Feature / Arts

‘The best grandfather a child could wish for’

A Brunswick man excavates his relative’s Nazi past

Mark Phillips
Wednesday, August 2, 2023

EVERY family has skeletons in its closet, and Brunswick writer Andreas Pohl’s family is no different.

But it took the distance of the other side of the globe and a quarter of century before the German-born Pohl was ready to reveal his familial skeleton to the world.

His beloved grandfather’s early life as a fully-fledged member of Hitler’s Nazi Party is now chronicled in meticulous detail in a new memoir, Opi: The Two Lives of My Grandfather, which has been recently published by Arcadia.

Pohl, who has lived in Brunswick for most of the past two decades after migrating to Australia in the late-1980s, has spent his entire adult life reconciling his mixed emotions about his ‘Opi’ (German slang for ‘Pops’), Friedrich Wilhelm Hymmen, who died in 1995, aged 82. As he writes, the man he discovered by sifting through his personal archives was almost unrecognisable from the grandfather he grew up with.

Hymmen was not a member of the SS or a guard in the concentration camps, but he was an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and served in the German infantry during World War II, losing vision in one eye on the battleground in eastern Europe.

Most importantly, as an up-and-coming writer before and during the war, Hymmen was part of the Nazi propaganda machine, with several popular works which sought to reinforce notions of Aryan superiority and loyalty to the German state.

In postwar West Germany, he successfully reinvented himself as a journalist and media executive, mostly scrubbing from the public record his Nazi past.

“His complicity with the Nazi regime, his willful indifference to the suffering of so many – this has been my grandfather’s crime … But his efforts to fashion a different life from the wreckage of his first one … that was his real atonement, his one great achievement,” Pohl writes at the conclusion of Opi.

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POHL says he was always aware of his grandfather’s story in the background, although it was rarely discussed when he was growing up.

It was becoming an Australian citizen in 2012 that finally compelled him to conduct the research necessary to write a book about his grandfather.

“That [distance of time and geography] made it easier because when you write it you have mixed emotions,” Pohl says.

“It’s always the excitement of what you might find, because there was research involved in archival stuff, and you get these packages of material and it’s all this is excitement of discovery.

“But then there’s also kind of that troubled part of it. You know, I mean, what might you find? How would it affect your memory of your grandfather because when he was still alive, and particularly when I was younger, we were exceptionally close.”

Pohl’s curiosity about his grandfather’s past is not uncommon among Germans of his generation (he was born in 1963), whose parents were born or came of age during Nazism and although they were not culpable for the ideology’s crimes, that era was still too recent and too raw to want to explore.

The book is preoccupied with two questions: how did a good, middle class boy get radicalised to join the Nazi Party, and what happened to his life after Hitler’s regime was toppled?

In answering the latter question, Pohl could see parallels with his own life of travelling halfway around the world from a small Bavarian city in the dying days of the Cold War, studying and working in Australia while perfecting his English, and eventually settling in Melbourne’s inner north with his Australian-born wife and daughter.

Consequently, his book is a dual memoir of his grandfather and of his own escape from middle class German life.

“In a way, my grandfather migrated from fascism into democracy. And I migrated geographically, but both stories of both migration experiences require giving up part of your old identity and kind of reinventing yourself.”

F.W. Hymmen was introduced to Nazism in 1929 at the age of 16, and by 1935 was working as part-time editor of the Hitler Youth’s news agency service. Pohl believes his embrace of Nazism was in part a rejection of his conventional and conservative middle class upbringing.

A couple of years later Hymmen became a fully-fledged member of the Nazi Party, by which time he was also an emerging writer of prose, drama and poetry and a journalist working within Hitler’s propaganda machine. He leveraged that into a career as a playwright before he was conscripted towards the end of 1939, spending 21 months as an infantry soldier on the battlefront in France, Poland and the Soviet Union before he was seriously wounded, probably by a grenade attack, and almost lost sight in both eyes.

He would regain use of his left eye, but for the rest of his life, his right was covered with a black patch or monocle.

During his rehabilitation, he wrote his best-selling book Letters to a Mourner, which, Pohl writes, “almost perfectly aligned with the aims of the regime” by glorifying death on the battlefield as a worthy sacrifice for the cause of the German nation, and cementing his status as a Nazi writer-activist.

F.W. Hymmen, the so-called ‘Warrior Poet’ after his war injury.

POHL says there is mystery about his grandfather’s involvement in events like the Kristallnacht, the displacement of Polish Jews, and book burning, but there was no doubt of his genuine support for Nazism.

“In his writing he was actively seeking to support the ideology or parts of the ideology … He was certainly a believer in it,” he says.

After the war ended, Hymmen abandoned his writing, partly as “an act of self-punishment” for his earlier complicity and sought to portray his involvement in the Nazi party as almost an accident.

Pohl bears no bitterness towards his grandfather, who he recalls fondly as attentive, affectionate and a great supporter of him as a younger man – “the best grandfather a child could wish for” – but he was also wary of writing something that was overly sympathetic.

“He talked about it [his Nazi past], and the books were on the shelves, but obviously, he talked about it in a very curated way.

“There was these polished anecdotes … that made him sort of disappear and that reduced his agency.

“But it always in the background, and I thought I really should look at this more deeply but I never did anything really serious about it.

“It also felt a little bit like unfinished business, so when I finally became an Australian I thought I had better kind of tie that knot, in a way.”

To research Opi, Pohl returned to Germany, retracing his grandfather’s life and delving into national archives.

Opi: The Two Lives of My Grandfather was launched in June at Brunswick Kitchen, a catering and cooking school run by Pohl’s partner, Tracey Lister. The book is available at Brunswick Bound and other bookshops or online. If a suitable translator became available, Pohl would also like to see it published in Germany.

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POHL says there is mystery about his grandfather’s involvement in events like the Kristallnacht, the clearing of Jewish ghettoes in Poland, and book burning, but there was no doubt of his genuine support for Nazism.