MEET THE AUTHOR

GÉRALDINE SCHWARZ’s book Those Who Forget deals with her German grandparents’ complicity with the Nazi regime

What made you want to write the book?

Most readers assume that I wrote the book because of my family history, but actually I was very worried about the political situation in Europe and the USA in 2016. Populist parties in France, Germany and Eastern Europe, and also in Italy, Great Britain and the USA, started to be very successful, and among these parties there were many who have a very nostalgic connection to Europe’s fascist past. And so I was wondering: if these parties are popular today, does it mean that we have failed to remember what happened in the 1930s and during the Second World War? Have we failed in our duty of keeping the past alive in order to learn from it?

These were the questions I was asking myself, so I decided to write a book about the importance of remembering, and I thought that maybe the first step would be to remember myself, to try to dig into what actually happened in my own family. So I tried to combine the family story and the big story.

What did you discover about your family? I knew that my grandfather on the German side had been a member of the Nazi Party.

I also knew that he had been a Nazi not really out of conviction, but out of opportunism. But I didn’t know the full story.

One day, when I was looking in the cellar of our family house in south-west Germany, I found a contract that stipulated that in 1938 my grandfather had bought a company from a Jewish family for a very low price. This discovery gave a new dimension to my grandfather’s responsibility, because being a member of the Nazi Party was one step, but making profit off the despair of the Jews was one more step – by doing this he became an accomplice of a criminal regime. His attitude was a very common one among those whom I call the Mitläufer in my book: those who follow the current.

I think that the story of my grandfather is quite useful to learn from, because I can imagine and I think many readers can imagine making the same mistakes that my grandfather did, and this is actually what the book is about. It’s about trying to help us to learn from history by thinking about what history can teach us about ourselves as human beings, our moral fallibility, our weaknesses, in order to be able to fight against them, and to avoid history repeating itself.

Those Who Forget By Géraldine Schwarz (Translated By Laura Marris) Is Available Now From Pushkin Press (320 pages, £20; bit.ly/pushkin- forget)