poor vision. “Perhaps your 70’s?” He laughed that joyful laugh of his. ”I will be 95 this April.” I was genuinely surprised, and we walked on, laughing together.

At the corner of Riverside and Angela John was about to turn toward Portage and home while I planned to continue on Riverside. But before we parted, he asked: “Can I hug you?” It had crossed my mind as well, but I had been too shy to say anything. We hugged, as snow came down gently on our hats and tiny sleet pebbles bounced off our coats. Two old people, two strangers, hugging at a street corner. Leaving he said: “This has made my day.”  And I agreed. “Happy New Year.“ It was off to a wonderful start.

Better Homes: The Play

A heartfelt end-of-year thanks to Caleen Jennings, author of Better Homes: The Play and to Aaron Nichols, Executive Director of the South Bend Civic Theater. Aaron commissioned Caleen Jennings, playwriting professor at American University, to turn Better Homes of South Bend. An American Story of Courage into a play. Her work makes us feel viscerally the pain and suffering of racism and discrimination, and the courage and perseverance of the group of Studebaker workers, migrants from the South, who stood up against it. Songs like I am Climbing Jacob’s Ladder and Aint Nobody Gonna Turn me Around made us all cry.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the audience, Better Homes had to be moved from the small to the large stage, and even then almost every performance sold out. For anyone not able to attend this World Premiere, WNIT has recorded it, and this Spring I will teach a Forever Learning class about both the book and the recording.

The Better Homes family on first night of play, Nov. 10, 2023. Above, the image of the 1954 picnic showing them as kids while the adults celebrated their 22 new homes in a white neighborhood.

Panel discussion after the play with Director Laurisa LeSure, Moderator, Exec. Dir. Aaron Nichols, author Gabrielle Robinson, and playwright Caleen Jennings

The blitz, Berlin 1945, and Ukraine today

Seeing the heartrending and terrifying images coming out of Ukraine, I am reminded of Greta Briggs poem written under the blitz.

The bombs have shattered my churches

Have torn my streets apart.

But they have not bent my spirit

And they shall not break my heart

In April 1945 under day and night bombardment in Berlin very similar sentiments appeared in makeshift signs pinned to ruins:

“Our walls are breaking but not our hearts.” Both quoted in Api’s Berlin Diaries

Perhaps both show how ineffective is the bombing of civilians, although the toll and human suffering are enormous.

audio book and sample

Back to 1945?

A child of WWII, I never imagined any kind of repeat of the past. In February 1945 my mother and grandmother fled Berlin with me, just two and half years old, after we had lost our apartment to bombs. My grandfather stayed behind to serve as doctor.

I dimly remember the shouts and screams on the overcrowded station platform and my mother telling me over and over to hold on to her suitcase because she had no hand free to hold me. We were lucky to get on a train and luckier still to find a place to stay, even if it was only a tiny farmer‘s cottage without running water and we were, not surprisingly, unwelcome guests.

Now I see similar scenes, husbands kissing their wives and children good buy at a crowded railroad station, apartments destroyed, and the Russians coming ever closer. Only back then Germany had been the brutal aggressor and now Ukraine is a victim of Russia’s brutal invasion.

Anxiety and Tyranny

I just read #JacquelineRose’s discussion of Freud’s essay “A Phylogenetic Fantasy. Overview of the Transference Neurosis.” #LRB 11.19.20

#Freud makes two points that resonate with us today. He shows how anxiety, the result of the catastrophies of history, is passed from generation to generation. Today we often refer to it as “transgenerational haunting.” Freud’s other point is equally chilling. Tyranny follows these catastrophes as people desperately seek rescue and salvation from their perilous state.

After 77 years: eyewitness to my father's fighter plane crash in 1943

This image with an eye witness report was published in #Iron Cross, a historical magazine in England. The eye witness, first on the scene, took bits of the perspex to make rings and broaches as souvenirs. Today the editor of the magazine has offered to give me a personal tour of the site, which he remembers from his adolescence. I am always moved by the kindness of former enemies in #World War II. It reminds me how a British airman befriended us in 1946 and I still cherish the teddy bear he gave me. There is hope for us to come together in peace, without hate and prejudice.

Can we Rise to the Challenge of the 9th?

Never before have I experienced #Beethoven’s 9th symphony as on this New Year’s Eve 2020 on #WQXR. The first movement starts powerfully but, as so often in late Beethoven, gets disrupted by disharmony, only to reassert itself. This back and forth is more pronounced in the rustic dance of the second movement. There is joy in the dance, but the storm clouds soon stifle it. As this repeats itself, you wonder whether moments of storminess, anger and anxiety even, invariably get replaced by the happy dance or whether those moments of happiness, which in their speed sound a bit hectic anyway, continually get vanquished, sucking the life out of dance and dancers.

Then comes the third movement, heavenly in its almost uninterrupted melodic harmonies. We feel rescued from turmoil in a world of beauty and iridescent polyphony. We want to remain there, motionless, just listening and dreaming. But the drum beats of the fourth movement shake us awake. It is not the storminess we heard previously but rather a stern admonition, a call to action. We must not get lost in the beauty we just enjoyed, we must rouse ourselves to action. This appeal continues when the orchestra takes up the Joy theme and it crescendos when the singers take it over. In this performance, which I found out at the end was made up of orchestras and singers from many countries to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the first sung words were not the usual “Freude,” Joy, but Freiheit, Freedom. This ending was rousing in a way I had not appreciated before, when I happily sang along with the Joy theme, and also a little intimidating. Will we be able to rise to the challenge Beethoven has set us? “Seid umschlungen Millionen, diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt.”

Api’s Berlin Diaries Today

Readers of Api’s Berlin Diaries are particularly fascinated by its relevance to today. If you are interested, join one such discussion at #Mackenziereads about all our political responsibility and what binds us together despite profound differences:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHrXI4vgc2-/

Facing our Past

It took me decades to confront my family’s and my country’s past. Growing up in post-World War II Germany, I went along with the German silence about the recent past. It took the shock of finding my grandfather’s Berlin diaries of 1945 which revealed not only the horrors of life under constant bombing but that my beloved grandfather had been a Nazi.

Perhaps Black Lives Matter today is driving a similar confrontation with our past in the US. What I have learnt is not clear-cut answers but the need to face our national and family past truthfully as a necessary first step to create a better future and reaffirm our common humanity, what binds us all together.

Api's Berlin Diaries. My Quest to understand my Grandfather's Nazi Past

As a record of post-war tribulation, Api’s Berlin Diaries is a poignant social history; as a search for an elusive, multifaceted grandfather, it’s a fascinating labyrinth."  5/5 stars FOREWORD REVIEWS

“A fascinating and admirably honest account of a woman’s journey to reconcile her love for her grandfather with his membership of the Nazi party . . . This is a must read for anyone interested in the German experience during WWII.” —ARIANA NEUMANN, author of When Time Stopped

Images of Protest in South Bend by Kay Westhues

Artist Kay Westhues took these powerful images of the protest in South Bend against the killing of George Floyd, and decades of racism and injustice:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/art-post/sets/72157714518084933

Camus, The Plague

“The plague will continue to crawl out of the woodwork…as long as human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements. We are all accountable for the ills of the world.” https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger