{"id":28246,"date":"2018-03-23T03:38:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T10:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=28246"},"modified":"2018-03-23T11:16:51","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T18:16:51","slug":"a-grandfathers-sins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/03\/23\/a-grandfathers-sins\/","title":{"rendered":"A grandfather\u2019s sins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prof. Roger Frie\u2019s \u00a0Not in My Family\u00a0<\/em>rises above the merely personal (image from\u00a0cenes.ubc.ca<\/a>)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Forty-three years ago, at Vancouver\u2019s first Holocaust Symposium, for which I was the chair, the keynote speaker was the Lithuanian partisan fighter Leon Kahn. His presentation to a large group of high school students described, among other things, how he watched, in hiding, while his mother and sisters were raped and murdered by members of the Einsatzgruppen \u2013 the murderous \u201ctask forces\u201d mandated to kill Jews by gunshot (the so-called \u201cHolocaust by bullets\u201d) in German-occupied countries. Approximately two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.<\/p>\n

After Leon was finished speaking, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy walked slowly up to the podium. He was, he said, of German origin, and wanted to apologize to Leon. His face revealed how devastated he was. Leon shook his hand and told him, \u201cLook, it wasn\u2019t your fault. Now go on and live your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was my first experience with deutsche Schuld<\/em>, German guilt.<\/p>\n

There are literally hundreds of books and websites approaching deutsche Schuld from every angle. The author of Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust<\/em> (Oxford University Press, 2017) is Roger Frie, a Simon Fraser University professor and locally practising psychotherapist who is a third-generation German-Canadian. Based on his profession, he addresses the issue of German guilt in the present book from a personal psychological perspective, using his fear of being exposed as a \u201cbad German,\u201d along with his experience with inherited guilt, as his templates.<\/p>\n

Frie\u2019s Not in My Family <\/em>was triggered, he says, by his mid-life discovery, long hidden by his family, of his beloved grandfather\u2019s Nazi past. The book invites us to follow him as he slowly builds up the courage to go to the archives in Berlin to find the documentation revealing his grandfather\u2019s Nazi membership and wartime activities.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpa\u201d was hardly a high-ranking Nazi functionary, it turns out: he was \u201can ordinary German,\u201d who operated, for all intents and purposes, as a minor motorcycle repairman. (Frie writes more about this apparently apolitical \u201cmotorcycle club\u201d later in the book, but one is still left to wonder how the author, already heavily burdened with inherited guilt, would have felt if his Opa were discovered to have been say, a camp guard, or a member of the Totenkopfverbaende<\/em>, the infamous Death\u2019s Head Units.)<\/p>\n

Ironically, Frie has professionally analyzed children of Jewish survivors, and some of his most intimate reflections arise from his wrestling, during these sessions, as to whether or not to reveal that he is himself of German heritage.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>Constantly throughout Not in My Family<\/em>, Frie reiterates that he \u201chas an obligation to remember the past\u201d and, while remembering, he has many sincere reflections on post-Holocaust German guilt and responsibility, complicity, prejudice, cowardly denial and \u201cshameful silence\u201d of past issues, as well as, of course, the \u201cneed for redemption\u201d and \u201cthe problematics of trauma,\u201d especially of his own, rooted in a questionable notion of vicarious perpetration, three generations down the line.<\/p>\n

On this last point, clearly, there was a therapeutic dimension for the writing of Not in My Family<\/em>: it reflects on every page. But the book rises above the merely personal. For example, Frie is brutally honest in rejecting the moral camouflage of the \u201cGermans suffered too\u201d ilk, and on the need to be suspicious of Germans who feel \u201cdeluged\u201d with the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Near the end of Not in My Family<\/em>, Frie reflects that \u201cwriting can be a form of discovery, of examining life and making sense of the past.\u201d This book, for him, he admits, was \u201cpersonally meaningful\u201d and \u201cemotionally draining.\u201d But if, as he puts it, the book \u201ccreates a space for dialogue and reflection on the nature of German memory and the Holocaust,\u201d it is a valuable contribution to an ever-growing body of knowledge about how the greatest crime in human history came to be perpetrated by, among others, affectionate, family-loving, probably not dogmatically antisemitic, minor motorcycle repairmen.<\/p>\n

Graham Forst<\/strong>, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Roger Frie\u2019s \u00a0Not in My Family\u00a0rises above the merely personal (image from\u00a0cenes.ubc.ca) Forty-three years ago, at Vancouver\u2019s first Holocaust Symposium, for which I was the chair, the keynote speaker was the Lithuanian partisan fighter Leon Kahn. His presentation to a large group of high school students described, among other things, how he watched, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[7987,4242,53,7906,7986],"class_list":["post-28246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-deutsche-schuld","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-intergenerational-trauma","tag-roger-frie"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}