Fritz Stern fled Germany with his parents and sister only in 1938, almost too late to escape the worst of Naziism and the concentration camps—which, in any event, devoured many of his relatives and friends. Returning as a visitor in the 1950s, he is dismayed at the Germans’ mute unwillingness to come to terms with their past. In one memorable encounter, he meets the historian Siegfried Kaehler. “True to his conservative-elistist views,” Stern recounts, Kaehler “had kept a certain distance from the Nazis, no doubt regretting their plebian character.” Stern and Kaehler discuss Hermann Lüdermann, once the governor of Upper Silesia, then after the war the first minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein.
“That scoundrel!” Kaehler said.
How so? I asked. He referred to Lüdermann’s womanizing. I objected: a man who had been once imprisoned and had then volunteered to join the conspiracy against Hitler, thereby risking his life and ending up for a second time in a concentration camp, didn’t seem to warrant the negative term. Kaehler responded unfazed. “We couldn’t all get entrance tickets to the concentration camps.”
--Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known 214 (paperback ed. 2007)
I hope to say more about this remarkable (but sadly uneven) book some day very soon.
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