Hallo zusammen -- and hello everyone. I’m Miriam Scott from Amarillo, Texas, back talking to you about the fantastic graphic novel written by my fellow German immigrant Nora Krug.
I just found out, that like me - well like most Germans - she also has a family member that didn’t make it back from WWII. Her uncle, the older brother of her father fell at age 18. She knows neither where nor when this happened. It was never talked about. That was a common theme in Germany it seems, to not talk about it.
The younger brother of my grandfather fell in WWII. For the longest time I did not even know he existed. In her research, Nora Krug was more successful than I have been.
She found pictures, old school composition books, and drawings this uncle of hers left behind. Her uncle’s name was Franz-Karl. This is also her father’s name, as he was born to replace the firstborn son. I can’t help but feel bad for her father, what a burden this must have been growing up.
It occurs to me here that the ramifications of war are vast, all-encompassing, and long-lived. They become part of the fabric of society. The old composition books, or Schulhefte as we called them, are filled with the old writing style in Germany. My generation was the first to learn an easier form of writing cursive. The pages remind me of my grandmother who used this writing style still.
Franz-Karl the first, writes an essay about Mother’s Day on one page. For decoration he draws flowers. And the swastika. This was in 1938 and children were heavily indoctrinated with propaganda in Germany. It is bizarre to read how sweetly he treated his mother that day and to see all these pink, innocently drawn flowers around the page, and at the top: two large swastikas surround two German flags. And here’s the thing, Franz-Karl, still a young child of about 11 to 13 years old at the time, drew the swastikas with just as much innocence as he drew those lovely flowers. That’s how it works, propaganda and indoctrination.
One of the very next pages has lovely drawings of red and white polka dotted mushrooms and conifer trees. I myself drew them many times as a child. We have many of these mushrooms in our conifer forests, they are beautiful but poisonous. They are a popular and lovely children’s book motif.
However, this essay written by her uncle Franz-Karl in 1939 in his schoolbook is less then lovely; it’s nothing like the Mother’s Day one. This one describes how Jews are just like these mushrooms, they may be beautiful to look at, but they are dangerous and can kill a whole people. You can see the boy’s neat handwriting, the red marks left by the teacher correcting spelling and grammar, and of course the lovely innocent drawings, just like any other schoolwork.
Eerie, isn’t it? How effective it is, this propaganda thing. It can even make use of innocence to reach its goals. Or maybe it is especially innocence it can use. It was no mistake when the NSDAP, the Nazi Party, decreed that all children starting at age 10 must join the Hitler-Jugend, Hitler-Youth. Nora Krug found a quote by Adolf Hitler, in it he describes the typical development of a young German as so completely devoted to the German Reich, that by the end of their education “they shall never be free again for the rest of their lives.”
Here is a chilling and sobering thought: what if he had succeeded? What would my life be like right now? Nora Krug describes the experience of reading her uncles essays as intimate but chilling. They intrigued her, but she never showed them to any of her friends. I’m not sure I would have either.
This is Miriam Scott for the HPPR Radio Reader’s Book Club. Tschuess -- and goodbye.
