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Those Who Forget

One Family's Story; A Memoir, a History, a Warning

Géraldine Schwarz

Géraldine Schwarz’s family never discussed what happened in the war. Neither heroes nor villains, her German grandparents were merely the ‘Mitlaüfer’ – those who followed the current. They just wanted to forget, to bury it all under the wreckage of the Third Reich.

But decades later when, delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Géraldine discovers that her grandfather Karl profited from the forced ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish businesses, she is compelled to investigate her ancestors’ past. How guilty were they?

Weaving together the threads of three generations of family history – from Nazi Germany to Vichy France – with that of Europe’s process of postwar reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, how they were overcome by a fog of denial after the war and how, eventually, they confronted the past. In doing so, she asks: what makes us become complicit? How should nations deal with collective guilt? And, amid the rise of extremism today, how do we ensure we remember?

First published:
2020
Published by:
Pushkin Press
Length:
Hardcover 320 pages

About the author

Géraldine Schwarz is a German-French journalist, author and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. Those Who Forget, an account of her family's complicity with fascism, is her first book. It has been translated into eight languages and won the European Book Prize 2018, the Winfried Preis and the Nord-Sud Prize.