THOSE WHO FORGET

A German French journalist views amnesia about the Holocaust through the lens of her relatives’ lives—and raises an alarm about far-right movements.

Schwarz’s grandparents defied a Hollywood trope of Europeans caught up in the cataclysms of World War II: They were neither Nazi thugs nor noble resistance fighters. Her German Protestant paternal grandparents, Karl and Lydia Schwarz, were Mitläufer, people who “followed the current” of the times and, by looking away, helped to keep Hitler in power. Karl was an opportunistic rather than ideological Nazi Party member who profited from a policy that allowed him to buy a small oil business cheaply from Jewish owners but paid up when proprietors’ heirs later sued for reparations. In this exceptionally timely and well-reasoned debut, the author 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. Germany has done heavy repair work—from creating Holocaust memorials to accepting more than 1 million refugees by the end of 2015—but France, Italy, Austria, and other countries lag far behind. Even in Germany, a backlash has arisen: After the Berlin Wall fell, “Eastalgia” parties sprang up in venues decorated with East German flags, banners, and other propaganda, and an extreme-right party holds its first Bundestag seat since 1949. Europeans used to be able count on American support in opposing tyrants, but that “safety net” unraveled with Donald Trump’s election, and Schwarz draws extended parallels between the president’s tactics and fascists’ (“first, stoke fear”). History doesn’t repeat itself, but “sociological and psychological mechanisms do,” and this book, a deserving winner of the European Book Prize, shows clearly how a willful amnesia can poison nations that have sworn never to forget the Holocaust.

The granddaughter of a Nazi Party member makes a powerful, convincing moral case for resisting toxic nationalism.