Writing Boots

Just read Endpapers, by Alexander Wolff, a longtime Sports Illustrated staff writer who recently read and gave an enthusiastic blurb to my memoir, Soccer Dad.

When I learned he’d written a memoir about his family, some of whom emigrated to the United States from Germany both before and after World War II, I thought I’d return the favor. Now it seems I owe Wolff two.

Wolff’s book gave me—or began to—what I’ve known for many years I’ve needed: an intimate, meticulous, walking-paced accounting of how one German family experienced the rise of the Nazis and the war, and how they view their behavior, before, during and after.

Why did I need this?

Of course it’s problematic to compare German citizens’ resistance to and complicity with the rising Nazis to our American moment. In 2015 here, I explained why then-Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was saying that to understand the dynamics of the Obama administration, people should read Mein Kampf:

[Carson] doesn’t know much about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the Sexual Revolution. He doesn’t know the Great Potato Famine from the Great Leap Forward. He knows not about Nebuchadnezzar, and little more about ancient Greece, and his idea of ancient Rome is before Mussolini showed up.

But like most Americans, he knows him some World War II history. Like them, eighty percent of his knowledge of all world history is World War II history. And eighty percent of that knowledge is history of the European theater of that war. And eighty percent of that knowledge is about the Nazis, who were fun to study as a kid for the same reason Lex Luthor was fun to study as a kid.

So when Carson is trying to get ignorant Americans alarmed about social catastrophes going on right under their noses, what’s he going to compare it to? The 100 Years’ War?

Except that: Studiously avoiding the Nazi story (and with it, all recent German history, which you can’t serve without the Nazi story) diminishes and distorts any understanding of Western culture, and of American culture. Germans made up a huge part of American immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, more than influencing modern American culture, but helping to build it. But the anti-German feeling around the two World Wars caused a great and lasting hushing of German-American cultural expression.

Here in Chicago, for instance, many if not most white people you run into are some combination of Irish and German (including the one in the bathroom mirror). The entire north side of Chicago was mostly German up until neighborhood ethnic homogeneity began to loosen up in the 1950s. Yet, the number of remaining German bars and restaurants and butchers are few. We dye the Chicago River green for St. Patrick’s Day, but you can live your whole life in Chicago without knowing much about Chicago’s Oktoberfest, which I just learned is in September.

Yet we are also German. My grandmother Rose was a Neubrander, her family emigrating here in 19th century. She married Charles Murray, the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant about which little is known except that he “knocked up grandmother Forbes.” But in partnership with his German wife and with the support of his German father-in-law, Charles rose improbably to become vice president of personnel and public relations for American Rolling Mill Company—known as Armco Steel—which was the company in the company town of Middletown, Ohio. “A listing of Mr. Murray’s community activities would not accurately indicate his total influence in Middletown,” his Middltown Journal obituary reads. “His advice and counsel were sought in the strategic planning for numerous bond issues and tax levies where civic progress was at stake.”

He asked my dad every day about his contribution in elementary school: “Did you strike a blow today, Tom?” I won’t call that a German attitude—for reasons already mentioned, I’m not a confident characterizer of German culture—but it doesn’t sound very Irish to me.

My dad fought in World War II. He wound up in Berlin, and what he saw there, and the rotting death he smelled there in the spring and summer of 1945, he didn’t say much about when he returned. He said so little, in fact, that his steel-executive father, on a government-sponsored fact-finding trip to assess what it would take to make German industry work again, was entirely unprepared for the total demolition and human degradation he saw in September 1947, more than two years after the end of the war.

“Bud,” my grandfather said to my dad when he got back. “You didn’t tell me.”

My dad’s response was, “How could I have?”

When my dad was dying of cancer in the fall of 2008, I miraculously scrounged on the Internet several segments of footage of his father on that German trip, walking through rubble-banked streets in Berlin and Munich … cruising on the Rhine past ruined bridges … and conferring solemnly with “A Woman Asking Mr. Murray Where She Might Get Materials to Make Dolls.” (See here, at the 5:40 mark.)

My dad gaped at that footage, seeming more stunned at seeing his father in motion for the first time since his death in half a century before, than interested in the context.

Reading Wolff’s book decidedly did not give me clarity about the American political moment and my place in it. If anything, it helped me understand my own ambivalence and doubt. Even in hindsight, Wolff’s accounting is complicated, almost infinitely so. The sheer number of possible ways any one person can be complicit in or resistant to the direction of a government and all other implicated social and economic institutions, depending on that person’s perspective and social standing—it’s not a simple matter of “what did the Germans know.” It’s what did Kurt (and his son Niko) Wolff know, at every stage of the game? What choices did they have, precisely? What would you have done in their place? And depending on how you feel about the current situation in your own country, how are you reacting now? It’s a hell of a puzzle that only the shallowly self-righteous will easily solve. Even in the context of Nazi Germany!

Alexander Wolff’s grandfather Kurt wrote to his own daughter shortly after the war:

For goodness sake, don’t think I see all Germans as black and guilty and others as all white and innocent. … In the main, however, I believe that we Germans are complicit in any injustice that others now commit. For the Germans unleashed the dogs of hell upon the world—hatred, wickedness, evil, cruelty—so that all of Europe is infected and sick, and another boomerang lands back whence this plague came.”

The Germans also made it hard for others to celebrate or even to describe without a hint of dark sides to the many virtuous qualities that they contributed to world culture and brought to American life. But I feel confident in saying that Alexander Wolff’s book, which doesn’t need a blurb from me, exemplifies them all.