UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

Wartime wounds.

Coenen, a German-born American botanist, has written an arresting collection of essays on what it means to live with political guilt, social trauma, and the unspoken memories not just of what Germany did in World War II, but of what was done to Germany during the conflict. The firebombing of German cities has remained the open wound in Allied history. Coenen develops the insights of the author W.G. Sebald, who understood that postwar German life and literature had to find ways of processing the pain of air war against it—the sense that thousands were erased and displaced by a force that no one saw, that came from skies no one could see. This memory shaped Coenen’s family life, and it shapes her relationship to German heritage and language. Moving to America for graduate work, teaching at a college in rural Pennsylvania, the author finds herself living in English but “processing emotions…in German through these years.” To write in English, she states, “felt like a betrayal.” And yet, she must tell her tale in her adopted tongue. That tale concerns the lives of her family during the 1940s—displacement, fear, and a childhood among ruins. Hunger was everywhere. Written with the scientist’s eye for detail, these essays ask questions that few may wish to answer: What was ordinary life like for Germans of the 1940s? How does an individual recover from the loss of a society? Can the pain of a family be inherited? How does the author cope with knowing that her grandfather, as a young man, voted for Adolf Hitler? “The scientist in me pores over…data,” she says. But the writer in her recognizes that sometimes you must come to terms with stories that cannot be pegged into a graph or spreadsheet.

A memoir of unbearable honesty about a German woman reckoning with war, family, and forgiveness.