Those Who Forget
My Family's Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, A History, A Warning
Table of Contents
About The Book
“Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal
Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly).
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich.
Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy.
Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich.
Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman under the Vichy regime.
Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of postwar reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget is a riveting memoir, an illuminating history, and an urgent call for remembering.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
Nazi Germany
1. Schwarz defines her German grandparents as Mitläufer, ordinary people who, like the majority of the German population, “followed the current” (page 1) during World War II. She argues that without the cooperation of the Mitläufer, the Nazis could never have carried out the atrocities of the Holocaust. What does she mean by that?
2. How did Mannheim change during the 1930s and early 1940s, and how did this impact the city’s Jewish community day by day? How did it impact Schwarz’s grandparents?
3. How did opportunism motivate many Germans to support anti-Semitic measures? How did its citizens become accomplices in a criminal regime? What role did indifference, fear, and blindness, as well as the manipulative strategies of the Third Reich, play in society’s transformation?
4. What parts of Hitler’s regime were appealing to Lydia, Schwarz’s paternal grandmother? How does Schwarz use her grandmother’s example to convey a popular opinion of the time?
5. When did Schwarz herself become aware of the original owners of her grandfather’s company, the Mineralölgesellschaft? How did she go about learning more about the Löbmanns’ lives?
6. What did the first letter from Julius Löbmann ask for or demand? What did Schwarz’s grandfather think of Julius Löbmann’s lawsuit? Why? How did the Third Reich’s strategy of legalizing crime impact Karl Schwarz’s behavior?
7. To what extent are Schwarz’s grandparents victims and perpetrators at the same time?
8. What’s the story behind Oma’s dining room furniture? Describe its provenance, and the likely fate of the people who originally owned it. When did Schwarz discover its origins? Why does she argue that popular attitudes about the looting and auctions of Jewish property are even more revealing than apathy about the deportations?
Germany after the War
9. What did Schwarz’s father, Volker, learn in primary school about the Nazi regime? What does this say about where postwar Germany was in acknowledging its culpability?
10. Describe the antimilitary, antinuclear, and antifascist movement that sprung up in Germany in the 1960s. What changes did that movement bring? How did this lead to the transformation in attitudes around who was responsible for the Nazis’ crimes against humanity?
11. Schwarz describes a “normalization” (page 222) process in Germany’s participation in international politics in the early 2000s. What did this process look like?
12. Why do Schwarz’s father and her aunt Ingrid have differing understandings of the past? What does this tell us about the reliability of memory and the need to confront memory with historical fact? How does Schwarz solve the problem in her book?
13. Schwarz quotes the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who says: “To make memory an imperative is the beginning of an abuse . . . I’m cautious about the expression ‘duty to remember’ . . . I prefer ‘the work of memory’” (page 247). How would Schwarz describe “the work of memory” in Germany? How did the reflection about the responsibility of the Mitläufer help Germany build its democracy? How did Germany build something positive from a terribly destructive legacy?
France
14. What was the political situation in France after its defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940? How did life change for French citizens? How far did the collaboration of France with Nazi Germany go?
15. What was Schwarz’s maternal grandfather’s role during the occupation? How does Schwarz define the scope of his responsibility compared to that of her German grandfather?
16. What was the official story after the war of how French people resisted occupation, as told, for instance, to Schwarz’s mother? What were the myths of “resistant France” and “victorious France” (page 162)? How does this encourage or prevent what Schwarz defines as “memory work”?
17. What difference does Schwarz sees between France’s and Germany’s democracies and how does she relate it to the way each country confronted its past?
Learning from History
18. What does Schwarz observe about the lack of memory work in many European countries? What connection does she make between memory work and far-right nationalism? What parallels does she see between today’s demagogues and those of the 1930s?
19. Compare the experience of Jewish refugees on the Saint Louis being turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada with Angela Merkel’s welcoming thousands of refugees to Germany in the 2010s.
20. Schwarz suggest that we can best learn from history by reflecting on the role of the people, not just focusing on the responsibility of the leaders. How can the question What would I have done? remind us of our present-day responsibilities and help us to protect democracy?
Europe after 1989
21. How did the fall of the Berlin Wall play into the political conversation around Germany’s past? How did Eastern Europe confront their own fascist past under the domination of the Soviet Union during the Cold War?
22. Schwarz writes that “Europe was brought back to life twice—in 1945 and 1989” (page 282). She argues for the importance of a transnational European memory, one that would build bridges between countries and communities through the work of remembering the trauma of the Holocaust, crimes committed under Soviet domination, and the criminal colonial past. Describe what she means by this.
Enhance Your Book Club
1. How has the United States reckoned with or failed to reckon with the massive injustices of our past? How are we as ordinary citizens complicit now? Discuss.
2. How would you describe the current role of Germany in international politics? How do you think this change has been accomplished?
3. Read Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and compare Oskar’s experiences in Danzig to Schwarz’s family’s experiences in Mannheim.
About The Author
Géraldine Schwarz is a German French journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. Those Who Forget is her first book. It won the European Book Prize, Germany’s Winfried Peace Prize, and Italy’s NordSud International Prize for Literature and Science and is currently being translated into eight languages.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (September 22, 2020)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781501199103
Raves and Reviews
Praise for Those Who Forget
"Those Who Forget goes far beyond the difficult endeavor of conveying the complexity of the German war experience: It is a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection on the far-reaching effect history has on us as individuals, as families, and as societies. Making a case for taking individual – not just collective – responsibility, she helps us understand the importance of openly facing our past, and of actively learning from it, at a time when our democracy, once again, is under threat. Those Who Forget is a powerful monument to our time, and an urgent wake-up call."
—Nora Krug, author of Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
“It took only two generations for her family’s unexceptional wartime past to recede from view. But as the author painstakingly peeled away decades of denial, it was precisely the family’s ordinariness that would prove so chilling. Geraldine Schwarz’s book is a brave and important contribution to our understanding of memory.”
—Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate
“An utterly original memoir for our times, elegant, courageous and deeply affecting.”
—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
“Out of all the books I read this year—and I read many, stuck at home during 2020’s endless quarantine—the one that resonated perhaps the most was Those Who Forget, an account by the French-German author Géraldine Schwarz of postwar Europe’s, and her own family’s, not entirely successful effort to reckon with the crimes of the Second World War. It made the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.”
—Susan Glasser, The New Yorker
“Schwarz’s answer to the cultural amnesia of the last five or 10 years has been this exacting and detailed memoir, a blend of personal and political history.… The stories are vital, and Schwarz is a meticulous, eloquent chronicler.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Although she has written a searing book about the past, Schwarz’s work is oriented toward the present and the future… Those Who Forget is as readable as it is persuasive. Schwarz embeds her appeal to citizens and nations to do memory work in a gripping detective story centered on her own family’s history. She has a gift for finding the single scene or exchange of dialogue that drives home her points... Schwarz’s book deserves to be read and discussed widely in the United States principally for all it has to teach us about the urgency of confronting the darkest dimensions of our own history. This is Schwarz’s invaluable warning.”
—Samantha Power, Washington Post Book Review
“[A] riveting exploration of Germany’s post-World War II reckoning with guilt and responsibility ... With eloquence and passion she demonstrates that we can never be reminded too often to never forget."
—Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal
“Schwarz’s memoir is astonishing. It illustrates the human capacity to deny, forget, rationalize and gloss over when we are face to face with the most unspeakable crimes against our fellow humans.”
—Dannye Romine Powell, Charlotte Observer
"Among titles that are predicted to be the biggest books of 2020... A Berlin journalist writes of her German and French grandparents, considered "ordinary citizens" during World War II but whom she later learns may have had more complex roles.
—Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post Dispatch
“It took Europe arguably two generations to fully face up to its shameful Holocaust past. Books like this one are needed to make sure that future generations don’t have any such guilt to deny.”
—Fran Hawthorne, New York Journal of Books
“The result of Schwarz’s explorations and her determination to find answers to her questions is a work that — as its subtitle indicates — is part memoir, part history, part warning. She has skillfully woven together ?‘the threads of major and minor history,’ to offer us lessons for today.”
—Jewish Book Council
“Those Who Forget is enlightening... It's an absolutely excellent choice for anyone interested in history and current events, and for book groups, too, providing timely and important fodder for deep discussion.”
—BookBrowse
“In this exceptionally timely and well-reasoned debut, Géraldine Schwarz, the granddaughter of a Nazi Party member, makes a powerful case that seeds of the recent resurgence of far-right nationalism in Europe were sown first by the denial and rationalizations of millions of people like her grandparents and then by postwar mythmaking that preempted the "memory work" needed to correct faulty recollections of Nazism. A deserving winner of the European Book Prize, Those Who Forget shows clearly how a willful amnesia can poison nations that have sworn never to forget the Holocaust.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred
"In her debut, journalist and documentary filmmaker Schwarz offers a powerful and unflinching look at Germany during World War II and Europe’s postwar reckoning with far-right nationalism, and calls for readers not to forget the painful lessons learned... In searing yet engaging prose, Schwarz makes her case for the need for memory work in this highly recommended read."
—Library Journal, starred
“A timely must-read, this brutally honest memoir is also a smart historical analysis and a relevant warning for the future.”
—Booklist, starred
"[An] astute debut ... this timely memoir also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the U.S."
—Publishers Weekly
"This book is a miracle. By uncovering what ordinary people did amidst horror, Schwarz offers a whole new understanding of the Holocaust — and puts a bright new spotlight on the importance of memory in making horror less likely. A work of profound humanity, and essential reading for the current era."
—Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University
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