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SPIEGEL: Mr. Schmeiser, what are the first scary moments in your life that you can remember?
Dietmar Schmeiser: Those are the nights in the bomb shelter. The Karlsruhe bombing started in 1942. We lived there in a four-family house, and during the war our community had to go to the basement about a thousand times after each pre-alarm. Almost nothing happened after that. But when the main alarm went off, we knew it: now he’s getting serious. They rarely hit our street, but two neighboring streets were totally destroyed. In our basement the floor swayed, the light went out, and even the high school teacher Bresch, who used to entertain us, fell silent. When I smell burned rags or cooking gas today, I think back to that time. It occupied me emotionally for so long that in 2005, more than 60 years later, I wrote another book about it.
SPIEGEL: Do these memories still scare you?
SchmeiserMeanwhile, a certain layer of oblivion ice has settled on him. I remember those years today more positively than they were. But I can still empathize with the despair of my mother, who watched her husband slowly die. My father was seriously injured in the tank battle near Kursk in 1943 and flew to Berlin for an operation. He was then taken to a reserve hospital near us, where he died after nine months of suffering.
