Mischling, Second Degree : My Childhood in Nazi Germany Book

Despite the fulsome blurb and the slightly less uncritical Foreword, this is not a particularly extraordinary book. The author leaves out a lot of things she discovered later (for example, her father was undoubtedly forced to divorce her mother, because this was required by the Nuremberg Laws of 1934). Leaving out things the child hadn't known is arguably a sensible decision, although there should have been more footnotes providing updates.

Other things, however, seem to have been deliberately elided. For example, the 'Jewish' grandmother (not Jewish by her own standards, but according to the 'racial' definition of the Nuremberg laws) does die in this book. This is not a spoiler, since the woman was elderly and frail even at the beginning. But it's never explained HOW she dies. The first-person narrator simply states at one point that her father has told her that her grandmother couldn't live much longer--and that the father will notify the child when the grandmother dies. Then it's never mentioned again.

The child, remembered by her adult self, is no sort of angel. As with most pre-teens and teenagers, she's often angst-ridden. She tends to assume that people treat her badly because they don't like her, making little allowance for harsh circumstances, which she understands as a child does. She does, however, accede to many of the proscriptions her family imposes on her, because she knows they will cause her family trouble if they come to light. In short, she's a fairly ordinary child--in very extraordinary times.

This is not, by the way, a diary. There may have been diaries, though it doesn't seem that likely. Many of the things Ilse Koehn (properly, by the way, this surname should contain an umlaut) discusses in this book are things that would have got herself and her extended family in a LOT of trouble at the time. For example, she joins the Jungmadelbundchen (the female auxiliary of the Hitlerjungend) essentially because she's required to: but her father warns her not to take any kind of leadership position. Ilse doesn't quite understand this, and her father doesn't really explain it: but he probably kept apprised of the pronouncements on the BBC (which it was forbidden to listen to on pain of death, so he wouldn't have told Ilse the details), and would probably have known that the youth would not have been put on trial, UNLESS they were in leadership positions.

Most of the people Koehn describes were not unusual. A great many people essentially went into 'internal exile' during the Nazi period in Germany. Though they didn't even remotely agree with the Nazis, they realized that they would almost certainly be sent to concentration camps if they openly resisted (or worse: remember the White Rose). So they ducked their heads and tried to avoid notice, and went along with the regime as little as they could get away with.

The descriptions of the war are often of what most people on the 'home front' experienced. On both sides, by the way. The bombing raids were also the same on both sides--bear in mind, for example, that the present Queen of England was sent away to the countryside with her younger sister to escape just such raids. There was one difference: in Germany, both Dresden and Hamburg suffered firestorms, whereas in Britain, only Coventry did. But this was not in the areas where Ilse lived. Where she was, the bombing raids, while terrible, were not the worst.

One warning: there is one situation late in the book which people will find truly horrible. It's while the Russians are advancing, but is NOT the period when the young women were in hiding. That part was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but not the worst. The really bad part involves a (?refugee?) Polish family. I issue the warning because I kept hoping it wouldn't end the way it did--so that others will not hold out hope and be even worse hurt.