Something really struck me as I was reading my grandpa's references to the Germans in these letters. They are absolutely the enemy. He both fears them and trash talks them. “The Germans don’t like the Yanks,” he writes to Leonard. “They are kind of afraid of them. When they see one walking around they throw a few trolly cars or whiz bangs at them. Trolly cars and whiz bangs are nicknames for shells they shoot. They don’t bother the Frenchman that way as bad so they must be afraid of the Yanks.”
And yet my grandpa came from a very German community, with both parents immigrating from Germany and surely speaking the language at home. Last weekend I grabbed a couple of more boxes of stuff from my sister’s house and came across three booklets. They are annual reports of sorts from the church, Holy Trinity, where my grandfather's family belonged and where he and his siblings were baptized. The booklets are written almost entirely in German – except for many of the advertisements (I swear the majority of ads are for beer!) and some sections that are translated into English.
Three or four times in these letters my grandfather references the annual “DRK” picnic that his siblings attended back home. “Well I hope you had a good time at the D.R.K. picnic and only wish I would have been present,” he writes to Leonard.
By chance, I was flipping through an exhaustive family tree book written about another branch of my family and happened to see reference to DRK. According to my dad’s cousin Herman Griesmer who wrote the family tree, DRK was Deutsch Romisch Katholischer, “an organization of Catholic men of German extraction. It was an active club from stories they used to tell and the pictures I have seen. It broke up shortly after the first war, from the animosity to the Germans,” according to Herman.
How conflicted people like my grandfather must have felt in the war. He grew up surrounded by people including both of his parents who were from Germany, speaking German, and now he’s being bombed by them and asked to shoot at them.
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