Today, the number of people alive from the Nazi era is quickly dwindling. If you don't count those who were children at the time, there are barely any. Manfred Keune, a Penn State professor emeritus of German studies, grew up in Hitler’s Third Reich and created a course about his experiences. “Sharing our stories,” he says, “helps us make sense of our lives and our way of being in the world." WPSU intern Marisa Jordan sat in on his last class and talked with some of his students.
Today, the number of people alive from the Nazi era is quickly dwindling. If you don't count those who were children at the time, there are barely any. Manfred Keune, a Penn State professor emeritus of German studies, grew up in Hitler’s Third Reich and created a course about his experiences. “Sharing our stories,” he says, “helps us make sense of our lives and our way of being in the world."
WPSU Intern, Marisa Jordan, attended the last class in his series titled “World War II through a German Child’s Eyes,” offered by Penn State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI. The students in the full-to-capacity, noncredit course, are age 50 or over.
Beth Glasser of Alexandria, signed up for the course because she was interested in hearing wartime stories from a new and interesting perspective. “I was fascinated by the topic. I mean, you don’t normally get the perspective of a German national, somebody who grew up, if you will, on the other side,” Glasser said.
Instructor Manfred Keune is a Penn State professor-emeritus of German language, literature and culture. Keune says WWII is a seemingly endless river of stories. His very personal account is based on experience and memory. “It’s the story,” he says, “of a childhood and what war can do to those children who survive the challenges of such times as witnesses and observers.”
“As a child you experience the war differently, because you don’t have a past as such. You do not have a character yet and this becomes part of you,” Keune said, “You see death and you smell it, and reality of the horror of war needs to be clarified. It needs to be shown. I’m one of the very few witnesses of the Second World War that’s still alive, you know; soon we’ll be gone.”
Keune was four in 1940 when his father, a book printer, was drafted into the war. He didn’t return home until 1945.
“He was very lucky; walked into an American prison camp and was home soon thereafter,” Keune said, “But it took a while, a year or two, until he was stable enough to pursue his old profession again.”
Keune’s course is part memoir and part philosophical reflection on morality and current events. He shared unsettling anecdotes, including the experience of visiting his hometown after it had been demolished in an air raid.
Keune said, “And at the moment when my uncle took me to town, after that fateful air raid in November ‘44, to show me “what human beings do to each other,” as he said, and when I saw the stacks of corpses, I experienced that the ultimate violation of humanness is the destruction of the body, inseparably linked with our minds and our souls.”
Keune interviewed his own cousin, who is about his same age, about her experiences growing up in Germany during WWII. When the Russians invaded, she and other refugees fled the country, enduring one of Germany’s most brutal winters.
“She can’t remember how they ate; all she knows now is that they had no desire to eat. They were sick; they were loused. But they stuck together,” Keune said, “She had a 12-year-old niece that was raped so many times by Russian soldiers, and she was sick, that she decided to end her life. And she just could not live that life anymore,” Keune said, “And her father did not want to separate from her, so both of them walked into the lake and drowned themselves.”
In recent years, he met a woman who lost an arm during the war. “They were in a trek of refugees and they were strafed by aircraft fire…all of a sudden she noticed her arm was missing. A typical story, which of course is more complicated than losing the arm, because there was a child in it. And the child was never found. You know, that was almost normalcy,” Keune said.
Keune’s mother did her best to maintain normal family routines. Despite the risk, she removed the portrait of Adolph Hitler that her husband dutifully hung on the wall. “And there was an absolute trust. I got that immediately as a child, that if I were to rat on them that would have very deadly consequences. So, I grew up in a mutual trust atmosphere.”
In a flash, Keune is focused on today’s refugees. He asked his class, “How are the refugees doing?”
The evening news shows images of a Syrian child washed ashore in Turkey, and Keune is flooded with his own childhood memories. “It’s that repetition that is so noxious for me,” he said. ‘”You know it's also kind of disappointing, as if we had not made any progress along those lines.”
At almost 80, Kuene acknowledges that the person he is today cannot be separated from his childhood experiences. He says the war didn’t just change his life; it determined it. “There is inside of me, as I look at the world the way it is today, an inexplicable grief - for the world. A grief that takes a hold of me sometimes,” he said. “I look at images of Syria today. We live in the age of exhilarated collateral damage, and we can’t get out. I’m not a peacenik, you know sticking flowers in rifles. I had military training and all that. But always that is in the background: for the sake of what?”
That simple question has plagued humanity since the beginning of time.
“I’ve seen war and I’ve seen peace," says Keune, "and peace is better.”
He adds, “We forget. The intensity of compassion is very energy driven…and begins to fade. That’s what today’s refugees are afraid of now. That they’ll be forgotten.”
