A Path Through Childhood

On September 1, 1939, a six-year-old child observed the waves breaking near the shore on the island of Sylt in the North Sea. She imagined their breaking foam to be made of mermaids' souls. Her childish reverie was broken by her weeping mother, who told her that Germany had invaded Poland. The chaotic return train trip of mother and daughter to Frankfurt served as a prologue to a childhood shadowed by war.

Good-bye to the Mermaids by Karin Finell is a story of the loss of childhood innocence. It is also a story of three generations of women bound together by ties of family but separated by generational status. The women were Oma, the grandmother; Oma's sister, Margaret; Astrid, the mother; and Karin, the daughter. Oma and her unmarried sister, Margaret, had grown up in Utah, but had returned to Germany as orphans to live with relatives. The mother was first a weaver, then a costume designer for an opera company; and Karin, the daughter, was involved in the Hitler Youth. Finell's war was not fought on the battlefield but on the home front, and in that respect her memoir is a useful corrective to accounts of war that emphasize only the battlefield.

A child of divorce, at a time when divorce was socially unacceptable, Karin lived in an all-female household. The three generations lived in reduced circumstances. The grandmother was widowed. Aunt Margaret was a retired nurse. The mother received inadequate child support, having been advised by her father not to accept alimony from her ex-husband. Her career choices also produced limited income. Still these women of upper middle-class background, but with limited income, were adept at making do. Oma was an accomplished cook; Astrid was an expert seamstress; both were experienced at stretching a limited income.

As a child Karin was enmeshed in a web of complex family relationships. Conflict was inevitable between the strong-willed mother and headstrong child, but there was always a strong bond of love between the two. Karin's infrequent visits to an aloof father and a stepmother busy with a new family required adjustments. A loving and caring grandmother and her beloved Aunt Margaret sustained her as she negotiated a path through childhood into adolescence. While she missed having a normal family and in school felt like someone who didn't belong, she admitted that they were a happy family.

Finell's account of life in Nazi Germany is particularly interesting in light of her description of the conflicted political attitudes of individual Germans. Her grandmother and Aunt Margaret were pro-American and pro-democratic and shared with the daughter a hatred of Hitler and his Nazi policies, while Karin, the innocent child, was caught up in the Hitler Youth movement. Her two uncles served in the army but refused to take the oath of fealty to Hitler. Her Uncle Viktor, who had served as a general in the Kaiser's army, had a Jewish stepdaughter who wore around her neck a golden amulet with a cyanide capsule. Her father, when Karin berated the Russians, reminded her that she had Slavic blood. As a newspaper editor he was forced to join the Nazi party.

Children are left out of the equation when decisions are made by nations to go to war, but their worlds are turned upside down by war. The image of British children being evacuated to rural locations is a familiar one to the American public. Less familiar is the story of the evacuation of German children to isolated areas. Finell poignantly portrays the sense of isolation and loneliness she suffered during numerous evacuations from Berlin. On one visit to her father after she had experienced the destruction of the family's apartment building, she was unable to laugh. Evacuations were sometimes made in the company of her grandmother and sometimes not. The evacuations, whether by personal choice or by order of the Nazi regime, meant...