Excerpt: Frau Karma Rauhut, Berlin
"In the German ideal of upbringing, whatever was creative was killed. If it danced out of line and did something that did not reflect the authoritarian father or mother, it got thrashed." Furthermore, "In Germany, when a child of nine months still wets its pants, it is a catastrophe. And mothers among themselves were proud [if they could say] 'Ja, my child is already clean.' That was such a tradition. One should not undervalue these small things. These little mosaic stones, I find, were already there and really paved the way for something like Hitler. I must honestly tell you, I was not raised that way."
That is putting it mildly. Frau Karma Rauut, almost the youngest woman in these pages, was born in 1925 in the village of Glienicke Nordbahn, just outside the northern rim of Berlin, to very young and, as she described them, rather Peter Pan-like parents. She pictured her mother as a young woman who mostly enjoyed herself by reading or partaking in Berlin's spirited cultural life. Karma's father was a banker (his "rank" was bank director) who "played at the bank" and speculated at the stock exchange. Neither parent was interested in child-rearing, so for that they hired teenage farm girls, who were not interested, either.
Karma and her one year older sister grew up "drilled in freedom." It was not good training for the Third Reich around the corner.
The friction within a free spirit within the Third Reich was intriguing (as was any German who had been named Karma), but I must admit to resistance about talking with her. Her youth, to my mind, removed her from the weight of the moral choices the Third Reich both offered and demanded. But Frau Karma Rauhut had a stellar recommendation: Asta von Moltke Henssel, sister of the resistance hero Helmuth von Moltke, described her younger friend from painting class as "urehrlich" -- honest to the core. Still, it was with hesitation that I rang Frau Rauhut's doorbell in the pleasant Charlottenburg section of Berlin one afternoon. By the time the afternoon was over, I knew I would return, and that moral choices are the provenance of children, too.
An unquestionably youthful-looking Third Reich witness opened the door. She had a smooth and casually sophisticated appearance -- silver grey pageboy, black stretch pants, espadrilles. Her home was atypically modern for Germans, or Germans in their sixties, with abstract paintings (not by her), black leather furniture, glass coffee table, an art deco teapot. She looked and lived smooth, one might say, but she did not talk nor act smooth. She indeed had a certain aura of frankness about her, both in her vocabulary and the way she seemed to think and re-think out loud, her words rushing through cigarette smoke and coffee. She seemed to be partly consumed by the Third Reich, and why not? It stole her childhood, and in a way, her parents.
Karma's early years had not lacked shadows. In 1929, after the stock market crash, her father lost his job and all hismoney. Unlike his colleagues, however, he had no debts. He happened to have been hospitalized for an internal problem in the months before the crash, and had not been speculating. Having flown, Peter Pan-like, over much of the financial disaster, he did try to work for a while as a carpenter, a phase his daughter recalled with wonder bordering on bemusement. "He was a complete," I would say, "un-craftsmanlike human being."
Her own family's economic circumstances affected her less than did encounters with the more dire circumstances other Berliners were facing. "I can remember as a child, that while traveling on the streetcar, people on the platform fell over from hunger." She saw "people everywhere on the streets offering themselves for any work. Like experienced salesmen stood on the Kurfuerstendamm or Unter den Linden, carrying cardboard signs saying who they were and that they desperately needed work."
Also, a friend of her father's took it upon himself to show her and her sister more, "because we were such protected city girls." He owned a small factory in a "workers'" section of eastern Berlin and took them to see the workers' wretched homes. She recalled being aghast at the sight of tiny buildings in rows one behind the other, each darker than the one in front, "without any comforts, only toilets in the yards or maybe in the stairwell." Worse were the homes themselves -- "one room with a kitchen, and dark and dirty." And crowded. To earn some money, women with "an insane number of children" rented out one of their own beds for a number of hours a day to "sleep guys" -- men who may have found some work somewhere, but could not afford to rent a whole room. While the "sleep guys" slept, the children lay in their parents' bed or on the floor. The tour met its purpose. "We were so shaken."
Just before the Nazi takeover of Germany, Karma's own family had a break. Her father got another bank director job, at a private bank.
Just after the Nazi takeover, his many Jewish colleagues and friends began trying to leave Germany. She said he often helped them quickly sell their possessions to get money to leave, and probably did not realize how illegal his actions were. In one of her many descriptions of him, she said, "He was a very soft human being and also very cautious."
By the following year, Karma's life had changed completely. The memory of a nine year old: "I can recall as a child someone coming to us asking for help and money. It's a little vague. I was young. It must have been 1934. It was a completely harmless man. He had a daughter who was a chambermaid in one of the big hotels. And the SS believed she had enabled this writer, Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, to get certain papers so that he could flee the country. And the daughter somehow had also disappeared. I don't know if she went with this man. In any event, they [took] the poor father into the SS barracks, there was a big Gestapo headquarters, and then they interrogated the man and smashed his glasses, smashed out all his teeth, and blue and... And this man, they didn't get anything out of him. Then they let him go. And he came, because he heard about us, there you'll get help, to my father. And wanted money because he had none at all." The man especially needed to buy new glasses. "I saw this man. And we as children somehow figured it out. It was whispered, of course. And children, as much as possible, should know nothing at all, because that was too dangerous." I asked if her father gave him money. "Ja, of course. Certainly."
It is perhaps not surprising that as the years passed and the Third Reich intensified its presence, Karma followed her parents' earlier example, and sprouted her own wings. "I must tell you completely honestly, I went through this time as in a dream. The way of living did not suit me and I knew my parents were also completely opposed to it and friends, too, our whole circle of friends. And during the whole time I fled into a dream world. For me, America was simply "the" land of freedom. Up until America entered the war, we still could see American films, ja, Hollywood drivel. We went to every American film there was anywhere. We didn't go to school and went to any matinee to watch every American film, no matter how bad. And collected pictures of the American actors there were then and they hung in our rooms." Robert Taylor and Clark Gable decorated her bedroom wall. Also, "there were stores here where, if they knew you, you could get jazz records in the back room. And those of course
were the things to have. That was just what you did."
What you did not do, she said with impatient scorn, was emulate the Nazis' version of beauty, sex, or culture. "Women under Hitler, that was something completely dreadful. A German woman does not wear make-up, she may not smoke, she should have a thousand children and... Ach, that still brings a chill to my spine. A little like the Greens, but in many ways more oppressing." She called the Nazis' output "pseudo-culture." And everything having "a tone of physical desire," she said with increasing anger, was called "Jewish piggishness. It had nothing at all to do with Jews. It was just passed off as that in the ideology. It was dreadful." She said German romance films showed no more than a kiss. "Later, during the war, things got a little looser, so that people thought about something other than just always listening to bombs. Perhaps from far away a bed could be seen, but there were no naked women and naked men. ...It was so prudish, hypocritical. What the Nazi bosses did inbed, I don't know." She added, "Sex was only to give the Fuehrer children. And when you consider these insane punishments, having to do with abortion or birth control and so on. They migrated into a K-Z for that. It was impossible." She paused. "Those are all such things that seize your life. One cannot convey it to [younger people] today. They say, you are insane."
To escape the Nazi life, she also flew to her attic with a girlfriend, and read the forbidden books her parents had dutifully "cleansed" from their collection, if not, as ordered,from their home. The books would have been too boring for her and her friend otherwise, she said, but "it was clear, if they were forbidden, they were very interesting."
