Hitler’s complete control even penetrated personal, daily life in Berlin. By forcing citizens to say “Heil Hitler” instead of the traditional “Guten Morgen”, he exercised his complete control and thrust the Nazi party onto those opposers. Some member of the capital city especially challenged these guidelines with small victories.
There is a recollection from a German housewife in Berlin at War about these small gestures of opposition. She recalls seeing the year 1918 on many houses, buildings, and posters. This year served as a reminder and a threat to the people of Berlin as the year that their country lost the first World War and was in civic unrest, revolt, and economic collapse. Josepha von Koskull, the German housewife, would write the year 1918 on posters and signs to show opposition to the Nazis. I was shocked by her immediately political actions, being that she was only a housewife (279).
My character for this trip is a German housewife with 2 young children, who is in her early thirties and living in Berlin in the WWII times. Her husband has a “good” office job, and my assumption was that she would be fairly ignorant to the nitty gritty of the politics of the war. My assumptions was that her knowledge of the war would only be to the extent of which things affected her: air raids, blackouts, etc. My image of a german housewife (non-Jewish) was one of ignorant bliss and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mindset; I did not envision them being political activists until now. I suppose I had forgotten about the silent, stealthy, non-violent and quiet form of opposition. One doesn’t have to riot or burn down building (or museums) to show opposition. As Koskull and many other German housewives, probably including my own, proved, you could have helped the opposition by small feats, such as a refused greeting or small scribble on a poster. I should have given this supposedly ignorant housewives more credit.
(Netherlands, circa 1945, but I think that it would have looked like a smaller form of this)
(Nie Wieder: Never Again)