The Russian attack on Ukraine also determines the everyday conversations of families in Germany. The fear of war is back at the kitchen table.
Geretsried – Seven years ago, Ludwig Schmid found his grandmother Anna huddled in a door frame in the bakery of the family business.
She had had a panic attack when the military planes that were flying then-US President Barack Obama from Munich Airport to the G7 summit at Schloss Elmau near Garmisch-Patenkirchen thundered over the town.
The door frame is still part of an old bunker; In her panic, Anna Schmid hoped to be safe there. “She was completely emotional at the time. And today it is again,” says Ludwig Schmid.
afraid of the war back
Four generations sit around the Schmids’ kitchen table in Geretsried, Upper Bavaria. Great-grandma Anna (born 1929) is the eldest, the youngest are the five-year-old twins Xaver and Simon. And with the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the fear of war is back at this kitchen table.
“It was only a few years ago that my brother and I talked about the fact that our parents will definitely not experience another war on German soil in their lives,” says 44-year-old Ludwig Schmid, who once married his wife in St. Petersburg proposed marriage and actually has good, happy memories of Russia.
“And that we probably won’t see anyone else either – but the boys, my nephews, possibly will. Today I am sure that the children will experience one and so will my brother and I – and maybe even our parents too.”
memories are revived
The 92-year-old “Uri”, as Anna Schmid is called by her family, lived through the Second World War. She wasn’t 16 when it ended, and today she’s afraid again “that the planes are coming,” she says. Because she can still clearly see how Munich was bombed, how Allied planes rushed over Lenggries, where she lived at the time.
Decades after the end of the war, she traveled to a remote corner of Russia, taking a taxi from Moscow to the place hundreds of kilometers from the capital where her father had been killed and buried in the war. “The church and cemetery were gone. But a local could remember graves of German soldiers and showed where they were.”
The situation is now particularly difficult for many old people, says historian Benjamin Ziemann, a university professor in Sheffield, UK. “My mother-in-law, born in 1939, who lives near Bielefeld, only got rid of her worries about the war – fed by her war childhood – after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, and now her worries are breaking out again.”
Karin Schmid (68) has tears in her eyes during the conversation. “I’m afraid of a third world war and I’m afraid for my boys,” she says. “My greatest fear is that my sons will have to go to war. My husband probably won’t have to do that anymore, but what about the boys?” She said she grew up afraid of Russia during the Cold War. “And now that fear is back.”
concerns in all age groups
According to a new study by the private Augsburg Institute for Generation Research, the German population of all ages was worried about the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s troops – but it was greatest in the group of those born before 1965. More than 96 percent of them have “great concerns” about the Ukraine conflict in a recent poll.
More than 95 percent of very young people (born between 1996 and 2010) are also very concerned, while almost 92 percent of those born between 1965 and 1975 have major concerns. For those born between 1980 and 1995, the figure is a good 89 percent.
When it comes to the question of a concrete, personal threat, those born between 1980 and 1995 feel it the most. In the younger generation (1996-2010), on the other hand, very few (a good 71 percent) feel directly threatened in a generational comparison.
Talking about the war
“Parents of young children in particular often feel overwhelmed when talking to their children about the war in Ukraine,” says study leader Rüdiger Maas. “We shouldn’t hide anything, but filter and adapt the information in a way that is child-friendly.”
Fears differ in the Schmid family: Ludwig (born 1977) is more afraid of a nuclear catastrophe, of radioactivity that will contaminate everything. “I read “The Cloud” as a child. That still concerns me today.”
His younger brother Georg (41) isn’t afraid of having to go to war either – “but of a nuclear attack, big ones. What will become of the children then?” He and his wife Steffi (41) have three: the twins and their two-year-old brother Kilian.
The boys were afraid when the family turned off the light a few days ago as part of a solidarity campaign with Ukraine and it got dark in the house, says Steffi Schmid. And when they called their cousin the next day to wish her a happy birthday, the children said: “If you’re celebrating your birthday, please don’t celebrate the war.”
“I do believe that, regardless of generations, more Germans than ever before are afraid of a war in Europe, even if the Federal Republic is not directly affected at the moment,” says historian Ziemann. “That would also explain why – according to the first polls – the vast majority of Germans welcome the dramatic shift towards a foreign policy that is ready to armament, and across all parties.”
Grandpa Anton (71) doesn’t say much in the conversation in Geretsried. But at some point he shrugs his shoulders: “Fear is part of it again now.” dpa
