Understanding the past of lambda individuals during the Second World War helps to fill collective memory gaps, often exploited by the far-right in Europe. This is the thesis developed in The Amnesiacs, European Book Award 2018, which reads like a novel.

In partnership with Euractiv.fr

Géraldine Schwarz is a journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker, born to a French mother and a German father. She lives in Berlin where Euractiv met her. In her book Les Amnésiques , published by Flammarion, Géraldine Schwarz offers a captivating dive in the past of her family of "Mitlaufer" , German bourgeois who "walked with the current" of Nazism, including taking over in 1939 a company that belonged to a Jewish family.

Written in French, adapted in German, soon in Dutch and Italian, his work which targets the European democracies tempted by the far-right will be awarded the European Book Award 2018 by Antonio Tajani on December 8th in the European Parliament.

Your book has just won the European Book Award, is it a message facing the rise of extremes in Europe?

Yes, the message of my book is deeply European. Because we can not understand, or consolidate our current democracies without doing a deep memory work, what I did while immersing myself in the history of my Franco-German family. It's important to understand what happened to ordinary people. Historians have focused on policymakers, but for Europeans to be concerned, talking about normal citizens is much more meaningful.

This memorial work on the second world war, is it done in a uniform way in Europe?

Germany did it 30 years ago, France started 20 years ago, Italy is still in denial, and the Netherlands has delivered three-quarters of the Jews who lived on their ground to the Nazis still have not apologized ... so there are many different situations!

The Germans began this memorial work on society. As a Franco-German I could both use this approach, but also bring a different perspective, with the decline of dual nationality, focusing on individuals, and individual responsibilities.

One can more easily identify with someone like my grandfather, who was a "Mitlaufer", one of those Germans who walked with the current, than Himmler or Goebbels. It helps to understand how an entire society can shift: the majority of the population did not directly pour into a criminal activity, but they supported a criminal enterprise: Nazism.

Is not it difficult to look into this potentially painful and complicated past?

I think it's pretty healthy to look at things as they are. My grandmother was fascinated by Hitler. She had not read Mein Kampf and did not know much about the substance of her ideas, but she thought he was great. This is a telling case of how Nazism spoke to all segments of society, and had something to offer everyone. The Nazis were very inspired, to manipulate the opinion, of a work, the psychology of the crowds of Gustave Le Bon. It is an important work that should be reissued urgently: it explains how the individual is transformed into the mass. At Afd or EPF in Austria, we find some of the processes described in this book: how to tell myths, to dream, to give a story that will please everyone.

And in the East? How to explain the success of illiberal democracies, in countries like Poland or Hungary?

Our democracies in the West were built in opposition to fascism, with Christian-Democratic parties giving a strong speech on the subject. But in the East, the story imposed by the Soviets has blurred the tracks. There was an anti-fascist speech, but not very credible because it was imposed by a totalitarian state. The result is an allergy to anti-fascism, which is reflected in the impressive scores of the Afd in East Germany.

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