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Join the Human Rights Program on March 7 at 12:30 PM at WCC 3007 for a book talk with acclaimed author Géraldine Schwarz about her memoir Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe. The event is open to HUID holders only. Lunch will be served. The event will be recorded and made available on our YouTube channel.
During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitläufer —those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely…this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).
Speaker biography:
Géraldine Schwarz is a German-French journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. Those Who Forget is her first book. It won the European Book Prize, Germany’s Winfried Peace Prize, and Italy’s NordSud International Prize for Literature and Science and has been translated into over 12 languages.
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