RODERICK STACKELBERG has an unusual story to tell, particularly of his early years. Stackelberg was born in Munich in 1935 to an American mother and a German father. He grew up in Germany during the Nazi years, including the Second World War, before returning to America with his mother in 1946. Out of Hitler's Shadow is based on personal journals Stackelberg began keeping as a boy of seven in Germany in 1942. It reconstructs his childhood in Germany, his years of school and college in New England, his return to Germany as a draftee in the American army in 1959, and his years of self-imposed exile in quest of knowledge about his background and his family's past. Out of Hitler's Shadow presents the first volume of Stackelberg's memoirs of a career devoted to the scholarly study of National Socialism, its antecedents, consequences, and lessons.
Out of Hitler's Shadow
Childhood and Youth in Germany and the United States, 1935-1967By Roderick StackelbergiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Roderick Stackelberg
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-6033-6 Contents
Prologue...............................................vii1 Mama and Papa: The 1930s.............................12 The War: 1939-1945...................................163 Our Return to America, 1945-1946.....................314 School and College, 1946-1956........................395 New York City, 1956-1958.............................636 The Army, 1958-1960..................................797 Boston, 1960-1962....................................1028 Berlin, 1962-1964....................................1199 Goodbye to Berlin, 1965-1967.........................144Epilogue...............................................169
Chapter One
Mama and Papa: The 1930s
One of my great regrets is that I never asked Mama to tell her story of how, or even exactly when, she came to Germany, fell in love with my father, and decided to stay for what would turn out to be more than fifteen years, including the entire Second World War. The bare outlines of her life are discernible and easy to trace, but unfortunately I know few of the details and little of her inner life. This is what I know: My mother Ellen (1912-1998) was born in New York on 20 January 1912 as the youngest and somewhat pampered daughter of Nicholas Biddle (1878-1923), a wealthy financier who managed the estate of John Jacob Astor (1864-1912) after the latter's death on the Titanic. Ellen's mother was Elisabeth Le Roy Emmet (1874-1943), member of a socially prominent Irish-American family and direct descendant of Thomas Addis Emmet (1764-1827), who was forced to flee to America after the execution of his brother, the Irish patriot Robert Emmet (1778-1803).
Ellen was not an easy child. She was strong-willed and adventurous, imaginative (according to her first cousin and playmate, 'Sis' Lapsley [1913-1993]) and rebellious. Ellen was dismissed from the prestigious Miss Chapin's School for girls in the late 1920s for insubordination, although I never did find out the specific act for which she was thrown out. It was not on academic grounds. Thereupon her mother decided to take her to Europe on a 'grand tour.' In the summer of 1930 Ellen and her mother, along with several other members of the Emmet family, stayed as paying guests at Schlo Neubeuern in the Bavarian Alps, the ancestral Wendelstadt family castle then owned by Baroness Julie "Sisi" von Wendelstadt (1871-1942) after the death of her husband Jan von Wendelstadt (1855-1909). Here and at 'Hinterhr,' the modest farm estate in neighboring Altenbeuern deeded by Jan Wendelstadt to Sisi's sister-in-law (Sisi's brother's widow) Countess Ottonie 'Sweety' von Degenfeld-Schonburg (1882-1970), Ellen met my father, Baron Curt Ernst Ferdinand Friedrich von Stackelberg (1910-1994), an impoverished Baltic German student at the University of Munich who was earning some of his expenses as a tennis coach to the guests at Hinterhr and to the students at Schloss Neubeuern (which housed a boys' private school founded by Sisi Wendelstadt and Sweety Degenfeld in 1925). The wealthy American and impoverished aristocrat fell passionately in love. Ellen decided to remain in Munich to study art, apparently over her mother's objections. Granny did not think highly of my father and thought him unsuitable for Mama. Undeterred, Mama got pregnant and they married rather abruptly on New Year's Eve 1931. My older brother Olaf Patrik, named after his paternal grandfather, was born in Munich on 2 August 1932, ending Mama's career in art before it got properly started.
While Germany underwent the exuberant turmoil of a 'national revolution' after Hitler's sudden appointment to the chancellorship at the end of January 1933, Papa continued to study law in Munich, now financially supported by his American mother-in-law, our Granny, while Mama stayed home with her growing family. My sister Betsy (named after her maternal grandmother) was born on 27 April 1934 and my birth followed, rather unexpectedly, on 8 May 1935. Mama, who had been nursing Betsy when I was conceived, did not discover her pregnancy until three months before my birth. It was a difficult birth, and she and I spent my first three months in the hospital. Her marriage was already beginning to go sour before Papa moved his family to Berlin in September 1936 to complete the year of in-service training required for a career in law. My younger brother Nicholas Temple was born in Berlin on 23 December 1938. This was one of my earliest memories, indelibly imprinted in my mind because of the scratch I received from the brooch Mama was wearing when she came back from the hospital. Years later Fritzi von Kgelgen, a close friend of the family, referred to Tempy as the prospective Vershnungskind on whom rested his parents' hopes of reconciling a marriage that was falling apart.
Ellen and Curt had very different personalities; in retrospect their relationship seems to prove nothing so much as that 'opposites attract.' While Mama was by nature independent, non-conformist, a dare-devil and a risk-taker, always ready and willing to defy convention and leave the beaten track, Papa was socially and professionally ambitious, much more cautious and correct than Mama, at least in his public conduct, and very aware of the obligations he thought he owed to his background as the descendant of an ancient Baltic aristocratic family. The emblematic story of their thorny relationship was that Papa had been unable to dissuade Mama from attending an aristocratic ball in her ski-boots. But Mama made merciless fun of Papa doffing his hat in obeisance to his unseen interlocutor as he deferentially answered the phone. Many years later, unconscious of the irony in his idealization of a normal middle-class lifestyle, Papa told me in an apologetic tone, 'Mit deiner Mutter war kein brgerliches Leben zu fhren' (with your mother a bourgeois life was not possible). However, he prized a visible dent she had once put in his desk in a fit of jealousy, provoked, it seems, more by his addiction to work than by any actual infidelity, although, according to Mama, there was some of that encumbering their marriage as well.
Each of us children bore some marks of our conflicting maternal and paternal heritages. In retrospect Olaf and Betsy took more after Papa, both in physical appearance and in other ways, and Tempy and I took more after Mama. Olaf became the "Aushngeschild der Familie" (the quote is again from Fritzi, meaning, roughly, "poster child"), professionally the most successful of the four of us, eventually ending his career as head of the Mathematics Department at Kent State University for twenty years.
Betsy and Mama were always at odds, just as different from each other in their tastes, opinions, values, and personalities as were Papa amd Mama. Mama herself always thought that Tempy was most like her, irreverent, insouciant, irascible and independent, and both shared a particularly cutting brand of humor. As for myself, I have always been conscious of my conflicted identity and divided loyalties. I admired Papa (after I got to know him in 1959), but have always felt much closer to and more like Mama. Looking back over my life, I am struck by how much I replicated some aspects of her peculiar biography: becoming an expatriate in my twenties, spurning a normal academic career path, marrying and then divorcing a German, never...
