Glad I Didn’t Know That
August 16, 2020
Today I was thinking about Nazis which made me think about Germany which made me think about my time at St. Andrews University in Scotland when I became good friends with three German students--Gabi from Bochum, Uli (short for Ulrich) from Essen, and Klaus, I’m not sure from where. Dusseldorf, I think.
Over Christmas break, Gabi’s parents were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, which in Germany involved recommitting with a second wedding. Gabi invited all three of us, and she asked me if I’d like to sing at the service, and of course I said yes. Her parents asked that I sing the same song sung at wedding number one, Schubert’s Ave Maria.
I had not done my homework before arriving in Bochum. Of course, there wasn’t Google then. World War II had ended only 30 years previously, and most of our generations’ fathers were veterans of the war, but for some crazy reason, I hadn’t considered what that really meant. Daddy had been exempt from the military because of his bout with tuberculosis. So, in my house, the war wasn’t a presence as it was in the homes of so many returning veterans who had brought the horrors of war home with them.
Bochum didn’t look like much. Blocky houses, modern, kind of ugly, honestly. Not like the Germany in the postcards. I certainly wasn’t going to comment on how anything looked, though; Mama had taught me that much. But when I arrived to practice with the organist at the cathedral where the wedding was to be held, it looked just like the cathedrals you expect in Europe, and I said to Gabi how beautiful it was. She said, bluntly, like she said everything, yes, that it was the only thing left untouched by the bombing during the war. Oh, I said, hoping it hadn’t been Americans doing the bombing.
The anniversary celebration was packed. I sat in the choir loft, just me and the organist, and had the extraordinary experience of singing Schubert’s Ave Maria in this ancient building that the Allied bombs had somehow missed. I feel certain I was the only American there. And weirdly, it did not sink into me then, as a 20-year-old, how profound a thing it was for the Bergers to have entrusted me to sing their Schubert, their wedding song, in their cathedral in Bochum on their anniversary.
Afterwards, we went to a dark, smoky, Brechtian-looking venue, and Gabi, Klaus, Uli, and I sat at a table up close to the band and drank and smoked cigarettes. It felt a little like being in a foreign film. I noticed Herr Berger on the opposite side of the room huddled with a group of men about his age, speaking German. They looked like they had a history together, maybe they were even talking about it, and there was the tiniest sinister vibe about them, like the part in the Sound of Music where you start to get worried. I asked who these guys were and Klaus answered that they were together in the war.
And that is when it clicked. That I was sitting in a room full of former Nazis, with friends whose parents had been Nazis, and whose country my country had bombed to smithereens. That realization lasted about a count of one thousand one, one thousand two, and then I came back to the present where Gabi, Uli, and Klaus were being so charming; there was wine to drink, cake to eat, and toasts to be made. I tucked all that other stuff away.
I’m grateful I wasn’t thinking about my friends’ parents being part of the Nazi machine or about what Herr Berger and his buddies saw or did in the war. I am supremely grateful I got to sing Schubert in the one building in Bochum the Allies didn’t bomb to the ground. There was beauty and perhaps healing in that, and that’s plenty to be grateful for.
©2021 Joy Cunningham