Customer Reviews

The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood

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Ms. Mahlendorf has given us a brutally honest story of a survivor. Although it reads like a historical novel, it is a true account of her young life as a German in Silesia during the years before, during, and after WWII. Her insights into her own behavior and feelings during those years are remarkable as are her vivid memories which detail the life she lived, the horrors and atrocities she witnessed, and the cultural, political, and economic conditions in Germany during those pre and postwar years. Her honesty and introspection about the permanent psychological consequences of an early life focused on survival is commendable. She helps us to understand a little better what happened and how Germans let it happen.

This book was impossible for me to put down. It was a compelling, beautifully written, and gut-wrenchingly honest, heart-pounding memoir. Reading it, one can't help putting him/her self into the scene and wondering what they would have done and felt had it been them born into and growing up in Nazi Germany. Growing up in America and being raised Jewish during the `40's I had bought totally into the notion that there was a uniqueness about the psyche and collective consciousness of Germans that made allegiance to Hitler if not inevitable, almost irresistable. ("They are militaristic, easily led, don't question authority, etc., etc."). While reading Dr. Mahlendorf's memoir and reflecting on our own very recent history, I realized that the ability to be seduced by a charismatic, articulate, demagogue with a messianic complex is not unique to any one people. That insight was, for me, a valuable albeit frightening revelation. Should be recommended if not required reading for high school and college students.

Mahlendorf's autobiography/memoir is among the three or four accounts written by former Hitler Youths. It is a rare and authentic insight into the daily life of Nazi Germany as experienced by a young girl until she is 16 years of age. The many years that passed since 1945 enables the author to deepen the personal narrative in the political and historical context. Experiencing the time with the author, the reader, knowledgeable about the period, also learns shockingly new things. For instance, what happened at the end of the war to the babies and their mothers designated to be Nazi "breeders." Exceptionally well written, the author connects the problematics of family deprivations with her historical entanglement in the Federation of German Girls. Against great odds, the author is able to transcend and yet remain always caught up in her past.There are few accounts like this one! Superb! There is no shame in this survival!

Ursula Mahlendorf spent a lifetime unpacking the Nazi slogan, "You are nothing, your people are everything," trying to uncover who she was and who she had been. The result of her willingness to look back is an important contribution to memoir literature. She reveals the story of a German youngster who happily hiked with Hitler youth groups and dutifully collected winter clothing for German soldiers. Indeed, when her father died in 1933, she writes that Hitler became a father-substitute for her. By placing her personal experiences growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in a political-historical context, her memoir has great value for students of social history as well as memoir literature. Young Mahlendorf herself was at the time unaware of many of the historical events because of her youth, social controls, survival concerns, and/or location in a small town in rural Silesia (now Poland). Despite increasing demands (physical labor, illness, expanding war, growing deprivation, loss, resettlement to West Germany, lack of food, cultural prejudice favoring sons and brothers), young Ursula held on to her goal of getting a university education. She organized books and tutors to fuel her dream as vigorously as she organized kindling and cabbage to sustain life. While she loved her family and enjoyed a sense of belonging, she read anything she could get her hands on and began to bury her emotions, her fury, anger at adults, resentment, regret, distrust, shame, grief, and loss under a shell of "numbness and toughness" (233). On rare occasions, she permitted herself to be moved by poetry, nature, and music. She received her PhD in German Literature in 1958 from Brown University and remains in the U.S. In the following decades Mahlendorf gradually worked though those buried emotions to produce a compelling story that is well-written, many-sided, thoughtful and honest. As a former grad student of Dr. Mahlendorf's, I am grateful that through her memoir we get to know this remarkable woman better and, more importantly, that we have a new perspective on the personal experience of Germans who grew up during the Nazi period.

Dr. Mahlendorf's is a remarkable coming-of-age story that give an insider's view of an episode in recent history that we all think we know something about. However we do not, most of us, know what it was like to be on the inside of that episode. This story shows us how participation in Nazi politics could be natural and inevitable - a part of organic being in the culture. How does it happen that an intelligent, sensitive, young person becomes a local Hitler Youth leader? In this book you see how it happens, what Hannah Arendt referred to as "the Banality of Evil."

You will also see how, from a position of full immersion in the historically inevitable, a single personality emerges and moves in her own direction, somehow an individual after all, taking a new and honest path without precedent in her experience.

I read this book when it first came out. It should be a best seller because it is completely honest and fascinating. There are few books showing the harm Nazism did to German children. This book is well written and impossible to put down.

This is a profoundly moving account of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany and her lifelong journey to come to terms with her childhood. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more of the human experience.

I thought this was fascinating. You could see how everyone was drawn into the whole culture when Hitler came into power. This was before people knew and realized how evil it was. This young girl had leadership qualities for sure, which she carried into her adult life as a professor. But, at this time, what other options were there? I assume like today, kids want to be part of the group and it was made to look like this was a great group to belong to. She gradually understood that it was not the great thing she had been led to believe. Very smart girl and I imagine it would be difficult to realize you were part of the whole thing back then and to not feel any guilt about all the evil that happened. Even though she as a youngster was certainly not guilty. She did what most kids would do in these circumstances and who were lucky enough not to be Jewish at that time. That whole period is so painful and to grow up there and realize how evil the whole system was, including many of the people, would be difficult. Still, if the adults had not been so gullible and then when they realized what was happening had stood against it, would it have still happened?

None of us knows how we would stand faced with that kind of evil unless we go through it. I certainly don't hold her accountable for any of it, but I do hold the adults who watched it happen and did nothing accountable.

I'm still reading and thinking about this book. I feel like I've stepped right into that world--and it could be me thinking and feeling and choosing the ways that Mahlendorf did as a youth. I'm also learning a great deal of history--autobiographies are my favorite way to learn history and geography--and it's humbling to recognize my own humanity in this particular thread of such a frightening episode in our human story.

Imagine growing up in Hitler's Germany. What is a child to think? What did the children know? How could the holocaust have happened? If you think it's important to understand this, read this book. Mahlendorf didn't have to imagine it; she lived it.