German Autumn by Stig Dagerman

I remember how horrified I was when I was taught about the Holocaust. I was 11 at that time and my wonderful history teacher not only explained what happened but showed us some documentaries and played some audio tapes of survivors.

Naturally, we were made to believe that the entire German nation supported both the Nazi regime as well as the policy of sending Jews to concentration camps. There were lessons on the Nuremburg trials and the punishment handed out to those who operated the death camps.

I was also made to believe that in a defeated and divided Germany that people immediately shunned the ideas of the previous regime.  I carried this thinking right up to my adult life, until a conversation a few years that began on a much lighter note.

I was living in Bangalore at that time and had a German friend. While an auto driver tried to rip us off one night, we refused to pay and the man in a fit of anger called us “bloody North Indians.” The assumption was that my German friend, with his dark black hair, was a light-skinned Indian from Kashmir or Punjab.

When I met his mother who also has jet black hair and recounted this incident, she said the reason they had black hair was that her biological father was a Hawaiian GI who served in Germany, but left soon after the war. 

She then spoke about how grateful she was that her mother’s husband accepted her. In those days, “children of the enemy” were looked upon as virtual untouchables. As our conversation went on, she gave me a glimpse of life in post-war Germany.

Stig Dagerman, one of Sweden’s greatest writers and journalists, was in Germany as a correspondent for a Swedish paper in the autumn of 1946.  The articles, he wrote, were compiled into a book titled ‘German Autumn.’ His approach to reporting what he witnessed was thoroughly professional and at the same time he showed a great degree of compassion.

He was disturbed by the way Western journalists wrote judgmental and triumphalist articles about the German people. He called out those who asked a starving family if they were happier in the Nazi days. Of course, a person who is under the worst duress would answer in the affirmative.

What touched me most about the writing is the fact that he did not look at rubbing in the suffering of the German people. He writes that suffering is suffering whether deserved or undeserved and his compassion purely came from seeing that people were suffering.

Dagerman who was in his mid-20s at that time, vividly captures the occurrences of the time, including the way Bavaria was deporting people to other parts of Germany and how poor women were throwing themselves at Allied soldiers and journalists. He also noted how some former Nazis with a dark past managed to thrive under the new system.

The book is probably the best account of immediate post-war Germany ever written.  It also helps the reader become less judgmental of an entire nation.  I can’t help but agree that suffering, whether deserved or not, hurts and that we all need to be compassionate.