A childhood in Lower Bavaria: Where the blacksmith sheared hair – Bavaria

In the summer of 1945, the Neuner family, expelled from the Romanian Banat, ended up in the village of Martinskirchen in Lower Bavaria, where the mother was given a job as a teacher. She replaced the local headmaster, who was a Russian prisoner of war. Initially housed in a makeshift zeugl (small farm), the family was eventually allowed to move into a room in the school building. It was 20 square meters in size, and the outhouse was between the two classrooms.

The village children knew little about what was happening in the wider world. The Hitler era and the war experiences were still very present in everyday life, but nothing was explained. “Why bother, we were only children,” says Gerhard Neuner, a professor who taught didactics for German as a foreign language in Kassel. The 82-year-old has now written a book about his childhood in Martinskirchen, which reads for long stretches like a description of a foreign world. Which is not surprising, as the change in living conditions has never taken place as quickly as in the generation to which Neuner belongs.

There were no cars in the village. The greatest luxury in terms of mobility was a bicycle with an auxiliary motor (henashprenga). Hunger was alleviated by care packages from relatives overseas and meat from illegal slaughter. Of existential importance for the village children was the question “whether the apples in the western farmer’s garden were within our reach,” as Neuner writes.

There is a flood of publications on the subject of childhood in Bavaria in the early post-war period. These include important works such as Wolfgang Schmidbauer’s book “A Childhood in Lower Bavaria”, Hans Niedermayer’s companion book “Child in Another World”, as well as the relevant novels by Marianne Hofmann (“The people, the horses, the hay are glowing”), Harald Grill (“Learning to walk”) and Marianne Ach (“Goldmark Pechmarie”) as well as the stories by Albert Sigl (“Sonnham”).

Gerhard Neuner’s book also fits into this list, but differs from the other works in one respect. In an attempt to faithfully convey what he experienced as a child, the author endeavors to express what he experienced in the language he heard and spoke at the time. Neuner thus brings the people, locations and events to life from a child’s perspective and in a child’s language, accepting that the view of the big picture is narrowed.

The teacher Werner Obermayer, a former school friend of Neuner’s, still likes this form very much. It is precisely this style of language that was characteristic of those children who grew up in Lower Bavaria after the war, says Obermayer. Those were rough times. Not all villagers had abandoned the Nazi worldview after 1945. Neuner describes an argument at a Corpus Christi procession in which the boys were harshly reprimanded with the saying: “Hitler wouldn’t have liked that.” Many things changed very slowly, and the denazification of the school library also took a long time. The books with the swastika on the cover ended up in the attic of the school building, where the schoolboy Neuner quickly discovered them. There he secretly read the stories of the Red Fighter Pilot and the Sea Devil, “because they were so exciting.”

It is a world full of oddities that Neuner describes with a warm-hearted eye.

The children’s playing field was the village and the great outdoors. Neuner’s book provides lasting evidence that there were happy children even in times of material hardship. Because they had the freedom to move around freely. Many years later, youth researcher Klaus Hurrelmann discovered that children who did not experience this freedom often suffered from adult illnesses such as stress, headaches and psychosomatic disorders. The children of those days did not own anything, but they ran, hopped, jumped and climbed a lot, which probably sharpened their senses better than a smartphone ever could.

Life offered the village children a wealth of experiences. Death was not hidden either. He and his friend Klaus were often allowed to serve as altar boys at funerals, writes Neuner. For one simple reason: “Because we were the best at singing.” Their crying earned them an extra tenner from the mourners, which was the equivalent of 30 small sugar Easter eggs. The boys were also there when a grave was dug. Once a buckle was found right next to a bone. Little Gerhard grabbed it, cleaned it clean and gave it to his mother, telling her that he had found the piece of jewelry on the path. “She is happy and hugs me.” Little did she know what her boy had brought into her house.

It is a world full of oddities that Neuner describes with a warm heart. And with a sense of humor that also allows for self-irony. The boy always addressed his mother as “Miss” during class, while many other children called her “Mummy,” “as they heard me do outside of class.”

The book’s 55 chapters cover the entire universe of village life in the past. It ranges from the discovery of war equipment to the obligatory village witch to the blacksmith Ade, who also cut the boys’ hair because a visit to the barber would have been too expensive. Ade cut the mane radically and painfully with a pair of pliers, only to then come to the now politically incorrect conclusion: “Now you look like flat-legged seaweed Indians.”

Gerhard Neuner, Martinskirchen Village Stories, Childhood in Lower Bavaria after the Second World War, Iudicium Verlag Munich, 14.80 euros.

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