Monika Schröder: The Dog in the Wood

This novel is fiction, but the background of what Fritz experiences in 1945 is based on historical facts and inspired by events of my father’s childhood in East Germany. The Second World War, which the German Reich began in 1939, and the genocide that the Nazis pursued against Jews and other groups that the regime had declared racially inferior, caused widespread death and destruction throughout Europe. More than sixty million people died, among them more noncombatant civilians than in any other conflict in human history.

When the Soviet army advanced toward Berlin in the spring of 1945, their forays into German towns and villages were accompanied by looting, pillaging, and violence. Many of the soldiers wanted to take revenge for what the German army had done to Russians and other Soviet people during the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. The Russian and the German people had been indoctrinated with hate propaganda about each other by their governments during the war. Many inhabitants of the eastern provinces of Germany left their homes in fear of the Soviet army to flee westward on treks.

On May 8, 1945, the Second World War ended in Europe with Germany’s capitulation. France, Great Britain, and the United States divided the western part of Germany into three zones of occupation, which in 1949 formed the Federal Republic of Germany. The eastern part of Germany between the Elbe and Oder rivers stayed under Soviet occupation. On October 7, 1949, the Soviet occupation zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, a socialist state that remained under the influence of the Soviet Union. The two Germanys were reunited in 1989, when the wall in Berlin and the border between the two Germanys opened.

After the end of the war the Soviet occupiers disassembled large parts of East German industry and infrastructure to send it to the Soviet Union as reparation. They also quickly installed a Communist government, working together with German Communists, some of whom had been in Soviet exile or in prison during the war. On September 2, 1945, Wilhelm Pieck, the leader of the German Communist party in the Soviet occupation zone, announced an agrarian reform, which expropriated all land belonging to former Nazis, war criminals, and farmers who owned more than a hundred hectares. Larger estates were converted into collective peoples’ farms, and farmland was distributed among peasant farmers and refugees.

The Soviets maintained ten “special camps” in their zone, several on the grounds of former Nazi concentration camps. Many of the prisoners were Nazis and war criminals. But due to the concern among the Soviets that National Socialists would continue their fight against them in an underground movement, an increasing number of innocent people were arrested, and sometimes only a whiff of suspicion or anonymous accusations resulted in imprisonment. About one-third of the prisoners did not survive the catastrophic living conditions in the camps.

My father was born on a farm in a small village northeast of Berlin, in what later became East Germany. His grandparents committed suicide before the Russians reached their village. At the time he and his sister were younger than Fritz and Irmi in my story, so they could recall only a few details. But they did witness how their mother was taken away at gunpoint. She spent four years as a prisoner in one of the Soviet “special camps.”

My grandmother and aunt remained in East Germany, but my father left in 1961 to settle in the West—before the wall was built and traveling between the two Germanys became more difficult. After 1989 I went back to the village where my father was born and interviewed several eyewitnesses of the Soviets’ arrival and occupation. Most of their stories were more gruesome than the one I tell in the book. But there were also a few stories of friendly Russians who liked children and handed out sweets. An entire generation of Germans in the East and West who were children in 1945 grew up with the trauma of war in their families’ history; many of them lost their fathers and their homes in the war. Although the Germans who were adults during the Third Reich can be blamed for supporting a racist, violent, and insane regime that brought on a destructive war of epic proportions, children were pawns in the events. They had to learn to live on despite their loss, grief, and fear. Fritz found a way to survive.

Most of the academic works and eyewitness accounts I have used are published in German and written for adults. For those readers who would like to learn more about the history of the Soviet zone of occupation, I recommend Norman M. Naimark’s book The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 , published in 1995 by Harvard University Press.

Q: How did you become a writer?

A:I did not grow up wanting to be a writer. I was born in Germany and speak fluent German. As a child, I loved to read but felt discouraged by the writing required of me during my school years in Germany. Narrative writing was not taught, and I assumed that published authors had a God-given gift for composition that I lacked. It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, as an elementary-school teacher at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, when I took a class on teaching writing that I became excited about the possibility of becoming a writer. The instructor asked me to compose a narrative inspired by a family story and I chose to write a short story about a boy named Fritz, based on my father’s experiences at the end of World War II. With encouragement from the instructor and my husband, I continued writing about the boy, and out of these episodes—and after many revisions—came my first book, The Dog in the Wood .

Q: How did you conduct the research for the book?

A:The main resource for the book was my father. My questions about his past always triggered very emotional responses. I lived in India at the time, so we usually talked on the telephone, and our conversations often ended in tears. He remembers his grandfather’s frantic attempt to defend the village; how they rode together on a horse cart while the old man yelled at other farmers to help build trenches to slow down the Russians’ advance. My father also recalls that due to a shortage in caskets, his grandmother had to be buried in the wooden dowry chest that was kept in the attic. He also told me about the Russian officers who stayed in their house, and the Soviet tank that was stuck on the slope by the pond near the garden.

As in every work of historical fiction, the dates of key events had to be accurate. I listened to a recording of Hitler’s insane last speech from Berlin, during which he asks the German people to envision the rebuilding of German cities while Allied bombs are hitting the building the speech was being broadcast from. I made sure that Fritz could have really heard Admiral Dönitz’s radio address after Hitler’s suicide two days before the Russians arrived.

In recent years, several books about the experiences of my parents’ generation of “war children” have been published in Germany. In the early 1990s, after Germany’s reunification, when traveling to the East became easier, my father and I visited Schwartz and interviewed eyewitnesses about the Russians’ arrival. Some of their anecdotes found their way into my book.

Q: Germany was divided after World War II and your father left East Germany to move to the west. Were you still able to visit your relatives in East Germany?

A:My father was born in 1939 in a small village northeast of Berlin. He left East Germany in 1961, a few months before the Berlin Wall was built, and settled in West Germany, where he met and married my mother. During vacations, we often visited my grandmother’s farm in East Germany. The farm was simple, but it seemed enchanted to me. I helped milk cows, witnessed the birth of calves, and heard my grandmother laugh at my shrieks when the beheaded chicken raced around the yard before stumbling down. There also was an outhouse, which, to my mother, became the symbol for everything that was wrong with socialism.