Leichte Sprache
DGSI am very pleased to return your questionnaire, as I appreciate aktuell very much. It is always a very good read, both in German and in English. I can read German quite well but I have never mastered the grammar, so it is a struggle for me to speak it and I am too ashamed to write in German.
When I left Germany on the Kindertransport, at age 4 years and one month, apparently I could talk endlessly and fluently in German. As soon as we (my 7-year-old brother and I) reached our first foster family, we were forbidden to speak German so that we could learn English very quickly and without any accent. After the war, in 1949 when my father had returned to Germany from 9 years in Shanghai, I was forced to go back to Germany on a court order against my will. I had been thoroughly brain-washed against Germany through British propaganda all through the war and after. I was terrifed of Nazis and Germany and furious at being forced to go to Germany. I learnt German very quickly because I wanted to understand what people were talking about – especially about me! But I expressed my fury and contempt for Germany by deliberately muddling the grammar. I can enjoy reading novels now but I can only speak and write very incorrectly.
As an adult, through reclaiming my very confused identity and getting back my self-esteem and confdence in a very stable and happy marriage, I have come to terms with my original fear and anger but I have not been able to master German grammar. As my brother chose to settle in Germany with a German wife, I now have a lot of relatives and friends both in Berlin and the Frankfurt area and enjoy visiting Germany at least twice a year. I have been three times already this year: in January to the press conference in Berlin of the TV film “Landgericht”, in February to give three presentations of my book in German translation, in May to show the film and lead discussions on it at Limmud.de, and now I will be coming to Berlin again to contribute to an international conference in the Reichstag on “Sexual Abuse as a Weapon of War”.
Through Ursula Krechel’s 2012 prize-winning novel “Landgericht” and the ZDF film of it, I have been inspired to find out more about my father’s story. This led to the president of the Landgericht in Berlin Littenstraße, where my father was a judge until the Nazis drove him out in 1933, organizing an event in his honour in 2015, which gave him the recognition that was denied him in his life-time – so poignantly portrayed in the novel and the film.
As the novel and the film “Landgericht” are fiction – my father goes to Cuba whereas in reality he fled to Shanghai and there was no affair and daughter with a Cuban woman as in the film – I have written a play of the real story which may reach the London stage this year or next.
With many thanks and all good wishes