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

Reading Angelika Bammer's Born After: Reckoning with the German Past involves joining Bammer in remembering and thinking of the "German past" from the perspective of the "aftermath of World War II," of the perpetration of genocide, as well as of cultural and physical uprootedness—and in "reckoning with" the depth of these difficult legacies for the post-war generation (4). While World War II is a macro-experience of, or for, the twentieth century, Bammer's autobiography explores a micro-experience of the war and of the post-war generation, while raising complex, thought-provoking questions about story, history, memory, and practice.

The book begins with Bammer remembering her uprooted childhood "in the aftermath of World War II," before diving deeply and extensively into her family's involvement with Naziism and World War II and her "reckoning with" having a family history connected with the perpetration of the genocide of Jews (4). Bammer is a child conceived post-war after her parents had reunited with each other when the war ended in 1945—a reunion that was, in the words of Bammer's father (who had been a German soldier), "a miracle" (140). As she writes, "Wars change the shape and scope of the worlds we live in…Sometimes we die there. Sometimes in that new place, our life resumes" (180). The book concludes with Bammer remembering taking her own young children on a visit to the Anne Frank House—a visit that while for her is a pivotal memory given her past appears not to reverberate with her children's own recollections (232).

Bammer approaches her questions not theoretically but predominantly practically, weaving in the autobiographical with problems and insights of scholarly value that are explored personally and practically. As she notes, she draws on Theodor Adorno as well as Sigmund Freud for the notion of "'work[ing] through' our entanglement" in a past that is not merely a historical reality but one that must also be lived with on an individual and psychic level (238). For Bammer, this "work[ing] [her] way out" involves her autobiographical and self-reflective journey of a life and family story defined and contoured by 20th century German history and World War II (238). While Bammer's work is situated at the micro-level of individual and family story, the issues and ideas broached in the book are nonetheless informed by scholarly and theoretical reflection.

Rather than take a firm position on the history of which she is part, Bammer instead bears out what it means to think with uncertainty and to live with, or through, the questions. Bammer indicates the possibilities of living with the "German past," but does not define, least of all prescribe, an answer. Born After does not take a position of moral certainty. I imagine her invitation to uncertainty and her restraint from moral judgment will also interest, as it has me, other readers and scholars of her book. The way in which Bammer expertly resists certainty and conviction, especially when it comes to thinking about a past that seems absolutely irredeemable, is noteworthy. One could suggest, for example, that for Bammer, being "born after" the violence and carnage of an ideology that held fast onto so-called 'truths' (about the Aryan race, about Jews, about anyone questioning Naziism, about the world domination of Germany) regardless of the myths or consequences of these 'truths' has led Bammer to a careful and cognizant refusal of certainty. The moral restraint shown by Bammer as author gives the book a scholarly distance, despite the fact that she is herself the subject of the story. The book's title and epigraph, which draws from Bertolt Brecht's well-known poem "To Those Born After," affirms the restraint from moral judgment that Brecht asks of from future generations. Bammer, following Brecht's appeal, does not stake out a firm truth or moral position in Born After, but rather puts a real stake on the position of uncertainty and ambiguity and...