A family history in the 20th century, told through three brothers, three soldiers, three fates. The military historian Bernhard Kroener traces his father Werner and his two fallen uncles Bernhard and Johannes. Back in the 1980s, as a student, he met the resistance fighter who had shot his uncle a quarter of a century earlier. At that time, he stood in front of the grave that bore his own name.
For many years, the need grew in him to write down this story. It has become a documentary narrative in which he interwove letters, diary entries and personal memories with contemporaneous official documents such as personnel files or war diaries to create a family history. It covers the family background of the three brothers born between 1911 and 1919, their personal and professional careers, and answers one of the questions that later generations still ask today: How did young people in the formative phase of their lives experience the impositions of the National Socialist dictatorship, the horror of war and the challenges of the immediate post-war period? Starting from humble beginnings in rural Upper Silesia, the family made a laborious social rise into the aspiring bourgeoisie of Breslau. Due to the First World War and the subsequent economic crises, there was always the threat of a descent into precarious living situations. This fear of further economic decline determined the brothers' scope and alternatives for action. They resisted taking sides with National Socialism, partly because of the immunising effect of a religious conviction passed down through generations, but the faith in the state they had been taught prevented them from resolute opposition or resistance to the regime.
Group
Books (first-hand)
Author
Kroener, Bernhard R.
Title
Lebensscherben - Hoffnungsspuren. Eine Familie aus Schlesien in den Stürmen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine dokumentarische Erzählung. Band 2: 1944 bis 1948
Details
Some b/w and colour photographs and colour maps. 308 pp.
