The German Puzzle: My Search for the Missing Pieces

By Paul Drexler

More Americans claim ancestry from Germany than from any
other nation. We speak a Germanic language, and from fairy tales
to Freud, were surrounded by German influences. Yet America has
lost touch with its German heritage. We simply cant fathom how
the land of Beethoven and Goethe could have been responsible
for WW II and the Holocaust. In The German Puzzle the author
recounts his own journey of rediscovery. Drawing on a unique
mix of personal and family experienceranging from schoolyard
fisticuffs to the exuberance of the New Berlinhe offers us a fresh
perspective on the German world, and how it shaped America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453570524

Book preview

THE

GERMAN PUZZLE

MY SEARCH FOR

THE MISSING PIECES

Paul Drexler

Copyright © 2010 by Paul H. Drexler.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010913022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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85006

For my mother and father

So for me . . . Germany was the most unknown of

all countries.

Also war Deutschland . . . für mich wohl das unbekannteste aller Länder.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

the immense variety of the German world . . .

des vielumfassenden Deutschtums . . .

Thomas Mann, Adel des Geistes

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note to the Reader

Introduction

Does Germany Really Matter?

1

Making Connections

2

Three German Muses

3

Bonn: Of Barbarians and Beethoven

4

Why Nothing Ever Works in Cologne

5

You’re Kidding! The Diet of Worms?

6

The Art of Boarding a German Train

7

And I Speak German to My Horses

8

Basel: A Blessed Corner of the Earth

9

William Tell and His Apple

10

Munich: High Baroque and Lowly Insults

11

Vienna: My Coffeehouse Moment

12

Felix Austria: Just How Happy are the Austrians?

13

Cheating at Bocce:

How Adenauer Rebuilt Germany

14

Hamburg: The Great Migration

15

Hanover: My Father’s Hometown

16

Ten Reasons (Plus One) for Nazi Germany

17

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

18

The University of Göttingen

19

A Journey into the Harz Mountains

20

The Holocaust

21

Weimar: Germany’s Cultural Capital

22

The Weimar Refugees in America

23

Bach and the Devil in Leipzig

24

Dresden: Frauenkirche and Synagogue

25

Prussia: I Visit a Country That Doesn’t Exist

26

The New Berlin

Postscript

Homeward Bound

Recommended Reading

Recommended Films

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my father, who introduced me to the German world, and to my mother, who encouraged me to write.

My wife, Bonnie, has offered innumerable forms of encouragement and help for which I’m deeply grateful. My children, David and Molly, have given me much-appreciated advice and support. Nancy, Dave, and Julie provided crucial assistance and input. Edie and Marlisa shared family memories. The Kelehers gave me suggestions and encouragement. All of my family deserve medals for putting up with my four-year immersion in German matters.

The many members of the German side of my family have all been wonderful hosts over the years and offered me valuable perspectives. Tante Gertrud and Onkel Wolfgang have been a very special inspiration. I would also like to thank Henning and Lafaine, Wolfgang and Maren, and Christian and Magdalena. I want to express my sincere thanks to Folker and Mareike Thamm, Hartwig, Erika, Eckhard, and Marianne Drechsler, Insea and Bjorn Jensen, Christian and Regitze Hohlt, Dorli, Frank, and Sylvius Hohlt, Gudrun Lohmann, Alice and Carl Butler, Nanette Davis, and Maria Nickles.

Many friends, both in Germany and America, have helped me learn about the German world and encouraged me in writing the book. I would especially like to mention the entire Mueller family and Peter Bourke. I also want to thank Carolyn Jenks and Brenna Barr for their support.

In researching Germany, I was both surprised and grateful at the many academics, journalists, and others from all walks of life who agreed to be interviewed and who shared their insights with me. Susanne Klingenstein’s superb lectures on German and German Jewish writers at the Goethe Institute in Boston introduced me to German literature, which was a wonderful gift. Steven Beller was particularly helpful on Austria and Viennese coffeehouses. My thanks to Professor Böhm in Göttingen for the tour of the Agricultural Institute and for his work on the biography of Gustav Drechsler, its founder.

Susanne Klingenstein, David Blackbourn, Ernestine Schlant Bradley, Michael Gorra, James Sheehan, Gerhard Casper, Helene Zimmer-Loew, Bob Frye, and Peter Olson offered helpful advice on how to tackle such a large subject as the German world. (Needless to say, I followed only some of this advice and should perhaps have followed more.)

My special thanks to the following academics, who read parts of the manuscript in earlier drafts (some of which didn’t make it into the final book). They graciously offered to read the work of a nonexpert and are in no way responsible for what I eventually wrote. They include Jens Kruse, Barbara Newman, George Marsden, Barbara Stollberg-Riesinger, Omer Bartov, Antony Polonsky, Michael Neufeld, John Hébert, Jan-Dirk Mueller, Anton Kaes, Sabine Dramm, Graham Bartram, and Sabine von Mehring.

Among institutions, I am particularly grateful to the Center for European Studies at Harvard for their many fine speakers and seminars (all open to the public); the Goethe Institute in Boston, with its many excellent programs; the Leo Baeck Institute in New York; the Boston Athenaeum; my local Minuteman Library system; Ken Schoen and Jane Trigère of Schoen Books in South Deerfield, Massachusetts; and Schoenhof’s bookstore in Cambridge.

And lastly I would like to mention my German grandmother, Grossmutti, who lived through WW I, the Great Inflation, the Great Depression, and then WW II. Recalling her interest in German literature and the best of the German tradition served as an inspiration to me in moments of doubt. I hereby acknowledge that I was wrong when I insisted (at the age of ten) that the cowboy and Indian writer, Karl May, was a far better author than Thomas Mann. I hope this book will go some way toward making amends for that look of profound disappointment, which crossed her face upon hearing my literary views.

Germany is a controversial subject, and often a painful one. I have waded into these waters without the benefit of being an academic expert myself and with biases that come from my own experience and that of my family. I have approached Germany from the perspective of an American who benefited from our victory in WW II, not as someone who experienced the horrors of war and Nazism firsthand, and I am acutely aware of that distinction.

Though I’ve tried very hard to be fair-minded and accurate, I am sure I’ve hit the wrong note at times, I’ve misjudged and misinterpreted, and I’m mistaken in some of my facts. Finally, this book describes my German world; there are many others. Those mentioned here, and in the book, bear no responsibility for my interpretations or approach, which are entirely my own.

Note to the Reader

All translations from German are my own, unless noted otherwise. I’ve aimed at the sense of a passage, rather than literal accuracy. I have also used some German words in the text, always followed by a translation. For longer German words, I’ve inserted a dot to help show the break in pronunciation (e.g., Wander•lust). Readers should feel free to skip the German if they find it a distraction.

German_Map.tif

Introduction

Does Germany Really Matter?

The German world is all around us in America, from the dollar in our pocket, named after the Austrian Thaler, to the very name America itself, bestowed on us by the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller.

More Americans claim ancestry from Germany than from any other nation, including England. Probably a third of Americans have at least one German ancestor perched somewhere in the family tree. But the ties go even deeper than that. The English we speak is a Germanic language. Our education, from kindergarten through graduate school, is directly modeled on German examples. America’s preeminence in technology rests, to a significant degree, on the earlier achievements of German science and the way it went about organizing research.

Protestantism was born in the German world, and both Catholic and Jewish traditions have deep German roots. American literature, when declaring its independence from Europe in the early nineteenth century, was inspired by German Romanticism. From fairy tales to Freud, our popular culture has been deeply influenced by the German world. The two world wars with Germany, followed by the Cold War, forged America’s destiny as a superpower. And our moral universe has been shaped by the Holocaust, which in turn left its mark on America’s civil rights movement.

Yet Germany puzzles us. How can this world of high culture, of music, literature, and science, simultaneously be the land of the Holocaust, of terror and tragedy? How can we make sense of these contradictions?

We know bits and pieces of the German puzzle: castles and cathedrals, Mozart and Beethoven, Einstein and Freud. But they don’t seem to fit into any readily discernible pattern. What we do know about Germany is often a jumble, like the pieces of a newly opened puzzle strewn across a table. Part of the difficulty is that throughout history, there have been many Germanys. Britain and France and even America have a long history as unified nations. They offer us a clear timeline. Germany, which was only founded as a nation in 1871, lacks any such convenient story line.

In fact, any real understanding of Germany cannot just focus on the nation-state but must consider the broader German-speaking world as a whole. This includes not only the region covered by modern Germany but also Switzerland and Austria (and through the old Austro-Hungarian Empire much of Eastern Europe). And the German world cannot be put together without a sympathetic understanding of the thousand-year history of German-speaking Jews.

Beyond its sheer variety, there’s another reason Germany puzzles us. We sense an American connection, but are reluctant to pursue it. What if Germany turns out to be far more important to us as Americans than we’re comfortable admitting?

Ever since the anti-German hysteria which accompanied the First World War, America’s German connection is something we have preferred to hold at a distance. There’s a paradox here: Americans have taken the lead in encouraging Germans to come to terms with their past, yet we are reluctant to recognize our own German cultural heritage.

Of course, coming to grips with Germany can be painful at times. It requires us to confront the Nazi period and the Holocaust head-on. Yet the German world, to be fully understood, must be seen as a whole, the good and bad together. Seeing Germany whole can help us recognize that there’s more to the story—a two-thousand-year panorama of history and culture. We tend to think of Germany as a monolithic nation-state, but it’s actually the diversity of German culture that makes it interesting and helps account for the many ways in which it has influenced America.

I have found it easiest to organize my thoughts about the German world around several key themes. These range from Romanticism and nationalism, to music and the German language itself. Other themes include religious faith, science, migration, Germans and Jews, and the existence of many Germanys, both geographically and through time.

My own interest in Germany goes back to my father, who fled Nazi Germany as a young man to come to America. When I was a boy of eight, my father’s job led him back to Germany. I found myself plunked down in a German primary school and, for three years, was immersed in the German world. I also got to know the large German side of my family. Later in my financial career, I frequently traveled to Germany and met with business and political leaders. Yet my focus was almost entirely on two aspects of Germany—the Nazi period and the postwar economic powerhouse. For me, as for many Americans, the rest of German experience remained something of a mystery. Subconsciously I considered it tainted by Nazi Germany, and so I preferred to hold my distance.

When my father died at the age of ninety-two, I realized how little I really knew about the German world in which he had grown up. I decided it was time to explore my own very mixed feelings about Germany. This book records a journey of rediscovery, one that has been both painful and exhilarating. I found Germany far more interesting than I had ever imagined. And I found something else: putting the German puzzle back together again has helped me understand who I am as an American.

1

Making Connections

Why am I here? In Germany? Germany, with its dreary weather and its heavy burden of history? The world is full of sunny, cheerful places to visit; why would anyone want to go to Germany?

I stumble through Frankfurt Airport at six in the morning, feeling sullen and groggy. When a rushing passenger bumps into me with his luggage, I give him a sharp jab of my elbow in return. What is it about Germany that puts me on the defensive, I wonder.

Germany is a country most of us want to keep at a distance. Its twentieth-century history is so appalling that we can’t help but think of it as an utterly foreign place. And yet, there is no country with which America has been more intimately connected. This leaves us with a strange, unsettled feeling. The Germans have a word for such an experience: un•heim•lich. It describes a familiar situation in which something is slightly out of kilter, something disturbing yet intriguing. Americans often feel this way about Germany—that it’s both familiar and unsettling.

I’m wandering through the airport feeling punch-drunk from the lack of sleep and the six-hour time difference. I need to sit down and collect my thoughts. Fortunately there’s a café open at this hour. I order a cup of coffee and a piece of my favorite German pastry, Pflaumen•kuchen, a plum tart with whipped cream. For some reason I remember a cop show I had recently seen on TV in which the drunken suspect, when finally pulled over, was asked to recite his ABCs as a measure of sobriety. Swaying slightly on his feet, he stoutly upheld America’s educational standards, insisting, I know my ABCs. I just don’t know them in alphabetical order. I feel much the same way about Germany.

Reviving under the influence of the coffee, I begin to reflect on my journey. Despite many business trips to Germany, I realize I’ve never once been here on vacation. As a result, there are many parts of the country I don’t know at all. And even the places I do know, I’ve always been in too much of a hurry to explore in any leisurely way. I resolve to slow down a bit and to try to keep my elbows to myself.

I’m beginning to remember why I’m here; it has to do with my father. I think back to the last days I spent with him. At the age of ninety-two, he was on his deathbed. When I arrived, he looked up at me and whispered, I know why you’ve come. You think I’m dying. Well, I might just surprise you! before easing back into a medically assisted slumber. Those were the last words of English I ever heard him speak.

My father did surprise me, but in a different way. During the last two days of his life, reverting to the world of his childhood, he only spoke German. As a young man, he had left Nazi Germany to come to America, and he was proud of being American. He was perfectly willing to speak German in business, or with relatives. But at home, as if to insist on his new American identity, he only spoke English. The German he now spoke was unlike any I had heard from him before; it had a singsong, childlike tone, gentle and accepting. I found it comforting to think he approached death in such a spirit. It was the only time in my life that I spoke German with my father.

Doing so made me realize how little I really knew about the German world in which he had grown up. He had been born into a large well-off family in Hanover in 1909. As a university student he had experienced the Nazi takeover—the persecutions, the book burnings, the wild torch-lit parades—and decided to immigrate to America. He didn’t have to flee; he wasn’t Jewish, nor was he politically active. He simply didn’t want to be a part of what he saw going on all around him. Fortunately his first wife, whom he met while she was an exchange student in Germany, was American. As a result, my father was able to get out of the country on the pretext that he was making a short visit to his wife’s family.

He had been a law student at the University of Göttingen. His ambition had been to enter the diplomatic service in order to help prevent the kind of foreign policy blunders that led to WW I. But it was clear to my father that the Nazis would provoke another world war; they had no interest in international law and diplomacy. In this, he proved more farsighted than most diplomats of the time. The day after getting his law degree, he and his wife left for America. The alternative was immediate induction into the Wehrmacht.

My father’s first marriage ended in divorce, and he later married my mother, whom he met playing tennis in New York City. Her maiden name, Kramer, means grocer in German. Her father’s side of the family was German too. But like many Americans, they no longer knew when or from what region or even why the family had come. They didn’t maintain any particular ties to Germany. My grandmother’s view of the land of Dichter und Denker, of poets and philosophers (as the Germans once liked to refer to themselves), was not much more favorable. After an argument with my grandfather, she would sometimes exclaim to my mother: Whatever you do, don’t marry a German! presumably meaning a German American. My mother did her one better; she married someone who had been a real German.

When I was a boy, my father spoke very little about the past. But in 1958 the Ford Motor Company transferred him to Germany to take advantage of his knowledge of German. Our family moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the little town of Bergisch Gladbach near Cologne. My sister Nancy and I went to a German primary school and were immersed in German life for three years. My youngest sister, Julie, was born in Cologne; but we left before she could learn the language.

I was eight years old when, much to my disgust, I found myself plunked down in a second-grade classroom in Germany. For the first three months of school, I was speechless. I felt a sullen resentment at finding myself in such a foreign environment. I was also afraid of speaking and failing, of sounding stupid in a foreign language. And as I look back, I realize there may have been a more powerful motive for my silence. In America I had been embarrassed by the fact that my father was a German immigrant. I insisted on thinking of myself as a normal American. To speak German would have been to admit that I too was somehow connected to the German world.

My sister Julie told me that even as a young child, she had sensed that there was something foreboding about Germany, something with which one didn’t want to be too closely associated. It had to do with the tone of voice in which the word German was pronounced. There was a sense of evasion, of something being mysteriously left unsaid. As soon as she described the feeling, I recognized it in myself as well.

And now there I was in the middle of a German classroom. Despite my stubborn silence, I managed reasonably well. I could figure out what was going on, and I could understand an increasing amount of German. But I didn’t trust myself to speak. Fortunately my teacher, Herr Bartels, a somewhat melancholy veteran of the Russian Front, treated me with considerable kindness. I was spared the indignity of the occasional Ohr•feige (a slap in the face) dispensed to those who disobeyed or talked in class. (Inge Meier! Komm her! Brille ab! Inge Meyer! Come here! Take off your glasses! Wham!)

I subsequently learned that I had been granted a special immunity from such treatment. My mother had told Herr Bartels that, as an American, I was not to be hit in class. Whether out of respect for her or out of fear that she might call for backup, which, who knows, might have prompted American armored divisions to rumble into town, I was the only student not subject to corporal punishment (which has subsequently been banned in German schools). To my classmates I must have seemed a privileged being, exempted from the trials and tribulations of ordinary German life.

Annoyed by such an aloof and provocative silence, the class bully, der dicke Wilfried, fat Wilfried (fat often being a term of respect in German), caught up with me one day as I was walking home from school. Planting himself firmly in my path, he called me a Schweine•hund, literally a pig-dog. The idea of such a ludicrous animal made me burst into laughter. Being called a Schweinehund, however, is no laughing matter in Germany—far from it. Der dicke Wilfried turned beet red and spat a thick wad of phlegm, what American kids called a loogie, right into my eye. Before I knew what I was doing, I managed to pin him to the sidewalk and returned the favor—with a slow, somewhat theatrical drool. To my amazement, I found myself speaking a torrent of German, including some choice bits of profanity. Fortunately a number of classmates had arrived to witness this astonishing development.

image 1.JPG

My German schoolmates in 1959. I’m in long pants,

second from left. Der dicke Wilfried, front row, fourth

from right, prompted me to speak German.

German kids of the 1950s assumed that Americans triumphed in whatever they undertook: world wars; the Olympics; inventing atomic bombs; or producing stupendously large automobiles. My classmates were astonished, not at my prepubescent physical prowess, but at my sudden willingness to speak German. Most surprising to me, however, was the reaction of der dicke Wilfried. He stood up, gamely pronounced me the winner, and offered his hand. We shook and became fast friends. From that day forward, I was accepted as a regular member of the class, known as der Ami, a bit of slang Germans used after the War to describe Americans. (The term implied both admiration for American success and contempt for our inability to act like proper Germans.)

Kids adapt to new environments with amazing speed, and I soon felt myself completely at home in German school. I liked my classmates, I was fluent in German (unfortunately no longer the case), and I was good at Fussball. But one night when I was about ten years old, my cozy German world suddenly vanished. I watched the first film footage of Auschwitz ever shown on German TV—faces emaciated beyond belief, corpses heaved into huge pits—and my view of the German world was forever changed. Like any American, I had to ask myself: How could this happen? But unlike most Americans, I confronted a more immediate question. What were my teachers, my schoolmates’ parents, what were my own German family members doing while this was happening?

I heard stories from my father and the large German side of my family about life in Germany during the Nazi years. Some hated the Nazis but didn’t actively resist. Others were caught in the middle, disgusted by Nazi tactics, but proud of Germany’s first successes. And some joined the Nazi Party, with motives ranging from outright enthusiasm to simply saving their jobs. After the War, my Tante (Aunt) Marlise, a cigar-smoking habitué of Weimar Berlin, worked for the DEFA film studios in Communist East Germany. Other relatives took the opposite direction. They loaded their goods onto the boxcar of a train and, amidst a hail of bullets, smashed their way across the border to the West.

In August 1961, I watched on German TV as the Berlin Wall was being built. I vividly recall Soviet and American tanks maneuvering, like clumsy metallic beasts, to confront each other at Checkpoint Charlie. We felt as if a miscalculation by a single tank commander might start World War III. There was an emergency evacuation plan for Americans to leave the country in twenty-four hours, but if it was going to be a nuclear war, that wouldn’t do much good.

To try to make sense of all this, I began to read everything I could find about recent German history. (I may be the only twelve-year-old to have ploughed through the entire 1,264 pages of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.) But WW II and the Cold War consumed all of my attention. I knew very little about the rest of German history. The constantly shifting borders, the theological disputes of the Reformation, the mind-boggling maps of the hundreds of member states of the Holy Roman Empire all left me in a daze. So for many years, I left things at that.

When I started my career as a financial analyst, the fact that I could speak German made me something of a reluctant German expert. I traveled to the country, met with business leaders, and visited German family members. Yet my view of Germany was almost entirely focused on the postwar economic powerhouse and on the Nazi period. Despite my expertise, there was much about Germany I didn’t know. In the aftermath of WW II and the Holocaust, I tended to hold German culture at a distance—as something suspect and tainted. I never explored German literature, or really learned much about a culture that had produced Luther and Goethe, Beethoven, and Freud. When it came to the broader German world, I was a reasonably well-educated ignoramus.

My father’s death made me realize how much of a puzzle Germany still was to me. In a way, my experience may be similar to that of many Americans. It’s perfectly possible to get a first-rate education in America (in colleges modeled on German universities) without knowing anything at all about German culture. We’ve developed a sort of general amnesia about America’s own German roots. When we do look at Germany, we often do so through the lens of the Nazi period. In one sense this is appropriate. WW II and the Holocaust are central to any understanding of Germany. But they are hardly the only things worth knowing.

So here I am beginning a journey of rediscovery. My father made the difficult decision to leave Germany in 1936—now I’m headed back in the other direction. Despite my many ties to the country, Germany is something I’ve tried to ring-fence, to keep at a safe distance. But Germany, I found, wouldn’t let go of me. It was something I needed to understand.

Having recalled the reason for my visit and revived by two cups of coffee, I set out with a renewed sense of purpose. After a considerable trek in which I retrace my steps several times, I manage to find the airport train station. I’m headed for Bonn, where my sister Nancy and her husband, Dave, are currently living. As soon as I get to the right track, I hear an announcement that the train I was scheduled to take is too full to accept any additional passengers. Would we kindly step to the other side of the platform and take a later train of somewhat dubious destination? I dutifully comply. The overfilled train arrives, and within ten seconds, every single person—except me—proceeds to scramble aboard. Just as I begin to reconsider, the train pulls out of the station. It’s a strange feeling standing here all alone on the platform to think that I, as an American, am the only one left still obeying orders in Germany.

The alternate train, however, turns out to be a bit of good luck. The high-speed train, which I missed, travels through tunnels and culverts designed to minimize the noise for local residents but leaves no view for the passengers. My slower train offers a panorama of the vineyards along the Rhine, ruined castles peeping up over hilltops, and little Baroque churches nestled away among the valleys. Perhaps, I reflect, there’s a parallel between America’s view of Germany and these two trains. We tend to think of Germany on the fast track as the powerful, monolithic nation-state. But there are other Germanys, slower, more varied, and more nuanced, which we often overlook.

Nancy picks me up at the Haupt•bahn•hof (main station) in Bonn. Now I can relax with hospitality, good food, and a ready travel consultant at hand. At the door to Nancy’s home, I’m enthusiastically greeted by her new dog, Anyu. She proves to be a trusting, sweet-natured creature with whom I immediately fall in love. Anyu requires a walk, so we set out in the brilliant October sunshine among rolling fields and orchards full of ripe apples and pears. Paved pathways run through the muddy farm fields, allowing easy access for walkers and cyclists. In fact, all of Germany is crisscrossed by a series of wonderful hiking trails and bike paths. For Germans, the freedom to walk and bike is almost on par with the freedom to breathe; it’s taken for granted. German visitors to America are dumbfounded to find that large parts of the country are only accessible by car. Germany is actually a very easy place for Americans to visit. Many people speak English, the train system is superb, and you can walk just about anywhere. It’s not even that expensive, if you choose to stay in smaller guesthouses rather than the big hotels.

Back at home, over some coffee and well-earned pastries, Nancy tells me a story about an American woman who has just moved to Germany, never having been abroad before. On her first trip into Bonn, she and her two young children had become hopelessly lost in the back alleys of the old town. (I proceed to do the same thing myself two days later.) As the full impact of being lost in a foreign city sank in, her little girl burst into tears, exclaiming, Now we’ll never get home, and we’ll never see Daddy again! My own journey, I realize, began with the death of my father.

Perhaps travel is