The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

by Nicholas Stargardt

Ernst Guicking’s luck held. After only a few weeks’ incarceration as a prisoner of war, he returned, finding Irene and their two young children at her parents’ home in Lauterbach. Her training as a florist and his childhood on the farm saw them through the post-war years: they began to grow flowers and vegetables on a strip of land next to the house. In 1949, Irene realised her pre-war dream and opened a modest flower shop of her own. When asked in 2003 whether she and Ernst had ever talked to their children about the war, Irene replied: ‘I don’t think so, I don’t think so, no. I don’t remember that, no. And then we were just so busy from morning to night in the market garden and the shop.’ She did not call to mind the letters she and Ernst had written in early 1942 about the deportation of the Jews and what happened to them in the east, or their anxiety that Germany should hold out in early 1945. What Irene did want to talk about was love, and this was the principal reason why she wanted to see their wartime correspondence archived and published.50