My German Mother

© Silke Hesse, 2013

My German Mother

Silke Hesse

My brothers and I grew up in Australia during and after World War II at a time when  people of German lineage and heritage, even if they were citizens of this country like we were, were made to feel that they came from a deeply flawed “race”. In a wider context, and as an act of revenge or retribution, this was not unfair; it was after all Germans who had made opportunistic and evil use of the concept of race, at the time considered by many to have a certain validity, in order to bring horrific death and destruction to millions of human beings. Our parents, however, had actually been forced to leave Germany after trying to oppose a regime of which only the worst could be expected. And we children of course, born in Australia, were personally quite innocent of German crimes. So we felt both ashamed and victimized in a confused sort of way. In the wake of the Holocaust, the civilized world made a decision that people must never again be disadvantaged and persecuted, or indeed privileged, because of their biological characteristics, be they looks, race, gender, mental or physical health, disability, blood-line or age. It then did not take long before the concept of race was completely discredited insofar as it indicated more than the most superficial and insignificant of differences between peoples.

I eventually chose German Studies as my career, partly in the hope of  better understanding what had gone wrong with a nation and culture that could bring forth, elect, submit to and even actively support a regime like that of the Nazis. It was not entirely surprising that in an age of nationalism and on a continent where innumerable relatively small and heavily populated ethnic states bordered on each other, most of them without geographically distinct boundaries, so that there was a need to display unique characteristics to justify their separate and inviolable identities, “tribal” race or ethnicity would be of interest as a marker. This could be presumed to be most obviously the case in states like Germany or Poland with historically shifting borders and few natural ones. It was also not surprising that on such a continent there would be movements, both peaceful and violent, to join these separate states into alliances or empires, that such movements would become more urgent after the Industrial Revolution when economies of scale were required for success, and that they could lead to wars of the dimensions of the two World Wars if satisfactory solutions were not negotiated. Nor was it surprising that a global economy might eventually ease the competitive pressure between these nations.

But why did racism develop on the scale it did in Germany? Was there something in German culture that predisposed it to racism and would it then have been discernable in the attitudes my parents too, and particularly my German mother? Did they export such attitudes from their homeland and did they guide our own upbringing within the family? Both my parents were constant and gifted writers of letters, diaries, reminiscences and family chronicles and in recent years I have read or reread many of these. Together with my own memories, they have begun to build up into something like an answer for me, an answer deriving predominantly from the brief moments of surprise and incomprehension that have confronted me every now and again.

Quite unexpectedly, this answer that has suggested itself to me locates the motor of racist attitudes not in obviously morally reprehensible views and activities but in the Germans’ deep reverence for nature that had found superb expression in the literature and philosophy of the greatest period of German culture, Romanticism. The German Romantic Movement developed as a reaction to the rapid progress of industrializing modernity which was changing the landscape and converting what was once mythical, ancestral and sustaining nature to a resource often used indiscriminately and destructively. While industrial production seemed to enhance the lives of the minority that initially benefitted, it degraded the lives of the many it displaced and enslaved along with the landscape. It drove people away from the life-styles and values that had been meaningful for centuries. Romanticism helped them to celebrate and mourn what was lost but also to preserve what could still be preserved.

The values of Romanticism have come into their own again now that the world is facing the destruction of nature that is likely to accompany climate change. It was wild, untouched nature that German Romanticism sought; my father looked for it and found it in the wilds of unexplored and pristine New Guinea which was at the time beginning to attract prospectors, timber cutters and plantation farmers but which more often than not, due to the remoteness and the difficult terrain of those islands, still resisted the onslaught of such developers. My father himself was caught between his need to earn a living supported by his fascination with pioneering achievements, and his veneration of untouched nature.

Nature as a conservationist and environmentalist sees it, as landscape, atmosphere, flora and fauna, all subject to invariable laws, is reasonably unproblematic as a concept. Human beings are of course also creatures of nature, though never exclusively. They are capable of making considered and unpredictable choices. It is the balance between nature and human choice or free will that is always crucial. To put things very simply: too much nature, and humans become its slave; too much free will, and nature is in danger of being destroyed by humans. In the Germany of Romanticism leading on to twentieth century Naturalism, human nature was seen as dominant over human free will, at times to the extent that man was perceived as totally at the mercy of his fears and passions, his heredity and ultimately his fate. Though both my parents were of themselves strong, active, independent and moral people, the culture of German Romanticism, to which they had both been exposed, adhered to them, particularly in unconsidered moments, and gave a glimpse of the mentality of many of those in the country they had left behind. When I sift through my memories it can flash into visibility.

Let me start with beauty. During my youth, my parents’ conception of beauty often puzzled me because physical perfection was so central to it. It had a Greek flavour and Greek culture, of course, as I have since learned, represented the classical ideal of Germany, and was much preferred to the civilization of Rome. Hitler too used Greek architecture and sculpture as a guide for the monumental and bombastic works he commissioned. Greek sculpture sought the perfectly shaped and proportioned body and face. When my mother’s nose was smashed in a car accident, she chose a Greek nose for the reconstruction. From his early letters, I discovered that my teenage father’s favourite painter had been Anselm Feuerbach with his well-proportioned classical women, such as “Medea” and “Nanna”. I myself found such classical figures somewhat boring. I was more attracted by faces that expressed personality, faces where unusual features were emphasized rather than hidden. I remember my mother calling one girl whose amazingly different face I had marvelled at  “ugly”, saying pityingly that she had to make up for her deficits with character. It was an assessment that would not have occurred to me. My mother was beautiful in the classical sense and that had certainly attracted my father; I merely had the ordinary good looks of youth. But apart from that, I was obviously closer to the generation of the Expressionists and above all Picasso, to what Hitler had called “depraved art”. These painters could make a “beautiful” painting of “ugly” things so that they became utterly new and exciting. I have actually never had much use for either of those words: “ugly” and “beautiful”.

Both my parents disapproved of make-up; it was considered “vain” if a woman tried to enhance her natural face, and vanity was the next best thing to a deadly sin. I was led to believe that what nature had provided would always be the closest you could aspire to beauty. It was necessary and proper to accept the cards that you had been dealt, and thus to accept your “true” self. I was shocked but also quite excited when my girlfriend told me one day that whenever she felt depressed, she went to particular pains to make herself up. And I can remember that she could look quite exceptional, for her face required colour and enhancement to come into its own; it would then also light up when people gazed at her admiringly.

The doll every German girl aspired to was the “Käthe Kruse” doll. These dolls were fashioned after the faces of the designer’s children, sweet children’s faces, not modishly pretty like French dolls: very natural faces. I had to wait till my own daughter was born till someone gave us such a doll but I would have been happy to have it much earlier. Dolls here in Australia generally looked artificial, some quite grotesque, with tiny bright red mouths and exaggerated eyes and lashes; I suppose they did not try to disguise that they were only make-believe babies, and this was honesty of a sort. But I didn’t want to be constantly confronted, as I would now put it, with some adult designer’s condescending humour. I too was to some extent a German girl.

When my mother read us Grimm’s fairytales, or when she turned them into puppet plays which the adults then performed for us, the princess was always beautiful. Nobility, virtue and beauty were apparently qualities that were inseparable, and if beauty is above all radiance, I agree that can be true. In the adult world in which these tales were first invented, the figures that populated them had been symbolical, so that their beauty too was symbolical; but as children’s stories they now tended to lack that dimension. For me, princesses ended up being beautiful in the same way that Hollywood actresses were; it was a generic and impersonal beauty. If you thought about it at all, it was most likely to epitomize the triumph of privilege, for it was clear that beautiful people simply did better in life than those less well endowed. When beauty is conceived normatively and moralistically, it becomes easy to declare a different style of face, e.g. a “Jewish” face, to be ugly or even depraved. I am not suggesting that this normative view of beauty was confined to Germany, but I think it was particularly entrenched there.

Another thing I remember from my youth is how persistently my mother would classify my various physical features as having been inherited from one or other close relative. Here she actually cheated a bit, and that should have given me occasion to think, because what she liked usually came from her side of the family and what she disapproved of from my father’s side. I was, apparently, a patchwork of other people. On one occasion when I was asked to shave my underarms for a theatrical performance she would not help me because “like her” I had no need of that. It gave me a momentary insight into how little she distinguished between the two of us. As a girl, I sometimes felt like a clone of her rather than a person of my own. My talents too were seen as inherited and predetermined with little leeway given to opportunity and education. Thus music was not for me, irrespective of whether I liked it or not, because my mother considered herself not musical. Perhaps my mother’s scientific training gave her this interest in heredity, in the human being as the random outcome of natural processes rather than as a unique individual. Of course race fits well with such attitudes.

My mother had grown up first as the only girl among boy cousins who were her age or older and then as the big sister of four brothers. Though she felt herself to be the bravest, most determined, intelligent and “masculine” of them all, she experienced being constantly excluded or insulted because she was a mere girl. She told me that when her brothers acted like “cry-babies”, they would be dressed in girl’s clothes and mockingly called by a girl’s name, something that enraged her but that she was helpless to prevent. Once her father, whom she idolized and had always emulated, realized that his gifted daughter hoped to study medicine, he took her out of school and sent her abroad to acquire womanly skills. He didn’t want her to become an “unmarriageable bluestocking”. That didn’t, of course, mean that she didn’t enjoy and make the most of her time in Wales. It was later due to her mother’s insistence that she was allowed to train as a pathology technician. My mother was lucky that my father always valued her as a friend and companion and that their courtship fell into the brief flowering of the tolerant and egalitarian Weimar Republic in Berlin before the Nazi winter set in. Yet my mother still needed the pseudo science of Otto Weininger, who taught that men and women had different mixes of masculinity and femininity in them, to perceive herself as an exceptionally masculinely inclined woman and thus worthy of being the equal of men. (It was of course “scientists” like Weininger whose theories allowed Jewish men to be denigrated as despicably feminine by the Nazis.) It was later a great disappointment to her that I was far less of a tomboy. She nevertheless encouraged me to succeed academically and unlike the parents of my Australian class mates, she was more than happy to see me at university fulfilling ambitions she had been denied. In those days Australia too was still a very sexist society that offered few career opportunities to women. Once Feminism started to draw attention to itself, my mother discovered to her surprise that she and I could also be valued as women, for womanly qualities.

Though neither of my parents were racist, they were both proud of their Germanic good looks. They saw themselves as worthy representatives of a noble race, though they always valued the good looks and special characteristics of other races equally. For them, as for Herder, the beauty and interest of the world lay in the great variety of its many peoples. Their views were racialist, never racist; of course the horror of racism has been such that racialism too has now been outlawed and replaced by a prescribed racial blindness.

   

Following the First World War, in which my father had fought and in the wake of which the generation of fathers tended to be accused of having sent their sons, their potential rivals, off to the slaughter, my father’s generation rebelled against their fathers. The rising Jugendbewegung or youth movement reversed the traditional hierarchy in favour of the young; ageism was replaced with “youthism”. For years, my father’s well-meaning but autocratic father had a hard time with his disobedient and independent-minded son.

But the household in which my mother grew up still had an authoritarian character and she rescued much of this “benevolent despotism” into her own family. For me, the oldest child and the only girl, she presented herself as the absolute authority in all things. I never openly challenged her because that would have been pointless, but I was also careful not to confide in her.  As an outsider in Australian society I could not afford to lose her support, and it was always generous support, yet I could not risk giving her more power over me either. I also hated the thought of being at odds with her because I loved her very dearly. This situation persisted to some extent right into the years where she became the family matriarch over children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a regal role she had learned to admire when it was enacted by her gifted and anomalous "half-Jewish" grandmother. Ageism remained a factor in our family, as it did in many Australian families of the time, often those headed by talented women who had insufficient outlets for their energy and ability. My mother had, incidentally, made sure underemployment would not be her problem by early assuming the long-term leadership of a German-Australian charitable organization.

And lastly I must mention what is perhaps the most easily recognizable form of biological privilege, the aristocratic blood-line. Aristocratic titles as such were abolished in Germany and Austria after the First World War; they were now to be considered merely part of a person’s surname, though few people took this too seriously. In Germany the hereditary “von”, which marks the lowest rank of nobility, had always been awarded for services to the nation. My mother’s family name bore such a “von”. Her grandfather  had earned this honour for his contribution to banking. But though I admired their refined and cultured life-style on my visits to the German family, it confounded me that some of my great-grandfather’s descendents, as well as other bearers of the noble prefix, actually seemed to consider themselves people of intrinsically higher worth. It surprised me still more when level-headed German citizens felt deeply moved and highly honoured to be greeted by an aristocrat, or even to consort with someone whose ancestor had been awarded the “von”. Britain too has a firmly established class system but nobility is far less obvious in names and it is less wide-spread, usually inherited by the oldest son only and very rarely awarded as an honour for services. I can’t help feeling that it was their veneration of aristocratic status that allowed Germans to be so readily seduced by Hitler’s pronouncement that they were a superior race.

One of the consequences of a biologistically determined view of the world is the difficulty of effecting change when change is needed. Here religions can offer a way out. Supernatural change or supernaturally sanctioned change tends to be seen as legitimately overruling nature. In Catholicism, obedience to the supernaturally instituted Church with its sacraments is the only path to salvation. In strict Lutheran theology there is nothing man can do to remove the stain of original sin beyond faith in divine redemption. In Calvinist theology a belief in “predestination” means that no amount of good works can influence God’s seemingly quite partial decision as to whether someone will be saved or condemned in the afterlife. Of course Pietism with its very personal relationship with a benign God had soon begun to modify such views. Original sin was certainly never part of the Christian upbringing my mother gave her children; her initial religious indifference had been discarded when she was sent to an exceptionally humanistic Christian school. But I think that the pessimistic helplessness embedded in German Catholic and Protestant cultures meant that divinely pronounced dogmas, divinely dispatched prophets or leaders, and divinely determined fate were easily welcomed as the only source of redemption. Thus the Nazis cleverly built up Hitler’s aura of prophetic authority, knowing that many Germans whose traditional religions had been undermined by science and modernity would be tempted to trust in it. My father, like numbers of other young soldiers, had proudly distanced himself from all belief in divine intervention when he experienced the indiscriminate slaughter of World War I. But though he was never inveigled into seeing Hitler as an alternative savior, years of his student life were taken up with studying the contributions of  “great men” to human society.

I could perhaps mention here that when my mother’s mother, grieving for a young daughter and deserted by her husband, turned to religion, it was to Rudolf Steiner’s version of Christianity, which Hitler had outlawed. Steiner’s approach was to take religiousness deeper into nature where simplistic determinism is replaced by profundity. That gives somewhat greater scope to the human imagination, though natural cycles and laws and precepts with their normative restrictions still play a central part. Anthroposophy is a very German religion, anchored in Romantic philosophy and natural science.

To complete my story and the story of German biologically justified status: I married a German man who had grown up during the sexist Nazi era and found to my dismay, just like most of my Australian girl-friends, that I was expected to honour my husband’s birthright of superiority at all times. Having grown up with my parents’ egalitarian marriage as a model, this was a shock to me. Today sexism, like everything else I have mentioned here an attitude that condones biologically determined status, is still a far more virulent force in Australian society than it is in Germany with its well-accepted female Chancellor and its many war-widowed, fiercely independent grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

But biology was, without doubt, a more widespread determinant of status, self-perception and privilege in German society than it ever was in English-speaking countries. Even before war was declared, under the last Kaiser with his passion for uniforms, unified Germany was becoming visually a uniform nation of people in uniform. Uniforms always emphasize the similarities between people and these tend to be “natural” similarities. A family history my mother wrote notes how on the eve of WWI her uncles all attended the christening of her brother in flamboyant uniforms. Months later in war, soldiers everywhere then came to be treated as little more than the bearers of natural strength and endurance and natural mortality, with all individuality and humanity discounted. And to mention yet another instance of German biologistic thinking: In Germany, situated as it is in the ethnically organized patchwork of Europe, nationality was until recently determined by the “German blood” of the parents and not by place of birth as in the often insular countries influenced by British law. This discrepancy between definitions allowed my father and his sisters to be endowed with two nationalities.

I believe that it was Germany’s cultural biologism which did much to encourage, sanction and sanitize racism and allow it to gain such extraordinary momentum. (It does not, of course, explain the more complex phenomenon of anti-Semitism.) My German mother had brought with her the culturally acquired habit of presuming humanity was defined primarily by its biology rather than its freedom of choice, though this view was in many ways quite at odds with her personality and was less noticeable in later years. My own childhood as the eldest had unfortunately fallen into a period of widespread racism in Australia, also a time when my father was often not present and when my mother’s younger sister, who was stranded with us by the war for many years, augmented conditioned German approaches; it had, moreover, included two years of war-time internment that strengthened German influences in crucial years. For my brothers, it was later more likely to be Australian society that demonstrated racism, and this country of course has always had its own problems in that area.

Should my mother then be seen as a bearer of guilt for the racism that destroyed six million Jews and many thousands of disabled people because they were supposedly biologically inferior, or that drove the terrible invasion of Russia because its supposedly inferior Slav population predisposed this country to be a site for colonization, for Lebensraum? Was her and our influence likely to be a danger to Australian society, as the Australian parents, who withdrew their children en masse when she enrolled us in a kindergarten most likely thought?

I do not believe so. For one thing, the man whom my mother loved all her life and whom she had left Germany to marry, my father, preached quite the opposite of biological determinism to his children, namely that there were no limits to what humans could achieve if they set their minds to it. His own varied and adventurous life seemed to verify this proposition. Our father had spent his childhood in Australia exposed to its pedagogical influences, had fought in the mind-changing Great War, had then studied in Germany and thought deeply and sympathetically about German culture, and had later lived and worked in many very different countries. He had thus been unusually free to make his own choices and during World War II this led him to insist on remaining neutral and retaining both his nationalities and identities.

Not surprisingly also, none of my mother’s children later chose to revert to a German culture they knew only at second hand. To some extent my younger brothers simply became Australians. But growing up between cultures and languages, for my mother had always insisted that German be the exclusive language of the home, also gave them the opportunity, where they wished to take it, to be critical or appreciative as the case might be of both cultures. For me, in turn, the differences between cultures were always food for thought; they later became subjects for discussion with students who might one day carry ideas, both critical and constructive, into wider society, perhaps even out into the world. It is precisely when cultures meet that habits and ideas are scrutinized and assessed; where they clash in the heritage of individuals this is more than ever the case. If we are worried, for example, about the culture of Islam, we should allow Muslim children to grow up here where their heritage comes face to face with very different ideas. Individual minds can then sort out what deserves to be honored and what should be discarded. My hopes rest with a world of great variety, one that has been consciously chosen by many responsible people to embody the best they can envisage for us all.