Jeffrey L. Katz is the author of the new book Unsettled Ground: Reflections on Germany’s Attempts to Make Amends. He’s a veteran journalist and part-time bookseller. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
Q: Why did you decide to write Unsettled Ground?
A: I started to write a memoir about discovering my family’s deep roots in Germany. My parents had both fled to safety during the Holocaust, though many of my relatives were murdered. And then I paused after realizing just how many children of survivors had already published excellent books along those lines. Did I have something new to say?
That’s when I decided to turn more of my attention to the people behind Germany’s powerful remembrance movement. These were the citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II, who broke through four decades of silence and denial about Germans’ widespread complicity for the atrocities.
They pressed their parents, grandparents, and neighbors—many of them perpetrators, collaborators, or bystanders to genocide—to find out what really happened in their hometowns during the Nazi era.
As a result, the country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance. And they’ve built strong connections to descendants of Germany’s former Jewish communities, like me.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen?
A: The title and subtitle evolved along with the book. At one point it was A Home We Never Knew: The Germans Who Welcomed Me in the Land My Parents Fled. Later, I later landed on Unfinished Reckoning. The publisher wisely thought “reckoning” wasn’t great word for marketing purposes, though the notion of “home” and “reconciliation” pop up frequently in the book.
By the way, the green-domed building on the bottom left of the cover is the restored synagogue in Essen, Germany, where my father’s family were members. And the Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, on the bottom right memorialize my father’s parents and brothers on the street in Essen where they lived until they were deported and murdered.
Q: How much did you know about your family history as a child?
A: Very little. Of course, I knew that my father had escaped from Germany as a teenager and that most of his family was later killed. I knew that my mother fled from Germany when she was 5, immigrating with her immediate family to Colombia, South America.
But I didn’t know any details about their departures or the heritage they left behind. Partly it was because my parents tried to shield us from the trauma they had endured at an early age. The expression that stuck with me was “you shouldn’t know from it.”
Also, shockingly, I wasn’t especially curious about what they had gone through. I was growing up in America as an American, largely oblivious to what transpired before.
My naivete began to peel away in my mid-20s. I was a journalist writing about some of the thousands of Cuban refugees who came to America in 1980. I told my dad I was moved by the stories they told me.
That’s when he casually mentioned that he, too, had been a refugee. I was stunned. And embarrassed. I said now I’m going to ask you about your escape from Germany and I’m going to write about it for the newspaper I was working for.
Q: The author Marc Fisher said of the book, “In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain.” What do you think of that description?
A: Marc touched on an important element of the book. It’s natural to resist dwelling on the past. We tend to want to live in the here and now, to imagine the possibilities and not feel relegated to what’s already occurred, especially if it’s a particularly tragic chapter of history. And yet, how can we move beyond these divisive events unless we resolve them through difficult conversations?
I sometimes describe the book as being about three Rs. A willingness to take collective responsibility for the mistakes of the past. A sincere desire to commemorate them through ongoing remembrance. And that can lead to a reconciliation among peoples.
Yet the challenges of commemorating the Holocaust are mounting, here and in Germany. Antisemitism has risen across the globe over the past few years. Beyond that, young people have a hard time relating to events that happened 80 or 90 years ago.
The audience has also become more diverse. I’ve had the opportunity to speak at quite a few schools about my family’s experiences. Some of the students come from families that have endured their own persecution and trauma, and much more recently than my family has.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: At its most basic level, I learned not only how my relatives perished in the Holocaust, but how they had lived in Germany for centuries before that.
Also, I became as interested in the lives of the non-Jewish members of Germany’s remembrance movement in the places where my relatives lived as I was in my own relatives.
I discovered valuable historical artifacts that confirmed where my ancestors had been and what they had done. And I discovered people who knew my relatives and crossed paths with them, and met some new relatives along the way.
As for what I hope readers take from it, I’d say … Don’t try to hide from history and the hard conversations that may be necessary to fully deal with it. Intergenerational hate can be overcome. And though it’s become less popular to say it now, diversity is a strength.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m enjoying doing book talks. People are eager to engage in the topics covered in the book. My next talk is March 14 at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. Beyond that, I’ve been nurturing my love of books while working part-time at Wonderland Books in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m doing some freelance writing and, yes, wondering if I have another book in me.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked is whether I feel more grief or gratitude when visiting Germany. There’s a strong sense of both.
I feel an overwhelming sense of grief seeing memorial stones that honor my relatives at the very spot where they were deported. Or when visiting the site of a former concentration camp. It's painful to have a clear sense of how my relatives were persecuted. Those feelings will always be there.
And yet I feel as though I’m reclaiming my family’s history whenever I’m in Germany. I’m grateful whenever I stand where my relatives’ homes were located, silently pray in restored synagogues where they once worshipped, touch their names on memorials embedded into the streets where they were deported, pause at displays that honor my family at museums and pay my respects at tombstones for those who died before the war.
The German remembrance movement is flawed; I get into that, too. But I’m deeply appreciative that it’s helped me and other descendants experience all of this, and that it's put the country's Jewish heritage back on the map, literally and figuratively.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
