Memories of an A-level class

• 352 pages
• apart from series (außer der Reihe)

978-3-933974-98-3

18.00 €           

They succeeded in adding a central, fundamentally new dimension to the publications about childhood in the Third Reich, which were published in the last years: They get a chance to speak, without comment, without editorial preselection or rubrication.

Life's journeys of the retired marketing directors, professors, physicists, businessmen, sportswriters and theater theorists got as different as their ways and detours to Frankfurt and the Liebigschule. The human value of this book is determined by the very personal memories and the still very present experiences. It obtains its historical importance since this class was representatively thrown together by the war and the postwar turmoil.

»Mein Kriegsende« is a »classwork« from start to finish: Since their A levels in 1958 the class of the Liebigschule in Frankfurt am Main held together, a hard core gathered for a class meeting every year. So, the idea for this book arose in 1995:

Out of a night talk the former pupils told each other how they had experienced war's end as children. How they, born in all parts of the then »Greater German Reich« experienced the fire in Dresden, Hanau's destruction, the persecution by the invading Red Army, the awefully last violent actions by Volkssturm and scattered Hitlerjungen, partly only a few years older then themselves ?

From the conception and the reports, from the historic explanations up to the draft for the title and its graphic, this volume is the work of the school class. A new glimpse in the devastatingly last years of the Hitler regime and the immediate post-war era, from which emerges 16 times »Childhood in the Third Reich and after«. The reports are supplemented with short historical overviews and background information on the experiences of the pupils of old.

The high-school graduates of old tell from the daily routine of the children during war and from the escape of the children and their mothers from terror bombing. They bring forward the difficult father-son relationships as background of a whole generation and its development – and the oppressive taboo issue of their childhoods, the persecution of the Jews.

The former grammar-school boys devoted this book on the one hand to their mothers – the true heroines of war and the post-war era – and on the other hand to one, whom they can only call a »fluke« in their young lives:

»What made this decades-long cohesion and, therefore, also this book possible, was – what many of us realized later on – especially the way in which our class teacher Dr. Helmuth Fleckenstein ran the class.«

Each of the ex-pupils attached a short life to his article, and a variety of photos from the family albums illustrate the history and the stories of a generation, which was fortunately too young to be collected and indoctrinated as »cubs« by the Nazi regime, but already old and alert enough to grasp the war in its whole extent – and to today warn against it with their publication.