SURVIVING BERLIN

Surviving Berlin is a rare first-hand account of the tumultuous Nazi and post-war years in Germany, and one man's poignant journey to finding the unvarnished truth. In 1957, in the most improbable place, the archives of a southern American university, twenty-one-year-old Karl von der Heyden discovered the answer to a question that had plagued him as he came of age in his native Germany: What had his parents known-how much could they have known-about the atrocities that the Nazis had committed? The only German student enrolled at Duke University at the time, von der Heyden found issues of the Nazi party's newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter (The People's Observer), dating from 1932 to the end of the Second World War, staring out at him from the stacks of the university's library. He spent many hours, poring over the pages, reading announcement after announcement of the latest restrictions placed on the Jews, and absorbing the newspaper's editorials, which blatantly justified the organized anti-Semitism; slowly he was able to fill in the gaps that had developed in the silence of his father and mother's generation. In the aftermath of the war, very few Germans spoke about what had happened, and when they allowed themselves to do so, they seemed to lump the horrors of Nazism in with those of wartime survival. "e;War is war,"e; they said. Or they placed the blame on Hitler alone. Once Hitler committed suicide, the adults ostensibly moved on psychologically, leaving it to the next generation, the Kriegskinder, children of war, to bear the shame for the heinous crimes of their country's past, and for their parents' possible participation-whether it was no more than a tacit show of sympathy for Hitler. For von der Heyden, his own regret was particularly acute with the knowledge that his father had been a member of the Nazi Party, and his guilt complicated by the fact that his father had risked his life during the war, and subsequently spent five harsh years as a prisoner of war in a Russian camp in Siberia. Equipped with new insights, von der Heyden was now stunned to see a "e;parallel injustice"e; between the experiences of the Jews in Nazi Germany and of the blacks in the segregated South-the North Carolina university itself did not admit African-Americans until 1963. Von der Heyden writes, "e;I found the fact that systematic discrimination against a particular group of citizens could exist in America-a country we Germans viewed as enterprising and modern-incomprehensible."e; At once affecting and thought-provoking, Surviving Berlin is a remarkable story, whose themes are as profound today as they were seventy years ago.