A review by msliz_31
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Nikola Sellmair, Jennifer Teege

3.0

Imagine being in a library one day and stumbling across a book in which your birth mother reveals that your grandfather was one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals, Amon Goethe? That is the journey Jennifer Teege, a biracial woman of color, takes readers on in My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me. While coming to grips with the fact that she shares DNA with one of the most repugnant human beings in history, Teege is also reconciling her feelings of love she has for the grandmother who loved and worshipped Goethe. How could her grandmother have possibly loved her while also loving this man and being a Nazi sympathizer? Teege's story is also about her struggle with depression and how she yearns for and continues to have a relations hip with her birth mother who gave her up for adoption when she was a child. The format of the book goes back and forth between Teege's voice giving us insights into her thoughts, feelings and experiences as she looks to perform a sort of post-generational mea culpa for her grandfather actions, and the voices of those close to her (her adoptive parents and siblings, friends and her husband) and their observations of her through this process of self-discovery and healing. At time the back and forth works well, but there are times where it seems a little disjointed; perhaps this is attributed to the translation. One area that I found lacking in the story was why she made the assertion that her grandfather would have shot. I know it goes without saying that the reason is because she is biracial, which Goethe and his ilk found to be an abomination, but in all the detail Teege provides, IMO she does not delve deep enough into the exploration of Nazi ideology against people of color and other marginalized groups. While it is known of the atrocities the Nazi's perpetrated against the Jewish community, rarely is the same attention given to how they also persecuted people of color, members of the LGBT community and the handicapped. All in all, this is a compelling read and offers a different perspective on another set of victims of the Holocaust: the descendants of the war criminals.