It was another nine years before the next puzzle piece crystallized. Andreas had just returned to Germany after a year as an exchange student in Chile. His uncle, after years of struggling with alcoholism, had just passed away, and Andreas went to his apartment to clear out the basement storage space. He stood in the dim room, letting his eyes adjust, surveying the shelves packed with books and belongings, trying to predict how long it would take to empty them, when he saw it. An old wooden suitcase pasted with a sticker that was oddly familiar. He stepped closer, and realized it was a customs sticker from Arica, Chile, stamped with the year 1931. The leather tag on the suitcase bore his grandfather’s name. Why had no one in the family mentioned, when he left for Chile, that his grandfather had also traveled there? And why did finding the suitcase make him feel so unsettled?
He asked his parents about it. His father shrugged and left the room. His mother spoke in vague terms. “I think he was involved in something or other,” she said, “and left for a few months.” The early thirties had been a time of dire economic crisis in Germany. Maybe his grandfather had sought opportunity elsewhere, as other young Germans did during those lean years. Andreas convinced himself this was true, and did his best to ignore the nagging feeling that there was more to the story.
A few years later, he asked his father’s other brother for permission to go through old family documents and memorabilia stored in the back of his house. Instinct told him that he might find in his grandfather’s past something that could explain the trench of unrest that linked the generations of his family—his father’s and uncles’ struggles with alcohol, their shrouded, closed-off manner that Andreas sensed had something to do with shame.
He read and sorted for days, and little by little, more pieces emerged. His grandfather’s old passport, stamped by immigration in Chile, showing his arrival in 1930 and departure in 1931. A telegram sent to his grandfather in 1942 at his job in Frankfurt where he worked as an office clerk for one of the big industrial conglomerates. Have you removed all the bicycles and belongings from the house in Frankfurt? the telegram read, signed by his grandfather’s brother. A peculiar message.
Then Andreas read the return address. His great-uncle had sent the message to his grandfather from the Gestapo headquarters in Marseille. How had his great-uncle been allowed to access a Nazi Telex machine? Why had his grandfather received a personal message from a Gestapo office? How deep did his family’s Nazi connection go?
He kept digging through documents and found a letter from a family friend, notifying them that his great-uncle had died during the war on a withdrawal mission in France when his car went over a mine. No personal effects or ID tags had been recovered from the explosion. He also discovered letters from his grandfather to his grandmother, written from a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Germany after the war. What alleged or actual offenses had put his grandfather in prison?
He searched for years for more information, but hit only dead ends. Despite his grandfather’s imprisonment, there didn’t appear to be any evidence of a trial or an investigation into his grandfather’s criminal acts. In a last-ditch effort to fill in the blanks in his family’s past, Andreas contacted archives of the home state where his grandparents had lived after the war. At last, he was handed a slim file. There were only a few sheets of paper inside, including a typed chronology that filled just half the page.
In 1927, when he was twenty years old, his grandfather had joined the SA—the Sturmabteilung, the first Nazi Party paramilitary group established to persecute Jews by throwing stones through windows and setting fire to city blocks, creating a climate of fear and violence and contributing to Hitler’s rise to power. He left the SA in 1930—the year he’d gone to Chile—only to return to Germany a few months later, rejoin the SA, and rise in the ranks to become a squad leader and a member of the Nazi Party. These decisions in 1933 facilitated his job at the finance administration office in Frankfurt, and his mayorship in the village where Andreas’s father had pointed to his name—Hermann Neumann—the four syllables that denoted the dark legacy he’d inherited.
“I share his name,” Andreas said. “My cells stem from his cells. In a foundational way, I’m a result—a product—of what happened.”
His very identity felt contaminated.
And history seemed to be repeating. At the same time that he learned the truth about his grandfather, the right-wing movement was gaining energy in an economically devastated eastern Germany.
“I saw pictures of people running after immigrants in Chemnitz,” he said, “and I knew my grandfather had done the same.”
He officially changed his middle name from Hermann to Phileas, after the character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, a book that sparked Andreas’s curiosity about the world during his childhood days. The name change was an act to distance himself from his grandfather, to sever the personal connection to his grandfather’s wrongs, to say, “Yes, I am Hermann’s grandson, and I don’t need to carry his first name.”
Andreas said he is still trying to release the burden of the past—the relentless shame that he carries the blood of a perpetrator, that his very life came into being as a result of the benefits his grandfather garnered from hurting others, from injustice. It’s a collective guilt that many German people unfortunately carry. If you are German, or
