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Friday, June 14, 2013

Diary of World War Two German teenager reveals how death and destruction became mundane and allowed a nation to turn a blind eye to its own brutality

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Her country stood on the brink of collapse, allied bombs rained down at night, the army was in retreat and an attempt had just been made on the exalted leader's life.
But German teenager Brigitte Eicke wasn't bothered by any of that, of far greater concern was her terrible hairdo.
Never mind the mysterious disappearance of all the neighbourhood's Jews, Brigitte now had to suffer the indignity of 'a disastrous perm' which meant going to work 'looking a state'.
Terror: The teenager's diary gives a candid insight into the world of Nazi Germany
Terror: The teenager's diary gives a candid insight into the world of Nazi Germany

In so many ways Brigitte was just another typical teenage girl, obsessed with her friends, first kisses with boys and trips to the cinema.
But as a Berlin resident in the late 1930s and 1940's, Brigitte was a first-hand witness to one of the most turbulent chapters of modern history and crucially, at the age of 15, she began keeping a diary.
The journal now serves as important historical record and has just been published in German under the title 'Backfisch im Bombenkrieg' - backfisch being an old-fashioned term for a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and Bombenkrieg meaning bombing war.
The seemingly mundane description of a girl's day to day existence gives a rare and fascinating insight into what life was like inside wartime Germany and just how the German people were able to turn a blind eye to the brutality of the Nazi regime.  
For years the wartime accounts of German people have been largely ignored. Their suffering paling into insignificance compared to that of the millions of Jews who died as a result of their country's atrocities.
But today as fewer and fewer of the wartime generation remain, German historians are increasingly realising the historical importance of these first-hand accounts.  
Despite her apparent innocence and naivety, Brigitte was absolutely fastidious when it came to keeping her diary.
She used it primarily to practice her stenography skills which meant she was economical with what she wrote, completely frank and honest and rarely felt the temptation to embellish or exaggerate.

  'There were some Jewish girls in my first ever class photograph, taken in 1933, but by the time the next was taken, they were all gone. When I asked my mother about them, she said they had moved to Palestine.'

Now 86, Brigitte lives just a few streets away from where she grew up and where in March 1943 an air raid killed two people, injured 34 and left 1,000 homeless.
But such is her indifference that Brigitte only makes mention of her annoyance at the fact the raid took place 'in the middle of the night, horrible, I was half-asleep.'
Another entry on February, 1, 1944 reads: 'The school had been bombed when we arrived this morning. Waltraud, Melitta and I went back to Gisela's and danced to gramophone records.'
Then on March, 2, 1945, just a matter of weeks before the fall of Berlin she notes: 'Margot and I went to the Admiralspalast cinema to see "Meine Herren Söhne." It was such a lovely film but there was a power cut in the middle of it. How annoying!'
Perhaps most haunting is the casual reference to the disappearance of the local Jews made on February, 27, 1943
She writes: 'Waltraud and I went to the opera to see "The Four Ruffians." I had a ticket for Gitti Seifert too. What a load of nonsense, it was ridiculous.
'We walked back to Wittenbergplatz and got on the underground train at Alexanderplatz. Three soldiers started talking to us. Gitti is so silly, she went all silent when they spoke to her. The least one can do is answer, even though we weren't going to go anywhere with them.
'Jews all over town are being taken away, including the tailor across the road.'
But despite this Brigitte remains unapologetic. In a recent interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel she explained:'I was young and busy with my own life.'
'My son always said to me: "How could you have been so oblivious?".
'I never saw a thing!'
And of the holocaust she still uses an old Nazi term, when she remarks: 'Berlin was already Judenrein ("cleansed of Jews") by then, and I was too young to have noticed anything before that.
Unapologetic: In her diaries Brigitte recalls seeing 'Jews being taken away, all over town'
Unapologetic: In her diaries Brigitte recalls seeing 'Jews being taken away, all over town'

'There were some Jewish girls in my first ever class photograph, taken in 1933, but by the time the next was taken, they were all gone. When I asked my mother about them, she said they had moved to Palestine.'
In March 1944 Brigitte makes a casual remark about joining the Nazi party. It appears she did so mainly to make friends.
'Usually all we did was sing songs,' she explains. 'But yes, we were pretty keen on Hitler -- of course we were, we were all indoctrinated as children.
'We just muddled through, we had no choice.'
It would take some 30 years before Brigitte was able to fully comprehend  what had happened.
She said: 'It was only when I visited Buchenwald in the 1970s that I saw photographs of the camps.
'It took me years to realize what had gone on.'
From many of the passages it would be easy to assume that Brigitte was completely oblivious to the horrors of the war. But that is too simplistic.
Realisation: Brigitte admits he took her years to realise what had gone on in Germany during the war
Realisation: Brigitte admits he took her years to realise what had gone on in Germany during the war

Brigitte experienced the Battle of Berlin first-hand, she lost both her father and her uncle on the front.
Her apparent naivety could instead be understood as an attempt to insulate herself from the grim reality of war. 
Her diary is already being compared to that of Dutch holocaust victim Anne Frank who began writing just a few months before Brigitte.
But while both girls' wartime accounts share a similar innocence, the Anne Frank was killed in the Bergen-Belsen concentration while Brigitte was able to continue her life.
Brigitte's diary was only saved when she sent it to German historian Annet Gröschner, who co-edited and annotated the published version.
Gröschner told Der Spiegel: 'The paper was yellowed and had virtually disintegrated. It was almost unreadable.
'What is striking about the diary is its authenticity. It's very different from personal accounts of World War II that were written with the benefit of hindsight and with later generations in mind.'

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