Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen
write about my life I must admit I began looking for parallels, good and bad. It seems noteworthy that while I crossed continents to travel as far away from the town of my birth as possible, my maternal grandfather moved from the southernmost eastern part of Germany to its northernmost city. Does that mean we have something in common? Unlike me, however, he stayed within the ‘Fatherland’. As the third son of a forester, he would have been paid off, rather than succeed to an estate. Trying to build a career in business, he first went to Breslau (Wroclaw), then to Berlin and Hamburg. It was in the Northern Hanseatic city that he met and married my grandmother, an attractive young woman orphaned by the city’s devastating cholera epidemic. When Otto was invited to run a branch office of a large tobacco company in Flensburg, my grandparents moved to the German-Danish border town. Both my mother and my uncle were born there. Today Otto and Lina Bluschke share a peaceful grave in the New Cemetery of Flensburg.
Perhaps the development of my mother’s father, first into a Prussian nationalist then a ‘master race’ German Nazi, can be ‘explained’ historically. His own ambivalent origin — there was more than a hint of Polish and Gypsy influence in the Bluschke Silesian family background — may have led him to overcompensate for his perceived lack of ‘pure Aryan’ appearance, especially in the big cities and cultural centres of Breslau, Berlin and Hamburg. It appears Otto Bluschke had an overwhelming need to belong. Travelling in search of a profession from the far south-eastern forests to Germany’s northernmost fishing port, ironically he moved from one controversial border area to another. It could be said that over generations my family quite literally led a borderline existence. Could it be that the widely discredited literary historian, anthropologist and folklorist Josef Nadler was right in at least one of his controversial nationalist and racist assertions, namely that human culture and political consciousness are shaped by native environment? If many of his writings had not prepared the ground for Germany’s emerging National Socialism, such an observation would perhaps have been accepted as almost self-evident.
Otto Bluschke’s commitment to an Aryan Nazi Germany cost his children dearly. During the Second World War his son Bodo was captured in Russia and spent many years in a Siberian prison camp. On his return home I remember that as a child I simply could not understand how the skeleton in front of me could still be walking. The term ‘dead man walking’ wasn’t yet coined. My mother, Bodo’s sister, had kissed her husband goodbye: the great catch and dashingly good-looking young man she’d married joined the International Red Cross to rescue the wounded and dying on the battlefield. He disappeared for over a decade, during which my mother ran Marius Jürgensen’s old chemist shop The Imperial Eagle in the heart of town while raising her three boys. I have already mentioned that she was awarded the title of ‘German Mother’ and received a New Testament signed by Adolf Hitler. In the final years of the war she came close to starvation.
The Bluschkes at least didn’t seem to suffer greatly while others, including members of their own family, were struggling to survive. In one of his letters my cousin remembers how, for Christmas 1944, their festive fare consisted of bouillon with two eggs, a potato fritter and apple sauce. The following day my grandparents enquired how their relatives had spent the festive season. After listening to an enthusiastic report of what my aunt, uncle and cousins considered a special wartime treat, my grandmother condescendingly replied: ‘How wonderful for you! We’ve had roast goose as always. Otto is such a good provider. With his position in the party he has little trouble organising these things, you know. We are truly blessed.’ The exchange gives some indication of the most painful border separating the family in good times and bad. There would not have been too many citizens of Flensburg enjoying goose shortly before the end of Hitler’s war.
We lived in a street called Castle Wall, high above the centre of the city with a glorious view across the harbour. My grandparents’ dwelling was located nearby at Castle’s Rest, and the primary school I attended from 1946 was in Castle Road. The curious thing was that no castle was to be seen anywhere. As so often in Europe, streets and monuments paid homage to times long gone by. Flensburg’s medieval Duburg castle, an ancient building of Viking origin restored in 1409 by Queen Margarethe of the Nordic Union, had in fact all but disappeared in 1719. It only survives in an entire network of streets bearing witness to its historical glory: Shield Bearer Street, Tiltyard, Tourney Square, Knights Street, Castle Square, Duburg Street, Horsemen’s Stable (the latter serving as the location of the local brothel). As always, what’s left of the past is language. One can only guess what effect verbal aggrandisement may have had on the local population.
In 1945, for reasons unknown to me, my mother and her children moved from Castle Wall to a hilly street closer to the heart of town. Its name was odd and controversial for historical reasons of a different kind: Toosbuystrasse. Only much later did I detect another thinly veiled portent reflecting the nature of our new home. Toosbuy was not only the name of a Flensburg burgomaster. It also had a very interesting etymology: the meaning of ‘büy’, corresponding to ‘by’ as in ‘by-law’, is ‘community’; the prefix ‘toos’ the ‘Angelish’ equivalent of ‘two’. Hence people who choose to live in Toosbuystrasse should by rights be proud to identify themselves with their city’s two different communities — the German and the Danish, or more precisely, the German majority and the Danish South Schleswig minority, corresponding to the Danish majority and the German minority across the border in North Schleswig, the country Hitler invaded the year I was born. The importance of such bilingual, bicultural relations was severely tested when Germany lost the war and Flensburg was occupied by British and Norwegian troops.
The concept of Toos-Büy wasn’t confined to etymological subtleties. It began to reflect the tense conflict raging in many local families, including my own. The cobblestone road leading from elevated Castle Square down to the low ground of the harbour featured beautiful turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau apartment buildings. Diagonally across from our new home was a Danish cultural centre called Ansgar (after the missionary Archbishop of Bremen [801-865] known as the ‘Apostle of the North’). Once a year, on the first of May, the Danes of Flensburg celebrated their cultural identity with a march through the city. On that occasion many Toosbuy locals displayed the Danebrog (Danish flag) in support of the march of their fellow countrymen. My mother had planted rows of tall vetch in our balcony flower boxes. On the day of Danish celebration she crowded them with dozens of German Schleswig-Holstein paper-flags. Two communities living in one street wasn’t quite the same as sharing one border. In the post-war years all kinds of new borders were drawn, and most of them proved too close for comfort.
It seems shame and defeat don’t necessarily lead to wisdom and contrition. Once Otto Bluschke had been ‘de-nazified’ he defiantly continued to wear his old mustard-coloured uniform in his home. ‘Now with a vengeance!’ my grandfather shouted at no one in particular. In the minds of some people reality and history are moveable feasts. While dressed in his favourite uniform my grandfather issued domestic orders. One of them was his demand that I should part my hair ‘like an officer’. In the afternoons and early evenings he ruled over a game of chess with one of his grandsons, either Claus or myself. Still clad in his outfit of ‘the glory years’ and smoking a Havana, he invariably suffered inglorious defeats at the hands of his unmilitary and generally unstable grandchildren. In my grandfather’s eyes all but Peacetime Holger were degenerates. Upon yet another defeat Otto Bluschke would frequently overturn the chessboard in a gesture of defiance. He really displayed all the hallmarks of a Nazi German general. My lasting memory of him became his peacock entrance one morning after he’d spent at least half an hour in the bathroom. Triumphantly he wore a ‘moustache band’ or gauze net that fastened comfortably around the waxed moustache so as to retain its shape during sleep. The contraption reached from the upper lip to the ears. It looked to me as if my grandfather was wearing a bra across his face.
Relocating to the new inner city address took my family to a large apartment that, despite its accommodating appearance, was to become a place of degradation and horror for me.
A number of events stand out from the mist of early childhood memories. One was my first attempt to run away from home when I was four years old. I made it down to the harbour and managed to hide in a deserted