Prologue: The Guest from the Past
By Erin Solaro
Prologue: The Guest from the Past
From Now You Know: The Last Day of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
© Erin Solaro, all rights reserved.
Who can refuse to live his own life?
—Anna Akhmatova
Mine is a family of dreamers and doers, secrets and silences, scientists and soldiers, so I grew up knowing the dead appreciate our attention. Some of them, some of the time.
The estuary where life and death meet is a liminal space, neither inherently malignant nor inherently benign. This estuary is a universe of bone fragments and pottery shards, frayed fabric and chipped stone points, poetry echoing on the wind ages before the written word, long-extinct animals effortlessly coursing along cave walls in torch light, rich grave goods and broken hearth stones, beneath our feet and haunting us at the edge of our sight in a glade or along a stream. It is as close as a nightmare or a dream and malignant or benign, depends on you and the dead to whom you offer your attention.
Halloween, Samhain is a night when things rarely part of our waking world seem more than possible. Whether they are then or not, you must discover for yourself.
The vast old Hyde Park house is quiet and I am alone in the library, having dispensed plenty of the good stuff to children of all ages. Hyde Park is no longer a place where you would think I would live, but this is my grandmother's house, where she raised me, bought for her by her husband, who had transferred money abroad for her in 1932, when he saw what was coming. Changed out of my costume but am not yet ready to sleep, for many reasons. One of which is no longer the itching of my chest and lung where I was shot.
Most of our dreams are the mind going through our personal files, making sense of them.
Not all of them.
None I have had of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
That Guy in the Tank. German commander, North Africa, World War Two. Desert Fox. One of Adolf Hitler’s fighting generals and perhaps also his enemy.
The strongbox Grandmama left me when she died normally lives in my safe. It’s old worm-eaten oak bound with rusted iron, still strong and watertight. In it are documents, legal and military, letters, and biographies of the German officer in question, read and re-read, here and there checkmarked at places Grandmama thought bore further scrutiny.
Right now, the strongbox is on my desk, and I reread her letter to me, fountain pen and ink in her elegant physicist’s handwriting, never mind Grandmama was present at the creation of the computer age.
“My dear child, we share certain difficult characteristics. A recessive gene, perhaps several. You will remember reading these books when you were 15, the age I was when I began doing war work in 1914, and asking me my own questions in my own, eerily exact words when I read your grandfather’s final letter, then the reports of the Nuremberg trials more than half a century ago. ‘How did Field Marshal Rommel go from admiring Hitler—while apparently never ceasing to be human—to being forced to commit suicide by him? Or did he choose that path?’
“I was too busy to answer your questions when they were urgently mine. Too close to the trauma. Too close still even at the end of my own personal century. You are, I have reason to think, already a fine intelligence officer. Perhaps when you are done with the wars of your time, you will answer our questions.
“All my love,
“Gus”
Augusta Christina von Silverberg und Lehndorff, named after Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein, the last German Empress and Queen of Prussia. Brilliant and brilliantly educated daughter of an old, wealthy, cultured, ennobled family of Jews, married to a Lehndorff, scion of a great Junker family, the ancient warrior aristocracy of the lost world of Prussia.
I leave the letter alone. I am not ready for it, vibrant as it still is with pain. We all have our limits and oblivion must have its share, for a time or forever.
The books are safer. So I leaf through them, a retired intelligence officer re-evaluating a teenager’s thoughts and see again in the text what I saw then.
There is a real story here and these biographers aren’t telling it. Why?
It is true: Erwin Rommel was one of the great masters of mobile warfare. It will be a long time before his campaigns cease to be studied: son of two teachers and brother to a third, he teaches still.
It is true: he had a relationship with Adolf Hitler none of his biographers understands. Do they want to understand?
It is true: he was a convinced National Socialist who also clearly and consistently rejected the sadism and nihilism of Naziism, as well as much of the racism, and with it, the rewards he could have reaped for embracing those qualities. Is this a paradox?
It is also true: his biographers don’t know his real relationship to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s coup attempt of 20 July 1944. Again, do they want to know?
They certainly don’t want to confirm or deny what he was really doing in Normandy on 17 July 1944, when he was badly wounded. Or why he went home to Germany a few weeks later.
Muddying the record is Rommel’s most prominent English-language biographer, David Irving, who portrayed him as an apolitical and innocent Hitler loyalist “only” contemplating an armistice in the West, deceived and entrapped by sophisticated conspirators seeking to depose Hitler and lose him a war long-lost. The actual word for that is “treason.” In 1977, when that book was published, mine was the proper response: An adult wrote this? And other adults took him seriously?
Retired two-star general here. No one becomes the equivalent of a five-star, or even one-star, by being innocent, apolitical, or naive.
Even then, historians of significant accomplishment were uneasy about Irving’s work. Soon after Grandmama’s death, Irving lost a libel suit he brought against a real historian: the court judged Irving a Holocaust denier who “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.”
You’d think an ambitious young historian might have reappraised Irving’s work on Rommel, asking,
What the hell is going on here?
Not so far.
Why not?
I am no more historian than physicist, but at this time in America, that second question may be important. Because history is a conversation, subject to revision as new information becomes available, between the living and the dead about how the past and the mythology of the past shapes our present and future. Especially when history starts to rhyme with current events.
I now attend to the grief and guilt, love and loss, rage and responsibility that have been echoing in my head for… 17 days now. Since his Yahrzeit, his death anniversary. I was dreaming one of those dreams that are not dreams at all. Erwin Rommel, bareheaded, staring at me, finally saying, Jetzt wißen Sie.
Now you know.
Well, yes. It was why I spent two years out of my country in the most violent place I could find that had meaning to me, because every week, America finds new ways to break my heart. Then I came home because although I have lived in many other countries and could live in many more, it is home.
I get up, stretch, sinews cracking, pour wine, lay a fire in the hearth. Note Gus’ name inscribed on each flyleaf, the dog-eared pages and checkmarks, reread her letter. Replace note and books in the strongbox, find paper, a fountain pen, ink, begin writing.
*****
Erin Solaro is writer-in-residence at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library. Her works-in-progress are a novel and historiographic essay about Erwin Rommel, based on new research. Her previous book is Women in the Line of Fire (Seal Press, 2006).