Opi: The Two Lives of My Grandfather
Andreas Pohl
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2023, $39.99
“My grandfather was the best grandfather a child could wish for. He … was also a Nazi.” So begins Opi: The Two Lives of My Grandfather by Andreas Pohl, who was born in Germany and moved to Australia in the 1980s. Pohl and his wife Tracey Lister have lived in Vietnam and published several books on Vietnamese cuisine.
Opi is a thought-provoking book that raises questions about guilt, responsibility, atonement and more.
As Pohl becomes aware of Germany’s history, he finds it harder to reconcile his beloved grandfather (christened Friedrich Wilhelm) with the young ardent Nazi.
Opi was not a war criminal; he did not preside over selections for the gas chambers, murder prisoners of war or machine gun civilians. He was, however, a propagandist for the Third Reich (a widely respected one) and, later, a soldier in its army whose short military career was ended by injury.
The author grapples with several questions: Why was Opi so easily drawn to Nazi ideology? After the defeat of Germany, when – why – did his perspective change? How should the knowledge of a beloved family member’s past change the way we feel about him or her?
The first question is virtually impossible to answer. Opi himself can’t really answer satisfactorily, citing the timing of his birth and the nearly seamless transition from quasi-military church-based youth group to Hitler Youth. The other questions are more pertinent, and universal. However one judges the youthful Opi, he clearly grappled with his past and made gestures of atonement. He concluded after the war that his association with Nazism should make him “forfeit his right to face an audience as a writer”. By the early 1950s, Opi gave up writing fiction.
While a fascinating story of one man’s response to a shameful past, Pohl’s writing at times would have been improved by judicious editing. His descriptions of Opi’s works of fiction, while useful in illuminating the ideology they advance, are more detailed than this reviewer found necessary.
Pohl recounts, from notes found after Opi’s death, the story of the family’s desperate exodus from Sudetenland at the end of the war. Petrified (for good reason) of being stuck in the Russian-occupied zone, Opi and his family join thousands of panicked Germans in a quest to reach the American zone. Pohl’s mother, age six at the time, remembers this ordeal.
Despite his obvious affection for Opi, Pohl is a clear-headed and critical analyst. He describes Opi’s account as “both illuminating and infuriating. The mixture of political naivety, self-pity and lack of awareness of what the Nazis did in the preceding years is appalling.”
Yet Opi’s draft memoir, found by Pohl after his grandfather’s death, described his evolution.
“My real life did not end in 1945 … what I learned and had to eventually acknowledge as the truth suffocated all will to live, because month by month, it became clearer and clearer. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Kyrie Eleison. Auschwitz, Auschwitz.”
