DER SPIEGEL:
You were thirteen years old that summer of 1945, a year older than the "Thousand Year Reich."
Your hometown Halberstadt was in ruins, and times played Kobolz, as you once wrote.
Much got mixed up.
June 1, 1945 burned itself into you.
You came home from pulling weeds in the beet field on a cold, rainy day, and your mother was standing there, completely unexpected ...
Kluge:
Stand in the door and give me a hug. I remember a young woman standing in front of me in the clothes of that time, in pre-war fashion, re-tailored umpteen times. My parents had been divorced since 1942. For my sister and me, this divorce is more striking and devastating than the fact that our parents' house burned down in the April 8 bombing. It wasn't as bad as the breakup of this marriage.
We students were loaded onto trucks and taken out of town so that we wouldn't make nonsense. On a manor near the village of Emersleben, we cleared the beet fields from weeds under the supervision of our Latin and mathematics teacher. It was cold in May, the six days of "Cold Sophie" came with hard winds blowing down from the Harz Mountains. So I come home completely frozen and see the dearest person who has come from Berlin.
You didn't hear from each other. The telecommunications networks, Telegram and Telephone, do not work. With one exception: some of the city administration's telephones could be used for a "quick guide" talk via a line from the former Halberstadt airfield. A leftover connection of the German Reich that the Allies had not broken. That was a plug that went from Halberstadt via Magdeburg and Potsdam to Berlin. Of course, "Führer flash talk" did not mean that Hitler was on the phone, but that senior officers were once able to hold important conversations with one another in his name: "Please send a box of champagne ..."
We once had a contact through such a "Führer flash talk", a sign of life, as they said: She is alive.
We didn't know more about her.
My mother stayed a week and then started the return journey with a lot of hamstered goods.
DER SPIEGEL:
You yourself were hoarders and, like little foxes, were out and about in the ruins of Halberstadt.
Once, near the Junkers factory, in the forest, they found planes that were still ready to fly, the leather seats of which could be dismantled.
In the basement of a department store you discovered unfilled coffee from the pre-war era.
Kluge:
Which earned me an appreciative look from my father.
He raised his finger and said, Commendation.
That was the highest honor, the knight's cross.
There was finally a positive moral rating for stealing and looting.
DER SPIEGEL:
Which, however, did not determine your career choice decisively.
Wise:
No, but the whole city was seized with a new, very contagious drive to own property. The firestorm after the bombing had destroyed or mixed up all property structures. The adults thought: where can you organize something? Organizing meant: scouting out and taking it in. Or: find and repair. We children settled down in the cellars of the burned down houses. I had discovered, shall we say, a box of cigar stumps from the airport canteen and appropriated it. Also a box of German sparkling wine. The boxes were among the supplies that the Luftwaffe intendant had stored for himself in order to use them in the post-war period. He did not live to see the post-war period. I used the material to exchange it for barbed wire fence, a huge mistake, as it turned out.Because then other booty makers thought: If the ruin and garden, i.e. the place in which I had set up myself, are fenced in, then there will be something to be fetched. A "found" collection of stamps was expropriated from me. With my friend Fritz I had accumulated 80 sets of Christmas tree decorations and 40 people-do-not-annoy you games from one of the Wehrmacht hospitals. The tokens were then my troops. With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.in which I had set up, are so fenced in, then there will be something to be fetched. A "found" collection of stamps was expropriated from me. With my friend Fritz I had accumulated 80 sets of Christmas tree decorations and 40 people-do-not-annoy you games from one of the Wehrmacht hospitals. The tokens were then my troops. With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.in which I had set up, are so fenced in, then there will be something to be fetched. A "found" collection of stamps was expropriated from me. With my friend Fritz I had accumulated 80 sets of Christmas tree decorations and 40 people-do-not-annoy you games from one of the Wehrmacht hospitals. The tokens were then my troops. With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.A "found" collection of stamps was expropriated from me. With my friend Fritz I had accumulated 80 sets of Christmas tree decorations and 40 people-do-not-annoy you games from one of the Wehrmacht hospitals. The tokens were then my troops. With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.A "found" collection of stamps was expropriated from me. With my friend Fritz I had accumulated 80 sets of Christmas tree decorations and 40 people-do-not-annoy you games from one of the Wehrmacht hospitals. The tokens were then my troops. With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.With them I later won the Second World War in the basement. Once a detachment of German prisoners of war cleared the street in front of my cellar, guarded by a British man. I asked him down in my schoolchildren's English and showed him my battlefield: Here is the Caucasus, there is the Eastern Front, etc. ... He found that - strange, I would like to say.
DER SPIEGEL:
So you were sitting in the basement of a destroyed house and replaying the past and continuing it?
Kluge: In
1940 we saw the columns moving from the west, from France to the east.
How the soldiers were entertained from the houses.
That makes an impression on children, there was pride.
Armored cars are the successors to the cavalry.
In our basement we had lead letters from a printing press, which looked like ships with color and a bit of imagination; you could name the letters as airplanes or as people.
We, friends and classmates and I, already played that during the war, especially if you had read Latin in school and had just read Caesar's Bellum Gallicum.
That didn't mean you were a militarist or a National Socialist.
Walter Benjamin also played with tin soldiers.
DER SPIEGEL:
As a 13-year-old, weren't you afraid of what might come next?
Wise:
First of all, a young person thinks that the world is good to him. And then suddenly there is a bombing raid. From one minute to the next you have extremely contradicting feelings. Of course you are afraid if a bomb crashes into the house next door about ten meters away from you. It had been heard that the air pressure from the bomb tore the lungs apart. So I tried to exhale, hold my breath, not even let in the expected air pressure. Just before the bombs fall, the electric utility stops working and all the lights go out. I fall off the bench on which we are sitting in the air raid shelter, over my father's legs, a person of great respect. I don't get that close to him otherwise. And at the same time I think: the piano lesson at 2 p.m. will be canceled. Nothing, neither the fear nor thatwhat goes through the head fits together. When I later heard that there would be no school the next day, I was very disappointed. I had hoped to be able to tell about the air raid during the school break.
DER SPIEGEL:
It was an adventure, an experience, finally something special ...
Kluge:
... and at the same time we were terrified.
I took my sister by the hand and we fled to the bathing establishment to have water between us and the burning city.
This is not a deliberation, but an intuitive, belly fear.
Nobody reacts consciously to such a catastrophe.
DER SPIEGEL:
But that experience in the basement didn't mean that, like many others, you later had panic attacks when you went to the cinema?
Wise:
I always study carefully where the emergency exits are. I don't lose this instinct - and we forget anyway. You believe that you will be saved, that the Father will also be saved, and at the same time you are afraid and expect your lungs to tear. These experiences accompany you as a basic feeling for a lifetime. It was not until my father died in 1979 that I began to describe the "air raid on Halberstadt" in literary terms. We had taken care of our father for a long time before. It was only during this time that I began to understand what it means that virtually an entire flying industry is raiding a city up in the sky. You can't even surrender down in the cellars. In our time it is fighter pilots in the eastern skies of Aleppo or Idlib who bring calamity over a city,silver arrows in the colorful oriental sky of Syria, which Homer already described. For me it is just as present as April 8, 1945.
DER SPIEGEL:
How does Halberstadt smell after the bombing?
Kluge:
The city stinks.
It has a very specific smell of fire and also of corpses.
After the third day, the odor of corpses prevailed.
We not only smell with our noses, but also with our imagination.
Even after the wind has blown the smell away, you can still smell it.
DER SPIEGEL:
What did the city look like in the summer of 1945?
Enlarge image
Cleaning up after the war: "Above all, women work"
Photo: Fred Ramage / Getty Images
Wise:
Gradually the rubble will be cleared. This ruined area is slowly being covered by paths. The paths follow the old road network that is no longer there. At first you don't dare to take shortcuts. German soldiers prisoners of war work in the rubble. Most of all, women work. They clean the streets and stack squares of plastered bricks. Nazi teachers, party officials and post office workers are also being recruited to clear the streets with shovels and spades. It is only at my age, when you let this time pass you by, that you come across the stories from back then. The story of a woman whose husband is now returning is quite early because the Americans released their prisoners very quickly. The men proudly moved out in 1939, now they come back without any self-confidence and have nothing to tell.You can no longer even sleep in a soft bed, lie on the floor for the first few weeks to fall asleep. That woman first had to "fix" her husband on their return, morally clean, just as she cleaned bricks. That took half a year. A year later there was a child. But until then this rubble woman had a lot of work with the brick man.
DER SPIEGEL:
You are interpreting a thought by Michel de Montaigne, who sees the surrender of arms rather than the common oblivion as a condition for lasting peace. Only the generosity of the victor who accepts the opponent into a new reality could continue a surrender to something like peace.
Kluge: It
makes a great impression on me how this "republic of the summer of 1945" is ruled by women and their daughters and sons who help and support them. This is a completely different one, an anarchic natural economy, into which the potentates, the men, are only slowly seeping in again. In summer I see zero when I visit my friends and classmates, locked workrooms in which the fathers who have returned crouch and brood. As a doctor, my father is not affected. As a doctor, he was needed again the day after the bombing raids. He moves into the apartment of the district leader who has fled and opens his practice there. My father's world of ideas began anyway with Frederick the Great and Napoleon, he was always to the right of the National Socialists.
DER SPIEGEL:
How can you imagine this anarchic natural economy in the Harz Mountains?
Kluge:
In June, what would later have been called a western miracle breaks out in our country, a harbinger of the economic miracle.
Anyone who had anything to do with the supply and distribution system during the war now brought their camps into circulation.
The Funger glove factory, the Kraux scrap company, the Hausbrandt clothing factory - they all had secret stocks back in the war for the time after the war, when the stuff would have value again.
It is an experience as if a garden were in bloom: the founding moment of a free economy, and that was very much encouraged by the Americans.
The good climate changed when the Russians entered Halberstadt in July.
DER SPIEGEL:
Do you remember any released prisoners?
Kluge:
In the mountains south of Halberstadt there was the Langenstein-Zwieberge subcamp.
This was not only a camp for Jews, but also for homosexuals and other persecuted groups.
We had already seen prisoners during the war.
In the Dohmeyer nursery there were so-called foreign workers, French, highly experienced horticultural technicians. They could fix anything. In the "Third Reich" they were important persons in the war and were not treated like prisoners. Now after the war they were courted people. If you want something, like legumes, for example, you go there to trade. For a brief period of time there was fear that they might take revenge for having been forcibly abducted and for having reason to be violent. There were no police to protect us, only auxiliary policemen with white armbands. Not very off-putting.
Something similar is reported from the Volkswagen factory. The gem of the industrial policy of the "Third Reich" was not shown on the Allied maps. The advance troops of the Americans drove carelessly past the industrial plants further north on the northern Harz. VW board members were almost offended that they were being ignored. They feared that the vast majority of foreign workers would take power in the plant. The bosses might then be executed there. So they sent messengers to the American troops and asked to be occupied. So they first had to do adult education with the American front troops: This is where the industry is located, please take it, so that we are protected.
DER SPIEGEL:
But surely liberated concentration camp prisoners must also have come through the Harz Mountains, from Buchenwald, for example?
Enlarge image
So-called displaced persons cross the Elbe bridge near Tangermünde on May 1, 1945
Photo: Fred Ramage / Getty Images
Wise:
No, I didn't see them. They would not have come through Halberstadt either. Buchenwald is in Thuringia, and liberated prisoners will have turned to the west. The Langenstein camp near Halberstadt was evacuated on April 9 on the orders of the SS. A murderous march of the prisoners to Franconia. I later made a film about such a march. Few prisoners were left after the air strike. The narrative of these displaced persons in the summer of 1945 must be told. These are elementary fates, like Homer's. Fates other than those of which Homer reports terribly enough after the fall of Troy. This applies to many places in Germany. There is an American lieutenant assigned to collect children from people from the concentration camps. The children are brought to London by plane.Each one has a tag around its neck that shows its identity. They are undressed and bathed in a large hotel in London, these signs have been removed from them and after the bath they do not know which child belongs to which parents. In contrast, what is a story in Homer? That parents may get back a child after the liberation, who they don't know for sure if it is theirs. These fates must be told. On the other side of the world I see Jawaharlal Nehru, who is sitting in a boarding house near San Francisco right now. As the leader of free India, he cannot afford an expensive hotel. Around him a cordon of British secret service officers and another ring of CIA agents who watch out that the British don't attack the Indian.In the early autumn of 1945, India joined the UN. The British have to accept that so that they retain their veto in the Security Council. That is also part of this summer. It is difficult to retell "odd simultaneities" because one thing is related to everything else in the world. Just like the German submarine 219, which is parked in Batavia, today's Jakarta, with its cargo of mercury and duralumin bars, and a team that was still allowed to play master race in the Javanese forced brothels.today's Jakarta, with its load of mercury and duralumin bars, and a team that was still allowed to play master race in the Javanese forced brothels.today's Jakarta, with its load of mercury and duralumin bars, and a team that was still allowed to play master race in the Javanese forced brothels.
DER SPIEGEL:
In your book »30. April 1945 «also from the German School in Kabul. Long after the end of the war there was an intention to perform the Nazi play "Schlageter". Do you know whether this performance actually took place?
Kluge:
I don't know for sure, but I think it's very safe.
Neutral Afghanistan weighed Germany up to the end.
It is no coincidence that Grand Admiral Dönitz's testamentary appointment as head of state of the German Reich was recognized by the Foreign Ministry in Kabul in May, by no other government in the world.
The German side is looked after by the Swiss embassy in Afghanistan.
The British have great need to enforce Germany's surrender as a fact among the stubborn Afghans.
The surrender had hardly any consequences for the German School in Kabul for a year and a half.
DER SPIEGEL:
The times will continue to run side by side for a while.
There is an inertia in the story (s) and sometimes the strands get tangled.
Kluge:
Also in people. I remember my father coming out of the basement after the bombing. He gets a case of cigars, his life insurance certificate and a suit. Relatively worthless stuff. He forgets the precious Gothic Madonna. He carries all of this through his winter garden at risk to his life, where the shards of the glass roof fall down from above, and puts the things in a pond that has run dry. Then he takes a bottle of cognac, goes to a patient and gets drunk. We are happy to find him the next morning. He wasn't quite there. And I maintain that it is generally the case. Such a "collapse of reality" confuses the senses. That's not what we're built for. Half a year later we can continue with the routine.
DER SPIEGEL:
You cough, should we take a break?
Kluge:
You know, I get upset when I tell you that.
I try to immerse myself in it.
It's always pictures.
And even as a literary author who is experienced in dealing with narratives, it is not that easy to put the images into context.
The British left at the beginning of July. We notice that when my friend Wolfgang Meyer, the son of the district doctor, "settled" in the West, to Goslar. "Deal" is the word for escape. The clothing company Hausbrandt is already in Vienenburg. So first of all we get news of who has already fled. Then the British occupying power disappears. Nothing happens for half a day. And then around noon, the Russians come from Braunschweiger Strasse with loud singing. Not like the Americans, where everyone had a vehicle. The British also had limited vehicles. And now the Russians come, one in front with a horse, then a large number of these simple panje wagons with horses in front of them and behind them a marching column. They sing beautiful, somewhat rough Russian songs.They will not then occupy the villas in which the Americans had quartered, no, they took a block of flats and painted it pink on the same day. The soldiers were barracked there because otherwise their superiors would not have had any supervision over them. This is Russian settlement method.
The next morning my father's waiting room was full of Russians. They had venereal diseases. Such a contagion was severely punished if the soldier had to report it. So they come to the doctor and want Western goods, pseudomedicines from the Wehrmacht. Penicillin doesn't exist yet. And they pay with occupation money. Bills worth over a thousand Reichsmarks, they don't want change out.
The Halberstadt commandant lives in an apartment across from my father's practice. He is a dark-eyed, black-haired young major from the Caucasus. My father called him the "Circassian", which he had read about in Pushkin. And the commandant's wife is having a child, it is breeched. So it has to be rotated in the womb. My father is called. If he does something wrong, it can have repercussions for him as a doctor and obstetrician. He did it with the so-called Bracht handle. Then there was food and binge drinking. We children are standing in the stairwell. From time to time my father brings something from the bowls into the hallway and we carry it home. The next morning at six in the morning, patients come and say: The doctor is down in the front yard. We find him asleep, stripped down to his underwear.The clothes carefully laid out around him. We had to cancel the consultation hour. It's all a mixture of pretty anarchic and pretty dangerous from a Western point of view. For example, you couldn't miss curfew. It was inadvisable to be hit by a drunk post.
DER SPIEGEL:
In spite of all your adventures, it was clear to you as a youngster that there are limits that make things dangerous?
Kluge:
There are limits where it is absolutely dangerous.
And the fact that I just had to cough is because it still arouses me afterwards.
DER SPIEGEL:
On August 6 and 9, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How did you find out about it?
Wise:
You have an intact radio, four of them, each directed by a different occupying power. You can hear everything there. They also have a daily paper. The entire Potsdam conference is accompanied by the most detailed reports. So there is already a public. Then you have the rumors. So you get told three times, on the radio, in the newspaper and from people's stories, and all pretty much at the same time. I don't know for sure whether we imagined something very specific under the atomic bomb. But it was something absolutely scary. And at the same time it had to do with what we imagined Oceania to be. We didn't imagine Hiroshima, but the Pacific and palm islands. Still it was a weapon that could change the weather, the atmosphere, like a storm,in which one burns.
We felt that very strongly, as a terrible threat.
It was the time when we were preparing for school again and the contact between us students was closer again.
There is no longer beet warping in early autumn.
We said to ourselves: If that had come down on us, if this weapon had been dropped in the Lüneburg Heath, we would have been caught up in it.
That was excessively scary to us.
And that makes me hard to think about and made me say that we can't deal with wars, not even with just wars.
That is the surrender experience.
The experience of sabotaging wars.
This is what storytelling is for.