An important piece of non-fiction on the Holocaust told from the perspective of a non-Jewish German
The title of Angelika Bammer’s book recalls two other important post-Holocaust accounts by second-generation writers: Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge (2004). The difference is that Bammer is not the child of survivors. Instead, she writes to come to terms with her past, and her family’s past, as non-Jewish Germans. We are caught up in her story in the very first pages. "I was born into a time of shadows," she says. Now Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Emory University in Atlanta, she left Germany in 1969 at the age of 22 for graduate study in the United States and has lived there ever since. The book, though, is about Germany: her own early years there, her parents’ and grandparents’ lives before and during World War II, and the knowledge she has gleaned from interviews and archives since she realised she had to undertake this historical, and very personal, project.
Bammer was born in 1946 in the village of Velen in Westphalia. In the context of a German education in which, as she says, high school history ended with World War I, she only gradually became aware of her country’s more recent history. The Eichmann trial in 1962 prompted an early recognition of the ‘holes’ in her country’s collective memory (as she puts it elsewhere), as did the six Auschwitz trials that ended in Frankfurt in 1965. Somehow or other, she got the idea, in her second year in high school, to write a paper on The Final Solution of the Jewish Question – though she writes that she does not remember whether or not she was aware of the trials.
Much later, in 1995, she decided to visit the city of Münster, where her mother had gone to school. Here she discovers the fate of two Jewish girls who had been at the school, and finds the Stolpersteine (memorial plaques) outside one of their houses. One girl was deported in 1942 and died in Trawniki camp. The other travelled to England on the Kindertransport, her parents deported and murdered. In the rest of the book, Bammer comes back again and again to intersections between her parents’ lives and the lives of Jewish people in their orbit. A particularly moving – and painful – passage considers the real likelihood of a literal passing of trains in a station, one carrying her parents during their courtship, the other carrying Jews on the first stage of their deportation journey.
Engaged in what was clearly a difficult – sometimes agonising – task, Bammer has produced a beautiful and important book. Published by an academic press, it nevertheless reads as the best kind of literary non-fiction. And one can only hope that the extensive research – historical, archival, interviews – she has undertaken, and the writing of her story, has enabled the author to abandon any lingering feelings that (as she indicates in a number of places) she was the one who had to do penance.
By Janet Wolff
Born After: Reckoning with the German Past is out now in hardback on Bloomsbury Academic, £90. The paperback edition is due in 2020.
Janet Wolff is Professor Emerita at University of Manchester. Her most recent book is a memoir about her family’s German history, Austerity Baby (Manchester University Press, 2017).