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Who Is Guilty?
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10083 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,002 Words |
| Author
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Wes Blomster
Wes Blomster, a retired professor of German, is a freelance
writer living in Boulder, Colorado. |
MARK UND BEIN (Joints and marrow)
Eine Episode
Walter Kempowski
Munich: Knaus, 1992
237 pp.
For Americans, it's homecomings that cause nerves to tingle with nostalgia; in recent years, older Germans--tears in eye and hand on cane--have surrendered to "home goings," heavy-hearted visits to those parts of present-day Poland that were German territory until 1945.
In this brief narrative--the author modestly calls it an episode--freelance writer Jonathan Fabrizius is dispatched to what was once Danzing and East Prussia with the advance party for an auto rally designed to publicize a Japanese car built in West Germany.
Fabrizius is to write on the cultural and historical merits of the territory to be covered in the auto race. The date is August 1988--a year and two months before the wall and, soon thereafter, the Iron Curtain fell--yet in a time when West Europeans visited the Eastern bloc with some freedom.
Little do those who have hired Fabrizius realize that the writer was born in this region in the bitter winter of 1945; at the time his mother was part of the massive German westward exodus before advancing Russian troops.
Mother Fabrizius died at his birth; his soldier father was killed at his post on the Baltic coast in the same part of the country.
In prose of near-Biedermeier calm, the author tells of encounters with elderly German tourists who have returned for the first time since the war to the sites of youthful years, describing their singing of sentimental songs with an irony that permits both criticism of and sympathy for their quest for a time--and a life--long past.
At Marienburg, the ancient seat of the Teutonic knights who colonized this region in the middle ages, these older Germans are confronted by a trio of Marxist-oriented youths from--symbolically--Bremen's leftist Rosa Luxemburg School. The young Germans, viewing their elders as unrepentant Nazis, are disappointed in their fervent hope for hearing even grizzlier accounts of Nazi atrocities from polish guides.
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