TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

him prisoner placed him on the hood of their jeep and jolted back to their unit with this easily captured figurehead. He had been sent out by his fellow soldiers – those with only walk-on parts – to scavenge a loaf of bread in the next village, and so, when the Americans aimed their guns at him, he still had a loaf under his arm. So did he put his hands in the air, as he was ordered to, I asked him. No, he said, he couldn’t because of the loaf of bread. They took that from him, along with the hand grenades he had in his jacket pockets. Then they took him to a prison camp in Normandy, not far from the village I’m sitting in right now and where today the weather is so unusually calm. Another phenomenon that’s equally well known and is generally excoriated is the silence that reigned in Germany after the war. In a study of the Nazi era, and of how it lives on in families’ memories, I read that this silence was more or less invented by the 1968 162

generation; they carefully cultivated the myth of a silent war generation because they themselves didn’t want to talk. This seems doubtful to me, but ultimately I can’t be the judge, since I interact only with people, not with generations. In the American prison camp where my father lived along with many other German teenagers, none of whom had ever known anything other than the Nazi regime, he tells me there was plenty of keeping silent. They did talk, of course. But the thousand-year Reich of their childhood and youth that had just come to an end (the Reich and their youth), and in which their parents and most of them had at least to some extent firmly believed – that was something they didn’t waste any words on. I try to imagine it, hundreds of lanky adolescent boys, locked up together in a confined space for months on end, to them for ever, their thoughts behind the barbed wire 163