The table at Josef Niehues' house is elegantly laid -- sparkling glass, glistening silver, fine china, all arrayed around a platter filled with white asparagus and ham, a seasonal delicacy. But the seven men, immersed in conversation, pay scant attention to either setting or food. The discussion, about something that happened four decades ago, still rivets their attention: Was one of their teachers then an apologist for Nazism or merely an outspoken nationalist?
The question -- never fully answered that evening -- will recur, along with related themes, over a 1988 Riesling, as the talk stretches into the early morning hours. The seven have seen little of one another since their graduation in 1956 from the Hittorf Gymnasium, a prep school in Recklinghausen (pop. 123,000), where the industrial Ruhr melds into the rich farmland of Westphalia. The reunion, prompted by the visit of a journalist classmate living in New York City, provides a perfect opportunity to catch up. Here with intensity, there with a curious lack of passion, their talk at Niehues' home in Recklinghausen ranges over a lifetime -- and is echoed later, in separate conversations, with former classmates living elsewhere in West Germany.
Eleven voices and plenty of topics. Pleasant and not so pleasant memories of school days. Personal achievements and setbacks. National guilt. Pride in a democracy and in the European family. And finally, astonishment at something not expected in their lifetime: impending unification. "We are part of the rubble generation," says Hartmut Ruge, managing editor of the daily Recklinghauser Zeitung. "A generation of moral disorientation and guilt. Now there is normality."
Eleven voices out of a class of 20 hardly amount to a representative sample: after all, the class of '56 included no women -- though Hittorf is now coeducational -- and, by the standards of the '50s, its members belonged to an educational elite. But their opinions -- serious, measured -- and their lives -- steady, prosperous -- do reflect the country they helped shape and that in turn shaped them. Raised in rubble, they went on to bridge and rebuild: youngsters touched by the fury of World War II; adolescents molded by the struggle out of the ruins; adults rewarded with stability, their lives dominated by a quest for acceptance -- and security. More than 40 years later, Manfred Poeck, a transportation planner in Munich, succinctly remembers the day after the war when, at eleven, for the first time in his life, he was not hungry.
He and most of his classmates had no specific plans when they walked out of their school in March 1956. "We were just feeling our way," says Wilhelm Wiethoff, a secondary-school teacher. "For a working-class boy like me to have graduated seemed enough." Making money did not figure high on anyone's agenda. "We knew things would go upward," says Niehues, a lawyer who considered following his father into public service and instead found his place at Ruhrgas, a large utility. "We simply wanted a well-ordered, good life, and we wanted to help shape the future."