In his 2008 memoir Weeds Like Us (see my review here) Gunter Nitsch told the incredible story of survival as he and his family in East Prussia fled the advancing Red Army at the end of World War II, only to end up in a Soviet-run collective farm where they nearly starved to death. His new book STRETCH picks up where the family is reunited with Gunter's father in Cologne in 1950. The city is still half in ruins, and the boy - now 13 years-old - must start a new life as a refugee in a strange place with a father he barely knew. School is a struggle; Gunter hadn't had any formal education on the farm or in the DP camp where he had been living.
The boy manages to catch up with his peers and is offered an apprenticeship at the chemical firm "Arminius AG", where he is introduced to the tragi-comic life of office routine. We meet the tyrannical boss, slacker secretaries, unrepentent Nazis, but also kindly mentors who take young Gunter under their wings and encourage him to continue with his studies.
The rubble of war is everywhere still, but also the remnants of the National Socialist mindset that precipitated the debacle. As Gunter hitchhikes around Europe he is given rides on more than one occasion by former officers of the Waffen SS who reminisce about "the best time of their lives" as part of Himmler's organization. Or, as was more common, people didn't want to confront the truth and deliberately tried to bury it: one of Gunter's first tasks at Arminius AG is to shred the personnel files of the thousands of slave laborers who worked for the firm between 1939 and 1945.
"For the most part, the events between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the war had been covered up or ignored since 1945. Adults were reluctant to discuss such things. If they had actively participated it was best to keep quiet about it. If they had been victimized, the memories were still too painful. As a result, since the entire shameful period of our history was deliberately omitted from the curriculum in the German classrooms, young people had been pretty much kept in the dark."
All this begins to change as the first documentaries are broadcast on German television.'
Gunter describes his experiences as one of the first draftees in the newly reconstituted German army. Eventually he completes his diploma at the business school and becomes a management trainee for a major cooperative supermarket chain. But his dream was always to go to America, and the book ends with Gunter boarding a ship to the New World. Is there one final book forthcoming about his adventures in "das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten"?
STRETCH is the story of a young man who, against all odds - and like the country he grew up in - , is able to build a new life from the the ruins of war.
Gunter Nitsch is coming out with the German version of Weeds Like Us - Eine lange Flucht aus Ostpreußen - this spring. Arno Surminski, the master chronicler of the East Prussia refugee experience, has written the foreword.
Read my interview with Gunter Nitsch.
I met Gunter in the elevator in my grandaughter's building where he gave me bookmark w/his book Weeds Like Us which I thoroughly enjoyed & will get his other book Stretch as soon as possible to continue his life in Cologne. Keep up the good work enlightening the world from your point of view. Frances Graszer
Posted by: frances Graszer | November 10, 2012 at 07:36 PM
What a great post!!!!
Posted by: theophilus | June 29, 2016 at 04:39 AM