Despite the passing of time, the traumas of the Holocaust call out to be known and remembered. How do German families respond to the Nazi past? What is remembered and what remains unsaid, perhaps even unknown? Can familiar family narratives be transformed into an understanding of the Holocaust’s forbidding reality?
The son of Germans who were children during World War II, and with grandparents who were participants in the war, Roger Frie uses the history of his family as a guide to explore the moral and psychological implications of memory. From the perspective of a life lived across German and Jewish contexts, Frie explores what it means to discover the legacy of a Nazi past. Beginning with the narrative of his grandfather, he shows how the transfer of memory from one German generation to the next seeks to keep the Holocaust at bay.
This talk will draw on Roger Frie’s new book, Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford, 2017).