Turning a blind eye to suffering to survive
Mitläufer (jumping on the bandwagon) was used to describe the German citizens who would never have personally condoned the terrible abuses that Jews suffered, but nonetheless went along with the Nazi regime. Their consequences were heavy but nothing compared to the treatment of the Jews. This story is about one such family: Liesel, Frank, Hans, Ani, and Jurgen Kappus. It is based on the life of the author’s grandfather, whose letters written during the war were found hidden in an attic wall.
Frank Kappus was a well-respected reconstructive surgeon who lost his wife in child birth and married shortly after her death. His new wife and grieving children had to succumb to the reality of war as they said goodbye to their father and husband when he was taken to serve in the military.
A lot of us can relate to hard times when we are consumed with focusing on our families we forsake all else — to make sure they are fed, have clean clothes, are bathed, that educational needs are met. These tasks are daunting when we don’t have the proper resources and support. Now ramp that up a step and visualize a family in survival mode; air raids at night, food scarce, no support from a father or husband because he is away serving in the military and the loss of loved ones occurring frequently. Homes invaded by multiple refugee families: “The notice was from the housing office. Two refugee families would be moving in next week. Their names were Dillman (five persons), and Winter, (six persons), all women and children. Each family would require its own rooms, its own stove for cooking, and access to the bathrooms and the wash kitchen in the cellar. An official would come to start refitting the rooms tomorrow, so they needed to clear all their possessions out now.”
The Germans as a whole were considered the enemy but many families suffered tremendously during the last year of the war and this story shows us the humanity of the characters in "Motherland." It is no wonder that some families did not know what was going on around them as they were striving to hold together their sanity day by day.
The author states, “The more I wrote, the more I knew I had to change my fundamental questions. I could not use hindsight as a knife to slice through the past and find anything but what I expected to find. Instead of asking, 'What did they know, and when did they know it?' I began to ask, 'What did they love? What did they fear?' And in place of a prefabricated fable, a complicated human story began to emerge.”
There is no mention of the Jewish atrocities, not that they didn’t exist but this story tried to present the character’s lives authentically from a different view and even though some families might not have knowingly participated in humanity's worst crimes, the backlash of war happened on their doorsteps.
Another novel about the Germans appearing to be blind to the horrors around them:
- “The Blindness of the Heart” by Julia Franck