Their History has become our present tense. 1930s fascism is not so different from ours

The early life of Elfriede Giselle Edelmann born this day-1928 Hamburg Germany

Oct 20, 2022

The start of my mother's life could have been the inspiration for the lyrics of a Kurt Weil song that was sung in a seedy 1930s Berlin cabaret filled with communists, spivs, and national socialists. She was the bastard child of a working-class gadfly who couldn’t decide if his ideology was womanising or socialism. Her mother was a manager for a hotel known for its cheap rooms, affordable grub, and prostitutes free of venereal disease in Hamburg's Reeperbahn district. My mum was born on October 20, 1928, and while she suckled her mother’s breast, democracy was dying in Germany.

It wasn’t a good year to be born working class in Germany because its ordinary citizens were paying a heavy price in reparations to the allies for being the loser in the first Great War ten years previous. But it was the best year; my mum would see in Germany until after the Second World War, as each year that followed 1928 was more unsettling than the next. 1929 was when Wall Street crashed. 1930, millions of Germans were out of work and on the breadline. 1931 the banking crisis and recession caused Germany to plunge like an elevator shorn of its cables into a Great Depression. 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in Germany's Reichstag. 1933, Hitler became Chancellor, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Had it not been for Germany's total economic collapse, my grandmother could have made it as a single mother managing a dingy motel for sailors and shady businessmen. But the economic and political instability of the times necessitated my grandmother become the mistress of a man who could provide both physical and monetary safety during an era of extremism. As my mother said in later life about my grandmother’s lover/provider. “He wasn’t the best sort, but there could have been worst.”

Uncle Henry, as he was known to my mother, was an overweight opportunistic importer of tobacco products. On weekdays, Henry deserted his wife and lived with my grandmother in an apartment he rented for her- located in a leafy suburb of Hamburg near its airport. On weekends he returned to his wife and five children, who lived in a small town north of the city.

To Henry, this division of affection and time was a perfect arrangement except for one inconvenience; my mother. It’s not that he disliked my mum, just her presence in his life. “I was a talkative inquisitive child wrapped around my mother’s apron strings. I disturbed his lovemaking to my mother and his business scheming.”

Henry was good at schemes because he had convinced an importer of games, who also happened to be a communist to sell a controlling interest in his company to him as protection against the Nazis. That same cunning had Henry arrange for my mother to become a foster child to a working-class family in the Altona district who was a bit short of cash.

It was there as a four-year-old, my mother witnessed in 1932 Bloody Sunday. That was when Nazi Storm troopers shot dead communists in her neighbourhood during a street battle that lasted many hours. My mother witnessed, unarmed men being killed by Hitler’s fascists, and then the adults around her drew the window curtains closed to pretend the violence around them was not happening.

I suppose because the adults in her life during the 1930s and 40s were so silent about evil happening- all around them, it made my mother extra vigilant in making me know about it while I was growing up as a boy. In my youth, she told me a lot about her past in Germany, not everything- but enough for me to find her unique and different from all the other mothers in our suburban Toronto surroundings. My mother also told me these stories of her early life in a totalitarian state because she wanted to make sense of how she ended up in Canada, married to my father. From these stories, I learned; what she knew life had mapped out a multitude of destinies for her, other than the one she lived.

The Nazis, however, cast the greatest shadow over her destiny as they did to everyone from her generation.

Evil was being done in Germany during my mum’s childhood for all to see. But people normalised it, rationalised it and said to themselves. “This is the price for stability. This is the price for economic growth and employment. This is the price we must pay.”

Now, as my mum grew into a teenager, she didn’t dissent like Sophie Scholl because that takes extraordinary courage. However, she tried as best not to conform to the norms by listening to foreign broadcasts for news or jazz. She was a problem teenager, even for her foster parents, who couldn’t handle her ”Hedda Gabbler” outbursts or her “dramatic” suicide attempt.

My grandmother’s lover had my mum exiled to work on a farm for the war effort, but the farmer sexually assaulted her when my mother was thirteen. After the rape, my mother was chucked out for insubordination and indentured to a Nazi family in Cologne. But a dropped bomb from an air raid quickly ended her tenure there as it caused third-degree burns on her back that required a stay in hospital. It was in that hospital my mum fully grasped the true horror of the war being fought all around her because her roommate was a 5-year-old boy whose legs were crushed when he was buried in the rubble of his apartment after another air raid. He called her Liebchen, befriended her, joked with her, and then died painfully from gangrene.

I was twenty and too wet behind the ears when my mum told me this story about her experiences in a hospital during wartime. When she was alive, I was more concerned with making sense of who I was to comprehend how complex and hurting my mother was as an individual. I carefully listened to all of her stories when she was alive. I stored them away until I was mature enough to investigate them free of a son's egoistic relationship with his mother. There was an enigmatic element to my mum that I never scaled until she died and could no longer tell me her stories. I am still unravelling her and me, like Ariadne's thread looking for the exit from the minotaur's cave of my family's diverse and painful working-class histories. But the one constant I am sure of in my mum’s personality was trying to find joy in living during times of evil and tumultuous events whilst doing it to the sound of your drumbeat.

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