In the fall of 1987, when I was twenty-nine, I moved to Germany, quitting my job as a high-school English teacher in Connecticut to follow a German woman I’d met in a summer literature program. It happened fast: boom, I fell in love, and suddenly there I was, emerging from a train station in the heart of Europe, my worldly possessions crammed into a giant, wheeled suitcase, clattering across the cobblestones toward my new love and what I hoped was a new life as a writer.  

I ended up staying for six years—a big chunk of my adult life, spent among Germans. Home was Mainz, a medieval city on the Rhine where half a millennium earlier, the man our fifth-grade history textbook called “John” Gutenberg had invented an ingenious printing tool that helped usher in the modern era. Some of Gutenberg’s Bibles were housed in the museum near the Mainzer Dom (Cathedral), in a darkened chamber of velvet and hushed reverence—relics doubly sacred, as Book and book, displayed like talismans, as if to ward off the digital ascendancy we didn’t realize was already well underway. 

Living in the town where Gutenberg revolutionized literary production seemed auspicious for someone who was giving up teaching books to try writing them instead. I’d spend all morning writing fiction, and in the afternoon I’d go jogging along the Rhine, pacing myself against barges heading upriver toward Switzerland. On weekends I coached a youth basketball team, a motley crew of inner-city kids who knew just enough English to dub our team, aspirationally, “The Ultimate Gangstas.” Two nights a week I taught English to secretaries and cab drivers, businessmen and retirees—earnest, polite Germans so anxious about making mistakes they’d count ahead in the exercise as we went round the table and rehearse their answers, a stratagem I would sometimes wickedly confound by switching the order at the last second.

My girlfriend was a student at the Universität, and we lived in a shabby-elegant flat in the Leibnizstrasse. Our apartment gazed down on a cobblestone courtyard where a hippie furniture-maker shared space with an avant-garde art gallery, whose black-clad denizens exuded stylish alienation, and with a mosque. The mosque’s handyman, a white-haired, kaftanned Ghanaian named Brimah, had come to Europe in the 1950s as a prizefighter, and once showed me a tattered photo of himself, beaming, arm in arm with boxing champ Archie Moore. Down the block was a bustling neighborhood Lokal, Zum Backblech, where we’d go for big plates of bürgerlich German food. The apex of its cuisine was a stupendous party platter featuring giant slabs of meat, including schnitzel “Hawaii” (topped with a slice of canned pineapple), piled together with vegetables and potatoes and decorated with a sparkler, the colossal production arriving at your table heralded by a hissing shower of pyrotechnics—a combination of gaiety and gluttony so spectacular that the first time my girlfriend and I ordered it, we burst out laughing. She found the place kitschy, but I loved it, all those dishes that brought out the fairytale look and sound of the German language, Rumpsteak mit Zwiebeln, Jägerschnitzel, Rahmschnitzel mit Pfifferlingen.  

Every day in my new life brought some revelation, small or large. This was before email and smartphones, before Netflix and Amazon and Google Translate and everything else that would shrink the globe so drastically in the new century to come. In 1987, when you were far away, it felt like being far away. Every time I left the apartment, my mind bedeviled by whatever story I was writing, it seemed as if I were walking into a far richer story that the world itself had written. I was turning thirty, newly in love and living in a faraway land, with all my senses wide open.

Though I had German ancestors, I didn’t know much about the country, and I found a lot of it baffling. Like the stilted formality of people referring to colleagues as Herr or Frau So-and-So, or the bizarre prospect of a little old lady in the supermarket who held her dog up to the butcher counter and asked little Schatzi what cut of Fleisch he wanted for dinner. Some of the strangeness was funny, and some wasn’t. One day on my way home from the market, I watched a young guy in a VW pizza-delivery car attempt to spare himself the trip around three sides of our block by zipping the wrong way along the fourth. This challenge to the iron law of the Einbahnstrasse thrilled me—I myself had been shouted at for going the wrong way on a bicycle—and I watched in the keen hope that a car would come up the block. Sure enough, no sooner had the pizza guy started out than a Mercedes sedan turned in at the next street. Pizza Guy pulled meekly over, giving the sedan ample room to pass. Instead, however, Mercedes Man drove up nose to nose with the VW—then backed it down the block, flashing his lights and honking his horn the whole way, making the pizza man eat his crime, meter by meter. It was an astonishing performance, a brazen exercise of power and intimidation, and I thought, “Now this is German.”

Back at the apartment each evening, I would share the day’s impressions with my girlfriend. She couldn’t help noticing that my insights about Germans tended to coalesce around certain ominous themes. “Americans have such a narrow view of Germany,” she complained. “The only thing you really know about us is the Nazis.”

It was true. My views of Germany had been shaped by war movies and TV shows, and by the stories of my father’s best friend, Joe, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Before moving to Germany, I’d read journalist William L. Shirer’s massive chronicle, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with its vivid first-person account of Nazi thugs running amok in the streets of Berlin. I was enormously curious about World War II, Hitler, and the Holocaust. And now these were no longer merely theoretical realities. Our flat was two blocks from the site of Mainz’s former Hauptsynagogue, a lavish neoclassical structure that had been destroyed in the rampages of Kristallnacht in 1938; all that remained were three crumbling pillars fashioned into a memorial. I would stand on our balcony, looking over rooftops toward the Hindenburgstrasse and the ruins of the synagogue. Soon it would be fifty years since the terror that had been unleashed on these very streets, and a time was coming when the living reality of eyewitness testimony would yield to the impersonal collective narrative of history. Sometimes it was as if I could feel it happening, the slow shift of eras, like a glacier massively but perceptibly moving. Yet people were still alive—right now, and here!—who had been present at terrible events. I wanted to get their stories before it was too late.

Eventually the chance arose. For my lunch break I sometimes took a sandwich to the park at the end of the block. Turkish women pushed strollers through the rose garden; a pergola sheltered a klatsch of winos who sat around drinking and cackling in mirth. Next to the pergola stood a long table where a group of retired men gathered daily to play chess. They all looked to be around seventy, which meant that they would have been teenagers when Hitler came to power and in their twenties during the war—soldiers all, certainly. These old men, I decided, would be my eyewitnesses; they would be my way in. They were the grandfathers that Germans my age shuddered over in dread. What had Opa done during the war? 

I knew enough about German reserve—especially among older people—to know that I should proceed slowly. For a week or so I simply watched them play. Eventually I gathered up my courage and asked if I might join in. 

Aber sicher! one man said. But of course! He made a welcoming gesture, like a maître d’, beckoning me to a chessboard. Sie sind Amerikaner, nicht?

Thus did I end up playing an hour of chess every day, five days a week, with a group of men who had once goose-stepped in Hitler’s army. 

They were dour figures, old men who traded toneless jokes and faced the dwindling of their circle with a stoicism verging on pleasure. Bad news about Herr X, they’d murmur as they moved pieces across the boards; cancer. They’d survived the war only by not being sent to the slaughterhouse of the eastern front; they knew they had been lucky, and when one died now, it was as if an error made long ago was finally being corrected. 

By dint of a mighty effort, I had come to speak passable German, which helped ease me into the circle; bit by bit, I became a regular in a shifting group of around a dozen. A few were daily stalwarts. The mild Herr Koppius; Herr Mallon, whose hobby was puzzles; Herr Pauli, stationed for part of the war at Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s headquarters; Herr Pinkernail, who spoke English and as a POW had served as translator for a British officer; and Herr Zeiss, the group’s intellectual, dressed formally in trench coat and fedora, furled umbrella hung on his arm, discoursing with genial pomposity on German history and the glories of Frederick the Great. Though one or two were widowers, most still had wives; they would play for an hour, until the church bell rang one o’clock, then promptly disperse to their apartments, where their wives would have lunch ready. 

As weeks passed, I sensed they had come to enjoy my presence, der junge Amerikaner. Eventually they grew comfortable enough to tell me about their families and hobbies—and to air their views. Our neighborhood was home to many so-called “guest workers,” and one day a group of boisterous Turkish teenagers gathered in the park, leaving some litter behind when they left, and the old men tsk-tsked. All these foreigners, Herr Zeiss sighed. Diese Ausländer.

“Aber ich bin auch Ausländer,” I said. 

“Sie?” He laughed. “Herr Cooper, wir meinen nicht Sie!”—Mr. Cooper, we don’t mean you! The others nodded eagerly.

I thought about one of my Ultimate Gangsta basketballers, a Black kid named Tony, son of a German woman and a long-absconded American GI. German was his only language, yet all his life he’d had to suffer the indignity of elderly German ladies patting him on the head and exclaiming, “Aber du sprichst so gut Deutsch!” As a white man I benefited from the flip side of Germany’s racialized notions of identity, and I couldn’t help but find something uncomfortable in the honorary citizenship the old men conferred on me. At any rate, I had their confidence. One day Herr Zeiss was expatiating on the Allied bombing runs and the destruction they had brought to the neighborhood, and I decided that the time had come.

What about the building in the Hindenburgstrasse? I asked. Had that been destroyed in the bombing?

Herr Zeiss peered past me, with an unaccustomed frown, toward where the ruins stood half-hidden beneath stately sycamore trees. “Ah,” he said, “you mean the synagogue.” I’d never heard the word in German before, zoo-nah-goga. “No, that was destroyed earlier.”

“By the Nazis,” Herr Mallon added. “In 1938.”

I asked if any of them had been there. Uneasy shifting around the table. “Herr Cooper,” said Herr Koppius finally. “We believed that all that with the Jews”—das mit den Juden—“was wrong. But what could we do? We were afraid ourselves.” At length he recounted an encounter on a train with “a well-dressed, fine-looking lady” who demurred when he offered her his seat, showing the yellow star on her sleeve—whereupon he insisted she take the seat. “Such things could get you sent to the KZ,” he said, using the abbreviation for concentration camp. “But I did it anyway.”

It was stunning to think how much moral ballast a story like that had provided, and for how long. I was silent, and Herr Pauli glanced up from his chess board. “Wissen Sie, wir reden nie darüber,” he said, quietly. We never talk about this. 

Did he mean with strangers, I asked, or among themselves?

“Neither,” he answered.

Back at the apartment that evening I recounted the exchange to my girlfriend. Was it really possible, I asked her, that these men had lived a half century since the Nazi regime and never talked about it—not even among themselves, not even with their wives?  

“I am quite certain they never do,” she said. “Think about my mother.” 

I knew what she meant. My girlfriend’s mother was a kindhearted woman who exuded a nervous, alarmed quality. The two of us had stayed at the family house for a few days while her parents were away, and I was astonished to find the bathroom shelves stocked with enough toilet paper and toothpaste to last a year. What’s your mother running here, I joked to my girlfriend, a boarding house? The answer was wrapped up in the experiences of her mother’s wartime childhood in Poland, where her father—my girlfriend’s grandfather—had been sent to help run a munitions company. The family took over a house that had belonged to a displaced Polish family, only to flee three years later, as Russian troops rolled in from the east. Though decades had passed, the excessive stocking of the bathroom suggested a permanent state of emergency, an anxiety bordering on neurosis. This was a complicated thing. Her family had been deployed as part of Hitler’s master plan to colonize the Slavic lands, subjugate their people and exploit their resources. And yet it was clear she herself had been traumatized—the imprint of fear and guilt leaving a woundedness preserved by silence. That lifelong silence engendered my girlfriend’s skepticism about my chances of ever getting the old men to unburden themselves. 

“Good luck,” she said, doubtfully. 

And yet the next day my chess partners showed up eager to talk. They were fortunate, they said, to have a reasonable American to engage with; they wanted to correct some mistaken perceptions the world had about them. Point by point they ticked them off. The Hitler Youth—I’d asked about it—was little more than harmless scouting. The roundup of the Jews was to be a resettlement to Palestine or Madagascar; no one had known what was really happening. And as for the Holocaust itself, yes, it was terrible—but terrible things were done to people all the time. Even by Americans. Herr Koppius insisted that his American captors in the POW camp where he was held at war’s end starved the prisoners, and when German women brought pots of soup, the guards machine-gunned them. Evil happened everywhere; German evil was different only in that the world paid attention. They weren’t complaining, the men insisted. The price of losing a war was Siegerjustiz—victor’s justice—and Germany had lost the war. If they had won, they themselves would have done the same thing, writing a version of history that damned the Allies. 

Behind their wall of polite imperturbability, the cynicism was cordial and absolute. Or perhaps they truly saw themselves as entirely blameless. None of them had been Nazis, they insisted—mein Gott, nein, Herr Cooper! And none had had any idea what was happening in the concentration camps during the war. I pressed further. What about the years before the war, right here in Mainz? I asked. What had they thought, seeing neighbors’ houses and shops ransacked, old men beaten up on the street, a house of worship in flames? 

Furchtbar, the group commented gravely, eine schlimme Zeit—a terrible time. But it was a generalized regret, with nothing personal in it, no hint of any concrete individual memory. Then Herr Pauli looked up from his chessboard. 

“I was there,” he said, quietly, and nodded back over his shoulder toward the Hindenburgstrasse. “The night the synagogue was destroyed. I was a schoolboy, fifteen years old. I saw this happen.” 

All the men fell silent. Herr Pauli frowned, uncertain how to continue. “Herr Cooper, from the beginning we were taught that the Jews were bad,” he said finally. “The Jews were at fault, they were less than human, they were rats, they were a pestilence. When a child hears this over and over from adults at school, at home, in the church, he comes to believe it.” He looked up at me. “We believed it.”

Mutters from the group, but Pauli held up a hand to silence them. “You know,” he said to me, “after the war we were forced to look at pictures from the KZ. I saw pictures of Bergen-Belsen, and I tell you, when I saw them, I was ashamed to be German.” 

The other men dropped their gazes. This was the inadmissible utterance, the confession they’d evaded for half a century. I thought about the times I’d come up against something curdled and bitter in the character of older Germans. It was what I’d seen when Mercedes Man humiliated the teenaged pizza delivery driver in our street: this ready rage older Germans carried for blasting away at petty infractions, a kind of bellicose conformity in the procedures of daily life. At heart I took it to be a bitter rearguard argument about individual responsibility and the Third Reich. See? they were saying, This is the kind of people we are, who respect authority; so don’t ask us to be the kind of people who could have stood up to Hitler! And now Herr Pauli had given voice to the hurt behind it. Here—at last—was someone revealing what the Austrian journalist Gitta Sereny called “the healing wound,” the hurt of conscience that makes redemption possible. Ich habe mich geschämt, Deutscher zu sein—I was ashamed to be German.

I would have left it at that, right there. It was what I had set out to get, after all. But Herr Pauli was not done. “Shall I tell you when I freed myself from this shame?” he continued. “I know the moment exactly. It was when I saw what the Israelis did to the Palestinians.” One night on the TV news, he explained, during one of the Israeli-Arab conflicts, he’d watched Israelis round up Palestinians in camps and shoot some of them at random. “They were tough as nails, these Israelis, I’m telling you”—knallhart was his admiring word. “At that moment I realized there are Hitlers everywhere. And so I stopped being ashamed.” 

The old men nodded vigorously. Pitching in, they fleshed out his point with a roster of world evils: the Turks and the Armenians, Stalin’s mass murders, the American sins against slaves and Indians. 

“Der Mensch kann alles, gut und böse,” Herr Pauli pronounced. Man is capable of all good and all evil. 

Behind us I could hear the hubbub of students in the Goetheschule, the grade school where twice a week I ran basketball practice with the Gangstas. I had read that in the spring of 1944, the school building had briefly held the city’s Jews, herded there to be dispatched to Auschwitz. Three thousand Jews had lived in Mainz then; today there was said to be just one, the very last survivor, an eighty-year-old lady living in an apartment nearby, in the neighborhood. I wondered what it was like to be her.  

Herr Zeiss meanwhile was smiling, in his pleasantly pedantic way. “Herr Cooper, have you perhaps read the books of the British historian, David Irving?”

I didn’t know how to say “revisionist” in German. “You mean, the Holocaust denier?” I said. Der Holocaust-Leugner.

“Ah!” Herr Zeiss raised a finger. “Irving does not deny that it happened. He merely says that it was…exaggerated.” Übertrieben was the German word. “The figure of six million has been used to beat the Germans around the head. ‘Six million, six million,’ this is all you hear. But it is exaggerated. David Irving has meticulously shown this to be true. I’m wondering if, as a fellow writer, you have an opinion about his work.”  

“My opinion is that he…he is…” I wanted to say that Irving was a charlatan, an intellectual servant of neo-Nazism, a cynical provocateur, but I found myself tongue-tied. I sputtered: What would Herr Zeiss consider a true number for the Holocaust?

He shrugged. “That’s hard to say—perhaps three million. I believe this is a number that David Irving might approve.” 

“Well, my opinion of David Irving is that he is…a great support to neo-Nazis.” Under pressure, my German was disintegrating. “My opinion is that these are dangerous ideas. They are a way to—to destroy the idea of responsibility completely.” My face was burning but I flailed away anyway. “And what if it was three million instead of six million who were exterminated? Or four million, or two million? Does that make the horror less? Does that make it acceptable? To you or to me or to anyone?” 

“Of course not, of course not,” said Herr Zeiss, backtracking. “This was not my intention. I merely wished to point out that there may have been exaggeration.”  

A long silence ensued, the men fumbling with eyeglasses and chess pieces. It had been a mistake to talk to me, they were doubtless thinking. I wasn’t on their side after all; I was just another American exercising a victor’s justice, dispensing a victor’s judgment.   

Herr Zeiss gazed off into the distance and blinked. I saw a certain look come over him, an expression—disappointed, even wounded, but most of all tired. 

“Naja,” he said, with a slow expiring sigh. “Alles Schnee von gestern.” It’s all snow from yesterday. 

The group returned to the chessboards then, and I shared their relief when, a few awkward minutes later, the church bell tolled the hour and we all went our separate ways.  

In the end, Germany turned out not to be the book of my life, just one especially vivid chapter. My girlfriend and I broke up, and I returned to the United States, where I married someone else, raised a family, and fashioned a writing career. A decade after leaving Germany I returned for a visit and stopped by at the park on my old street in Mainz. None of my chess group was there—and today, twenty years after that, they are doubtless all dead. And I, to my disbelief, am approaching the age that they were then.  

It is all so long ago; and the long-ago is piled atop the longer-ago. I think about die alten Herren in the park, pushing pawns and rooks across the chess boards, all the while sitting atop the jumbled heap of their memories. What was it like for them to explain themselves to me? As a young man I did not grasp the paradoxes of time, whose gift of forgiving goes hand-in-hand with its theft of forgetting. When I was living in Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl coined a trenchant phrase, Die Gnade des späten Geburts, “the mercy of the late birth,” that demarcated the demographic wall separating those who could have witnessed wartime atrocities—or participated in them—from those who couldn’t have. Germany today is dominated by generations who feel little relationship at all to the direness of their country’s history. But back in 1987, those Germans blessed with a late birth were waiting for those cursed with an early one to die, anticipating with relief the lightening of the nation’s moral load and the erasure of the living link to a fathomless evil. And my chess partners knew it. All these years later, I still recall that sigh Herr Zeiss yielded up. It was as if he was feeling it himself: the relief of being mercifully melted away, of being forgotten, vanished like yesterday’s snow. 

This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.