Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio high
Speaker 1: Family Secrets Listeners. It's Danny here to share a bit
Speaker 1: of exciting news with you before today's episode. We just
Speaker 1: found out that our podcast is a nominee for the
Speaker 1: Webby People's Voice Award in the category of Best Series.
Speaker 1: This is a huge honor and honestly it put a
Speaker 1: spring in my step as I walk alone each day
Speaker 1: down into my basement to record my conversations with my
Speaker 1: amazing guests. Podcasts can be a bit like the sound
Speaker 1: of a tree falling in a forest. You know, is
Speaker 1: anyone listening? Does it really exist? So here's the thing.
Speaker 1: This is the People's Voice Award, So you get to vote.
Speaker 1: It would mean so much if you'd go to vote
Speaker 1: dot Webby Awards dot com and cast your vote for
Speaker 1: Family Secrets. Thank you so much for hearing me out.
Speaker 1: I love you guys. Now on with today's episode. I
Speaker 1: had the America of my American father. He anointed our
Speaker 1: lawn but Scott's turf builder. He bought us frozen cokes
Speaker 1: on the boardwalk at Rohoba Beach. He brought home a
Speaker 1: late model Ford Mustang, a stable name for our Ford
Speaker 1: fair Lane wagon. And lavished care on both. He flew
Speaker 1: the flag each Memorial Day in fourth of July, flaunting
Speaker 1: his citizenship so enthusiastically that I never believed he spoke
Speaker 1: with an accent, even as friends insisted he did. The
Speaker 1: fifties gave Nico the perfect background in which to recede,
Speaker 1: to take on the protective coloring of red, white and blue,
Speaker 1: to get on with the anesthetizing business of dissolving into
Speaker 1: the lonely crowd. By the mid sixties, he was raising
Speaker 1: three kids in a world with a Russian front had
Speaker 1: become a laugh line on Hogan's heroes. I watched my
Speaker 1: father grow his shell hard and tuck his head in.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's a word, but he turtled. That's
Speaker 1: Alexander Wolfe, longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, an author of
Speaker 1: the memoir and papers. Alex's story, as is true of
Speaker 1: so many stories we tell on family secrets, begins many
Speaker 1: years before he's born. This is a multi generational journey
Speaker 1: of both privilege, survival, investigation and reckoning. What is our
Speaker 1: legacy made of? How responsible are we for the lives
Speaker 1: lived by generations before us? Alex's story begins with his
Speaker 1: grandfather Kurt Wolf, one of the most esteemed literary figures
Speaker 1: of his time. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and secrets we keep from ourselves. My
Speaker 1: grandfather was born in seven and Bonn, the Rhineland. His
Speaker 1: father was a musician, taught at the university. They're taught music,
Speaker 1: choir master, composer, just completely assumed by music. And on
Speaker 1: his mother's side, my grandfather's mother's side, she was Jewish
Speaker 1: and came from a long line of very prosperous Rhineland
Speaker 1: Jews were great collectors of books and art. So between
Speaker 1: the music and the art and the books, he was
Speaker 1: just steeped in this build on, this cultivating theself through culture.
Speaker 1: And it was no real surprise. I suppose that as
Speaker 1: soon as he had twenty three he was founding a
Speaker 1: publishing house. Um he'd begun collecting books as a teenager,
Speaker 1: really valuable books and incunabula, really early valuable ones, and
Speaker 1: had an interest in literature too. He had gone off
Speaker 1: to to study. It seemed to have been the custom
Speaker 1: of the time to migrate from campus to campus around Germany.
Speaker 1: He studied on four different campuses around the country stuttering literature.
Speaker 1: So books and literature were going to be his destiny.
Speaker 1: However it came to be. Now, my dad was born
Speaker 1: in nine after World War One, and it's difficult to
Speaker 1: overstate how much Germany was convulsed by the war in
Speaker 1: the aftermath. So being born into ninety one not only
Speaker 1: did it DestinE him to be part of that cohort
Speaker 1: of males who would be sent off to war Hitler's War,
Speaker 1: but it also meant that his childhood would be colored
Speaker 1: by the Weimar hyper inflation. Now, he did have the
Speaker 1: good fortune of being born into a family that was
Speaker 1: very prosperous, not just because of his father, Court's wealth,
Speaker 1: family wealth, but also because Court had married an heiress
Speaker 1: named Elizabeth Mark, the Mark Pharmaceutical and chemical company known
Speaker 1: in States as More but originally from Germany. Alex's father,
Speaker 1: Nico is raised along with his sister Maria in Munich
Speaker 1: in a very comfortable life. They're taken care of by
Speaker 1: nanny's and really not a part of the life and
Speaker 1: social world of their parents. So fast forward light years
Speaker 1: later too, when Alex and his siblings are growing up
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifties post war suburban America. The whole scene
Speaker 1: is very Ausi and Harriet hands on parenting. Dad has
Speaker 1: a corporate job, Mom stays home, and the past, the
Speaker 1: past is solidly where it belongs in the past. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing, a lot of history went down in
Speaker 1: those couple of decades before nineteen fifties America. For a
Speaker 1: German family with some Jewish roots, that history was fraught
Speaker 1: and complicated and not so easily erased. Kurt was Jewish
Speaker 1: to the extent that the Nazis would have declared him Jewish,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't strictly speaking Jewish, in that his mom
Speaker 1: and her parents had been baptized Christian and his father
Speaker 1: was Christian. Indeed, he was the choirmaster at a Luciman
Speaker 1: church and bond. So there was a great deal, particularly
Speaker 1: among the upper classes, of this crawling to the cross,
Speaker 1: as Heinrich Kina derisively put it, if you were that
Speaker 1: invested in German culture, and there was this roadblock to
Speaker 1: being a full participant in it, it was very tempting
Speaker 1: in nineteenth century Germany to abandon Judaism and fully embrace
Speaker 1: Germany and Germanism and all these ways, and it was
Speaker 1: the same way that Felix Mendelssohn had abandoned Judaism. The Nazis,
Speaker 1: of course regarded him as Jewish and always would, but
Speaker 1: he not only became a Protestant, but he wrote the
Speaker 1: famous Reformation Symphony celebrating it. So it was very tricky
Speaker 1: that the cultural inheritance I'd say that my grandfather had
Speaker 1: was very heavily inflected with Judaism. M His mother, I
Speaker 1: think had more than anything to do with his interest
Speaker 1: in literature. His father was a musician, but because he
Speaker 1: composed and he conducted and played, in his head was
Speaker 1: always somewhere else. But the inculcation of literature and stories
Speaker 1: and so forth came from my grandfather's mother, and of
Speaker 1: course her being steeped in build on was the result
Speaker 1: of these very prosperous Jewish ancestors of hers. I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's so interesting to me, and
Speaker 1: I think that listeners will find really interesting, is this
Speaker 1: idea that there was this cultural choices and ultimately heritage
Speaker 1: that Nazis would not have looked at as oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is now someone who is Arian, who is one
Speaker 1: of us, because they've been baptized, or because they've made
Speaker 1: the choice to fully adopt our culture. Yeah, that to
Speaker 1: the Nazis judaism of the racial construct, and there's no
Speaker 1: way one can simply convert one's away out of being Jewish.
Speaker 1: And the Nuremberg Laws in the mid thirties when they
Speaker 1: were enacted, were an attempt to somehow sort this out,
Speaker 1: and my father and his sister were very lucky to
Speaker 1: fall on the more favorable side of that verdict. While
Speaker 1: not considered part of the German race and nation, were
Speaker 1: not targeted for elimination. By the time of the Nuremberg Laws,
Speaker 1: my grandfather had already left Germany. He had had seen
Speaker 1: the Tea Leaves, had read them, and was on the
Speaker 1: lamb in Italy and southern France with a German passport.
Speaker 1: He was ultimately unable to renew, but then was quite
Speaker 1: happy to just abandon Germany. But in abandoning Germany, he's
Speaker 1: abandoning his his children. It should be mentioned too that
Speaker 1: by that point your grandfather was no longer married to
Speaker 1: your grandmother and was with another woman who he would
Speaker 1: later go on to Mary, who was also not Jewish.
Speaker 1: Is that correct? That's exactly what Yes, By nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: Kurt and his soon to be new wife are essentially
Speaker 1: on the run, ending up in southern France, Italy and
Speaker 1: North Africa, while his children, Nico and Maria remain with
Speaker 1: their mother. Kurt had spent the nineteen twenties becoming a
Speaker 1: well known literary figure in Europe as a publisher of
Speaker 1: Franz Kafka, Einrich Mahnn, brother of Thomas Mann, and Karl
Speaker 1: Krauss of Viennese cultural critic. These were artists and thinkers
Speaker 1: who were pushing the envelope. The new and exciting is
Speaker 1: what animates Kurt, But by the early nineteen thirties, with
Speaker 1: the advent of Hitler in Germany, the new and exciting,
Speaker 1: the pushing of the envelope and any whiff of Jewishness
Speaker 1: were all deeply dangerous. Kurt Wolf is restless, stymiede He
Speaker 1: grows tired of life in exile and decides to attempt
Speaker 1: a return to Berlin. He's been in this funk. He's
Speaker 1: desperate for something to engage him. He wants it to
Speaker 1: be in the cultural sphere, and he understands that there's
Speaker 1: an opening in the Foreign ministry of some cultural attach
Speaker 1: shape position so he heads to Berlin in late nineteen
Speaker 1: hoping to interview for this job, and he checks in
Speaker 1: with friends and some writers and ultimately interviews for it.
Speaker 1: But then by January and February of ninety three, it's
Speaker 1: clear that Hitler is getting enough of a told that
Speaker 1: there's no way he, with his record of having published
Speaker 1: all these degenerate writers, um to say nothing of his
Speaker 1: being half Jewish, he would not be a candidate for
Speaker 1: this job. And it was literally within the forty eight
Speaker 1: hours after the Reichstag burns that he and Helen Fleet
Speaker 1: they go first to London, where they get married, and
Speaker 1: then launched into this will be six or seven or
Speaker 1: eight years of exile before they finally land in the US.
Speaker 1: In your book, you have this really lovely meditation about
Speaker 1: I could sort of an inquiry really a question of
Speaker 1: what makes one know when it's time, you know, like
Speaker 1: when it's time to get out. In Holocaust literature in particular,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about the people who just simply didn't believe
Speaker 1: that it could happen there, or it could happen to them,
Speaker 1: or that their privilege or their position would protect them.
Speaker 1: And it's just interesting that your grandfather who had, you know,
Speaker 1: so much privilege and protection in so many ways, read
Speaker 1: the tea leaves and got out, like really just in
Speaker 1: the nick of time. I believe it's very rare anybody
Speaker 1: who has read about or studied that period of the
Speaker 1: thirties in Europe hasn't given some thought as to what
Speaker 1: I would do if I were in those shoes and
Speaker 1: had to make that decision. And I think for people
Speaker 1: who are vulnerable under threat, but were of that upper
Speaker 1: educated class who really loved and new the culture that
Speaker 1: had been created in Germany, the German jew who adored
Speaker 1: Good for instance, or Mendelssohn, and just could not conceive
Speaker 1: that the people who had created this that I love
Speaker 1: so much could then turn and embrace this barbarity. And
Speaker 1: the quote from Bear told Break nails it so beautifully
Speaker 1: that the ability to figure out whether you have to
Speaker 1: get out now or you have another day or two
Speaker 1: requires that kind of imagination with which you could create
Speaker 1: an immortal masterpiece. And I think that Breath quote nailed
Speaker 1: it for me and got me thinking about this thing
Speaker 1: that it, as you point out, is really a kind
Speaker 1: of universal sing wondering. We ask ourselves questions, you know,
Speaker 1: would what would I do if if I were forced
Speaker 1: to defend my neighbor down the street. But also what
Speaker 1: would I do to protect myself in my family if
Speaker 1: it meant forsaking this world that had found my place
Speaker 1: in and contributed so much too. And I can hear that,
Speaker 1: particularly in my grandfather, who was so wedded to the
Speaker 1: German language, and never, even as he published bestsellers in
Speaker 1: the English language, never mastered English. That must have been
Speaker 1: just a just a horrifying break to make. And he
Speaker 1: did it because he knew he had We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Kurt and Helen do see the writing on the law,
Speaker 1: and once again they flee Germany. Nico continues to see
Speaker 1: his father for visits during school breaks, spending stretches of
Speaker 1: time as a family, while Helen and Kurt are living
Speaker 1: a stable existence in southern France, so their separation is
Speaker 1: more of a gliding path then a harsh break. When
Speaker 1: finally his father and stepmother leave for New York, Nico
Speaker 1: is still in boarding school his final year. Where it
Speaker 1: really gets harsh is indeed forty the war begins. Nico
Speaker 1: is finishing up his final year in boarding school after
Speaker 1: the invasion of Poland and it's in nineteen forty that
Speaker 1: he's inducted. In ninety is the year that Curt and
Speaker 1: Helen or are leaving Paris and heading for what's become
Speaker 1: Vichy Fraus, And it's in forty one that they actually
Speaker 1: make their way via Lisbon to New York, which, as
Speaker 1: it happens, is precisely when my dad is inducted and
Speaker 1: conscripted into the Luftwaffe and as part of the invasion
Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union. Could you define the word mich Ling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mischling is a Nazi word for someone who has descended
Speaker 1: from Jewish descent. It's always so tricky, and I tried
Speaker 1: to distance myself from words like this by using quotation
Speaker 1: marks religiously around them whenever they appear in the text.
Speaker 1: But it's basically, if you're a first degree Mischling in
Speaker 1: Nazi terms, you would be what we might call half Jewish,
Speaker 1: that is, having one Jewish parent. And if you're a
Speaker 1: second degree Mischling, you would be like my father as
Speaker 1: opposed to my grandfather, which is to say, one of
Speaker 1: your four grandparents is considered by the Normberg laws to
Speaker 1: be Jewish. The irony here, of course, is is that
Speaker 1: rabbinical law also considers people are descended of Jews to
Speaker 1: be Jewish and that there's no converting out of it
Speaker 1: in the same way that the Nazis felt that way.
Speaker 1: But be that as it may, that that was the nomenclature,
Speaker 1: the terminology, and my dad, as a second degree Michelin,
Speaker 1: was eligible to serve in the armed forces of the
Speaker 1: Third Reich. There were about a hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 1: of these Jewish soldiers and who served in one capacity
Speaker 1: or another, and they were under threat. They were constantly
Speaker 1: changing definitions of who would be eliminated, who would be
Speaker 1: discriminated against. And there are academic studies that predicted, had
Speaker 1: Hitler won the war, that even these partly Jewish Germans
Speaker 1: who served in the enforces of the Reich would have
Speaker 1: been targeted for elimination afterwards. Imagine being part Jewish in
Speaker 1: a world dominated by Nazi ideology, a second degree quote
Speaker 1: unquote mischling and serving the Third Reich. What parts of
Speaker 1: yourself would you have to bury to put on hold
Speaker 1: to decimate during the war. Just after he graduates high school,
Speaker 1: Niko is drafted into the Luftwaffe. He participates in the
Speaker 1: invasion of the Soviet Union, driving a jeep with target
Speaker 1: maps and reconnaissance photos for a fighter's squadron. For a
Speaker 1: while he holds up in the Ukraine, but then it
Speaker 1: begins again and he's sent into active duty, and in
Speaker 1: n he's assigned to anti aircraft battery in the Battle
Speaker 1: of the Bulge. The following year, he's taken prisoner by
Speaker 1: American forces and sent to a US POW camp in France.
Speaker 1: When it's all over, he returns to his mother's home,
Speaker 1: so estranged from himself that he doesn't simply walk in,
Speaker 1: he rings the doorbell. This is the history he brings
Speaker 1: with him to America when Kurt is finally able to
Speaker 1: send for him, And this is the history he carries
Speaker 1: as he starts his family and embarks on the American dream.
Speaker 1: What did you know growing up in Princeton, New Jersey
Speaker 1: of your father's history. I knew as a boy that
Speaker 1: my father had fought in World War Two, just as
Speaker 1: so many fathers of so many of my playing eight
Speaker 1: friends had fought in World War Two. And I knew
Speaker 1: all along that he had been on the other side,
Speaker 1: and very quickly knew that he had been on the
Speaker 1: wrong side. And he never trimmed or concealed that in
Speaker 1: any way from me. If you were a boy of nine,
Speaker 1: ten eleven years old growing up in central New Jersey
Speaker 1: in the late sixties, you would play army sometimes, and
Speaker 1: I would sometimes play army on the wrong side I was.
Speaker 1: I was acutely aware of it. The moral implications of
Speaker 1: all that would be a long time in setting in
Speaker 1: with any kind of nuance. But no, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: But I also knew that my mother had planted a
Speaker 1: victory garden growing up in Connecticut. And I knew too
Speaker 1: that my grandfather had been essentially chased over to the US.
Speaker 1: So there was this vague sense that there had been
Speaker 1: these two very divergent paths. But for some reason, when
Speaker 1: I considered my father and grandfather, I never entertained the
Speaker 1: idea that my grandfather had in any way abandoned my father.
Speaker 1: And then when I happened upon particularly my aunt Maria's
Speaker 1: letters and just some of the resentments that she nurtured
Speaker 1: for the rest of her life, I get a sense
Speaker 1: that it was real, that that sense of abandonment was
Speaker 1: very real for her. I think in my dad's case
Speaker 1: there was so much redumption there was such a sense
Speaker 1: of a fresh start that he was able to embrace
Speaker 1: by emigrating. And when he emigrated, and it was just
Speaker 1: as the fifties, We're gonna launch that generation of Americans
Speaker 1: and immigrants on this this great path of success, and
Speaker 1: that allowed him to put everything behind, so he wasn't
Speaker 1: rehearsing these resentments. For me, Maria and Nico had very
Speaker 1: different paths. Many siblings do, but there is diverge in
Speaker 1: stark ways, perhaps the starkest of which is that Maria
Speaker 1: remains in Germany whereas Nico emigrates to the States. That's
Speaker 1: so interesting, the way that two people, you know, two siblings,
Speaker 1: coming from the same parents and the same environment, you know,
Speaker 1: the same childhood, can end up with such different narratives
Speaker 1: for different reasons. It's always the case with siblings. It's
Speaker 1: as if they have had different parents in some way.
Speaker 1: But there's a moment where you write, I never felt
Speaker 1: like a child raised post traumatically, and that struck me
Speaker 1: so hard, because there's so much trauma in both your
Speaker 1: grandfather's story and your father's story. It seems something of
Speaker 1: a triumph to not have had that trauma extend to you.
Speaker 1: But it was the turn of phrase, you know, raised
Speaker 1: post traumatically, which to me really means that your father
Speaker 1: and your mother didn't raise you with that being a specter,
Speaker 1: and that you know, it's funny because I mean, this
Speaker 1: is this is a podcast called Family Secrets, but this
Speaker 1: is actually a case where it makes me wonder if
Speaker 1: Nico had kept that a secret, if he had been
Speaker 1: deeply ashamed of his service, and that shame had caused
Speaker 1: him to tuck it away, you know, to put it
Speaker 1: somewhere where his children wouldn't know about it, that then
Speaker 1: you would have been raised post traumatically. If that makes
Speaker 1: any sense. It makes all sorts of sense. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that I came to realize in a
Speaker 1: very profound way was the more I thought about it
Speaker 1: and rooted around my dad's letters, is that he was
Speaker 1: so forward looking, and I think to a fault in
Speaker 1: some ways, but being forward looking meant that, Okay, what
Speaker 1: can I do now as I go forth with my
Speaker 1: life to a tone in some ways for this chapter,
Speaker 1: which for for no fault of my own, I was
Speaker 1: caught up in, and I I'm struck a new at
Speaker 1: how much he was devoted to the cause of peace,
Speaker 1: between the Soviet Union in the US during a time
Speaker 1: when that wasn't to be take and for granted. And
Speaker 1: he was obsessively interested in in the Russian people. He
Speaker 1: loved reading a Bukov, He participated in exchange programs with
Speaker 1: Soviet citizens. Um, it was almost as if he needed
Speaker 1: to get on the ground, you know. Here he had
Speaker 1: been supplying maps and photographs for Aloft Boffe Squadron during
Speaker 1: the invasion of the Soviet Union. And as he hit
Speaker 1: his late middle age, he was engaging himself with the
Speaker 1: descendants of these very people. And that's a way of
Speaker 1: spinning it forward, really, I think, um, rather than wallowing
Speaker 1: or being shackled by the past. Now, I think part
Speaker 1: of it was he was dropped into a United States
Speaker 1: was putting the war behind it. I mean, the economy
Speaker 1: and everybody's orientation was entirely spun forward. And here he's
Speaker 1: living in suburbia and he has an American wife and
Speaker 1: three kids, and me being the eldest and the only male.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was based forward, boy, and embrace this
Speaker 1: country and all these opportunities they are here as he
Speaker 1: was doing, you know, that's what he modeled for me.
Speaker 1: And then there's the imposition of our next door neighbor
Speaker 1: who works for the Boy Scouts of America and is
Speaker 1: slipping me copies of Boys Life, and all I want
Speaker 1: to do is become a member of the Boy Scouts.
Speaker 1: And my dad has to explain to me that he's
Speaker 1: not a big fan of the idea of me becoming
Speaker 1: a member of the Boy Scouts wearing a uniform and
Speaker 1: pledging some oath and insignia and secret handshakes or whatever
Speaker 1: it might be. And he did. I do remember this,
Speaker 1: him explaining that I was Sinn Hitler and there's a
Speaker 1: downside to this, And there was a real sense of Oh,
Speaker 1: I have a second I've been given the grace of
Speaker 1: a second chance, and I'm going to try to get
Speaker 1: it right, not just for myself, but for my kids too.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Niko is able, for the most part, to put his
Speaker 1: experience is in the war behind him, in part because
Speaker 1: of the time and place of postwar America and in
Speaker 1: part because of his own temperament. I think many of
Speaker 1: us have a natural set point as either forward looking
Speaker 1: or backward looking. Nico is definitely forward looking. He isn't
Speaker 1: forgetting or sloughing off the past as much as he
Speaker 1: is learning and moving forward from it. In a beautiful
Speaker 1: passage in Alex's book, he writes, we are raised to
Speaker 1: regard shame as something to avoid or bury, not to
Speaker 1: speak about. But shame can be a great animating, activating
Speaker 1: force if we let it. All of this is encapsulated
Speaker 1: in a German word I wouldn't dare try to pronounce
Speaker 1: because it's about nine thousand syllables long, but I'll ask
Speaker 1: Alex to share it with us. The word is for gundenheights,
Speaker 1: also our bit believe I've had a chance to to
Speaker 1: pronounce it with a little bit of grace. Fraganenheit is
Speaker 1: the past, and alfy tongue is literally working something off,
Speaker 1: so working off the past. And I have to credit
Speaker 1: Susan Neeman and her remarkable book Learning from the Germans
Speaker 1: for introducing me to a lot of these concepts. There's
Speaker 1: somebody that Susan's worked closely with them, a German named
Speaker 1: Joan Choi Minzma, who really came up with this idea
Speaker 1: that we can take shame and kind of mold it
Speaker 1: and repurpose it. And I think This is where I
Speaker 1: tipped my hat to the Germans into modern Germany, because
Speaker 1: when you look at the ways and the public sphere
Speaker 1: that the Nazi catastrophe has been repurposed so it can
Speaker 1: be a lesson of never forget and never again. There
Speaker 1: are these memorials of these get denshtet, which are the
Speaker 1: German word for a place of reflection, the ways that
Speaker 1: the German people engage with their past on the daily basis,
Speaker 1: and perhaps nothing more found in these stumbling stones, the
Speaker 1: Schlodpersteiner that are embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin and
Speaker 1: many other German cities to memorialize individuals who were targeted
Speaker 1: by the Nazis and eliminated by the Naxis. And I
Speaker 1: think what shame does. And I watched the Germans over
Speaker 1: this year spend in Berlin do this is it? Um? Okay,
Speaker 1: this is the past that's been handed down to me.
Speaker 1: These are things that I'm willing to accept and embrace
Speaker 1: and and improve upon. We're big on that in the States,
Speaker 1: certainly taking our past and trying to perfect the American story.
Speaker 1: You know, then that arc toward justice. But then there's
Speaker 1: things that that I'm going to reject and and Susan
Speaker 1: Eman in her book makes such a great case of
Speaker 1: that part of growing up is taking those things from
Speaker 1: your parents and sifting through them and then deciding what
Speaker 1: you're going to accept and what you're going to reject.
Speaker 1: And the Germans have done this, I think, in a
Speaker 1: civic way on a large scale, in this extremely admirable fashion.
Speaker 1: And I think and Brian Stevenson has done such good
Speaker 1: work with this down in Alabama, with this project on lynching,
Speaker 1: and um, we really if there were a way that
Speaker 1: we could build a civic culture in the US that
Speaker 1: allows us to grapple with slavery and Jim Crow in
Speaker 1: that scene wait where there's no debate over whether this
Speaker 1: is shameful. We accept that. And unfortunately where we are
Speaker 1: in the States right now is there seems to be
Speaker 1: some lingering debate over what's shameful. And that's a great lesson,
Speaker 1: I think. In Susan's book, Learning from the Germans, she's
Speaker 1: braided these two national shames and tried to instruct Americans
Speaker 1: about it. And the proof of how successful she is,
Speaker 1: I think, and how successful the Germans are is it
Speaker 1: the German people are appalled when they learned the title
Speaker 1: of this book that Susan has chosen. But there's something
Speaker 1: that we Germans have can teach others that's outrageous. You know,
Speaker 1: we're still humbling ourselves from the way we betrayed humanity
Speaker 1: during the middle of the twenty century. Yeah, it strikes
Speaker 1: me almost as our shame is actually the thing that
Speaker 1: makes us debate whether there is any reason to be ashamed. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we're because we're not accustomed to a basing ourselves before
Speaker 1: anybody as a nation. We're not we're not into that.
Speaker 1: We ride high and tride a stride the rest of
Speaker 1: the world. And one of the things I took away
Speaker 1: from your in Germany and talking to Germans, including my
Speaker 1: my relatives, was that there's great grace and power and
Speaker 1: to be embraced in the humility of acknowledging that you
Speaker 1: have something to be ashamed about. You picked up, you know,
Speaker 1: with your family, and you moved to Germany for a
Speaker 1: year to do the research into your father's past. Was
Speaker 1: there a moment that you knew this was something that
Speaker 1: you needed to do and or a series of moments,
Speaker 1: or was it something that you knew for a long
Speaker 1: time that you would eventually want to really excavate. It
Speaker 1: was probably a confluence three things. Um I watched the
Speaker 1: magazine i'd worked for for thirty six years of Bleeds
Speaker 1: staff and became part of that exodus, which was Inhich.
Speaker 1: Of course, is the same year that Donald Trump was elected,
Speaker 1: which I think brought into very sharp focus for me
Speaker 1: that maybe America isn't so exceptional, that maybe there are
Speaker 1: these parallels to what happened in Germany. But then also,
Speaker 1: you know, to be perfectly honest, that the fact that
Speaker 1: these ancestors of mine were dead I think liberated me
Speaker 1: in a way. And I still had a cousin and
Speaker 1: an uncle who are still very invested in that generation,
Speaker 1: and I knew if I could get them on board
Speaker 1: to share archival stuff that they controlled, that I could
Speaker 1: really do some important work. And they both have been
Speaker 1: so supportive and incredibly grateful to them both. The cousin
Speaker 1: isn't in Munich and the uncle is over a mountain
Speaker 1: rage here in Vermont. And there's a real simple truth
Speaker 1: in in archives. I have dealt with archives a great
Speaker 1: deal in my journalistic career and get more and more
Speaker 1: comfortable and burying myself in them. But I knew that
Speaker 1: this had to do more than that, that I had
Speaker 1: to find living, breathing people too, and I was so
Speaker 1: grateful to find them in my cousin John and another cousin, Nico,
Speaker 1: who was exactly my agent. Has wrestled with some of
Speaker 1: these things. You know, he's had enormous privilege as a
Speaker 1: as a mark in Germany, but he's also has a
Speaker 1: real conscience and has tried to change the world in
Speaker 1: his own way. And long conversations with him in Berlin.
Speaker 1: Berlin is a great town for for law conversations, and
Speaker 1: it all came together. And I also knew that I
Speaker 1: had been kind of running from stuff for thirty six
Speaker 1: years that being a staff writer for Sports Illustrated during
Speaker 1: that period I worked there was it was really a
Speaker 1: joy ride. I mean, there were so many exciting things,
Speaker 1: and I knew that there was something in the past
Speaker 1: to turn back to and take the measure of. And
Speaker 1: I've got to say there was one thing, and I
Speaker 1: heard it in Arian Annoyment's episode with you two. There
Speaker 1: was this this moment where she felt she had been
Speaker 1: given permission by father to go back and tell his
Speaker 1: family story. And when my father and I took this
Speaker 1: Danube River cruise, which was really the most we dug
Speaker 1: into his past, and I asked him the toughest questions.
Speaker 1: At one point, in a lull on our conversations, he said,
Speaker 1: maybe he'll write about this. This is a huge, this
Speaker 1: idea of permission, not just for writers, but for all
Speaker 1: of us, we the survivors, the ancestors, the ones left
Speaker 1: to tell the story. We long for that elusive permission,
Speaker 1: that sense that it's really okay, and it's so rare
Speaker 1: for that permission to literally be granted. This was also
Speaker 1: true with my guests in season three of this podcast,
Speaker 1: Arianna Noyman, whose father left her a box after his
Speaker 1: f an actual box filled with his story, essentially bequeathing
Speaker 1: it to her. If you haven't listened to Ariana's episode,
Speaker 1: I hope you'll go back and find it later. Mm hmm. Permission.
Speaker 1: I took it as that. I took it as permission.
Speaker 1: And of course the fact that all these letters and
Speaker 1: my father's denocification questionnaire and is certificate of Varian ancestry,
Speaker 1: all this stuff is still sitting around. What is a
Speaker 1: denazification questionnaire? So in the immediate post war um, every
Speaker 1: German citizen above a certain age was asked to fill
Speaker 1: out of a questionnaire was undred and thirty plus questions
Speaker 1: on it about you were past and political and otherwise,
Speaker 1: as my dad called it. And the important thing was
Speaker 1: to determine who had actually been a Nazi. And they
Speaker 1: had five different classifications of how implicated you were, and
Speaker 1: simply by dat of having been in the armed services.
Speaker 1: My dad had to fill out the questionnaire and he
Speaker 1: had been in the Hitler Youth because everyone at his
Speaker 1: boarding school had been in the Hitler Youth. And when
Speaker 1: he studied at the university, there was a German students
Speaker 1: union that was a Nazi Party organization. He had to
Speaker 1: be a part of two in order to study, but
Speaker 1: he had never been a member of the party, and
Speaker 1: this allowed him to apply for a student visa, and
Speaker 1: the intercession of my grandfather, who by then was an
Speaker 1: American citizen in allowed him to come over to the
Speaker 1: States to do graduate work in chemistry. But yeah, all
Speaker 1: these documents were still they're moldering away, and they called
Speaker 1: to me the photographs. My dad was, you know, he
Speaker 1: loved technology, is like it was his favorite little gadget,
Speaker 1: and his mom would send him film. When he was
Speaker 1: deployed around Europe. We take pictures and send them back
Speaker 1: and she saved every letter, every photo, and my dad
Speaker 1: this is further permission. My dad translated all his letters
Speaker 1: for my sisters in me before he died, and I
Speaker 1: think he wanted us to know. One of the most
Speaker 1: difficult things for Alex to process had to do with
Speaker 1: Niko's letters home, describing in detail how well he was
Speaker 1: eating during his early days in Hitler's army when the
Speaker 1: Nazis were in power. The idea was to eat everything
Speaker 1: in sight. When the Nazis were riding high and they
Speaker 1: were taking everything they could out of the Ukraine, He
Speaker 1: and his fellow soldiers not to say that also civilians
Speaker 1: back in Germany were eating just scandalously well. And it
Speaker 1: was only after I got to Berlin and started to
Speaker 1: read that I realized that this was all part of
Speaker 1: a genocidal plant to starve the native population. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just to feed German soldiers, it was also to eliminate
Speaker 1: Slavs who were subhuman, and Jews who were subhuman, and
Speaker 1: and just decolonized basically the swath of eastern Europe which
Speaker 1: would become eventually resettled by German farmers and annex to
Speaker 1: the right, and to read the history alongside my dad's
Speaker 1: letters is to just, you know, just to start to cry.
Speaker 1: Then later food became scarce, particularly during Niko's time in
Speaker 1: the American pow Camp. I think the enduring part of
Speaker 1: my dad's wartime experience that we would see was around
Speaker 1: the dinner table, when his appetite would be on display.
Speaker 1: So when I say I was raised post traumatically, I
Speaker 1: suppose that might have been the one exception, because he
Speaker 1: did have a relationship with food that made it clear
Speaker 1: to anyone who really thought about it that there was
Speaker 1: a time in his life that he didn't have enough.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that you got to know your father
Speaker 1: better through the reading of I mean, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of this extraordinary body of personal writing that he left behind.
Speaker 1: Did you feel like you were adding another layer to
Speaker 1: your understanding of him? Yeah. I think his letters home
Speaker 1: they're very practical. I recognize his personality and every single
Speaker 1: one of them. So I didn't really learn anything new
Speaker 1: about who he was, but I was able to see, Okay,
Speaker 1: he went through all this, and he kept my sisters
Speaker 1: in me protected from it throughout his life as a
Speaker 1: father and a husband. And I think that was the
Speaker 1: revelation to me, was just the length that he went
Speaker 1: to to make sure that we wouldn't be troubled by
Speaker 1: his own trauma. And he knew how lucky he was
Speaker 1: to have landed in the US that a father he
Speaker 1: may have resented for having abandoned him then worked really
Speaker 1: hard to bring him over and help set him up,
Speaker 1: which I think squared accounts between him and his father
Speaker 1: in a way that my aunt Maria never entirely squared
Speaker 1: accounts with her father. So yes, I did gain a
Speaker 1: real appreciation for his the way he ran interference for us,
Speaker 1: and he was really scrupulous about sharing with us. I
Speaker 1: say this in the book, sharing with us really only
Speaker 1: the beauty and now, whether it was books or art
Speaker 1: or music. And I I do caricature him a little
Speaker 1: bit as a as a child and an adolescent, as
Speaker 1: this techie who didn't really care the way his sister
Speaker 1: did or his father certainly about art and find things.
Speaker 1: But he came around to all that and love music
Speaker 1: and loved art and loved the well written novel. So
Speaker 1: he had plenty to live for an embrace and know
Speaker 1: that even as he was in these horrific places that
Speaker 1: there was something back in Munich that was it was
Speaker 1: being kind of preserved behind the walls of the house
Speaker 1: where he had had grown up in. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the next point between my dad's experience and the
Speaker 1: experienced of so many German Jews for me, because they
Speaker 1: were every bit as invested in this German culture and
Speaker 1: helped create it. And this was this was the world
Speaker 1: that my dad had grown up been first destroyed by
Speaker 1: the Nazis on a cultural level, and then was destroyed
Speaker 1: from the air by the Allies because there really didn't
Speaker 1: seem to be any other way to bring the Third
Speaker 1: Rch to heal than to just destroy Germany full stop.
Speaker 1: In Alex's treasure trove of letters, there is one Nico
Speaker 1: wrote to Kurt after visiting Darmstadt, a town where his
Speaker 1: mother had grown up, shortly after the war had ended.
Speaker 1: Nico uses a resting language to describe Darmstadt oozing rubble
Speaker 1: like thick porridge ruinous. In the summer, Nico takes Alex's
Speaker 1: youngest sister on a cruise through the Mediterranean, where they
Speaker 1: stop at the scattered ruins of Ephesus. Nico separates himself
Speaker 1: from the group, takes a seat along this ancient plaza,
Speaker 1: and begins to weep. It seems that the markers of
Speaker 1: a civilization laid bare, that rubble undoes a seam inside
Speaker 1: of him and opens up his own history. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's any question that my father's reaction at Ephesus
Speaker 1: was a flashback. You know, the trip was a kind
Speaker 1: of taking stock of aledictory tour with daughter, and you know,
Speaker 1: his mortality very much on his mind, and and Cathy
Speaker 1: didn't discuss explicitly the reason for his breakdown and him
Speaker 1: revealing all that emotion. But I don't think there's any
Speaker 1: question that it was tying into the Darmstadt. And indeed,
Speaker 1: the omen which his mother had grown up was was
Speaker 1: a ruin, and he describes it in this letter to
Speaker 1: his father in great detail, and the pipes clanking on
Speaker 1: the outside, and a bathtub just exposed to the world,
Speaker 1: and his great uncle stooped and ruined and living in
Speaker 1: a garden shed, and these things just don't leave you.
Speaker 1: And he had concealed them all so so well. And
Speaker 1: the last thing I ever said to him before he died,
Speaker 1: where I knew that he was conscious and processing. It
Speaker 1: was I just told him that your life has been
Speaker 1: a miracle, and it was yes. He talked about how
Speaker 1: he had escaped death in number of times, and it
Speaker 1: was that, of course, But really, I think the miracle
Speaker 1: that I was referring to. He nodded his assent. I
Speaker 1: think he understood was the way he had re constituted
Speaker 1: a life for himself as an immigrant. Family Secrets is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan
Speaker 1: Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor.
Speaker 1: If you have a secret you'd like to share, leave
Speaker 1: us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
Speaker 1: upcoming bonus episode. Our number is one secret zero. That's
Speaker 1: secret and then the number zero. You can also find
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot
Speaker 1: com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot.
Speaker 1: And if you want to know about my family secret
Speaker 1: that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times
Speaker 1: bestselling memoir Inheritance. Yeah. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.