Book Note: Karin Finell’s Good-Bye to the Mermaids
(University of Missouri Press, 2006) is
an autobiographical account of life in Germany during and after WWII from the perspective
of a young German (non-Jewish) girl. I
learned about this book after my book club discussed Kate Atkinson’s novel Life after Life – which is partly set in
Hitler’s Germany--and another member told me about it. (For a review of Atkinson’s novel, see my blog
of January 26, 2016,
Good-Bye
to the Mermaids: a Childhood Lost in Hitler’s Berlin
Born in 1933, Karin Finell came from an educated and
accomplished bourgeois German family.
Unusually, her parents were divorced and she lived with her mother and
grandmother. Her father, with whom she rarely
had contact, was a newspaper editor in a small town in what eventually became
East Germany. Her father’s sister was a well-known
poet. Her grandmother had grown up in
the United States and was thus somewhat immunized against Hitler’s propaganda.
During the war Karin experienced bombings and barely
escaped death with her mother when one of their many temporary homes was
destroyed. They moved from place to place as housing became ever scarcer; in
between times, Karin was sent to various schools in the countryside.
Karin joined Hitler youth group for girls, as all
German girls were obliged to do. Nevertheless, she seems not to have picked up
the required amount of hatred of Jews. On a bus one day, she offered to give up
her seat to an old man, as she has been trained to respect her elders. She did
not realizing that the interesting star he wore on his coat meant he was a
pariah: another man reprimanded her for offering her seat to a Jew.
Karin believed all the propaganda she was fed and
worshipped Hitler. Her family, fearful
that she would betray them if they criticized Hitler in her presence, listened
quietly and without argument whenever she told them how wonderful Hitler was. She
did not realize until the end of the war how she had been duped, in part
because—in her still childish mind—she felt betrayed when Hitler committed
suicide.
Like many “Aryan” German families, Karin’s family
had Jewish, “half-Jewish” and other assorted “impure” relatives. Karin overheard her family talking about how
her cousin Maria wore around her neck a
gold locket containing cyanide. She did
not understand why: the reason was that Maria’s deceased father was Jewish, but
that her step-father, a heroic General in WWI, was protecting her.
One of her mother’s closest friends was adopted by a
non-Jewish couple, but her birth mother was Jewish. The Nazis locked her up
until they could figure out whether her birth father was Jewish as well, so
that they could properly categorize her, and she survived the war. Tragically,
her adoptive parents were killed because they would not reveal her biological origins.
Another of Karin’s mother’s old friends lost her
father, one of the 1944 plotters against Hitler. He was hanged.
 |
| Karin Finell |
As the war was winding down, Karin was permitted to
leave a boarding school in then East Prussia (now Poland) on account of illness. Shortly afterwards, the school was evacuated
as the Russians advanced, but not soon enough.
The Russians raped a trainload of her fellow students. Karin ran into
one of her friends some time later: the friend was attended by a nurse, and her
eyes were completely was vacant.
Like almost all German women, Karin, her mother and
grandmother were petrified with fear when the Russians invaded Berlin. They
were living in the cellar of their bombed-out building: every so often a
Russian would come in and say “Frau, komm” (woman, come) and take away some
women to be raped. At twelve, however, Karin was already an excellent actress (she
was later offered a job in East Berlin in a theatre run by Berthold Brecht, but
turned the opportunity down to move to the U.S.). She disguised herself as a
filthy, disabled and drooling female, so the Russians would overlook her. It’s
not clear, though, how her still-young mother
escaped the fate of so many other women.
Karin paid frequent visits to a 14-year-old friend
who had been raped and impregnated, and who also contracted syphilis. Treatments
for syphilis at the time were extremely painful, as was the friend’s illegal
abortion: eventually, the friend escaped to the American zone of occupied Germany.
After the Americans took over the part of Berlin in
which Karin and her family lived, life improved, as they were no longer close
to starvation. By contrast, Karin’s three half-brothers living with her father
in East Germany were still short of food in 1952. Her father visited her shortly
before his death and was horrified to see her feeding a piece of chocolate to
her dog, pointing out that her brothers had not seen chocolate since the war
years.
This is a very good book just for people who like to
read: it’s a shame it was published by a university press and probably did not
get much publicity. I also recommend it
to colleagues who teach German or WWII history to assign to their
students. It would also be good for
literature courses on autobiography, for women’s studies courses, or for
courses in memory studies.
