What my Father Never Told Me

The father was a physicist, privately flew model aeroplanes and always tinkered with little machines of all kinds. After 1952 he was a manager for chemicals manufacturer Hoechst. He was a devout Catholic and the first in his family to study at university. When the father died in 1982, he left his son a cabinet of documents, including significant papers dating back to NS times. He had been employed in military physics and had thus been exempt from active military service. As papers from the Reich patent office show, he worked extensively on ignitions as well as on communication systems for small submarines.

Hermann Kurzke’s book is much more than his search for evidence. The great scholar of German literature and biographer of Thomas Mann goes beyond the documents to use inner monologues and fictional conversations in an attempt to breach the silence. The book works to get inside that silence, also via silent witnesses: An engraving of Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University on a wall of the parental home marked the father’s lifelong dream to teach in higher education. Somewhere, there was always a quadrant from his time with the submarines. And there was a wall hanging with a comforting biblical verse from a time of unemployment.