The book I best remember from my father’s large collection of ponderous-looking works in German was entitled Ja, Nein und Trotzdem. Once in my mid-teens, having acquired a basic command of the German language, I learnt that it meant “Yes, no and nevertheless”.
This, I think, best summed up my dad’s attitude to his native Germany and, to some extent, my own. Written by a now long-forgotten Right-wing German-Jewish thinker named Hans Joachim Schoeps, whom my father knew and idolised in his youth, it expresses a strange attachment to a certain idea of Germany; one which transcended even the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.
For Jews with deep roots in that country, people like my father, the possibility of some ongoing connection even after the Holocaust was made easier if your own immediate family had mostly escaped in time, and if your own school days had been marked by protection: by a clutch of loyal friends, by an anti-Nazi Catholic headmaster and the temporary advantages which came of being the child of a frontline solider in the 1914-1918 war.
For me, with two German-born parents and thinking that getting old inevitably meant the acquisition of a German accent (when I was small, I knew nobody over seventy without one), Germany obviously loomed large in my childhood. My grandparents holidayed in Switzerland, where they could bathe in the German-speaking environment without having to confront Germany itself.
In an otherwise essentially English home, I learnt Hoppe, Hoppe Reiter at my mother’s knee, we ate Suppenfleisch and Aufschnitt and everyone got quite excited when Stollen became available in December. But aside from that, in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s, emphasising difference was not something one was encouraged to do.
The formative experiences of my parents were those of wartime — serving in the Army in my father’s case, living in provincial boarding houses wherever my grandfather was stationed and then dodging the Doodlebugs back in London in my mother’s. Penniless and living hand-to-mouth in rooms in other people’s homes, my grandparents felt obliged during the war not to speak the enemy tongue, which is why my mother forgot most of her German and I had to learn it from scratch.
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SubscribeThe courage of Jews who choose to return to Germany is, trotzdem, characteristic of a people whose written history ultimately established a moral foundation upon which the Western world was built.
“Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, shalt nor covet thy neighbor’s wife, etc. . .” t’was quite a significant list there. . . principles upon which an entire continent, or two or three, were civilized during the last several thousand years.
Thanks to you, Paul, and to your people, for setting the cornerstone of Western morality and law upon which our civilization prospered well for several millennia.
Thank you, Paul. Keep up the good work. Don’t let the nazis discourage you. We took them out of the way in 1945.