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Note to the American Edition
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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xxxiii NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION In 2006 my German publisher forwarded a letter to me from a German Studies student in Berlin, who told me that several war diaries written by my Uncle Eberhard had come into his possession. He was a collector. It was only by finding a document that had Eberhard’s name on it, left in one of the five notebooks, that he had been able to trace me via the internet, since the journals themselves were unattributed. I was bowled over at this news and remained riveted by this sign from the past for quite a while. The student offered to email me the text, which he had already transcribed, and one month later, at my invitation, he arrived to deliver the small notebooks in person. It wasn’t until I saw Eberhard’s handwriting, so familiar to me from his letters, that I really allowed myself to believe it! After a while the student agreed to turn the journals over to me, so that now they are in my possession. Thanks to this unexpected occurrence, I was given a glimpse, sixty-two years after Eberhard’s death, into quite another aspect of his life, the world he would leave behind when he visited us. I now had a number of answers to my original question of “What had his eyes seen?” although the diaries didn’t answer all of them, naturally, for one thing because they did not cover the entire war. The first two notebooks cover the period of 20 November 1939 until 11 June 1940; the other three range from 10 March 1942 to 6 November 1943. So, for instance, his entries from poland and his first deployment to the Russian front are missing. The last ten months in Normandy and the battles of the retreat through Belgium are also lost. They must have existed, however; the recovered journals are clearly part of a continuous sequence. Just how these five booklets managed to find their way to me in the end will forever remain a mystery. The Berlin student had purchased them two years earlier from an Internet address that appeared no longer to exist. It’s strange to think, for that matter, that those journals must already have touched down in our home in Amersfoort once, since they include Eberhard’s notations of his impressions when he was with us! I retranscribed the contents of the diaries, as accurately as possible this time, while trying to find explanations for much of what is mentioned that I had not heard of before. Next I inserted all of his letters, unabridged and in chronological order, including, therefore, those from the intervals lacking diary entries. That combination of letters and diaries occasionally yielded information, since in his letters he would Note to the American Edition xxxiv write at length about events that were mentioned in his journals only in passing. And conversely, casual remarks in his letters were given a clearer frame of reference by what he had noted privately. But of course even in his private musings he doesn’t reveal everything; they are merely jottings, since he himself already knows what it’s about. For example, “a curious political conversation” doesn’t give you any more to go on, while you would so dearly like to find out what it means. I was occasionally hit with a sense of alienation, of irritation and impatience even; my uncle kept growing more removed from the image of him I had created for myself. I also think that he was far more supportive of Hitler and his war of conquest than I had previously assumed from reading his letters, and that he did not harbor any doubt as to Germany’s right to annex the Netherlands. Eberhard starts each new entry with a notation of his current location, which has made it possible to establish exactly where he was at any given time, at least in the two time frames covered by the diaries. The letters from the last months of his life contain a tone of increasing despair. To explain his long silence, he writes to his cousin Ursel that “so many things went awry that he had a ‘falling out with the world’ and simply did not want to write anymore.” My mother once confided to me that she suspected that Eberhard, in the frame of mind he was in, might have volunteered for the dangerous mission that had proved fatal, because he...