Géraldine Schwarz

Géraldine Schwarz (born 1 October, 1974 in Strassbourg) is a German-French journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. In her publications she advocates rethinking in practising Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

As a daughter of a French mother and a German father, Schwarz defines herself as "a child of German-French reconciliation" and "a committed European" ^[1]. She grew up in the Paris area and attented the Lycee Innternational de Saint-Germain-en-Laye from 1985 to 1992.^[2], where she passed her abitur exam at the German department in 1992. From 1993 to 1997 she studied history at the Sorbonne and at the London School of Economics. In 1997 she joined the Paris Journalist School Centre de formation des journalistes de Paris" (CFJ). Later she worked for Bloomberg News and became a correspondent for Agence France Press in Berlin.Ten years later she said good-bye to news journalism but went on publishing and discussing in international media. She also produces documentary films. Her voluminous documentary essay Les Amnésiques was published in France in 2017 and was awarded the European Book Prize in 2018.

In 2017 Géraldine Schwarz published Les Amnésiques at Flammarion,an autobiographic and historical essay, which was translated into more than ten languages, among them German Die Gedächtnislosen, Erinnerung einer Europäerin, ISBN 978-3-906910-30-7 and English Those Who Forget at Simon & Schuster and Pushkin, ISBN 97815011099080 Through three generations of her family Schwarz depicts the painful "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" of the Nazi era in Germany. The author one day discovers that in 1938 her German grandfather Karl Schwarz had aryanised ^[3] a business owned by two Jewish families Löbmann and Wertheimer in Mannheim for a low price .When after the war a survivor of the Jewish families demanded reparation payments, the grandfather refused to accept his resonsibility as a Mitläufer. Her German grandmother Lydia was seduced by the life Hitler afforded Aryan women and also took advantage of the Jewish exodus from Mannheim in 1940, decorating her dining room with personal belongings from the homes of fleeing Jews. Géraldine Schwarz starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman of the Vichy regime. After the publication of the book in France,a commemorative plaque for the Löbmann and Wertheimer families was erected ^[4] in the former concentration camp Le Camp des Milles. Both families were imprisoned there between 1940 and 1942, before they were deported to [[Auschwitz] ]and and gassed there. The sons Fritz Löbmann and Otto Wertheimer were among the children of Izieu, who were traced and found in their hideout near [[Lyon] ]and also deported to Auschwitz by command of Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie.

Schwarz claims that working up the past not by forgetting but by remembering it and bearing responsibility came late and after decades of scandalous impunity, but was after all successful. She finds the key to that success in focussing on the role of the Mitläufer, those dozens of millions of Germans who became accomplices of the Nazi criminals for opportunistic or conformistic reasons. This process of identification with the offenders promoted the people's awareness of their fallibility and sharpened their democratic responsibility. ^[5] It is true, Schwarz says, that in France people are ashamed of the collaboration of the Vichy leadership with the Third Reich, the question of people's responsibility,however,has not been discussed.^[6] The author shows that many countries do not face up to their fascist, communist or colonial past.^[7] She realises a deep misunderstanding about the importance of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for the democratic stability of a country - also when dealing with populists. On the other hand, she argues that coming to terms with history is not expected to make way for a culture of guilt, which splits society. She rather advocates a reminiscential culture which is pragmatic and responsibility-oriented, in order to learn from history what is important for the present.^[8]

In many countries the book triggered discusions about their own history. In her laudation at the award ceremony of the Winfried-Prize cultural scientist Aleida Assmann says that Schwarz "has invented a new genre", a book which encompasses not only different nations but also different generations and shows, from Assmann's point of view,"that it is possible to keep up sentiments and family loyalty, and still face historical facts", and thus create from memory an irreplaceable foundation of civic education and the self-portrait of a nation ^[9]. The director of the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich Mirjam Zadoff wrote in Der Spiegel:"Schwarz describes as those wo forget all those who demand forgetting again, who compare the Nazi era to a birdshit in history and dispraise the Holocaust memorial as a memorial of disgrace. ^[10] Samantha Power wrote in the Washington Post : xxx Susan Glassercommented in The New Yorker: xxx In Spain Juan Luis Cebrián wrote in El País:„We are facing a similar reminiscial fight today and it is reflected in the controversy about transferring the corpse of dictator Francisco Franco as well as in the fraudulent invention of Katalonian history by supporters of independence. ^[11] In the Netherlands Bas Heijne wrote: "Schwarz calls for a retrospect to the present :Don't be a Mitläufer like your grandparents(...)Even though you think that your contribution hardly makes a difference, you still can play an important historical role." ^[12]

• Learning to learn from History in Magazine of the European Observatory on Memories, December 2020.^[13]
• Hoe kunnen we lering trekken uit de geschiedenis? (How can we learn from History ?) in Tijdschrift Nexus Instituut, Nexus 84,You tell us stories, why? September 2020
• Suppressed history is like a Boomerangin De Balie cultuurcentrum, Amsterdam, August 2020.^[14]
• Tell Me About Yesterday Tomorrow, Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, collective volume together with among others Roger Cohen, Liam Gillick, Annette Kelm, Fred Moten, Khalil Muhammad, Andrea Petö, Dirk Rupnow, Philippe Sands, Geraldine Schwarz, and Niko Wahl, 2021.
• It’s tempting to want to forget the past in Time Magazine 22.09.2020.^[15]
• Germans know that toppling a few statues isn’t enough to confront the past, The Guardian, 23.06.2021.^[16]
• My family has a Nazi past. I see that ideology returning across Europein The Guardian , 18.04.2018.^[17]
• N’insultons pas les Allemands de l’Est qui ont délibérément choisi d’enterrer leur pays in Le Monde 09.11.2019.^[18]
• Il faut rendre aux Européens la fierté d’appartenir à ce continent in Le Monde, 29.04.2019.^[19]
• Pourquoi les Allemands ont presque tout bon, Le Monde 22.12.2015
• Enquête sur la seconde vie des nazis in Le Monde 28.01.2015
• Les espoirs perdus de la réunificationin Grand continent 09.11.2019.^[20]
• Erinnert euch ! Wir brauchen eine neue Erinnerungskultur in Die Welt 27.01.2020
• Was uns die Krise lehrt in TAZ, 28.11.2020^[21]
• Die Nazis und der Nahe Osten in Welt am Sonntag, 15.02.2015.^[22]
• Sin Memoria no hay democracia in El País, 28. 06.2020^[23]
• Merkel: la magia de una gobernante in El Pais 24.01.2021.^[24]

• Rester en Algérie, avec Philippe Baron, France Télévision 2012
• Exil nazi : La promesse de l’orient, Artline Films, France Télévision, RTBF 2014
• Les espoirs perdus de la Réunification, Eléphant et Chrysalide productions, France Télévision, RTBF, 2019

1. 2018: The European Book Prize
2. 2019: The German Winfried-Prize for international understanding and peace of the city of Fulda^[25]
3. 2019: The Italian North-South Prize for Literature
4. 2020: Longlisted for the British Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
5. 2020: Best Books of the year of the American Kirkus Reviews
6. 2021:Shortlisted for the American Mark Lynton Prize ^[26]

• Literature by and about Géraldine Schwarz in the German National Library catalogue
• Talk aus Berlin mit Jörg Thadeusz RBB Juli 2019
• Interview im SPIEGEL Online Dez,2018
• Deutschlandfunk Kulturfragen. Debatten und Dokumente vom 2. Dezember 2018: Die neuen Rechten und die Erinnerungskultur. „Die AfD ist radikaler als der Front National“