Jutta Schwarzkopf, 1953-2016

Jutta’s death dumbfounded almost all friends and acquaintances: she had been keeping her multiple myeloma (a bone-marrow cancer that unexpectedly accelerated) as good as secret from all but the few friends who knew of her sudden confinement to a wheelchair in late 2015. She had also, for example, been refereeing an article a mere fortnight earlier. Her parents originally moved, or were expelled, from Poznan/Posen. As Germans under Polish rule from 1919, they were bilingual and subject to many temptations once the Nazis arrived in 1939, perhaps all the more as her mother, Hildegard Hettmer, had for some years been a secretary at the German consulate. There, as elsewhere till far later, such a job was too ‘good’ to lose because of the marriage bar. The sole political story Jutta had about either of them was that her mother had dithered when a Gestapo man asked her to become an informant. Her refusal had not taken long, though. One reason was that he had firmly kept his feet on his office desk throughout their conversation: very low upbringing! The other was that the first target he wanted her to spy on was not only Polish (of course), but a priest: theologically worrying for a Catholic. Perhaps her parents and grandparents had known of Bismarckian persecution of Catholics, not least in the Posen archdiocese, during the late nineteenth century. As refugees (separately) with about 10,000,000 other ethnic Germans around 1945, Jutta’s parents began in Berlin before moving to Hanover. There they married, having been friends since before the War. She was forty-two years old when she had Jutta, her sole baby. Whatever Mrs and Mr Schwarzkopf’s opinions on the East German regime, her father always insisted that communist economic methods were ‘far more rational’. In Jutta’s presence, her parents always spoke Polish when they wanted to exclude her from the conversation. Jutta was to channel that frustration into learning Polish for many years to, I gather, a high standard.

German · Grandparent · Nazism · Political science · Politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity