Géraldine Schwarz is joined by Philippe Sands to discuss her new memoir, Those Who Forget, exploring her family’s complicity with fascism.
In association with Institut Français du Royaume Uni and Goethe-Institut London and with the help of Daunt Books, join us via Zoom for a Q&A discussion featuring German-French journalist, author and documentary filmmaker Géraldine Schwarz (author of Those Who Forget) and Philippe Sands (the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Ratline and East West Street) for a discussion of Géraldine’s book, an account of her family’s complicity with fascism.
During the war, Géraldine Schwarz’s grandparents were neither heroes nor villains – they just followed the current. Afterwards they wanted to forget, to bury it all under the wreckage of the Third Reich. But decades later, delving through the basement of their apartment building, Géraldine discovers that her grandfather Karl profited from the forced ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish businesses – and so she is compelled to investigate her ancestors’ past. On her mother’s side, she delves into the role of her French grandfather, a policeman during the Vichy regime. How guilty were they?
Combining generations of family stories with the history of Europe’s post-war reckoning, Géraldine asks: how did Germans transform their collective guilt into democratic responsibility? And, given rising populism in Europe today, how can we ensure we learn from history?
