OF GERMANY’S many wonders, its octogenarians are in a class of their own. Like the lady wearing the smart, understated dress and chain of pearls on the train to Cologne last month.
She let slip that she was 81, though she had the poise of a woman many years her junior – not to mention stamina.
This woman was on her way home to Düsseldorf after attending a funeral outside Berlin earlier that day. She had left home – alone – at 5am that day; now it was after midnight and it would be another 90 minutes before she would be in bed. Nearing the end of her 20-hour, 1,200km round trip, this octogenarian was still fresh as a daisy. After devouring the newspaper, she talked about her life, punctuating her anecdotes with the mantra: “No names, no names”. She grew up in prewar Berlin on the notorious Voßstraße. Her father had a short commute to work: across the street to Reichs Chancellery opposite where he served as Hitler’s chief of protocol.
Her family had to move from the Voßstraße eventually, she confessed, after a complaint from Hitler. When he took his morning walk in the courtyard, the dictator said he was tired of being stared at by the children living opposite. From her expression, it was clear that Frau No-Name was one of those child starers.
Her father left the chancellery under a cloud, she said, after a protocol faux-pas: he sent Hitler in evening dress to attend the opera in Rome with Mussolini – not knowing a troop inspection was planned for afterward. The uniform-loving Hitler was not amused.
“He chopped my father’s head off,” said Mrs Noname before, seeing my eyes widen, adding, “figuratively speaking, of course”. After the war her father served for many years as chief executive for a leading German company – again, “no names, no names”.
After a glass of wine she moved on to describe her active social life in Düsseldorf and her winters in Florida practising her golf, cooking casseroles and teaching her American friends a new variation of bridge.
Eventually I asked how she kept so fit, so active and so alive.
“I suppose we went through a tough school,” she said thoughtfully.
For today’s German octogenarians, the second World War was the toughest school possible. As wartime teenagers they were young enough not to have played an active role in the Third Reich, but old enough for the war to leave its mark.
Yet the octogenarians I meet, far from damaged or bitter, are often incredibly hard workers, and have both a taste for new experiences and a satisfaction with life’s simple pleasures.
Thankfully this isn’t Italy: German senior citizens don’t cling to power or prestige. Instead they remain active participants in German life as welcome contributors to public discussion. What’s more, society here listens to them.
In German public life, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (admittedly, at 91, no longer an octogenarian) remains a towering moral instance. Despite losing his wife of 68 years last October, he keeps up an incredible workload of public appearances, books (two last year alone) and columns in the Die Zeitweekly, of which he is publisher.
Last month he penned an extraordinary analysis of the euro-zone crisis, the best contribution from an German public figure to date. With sharp insight he insisted that Europe needs a Germany that is “neither a commander nor a schoolmaster”.
“German politicians have to explain to their citizens that we Germans – and why we Germans – have to make a sacrifice.” His life experience, in particular his time as a soldier six decades earlier, have never left him. Instead they have coloured his thinking and writing in the most positive way possible.
There is Jürgen Habermas, too, an 81-year-old giant of European intellectual tradition, and Joseph Ratzinger, 83, whose credentials as one of the great thinkers and theologians of our time were assured long before he became Pope Benedict XVI And lets not forget Imogen Stuart, the German-born sculptor who has lived in Ireland for 60 years and shows no sign of slowing down.
The pace these octogenarians keep – physically and intellectually – is exhausting to watch and it is worrying to think how anyone can hope to fill their place when they are gone.
What of Ireland? I wonder what octogenarians beyond Garret FitzGerald still make a contribution to Irish life, perhaps without the recognition they are due? Are our eightysomethings not ideally placed to give us some perspective on the current crisis? At a wedding last year, the groom’s grandmother told me how her brother and father never returned from the war and how she barely survived the fire-bombing of Hamburg with her mother.
I asked her why, despite the tragedy and hardships in her life, she exuded a remarkable aura of being at peace with herself.
When you survive the tough years, she said, you appreciate everything else.
“The secret in life,” she added, “is that you have to decide to be happy.”