MY NEW BOOK

 

            When my parents built their house in 1958, they designed it with a great deal of storage space. When my father died in 2005, that storage space, as well as my father’s office and three storage sheds in the back yard were packed. My brother stayed on in the house until 2013, when he decided he’d prefer an apartment. So we began the task of deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what needed to be tossed.

            I grabbed a bunch of stuff to look through as I found the time to do so. In 2019 I found a batch of letters that became my new book, Letters from East Germany: The Postwar Journey of Christoph Haufe (Westphalia Press, 2024). The letters begin in 1948 and end abruptly in 1959. As I read through the letters, I began to think they might be valuable as primary resource material for scholars researching what life was like as East Germany progressed from one dictatorship to another. When I got to a letter written on the tenth anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, where Christoph Haufe (1925-1992) lived at the time, I realized the letters needed to be published. This letter preceded Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which, deservedly or otherwise, made Dresden shorthand for Allied atrocities by fourteen years. After pestering any number of people for nearly five years, I found a publisher.

            My job was to make a coherent book out of the letters, I studied East German history so I could put the letters in context as conditions and regulations changed during the eleven years Christoph wrote these letters. I also decided to find out as much about Christoph as I could—several people who read the letters said they’d like to know what happened after the letters ended. Some of what I found out was disturbing. But it happened, so I had to include it.

            I was gratified to find so many historians willing to help me with this project. I began by asking a UMKC professor who teaches courses in German history to recommend books that might help me understand what was going on while the letters were written. He not only did that, he recommended Phil Leask, a friend of his who is a specialist in East German history and teaches in London. Phil was extremely helpful—especially when, as I was completing the book, I found Christoph’s journey took a problematic turn.

            Emil Fuchs, a Quaker philosopher, became instrumental in Christoph’s life. His son, Klaus Fuchs, who leaked atomic secrets, even makes it into the book.

            Here’s the preface:

            I began this book with the intention of preserving primary source material for scholars researching what life was like for ordinary people in East Germany in the years after World War II. As I came to know Christoph Haufe (1925-92) through his letters, I realized he has a message for a wider audience. And as I researched his life after 1959, I found he made choices that enhanced his career, but which indicated a degree of ethical flexibility that some will find questionable.

            Christoph refers twice to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, once early on when he says he read a German translation before the war, not knowing he would witness devastation in Germany similar to what Mitchell described the American South experienced. Later in the book he is reading the book in English while he is recuperating from a severe bout of the flu. We can sympathize with Christoph, who was twenty-three when these letters begin, as he compares his life before the war, which included a pleasant home and a family car, to his life in a devastated Dresden, where his family can only heat one room and where food is severely limited. The family goes everywhere not accessible by streetcar or train on foot or by bicycle, including his father, who is a minister, age fifty-two, and whose parish covers a large geographical area.

            Mitchell’s novel has fallen out of favor, and I doubt many people are familiar with 1,037-page behemoth. When I was growing up, my parents would often mention having seen the 1939 film, which was not re-released until 1967. I was in college at the time of the re-release, and a group of us went to see it on a wide screen. It was impressive, and it was a discussion topic among us for quite some time. We debated such weighty topics as whether Rhett killed Scarlett’s second husband, Frank, when he rescued the vigilantes, who wound up at Melanie’s house. I was inspired to read the novel, which I found had lessons for the 1960s, when Vietnam was raging. Among those lessons were Rhett’s pointing out at the Twelve Oaks picnic that the North was in a much stronger position than the South—“there’s not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line… [there are] few iron foundries… or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries… not a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad… .”

            As was the case with Germany, it had been a generation since the last war, and between wars we tend to forget exactly what war means for those who fight it. At that same picnic, the elderly Mr. McRae warns those so eager to go to war, “You fire-eating young bucks, listen to me. You don’t want to fight. I fought and I know. Went out in the Seminole War [1835-42] and was a big enough fool to go to the Mexican War [1846-48], too. You all don’t know what war is. You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero. Well, it ain’t. No, sir! It’s going hungry, and getting measles and pneumonia from sleeping in the wet. And if it ain’t measles and pneumonia, it’s your bowels. Yes sir, what war does to a man’s bowels—dysentery and things like that--,” at which point his family escorts him away from the crowd, since he’s embarrassing them.

            Finally, there’s Rhett’s response when he denies the war is sacred: “All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down With Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’” I imagine Christoph might have thought, and sometimes Lebensraum, racial purity, and all that came with Nazism as he looked at the ruins all around him.

            As we witness from afar the devastation in Ukraine as well as Gaza, I think we should consider ourselves fortunate to have escaped such devastation in the United States. So far. As we risk both being pulled into an international conflict and the threat of a civil war here at home if national elections don’t go one way or another, I hope we will take a deep breath and realize how lucky we have been, and how unlikely it is that we would escape such devastation in a future war. And I hope world leaders who keep us on the brink of international conflict and those who talk of a “new civil war” realize just what they would risk for themselves and their fellow citizens if either came to be.

            In Christoph’s letters we’ll meet Emil Fuchs, who becomes very important in Christoph’s development and career. Emil’s son, Klaus infamously leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets. My research on Emil led me to Nancy Thorndike Greenspan’s 2020 Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs, which is a well-researched and quite readable biography that discusses the entire Fuchs family. The descriptions of Germany as Hitler and his thugs seized power is enough to make one wonder if it could happen here. The actions of the Nazis forced Klaus, who was an active member of the Socialist Democratic Party, to flee to Paris and then to England, where, after the war began, he would become an internee for a period of time as an enemy alien. Greenspan’s description of the conditions the internees endured is almost unbelievable and include short rations and one shower a month! Klaus was interned first at Huyton, followed by the Isle of Man, and finally in Canada before being allowed to return to England, where he would work on England’s atomic bomb project. He would eventually work on the Manhattan Project in Manhattan, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge before returning to England. He was arrested on espionage charges on February 3, 1950. His arrest was front-page news around the world, and on February 9, 1950, an emboldened Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he claimed to have a list of 205 communists who worked in the U.S. State Department. Thus, Klaus Fuchs contributed to McCarthy’s four-year reign of terror, which caused a great deal of paranoia and misery and ended the careers of many in academia and Hollywood, many of whom ended their own lives. An interview Klaus Fuchs had with the FBI led to the eventual arrest and 1953 executions of the Rosenbergs. Klaus Fuchs remained in prison until June 23, 1959. The day he was released he was flown to East Berlin and settled in Dresden. Given Christoph’s affiliation with Emil Fuchs, it’s almost certain he met Klaus Fuchs as well as Emil’s nephew, Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski, who became a student at the University of Leipzig in 1956.

            In 1949, Emil Fuchs was living in Frankfurt, which was in the American Zone. The University of Leipzig offered him a position as a professor of Christian ethics and the sociology of religion. This was the position that would bring Emil Fuchs into Christoph’s life. It was also one of the stated reasons the British government used to investigate Klaus Fuchs, although by the time Emil took the position at Leipzig the investigation had been ongoing for quite some time. 

            The book is available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.