In My Father’s Country, subtitled “The Story of a German Family”, Wibke Bruhns takes us through German history from the start of the 20th century to the Second World War, as it affected her family. She begins with her grandparents and ends just after the trial and execution of her father, “HG” Klamroth for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
The family were wealthy, owning several businesses and being heavily involved in international trade. They were steeped in German nationalism, being conservative in the extreme and highly respectful of the military and its leaders. Wibke Bruhns writes that her father HG, had to absorb “three cheers for Kaiser and Fatherland with his mother’s milk”.
HG serves in the army from 1917 and is injured in the shoulder, soon returning to fight in the Baltic nations and eventually journeying up to Kiev and the Ukraine. He experiences and event that causes him mental pain adn guilt for most of his life, when he shoots (in self-defence) a drunk soldier. The defeat of the First World War hits the family hard and like so many Germans they raged at the “stab in the back” delivered by the centre left parties who suddenly requested an armistice (largely to prevent the war coming into the German nation).
HG returns to civilian life and eventually become a partner in the family business, marrying the beautiful and vivacious Else along the way, a bride from a wealthy and liberal Danish family. The marriage is fruitful in terms of children, but HG has a desire for other women which brings grief to Else and eventually makes the marriage a hollow sham, held together only by the over-riding demands of sheer survival during the years of the Second World War.
When war is declared, HG returns to service, eventually joining the SS. He occupies many roles in the service, travelling to occupied Denmark; a very difficult thing for him in view of his family connections. Wibke is at pains to chart the ideological course of his life through the numerous letters and journal entries HG wrote during that time, revealing a deep love of country, and a total blindness towards the cruelty and devastation wrought by the Nazis on other peoples.
Eventually, HG is implicated in the assassination plot, and it is interesting to note that those involved were not necessarily heroically acting to defend the Jews and to bring an end to the subjugation of mass slavery, but more to avoid the total devastation to Germany which would accompany a final defeat by the Allies. It is in one sense sad to read about the final destruction of this “honourable” family, but the reader is always aware of the attitudes it embodied which are so very abhorrent to us today.
Wibke Bruhns has access to a vast array of family papers and it is these which give the book its deep insights into the mentality of these upper-class Germans. It is only remarkable to note how these attitudes were largely eradicted in the aftermath of the war. It is almost inconceivable that a member of any modern European nation (including Germany) would write such high-flown prose extolling love of nation and an intense patriotism, so blind to its dangers and potential evils.
This is no ordinary family biography, and is in many ways a polemic against the culture of the time, being scattered throughout with interjections from the author. For example, when her father joins the SS, Wibke Bruhns interjects, “Didn’t he know he was joining a gang of murderers?”. During the book burnings of 1933, which goes unremarked in HG’s copious diary, Wibke explodes, “Don’t they care?” When her mother expresses love for the Fuhrer, Wibke exlaims, “Oh Else!”. It is as though through reliving the lives of her parents Wibke is in conversation with them, a silent observer, writing a sometimes outraged, sometimes sarcastic commentary on everything they do.
I can well understand why Wibke Bruhns wrote this book, and her outrage at her forefathers must be a difficult thing to bear, when every family photograph album and item of correspondence provides the backdrop to such terrible times. It sits well with two similar books, The Himmler Brothers by Karin Himmler, and On Hitler’s Mountain by Irmgard Hunt as an account of how apparently ordinary people could be swept up by Hitler into war crimes of such immensity that it is painful to read of them.
