02.2 Hist 20 podcast: Hedda 1910-1919

Hedda in the 2nd decade of the 20th C

Transcript

 podcast 2.2

Hi, again. This decade's visit with Hedda my great-grandmother. She was 10 years old when the Mexican

Revolution started. And I'd really be surprised if she knew anything about it. I don't know if she read the

newspaper. And I really don't know what Mexico would have meant to a 10-year-old girl in Berlin.

In fact, at the turn of the century, or early 20th century, most Germans' experience of the West, as we could have

considered it, I mean, if they had any sense of Mexico or the American West, would have come through books by

Karl May, a prolific German writer who wrote mostly about the Wild West. And it was an idealized version of the

Wild West. And it completed US and Native American history with German stereotypes about nature and man and

good and evil and values.

I don't want to make too many assumptions or too much about this. But [CHUCKLES] it's kind of a head trip to look

at what Karl May was writing. And it mirrors what we've often seen about the West and about the Americas, about

people writing about something that is an idea that doesn't really exist. It doesn't match with reality.

Anyway, back to [? Heda. ?] I have no idea. I have no evidence that my great grandmother cared very much for

cowboy stories. And really nothing in her attitude when I knew her suggests that she had any preconceived

notions about this, really. No, she never mentioned any of it.

The World War I started a couple of days before her 14th birthday. And I really wish we had some record of what

it must have been like to turn 14 a couple of days after your country has declared war on half of the country you

live in, has declared war on half of Europe. Yeah, I mean, I hope we never get to find out what that means.

By winter of 1916-- so she was 16 years old-- Berlin was a desolate, isolated place. It was a very, very rough

winter. Germany's ports had been blockaded by the British. And so it was difficult to get any type of foodstuff. Or I

mean, they blockaded for militaries. But that also meant that food was not making it through the ports. And [?

Heda's ?] parents worried that she and her sisters, and anybody in the household, would starve to death.

And this was not a concern that was unique amongst them. This was a fairly standard concern. And a lot of people

died that winter. In fact, on the other side of my family, my mother's mother's mother died. My other great-

grandmother died in the winter of 1916. She wasn't living in Berlin, but it was a bad winter across Germany. And

apparently, she ate something-- it's called the Turnip Winter, because that's really what most people ended up

eating. They ate old root vegetables, because that was the one thing that people had been able to save from the

summer and were still able to harvest.

And my other great-grandmother apparently either ate something that had been too rotten or that-- again, it'shard to know, because nobody-- by the time my grandmother heard the story, it had already gone through a

couple of revisions. And she wasn't told the exact story. But I had one great-grandmother that survived the winter

of 1916 and the other one that didn't.

The one that survived the winter of 1916 largely survived it because she was sent to live elsewhere. So the [?

Silberman ?] household, her father and her mother, had three daughters. Some of them were quite young in

1916. And [? Heda ?] was probably the only one that was deemed old enough to be able to travel on her own.

And so in December of 1916, she was put on a train. She was sent to live with friends of the family in the

Netherlands.

Take a look at the map. This was not something-- this was not a two-hour drive. She probably spent 10, 12 hours

in the train, crossing snow-covered, very cold Germany, all the way into the Netherlands, where she spent three

months with the [? Lansberg ?] family.

Her departure to the Netherlands would mean one less person to worry about in Berlin, more food for those who

were in the house, and knowing full well that [? Heda ?] would not starve to death in the Netherlands. And she

came back in February of 1917, when I suspect it seemed to her that the worst of the winter were over and that it

was safe for her to return home.

So during this time, while she was in Germany, while she crossed Germany in the middle of December, her future

husband, whom she didn't know yet, Aaron [? Sega, ?] was fighting in a German regiment. He was in the

trenches. He was at risk of getting gassed or getting shot, much like every other soldier in this terrible war, at risk

of losing a limb.

She was in a train crossing Germany, not once, but twice. Wouldn't you think she should have stayed in the

Netherlands until the end of the war? I mean, it seems like it might have been a better-- sort of safer. But she was

just 16. And when you're 16, you think you're not going to die. You can take on any risk.

But she also probably missed her parents, right? She was 16 in the sense that she was a teenager, and she

thought she could do anything. But she was also 16, which meant she probably missed her mom. She probably

missed her sisters. And it's really not difficult to get into her head and imagine her personal wishes and the fact

that, at 16, she might have been aware of how dangerous the situation was and that there was a war going on.

But that didn't mean-- she had managed to cross into the Netherlands once. There was no reason why she

wouldn't be able to do it in the spring.

And so the fact that from our perspective, it seems not particularly strategic or wise to have done that, from her

perspective, it may have been the only choice she had. But did [? Heda ?] or her parents understand the risk ofsending one of their daughters, in the middle of winter, on a train to another country? I don't know.

But clearly, I have to think that they thought the risk of staying was greater. And that's often how decisions are

made in a time of duress. There's really no good option. It's just a question of, what's the least bad option, right?

And the least bad option, it's not obvious which one it is. And so you kind of gamble and hope things work out.

A few decades later, [? Heda ?] would find herself in a similar situation, once again faced with even probably a

worse circumstance and the as yet unimaginable evil and a lot of least bad choices to make. But that's not until

the 1930s. We've got the 1920s to go through, and those are fun. So let's just focus on that for next time.