Born After: Reckoning with the German Past by Angelika Bammer (review)

The other evening, I was hoping to get a good night's sleep because I had to drive to Nashville the next morning; but, sleep would not come. I had been reading Angelika Bammer's recently published book Born After: Reckoning with the German Past and the stark images and powerful queries had deeply disturbed my peace of mind, perhaps because we share a similar history. Bammer is five and a half years younger than I and she immigrated to the United States seven years after I did, at age 22. I was 21. She now lives in Atlanta while I am just three hours north in Knoxville.

The beginning of Bammer's volume sets the stage for a brutally honest, deep-wielding, even surgical introspection that has one primary goal: to learn whether her family had been Nazis. Bammer leads the reader through a psychological thriller of a Kafkaesque nature that ends again and again in silence. There will be answers, but it is not yet time. Her arduous attempts to obtain the elusive information explore physical, psychological, geographical, and ethnographic avenues. She details her life in Germany, in Canada, in the US, and a trip to Buchenwald, all in the service of both personal and academic inquiry.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been a process that has weighed heavily on the post-Nazi generations of Germans, those like Bammer. In the public domain, this quest has often led to rewriting Nazi history, to view it in a better light, and to Holocaust revisionism. There is no such problem with Bammer's work. She has no interest in improving on anything that happened; she attempts to get to the truth. Although, as one born after the war in 1946, she can have a clear conscience—there are no skeletons in her closet; nevertheless, the specter of the Third Reich reaches like a stealthy claw out of the shadows, claiming her peace of mind again and again. Her sense of inherited guilt is not helped by her strong Catholic faith and upbringing and tortures her again and again.

I personally connected to the volume's third historical part where Bammer engages in research in archives and other sources and interviews that provide facts for a narrative that the author presents to the public. I published such an account about two Jewish families in my hometown of Süssen in southern Germany in 2012—Süssen is Now Free of Jews. But, it was different from Bammer's intent and goal: I wanted to make sure that these Jewish families were not written out of history but instead had their rightful place in a narrative of this small town that was not too forthcoming back then about its past. Bammer, on the other hand, while also chronicling the history of Jews in Velen through interviews and archival research, has only one goal: to get to the truth about her family's past. She admirably faces the assault on memory and the challenges this poses head-on.

The book is organized into three parts. It begins with her early life, which is truly an autobiography, dwelling on her family's seven years in Canada, where she became aware that being ostracized for being German was synonymous with being a Nazi. She then recounts her life in boarding school while her father was ambassador to Gabon. During this time, she wrote a research paper, "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question," interspersed with historical events during those years, such as the Eichmann trial and the war crimes trials, and her immigration to the US. She returned to Germany in 2007 to retrace her journey for her twins and became aware that the route would lead past Bitburg, widely associated with an insensitive political snafu during the Regan era and lessons learned from Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Bammer does not condone the violent ways of Meinhof, but admires the young student who, like...