I’ve been a friend with the artist Renata Zerner for quite a few years now, a friendship that developed because of my admiration for her art. Is that not the best form of flattery for an artist? I know for sure that when another artist likes my art, it instantly throws me into a state of great felicity.
Now, hot off the press, Zerner has written a memoir, “Dance on the Volcano – A Teenage Girl in Nazi Germany” (available on Amazon). Her memoir covers the final years of World War II (the later part of 1943 to the first few months of 1945) when Zerner was in her late teens.
Written memoirs are usually the domain of the famous or infamous, not the average plebian caught in the common whirlwind of destruction. I’ve read many a book on spies, generals, soldiers, aviators, political leaders, concentration camp survivors, prisoners of war, and even a memoir by Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, yet I’ve never read a book on the life of an average German, let alone a teenager, who lived during this horrific period. Now, because of Zerner’s new book, I’m happy to report that I have! And I must say, what a read it turned out to be.
The book is written in the voice of a teenage girl, simple and direct. She holds back none of her youthful emotions. I felt throughout the book that her story was less a revisit to her past, than a cathartic endeavor. “Dance on the Volcano” succeeds brilliantly in sweeping the reader into the narrative, into her very personal situations with all the imagery of her experiences vividly conjured in the reader’s mind.
The book starts off with a bang (a pun intended) by describing an early air raid on Berlin. Her father, a former medical officer during World War I, later left the army to establish a thriving medical practice in Berlin and resided in spacious city digs. Like a number of urbane and educated Berliners, he quickly grasped the nonsense and propaganda of the Nazis and continued to treat his Jewish patients as well as employing a Jewish nurse, at least as long as he could.
To escape the bombings Zerner is first sent to a school some distance from Berlin. As the bombings increased, she later joined her mother in the village spa of Bad Wildungen far from Berlin. She relates their problems obtaining food and fuel, and dealing with the black market and the ration cards (“Our official allowance was one egg once a year, at Easter.”). Refusing to abandon his patients despite the danger, her father chose to remain in Berlin, periodically visiting his wife and daughter until he was killed during a bombardment. She describes the retreating German army through the main street of Bad Wildungen shortly followed by the incoming American Army on the very same road.
What makes her story so consistently interesting are her continuous descriptions of what historians have termed, “the atomization of a society,” where a regime has, through fear and the nationalization of every group, isolated each of its citizens from all other citizens. For Zerner it was the dangers of listening to the BBC on her radio, making a wrong statement, or trusting the confidence of others. Paranoia was the best tool for survival.
Her mother was once overheard talking in a restaurant about a recent bombing of the city of Kassel where she simply cited, “So many lives are kaput in this one night.” The next day a police summons arrived for her to see the village mayor. “Mrs. Zerner, I have a report about you that I must investigate”, he said,” It states that you used the phrase, ‘people’s lives are kaput’ when you talked about the last air raid on Kassel. You said it in public, and the person who overheard you thought it most disrespectful…it’s an insult to those who die in air raids. They are war heroes and to say kaput is offensive and demeaning.” Only a generous amount of semantic gymnastics regarding the misunderstanding of her words got her off with a warning and not incarceration. Zerner also mentions that everyday rules were draconian, citing a situation involving a minor theft: “He only stole a chicken, and tomorrow they’ll hang him…so young, about seventeen.”
Much of the book relates her blossoming womanhood during a period of extreme uprooting and the soldiers on leave that she either had to or wanted to date. Especially touching were the love letters from an army officer ten years her senior, Tassilo von Woedke, who had fallen madly in love with her only to ultimately perish on the eastern front.
And yet between very trusted persons there was still time to joke about their existence. Zerner gives us samples, my favorite being about Santa Claus complaining to his helpers. “I have a problem: I know I shall give Goebbels a sexy blond doll for Christmas and Goering a toy airplane, but I don’t know what to get for Hitler, he has broken everything I ever gave him.”
Zerner, her mother, and her sister survived the war but, as for so many including my own family, the war changed everything!