Hat Christiane Hoffmann suspected something of the Russian war of aggression against the Ukraine? One reads her reflections against the background of images of fleeing Ukrainian women and children with even more tension. Never again war! Never again war?
“The terror lasts for two generations at most,” she writes. And that’s where Europe is now. This book is a tribute to the late father. As a nine-year-old boy, he set out west with his mother and a trek from his village of Rosenthal in Lower Silesia in January 1945 to escape the Russian army.
The family experienced attacks, hunger, exhaustion and then settled down in northern Germany. Hoffmann was the child of refugees, because the mother had also fled East Prussia with a trek as a child. The parents pupated, always spoke the same sentences. Escape often turns into a curse. Who doesn’t want to break free from this?
And so the daughter sets out, with maps and family notes: A woman in her 50s, who has been suffering from this “memory disease” for 40 years, starts on foot in January 2020 from the village that for centuries was the home of the Hoffmann family had been. It will be a 550 kilometer walk. The homes of remote Rosenthal and all the other places she will pass are now home to Poles, themselves forcibly resettled by the Soviets after the war, often from the Lemberg area of western Ukraine. They mourn the loss of their homeland themselves, and are not interested in the former residents who sometimes came to visit after the Ostpolitik in the 1970s to alleviate the pain of their loss.
It was idyllic back then: Rosenthal on a historical postcard
Source: © private archive Christine Hoffmann
The Hoffmanns also drove to Rosenthal again and again over the years, most recently the author with her two daughters and the 80-year-old father, to “burn the memories into the daughters” because this flight was the “only family legacy”.
When flight is the only family inheritance
Christiane Hoffmann traveled to many Eastern European countries, studied and worked as a correspondent in Moscow and says about herself that her path was a huge detour via Russia to Poland, this Poland that many Germans have remained strangely indifferent to.
Author Christiane Hoffman
Source: Ekko von Schwichow/schwichow.de
The villages that she reaches after daily marches, armed with a lot of poetic strength against wind and cold, are sometimes run down, but also come to life every now and then, full of color on the house walls and the thirst for action of the mostly young residents. “I’m going my father’s way,” she says when asked. But nobody knows anything about the trek of the Rosenthalers. You look down on them with pity and even mocking. And when she goes to the local museums because she is lonely, she sees everyday German objects presented as if they were in an archeology museum. The story goes back to the Neanderthals and ends in 1945.
In conversations with all the amateur historians who line their way, a lot of hatred comes to light, for the Russians, the EU. A history war is raging in the East. “Nothing has passed, everything is still there and new, again and again.” The historical truth remains ambivalent and ambiguous. We Germans believe that we have “worked up” history. “What if we’re wrong, what if we don’t realize that nothing’s over and they’re just preparing for the next war when embers are still smoldering under the ashes?” Putin has now kindled them to a fire.
Throughout the book, Hoffmann addresses his father directly using the first name. It borders on kitsch when she imagines the boy trotting along next to her on this “pilgrimage, retreat” through history and memory. “I do penance without knowing why, to feel the pain that was kept silent about in my childhood.” She sees the fragments of her father’s memory as a mandate to “stock up for future generations” and describes her book as father’s will.
The story knows no quarter and no end. There is a new war right now, in the 21st century, with destruction, death, escape, suffering, especially for many children. Escape is always a chance to survive. Leaving is possible and good, arriving is more difficult, and even more so putting down roots. There is little consolation in the fact that there are so many displaced people in the world.
Christiane Hoffmann: Everything we don’t recall. CH Beck, 279 pages, 22 euros