Product Description

Why did the German people tolerate the Nazi madness? Maria Ritter's life is haunted by the ever-painful, never-answerable "German Question." Who knew? What was known?

Confronting the profound silence in which most postwar Germans buried pain and shame, she attempts in this memoir to give an answer for herself and for her generation. Sixty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, she reflects on the nation's oppressive burden and the persecution of the contemporary consciousness.

"'We received what we deserved,' my grandfather said after the war, and I believed him. His stare out the window spoke of bitterness and solemn resignation in the face of God's punishment and pity for us all."

In probing the dark shadows of wartime, she reconstructs the voice of her childhood. With a determined search for remnants of her past during a visit to her homeland, Ritter retrieves memories and emotions from places, personal stories, and letters. As she interweaves them with events in her family's struggle to survive the war and its aftermath, she creates a tragic tapestry.

She recalls the weary odyssey from Poland to Leipzig with refugees in 1943 and remembers being sheltered there beside her grandfather. She returns to Dresden to rekindle memories of the firebombing in 1945. She revisits the remote Saxony countryside where she and her mother crossed the border from East to West Germany in flight from the Communists in 1949. She relives the pain of learning that her father "will never return from the war." On a Memorial Day many years later, Ritter's longstanding, unresolved grief overflows as she writes a posthumous letter to him. She suffers in the heartbreaking memory of her valiant mother, who overcame loss and grief along the road to freedom and a new home.

Ritter's memoir sweeps through German history of the 1930s and '40s as she meditates on how she and her people figure in the tragic story of defeat and debacle. In her recollections, in listening to the voices of her kin, and in speaking out about the past, she finds the humane way to healing and reconciliation.

Maria Ritter is a clinical psychologist in San Diego, California.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1188274 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From the Inside Flap
A healing memoir that confronts national guilt for the Nazi past

Customer Reviews

Both heartbreaking and inspirational
Maria Ritter returns to Germany as an adult, and through the recollections of her early childhood, recalls the horrors and devastation brought to her homeland through the Hitler regime and the post WWII years under the communists.
With her father fighting in the German Army, her family becomes refugees from both the Russians in the east, and Allied bombs from the sky. Making numerous moves to try and ensure their safety, they go to Dresden and become victims of the firebombing in February, 1945. Dealing with the reality that her father may never return to them, her brave mother takes the initiative to escape to the west, leaving behind loved ones in the east during the post war years...and the resulting story of their escape and subsequent life is one of inspiration and encouragement. Coming to terms with much of the heartbreaking events she suffered as a young child, makes this read a heart rending and touching memorial to all the innocents who have had nothing whatsoever to do with politics and war.

Moving Memoir
This book touched me on many levels. First, it was eye opening to learn more about the effect of WWII from the prospective of a child in Germany. To learn not only about the raw experience of war itself, but the struggles and shame after the war. Issues that are complex for anyone, let alone a child who was given no explanation for what had happened. Second, it is a story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit. Third, it discusses the importance of coming to terms with the struggles of the past and learning to be at peace with them.

Stories until now untold
One way of dealing with events that bring one to a daily struggle is to tell a story, and Maria Ritter has told a fascinating story, captivating at every turn, and elucidating a period in her life that helps us all in overcoming the struggles of our own pasts. This book is one of several appearing in these days about the world of the writer's childhood. We have heard it from those who suffered through the holocaust, we have heard it from the point of view of Europe coming out of the destruction of World War II, but here is another account of one who was a child, severely wounded in the bombing of Dresden, seeking to find her past, and either forgive it to redeem it in the light of all that history has shown about the power and abuse of Hitler in Nazi Germany.
I recommend highly this journey along with its therapeutic methods to those who would follow in this journey or understand better the children of World War II.