My Father's Country: Story of a German Family - Hardcover

Wibke Bruhns was born in 1938 in Halberstadt, Germany. She has worked as a journalist in both TV and print and as a TV host and news broadcaster. She was a correspondent for Stern magazine in the United States and Israel and headed the culture section at one of Germany’s largest radio stations, ORB. She has two grown daughters and now lives and works as a freelance writer in Berlin.

I can immerse myself in the early photographs-the half-timbering, the baroque, ramshackle stables, the courtyards. The town had 43,000 inhabitants in 1900, the pictures suggest affluence and above all industry. Shops everywhere, markets, awnings outside the shops. The Kaiserhof patisserie by the fish market served its customers under parasols on a second-floor terrace. From 1887 there was a horse tram, replaced in 1903 by the electric one. From 1888 the people of Halberstadt were able to use the telephone. Charlemagne himself had established the diocese in 804, and even today when I drive across the incredibly flat North German landscape I see churches in the distance, many, many churches.

For me Halberstadt is a metaphor. Halberstadt is "before." My memory of the town where I was born, the town of my early childhood, begins on April 8, 1945, the Sunday after Easter, at 11:25 in the morning. Allied bombers, supposedly 215 of them, reduced 82 percent of the old town to rubble. I was six at the time. All my memories prior to that are buried under ruins, consumed in the conflagration that raged for days. After that I remember a difficult postwar time everywhere and nowhere-that was the beginning of what became my life. Halberstadt isn't part of it. Whenever I drove there later on, what I found was gray, decaying everyday life in East Germany, brightened by family friends, but still strange to me. Today Halberstadt is a pleasure. The town always picks itself up, as it did after the destruction wrought by Henry the Lion, the Peasant War and the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, French rule, and its storming by the Cossacks.

At some point in the meantime the Klamroths arrived. "For when our forefather came out of the woods near Börnecke in the Harz . . . dapp-i-dee," they sang later at their family parties. The forefather appeared sometime around 1500. Thereafter Klamroths were living in the villages of the Harz mountains as foresters and saddlers to the court of Saxony, master brewers, and even one town councillor in Ermsleben. Things really got intriguing with Johann Gottlieb. He was a trained businessman, he traveled with the certificate of the "Honorable Guild of Grocers and Canvas Tailors" from Quedlinburg to Halberstadt, "at which place" he founded the company I.G. Klamroth in 1790. He was twenty-two; in 1788 he first sealed his letters with the family crest that we still use today.

There was one infallible way for me to put Else in a fury. Like everyone who marries into a family of stature she was a convinced convert: the honor of the Klamroth family was sacred to her. If I compared this family-not inaccurately-with the Buddenbrooks, Else foamed at the mouth. If I described the company-that company!-as a shop selling hop poles and jute bags, there was serious trouble. Yet it's not a completely inaccurate description either.

Johann Gottlieb ran a business selling "fabric and victuals." That was how it started. He wore his hair in the style of Napoleon-how did they do that in those days, long before hairspray was invented? When he got up in the morning, did he look as handsome as he does in his oil painting? How often were the lace ruffs under his velvet collar washed? And did he wear them at the counter? We don't really know anything.

In 1802 he married sensibly into a flourishing leather company. His wife's father had passed away, and Johann Gottlieb moved his business into his late father-in-law's residence at No. 3 An der Woort-"house fit for a brewery, with 5 large rooms, 8 smaller rooms, 2 alcoves, 1 plaster and 2 tiled floors and 2 vaulted cellars, valued at a total of 2,011 thaler 14 groschen." It was in the ruins of this glorious building, frequently rebuilt and finally flattened, that the company continued to vegetate after the Second World War.

For Johann Gottlieb and his vivacious wife, Frau Johanne, things went from strength to strength. There were no paralyzing guild regulations; instead there was freedom of trade. The peasants were liberated in 1807 by Friedrich Wilhelm III and his Baron von Stein. Somehow, herring barrels and dibbles were no longer of the moment. The trade now moved to peas and wheat, poppy seeds and hemp, far beyond the boundaries of Halberstadt. Industry! It's a joy to follow the traces of these early family entrepreneurs, who efficiently absorbed each economic change, spotted each innovation on the horizon just in time, and converted it into profit.

In 1828, at the age of twenty-five, Johann Gottlieb's son Louis joined the company. He was as ugly as sin and a gifted businessman. With various different partners and a complex network of companies, he sold seeds imported from all over Europe, agricultural implements, grains, and fertilizer. In his own factories he produced beet sugar, spirits, and vinegar; he traded in cement, wine, and even money. His flourishing pawnbroker's firm bought its customers' family jewels for good cash and gave them credit on favorable terms.

Louis bought farmland that he leased out to his own factories for the planting of sugar beet. He owned houses, properties, farms, and a manor. His transport company carried goods from the new railway to the buyer; agricultural products were stacked up in warehouses for sale even beyond the boundaries of Prussia. He was one of the first to equip his factories and farms with new steam-operated machinery, sowing machines, and harvesters-Louis was heavily into the new technology. By 1840 he had in his private office a desk with a built-in copying press of which he was particularly proud, because it meant that he didn't have to have his letters copied out by his apprentices.

Louis Klamroth advised the region's farmers of the advantages of Victoria or giant-yield peas ("a yield of 16-18 Berliner Scheffel"-about fifty-five liters-"per Magdeburg acre, the softer, longer straw is very healthy feed for cattle"), and Hungarian seed corn ("has proven in our last harvest to be ideal for our climatic conditions"). He included "red clover, green fescue, and timothy grass" in his assortment, and sold "English riddles," coarse-meshed sieves for separating wheat and chaff.

In his youth, Louis traveled on horseback to visit business colleagues in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main, finding the express post chaise too slow. On these journeys he carried large sums of money in a belt wrapped around his body. It hasn't been recorded whether he carried a weapon as well, but horse riding has stayed in the family. In 1861 Louis Klamroth-his actual name was Wilhelm Ludwig-was appointed to the Royal Prussian Chamber of Commerce, and when he died twenty years later he left a princely fortune. Holding in my hands the will that he drew up together with his wife, Bertha, I was impressed. Even their young granddaughter Martha Löbbecke, whose mother had died in childbirth, was promised 330,000 marks, a vast sum of money at that time-and their son Gustav, Louis's successor in the company, paid the sum in a single installment. Gustav was also able to perform a similar service for his three living brothers and sisters, and nowhere is there any suggestion that these disbursements brought the company to its knees.

Gustav is educated like a crown prince--a year at the renowned Beyersches Trade Institute in Braunschweig, a four-year apprenticeship with the import-export business of the von Fischers in Bremen, extended internships with companies in London and Paris. Finally in 1861, at the age of twenty-four, he becomes a partner in the firm. New brooms sweep clean, and like his father before him, Gustav now seeks to ensure that an already impressive business grows even bigger.

Gustav admires the chemist Justus von Liebig, who revolutionized agriculture with his artificial fertilizer. After less than three years with the company, and much earlier than his hesitant competitors, Klamroth junior begins manufacturing superphosphates, which would very swiftly lead to the establishment of an extremely profitable fertilizer factory in Nienburg an der Weser. The Liebig label was still a presence in my childhood: in my parents' library there were imposing albums of pictures collected from Liebig's meat extract packages, and everything I know about the legend of King Arthur or the battle of Königgrätz I have gleaned from these trading cards.

The 1866 war--Prussia versus the rest of the German-speaking world--was resolved in Königgrätz after just four weeks. In those days wars tended not to last very long. Two or three big battles--I imagine them as being something like a soccer final, with brightly colored uniforms, foaming horses, banners, flags. On the com-manders' mound Wilhelm I and his leather-faced General Helmuth von Moltke. "March apart, strike together," was his credo: three Prussian armies came from different directions, to the bafflement of the Austrians and the Saxons.

Things got going on July 3, 1866. The different sides lined up in the open field-the town of Königgrätz was a long way from the tumult-a trumpet sounded, and a murderous clanging of weaponry began and lasted till evening, when messengers on horseback appeared with white flags and the horrors were over. A single day. That was it. At least that was how "the greatest battle of the century," as it has since come to be known, was told in Liebig's meat extract pictures.

There was great agitation at I.G. Klamroth. The kingdom of Hanover had sided with Austria against Prussia, and relations between Prussian Halberstadt and Nienburg in Hanover were difficult. Banks had stopped credit, imports from England were being held on the River Weser, trains weren't allowed to cross the border, which was guarded with great suspicion by the Cuirassiers of Halberstadt. Louis and young Gustav walked about with concerned expressions, while packages for Bohemia were assembled at the company's headquarters, and workers picked rags for lint. But then Hanover was swallowed ...