When I was a crew-cut youngster, not yet in kindergarten, Mom and Dad took my brothers and sister and me to the early service at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Sleepy Eye. I wore long pants with suspenders and a clip-on bow tie with a white shirt. My face was round, my eyes blue, and my short hair almost blond from playing outside. After the service, the husbands in dark suits, narrow ties, and black oxfords followed their wives wearing dresses, nylons, and heels down the aisle between the wooden pews and through the narthex. We all shook the pastor’s hand outside the two huge wooden doors and then descended the wide concrete stair to the sidewalk along Walnut Street. In warm weather the adults lingered in small clusters, nodding to one another, talking about the weather, the second cutting of alfalfa, whether corn would be knee-high by the Fourth. When Mom chatted with other women — maybe her older sister Mildred or her very large and loud sister-in-law Alma or Elaine Vogel — I hid behind her and peered around the flared fabric of her skirt. I suppose Aunt Mildred and Aunt Alma tried to coax me out, but apparently I wouldn’t budge. “You were scared of other women,” Mom told me years ago.
I want to believe I was just shy, but that’s not what she said. Since I don’t remember actually clinging to her skirt and have only the image I’ve patched together based on black-and-white photos and what Mom and Dad said about me, I suppose “scared” is closer to the truth. Maybe that’s why I remember this. Not because I recall the fear but because this is how they saw me. This is what I was.
Another memory: Once as a first-grader, after I got off the bus and walked the long driveway up to the old farmhouse with Ken and Darla, I went into the living room where Big Grandma — Dad’s mom Metha Koch — sat in the red vinyl armchair. Her long gray hair wound up in a bun on the back of her head, she wore black shoes with thick blocky heels and a faded house dress with short sleeves that let the heavy loose flesh behind her arms sway whenever she reached for a plate or a bowl in the cupboard. That afternoon I stood near her left hand, the one with the protrusion on the side of the middle finger, and breathlessly described something that happened in Mrs. Beltz’s classroom or in a game of dodgeball during recess, something I was sure would make Grandma gasp and her eyes get wide.
But when I finished, she only raised her eyebrows, peered at me through her wire-rim glasses, and drew out a single syllable: “So?”
Her question stumped me. Did she mean “So then what happened?” or “So what?” Not until years later did I realize that Grandma’s “So?” wasn’t English but German; she’d replied with the language of her childhood, and to her “So?” simply meant “Really?” or “Is that true?” or “Is that so?” And had I known then what I know now, I would have smiled and said, “Ja!” instead of standing before her as I did, puzzling over what I’d left out and why she didn’t care.
I suppose I remember these seemingly insignificant incidents from over 50 years ago because I thought they were early evidence of how my family misunderstood me. But it’s more likely they show how much I didn’t understand about them. And about myself.
For instance: I always knew I was German, and reminders of this fact littered my childhood. I went to grade school with kids whose last names were Zuhlesdorf, Ziegenhagen, and Dittbenner. When Mom sensed exaggeration, she dismissed it, as Big Grandma did, with a guttural “Ach!” My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Heimann, taught us some basic German — the days of the week, numbers, greetings, and colors — but “schwarz,” or “black,” always made a few boys snicker because it sounded like “farts” to our childish American ears. And once in a while Dad let slip an insult like “Schweinhund,” meaning “pig-dog,” or a bit of cussing like “Scheiβ in der Luft!” which means, oddly enough, “Shit in the air!”
But it took me a long time to understand the meaning and implications of being born German just a dozen years after the end of World War II. When I was in junior high and we read Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank in Mrs. McClellan’s English class, the swastikas that Jimmy Clarken and other kids drew on their notebook covers no longer seemed like innocent doodles or attempts at teenage rebellion. When Dad bragged that he “jewed the guy down” before buying something, I thought less of the deal than of his diction. And even though my great grandparents all left the Old Country before the turn of the twentieth century, I couldn’t help but wonder in 1975 when, as a junior in high school, I found my family name — certainly common in Germany — in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, where it was associated with declarations about “the Master Race” and with Buchenwald.
Or when, as a thirty-something college student in 1989, what I read for a literature class — Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum — collided headlong with news of Eastern Europeans rebelling against the Soviet system, Gorbachev’s announcement that the cold war was over, and, then, in November the joyful collapse of the wall that had divided Germany since 1961.
Or when, through online searches during the past three years, I uncovered more about my German ancestors and could finally name and pinpoint on a map locations from which they’d emigrated or where they remained: Beestland, Brekendorf, Nossendorf, Brunsbüttel.
Or this past winter while reading Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall, I discovered who, in August 1961, painted the line marking where the 29-mile-long wall dividing Berlin was to be built: Hagen Koch, who, despite threats to his life and livelihood, eventually gathered his courage and defied the GDR.
And as I dig deeper, I’m left wondering: What became of my great-great grandparents? What of their other children who didn’t emigrate and of their children’s children? Did they survive the Great War? How did Hitler’s rise affect them? Do my distant relatives, like Günter Grass and others of his generation, carry guilt for the horrors committed in their names?
For now I cannot say. And I’m certainly not the only one with questions about my origins. I only regret that it took me this long to come out from behind Mom’s skirt and face them.
