“German was heard so often in our Dutch home”: German Nazi Refugees in the Netherlands and Their Ambivalent Relationship with Their Mother Tongue

Summary

In His Autobiographical Report Untergetaucht unter Freunden, German-born refugee Claus Victor Bock describes how he survived the German occupation by hiding in Amsterdam as a member of the Dutch-German community of artists Castrum Peregrini. In order to capture the atmosphere in the group, he states that nobody belonging to this circle gave it a second thought when two Dutchmen presented a third with a volume of German poetry, thereby demonstrating a positive relationship with the language of those endangering their existence, focusing on its aesthetic values. While the situation in the Castrum was certainly a special, if not unique one, Bock’s remark strikingly illustrates a twofold phenomenon that will be central to this article. Whether German or Dutch, those having to fear persecution by Hitler’s henchmen in the occupied Netherlands found themselves confronted with a dilemma: for the Germans, the language of their home country had become the language of those forcing them into exile and threatening their lives beyond the German borders. For their host country, whose intelligentsia had traditionally shown a lively interest in German literature and philosophy, German became the language of the occupiers. This article will focus on autobiographical texts written by the first group and examine to what extent their authors’ fate influenced their relationship with their native language: how and to what degree did they distinguish between “German” and “Nazi”? In the cases of those who avoided using their mother tongue, was this a decision motivated by their contempt for the system they fled, or by a desire to accelerate their integration into their new surroundings? Did they react to the fact that their persecutors had caught up with them and brought their language to all occupied countries? The second group, Dutch with an affinity to German language and culture, will be considered whenever this seems useful with regard to crucial points. The majority of the primary sources used in this article will come from migrants who were not famous at the time they went into exile and whose memories of the years between 1933 and 1945 are often their only publications. These range from Anne Frank’s Diaries and texts from an anthology published by German-Dutch couple Volker Jakob and Annet van der Voort that contains twenty-seven accounts based on transcribed interviews (1988) to Eva Schloss’s After Auschwitz, published in 2013.