MEET THE AUTHOR

JOSEPH PEARSON discusses My Grandfather’s Knife which tells stories of the Second World War through five everyday objects

Why did you write the book?

I began writing My Grandfather’s Knife because I had to. When I was a child, my grandfather told me that he had “liberated” a Nazi bayonet when he was in the Canadian Army fighting against the Germans in the Netherlands, bringing it back to Canada as a souvenir. After he passed away it was sent to me at my apartment here in Berlin in a box of books, and when I opened the box I just went to pieces. This is a really ugly bayonet – it has an eagle hilt and a swastika – and you’re not allowed to send anything with a swastika on it into the country. So I needed to write about the knife because the only legal way for me to possess it and to have imported it into Germany is to use it as an object of research.

How did you find the other objects for the book? I went round Berlin talking to people who had lived through the war asking them, “Is there an everyday object that tells your Second World War story?” In response I got dozens and dozens of objects, and for the book I chose the top four: a diary that was written in code, a recipe book, a stringed instrument and a cotton pouch. Because I’m a trained historian and I teach at a university I thought, “I’m not just going to go off of what people tell me. I’m going to go behind the story and use my skills as a historian, and basically do a lot of detective work.” There’s a real pleasure in confirming people’s stories. You sit down and talk with an old person who tells you, “I was Joseph Goebbels’ cook.” Then you find out that all of the information she told you matches the evidence you’ve dug up in the archives, and that her description of Goebbels’ house matches the architectural plans you’ve tracked down. It was really important to me for the book to be not just a collection of memories but also a document containing solid history.

What can objects tell us about history?

Object history has long been ignored in classical historical scholarship. It was really only in the 1980s that historians decided that everyday objects could be used to either be the thing we tell history about or as a device we can use in a strategy to elicit stories from witnesses. In oral history, once a story’s been told three or four times it starts to get a little ossified. What’s wonderful about an object is that if you show it to someone and say “Tell me the story of this thing”, you can often get into recesses of historical remembering. The object prompts your interviewee to tell stories that they’ve never told before. My Grandfather’s Knife: And Other Stories Of War And Belongings By Joseph Pearson Is Available From The History Press (320 pages, £20; thehistory press.co.uk/publication/my- grandfather-s-knife/9780750997393)