Germany's baby boomer generation

Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America
by Ursula Hegi

Let me start with a rather long quote from the introduction.

Born in 1946, I grew up surrounded by evidence of war--bombed out buildings, fatherless children, men who had legs or arms missing--yet when I tried to ask questions, my parents and teachers only gave me reluctant and evasive answers about the war. Never about the Holocaust, "We suffered, too," they would say. It is an incomplete lens, but it was held up to many of our generation as the only lens to see through. if our parents had spoken to us about their responsibility for their actions or lack of action during the war, if they had grieved for the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and political prisoners who were murdered, and if then, in addition to all this, they had told us, "We suffered, too," their victimhood would have become part of the total lens.

Taken by itself, it is flawed. Incomplete. A lie.

What they tried to create for their children was eine heile Welt--an intact world. What was their motivation? guilt? Denial? Justification? The desire to protect the next generation? Perhaps all of these. But their silence added to the horrors of the Holocaust.

After a thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction, she goes on to interview fifteen other children of her generation who--like her--emigrated to America after the war.  Some had childhood memories of the war; some did not--but all were haunted by it, in visible and invisible ways. And all shared the loneliness that seeps out from silence.

It was brave of her to disturb the ghosts, but I'd expect nothing less from the author of Stones From the River. Not everyone she interviewed was admirable or  likeable or even slightly interesting, be we have something to learn from them all.