Musings

In class today we watched a movie, and one of the scenes will not let me rest.  I found it surreal and fascinating, eerie and captivating to see, in however watered-down form, the bombing of Berlin during an Allied air-raid.  It is little moments like that which capture my imagination and gnaw at my conscience, perhaps because I know this history so well, perhaps because my family experienced it, or even maybe because I have a strong connection to this city.  Leaving the classroom and walking through the cold, rainy, and dimly-lit streets of Berlin, much was on my mind…

An air-raid siren.  In the Midwest, that sound means a tornado is in the area.  The first few I experienced filled me with adrenaline-fueled anxiety, and I gazed out the window of our basement, half expecting to see a funnel of destruction coming down my street.  Today, as do many Midwesterners, I barely acknowledge this seasonal, and fairly common, sound, knowing full well that the chances of destruction are slim.  But what must it have felt like in a German city, to be awoken in the middle of the night by that hellish, that eerie sound?  During the movie I shuddered as I transported myself to that time, to hear that terrifically terrifying wail, a noise which sounds both forlorn, filled with sorrow, and at the same time contains overtones of angst and impending doom.  What must it have felt like?  Panic, fear, perhaps even after a while resignation?  Perhaps one could learn to accept the noise, and one reacted with mechanical motions…to be in a poorly ventilated shelter, to hear those awful sirens and hear the distant boom of anti-aircraft guns, to feel the first tremors of the falling bombs, to have dust fall from the ceiling and hear screaming, terrified masses cowering from the shocking and bone-rattling explosions.  How would one deal with this confusion, this din, this terror?  Scream out loud until it was over?  Pray perhaps?  Go insane?  All Germans who lived in the large cities experienced this and tell stories of this time, of how the women, children, and elderly, left to fend for themselves by the men who were off to war, faced this almost daily terror, how they encountered fear, death, and the ensuing destruction of lives and homes.  I myself have a great-great uncle who was buried in the rubble of his apartment building in Berlin; no body or trace of him was ever found, and he joined the thousands who just disappeared in the chaos and flames.  However, he had never, after having lived through the horrors of a shelter once, intended on leaving his home during an air-raid, preferring to stay in his chair in the living room.  This he vowed to my grandmother’s family.  What audacity, what inner courage and strength it must have taken to sit in an easy-chair, perhaps drink a schnapps and smoke a cigar and gaze out at the world destroying itself, never knowing, or perhaps waiting for, that bomb that fell directly on his roof.  One cannot blame him though, for fearing the shelter, that rat-like and foul smelling haven filled with screaming masses.  The darkness and claustrophobia as the house quakes and quivers above you; the shelter must have been as unnerving as the bombing itself. 

I recently celebrated the New Year in Berlin, and gazing at the fantastically-lit night sky, with the many explosions of colors, lights, and noise, I felt a surreal, strangely familiar fantasy enter my mind, as I wondered what it must have looked like over six decades ago.  The hundreds of spotlights illuminating off of the clouds, the shadow-like silhouettes of the planes bearing their deadly cargo, the hundreds of bursts in the darkness…if the sight would not be so terrifying and foreboding, surely it must have been breathtakingly epic and somewhat beautiful.  The ultimate fireworks show, what an awe- and fear- inspiring sight!  It must have been intoxicatingly magnificent and strangely alluring while at the same time terrifying, to look up into the night sky and see this epic sight.  I am reminded of an incident when I was a child, of how the fireworks were exploding directly overheard of my family, so that the boom was especially loud, shuddering the tree branches above us and sending quakes through my body.  I asked my grandfather if he had ever seen or felt anything such as this, and he answered grimly plenty of times.  In the war.  I thought of that too, that night of the fireworks extravaganza, and during my cold walk home down the streets of Berlin.

My grandfather was drafted into the army at age 18, in 1943.  He was trained as a FLAK operator, the men who manned the batteries of guns which aimed at the sky and fired at those waves of olive-drab machines which bombed targets in Germany on a daily basis.  As I walked, I remembered of how I had thought of my grandfather during the movie, of what it must have been like to have seen and participated in such a spectacle.  My grandfather never speaks of his feelings or experiences of the war.  He has only recounted where he was stationed and what he did, but never how it felt or the sights he saw.  He was one of three men who manned the targeting system of the 8.8 cm anti-aircraft guns.  Trained in all three duties, and alternately manning each position, these men were known as E1, E2, and E3.  Each man had a specific function during a raid, which he performed by gazing through his scope and lining up the plane in a target; each scope judged either speed, direction, or height.  During an engagement, each would look at the same plane, line it up in his sights, and yell, for example, “E1 ready!” until all three had counted off and the officer in charge dropped a pin which locked the measurements in place.  The gun would then on its own follow the plane based on those measurements of height, distance, and speed, and all that was left to do was load the ammunition and fire as fast as possible, until the plane was hit or the pilot had adjusted one of the factors, so that a new measurement was required.  It was fully automated and sophisticated for its time, the perfect method of killing men.  Progress!  In this way my grandfather’s battery of four guns brought down 68 bombers. 

Did my grandfather look up to see his handiwork, to admire the puffs of exploding shells, as hundreds of guns fired at the formation and planes began to become crippled and parachutes deployed in the sky?  What was going through his mind?  Joy, pain, guilt?  My grandfather said that they would loudly cheer as a plane would catch fire or start to nose-dive out of control, the black plume of smoke indicating its demise and the death of the men inside.  Did he ever think about the panic those men, or even mere boys, felt in those planes as they caught fire and the hulls came apart around them?  Perhaps not.  He was only doing his duty; the same those men in the planes did when they dropped their explosive armaments on my grandfather’s homeland and fellow citizens below.  Still, I think as I continue my slow journey home, what must it have felt like to witness such destruction and carnage?  I only know it from movies, but it is enough to give me shivers.  My grandfather’s feelings today are a mystery to me, if he has regrets or guilt.  However, he does say that he would never have expected his future son-in-law to be an American.  I think of how my fiancé’s father was in the Air Force; a few decades earlier, and he would have been the enemy my grandfather was doing his utmost to kill, and today they can sit together at a table and laugh and feel genuine affection towards each other.  The insanity of war! 

My grandfather was younger than I when the war ended and the killing was over.  I wonder if I could have performed and survived such unreal pandemonium.  My grandfather once told me that his column was strafed once.  He never told me any other details.  My imagination places me in the back of that truck, laughing with friends until someone yells as a plane descends from the sun (which was the preferred method of attack, in order to disguise the approach), bearing down on their position.  Jumping out and diving for cover as gunshots and explosions and yells fill the air, the absolute fear and helplessness of huddling and screaming, the only mechanism for releasing that inner fear, as you wait for the end of the attack or the death-blow…could that ever have been or be me?  What is it like to carry that with you for your entire life?  All I may ever do is carry the anguish of losing a loved one, or a setback in my life.  How can one continue after war, after seeing pain and destruction and agony day after day, how does one carry such sorrow and even guilt in one’s heart?  What does it feel like to carry such a soul-rending experience through one’s life?  To return to a society which tells you to love thy neighbor and though shall not kill, which praises peace and yet, as all societies, continually reaches for the gun or the knife, when each nation throughout the ages sends its youngest and most innocent to the slaughter…how can one do that and afterwards be “normal” and raise children and just live??? 

As I get home I wonder if I have an overactive imagination, if something is wrong with me to dwell on such macabre thoughts.  Perhaps it is a good thing to be able to vividly envision the sights and feelings of such distant and surreal times.  History is a Hollywood movie to me, I guess, and what others see as an acted-out drama, I appreciate for a reality.  After all, I think after the movie, my family is intricately connected to those scenes of the bombing, a scene which does not do the true terror and fear and destruction justice.  Perhaps my ancestors’ experiences and emotions haven’t been inherited by me, written into my DNA, but the past lives on into the future, and lives on in us, whether we want it to or not.