The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood

Dr. Mahlendorf's is a remarkable coming-of-age story that give an insider's view of an episode in recent history that we all think we know something about. However we do not, most of us, know what it was like to be on the inside of that episode. This story shows us how participation in Nazi politics could be natural and inevitable - a part of organic being in the culture. How does it happen that an intelligent, sensitive, young person becomes a local Hitler Youth leader? In this book you see how it happens, what Hannah Arendt referred to as "the Banality of Evil." You will also see how, from a position of full immersion in the historically inevitable, a single personality emerges and moves in her own direction, somehow an individual after all, taking a new and honest path without precedent in her experience.

Ursula Mahlendorf spent a lifetime unpacking the Nazi slogan, "You are nothing, your people are everything," trying to uncover who she was and who she had been. The result of her willingness to look back is an important contribution to memoir literature. She reveals the story of a German youngster who happily hiked with Hitler youth groups and dutifully collected winter clothing for German soldiers. Indeed, when her father died in 1933, she writes that Hitler became a father-substitute for her. By placing her personal experiences growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in a political-historical context, her memoir has great value for students of social history as well as memoir literature. Young Mahlendorf herself was at the time unaware of many of the historical events because of her youth, social controls, survival concerns, and/or location in a small town in rural Silesia (now Poland). Despite increasing demands (physical labor, illness, expanding war, growing deprivation, loss, resettlement to West Germany, lack of food, cultural prejudice favoring sons and brothers), young Ursula held on to her goal of getting a university education. She organized books and tutors to fuel her dream as vigorously as she organized kindling and cabbage to sustain life. While she loved her family and enjoyed a sense of belonging, she read anything she could get her hands on and began to bury her emotions, her fury, anger at adults, resentment, regret, distrust, shame, grief, and loss under a shell of "numbness and toughness" (233). On rare occasions, she permitted herself to be moved by poetry, nature, and music. She received her PhD in German Literature in 1958 from Brown University and remains in the U.S. In the following decades Mahlendorf gradually worked though those buried emotions to produce a compelling story that is well-written, many-sided, thoughtful and honest. As a former grad student of Dr. Mahlendorf's, I am grateful that through her memoir we get to know this remarkable woman better and, more importantly, that we have a new perspective on the personal experience of Germans who grew up during the Nazi period.

Ms. Mahlendorf has given us a brutally honest story of a survivor. Although it reads like a historical novel, it is a true account of her young life as a German in Silesia during the years before, during, and after WWII. Her insights into her own behavior and feelings during those years are remarkable as are her vivid memories which detail the life she lived, the horrors and atrocities she witnessed, and the cultural, political, and economic conditions in Germany during those pre and postwar years. Her honesty and introspection about the permanent psychological consequences of an early life focused on survival is commendable. She helps us to understand a little better what happened and how Germans let it happen.

This book was impossible for me to put down. It was a compelling, beautifully written, and gut-wrenchingly honest, heart-pounding memoir. Reading it, one can't help putting him/her self into the scene and wondering what they would have done and felt had it been them born into and growing up in Nazi Germany. Growing up in America and being raised Jewish during the `40's I had bought totally into the notion that there was a uniqueness about the psyche and collective consciousness of Germans that made allegiance to Hitler if not inevitable, almost irresistable. ("They are militaristic, easily led, don't question authority, etc., etc."). While reading Dr. Mahlendorf's memoir and reflecting on our own very recent history, I realized that the ability to be seduced by a charismatic, articulate, demagogue with a messianic complex is not unique to any one people. That insight was, for me, a valuable albeit frightening revelation. Should be recommended if not required reading for high school and college students.

Mahlendorf's autobiography/memoir is among the three or four accounts written by former Hitler Youths. It is a rare and authentic insight into the daily life of Nazi Germany as experienced by a young girl until she is 16 years of age. The many years that passed since 1945 enables the author to deepen the personal narrative in the political and historical context. Experiencing the time with the author, the reader, knowledgeable about the period, also learns shockingly new things. For instance, what happened at the end of the war to the babies and their mothers designated to be Nazi "breeders." Exceptionally well written, the author connects the problematics of family deprivations with her historical entanglement in the Federation of German Girls. Against great odds, the author is able to transcend and yet remain always caught up in her past.There are few accounts like this one! Superb! There is no shame in this survival!