Review of "In My Grandfather's Shadow: A Story of War, Trauma and the Legacy of Silence" by Angela Findlay

I've got very mixed feelings about this book. Part of it is to do with my own feelings about Germans and German-ness. I have a lovely German brother-in-law and some very nice German friends. I don't hate Germans at all; my personal relations with many Germans have been very enjoyable, and I really enjoyed working with German people during my professional life - the honesty, the orderliness, the courtesy - it was all great.

And I have strong memories of how my first ever argument with my Dad was about Germans - how he'd raised me to be against racism but was telling me that he hated all Germans, because of what they'd done. I was about ten, and suddenly I was realising that he wasn't always right, and that he didn't live up to his own standards. Of course he didn't actually hate all Germans - his Jewish Judo club included a young German lesbian woman who was sort of an honorary Jew, and who he really liked.

But still, I find it hard to be sympathetic to the suffering of Germans - civilians and soldiers - that resulted from their defeat in WW2. Intellectually I can accept that the Allied bombing of German cities was wrong and bad, and that if there was an objective standard would be ruled to be a war crime. Only, I can't find it in my self to feel really sorry for the victims, or for the Germans who lost their homes in territories awarded to other countries after the war. Because of what they'd done, and what they had shut their eyes to.

Angela Findlay's book addresses all this, but not with the same structure of feelings that I'd bring to it. Not surprising, really, since she's a descendant of one of the perpetrators rather than one of the victims. Her grandfather wasn't in the SS, but he was a German general, and was doing his utmost to make sure that Germany won the war. So it's hard to work up much sympathy for his two years in captivity at the end of the war.

For the most part I liked the parts of the book where she details the personal histories, and I wasn't so keen on the parts where she describes her own personal history of psychological suffering. Nevertheless there's a good survey of all the current thinking about PTSD and trauma, including epigenetics, and it's worth reading for that. And I think she's been brave to have confronted her family story, and to have attempted to disentangle the ways in which it has reached from the past into the present. But I can't help thinking that she tried too hard, and too fast, to find a good thing that her grandfather had done (allowing some fleeing Italian civilians to hide in some tunnels that he'd been ordered to destroy), and to feel at peace from that. I can't blame her for that, but I can't feel the same, and that's partly what the book is about - how to feel about these legacies.