“Nazi! You’re a Nazi!” a first-grade classmate shouted at me during a game of tag under a warm September sun. I stopped running, baffled and hurt, not understanding how the insult applied, only that it was intended to sting.
I was a serious, introverted child, most often to be found reading at recess, propped against the brick of the school building. My favorite place besides school was the Green Lake branch of the Seattle Public Library, from which I emerged on Saturdays, small, blonde and pigtailed, my week’s worth of books towering in my arms as I balanced down the wide stone staircase to the sidewalk. When asked to share in class about our summer vacations, I’d talked about visiting family in Germany, giving classmates who already found me weird and unapproachable a sharp new dart to add to their quiver of “nerd” and “teacher’s pet.”
I had always thought of my half-German heritage as fun and exotic, like our family trips to the quaint Black Forest town where my grandparents lived. Oma wore beige skirts and patterned blouses and served Kaffee and homemade Kuchen every afternoon around a table in the living room reserved solely for this purpose, with china cups of hot chocolate for my sister and me. Opa built us a wooden dollhouse and furniture painted in the Bauernstil, floral curlicues on the tiny bedsteads matching those on the wardrobe in the guestroom where we slept. They both spoke accented English and kept their television hidden inside a cupboard until the evening newscast began after supper each night.
That “Nazi” flung in the schoolyard is when anxiety about my German family, and what they’d done during World War II, first emerged. I’d already seen The Sound of Music; it was clear who the bad guys were. Unlike the other silly insults of my childhood, this one left a splinter that lodged and festered, pointing to an unplumbed well of questions about what my German grandparents—so serene and conventional in ways I found appealing compared with the raucous American side of my family—had been doing and thinking when they lived under Hitler’s Third Reich.
Today I feel a bone-deep dread watching homegrown American fascists stoke white supremacy and racial violence, dismantle democratic institutions and arm extra-governmental militias. My dread about current events is rooted in the truths I learned within my own family. About beloved grandparents’ buried secrets. About decisions made when moral imperatives collide with everyday survival, and how we as humans carry on. My family’s past tells me how hard it is to know which way a mostly good people, or a mostly good person, will land when faced with these choices—even when that person is myself.
My childhood exploration began with my father, naturalized American soon after my birth but with a name (Claus-Dieter) and formal demeanor (slacks and button-down shirts at neighborhood barbecues) steeped in the old country. He was born in northern Germany in 1943, the second of two boys, in a town called Neustadt, though when I asked he couldn’t pick his own town from the several identically named cities on the World Book Encyclopedia map. “Oma traveled there to have me because of the war, it’s not near where we lived.”
I tried to picture my dignified white-haired grandmother as a young mother of two boys, in the upheaval of a country at war. While Opa was where, I wondered?
“In the Navy,” said Dad, softening it when he saw the shock of a Nazi swastika reflected in my six-year-old eyes. “Every able-bodied German man had to be in the military during the war. He wouldn’t have had a choice.”
My father condemned the Nazi regime unequivocally and with lifelong effect, notably rejecting all notion of God and religion after the complicity of the Catholic and Lutheran churches of his boyhood, but he can’t personally remember life under the Third Reich. He was two years old when the Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps, too young to take in the specific horrors of that moment.
Instead he talked about the sparse times after, how his parents and maternal grandmother, who lived with them, struggled to provide for them all during postwar rationing and rebuilding. He recalled chasing the American planes dropping candy during the Berlin airlift; going with his big brother and his grandmother to gather coal in their little wagon when the first trains came through after the blockade ended.
I was young to be grappling with the feelings these conversations brought up for me: Germany had started the war and done heinous things during that time. Should I feel sorry for German suffering—even my own family’s—after it was over? Dad shared his stories with a glint of excitement, the adventures of a five-year-old boy. These glimpses of my father as a child—around my age!—were captivating, but the context troubled me, lacked the purity of my beloved novels featuring little British and American children.
At the close of the 1940s, my Opa began a postwar career in the German diplomatic corps. Dad described the relief of leaving a decimated Germany for the plush greens of California’s Mill Valley, and later Seattle’s lakeside Madrona neighborhood. These memories, and time spent in bright, airy elementary schools with kind teachers who seemed to enjoy their work, a far cry from the regimented German educational culture, shaped my father’s future. When he talks about his ultimate decision to emigrate to America, sailing out of Rotterdam at the age of nineteen together with his older brother and their precious VW Bug, he draws almost a straight narrative line back to that airlifted candy, the freedom and sweetness it promised in the streets of a war-torn Berlin.
Average Germans weren’t the same as the villainous Nazis. People like my grandparents were only trying to survive under an ugly dictatorship and an unwanted war. This wasn’t so much an articulated belief as a patina shrouding my early childhood. But I kept digging at the scar where that playground splinter was lodged. How could these same average Germans not know what was happening just down the road from them, in their own cities and neighborhoods? Jews and others were violently persecuted long before the trains and marches to the camps, long before the chaos of the war years. Surely there would have been a chance to stop what happened? Before the Nuremburg Laws in 1935; before Kristallnacht in 1938; before Dachau, opened in 1933, morphed into the death camp it became?
We didn’t speak of these things on visits to Denzlingen, the town in southwest Germany where my grandparents were settled into a very comfortable retirement. That patina thickened into a heavy veil spread over the past whose existence no one acknowledged. I sensed my growing questions weren’t dinner-table talk, and articulating them was beyond my youthful conversational skills.
It was Opa who pulled it back one evening. I was around eleven on that visit and I guess he decided I was old enough for him to disregard my parents’ protective sensibilities. Opa was an imposing man, tall, buttoned V-neck sweater spread across his wide girth, oiled strands of dark gray hair in a sparse combover for as long as I can remember. He presided over their traditional German supper table arrayed with smoked cold cuts, yellow cheeses, black bread, and the block of Philadelphia cream cheese they’d grown fond of while living in the United States.
I’ve forgotten the context of that evening’s conversation but clearly recall the moment Opa said, “Hitler was very good for the German economy.” I understood it was a bad thing even before my parents shushed him. Dad was angry, a rare occurrence, though he kept his voice calm in accordance with their ever muted household. What struck me was his lack of surprise.
I was horrified, but I also remember a feeling of relief. Here at last was a truth revealed! My first insight into this part of my family’s story, what they thought and felt. What lay on their conscience, or did not.
That night, after everyone went to bed, I snuck out and searched the rows of leather spines with gilded titles on my grandparents’ heavy oak bookshelves for the copy of Mein Kampf I feared might be there. Not finding it only made me wonder if they hid it when we visited.
But Opa, at least, stopped hiding things from me after that. In fact, he seemed to want these little conversations I also craved, that we both instinctively knew to keep secret. He would wait until my parents were out of the room before broaching some new aspect of his verboten opinions; maybe hoping for my complicity, or checking to see how much indoctrination I’d undergone. He told me how he’d been prevented from joining the Nazi party as he would have liked to before the war, because of cronyism and local politics that hadn’t favored his working-class background. “And so when the denazification came, after the war, that’s why I was able to join the foreign service and go to America!” he gloated, pleased at this small revenge that had not really been of his making.
Once, when I told him “maybe journalism” in answer to a question about my plans for the future, he stood and pulled down a dusty-jacketed tome from their bookcase. “Then you might like this book by an American journalist, about how Roosevelt and his Jewish advisors are really the ones who started the Second World War!” I didn’t even want to touch the book when he tried to hand it to me, which only made him chuckle.
I felt dirtied by these exchanges but also fascinated, unable to pull back from my desire to know the truth about my grandfather. Opa had bounced me on his knee as a toddler, he loved to take my sister and me on long walks and point out the edible greens that grew along the river, he drove us all to the next town over on Sunday afternoons for the best Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Kaffee mit Schlag. I needed to see the darknesses in his soul. Did such damage reach down generations? Did I owe some kind of atonement to keep my own spirit whole?
The remaining hope in my soft preadolescent heart for a “good” German heritage fell to my Oma. She was always gentle of voice and movement, attentive to others while keeping her own feelings to herself. Her white hair framed her face in a perfect heart shape after each weekly visit to the hairdresser. Even when we stayed overnight I rarely saw her anything but fully dressed, her knee-length skirts paired with heavy stockings and comfortable walking shoes.
When I asked what the war was like for her, her face tightened but she spoke readily enough. “It was difficult with the rationing, and two little boys! But my mother lived with us, and she was good at finding the shops that still had supplies, and at bartering with our neighbors.” Oma talked about their chickens that laid them eggs after the war was over, until they were stolen one night, killed for their meat. “I hope whoever it was needed them more,” she said in the telling, her voice suddenly rough with grief; or maybe it was anger?
She didn’t mention the things I really wanted to hear, and I never asked directly, shaped by a family that skirted the hard questions and afraid of what might break if I did. What did you know about the concentration camps? Did you hate the regime? Did you wish you could stop it? Were there friends you could talk to at the time?
As a young teen I grew to understand more of the detail and nuance in her circumstances. Oma was born in Austro-Hungary just after the empire dissolved, schooled by French nuns and prepared like most young women of good family for marriage and motherhood as subservient roles.
I thought of her as sophisticated, with her fluency in four languages and her love of reading, but perhaps the spheres of courtship and family still dominated. The happenings of the greater world, war by a German aggressor, may have been irrelevant to her when she met and wed my German grandfather-to-be in 1940. Or it’s possible that through cultural affinity or social conviction, she chose the Führer as willingly as she did the tall, handsome man she was marrying.
Whatever her past beliefs or lack of them, Oma was quietly activist in my teen years. She washed and reused plastic bags and containers, religiously sorted recycling into different bins. She supported the leftist, ecologically focused Green Party despite Opa’s only half-joking irritation that she was “canceling out” his own right-leaning votes in German and European elections. In the decades-long patriarchal dynamic of their marriage, where Oma would hide away a soft-boiled egg whose shell had cracked rather than serve it to him at breakfast, this counted as a solid stance on her part. I wondered if she was atoning for past sins, whether shameful belief or willful ignorance, in silent conversation with her own heart?
In the 1980s my parents moved our family to Munich. Living in Germany drew my own Germanness closer to my center. These were my high school years, and as maturity layered onto this shifting identity, the focus of my questions also turned inward. Less about who my grandparents had been, more about my own moral core. What would I have done in their place?
My imagined scenarios found external expression in the physical buildings and streetscape around me. Plaques embedded like shrapnel in stone and concrete memorialized astonishingly recent atrocities perpetrated—right there! —during the Third Reich and the Second World War. At every corner a fresh reminder.
In school, our history curriculum applied a lens of the banality of evil to the Nazi era. Nothing was exceptional about Hitler or Germany or the times, merely common elements come together in terrible ways: Deep economic distress, underlying antisemitism and other vicious “us versus them” ideologies, the appearance on the scene of a charismatic and ruthless leader and others who were happy to ride his coattails to power. These factors could present again, anytime, anywhere. As they do today in our United States.
In Munich, my teenage stomping ground, on my way to cafés and dance clubs where I hung out with friends, I would walk through the square where the Scholl siblings, Hans and Sophie, distributed anti-Nazi flyers as university students in early 1943.
Hans and Sophie were arrested and executed within four days of their protest. What would I have done in their place? The Reich’s implacable speed and brutality, etched into a plaque on the wall, demanded I be honest with myself. Could I truly imagine the courage it took to join the White Rose resistance? I thought about Oma, caring for a toddler and a baby son with her husband away at war. How could I presume to question choices she may have made, not knowing what was in her heart?
When I look at my hands today, I see my Oma’s in her later years. She and I share the same slim, elegant fingers, and I’ve now acquired the papery skin, the sprinkling of age spots at once surprising and familiar. Two generations between us, two generations of time gone by since I began asking my questions about facing down evil: What did they do? What would I have done?
The United States have been my home again these past twenty-five years, and it is here and now that the same banal horrors threaten our democracy, rule of law, humanist values of freedom, equality, dignity, and compassion. As happened in my grandparents’ Germany, our existing democratic institutions seem unable or unwilling to hold up against a ruthless leader and his cronies.
“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” the philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote. This means, of course, that the monsters are never fully banished. They live always among us. Dread runs through my veins, and so I have ever known this to be true.
Here in the final third of my life, the question I have long engaged with is no longer a comfortable hypothetical. I stare it in the face instead of the rearview mirror: What would I have done?
I thought the pivot point I needed to understand was would I have? A dilemma of values and character in the face of evil. But the ethical question is answered effortlessly, in activism begun long before the monsters entered our politics with a ruthlessness my lifelong dread immediately recognized.
Now it is revealed: The part of the question that matters was never the would I? but the what? What can I do to stop democracy from derailing? What will help when our institutions aren’t fulfilling their promise to us, the people? If our democratic systems don’t rise to the occasion, what will I sacrifice for this fight? And thus to the real, underlying dilemma: Will my sacrifices—of daily comforts, financial security, physical safety—make enough difference in the end?
At our every leave-taking during her long life, Oma placed her cool hands against my cheeks, redolent of the Nivea lotion from her kitchen windowsill as she held my face and looked into my eyes. Her parting words were always the same: “Be happy, my darling.”
With my softly creased hands so like my Oma’s resting on this keyboard, I ponder the fragility of systems of government that rely on mere humans to navigate between what is right and what is safe; between the higher glories, and the smaller gladnesses of those we love the most. I see how the paths we choose in challenging times are not as clearly marked as I imagined in my youth. How good people might sway different ways. Here, at the monsters’ return, I begin to understand.
