Endurance: A German Tale from the World War Era

By Peter Bowman

Endurance: A German Tale from the World War Era is the memoir of Peter Bowman, raised in 1920s-1930s Germany. His story is told as recalled during his twilight years, through the eyes of a philosophic mental health professional. Endurance is a reflective tale of rebellion against tradition, in a time when conformity was the best strategy for survival. Against the back drop of Germany’s political and cultural upheaval, Bowman strips back the traditions and tenets his family practiced as a means to maintain its social position and offers a practical and critical (and affectionate) assessment of how conformity made him the person he was, regardless of his efforts to escape it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicole Carter
• Release date: Nov 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311156730

Book preview

Endurance:

A German Tale from the World War Era

A Memoir by

Peter W. Bowman

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by

Nicole Carter

Heirloom Chronicles

Copyright © 2013 Nicole B. Carter

All rights reserved

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Acknowledgements

My profound thanks go to my father, Hermann E. Baumann, 1889-1958, as well as to my mother, Dora Ranck Baumann, 1890-1978, for their support, patience and for making an outstanding education available to me in Germany, in spite of the difficulties and destruction during the Hitler years and those immediately following World War II, and of the obstacles they encountered when trying to cope with me.

My associates for many years and friends for many more, Jack Hoffman and Philip Lape, I thank for their inspiration and wisdom.

Nicole Carter, my daughter, was able to balance her own varying commitments to act as my editor, providing refinements, technical advice, and valuable insights. Without her I would not have been able to cohesively put it all together.

This memoir is my attempt to reflect on key times and episodes of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood—times of doubts, confusion and contradictions—as seen in hindsight by an aging philosopher. It is tempered by fading memories and involuntary repression from consciousness, as well as an occasional embellishment to overcome those gaps.

P.W.B.

Brunswick, Maine

July 1994

Contents

Chapter 1 – My Pre History

Chapter 2 – Recollections & Ruminations

Chapter 3 – Hermann Baumann

Chapter 4 – The Caste

Chapter 5 – Early Warnings

Chapter 6 – Dorathea Meyer Ranck

Chapter 7 – Anna Schmidtkunz Baumann

Chapter 8 – My First Ventures Out

Chapter 9 – Principles?

Chapter 10 – Horror

Chapter 11 – Winding Down

Chapter 12 – Free at Last

Chapter 13 – Vignettes

Chapter 14 – Locked Doors

Chapter 15 – On Blindness

Chapter 16 – Silence & Distance

Chapter 17 – Auf Weidersehen

Chapter One

My PreHistory

In late 1913, at the age of twenty-three, my mother became engaged to a man I know absolutely nothing about, except for his existence. This unfortunate man was promptly drafted into the German Army in August of 1914, at the beginning of World War I. In the early months of that insane disaster he was killed by enemy fire—a hero of the fatherland, of the centuries old, stupendous glorification of human annihilation.

A year or so later, my mother met my father. While walking through meadows outside town, they were surprised by a violent thunderstorm and sought shelter in the open animal shed of an empty pasture.

My mother was terrified by lightning throughout her life, and understandably so. In those days the fire truck consisted of a horse-drawn tank wagon (with a capacity of about a thousand gallons of water). After the horses were hitched in front of the wagon, they sped away towards the fire at a maximum pace of some twenty-five miles an hour. By the time the vehicle with its crew arrived and the men started to pump water into thick hoses (by hand), the building was usually destroyed, not infrequently with human or animal fatalities. Houses were covered by quick-to-ignite, thatched roofing. Water mains did not exist.

So I imagine the thunder and lightning, and my mother clinging to my father in panic, which would then have turned into an embrace and culminated in their first kiss. She, acting in despair. He, in search of affection that had eluded him throughout his childhood.

On October 3, 1916, they married in the Sulingen Dofkirche (village church), and on July 22, 1917, my sister arrived on this planet: in my mother’s mind only a girl, but a child anyway. When, some twenty-five months later, I descended from my mother’s womb, she must have felt fulfilled to perhaps have unconsciously made up for the loss of her fallen fiancé.

Of this I am certain—she favored me over my sister, and even over my father. Such assessment on my part has ironic anatomical evidence. My father, himself wounded in World War I by a bullet through his left forearm, sported a scar about one and a half inches long. I was born with a large mole on the identical spot of my left forearm. My mother’s original fiancé was presumably shot through his heart. I was born with little holes in my aortic valve (fenestration of the aortic valve), and diagnosed after years of uneasy speculation (mainly caused by an unusual heart murmur). This was firmly established when I was fifty, at the Union Medical College in Albany, New York. I was conscious during heart cathertization and allowed to watch the anatomical evidence on the monitor screen. Mind over matter?

Chapter Two

Recollections & Ruminations

For Thea

When one has become an individual, one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects.—Erich Fromm

On Sundays my parents preferred to sleep until midmorning. My sister, Thea, and I were not permitted to leave our bedroom. Otherwise we could (and would) have disturbed their peaceful parental slumber.

So when we children awakened early, we planted our thick goose down pillows on the broad sill of our large bedroom window. In this way we buffered our backs and behinds in feathery softness and warm, snug comfort. There was enough space for both of us as long as we assumed fetal position.

With fascination we looked down from the fourth floor into the vast openness of the backyard courts among the buildings that made up our neighborhood. When we were surprised by our mother, she would scold us. You must not sit there! she would say. The window pane might shatter and you will fall to your certain death! Death is certain, anyway.

Fortunately for us, we had two doors to provide an early alarm system. The first connected the corridor with the family room, which was located between the latter and our bedroom. Thus, when it opened, the resulting draft rattled our bedroom door so that we could quickly jump off our perches and hop back into bed and pretend to sleep. This discrepancy between our parents’ desire to sleep (allowed!) and our quiet preference to sit on the windowsill (verboten!) seemed utterly unfair.

But we did it anyway. From our commanding position we had a full view of a colorful blending of trees, flowers, vegetable patches, cats and dogs, and the many clotheslines that held drying shirts, underwear, bed linen, and numerous machine-knitted, washable sanitary napkins. The latter were the outward signs that a woman in the respective family had once again endured the fruitless and bloody business of her monthly menstruation. No one explained this practice to Thea and me. But we knew from our mother’s regular routine that it was happening in other households as well.

During one Sunday morning session on the windowsill, a new observation heightened our biological curiosity further. On this occasion we noticed a dog licking the rear end of another. Suddenly, a baby carrot-like stick protruded out of the dog’s pee. He quickly jumped on the hind part of the bitch and sank his carrot into the rear end of her (or so it seemed). It was not until years later that I could grasp the meaning of the resulting frantic motions. If I had had a valid understanding of rape, little doubt I would have applied this word to what we saw. But sexual subjects were not to be discussed, especially with young children, and this kept us from gaining objective biological insights and understandings.

There were other instances of this suppression of intellectual curiosity. Around this time, I became very puzzled when I discovered that my parents’ friends had themselves become the parents to a set of twins. This was a new and unprecedented discovery in my young life. When I asked my mother for an explanation of how such a thing could happen, I got nowhere. She blushed visibly, and sternly told me that I was much too young to comprehend such complicated matters.

The obvious secrecy surrounding human sexuality led me to the erroneous suspicion that there must be a powerful secret of criminal or evil nature involved in producing twins. I vowed to myself that I would try to discover cause and effect. But my resources were very limited, since I had yet to learn how to read. To ask another adult would be dangerous, I mused, considering how unwilling my own mother was to discuss the matter.

My parents had a number of friends with whom they met about once a month. The men gathered to play cards and drink beer in the smoke filled herrenzimmer (gentlemen’s parlor). This segregated designation probably goes back to the Middle Ages when the male members of nobility enjoyed such privileges. The wives indulged themselves in coffee or tea and ate high cholesterol pastries in the dining room over the exchange of petty gossip and trivial topics of the week.

During those sessions I noticed that the consumption of beer had a definitive effect on the men’s speech (slurred), coordination (impaired) and behavior (foolish, silly, amorous, and aggressive). Thus, I incorrectly concluded that it probably took a large amount of beer to produce twins! I pondered a husband passing all this fluid to his wife as the most likely mechanism to get twins