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"During the war we ate water soup"

The memory of the Second World War plays a prominent role in the Federal Republic.

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"During the war we ate water soup"

The memory of the Second World War plays a prominent role in the Federal Republic. As a symbol of a total moral failure on the part of the Germans, it appears in politicians' speeches as well as in countless TV documentaries and books. The picture is thus quite solid - and so it is very surprising today that the conflict, in which millions and millions of people died, fulfilled a very pragmatic function at the table very soon after May 8, 1945.

At the Baierhof in Reit im Winkl, where the historian Wolfgang Hardtwig spent his childhood and youth, expressions such as "in the war" and "after the war" or "right after the war" were common, he writes. To continue laconically: “Mostly they served to break down occasional resistance to food that didn't taste good. 'During the war we ate watery soup...' - or any other dish whose poorness, not to say hideousness, was then described in detail."

It is narrative sequences like this that give Hardtwig's recently published autobiography "Der Hof in den Bergen" power. People who lived through those years will probably remember something similar. For everyone else, they are sentences from a lost world. To use such a horror as this war to discipline children when eating with a bad conscience - that is beyond any imagination today. That's why it's good to describe situations like this again: they illustrate very tangibly the difference in the conversation about the war between then and now.

Anyone who experienced Wolfgang Hardtwig, born in 1944, as a history professor specializing in the 19th century in Erlangen and from 1992 to 2009 at the Humboldt University in Berlin, would never have expected him to publicly disclose such experiences. Like no other, his name stood for wanting to disappear behind the historical material as completely as possible, i.e. to only let the facts speak for themselves. The spectacle of his seminars will not be forgotten by anyone who has experienced it like the author of this article: There stood a man, struggling for every word, for every petitesse. Now and then he got into telling stories, but only in the most intimate of circles – and anyone who clumsily tried to bridge the distance he could also scold, like those who were conspicuous by their intellectual absence in the seminar.

The book stands in clear contradiction to all of this. Although it is less than 250 pages long, Hardtwig writes a multi-layered form of history that is rarely found anywhere else in Germany: the book is a mixture of socio-historical descriptions, mental portraits, autobiographical stories and psychological motifs that allow a deep look into the author's soul . In view of this, it is a blessing that the scenery with Reit im Winkl remains manageable.

The founding of the Federal Republic did not only take place in the big cities, and so the description of a village milieu is both refreshing and instructive. As an educated middle-class family, the Hardtwigs did not originally belong to the village community; the historian tells the story from the perspective of an outsider, in which the "order of the village" confronts the milieu of his own family.

As far as this order is concerned, it is striking how naturally the hierarchies from before 1945 initially remained intact. Reit im Winkl made a living from agriculture and the timber industry, and increasingly from tourism, and had the necessary crafts. The big farmers settled the important issues in their mind, however the other villagers coped with it.

There were three butchers, a tailor and the inns, whose status everyone in the area was aware of: the unskilled workers from the "Löwen" would never have stopped at the "Oberwirt" or "Unterwirt". Of course, there were residents who had to live with the reputation of having been “Nazis at the time”, but that was hardly considered a social flaw. The power of the church was still unchallenged. Pastors mixed religion with politics without restraint and otherwise saw it as their task to make their followers as afraid as possible of God the Father in heaven.

What Hardtwig writes about the persecution of the Jews in retrospect is particularly enlightening. Keywords such as injustice and reparations would have awakened in him early on vague ideas about recent but terrible events: "The word Jew encompassed a mysterious, mysteriously special group of people who had suffered terrible things, although many of these Jews had apparently been important people, who, again in some mysterious way, were different from ourselves.”

Young Wolfgang Hardtwig noticed little of the friction with the refugees who streamed into the village. This can be seen as evidence for the thesis that young people come into contact with each other more easily than adults. All in all, the system that kept the village alive was based on the hardest physical labor in nature, which is rarely used today to earn a living.

When cutting down trees in winter or mowing with a scythe, people were regularly injured, sometimes even dead. Even the educated middle-class son had to look after firewood or clear roads with shovels when they were under a thick layer of snow. Wolfgang Hardtwig earned his first money as a house painter.

The author's family was dominated by a man who was no longer alive. Eduard Hamm, Wolfgang Hardtwig's maternal grandfather, a liberal lawyer and Reichstag politician from the ranks of the DDP with good contacts to industry, acquired the farm in 1932 as a refuge. During National Socialism he had established connections with the resistance group around Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. After the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944, he was caught by the Gestapo and threw himself out of a window during interrogation in the prison on Lehrter Strasse in Berlin on September 23. Family and friends suspected that he did not want to reveal the names of his fellow combatants under any circumstances - at the cost of his own life.

After the end of the war, Hamm finally became a mythical figure, and Hardtwig had to experience how his mother, although a highly educated woman, knowingly or involuntarily suggested to him that he had to accept her father's inheritance. The author embeds his personal experiences in larger contexts. In some families, the devastation of the Nazi regime continues into the third generation - and, as one has to assume, sometimes even beyond.

Whenever he describes his own behavior, the author does not spare himself. He often appeared to visitors of his seminars and lectures as a kind of polymath, as someone who probably already presented his teachers with Thomas Mann interpretations in elementary school. But this picture has serious cracks. So the young Wolfgang Hardtwig developed an affinity for the not so successful German Navy early on and devoured dubious literature about battleships like the "Bismarck" or submarine aces of both world wars. It takes a lot of sovereignty to admit this as a man who wrote the basics about a great historian like Jacob Burckhardt and who decisively shaped political cultural history as a theoretical concept. It's probably also a question of age.

Then there are the passages in which the high school student skipped school for weeks and months: "When the weather was good, there were opportunities to walk to the nearest edge of the forest and pull out the Karl May book there, to go on an extended hike or to do both variants in one to combine in any form.” In bad weather, the reading took place in a grocery store.

The price, however, was that Hardtwig, contrary to all the torturous instructions of his father, a lecturer in geophysics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, completely abandoned the material. It must have been hours full of fear, because the youngster was of course aware that the lie would be exposed that he had not really been to school. He remembers the day of reckoning as surprisingly mild, because the mother kept her composure, but she did not free her son from the guilty conscience. However, this is a timeless technique of education; The world that Hardtwig draws has by no means vanished completely.

But of course there are in “The farm in the mountains. A childhood and youth after 1945” (Vergangenheitsverlag Berlin. 250 p., 20 euros) also includes all the passages in which a young man discovers reading and traveling to Italy or England for himself. There are lively observations from the 1961 federal election campaign in the country and other scenes that stuck in his memory so much that he can still report on them precisely decades later. An example is the sequence in which a successful local taxi operator and FDP politician personally picked up the bedridden grandmother in the 1953 federal election and drove her to the polling station because he could be sure of her vote. All of this is presented in an unpretentious manner.

He simply remembered a lot in the past few years, explains Wolfgang Hardtwig, explaining the motivation for writing his autobiography. And some things seemed really worth handing down to him as a historian. The audience interested in history is to be wished that more people who have something to say actually do it. It would be a win.

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