Wibke Bruhns (1938–2019)

In My Father's Country Wibke Bruhns combs through the copious documents -- letters, diaries, 'children's diaries -- produced by her bourgeois German family during almost a century leading up to her father's execution for his part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. (That plot is soon to be the subject of a Major Hollywood Film Starring Tom Cruise. On the strength of existing Hollywood forays into history, I'd recommend reading this book before seeing the movie.)

This is probably the first show more book I've read that treats the two world wars (which probably should be known as The Great War Parts 1 and 2) from a German point of view. Reading it, as I just have, with the intention of deepening my awareness, if not understanding, of the Holocaust, I was struck by the way the 'Jewish question' was close to peripheral to the family's concerns, and seems to have played no part at all in the motivation of the conspirators: they were aristocratic or wannabe-aristocratic officers in the German armed forces, who despised the crude brutality of the SS and toed the Nazi line, if not reluctantly, at least with distaste. There's a moment when HG (Hans Georg Klamroth, Wibke Bruhn's father and the book's central character) sees Brownshirts and Communists battling in the street below his window and quotes Horace in his diary, 'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo', which translates loosely as, 'Nobody with a decent education, which of course includes the Latin poets, would involve himself in such activities.' When an old friend comes to stay the night and brings three Brownshirts with him (the only ones to ever sign the family's guest book with 'Heil Hitler'), HG spends several hours the next day drinking and chatting with a Jewish doctor, friend of the family -- although neither his diary nor Wibke's narrative makes it explicit, the suggestion hangs in the air that he is trying to cleanse himself of contamination. But contaminated he was. Eighteen months after that visit, he wrote in his diary: 'Evening, employers' association re. poss. expulsion of Jew Jacobsohn -- sign of the times.' That last phrase almost certainly indicates the presence regret, but if so there wasn't enough of it to stop him from voting for the motion to expel.

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Mrs. Wibke's dad was an Anti-Hitler Conspirator named Hans Georg Klamroth, executed in August, 1944. This is a collection of family documents culminating in a biography of her father and a relation of the family's troubles in WWII. The english-speaking reader seldom has such an intimate portrait of a middle-class German family and their concerns. Good read.

The book is well written and is full of interesting historical data about why the Second World War was inevitable outcome of the unfair Versailles Treaty, in the eyes of the Germans who were not defeated militarily in the Great War. It also states that an anti Jewish party had one seventeen seats back in the 1870's and that anti Semitism was not a new phenomenon of the Nazis.

Dieses Buch schildert die interessante Spurensuche der Autorin in ihrer Familie, eine Geschichte, die deutsche Geschichte lebendig macht. Am Beispiel der Familie Klamroth wird exemplarisch deutlich, wie eine großbürgerliche Familie vom Kaiserreich bis zur Kapitulation 1945 lebt und fühlt. Der Vater der Autorin, begeisterter Militär und Offizier wird schließlich als 20.-Juli-Verschwörer in Plötzensee hingerichtet.
Ein hochinteressantes Buch!