My Father's Legacy

A recent interview on a local radio-station got me to think more about what exactly is the impact my father’s life has had on my own life. What is his legacy? I know that for many sons fathers are the ones who pass on skills—how to hold a hammer, how to throw a ball, how to fish, etc.—I don’t think this is the case for me. I could make an exception for “how to bicycle”. Except, my father didn’t teach me how to bicycle. It was my mother. I still remember the day, as a matter of fact. No, my father’s legacy, i.e., his presence in my life has a lot more to do with how his life began to shape up about five to six years after he was born.

My father was born in 1937. He was five or six years old when his own father died as a soldier on the Eastern Front. From all I can tell, Bruno, his father, was a simple man. He worked for the postal service in Germany, but had fallen into some sort of disrepute for stealing. He probably wouldn’t have, on his own, chosen to be a soldier. But serving in the military meant that he would get out of prison and, certainly, that was better than having to serve time. He became a Red Cross medic. In 1943, he was shot in the leg by a Russian bullet and bled to death on the battlefield.

I could never get around how non-heroic and senseless his death was. I wondered, why wasn’t there anyone to help him? Weren’t there any other medics around? Didn’t anyone know how to stop his bleeding. He must have been lonely when he died. He must have wondered, too, why am I dying from this kind of wound?

There are only two pictures of my father with his father. Both were taken on the same occasion, I believe, a visit home from the front. One shows my father with his mother and father somewhere in the city of Hamburg in the winter, next to a bare tree. The other shows my father on his father’s lap. In both pictures, my grandfather is wearing his soldier’s uniform.

I knew very early how my grandfather had died. I think I knew it from my father. He also told me about the stealing. I couldn’t help feeling some shame about all this. Why did he steal? Was he poor? Did he do it to help out his family? Relatively early, too, I had an experience with my grandmother, his wife, who showed me a picture of the white cross that had been sent to her after his death. It had his last name—Srajek—in big black letters on it. Strangely, my grandmother believed that this picture was a photo-montage that had been sent to her to appease her. About twenty years later I read a letter that had been sent to her after his death. The letter spoke of his heroic death for the fatherland, it spoke of how he had “fought” until the last breath, how he had saved his comrades, etc. Bullshit, my grandmother said. She was disgusted. She knew him well enough, she knew how he had died. How scared he probably was, how very lonely.

Perhaps my father’s legacy begins here. But, no, it begins earlier. Somewhere where he, already as young boy, couldn’t stand being asked to join large groups of boys and girls gathered to swear allegiance to a flag, the flag of the NSDAP. There are no stories about the impact of his mother’s distrust of the Nazi’s on my father’s life. I imagine that she radiated it with every gesture, every breath. My father, rather than becoming a child recruit of the NSDAP, joined the church. He found a strong group of people, led by a young aspiring pastor, who carried him through his fatherlessness as a young boy and gave him a sense of belonging he didn’t have anywhere else. This affiliation saved his life. Not in the sense that he would have died without it, but in the sense that it gave him a horizon beyond what he had seen and experienced as a boy. Much of his determination to graduate from high-school and, then, to go on and get a university education originated with his connection to this group. With this group also came a strong antipathy to war, violence and aggression. He never served in the military and to this day abhors and criticizes military and other aggression around the world.

When, in 1980, I became a conscientious objector my father’s life and experience had a huge impact on my decision. By the way, he never had to “object” in the way I did. His generation had been exempted from serving in the new German military because of their closeness to the war. Had I not objected I would have served in the German military for 15 months. Since I objected I had to serve in National Service for 18 months (three months more, because, though the German constitution allows for “objection”, it still “punishes” objectors with an increased length of service). I worked in a home for severely physically disabled children. Children whose parents had “dropped” them off and, essentially, didn’t want anything to do with them anymore.

The thing is I don’t recall a single time that my father and I actually talked about this decision. Rather, I remember my mother repeatedly telling me she hadn’t brought me into the world to see me end up as cannon fodder. She was right, of course. But my father’s silence was still strange. When I “passed” the military court session that would approve me as an objector there was no praise, no pride, no celebration. Perhaps, it was simply expected.

All this has changed with my children. Living in the US, means that we are living in a country that has repeatedly put itself into situations of war since the end of WWII. Living in the US also means that my children go to American schools and participate in the daily ritual of pledging allegiance to the flag. My father balks at these activities. He worries about his grandchildren, more than he had to worry about me.

My father’s legacy is peacefulness. Not just the conditional peace “If no one attacks me then I’m peaceful”. Rather it’s the kind of peace that rather leaves than fights. It’s the kind of peace that argues that nothing, not even one’s love for one's country, justifies or makes plausible the move to go to war. And as far as defending your loved ones is concerned, my father has always believed that such defense is possible in many other ways than to have to go to war. My father’s legacy, I realize, is in many ways a much more stringent version of America’s cherished individualism than most American’s have to offer. It argues that being an individual means that we have to object to all forms of patriotism because they will inevitably lead us into aggressive and defensive relationships with others.