Marty's thoughts

I might have known Martin Noth.

Not personally, perhaps, and certainly not in the life I eventually lived. But there was another life available to me once—a life that disappeared before I was old enough to choose it.

I was born in Germany on February 7, 1945, while the war was still being fought above us and around us. Stuttgart and the towns of Württemberg were living beneath the bombers. Germany was collapsing. Roads were crowded with soldiers, refugees, prisoners, displaced families and people simply trying to find someplace where the war might not reach them.

I arrived in the middle of that.

I knew nothing of Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, armies, borders or history. I knew nothing of Germany’s guilt or Germany’s suffering. I knew nothing of the ancient Israelites or Abraham or the Bible as history.

I was simply a newborn child beneath a sky filled with war.

My father had been a German soldier on the Russian front. The war eventually ended for Germany, but not immediately for him. He disappeared into Soviet captivity and remained a prisoner for years.

For a child, five years is almost beyond comprehension.

Nations speak easily of wars ending on certain dates. Historians put a neat line beneath 1945. But wars do not end so neatly for families. Somewhere a mother keeps waiting. Somewhere a child grows without knowing his father. Somewhere a prisoner measures time not by treaties but by winters.

Eventually my father came home.

There was, at least in possibility, another future waiting for us in southern Germany. We might have lived around Münsingen, near Reutlingen, in the landscape of Württemberg—the Swabian hills, farms, church towers and university towns that had survived, damaged but still recognizable, beyond the ruins.

Had we stayed, I would have grown up German.

That sentence stops me.

What does it mean to say that I might have become someone else when I would still have been myself?

I might have attended German schools. I might have entered a German university. Perhaps engineering would still have claimed me. Perhaps history would have. Perhaps theology.

And somewhere along that road I might have encountered Martin Noth.

Noth was already one of Germany’s important Old Testament scholars when I was born. He too had passed through the war. He had served as a German soldier. His academic world at Königsberg disappeared in the destruction and territorial rearrangements of 1945. His books and papers were lost. After the war he rebuilt his career at the University of Bonn.

There, while Germany attempted to understand what remained of itself, Noth returned to an older question.

How does a people remember catastrophe?

He studied ancient Israel.

He studied a people who had experienced conquest, destruction, displacement and exile. He examined stories that had been told and retold across generations: Abraham leaving his homeland, Jacob wandering, Moses leading people out of bondage, Jerusalem destroyed, a people carried away and later trying to understand why history had dealt with them as it had.

Noth’s great insight was that history is not simply what happens.

History is also what human beings remember about what happens.

And memory is never a warehouse in which facts sit untouched.

Memory selects. It arranges. It connects. It searches for meaning.

Perhaps that is what has drawn me toward Noth so many decades later.

I can imagine myself at twenty years old entering a lecture hall in Bonn sometime in the 1960s. The room is plain. There are wooden desks. Young Germans sit with notebooks open. Some of their fathers had fought in Russia. Some had not returned. Some families had fled the East. Some carried memories nobody discussed.

At the front stands Martin Noth.

He speaks about Abraham.

Not simply Abraham the biblical patriarch, but Abraham as memory.

Perhaps there had once been an ancient ancestor behind the stories. Perhaps different communities had preserved different traditions. Perhaps generations had added meaning to the old accounts until Abraham became more than an individual man.

He became a beginning.

A wandering man became the father of a people.

A promise became a national memory.

An ancient family story became theology.

I imagine sitting there and suddenly thinking about my own father.

He too had gone east.

He too had disappeared.

He too returned carrying a history his child could never fully enter.

And I would have begun to understand something Noth probably never intended to teach me.

Every family possesses its own Deuteronomistic History.

We gather fragments.

A photograph.

A place name.

A military story.

A sentence overheard when we were children.

A silence at the dinner table.

A father’s reluctance to speak.

A mother’s recollection.

A date.

February 7, 1945.

We assemble these fragments and try to create a story from them.

Not because we wish to falsify the past, but because the human mind cannot live comfortably among disconnected pieces. We need beginnings and endings. We need causes. We need to know how one thing led to another and, above all, how we arrived here.

Perhaps ancient Israel did the same.

Perhaps Abraham became necessary because a people needed somewhere to begin.

And perhaps I have spent much of my later life doing something similar.

Where do I begin?

With the bombing?

With my father on the Russian front?

With his captivity?

With Germany’s defeat?

With immigration?

With America?

With engineering?

With children and grandchildren who belong to a world my parents could never have imagined?

History gives me many possible beginnings.

Memory chooses among them.

That is where Martin Noth and I finally meet.

Not in a classroom in Bonn.

Not in Germany.

Not even in the same generation.

We meet across the strange distance between history and memory.

He spent his scholarly life asking how ancient Israelites took scattered memories and formed from them a meaningful history.

I find myself, late in my own life, asking much the same question about myself.

What survives?

What is remembered?

What is forgotten?

And what do we create when we attempt to join the surviving pieces?

There is something almost cruel about imagining the life that might have been. Had my family remained in Germany, perhaps I would have walked through Tübingen or Bonn carrying books beneath my arm. Perhaps one of those books would have been Noth’s History of Israel. Perhaps I would have sat in one of his lectures and argued with him about Abraham.

Perhaps I would have asked the question I ask now:

“Professor Noth, how much of Abraham is history, and how much is imagination?”

And perhaps Noth would have reminded me that this is not quite the right question.

The more interesting question is what happens between history and imagination.

There lies memory.

Memory does not merely preserve the past. It gives the past a shape through which the present can understand itself.

The Israelites remembered Abraham because Abraham told them something about who they believed themselves to be.

And I remember February 7, 1945, not because I remember the bombers—I was an infant and could remember nothing—but because that date has become one of the foundations upon which I have constructed the story of my life.

I was born into war.

My father vanished into its aftermath.

He returned.

We survived.

Then history carried us elsewhere.

That last sentence may contain the entire story.

We could have remained.

We did not.

I could have been a German university student listening to Martin Noth.

I was not.

Instead I traveled another road, became an engineer, became an American, raised a family, grew old, and eventually—after eighty years of living—found Martin Noth waiting for me in a book.

Perhaps that is why the imagined meeting still matters.

The professor I never had has become, in a strange way, one of my teachers after all.

And Abraham, the wandering old man whom Noth spent so much of his life trying to understand, seems almost to smile at the irony.

For Abraham’s story begins with leaving one country for another.

Mine does too.

Perhaps all of us carry an Abraham somewhere within us: a remembered ancestor, a lost homeland, a road not taken, and the persistent human need to make meaning from the journey.

History tells us where we went.

Memory asks why it mattered.

And imagination allows us, for a moment, to walk the road we never took.