2021
Germany: Reconciling with the Past r i c h a r d p. h o w e , j r .
H
ave you heard of the concept of a “second country?” I heard this recently: The country in which we live is our first country, but we usually feel a connection to a second place. It could be the country that we or our ancestors came from. Maybe it’s a place we have visited. Or it could just be a place we read about or saw in a movie. My second country is Germany. On November 15, 1980, I landed at Frankfurt’s RheinMain Airport and spent the next three years living there while serving in the U.S. Army. I lived in two major cities, first Stuttgart, then Nurnberg, and traveled throughout. Most of the time I was with other Americans but I spent enough time “on the economy” to develop a feel for the place unlike the experience of a typical vacation trip. Germany is also where I met my wife, Roxane, who was stationed there as well. We’ve gone back twice: in 2007, joined by our son Andrew, we returned to the places where we had been stationed and re-visited other places that had left a positive impression on us. In 2013, Roxane and I spent a week in Berlin, a place that would have been exceedingly difficult for us to visit during the Cold War of the early 1980s. I hope there are more visits to Germany in our future. One of the most interesting aspects of going back was to see how things had changed in the twenty-five years since we had lived there. Merrell Barracks, the base I was assigned to in Nurnberg, had become the German government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. And Flak Kaserne in Ludwigsburg, Roxane’s home for three years, was abandoned, padlocked and overgrown with weeds. Perhaps the biggest and most substantial change I noted was the attitude of Germans towards their involvement in World War II. In 1980, no one really spoke about it, except for sixty-plus-year-old men after several liters of Lowenbrau at the local beer fest. And while the concept of “political correctness” had yet to be acknowledged, what they muttered was off the charts by that measure. A few places, like the former German Army barracks at which I worked, still had walls pockmarked by American .50 cal. rounds from 1944. In Nurnberg, the great marble reviewing stand at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds was intact and in good repair except for the swastika that had been dynamited off the roof by American Army combat engineers after the city’s capture. Then there was Dachau, the concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. When I visited it in 1982, the remains of the camp were still there. Some of the original buildings stood although you could only view them from the outside. There may have been a few signs but no detailed labels telling you what you were looking at. There was
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The Lowell Review
