I Come from the Long Line of Brockhaus

Some thoughts on heritage, inspired by Ben Macintyre's "Prisoners of the Castle"

A cropped version of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818

When my grandmother, Ilsa, was a girl she lived in Germany, the daughter of a skilled engineer and the progeny of a line of notable intellectuals. Her clan, the Brockhaus family (likely the same one that inspired the reference in The Fellowship of the Ring), included the publishers of a popular German encyclopedia, well-known art dealers, and old money politicians. Somewhere along the way one of her ancestors even married notorious composer Richard Wagner. This was an old and affluent family, part of the German elite, relevant not just for its name or crest (which, I recall, included a pineapple), but for its contributions to nineteenth century German culture. They were academics and lawmakers, doctors and lawyers; people who mattered. But in the late nineteenth century the family had a falling out, divided on the lines of religion and rationalism. My grandmother’s side turned towards pietism and faith, while the other side abandoned their religious roots. One side turned towards the legacy of German Christianity, the other towards the fashionable principles of the German Enlightenment.

And then came the twentieth century and with it two world wars and economic disaster and the rise of the Nazi party. Quickly, Germany fell from grace. No longer the country of Luther and Bach and Kant and, yes, the Brockhaus clan, it soon became known as the sworn enemy of the civilized world.

My great-grandfather was born just before World War I and came of age in Weimar Germany, while my Oma and her five siblings grew up near Berlin during World World II and came of age in West Germany in the midst of the Soviet occupation of the East¹. So, as with many German families, their story is marked by dissonance and contradiction. They were deeply religious people, Evangelical Christians who disliked the Nazi party and seemingly knew nothing of the atrocities perpetrated toward their Jewish neighbors; yet they had to live with the knowledge of what they had missed (or perhaps, in some cases, simply ignored). They were proud of the Germanic cultural heritage but dismayed by the violence and evil begotten by it, too.

I remember visiting my grandmother in her small Milwaukee apartment where she lived alone. She wasn’t a warm person and in that way she was a bit of German stereotype. She displayed a natural coolness exacerbated, I suspect, by how far she lived from her family, but which was surely cultivated by her childhood experiences. In a way I have come to view her and her apartment as a sort of objective correlative for the enduring influence of the wars on her homeland. I have vivid memories of her furniture (earth-toned and simple and joyless, including a stiff pull-out couch we sometimes slept on), of her many German trinkets and works of art, of photographs of family members still in Europe, of her broken English and distrust of cultural institutions. I remember her apartment as a lonely place, lived in by someone who was never fully at home there. Even as a child I recognized an inherent sadness in her.

Perhaps because of this I have always been unsure of how to feel about my German heritage. I loved my grandmother and appreciated German food and architecture and folklore and many other things that the family shared with us. But like most young American men I grew up thinking of Germany as the enemy at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, as the devilish evil overcome in the name of World Order. As the bad guy in Call of Duty and Die Hard and Rocky. It took a while for me to recognize, to truly think about and internalize, the reality that Bach and Kant and Luther came from the same ground as Hitler and Himmler. That we all come from the same ground of evil-doers. It’s a troubling thought that now, as an adult, I think about all the time. There but for the Grace of God and so forth.

The Brockhaus family has been on my mind lately because of Ben Macintyre’s book, Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison.

Macintyre writes historical non-fiction, often about spies and heroes in unlikely places, and in this one he tells the thrilling story of the most infamous prison of World War II—from the perspective of both captives and captors. Colditz was a prison on a hill, an impenetrable medieval castle used primarily to house the Nazi’s most difficult POWs, regardless of nationality. French, English, and American soldiers were locked up alongside their Dutch, Polish, and Czechoslovakian counterparts. Many of them spent more than four years inside the castle, attempting escape over and over again increasingly innovative and theatrical ways. A few made it clear of the walls; even fewer made it out Germany. In Macintyre’s hands, the story of this place reads like a thriller, like a LeCarre novel, replete with a memorable cast of compelling characters.

But exciting as it is, I found the book more moving than thrilling. I was moved by the fortitude and creativity of men who repeatedly attempted to escape, not simply so they could be free, but so they could return to the fight. I was moved by the way men from different places, who spoke different languages and came from different cultures, found ways to coalesce, create common bonds, and build a mini society that helped them survive the physical and mental strain of being a POW. I was moved by the way they looked out for each other. And I was also moved by the way the prisoners and their guards grudgingly came to respect one another. Colditz was a POW camp, it was a prison, it was devoid of comfort² and pleasure and it was a brutal place. But in many ways it was also more civilized than the rest of the war. As Macintyre tells it, a sort of code began to emerge, a grudging respect from the German guards for the ingenuity and personality of their prisoners, and from the prisoners for the relative respect offered them by their guards.

The head of security at Colditz was a man named Rheinhold Eggers, a teacher before the war, who was determined to treat his prisoners with dignity. He thought of them as similar to a classroom of unruly students. He hoped to control them, but not to batter them. Crucially, Eggers never joined the Nazi party and from the beginning viewed it as wrong-headed. For this he came under fire from certain authorities, and was never fully trusted by the Gestapo. He was viewed suspiciously on more than one occasion and narrowly avoided being detained by his own side. As details of the atrocities of the party began to emerge, he became disgusted with his countrymen, disillusioned regarding his country’s future. So he sought to go another direction. In the end, the vast majority of the prisoners under his watch survived the war and returned home to their families. Some even spoke of Eggers with something akin to awe. He was a tough but oddly gentlemanly soldier fighting for an army that could be as barbaric as any force in history. In that I see a microcosm of being German in the twentieth century. Isn’t that one of the great lessons of history? Some men value the humanity in other people, while others seek to destroy it.

When I think of the Brockhaus family I think of their commitment to beautiful things, of their faith and creativity and intelligence. I also think of my grandmother’s sadness and of what they and so many of their countrymen missed (or ignored). I think of the fact that Corrie Ten Boom (author of The Hiding Place) once slept in my grandmother’s bed, but that a Brockhaus before her also shared a bed with Richard Wagner, the man who composed Hitler’s favorite piece of music. I am drawn to my German heritage because it is made up of Luther and Bach, but also because it contains a warning. It reminds us all to be watchful and careful and aware. No nation has ever been so good it can stop guarding its own soul.

Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother thought of her lonely little apartment as a prison. Did she, too, feel locked away, far from home, alien?

Can any of us escape the heritage we’re born into?

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From around the Bookish Web

• Gary Saul Morson on Eugene Vodolazkin’s novels (in the New York Review of Books)

• Ted Gioia on Sigrid Unset’s journey from secretary to Nobel Prize winner

• Also from Gioia: Some thoughts on Barnes and Noble’s surprising turnaround.

• Nicole Miller on Paul Newman’s love of literary adaptations (for LitHub). Related: I love Paul Newman.

• The 103 best book covers of 2022

• Jillian Hess on twelve ways to use a diary (from her Substack, Noted)

• Joel Miller’s tips for reading more in the new year (this is a very good Substack, too)

• Grace Olmstead’s delightful winter reading list

• Bruce Riordan on the delightful Lincoln Lawyer books (for Crime Reads)

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That’s all for now. What are you reading these days?

1. Family lore tells that my great-grandfather was an engineer who the Soviets wanted access to, so he piled his family's belongings onto a cart and all eight of them sneaked through the woods into the Allied sector of Berlin to avoid the Soviet authorities. Supposedly, they crept through a forest full of Soviet troops but were never noticed. My grandmother said it was a miracle.

2. One of the book’s fascinating details concerns the way the Red Cross provided a wide variety of comforts, from shaving supplies to food to correspondence from home, the deliveries of which were often guaranteed (and watched closely) by the Swiss. Well, until the fall of Berlin, that is.