German culture and history

Family Heritage -- German Culture

My family represents a dichotomous social history that reflects simultaneous identification with and allegiance to two concepts that have a fundamental basis for potential antagonisms. That is because I am of German-Jewish decent. My ancestors date back to the town of Frankfurt am Main, a suburb of the German town of Frankfurt, as far as the middle of the 18th century. My grandfather fought heroically in World War I for the Keiser and largely without any conceptual understanding of the wartime international conflicts that took the lives of so many of his companions. Part of our family heritage was defined by his experiences as young soldier who survived the Western Front trench warfare. Throughout his life, my grandfather maintained the perspective of a military officer and the value of military service was instilled in all of the male children in my family from a very young age. On one hand, my grandfather later came to accept the fact that Germany and Austro-Hungary were responsible for the tragedy that befell Europe in the early part of the 20th century. On the other hand, he never managed to fully reconcile his heroism and that of his fallen comrades with the historical reality that he has since learned.

To some degree, that theme repeated itself in my grandfather's life a generation later and it helped him overcome resentment and animosity that many would say would have been appropriate under the circumstances. That is because we are of Jewish decent and many members of my grandparents' extended families perished in the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. Specifically, my grandfather experienced the persecution of Jews under the infamous Nuremburg Laws and lost his teaching position. His former teaching colleagues had all but ignored him for the year or two preceding his formal termination but at the age of 85, he reconnected with two of them by letter and eventually visited them in Germany shortly before his death. They expressed remorse for what had happened to his family and for believing that they could not maintain a friendship with him under Nazi rule.

My grandfather had returned to civilian life as a university student after the First World War and became a teacher in his family's hometown. They had always valued intellectual development and higher education and his parents had been extremely distressed when he left school as an eighteen-year-old to fight in the Firs World War. The fundamental importance of education was a value passed down in my family: my father is a research physicist and my uncle (his brother) a professor of medicine. In my family, education and intellectual development were always the most important value and we all absorbed the message very early that education and intellect were a much more appropriate measure of a person than financial success. No doubt, that theme played a role in my father's decision to devote his considerable talents to research and in my uncle's decision to teach medicine rather than practice medicine.

As non-observant Jews whose family suffered greatly during the Holocaust, we also experienced a dichotomous set of messages in that regard. On one hand, we have never identified strongly with the religious aspects of Judaism, living secular lives. On the other hand, my grandparents and my parents always identified very strongly with the non-religious (i.e. cultural) aspects of their Jewish heritage. In retrospect, we children were exposed to regular messages about the plight of Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust. As a result, my family has always expressed a concern that the children date and marry fellow Jews, despite the fact that we have never been observant in terms of any religious identity whatsoever. The other predominant concern of our parents was always that we associated with others who were educated and accomplished intellectually, although they never expressed particular concern with earning potential beyond the ability to maintain a relatively comfortable middle-class existence.

My family made a very specific effort to make sure that all of us learned to speak German at home and we were raised bilingually and encouraged to speak German at home. My parents were instrumental in at lobbying the private school that some of us attended to provide the option of German language lessons when the only choices available to students at the time were French, Spanish, and Latin. We also grew up with traditional German cuisine at home and my mother still prepares her own wiener schnitzel, strudel, and blood pudding. Only the last is a taste that we children never learned to share.