A SOUP BOWL OF CONFLICTS

"Sie brauchen nur ein wenig Salz und Pfeffer."

("You just need a little salt n' peppah.") — Chef Tell

On November 5, 1943, the tree-lined ridges around Stuttgart, Germany, resembled the nearby Black Forest. They edged and defined the steep-valley makeup of the sweep of the city. Past nightfall, searchlights silhouetted the skyline, and air-raid sirens clarioned.

As they had done for three years, thousands of stoic men, frightened women, and bewildered children spilled out from their residences onto darkened, foggy streets and sought shelter inside large caves dug into the hillsides. There they waited for death or another peaceful respite. The safety of the dugouts assuaged little of their fear as earth-shaking, two-ton bombs exploded above and around them for hours.

A mother's hoarse screams of labor could not be heard over the constant din and the drone of 165 laded Allied bombers. The staccato pops of 49 heavy and light German anti-aircraft gunneries and the percussions of hundreds of detonations echoed loudly up and down the damaged hills and valleys and drowned her cries. Just as surely as Germans gasped their last breaths somewhere in that terrain, her newborn drew its first gulp of life-giving oxygen. It was a wonder that her baby boy survived the night.

Like clockwork, night after terrifying night, Stuttgart skies resounded with the recurrent screams of low-altitude bomber squadron payloads after their release. "Pink Pansy" flares lit up blackened ground sites and guided R.A.F. de Havilland "Mosquitoes" along marked pathways to their intended targets — Stuttgart's fighter-plane manufacturing factories. In time, new "Oboe" radar enabled the "Mossies" to operate without direct eyesight just as effectively as on clear nights, despite the fog and rain, and the bombing runs multiplied.

Between the air raid of October 8, when 342 Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force flew overhead, and the last large raid of 162 aircraft on November 26, more than 2,000 aircraft dropped over 3,000 tons of bombs on Stuttgart.

The cacophony of the Allies' horrific lullaby pierced Friedemann Paul Erhardt's ears for the first fortnight of his life. He lived below the eerie glow of searchlights that dappled the smoky sky like Manet's brush strokes.

Decades later, the glow of restaurant gas burners on professional stoves would remind Erhardt of those early months, and of his mother's fears of the swastika and the Nazi party that reigned at the time of his birth.

Nazi leaders prided themselves on the willful creation and maintenance of Aryan-blood purity and committed upwards of forty million people to their deaths for the sake of their aim. Their idea of racial pureness emerged from laboratories and spliced genes slid under scientific microscopes by psychiatric eugenicists, which held the belief that Man was only flesh and bone. Earlier, German and Austrian philosophers speculated that human behavior was a product of the environment, not the other way around. They, too, denied Life's spirituality.

Oddly, the worst of the fascist Nazis abhorred both communist bolshevism and liberalism alike. They assigned "cause" for the existence of these curses to a quasi-race (as they saw it), the Jews. They also sought suppression of the Catholic Church, whose teachings influenced humanity toward spirituality. The Church's position that the soul is the ultimate arbiter of how cultures live, evolve, and move forward took hold and was embraced around the globe, but godless Nazi eugenicists abhorred its expansion and moved to strike a death blow.

Into this soup bowl of conflicting activities and notions, boiled over into a full-fledged world war, the youngest Erhardt arrived. He would grind out his meager childhood among the latest ruins of this centuries-old battle for minds, bodies, and souls. Survival would not come easily for his family or his nation as each struggled to rebuild itself and its identity.

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