Germany, usually it has to be said, has in an exemplary way made up with the heritage after the second world war. Admitted guilt, paid reparations, opened the file, and built democracy.
At ground level, it may seem a little different.
it is very not talking about, and especially reluctant about Opa, grandpa. She is born in the end of the 1960s, in Brazil. But the family is ädeltysk, grandpa carrying large farms, first in Germany and later in occupied Poland. When the russians came, he moved back home to Germany and fifteen years later to Brazil. The soil was better there.
Paragraph.
For the mother Julie a silent and outrett relationship, the most vivid link back is her beloved but strict grandmother who followed his grandfather across the world, and have warm hands, a determined will and a series of bitter reviews on indefinite adversity in the past.
All we lost.
remains unsaid in a way that shrinks the existence and weighing down with vague feelings of guilt. As if all the worries under the surface is Julies own fault.
In the book ”the Pendulum,” tells Julie Lindahl – for many years a resident in Sweden, and how she as an adult will begin researching in the family history: what was it really grandpa did during the war?
It turns out, of course, that Opa has been a high-ranking SS officer known to be brutal. After the war, he owned a hunting lodge in northern Germany, where the old SS-treat used to meet.
But it is slow, and at first, I read the book with some irritation. Her path to insight is incomprehensible sluggish and ornate, even in adulthood, it seems she does not want to understand the meaning of all of the wild flashing lights. Poland during the war? Exile in Brazil?
that Opa has been a high-ranking SS officer known to be brutal. After the war, he owned a hunting lodge in northern Germany, where the old SS-treat used to meet, but towards the end of the 50’s, opened new proceedings against the hibernating nazis and many fled to Latin america, among them the Julies grandfather and grandmother.
Grandmother’s response when she is confronted with the questions are as elusive as icy. It is at once the loving and terrified the portrait of the old lady with her, as it turns out, deep not only the ideology becomes increasingly fascinating is the book’s biggest merit.
In the German archives to find Julie some basic facts, but much is tillrättalagt. The process was called denazifiering was often clean vittvätten of old war criminals, and in the was dismissed, the grandfather as a stooge.
ear sounds somewhat familiar here. Queen Silvia – she was born in Brazil, undertook a similar study since it emerged that the father, ascended the Swedish throne has been a member of the nazi party. The conclusion was similar: he was believed to have been ”not politically active” – but the archives are therefore notoriously unreliable.
Now, relying Julie not only on the old paper. She also seek out places and people who can carry on the memories. The farms in Poland, the castle in Schleswig-Holstein, the plantations in Brazil.
She talks with the older relatives as well, and reveals that the Opas recklessness also affected the family more directly: he abused his oldest daughter, explains that she early on broke with the parents. Even his uncle fled the family, all of them claiming that he is dead but towards the end succeed Julie to find him fully alive with a wife and children in Paraguay.
develop a mildly consolatory vision of nazism – and I may once again need to disturb me on how to gently Julie front paws and let him be; he gives a more detailed interest in the gifts she gives and receives from his newfound relatives.
But I give me – at least partially. The old man is eighty, and it is not him it is, last of all, this book is not even about the hunt for the perpetrators in the past, but about something that perhaps is more important for the third generation of survivors: the legacies of silence and how it can be broken. How doors can be opened, air flow in and old familjesår heal.
And so seen, it is still a right dizzying journey through the history and the family that Julie Lindahl allow us to follow. If she moves ängligt and tentative, she is also stubborn and brave, and once she completed her journey, the world is not completely similar anymore.
It is actually really beautiful.
