In her memoir TRAUTEROSE (Growing Up in Postwar Munich), Elisabeth Haggblade meditates on the countless moral ambiguities of post-war Europe. Haggblade has a clinical eye and a concise way with words, which not only accounts for this slim volume’s brevity (157 pages) but also the heft that she inserts into each line. The result is a powerful and harrowing account of life in the years after Germany’s debilitation in 1945.

Haggblade knew little of Germany’s surrender first-hand. Born in the latter years of the war, she was given up by her mother to a Bavarian couple who gave her the nickname of the title, which translates as “courageous rose” in honor of her difficult beginning. Her foster father was a member of the SS who christened her elder brother Adolf, served at Dachau before the war, left the organization under a cloud, and struggled with menial jobs in the post-war years, “disenchanted with the Nazi culture.” Abject defeat will do that to people. It is impossible to feel any sympathy for him, and Haggblade does not try to conjure any—though she does note in passing that Jewish “inmates” put in good words for him during his trial, and that she was genuinely fond of him despite his bouts of anger. The family lived in poverty on “watery” unpasteurized butter, dark bread, and meat once a week. Haggblade’s Vati eked out a living as a gardener and rag-and-bone man while her foster mother suffered from increasing ill-health, due to a series of strokes, before dying when Haggblade was ten.

By her early teens, Haggblade was being passed off from pillar to post, finally finding herself at a Catholic home for girls. Schooling was basic and earnest—as Haggblade puts it, “no jokes, no funny sayings”—and conditions were basic. Haggblade often fell ill, with the sisters adopting a grin-and-bear-it approach to care. But her time at school was punctuated by brushes with people who would go on to great things, such as Christine Kaufmann, the actor who, like Haggblade, would emigrate to the United States (she won a Golden Globe and married Tony Curtis), and Joseph Ratzinger, otherwise known as Pope Benedict XVI, with whom Haggblade kept up an intermittent correspondence in the following decades. By now Germany was beginning to prosper after the post-war hunger years, and class divides became more acute.

Haggblade saw education as her way out of poverty, and grasped it—but she did not envisage emigration to the United States with a young American man she barely knew: “I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t speak the language. I didn’t really know the man, nor did he know me. We had known each other only for a few weeks. He brought the ring. All of a sudden, I was engaged. How did this happen?” When in travail, life has a habit of throwing curveballs masked as opportunities. Depression, language issues, and a debilitating longing for her home country (of the sort that any immigrant will recognize) followed. It would have been interesting to discover how Haggblade got on in the end; very little of her life in America is covered, with the ending largely devoted to a discussion of German war guilt. It is a minor wrinkle in a memoir that is sometimes shocking and often sad, but always riveting.

TRAUTEROSE (Growing Up in Postwar Munich) by Elisabeth Haggblade offers an uncompromising, moving, and elegiac memoir of a deprived childhood in postwar Germany.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader