exploring why.
My father’s first years of sentient childhood fell during the Stresemann era, Germany’s interval of calm between 1924 and 1929, which historians have named after the country’s sure-handed foreign minister. But a generation of German men born just after 1900 were maladapted to this normalcy. They had grown up treating dispatches from the front as if they were sports scores, and then—after Versailles, during the Weimar-era hyperinflation—watched their mothers and young wives fill laundry baskets with cash simply to go to market. Through the decade beginning in 1914, this cohort had been trained, Haffner explains, to have
the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, for joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills—accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.
This would not be the case for my father and his Bildungsbürger family. But most Germans in the half generation Niko looked up at felt wrong-footed by the postwar era, and that experience scarred and radicalized many of them. Haffner again:
Only a certain cultured class—not particularly small, but a minority of course—used to find, and still finds, similar sustenance and pleasure in books and music, in independent thought and the creation of a personal “philosophy.” . . . Outside this cultured class, the great danger of life in Germany has always been emptiness and boredom. . . .
The menace of monotony hangs, as it has always hung, over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany, with their colorless towns and their all too industrious, efficient, and conscientious businesses and organizations. With it comes a horror vacui and the yearning for “salvation”: through alcohol, through superstition or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass intoxication.
You can apply these words to some of the same parts of Germany today. There, descendants of the people Haffner referred to find their lives subsumed once more by a menacing monotony. Fear, hate, or some other base motivation rushes in to fill the vacui in their lives, and they turn on the thin scattering of immigrants among them.
Haffner believed he knew what accounted for this. “In animals [it] is called ‘breeding,’” he wrote. “This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans. As a nation they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone.”
Albert Einstein also remarked on the “inborn servility” of the German people, and more than three decades before the Nazis’ rise to power described his countrymen as being under the spell of Autoritätsdusel, a foolish faith in authority that he considered “the worst enemy of truth.”
On this, Einstein and Arendt—German exiles turned Americans, one a physicist who sounded an early warning, the other a philosopher who performed a postmortem—agreed. In the end and above all, what matters is truth.
After Günter Demnig, the Berlin artisan who engraves and lays virtually every brass Stolperstein himself, learned that his father flew bombing missions during the war, Demnig refused to speak to him for five years.
It never occurred to me to force so pointed a reckoning with my own father. But I find myself hunting for evidence that, given a choice, my ancestors made one I can be proud of. At the same time I’m skeptical of any story that casts some relative in a virtuous light, for each raises the question: Has it survived the years only because it’s flattered by the perspective of history?
Maria once told me of her first inkling that something horrific was going on. One day in the late thirties, Hans Albrecht’s brother-in-law, then the director of a Munich hospital, came by Hans and Elisabeth’s home in an agitated mood. Two SS officers had just brought in a couple of ailing men and insisted on remaining in the operating room for the requisite procedures. He believed the patients were inmates at Dachau, and that the SS was afraid of what they might say under anesthesia.
Maria shared a second story, a kind of bookend to the first. During the fall of 1944 she was driving her mother to the Tegernsee, south of Munich, on a day so warm and clear that they left the top down on the car. Hearing an air-raid siren near Sauerlach, they stopped to take cover in the shade of trees by the roadside. “Suddenly we spotted three men with shaved heads creeping around in the brush,” Maria told me. “We called out ‘Don’t be afraid’ in English and French. They told us they had escaped from Dachau.”
Hustling the fugitives into their car, they drove off, praying they wouldn’t be pulled over. They headed for the nearby home of the widow of a Munich doctor, a woman named Uschi, whom they knew and trusted, because her anti-Nazi sympathies had surfaced during a visit several months earlier, shortly after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life. Uschi fed the escapees and let them bathe before sending them off toward the Swiss border in civilian clothes and with a map.
Or so goes this story passed down to me. “True heroism in such times takes place not only on the battlefields,” Helen had written Maria from New York in early 1940, “but works in those souls who still try to live as if there were some eternity, and an accountability to that eternity.”
With those words Helen had put Maria on a kind of notice. And my aunt and grandmother seem to have indeed performed an act of bravery and decency that day in the Bavarian countryside. But if I allow myself to feel good that several ancestors bucked the Nazis, how am I to feel upon learning of those who didn’t?
When Günter Demnig fields a request for a Stolperstein, it’s more likely to come from the descendants of perpetrators than the families of victims. This seems to me to be a just and salutary thing. Whether a memorial takes the form of a lone stumbling stone in the sidewalk or a more expansive Gedenkstätte, a place of reflection, these impositions of the past unsettle the contemporary conscience. We are raised to regard shame as something to avoid or bury—to not speak about. But shame can be a great animating, activating force if we let it. “Detached from the question of guilt, [shame] seizes anyone who lets themselves be seized,” the German scholar, activist, and philanthropist Jan Philipp Reemtsma has written. “To waken and practice consciousness and shame—that is the reason for these monuments.”
As I try to construct a frame in which to fit discoveries that lie in wait for me, it’s worth considering a few guidelines for what looking back at a Nazi past isn’t and is about—or at least ought to be about. For those of us in successor generations, it isn’t a matter of collective guilt so much as collective responsibility. And the point of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t just to remember but also to confront and engage and respond. As the political philosopher Susan Neiman puts it in her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, “You cannot choose your inheritance any more than you can choose your parents. You can only choose your relationship to them.”
If only Americans were as scrupulous and imaginative in the excavation of our past. To take up our most shameful historical chapters wouldn’t be to perform penance, exactly, for penance, voluntary and self-imposed, usually follows from some sort of personal implication. Germans who today underwrite Stolpersteine that memorialize people they never knew are engaging in atonement, an act of repair—but that doesn’t fully capture what I have in mind either. To alight on what feels right, it’s worth turning over the topsoil around the German word Erbsünde, which means both original sin and inherited sin, double duty that highlights the binding of one generation to another. Perhaps there
