A review by laurenkd89
Those Who Forget: My Family's Story in Nazi Europe - A Memoir, a History, a Warning by Geraldine Schwarz

3.0

"I wasn't particularly destined to take an interest in Nazis. My father's parents were neither on the victims' nor the executioners' side. They didn't distinguish themselves with acts of bravery, but neither did they commit the sin of excess zeal. They were simply Mitläufer, people who 'followed the current.' Simply, in the sense that their attitude was shared by the majority of the German people, an accumulation of little blindnesses and small acts of cowardice that, when combined, created the necessary conditions for the worst state-orchestrated crimes known to humanity."

Géraldine Schwarz is a French-German journalist who takes it upon herself to reckon with her family's complicity in the Third Reich. She traces the progression of political, social, and cultural opinions after World War II, showing the tide slowly turning against Nazism. Shockingly, after the war, many "everyday" Germans were quick to deny culpability for the Reich and the Holocaust - they were simply Mitlaufer, a category in the U.S.-occupied section of Germany that meant they were just going along with the tide, supporting some of the NSDAP's beliefs but not taking any strong stance for or against the war. Schwarz is quick to refute this categorization. Although many Germans hid behind the idea that they would be punished for going against the Party and that they were supportive of the NSDAP simply for the economic revitalization and not for the anti-Semitism, countless Germans benefitted from the "Aryanization" of German businesses - the informal practice of boycotting Jewish-owned businesses until they had no choice but to sell to Germans for far below market price. Schwarz's own grandfather was one of these Germans, buying a mineral business from a German Jew at barely face value, then denying all blame when that same German Jew filed a reparations suit against Schwarz's grandfather after the war.

Schwarz's documentation of the history of immediate postwar German "reconstruction" was quite interesting. Most works I've read and watched about WWII basically stop after Potsdam, and hardly focus on the punishments that we all expected to be doled out after the war. You'll learn here that punishments were not doled out, not nearly as many as were deserved - people were scared of being implicated, even non-German officials in France and England.

However, after the first third of the book, I found the narrative to be quite meandering and the timeline a bit hard to follow. Schwarz often goes back and forth between pre-war and post-war history, which I understand is needed to show the gradual process of Aryanization and subtle cultural shifts - but the blending of these timelines makes the story slightly confusing. After going through her German grandparent's history, Schwarz enters into more recent history, discussing her father and aunt's upbringing, then introducing her French mother and her French grandparents' side of the story. I would have preferred it be arranged chronologically, with all of the grandparents' stories first, then her parent's generation, then hers. Schwarz goes quite in depth with the French occupation and collaboration with Germany (sometimes it seems that the French were worse than the Germans here!), but this story wasn't as compelling as the recounting of German history.

I enjoyed this piece of history that I haven't read about before - although it could be dense at times, it is a fascinating story, and one that I hope causes other Germans to interrogate their pasts and reckon with the scars in their family's histories. Thank you to Scribner for the ARC.