Don't talk about the war

War is the father of all things—Heraclitus

For most boomers in North America, WWII is nothing personal; it’s a kind of background noise easily ignored until Remembrance Day brings it back. And maybe a relative who died in that war will be honoured and remembered in some way. But in general, people prefer to ignore this dire subject. It’s too big and too complicated unless you belong to those people who tend to identify with the ‘winners’ and look down upon the losers. As the eminent historian Margaret MacMillan observes in her recent book, War: How Conflict Shaped Us,We can never really get at the truth about war…’though her book makes a compelling argument that we have to think about it because it is a permanent feature of human existence. In fact, talk of war is very much with us. We could find ourselves in a lethal conflict with China soon, though any global war is likely to happen in space, knocking out the satellites upon which our entire world depends. It could get real sixteenth century, real quick,’ warns Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College.   

That’s a catchy way of putting it, probably meant for Twitter stardom. But for me, born seven years before the boomers and in the country that lost, Germany, war is a personal, emotional thing, something that has clearly shaped me though I would prefer to forget. It is deeply ingrained and in writing this, I am finally coming to terms with my status as a child of war. I carry the scars to this day though they are not immediately obvious.

Herrmann Finscher, decorated Wehrmacht officer and proud Nazi

My very first memory is about the personal cost of war. In 1942, my twenty-year-old uncle, Hermann Finscher, came home for his last furlough from the Russian front. I was barely two, and what I dimly remember is a terrible feeling. My mother picked me up and carried me into the dining room, where her mother, her two sisters and Hermann’s younger brother, Lutz, were seated around an oval table. Acting normal though they knew that this was the last time they would ever see him. The dread and sorrow that hung in that room is what I sensed but could not comprehend. Herrmann was a fervent Nazi, groomed since the age of ten in the Hitler Youth. A highly decorated career officer, he would have joined the SS had he been tall enough. What he lacked in height, he made up for with ferocious intelligence, exceptional leadership, and utter devotion to the cause. His letters from the front reveal how much he hated the Russians, whom he describes as a race of Untermenschen. Herrmann perished during the second wave of the decisive, bloody tank battle of Kursk, in 1943. It involved 1000 tanks and two million men, with heavy losses on both sides. However, the Russians had reserves the Germans lacked, and they won during the second phase.

The Finscher family, 1942. From the left, Herrmann, Marta, Lutz. In the back, Lieselotte, Lore and Margret, my mother.

The memory of dreadful sorrow overwhelms me every time I am forced to confront what war is and what it means. No wonder I hate Remembrance Day. Apart from the emotional scar, there are physical ones. As was common to my generation in Germany, my childhood was marked by periods of hunger and cold, shaping my relationship with food and temperature forever. My anxiety levels rise as food supplies run low. Costco seems a rather miraculous place, bursting with all the things that I couldn’t even imagine as a hungry six-year-old, grubbing for beech nuts in the woods, desperate for the oil hidden inside the tiny brown seeds. I hate the cold because we were often freezing in the dark. My mother risked her life stealing sacks of coal at night on a railway siding. You could say that we came to Canada to finally forget and be rid of the war and its awful, dark shadow. Canada helped us forget, but never completely. Forgetting that war proved to be impossible.

Throughout my life, the war insisted on being remembered. During the mid-seventies, travelling in Spain with the wife of my brother Claus, we were heading towards the birthplace of Francisco Goya and a tiny museum housing The Disasters of War, the famous black and white prints that launched not only Picasso’s Guernica but also Otto Dix, Salvador Dali and war photography. When we arrived at the museum, one of those terrifying electrical storms Spain is famous for erupted and plunged the entire village into darkness. The drawings, perhaps the first truly honest depictions of war’s brutality, flickered in and out of darkness with every lightning strike, immediately followed by ear-splitting thunder. What a way to experience Goya’s dark visions, I thought. How absolutely right and proper.

My mother never was able to forget either; the war haunted her. After she returned to Germany for good and lived to a ripe old age near her hometown, Kassel, I used to visit her annually. During one of those visits, on an outing into the town, the provincial capital of Hesse, we were waiting for the bus when out of the blue, an enormous tank came rumbling down the road. It took up the entire street and seemed to bear down on us. We were transfixed by its size and the utter incongruency of its appearance. We had not realized that Kassel is a Bundeswehr site but why a tank would use a public road is still something of a mystery. My reaction was nothing compared to my mothers’. She started to tremble and hung on to me for support. Get a cab, she whispered, I have to go home.

Somehow, I managed to flag one down. She got into the front with the driver; I sat in the back, listening as they exchanged stories about the war. He was almost her age; he remembered everything. That exchange calmed her down. But our day was ruined.

On a lighter note, I confess that at the age of 10 months, I became a Nazi poster child. My father, who was the only one in my family who never ‘believed’ in Hitler, had a friend who worked as a journalist for the local paper. She also wrote poems, and she wrote one about me, a fat and happy looking ‘war child’. She got a photographer and had it all published. I apologize profusely.

We should all apologize for our continuing inability to stop war. We continue to glamorize it, with movies, songs, art, and literature. And in truth, war can have a positive side. As a teenage bride living in Summerland, we had an experience that illustrates this. We were having dinner with a much older British couple, the Storeys. He was teaching Math at the high school where my husband Peter was pretending to be a shop teacher, and his wife, Freda, was the highly opinionated daughter of an Anglican (?) cleric. Somehow, we got on the subject of WWII.

To my incredulous shock, they both reminisced about how close they had felt to total strangers, how everyone had a purpose and a place and that, all things considered, their war memories were rather positive. The dinner did not end well and I had to come to terms with the fact that the war I remembered was not like theirs, at all. But it is true: War can unite people in ways that nothing else can. It can also sell them lies in ways nothing else can. I have never bought into the ‘war hero’ trope, believing as I do that convincing youngsters to lay down their lives in a war is utterly immoral and ultimately, futile. And frankly, I have no wish to return to the sixteenth century. I am hoping we can avoid that. But I am not at all certain that we will.