Decadent 1930s Berlin, a wartime first love and escape from the advancing Red Army feature in this absorbing study of the author’s grandmother
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein’s famous proposition is sometimes quoted in relation to war survivors and their reluctance to talk about their experiences. The men and women who came through the second world war, building new lives for themselves in the ruins, were especially taciturn, none more so than Svenja O’Donnell’s German grandmother Inge, who’d been a 19-year-old with a baby when the advancing Red Army forced her to flee her home in Königsberg in January 1945. But for the promptings of her granddaughter, the dramas Inge was part of in the years either side of that escape might have remained a secret. But in her 80s she began to open up a little. What she revealed over the next 10 years, and Svenja supplemented with her own discoveries, has resulted in a fascinating book.
Inge was a small child when Hitler came to power and in her “carefully curated” memories of skating parties, ice-creams and pet monkeys the rise of nazism barely figured. Her parents were Lutherans, not Jews, and though they disapproved of Hitler they kept their heads down. Initially resistant when Inge pushed them to let her go to college in Berlin, they soon succumbed. In September 1940, with allied bombing raids yet to kick in, the only threat to a vivacious 15-year-old lay in the city’s decadent nightlife. And when Inge made friends with a girl called Gisela, whose mother Dorothea invited her to live with them, they’d every reason to think she would be safe.