a book for our time

Some thoughts on

Mein Opa, sein Widerstand gegen die Nazis und ich
(My Grandfather, His Resistance Against the Nazis and I)
Nora Hespers
Suhrkamp 2021

Nora Hespers grew up rolling her eyes at her father’s outrageous stories about how his father was an important resistance fighter against the Nazis from the very beginning and how they executed him by hanging him from a butcher’s hook. After her father left the family and disappeared from her life, she never heard the name Theo Hespers mentioned again, as nobody outside the family seemed to be aware of his story. Until the fateful day when a colleague at the broadcaster where she worked casually mentioned that he had written his PhD thesis about her grandad and would she perhaps like to take part in a radio show about him?

This jaw-dropping moment sparked a blog, evolved into a podcast, and eventually crystallised into this very impressive and deeply moving book, which intersperses Theo Hespers’ biography with the journey of discovery undertaken by his granddaughter after she began to realise that the wild stories she heard as a child were largely true, actually. The learning experience that started in autumn 2012 and snowballed through to the completion of the book in 2020 became all the more dramatic as some of the history repeated itself in ways that were unconceivable at the beginning, making it all the more important to pay attention to the lessons of the past.

West Germany honoured the resistance of a very few select people including the White Rose circle around the students Sophie and Hans Scholl, and the July 20 (1944) coup attempt led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The famous book Das Gewissen steht auf by Annedore Leber, which we had on our shelves when I grew up contains biographies of 64 members of various resistance efforts. (An English version has been published as Conscience in Revolt) In the GDR, the emphasis was naturally on communists fighting the Nazi regime, including the group known (in Nazi documents, not in their own understanding) as the Rote Kapelle (featured in the recent movie From Hilde, with love).

As Nora Hespers notes, the resistance of the July 20 movement only awakened at the time when it was obvious that the war was lost. The officers involved had previously served Hitler’s army without resisting too much. In contrast, her grandfather, motivated by a deep Christian humanism (but also critical of church officialdom) recognised and militated against the sheer inhumanity of nazism from the very beginning. Therefore he and his family had to flee to the Netherlands as early as April 1933 and had to flee further when the Netherlands and Belgium were occupied. At one point, Theo had the opportunity to escape from Dunkirk to England but would have had to leave his family behind, which he refused to do.

This early anti-fascist engagement makes it practically inevitable to compare his story to the modern developments. At the stage where we are now, the likes of Theo Hespers are shouting from the rooftops that we have to stop fascism. Other early resisters around him who also feature in the book include Hans Ebeling (nickname Plato) from Krefeld, Max Behretz (executed 1942), Josef Thome, Josef Steinhage (cofounder of the antifascist paper Der Deutsche Weg, Peter Lütsches, Selma Mayer. Many of Hespers contacts were from various catholic movements, but he didn’t fundamentally object to working with communists united in the cause against fascism.

I read this sort of books partly as examples of how to turn family history into something that is relevant and interesting to humans beyond the family circles in question (which worked out amazingly well for the Hespers family). In this case there was an additional overlap of interest as Theo Hespers’ family lived near Mönchengladbach, in the village of Dahl, which is between Mönchengladbach and Rheydt. (Rheydt was merged into the bigger city in August 1929 and demerged at the specific request of Joseph Goebbels, who hails from there, then merged again in the 1970s.) My grandmother Ruth went to school in Rheydt, and the family lived there from 1923 until they moved to Königsberg in 1935. I didn’t spot any familiar names in the book, and she wasn’t quite the same age as Hespers (she’s from 1908, he from 1903) but I love the idea that with enough info about the social networks around both, one could probably find a connection with fewer than the famous six degrees. I was also intrigued by the very fleeting mention on page 53) that Nora Hespers’ great-grandfather might have ended up owning Kaiser’s Kaffee (a chain of grocery stores originating in Viersen).

Speaking of which, I think a book like this should definitely have an index - if only to save me the trouble of noting down all the names and page numbers. The other thing I missed was: What did that colleague write about Theo in his thesis? I may have missed something but I didn't see it mentioned or cited as a source again.

Nora Hespers launched her blog and podcast as Die Anachronistin, a word merged from the German versions of a (female) chronicler and anachronism, as she describes herself as a chronicler fallen out of the time she's writing about. Unfortunately the times have somehow looped back since then, such that this book about how brave people resisted the Nazis in the 1930s has turned into a very important book for our time, not anachronistic at all.

PS This English-language web page from her publishers seems to be an attempt to sell translation rights, which doesn't appear to have worked so far. Would be good to see more international publicity for this story though.