66. Nothing for Tears, Lali Horstmann

I am breaking my rule here, as I have more than 25 words (each) to say about these next four books, which I read as a group. (I find that I am more articulate when I'm annoyed.)

Nothing for Tears recounts the last months of WWII and the fall of Berlin in the Russian sector. I occasionally read books like this because I'd prefer to think that not all Germans were bad and to remind myself that some of them underwent undeserved hardships. Undeserved, however, is not the adjective that comes to mind in the case of the Horstmanns.

Here is Lali describing a snobbish waiter in a restaurant for the elite: "It was not persecution or crime that shocked him, but the unbearable humiliation of being governed by [Hitler] whose humble origin he considered far beneath his own in birth and education." This from a woman whose circle of friends "collected postcards of the Nazi leaders . . . and would send [them] to one another. We tried to convey to each other, 'Look how ridiculous they are, no one as phoney can touch us. . .'" One gets the impression that winning the war, at least, might have redeemed the Fuhrer in their eyes.

Even as the bombs dropped and the Russians approached, driving most of their friends west or out of the country, the Horstmanns stayed put, Herr Horstmann, a veritable caricature of German arrogance, being convinced that nothing could possibly touch them. The Tarter hordes are descending and his main concern is that Lali has not arranged the flowers to his taste. One can imagine that his death in a Russian concentration camp 2 years later of starvation could possibly have been the result of his refusal to eat inferior food.

Lali did better. She scavenged for food, hid in neighbouring villages when necessary (her husband stayed home), and organised and worked with the peasant women in her vegetable garden, all the while agonising over whether to leave or to trust her husband's judgment.

Her actions, however, didn't have much effect on her attitudes. When she meets the chauffeur of an Embassy friend in the railway station, he pleads with her to put in a word for him, so that he will keep his job and not be sent to the Russian front. "I was disturbed at being confronted with a man in such an agony of mind, and was relieved to learn some time later that he had succeed in escaping." No indication that she put herself out to intercede for him, but she was disturbed.

As three villagers are taken off by the Russians, replacements for three escaped POWs, she thinks, "Human beings were treated as ingredients in a chemical process, with an Asiatic indifference which was foreign to Europeans." Not that I hold any brief for the Russians, but I haven't heard that they had ovens in their concentration camps. Later she muses, "These terrible [Russian] camps are one of the most significant phenomena of our times. . . crushing not only the lives but the personalities of human beings." It is well after the war when she writes this, at a time when it is no longer possible to plead ignorance of the German camps.

In a couple of days, recovering my equilibrium, I remembered that the arrival of the Russians and their Tartar troops was interesting in a horrible way and something I hadn't read before. If only the story had a more sympathetic narrator.