Book Review : Round of Psychoanalysis on Postwar Germany’s Couch

What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?: Growing Up German by Sabine Reichel (Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 214 pages)

About halfway through “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” by Sabine Reichel, a short but earnest book about growing up in postwar Germany, we come across something truly and profoundly horrifying--an arithmetic exercise from a textbook that was used in German schools during the Third Reich.

“If a mental patient costs 4 Reichsmarks a day in maintenance, a cripple 5.50, and a criminal 3.50, and about 50,000 of these people are in our institutions, how much does it cost our state at a daily rate of 4 Reichsmarks--and how many marriage loans of 1,000 Reichsmarks per couple could have been given out instead?”

Nazification in the ‘30s

This ominous “word problem,” suffused as it is with vile and wholly evil assumptions, is recounted to Reichel by a schoolteacher who witnessed the “Nazification” of the German schools in the ‘30s. I was reminded that the Nazis first experimented with poison gas to murder the mentally and physically handicapped patients in their own hospitals before using the same technique on a much grander scale to kill 6 million Jews. And, suddenly, I began to understand how a whole nation could be led so readily into genocide.

That, I suppose, is the author’s real purpose in “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” Sabine Reichel, born in Hamburg in 1946, is an articulate and thoughtful woman with a restless moral curiosity about her nation and, especially, her parents. Although Reichel has lived in the United States since 1976, where she has worked as a clothing designer and a journalist, she returned to Germany to seek out the answers to her insistent and uncompromising questions.

“It wasn’t the historian in me that needed to come to terms with the past, but anger and outrage against people who had betrayed me by their silence, crippling me by their refusal to speak,” Reichel writes. “Back to Germany, back to the source of the pain. Psychoanalysis on a nation’s couch. My mission: soul espionage. I felt like an archeologist excavating a rare find, a detective in search of a lost time and the missing conscience of a country.”

Reichel is preoccupied, naturally enough, with her own parents. Although Reichel has interviewed and written about other Germans who were somewhat closer to worst crimes of the Third Reich, she devotes much of her short book to her own urbane father, an actor who entertained Nazi troops in occupied countries and later served as a radio announcer, and her vivacious mother, a Lithuanian hausfrau who saw herself as a “displaced person” because she ended up in Berlin during World War II.

“Why are German fathers such a problem? It is their fate to be linked to a reprehensible crime that was carried out in their name, and they will never rise above suspicion as long as they live,” Reichel writes.

As it turns out, however, Sabine’s father was not a war criminal--indeed, he claims to have played a rather distant and speculative role in the failed effort to assassinate Hitler. (The story is a bit obscure and, in any event, impossible to verify: “I’ll never know for sure what he did or didn’t do in the war,” Reichel writes.) And Reichel’s problems with her father seem more generational than moral: “He saw himself as one of the world’s most original gifts to mankind. My father was not so much a Nazi as he was a narcissist.”

Still, even Reichel’s father gives voice to the moral complacency that, according to the author, characterized a whole generation of Germans: “Everything that was good in the Third Reich wasn’t new, and everything that was new wasn’t good,” he quips. “Actually, economically the war had advantages. It wasn’t bad that we had to start anew. Germany looks much nicer now--except for Dresden maybe.”

Reichel’s mother is depicted as a victim of a peculiarly nasty strain of sexism (“The war stole the best years of my life”) and the seductive materialism of the “economic miracle” of the postwar era.

Confronting Nation’s Amnesia

When she is not musing over the fate of her own parents, however, Reichel is willing to grapple with the ugliest realities of the Nazi era and its lingering shadows in contemporary Germany. Reichel tries very hard to be honest, blunt and uncompromising, and she mostly succeeds. She always comes back to the central theme of her book--the moral and historical amnesia of the German nation--and she never flinches from her self-assigned role as the voice of conscience.

“The terrible truth is that Hitler’s murderous task, euphemistically called ‘the final solution of the Jewish question,’ was completed successfully,” she writes. “When I was born, Germany was indeed Judenrein (free of Jews), not just numerically but also in the conscience of the Germans. They killed the Jews twice--first their bodies, then their souls.”

I must confess that, as an American Jew only one generation removed from the Holocaust, I was distressed by Reichel’s book. Can we explain away her good conscience as a strictly postwar phenomenon or, what’s even worse, as an aberration? Still, we must welcome Reichel and salute her efforts at truth-telling, even if we wish that there had been more Germans like her when it really counted.