Inge’s War by Svenja O’Donnell review – the burden of secrecy
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein’s well-known proposition is usually quoted in relation to battle survivors and their reluctance to speak about their experiences. The women and men who got here by way of the second world battle, constructing new lives for themselves in the ruins, had been particularly taciturn, none extra so than Svenja O’Donnell’s German grandmother Inge, who’d been a 19-year-old with a child when the advancing Red Army pressured her to flee her house in Königsberg in January 1945. But for the promptings of her granddaughter, the dramas Inge was half of in the years both facet of that escape may need remained a secret. But in her 80s she started to open up somewhat. What she revealed over the subsequent 10 years, and Svenja supplemented together with her personal discoveries, has resulted in an interesting e-book.
Inge was a small youngster when Hitler got here to energy and in her “carefully curated” recollections of skating events, ice-creams and pet monkeys the rise of nazism barely figured. Her mother and father had been Lutherans, not Jews, and although they disapproved of Hitler they stored their heads down. Initially resistant when Inge pushed them to let her go to school in Berlin, they quickly succumbed. In September 1940, with allied bombing raids but to kick in, the solely risk to a vivacious 15-year-old lay in the metropolis’s decadent nightlife. And when Inge made pals with a lady referred to as Gisela, whose mom Dorothea invited her to dwell with them, they’d each motive to suppose she can be protected.
So she may need been had she not fallen in love with Gisela’s 19-year-old brother, Wolfgang, a shy, clever boy who had averted being referred to as up for military service and who shared her love of swing and jazz. To the Nazi regime, the swing music of Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong was dangerously subversive however Inge and Wolfgang weren’t alone in being devotees: to the 3 million Germans secretly listening to the BBC, the music it performed was as essential as its information broadcasts. Swing definitely contributed to the romance between Inge and Wolfgang. The night time they heard a band play Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing” was significantly intense, as a result of Wolfgang had simply obtained the telegram summoning him to battle.
By the time Inge realised she was pregnant, he’d gone. But when she wrote to inform him, he promised to take care of her and make issues proper. Consumed by guilt for failing in her responsibility of care, his mom Dorothea was equally set on them marrying. Inge’s mother and father, forgiving fairly than offended, hoped the similar. The fly in the ointment was Wolfgang’s father, Carl-Otto, Dorothea’s ex-husband, who flatly forbade it. Inge thought Wolfgang ought to have stood as much as him; the sense of betrayal by no means left her.
The youngster she gave delivery to, again house in Königsberg, was the creator’s mom. A number of years later she had a second daughter with a unique father, her husband for the subsequent 60 years. What occurred to Wolfgang? At the outset, O’Donnell didn’t even know his identify. She may need assumed he’d died on the jap entrance, as so many different German troopers did, however the story proved extra complicated. So did the story of Inge’s fortunate however terrifying escape to Denmark, on a ship referred to as the Göttingen, and the kindness proven to her by Dorothea, who stayed in contact, despatched her 10,000 marks and got here to depend upon her for provides of morphine. How Inge acquired the morphine, by way of a seemingly type however unscrupulous grocer, and what ensued from that, is a narrative in itself, the darkest in the e-book.
O’Donnell fills out her grandmother’s narrative by way of various analysis: on the excessive incidence of wartime rape, with girls as “collateral damage”; on Goebbels’s weird creation of a Nazi swing band, Charlie and His Orchestra; on Russia’s torpedoing of ships carrying German civilians; on youngster malnutrition and loss of life in postwar Denmark. It’s stunning that Walter Kempowski’s monumental Swansong 1945 is lacking from her bibliography and there are a couple of lacunae (how Inge obtained collectively together with her husband for instance). But her pursuit of the reality – which incorporates her visiting all the locations related to Inge – is impressively tenacious.
Here and there she reproaches herself for the ache that uncovering the reality brought on to Inge and others in the household. But by way of it she got here to grasp a grandmother who’d all the time appeared chilly and aloof. And the peace Inge discovered at the finish of her life – she died aged 92 in 2017 – happened, partially, as a result of the burden of secrecy had lastly been lifted.
• Inge’s War: A Story of Family, Secrets and Survival underneath Hitler is revealed by Ebury (£16.99). To purchase a replica go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery prices might apply
