My Frozen Father in a Never-Ending War

In the 1960s, I was a timid child who, unlike my own father in his youth, was bad at playing football and other sports activities. When I was bullied by other boys, I did not know how to defend myself. I had rather developed a fascination with things military, assembling model airplanes where I would fantasize about being a fighter pilot. Twenty years after the war had ended, it was still present in the stories I heard from my mother and my grandparents. They had lost loved ones in the war, and they also vividly remembered the bombing raids on the neighboring city during the last years of the conflict. They, like many other Germans of their generations saw themselves mostly as victims of a smaller group of committed radical Nazis who had ruled the country with an iron fist and seemed to be solely responsible for all the atrocities and the suffering. Unlike the SS, so I was told, the common German soldier had been fighting a clean war. The Holocaust was simply not mentioned.

It was my father alone who completely refused to talk about his time in the war. I only know that he had served as a member of a tank (Panzer) crew in the German army (Wehrmacht) into which he was drafted at the age of 18. I had fantasies that during the war he may have been an energetic and adventurous person unlike the real father I experienced twenty years later. But despite my keen interest about how life was as a soldier he left me alone with my questions.

My dad had been a distant father, whom I did not see much during the week time, because of the long train travel to and from his workplace. He did not seem to be very interested in me when I was small. As I grew older, I began to excel in mathematics and the natural sciences at school. Being now accepted by other kids I developed a greater self-esteem and I think that was something which he may have recognized. I had begun somewhat of a bonding with my dad when I started helping him at the building site of our almost finished new house on th