Family Secrecy: Experiences of Danish German Children Born of War,1940–2019

Secrecy and Family Memory

Neither memory nor the secrets that are sometimes uncovered offer factual accounts of the past. The conditions of the present moment shape any recollection of a past event. As total recall is impossible, Paul Ricœur notes that the process of memory is always in negotiation with the simultaneously ongoing process of forgetting. Both processes are vulnerable to manipulation. ³⁴ Individuals can become complicit in accepting how official histories edit narratives about the past, unless they re-assert their own stories. Forgetting is, in Ricœur’s view, a semi-active, semi-passive activity. ³⁵ Secrecy, on the other hand, is an intentional act of concealment. ³⁶ Even though secrecy and forgetting are distinct processes, both shape practices of memory in similar ways. Secrets can be lies and half-truths, but secrecy also materializes as a form of active knowledge management, through, as Carol Smart put it, “innuendo, palpable silences, evasions and rumour.” ³⁷ These communicative practices echo the process of negotiation between memory and forgetting. Who has access to the information stored in secrets at a given point in time shapes the kinds of memories people can re-create. This has powerful implications for the experience of CBOW family secrecy and its relationship to how families create, share, and transform their memories over time.

Secrecy goes beyond the level of memory, but for my analysis here it is crucial that family memory is a node through which secrecy influences power relations within families. As Ashley Barnwell points out, in an act of memory, each individual, each family, and even each generation evaluates which elements of the past to include and which ones to forget in order to enable a “feasible social future” for themselves in a given moment. ³⁸ Within families, secrecy can create trust between family members and offer protection from stigma and social vulnerability, but, at the same time, it might also rank the needs of stronger family members over those of weaker ones—often children. ³⁹ Secrecy thus both registers and facilitates power dynamics within families. These dynamics, in turn, shape family memory by regulating who has access to which kinds of family narratives and how these memories are passed on to future generations. ⁴⁰ Narrative processes, alongside other kinds of social and embodied experiences, shape identity formation and secrecy can thus affect how we understand ourselves through family memory. ⁴¹

Family memories define who we are on a fundamental level. Not only are they usually the first memories we acquire; family loyalties also make such memories highly emotionally charged and thus relevant to our sense of self. Because family memories are continually re-actualized within kinship groups, they develop across generations and respond to changes in individual needs as well as sociocultural contexts in each permutation. ⁴² Since secrets shape the stories families tell about themselves, they co-create a shared archive of family memories. These stories feed into our personal memory and they interact, at the same time, with the social norms embedded in the cultural context around us. ⁴³ The study of the family memory thus offers a unique window into how individual and national/transnational memories continuously shape each other. ⁴⁴

Within the study of family memory, the role of family history research has become increasingly important. Family history research is now a highly popular leisure activity worldwide. ⁴⁵ With millions of users and a growing ancestry industry, individuals not only re-write their own family narratives. If a specific topic in family history research develops sufficient force within a generation, this narrative intervention can even change national memories. ⁴⁶ Genealogists use family history as a readable memory text, which places the lay researcher in the position of an editor of family memory. As such, family history research can shape national conversations about past events. For example, the DKBF’s coordinated work brought the existence of CBOW in Denmark back into public awareness. However, as Emma Shaw notes, personal motivations and the impact of family historians on the microsphere of the family have not yet been sufficiently interrogated. ⁴⁷

CBOW may benefit from the increased availability of DNA testing, but their engagement in family history research still meets significant ethical as well as emotional challenges within their families. Their search is not merely a leisure activity; it is often driven by a deep personal need to find absent fathers and to know ones’ roots. ⁴⁸ This does not mean, however, that their personal motivations are straightforward. CBOW family history research has the power to upset their own family structures. The exposure of reproductive secrets, for example, the revelation of hidden fathers, can disrupt a family narrative and the sense of family it created—it may simultaneously represent a crucial need for some family members and a danger for others. Kinship can take many forms, but Carol Smart notes that in Euro-American contexts, uncovering reproductive family secrets tends to instigate a profound transformation: it changes one’s legal status, perceptions of one’s identity, relations to family members and family memory as well as the stories we tell ourselves. ⁴⁹ CBOW family history research thus confronts a distinct ethical dilemma. The search for unknown fathers may re-traumatize mothers, but if CBOW accept the family secret, they forego their own needs. As the following case studies show, secrecy could play an important mediating function between protecting the different vulnerabilities of mothers and CBOW at different times and even enable a belated access to family memory.

CBOW Experiences of Secrecy

Active not-knowing is the most common experience of secrecy for CBOW in the case studies. Monica Konrad introduces the notion of, “knowing what not to know and living one’s life in relation to ‘active not knowing’,” ⁵⁰ to describe how secrecy can be a life-long process that unfolds between concealment and revelation across generations. Learning what not to know means that children are aware that certain things are concealed, but they do not ask about it. ⁵¹ In the case of Danish German CBOW, other family members and even society around them (neighbors, peers, schoolteachers) often knew about their fathers. Being a child born of war could thus be a public secret, known by everyone but the child itself. Despite a family’s intent for secrecy, most CBOW in the case studies developed some suspicion about their paternity in their early adulthood. They encountered secrecy as access to partial information in the form of gossip, rumors, or personal comments from relatives or peers. If CBOW then pressed mothers for more information, responses could be outright rejection or lies, half-lies, or very limited information.

Elsa grew up as an only child with her parents. ⁵² When she was about ten years old, they spent their summer holidays with relatives in the countryside. A cousin all of a sudden pointed out to the sea and said “your father lies there.” Confused Elsa approached her mother: “I can’t quite remember the situation when I told her, but I asked, who was my father? But my mother said you know well this is your father [her stepfather], we are married and we have you together.” When Elsa turned twenty, her mother decided to tell her that her biological father was a German navy officer who had gone missing after the war. She received two photographs, an address and learned the story of how they had first met in a bakery. Over the next decades, Elsa sometimes asked her mother for more information, but she refused to share more than that. Her mother only revealed her father’s name when she turned ninety years old, which enabled Elsa to start her own (clandestine) search for information.

CBOW in the present case studies at times knew or suspected they had German fathers early on, but then buried the secret themselves and engaged in active not-knowing—becoming part of the process of maintaining the family secrecy around their fathers themselves. Erik Jensen vividly remembers the night when his drunk (step)father burst out that he was a “nazi boy” and not his child. After this outburst, they never talked about it again and Erik buried this information until after his mother’s death. ⁵³ Bente Skipper also navigated confusing half lies and gossip growing up. She first learned that she was a “German child” from her classmates when she was eight years old, but ignored the episode. When she turned fifteen, she needed a passport for a school trip and her mother very reluctantly provided her birth certificate. Bente then noticed that her certificate included a strange paragraph different form her peers’ certificates. When confronted, her mother claimed that this referred to the fact that she was not married at the time of Bente’s birth—not incorrect, but partial information. Bente also noted that her family treated her differently than her siblings and that relatives blatantly gossiped about her. For example, her family blamed any bad behavior on her heritage, to be expected of “such a girl.” ⁵⁴ Bente internalized the expectation not to talk about such private matters, engaging in active not-knowing. She never confronted her mother even after she learned the truth about her heritage as an adult. ⁵⁵

Going against the family’s expectations for discretion could also lead to direct confrontations and crisis. Bente Asaa learned early on that they had to project a happy outward family image, a cover for her parents’ unhappy marriage. Even though she overheard her brother saying that her father was not her real father, she diffused the situation with a smile simply ignoring the statement. In her narrative, Bente sees herself as a product of her time when girls, especially, were not expected to talk back or cause trouble. It was only as an adult in 1989 that an aunt told her the truth. Bente first asked her mother, who outright rejected her questions. She then asked other family members, and her mother got very angry. She was upset that Bente talked about the secret, even though it was an open secret, which most family members already knew about. Her mother cut off contact and stopped talking to her for years. Only when her mother fell ill did she begin to open up about the past. According to Bente, both of them found relief in finally being able to talk about Bente’s father and the happy relationship he and her mother had had during the Occupation. This shared re-creation of happy memories re-connected them to some degree. ⁵⁶

CBOW in the testimonies could not always say exactly how and when they understood they had a German father. Bjarne Schmidt remembers he intuitively knew without ever asking his parents and fiercely kept their secret out of emotional loyalty. To avoid bullying in school, he simply claimed his father was dead. At home, he secretly searched for photos and other clues, but never openly questioned his parents. Only when he turned thirty, his grandmother told him that he looked like his father Eddie, a soldier from Vienna. At that time, Bjarne was not ready to deal with the information and facing the horrors of the Nazi regime he fully understood his family’s silence, feeling gratitude for the protection they had offered by keeping his heritage secret. ⁵⁷ Even though Bjarne did not experience secrecy as a burden in his youth, he began to regret not-knowing in the 1980s. His regret was spurred by various personal crises and the fact that the first family members of his mother’s generation began to pass away. He started looking for his father, but faced significant resistance from his mother and his Austrian relatives as well as from Danish archivists and a judge who denied him access to paternity files in a 1994 court ruling. ⁵⁸

These examples illustrate that the experiences of secrecy among CBOW are quite diverse and ambivalent. The cases of Bente Asaa and Bente Skipper further indicate that gender likely shaped the experience of family secrecy in specific ways. However, it exceeds the scope of this study to analyze how class, cultural context and gender have shaped experiences of CBOW family secrecy over time. I focus here on one key element in the experience of CBOW family secrecy that appears across the available case studies. Most CBOW here were only able and/or ready to confront and work with the family secret in their late adulthood.

Why did so many CBOW wait until the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s before they began looking for their fathers? These decades represent a break with the Danish post-war memory generation on a personal as well as a collective level. Personally, CBOW saw their mothers’ generation come to an end. This sense of generational transition could also coincide with a belated (re-)revelation or the discovery of letters, photos, or other objects in an inheritance. Collectively, the fiftieth anniversary of liberation in 1995 spurred new public and scholarly debates that critically re-examined Danish history during Occupation. Two texts published during this decade were particularly important to CBOW: Anette Warrings’ Tyskerpiger (German girls, 1994), the first systematic historical examination of the lives of their mothers during and after the war, and Lotte Tarp’s memoir det sku’ nødig hedde sig (Keeping up appearances, 1999). ⁵⁹ Both Warring and Tarp were public figures who inspired and supported many CBOW to start searching for their fathers—in particular those CBOW who had engaged in active not-knowing or buried prior knowledge of the secret themselves. Listening to Tarp’s lectures or reaching out to Warring encouraged CBOW to either start or resume efforts to find their fathers. ⁶⁰

The politics of family secrecy are historically situated and shaped by factors beyond the Danish post-war context as well. The status of reproductive family secrets in Europe has radically changed in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, illegitimate births were no longer a cause of shame and authorities largely recognized that children have the right to know their biological parents. ⁶¹ The question of whether it is always in the best interest of a child born of war to know its paternity can remain difficult to answer on a personal level though, especially for CBOW conceived through rape. ⁶² The CBOW in the present Danish case studies were born to consensual relations, but they also struggled with the ethical dilemma of weighing their right to know their origins against their mothers’ needs for privacy. The published testimonies note this particular dilemma too, but I focus in my subsequent analysis on the oral history interviews because they reflect upon the changing functions of their family secrets in more detail. In the following, I show that memory work and belated family history research were important coping mechanisms with which the interviewees negotiated this ethical dilemma of CBOW family secrecy.

Finding Fathers/Finding Memories

When CBOW engage in family history research, many set out with hopes of locating their fathers or, at the very least, finding information about their fathers to better understand themselves. The desire for a recognition of likeness is undoubtedly important and can help CBOW to develop ontological security, a sense of where they come from. ⁶³ In the best-case scenario, a successful search can restore a CBOW’s place in a new family. And yet, such a sense of closure can be elusive. Sometimes leads are false or run dry. After years of research, Peter Brink-Frerup discovered that he had looked for his father under a misspelled name, which meant he had to start over. ⁶⁴ Moreover, German/Austrian families were not always willing to establish contact or it took them a long time to work through their own legacy with the family secret. Georg Jensen’s mother always supported his search and he was able to locate his German father. However, his father’s German wife hindered contact and he never met his father. Georg eventually managed to find a German cousin and another half-brother in Norway in the late 1990s. ⁶⁵ Henny Granum, by contrast, was accepted as a family member among her German relatives, but this process of acceptance took decades. ⁶⁶

Lina’s interview shows that CBOW may find elements in their father’s history that they do not necessarily want to identify with. ⁶⁷ For Lina the secrecy around her father’s identity blended into secrecy around her grandparents’ politics, too. Her grandfather had supported Danish National Socialism and German soldiers frequently visited their farm in the Danish countryside during the Occupation. Her parents’ relation was thus not a deep secret within her family and her mother at times commented that she had married Lina’s stepfather, because he looked like her biological father. This likeness became a running inside joke within the family, but the secret was never shared with anyone else. As a teenager, when Lina fully realized the national-socialist connections of her grandparents and the possibility that her father had also aided the regime, she stopped talking about her family history altogether.

Lina remembers herself as a shy child who would not let anyone see who she was. Lina frames this shyness as an inheritance, “I got it with my mother’s milk,” and as a form of self-protection. She expressed resentment about her family secret, mostly directed at her father. Lina hoped that her father would one day make contact for a long time, which he never did. It thus came as a shock to her when she learned that her mother had secretly had contact with her father. Her parents regularly wrote each other letters from 1945 until ‘49, when her father had returned to Germany to live with his wife and two other children. Her mother even sent them necessities to alleviate their life in war-torn Germany and tried to take up contact once again in 1977 for her daughter’s sake, but Lina could not find a recorded reply among letters her mother had kept.

Material traces, such as photos, documents or letters between the parents, play a key role in the transmission and reconstruction of family memory in the present moment. ⁶⁸ A photo or letter is sometimes the only piece of information about their fathers that CBOW have or inherit. Letters are a central part of the family archive that enabled Lina to reconstruct and reclaim memories her family had kept from her. Her mother had to hide the letters for decades outside their home, probably at her sister’s house, because Lina’s stepfather did not want them around. After his death, Lina’s mother gave her the letters. At this point in her life, Lina used the letters to seek confirmation of the negative suspicions she had already held about her father’s character: “I had to maintain my mother’s respect, but to know about my own DNA, to know why did such a person not go and look for a little girl back in Denmark? I said to myself, this person did not have any good humanity.” In her reading, her father exploits her mother even after his return to Germany. In his letters, he only writes about himself and asks for help, and he never inquires about her—to her a sign of a “primitive” mind. Lina does not recognize herself in him, as she sees herself as a “carer,” a person who always helps others like her mother.

Today Lina is very outspoken, at ease with herself and open about her family history: “I have changed it now.” Like many CBOW, Lina sought to know more about her father to better understand herself. Lina appears to attribute her strong-mindedness to her father, but his negative traits offer little assurance by way of recognition or likeness. The search for her father was important to her in a different way: as part of the process of “finding,” that is re-creating, memories and in taking control over their transmission to the next generation. After her mother’s death, Lina finally felt free to search for more information about her father, including his war crimes. She was also able to locate her half-brothers in Germany and is currently trying to get in touch with them.

Irrespective of the search outcome as such, Lina’s sense of self and her experience with the family secret have already significantly changed by taking charge of the intergenerational transmission of family memory. Lina wants to change how her daughters understand their family history as well as their own mother and grandmother: “I had to do it before I die (…) you had to know it! It formed you.” She emphasizes “I do not want to pass on the shame, or something, to my daughters.” Her mother wanted to be respectable under all circumstances and Lina is certain she would not have approved of her search. Lina thus attempts to strike a balance in her own re-creation of family history. She explains that she is careful to present a respectful image of her mother to her daughters, but she refuses to perpetuate the family secrecy around her father against the ongoing resistance in her wider family. Lina’s re-negotiation of family memory thus adjusts the power relations within her family. She is now able to identify herself in her version of the family narrative. Her experience points to a different approach to CBOW family history research.

CBOW’s ability to shape and pass on their own perspective on family memory to the next generation can also generate a sense of closure and security. Rather than placing the sole focus on finding fathers, the search process itself appears to be another knowledge practice that allows CBOW to work through fraught relationships, to process emotions and to gradually re-create family memories that hold new meaning for themselves. As we can see in Lina’s experience, the search process can mitigate the emotional impact of life-long secret keeping at the moment of generational transition and build resilience, even if it cannot entirely resolve the ethical dilemma of CBOW family secrecy over who has the right to tell.

Whose Story? The Ethics of Family Secrecy

A family secret by default involves at least two people, usually more. It affects the family member who decides to hide information as well as the one left in the dark and the surrounding kith and kin. ⁶⁹ This multiplicity undergirds a central ethical problem of family secrecy: Who has the right to hide information? How and for how long? And if moments of revelation come into play, whose story is it to tell? For CBOW the heart of this ethical conflict plays out between the mothers and their children, but their intergenerational family secret is embedded in many layers of family and community: Danish relatives, the lost German side of the family, peers and local communities as well as the changing national perspectives on wartime secrets of Danish families. Differences in access to positions of power, emotional ties, dependencies and societal contexts all modulate who can and should keep or reveal the secret at a given place in time.

Revelations can be as troubling as secret keeping, depending on the circumstances. When Finn was fourteen years old, his mother took him aside to tell him: “Finn, your father is not your father. Your father is called Helmut and he was a German navy soldier.” ⁷⁰ This revelation was the beginning, and not the end of Finn’s experience with secrecy and it implicated him in the intergenerational transmission of the secret itself. In the interview, Finn remembers that he felt paralyzed in the moment of revelation, left with the sensation that he could not do anything with this information. In 1958, they had just learned of the horrors of Nazi Germany in school, and he thought that he could not openly talk about having a German father, making it a secret himself. He told his first wife after a few years of marriage, but otherwise kept it to himself; it was “my secret only.” But ownership over family secrecy is hard to achieve. Finn guarded his mother’s secret his entire life and only started to search for his father five years after her death. After decades of secrecy, he finally decided to tell his own children in 2009. He summoned a family council and explained the situation only to find his first wife had told their children years ago without his knowledge or consent. In his words: “I felt like a fool.” As Øland notes, breach of trust and losing the ability to trust others are among the most troubling effects of the family secret on CBOW. ⁷¹

Despite her early confession, Finn’s mother never told him any details about his father. When Finn pushed his mother for more information, she only said “Why, Why?” and then he remained quiet: “I accepted that she did not want to talk to me about it. (…) What else could I do? Nowadays, I think it is different…At that time, you had respect for your parents…” Finn’s acceptance ranks his mother’s needs above his own, which then implicates him in perpetuating the distressing impact of the secret on himself: he can neither find his father, nor develop a trusting relationship with his mother. When Finn thought about searching for his father for the first time, he asked his aging mother to tell him his father’s full name. She sharply rebuffed his request asking: “Why do you want to know that? Your father has been dead for many years—that was in 2001, my father died in 2009.” It took Finn five more years before he was mentally ready to start a search after his mother’s death in 2004. He was very anxious, especially once he had located his father’s village. He feared rejection and he was not sure what he would do if his father turned out to be still alive. Finally, his wife pushed him to follow through. He arrived in the village in July 2010 only to find that his father had died just one year earlier.

Finn was deeply moved when he found his father’s grave, but this moment also exposed the severe impact of the slow violence through family secrecy on his life. His mother’s secrecy had cut off “relatives or branches (…) from one another and from the family stories they each hold.” ⁷² Secrecy had prevented Finn from starting a search in time to find his father alive. This effect of slow violence is further compounded through the entanglement of his mother’s misleading information and Finn’s own role in upholding the secret. However, it is difficult to tell in how far Finn’s complicity with the family secret constituted violence for him emotionally while his mother was still alive. Finn attributes his acceptance of his mother’s silence to the social pressures of the time, but he also simply feels for her. Upholding his mother’s secret was doing the right thing to Finn, as he otherwise would harm his mother, and it constituted his own sense of self as being a “good son.” The tension between his and his mother’s opposing needs must have nevertheless been a burden. One time his frustration erupted in a violent exchange of words with his mother over her sleeping with the enemy. He now regrets this episode, but not the fact that he kept the secret while his mother was alive—even if that meant not finding his father alive.

Empathy and emotional ties shape family power relations along with societal norms. Concern for their mothers’ wellbeing was a key reason why so many CBOW in the case studies waited until their mothers had died before they officially started their searches. Sometimes CBOW, like Peter Brink-Frerup, came to regret that they did not push their mothers for information sooner. ⁷³ In other cases, CBOW started their search without telling their mothers, adding another layer of secrecy as a form of reverse protection. ⁷⁴ Despite the damage done to CBOW families through secrecy, the concept of slow violence can thus not fully describe the ambivalent functions of CBOW family secrecy. Secrecy affected, often even infringed upon, CBOW, but it could also help them to live with its consequences. For example, Elsa distinguished between her mother’s and her own story: “I chose not to confront my old mother and force her to change her own history,” but “I thought I had a right to this story, and that is how I came to the DKBF and came to talk to Arne Øland.” Secrecy offers here the possibility to differentiate between generational narratives and social vulnerabilities as long as mothers were alive. This does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma between mothers and children, but it offers a working solution that enabled CBOW and mothers to function within their respective family practices.

Finally, in Finn’s case belated family history research also enabled him to reconnect the previously separated family branches through the joint recreation of lost family memories. He did not find his father, but he reconnected with a sister, a grandmother, an uncle and a niece in Germany. Finn’s existence had also been a family secret on the German side and his appearance in 2010 came as a shock to most of his German relatives. Finn and his German sister meet regularly now, sharing photos and anecdotes to fill in each other’s family memories. For example, Finn could help his German family make sense of a photo depicting their father working at a Flak tower. His German family did not know about this, but Finn could tell them these Flak towers were built by the Germans in Denmark during the war. Finn worked with the Deutsche Dienststelle and learned that their father had been in British captivity after the war. Finn also resorts to cultural productions, films about World War II and German prisoners of war, to re-create memories about his parents’ wartime experiences he cannot access. ⁷⁵

Finn’s process of family history research did more than just uncover his father’s hidden life. It is clear from the interview that Finn is well aware that he cannot re-construct all aspects of his family history. However, genealogy in itself provides a deep sense of satisfaction to him, and, most importantly, Finn and his sister have begun to develop kinship by recreating new family memories together. His sister was born to a different father during the war, but Finn’s father raised her as his own daughter once he returned. Finn and his sister are thus not related by blood, but they share a keen interest in their family history. The legacies of the family secret tie them together as they unlock more and more information about their biological/social father. Their joint memory work co-creates their kinship. Finn’s experience thus points to the possibility of new forms and experiences of kinship, beyond biological, legal and social frameworks, that can emerge through memory work in re-united CBOW families.

Conclusion

Family secrecy around German fathers does not just create a gap in the narrative inheritance of the Danish German CBOW in the case studies. In most cases, secrecy was a process that implicated CBOW throughout their entire lives. Many CBOW in the present cases have engaged in active-not-knowing and thus participated in upholding the family secret well into their adulthood. CBOW who wanted to uncover the secret often faced a highly ambivalent situation where they had to weigh their mother’s discretion against their own need to know their fathers. These experiences infringed upon CBOW identity development and could even accumulate into a form of slow violence, if the secret permanently cut off CBOW from other family members and their family histories. However, as the case studies have shown, CBOW family secrecy could also function as a kind of storage device for family history that was too sensitive at a certain moment in time. The secret then stores potentially harmful information until circumstances have changed sufficiently to safely process them.

The moment of generational transition from mothers to CBOW can turn a secret into a productive part of a narrative inheritance, if the information stored in secrets enables family history research. CBOW in the case studies who re-create family memories and intervene in the transmission of their own family history appear to find closure and a strengthened sense of self irrespective of the precise outcome of their search for their fathers as such. This potential for belated access to hidden family histories does not change the multi-valence and ethical constraints of CBOW family secrets during their mothers’ lifetime. Many CBOW accepted disadvantages to themselves to keep functioning within existing family hierarchies. Belated re-creation of family memories cannot replace the decades of potential family bonds lost to CBOW themselves either. However, working with and through family secrets may hold productive potential for new family memories as well as for new forms of kinship to emerge in the next generation.