Nothing but a Pale Shadow of Happiness - Vendido!

The Story of a German Family
Uwe-Karsten Heye
Original title: (Vom Glück nur ein Schatten Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte)
Blessing
250 pages - September 2004

*** Editora Palíndromo / Brasil ***

Book Description:
This is a book about shattered dreams. The dreams of Ursel and Wolfgang, the author’s parents, who were torn from one another by the war. Neither of them had any say in how they lived their lives. The author’s father, a trained opera singer, had fulfilled only two engagements before he was called up by the armed forces. As a marine artilleryman, Wolfgang Heye deserted twice; he was punished with a lengthy prison sentence before ultimately being sent to a special ‘punishment platoon’. One consequence of this sentence was that the regime demanded that his wife immediately divorce her husband, unworthy of military service as he was. At that time, she was working in the Danzig branch of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. There was no secret made of the fact that if she didn’t divorce her husband, she would lose her job. Ursel had no choice. Her family commitments meant she was entirely dependent on having her own income: she had to take care of her and Wolfgang’s two children as well as her parents – not least because her father was serving a two-year prison sentence for falsely denouncing someone. But although Ursel Heye’s decision was forced upon her, she would spend the rest of her life plagued by the thought that maybe she had been too cowardly. As an elderly lady, she gave her son her scant 17-page memoirs in which she asked herself precisely this.

For their flight from Danzig she had managed to get hold of tickets for the evacuation on the former Kraft durch Freude [‘Strength through Joy’] steamer, the Wilhelm Gustloff, now being used to transport refugees, for herself, her children and her mother. At the last minute, though, she had a change of heart, and the family set off on an eventful train journey westwards instead. Fate was on their side: it was the last journey the Gustloff ever made. It was sunk by a Soviet torpedo attack: 10,000 people died in this, the most appalling maritime disaster ever.

Once the war was over, the couple who had been torn asunder set out to find one another again. Yet the information provided by the Red Cross missing persons service shattered all their hopes of a happy end. Wolfgang was told that his family’s names had all appeared on the passenger list of the Gustloff – and that they were presumably among the thousands who drowned in the Baltic Sea; and Ursel was told that her husband was missing in Stalingrad.

From then onwards, their lives finally took their separate paths, until an unexpected meeting some twenty years later – though by then it was too late for them to be able to carry on where they left off. Their unfulfilled love and the transfiguration of their brief happiness had slowly broken down their ability to relate to one another. The war and post-war years had changed their lives forever. They were no longer the same people who had spent that lovely holiday together in 1942. They had had no more than a few days together – but they were ‘days that outweigh an entire life’, as the mother once wrote. A small album testifies to the infinite, melancholy tenderness they harboured for one another.

Uwe-Karsten Heye’s book traces the life of Ursel, whose love for Wolfgang became nothing more than an illusion. The author tries to discover what motivated the people concerned. He plunders the archives for evidence of a story that had remained alive as no more than family memories. In this attempt to remember the past, we also see the scars born by the post-war generation which has had to carry a heavy burden indeed: the Sign of Cain that is the Holocaust; the unhealed wounds and losses in practically every family; the sadness about why their parents were betrayed – or betrayers.

Nor must we forget the book’s contemporary context: in addition to dealing with personal reminiscences, it is also a narrative about a difficult fatherland. The work becomes the author’s attempt to trace his own self as well. He set out with all the same hopes and fears felt by many people who grow up fatherless: the hope that his own father might have been somehow ‘different’ and that he wouldn’t have let himself be seduced by a murderous regime; and at the same time, the fear that the family story might be a mere legend, and that his own family, too, could be harbouring perpetrators of crimes – people linked to gruesome acts, wherever they might have been carried out in the madness of international conflagration in the name of Germany.


In 1945, the final year of the Second World War, unimaginable numbers of refugees poured out of the East into the destroyed cities and devastaded areas west of the Oder. These people who had been driven out had saved their lives – but they left behind everything they possessed: families were torn apart, marriages destroyed. It was men who were responsible for creating such utter misery, but women who had somehow to overcome it – young women who, together with their children, witnessed the annihilation of total war during the end phase of the Nazi dictatorship and used incredible courage and energy to develop survival strategies. Most of them belonged to a whole generation of women who had been cheated out of their own lives. The author’s own mother was one such woman who wore herself out battling to ensure the survival of her children and her own parents.

Author:


Uwe-Karsten Heye
State secretary, retired

Uwe-Karsten Heye was born in 1940 and was an editor and correspondent before working as press advisor and speech-writer for the former SPD chairman Willy Brandt. In the 1980s he was a freelance TV writer. In 1990, following the election victory of the future German chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Lower Saxony, he became the latter’s press spokesman. Between 1998 and 2002 he was the Federal Government’s spokesman and head of the press and information office. He has been Consul General of the German Federal Republic in New York since 2003.

Uwe-Karsten Heye trained as a journalist at the "Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung", a daily German newspaper, became an editor there and moved to United Press International in Bonn in 1963. He started work as a correspondent for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" in 1968. From 1974 to 1979, he worked as a press assistant and speechwriter for Willy Brandt, then chairman of the SPD party. In the 1980s, he turned to television, worked as a freelance author for ARD and ZDF, national German television stations, among others. Starting in 1984, he reported as an editor for "Kennzeichen D" (ZDF) from Bonn and Berlin. In 1990, after Gerhard Schröder won the election as minister-president of Lower Saxony, he became his state secretary and government spokesperson. From 1998 to 2002, he was government spokesperson and head of the Press and Information Office for the Federal Government.