Imagine growing up in a happy family but knowing you were adopted. Then one day, out of the blue, while browsing in a bookstore you come across a book written by your birth mother and discover she is the daughter of a Nazi war criminal who was hung for his crimes. This is what happened to Jennifer Teege, whose mother is German and father is Nigerian. Being biracial means she would have been just the sort of person her grandfather would have murdered during the war. She coauthored the book, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers her Family's Nazi Past with Nikola Sellmair about her experiences. While I am reluctant to say I 'enjoyed' reading this mixture of memoir, biography and history, it was very compelling.
When Teege made this discovery it was utterly devastating. She had always sensed there was something not quite right in her history. Her mother gave her up for adoption when she was very young and they lost touch with each other. I think she sensed this was a rejection by her mother and grappled with feelings of unworthiness and confusion, though she was not to learn until much later that her adoptive parents thought she would adjust much easier if ties were cut between the two families. Teege was married and had children of her own when she learned that her grandfather was one of the most notorious war criminals, Amon Goeth, made even more infamous by the scene in the film Schindler's List where he stood on his balcony and shot Jews with a rifle as if for sport.
Teege had lived, worked and studied in Israel as a younger woman and loved the country and the people. Some of her closest friends were Jewish and had lost family during the Holocaust. How could she possibly reconcile her life now with her notorious grandfather, and not just that--her grandmother, whom she loved and had been very close to, not only lived with this man and had a daughter, but almost until the end of her life denied knowing what was happening despite living with Goeth close by the concentration camp he commanded. How could she admit to her family and friends her own grandfather was one of the worst criminals of the war. He had shown an utter lack of humanity and she is a direct descendant. Dealing with this knowledge she had what amounts to a breakdown.
This memoir chronicles how she found out about her history and how she has tried to "recover" from it. It is also an exploration of her family. She begins with Goeth and then in turn writes about her grandmother (Goeth's mistress), her mother (Goeth's and Ruth's child) and then her own life. It was both disturbing and fascinating reading. It's good to read about the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes in order to know and remember so that it cannot happen again (though time and again history repeats itself--just in different ways and in different places, but we still don't seem to learn the right lessons), but it is also painful reading. It's painful to think that people ignored what was happening or excused it--particularly those who lived through it. It's interesting to learn how second and third generation Germans dealt with the guilt and the feelings of betrayal and being betrayed. I've always been curious how as a culture Germany has responded to history--what happened, and what was allowed to happen. When does the guilt stop. How is it studied in school now. Someday I'll find a book about this.
For Teege it seems as though she has made peace with her history. She was in touch with her mother, though it sounds as though they are somewhat estranged now. Jennifer always felt closer to her grandmother, so it was especially hard to find out she was Goeth's mistress and deeply in love with him even after his death. Jennifer's mother, Monika Knauss has battled her own demons and it sounds as though it took a long time to reject her notions of what could be excused or the many misperceptions she had about Jews. There was a documentary made about her mother's wish to learn about her father called, Inheritance, which my library owns and I would like to watch at some point.
I really liked the style in which the book was written. It was coauthored by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair. Often in a book like this the 'second' author's voice is just integrated into the main text. Here the type changes when Jennifer speaks as opposed to Nikola. Often Nikola would offer additional information or explanation, historical detail or would write about Jennifer and this discovery process as an observer. I thought it worked really well and was nice to be able to distinguish voices and know where one left off and the other picked up. Included is a bibliography with titles of books, films and websites used in research. This was at times a really harrowing read, but a very worthwhile read, too.