Gather On Being German: A Personal Journey Into The German Experience Curated By Doris Pena-Cruz Shown As Textbook

MY GOODNESS. I have always wondered about lives of the everyday German citizens before, during, and after WWII, This book is a stark, beautifully crafted, honest account of one familys experiences underneath Hitlers regime, Her emotional journey is worth reading to appreciate the strength of the innocent German citizens caught in an inescapable labyrinth of pride, guilt, ignorance, love and loss, I couldnt put it down, At first glance, I thought that this might be astar review as everyone has a story to tell, The part of her fleeing from East Prussia, was well done no doubt gone over and over in therapy, However when she broke into several,chapters of German history from the Romans on, I thought that a publisher and editor should have stepped in,
True, we live in the shadows of our ancestors as the sins of the father are visited on the sons, but get a hold of it, As she said, her sister lived in reality I enjoyed the story of the family fleeing from East Prussia, It reflected some of the experienced of my mother's family and it brought home what a wardamaged generation was left after, I can also identify with the feelings of guilt that the author experiences, My German background has never been a source of unencumbered joy to me,
I don't think the history section, albeit quite interesting, adds any explanation as to why Germany ended up where it did in the WWII as Austria doesn't share the same history and embraced Nazi ideology with gusto.
Also, I also don't think that Hitler and his acolytes were mad, They were evil and they knew what they were doing, Although I do think many Germans didn't know about the extent of evil that was perpetrated, many were witness to the treatment of Jews and did nothing, All those death marches across Germany and Austria No one saw anything And all those people at the rallies There were plenty of enthusiastic Nazis about that liked what they heard.
There's a very moving sculpture in Vienna of an old Jew, wrapped in barbed wire, scrubbing a pavement, These things were real and happened, However, given the punishment meted out to anyone who did not follow the party line, I don't blame them if they didn't have the 'Zivilcourage' to stand up and say or do anything as often entire families were punished or murdered for the actions of an individual.
I also don't think that it is a particularly German fault to fall for the likes of Hitler, I think that given similar circumstances, it is all too easy for any nation to fall under the spell of such a convincing bunch of liars, I don't think other nations are exempt,
I've looked for contact details of the author as I have a question: what was the name of the married man that Aunt Frieda fell in love with in Berlin I'm very curious, for entirely personal reasons.

Also, his book badly needs editing to make it more readable, The language is odd at times and repetitive, Sentences like: ' personal contact with Jews to counteract the viscous antiSemitic literature, . . ' I doubt that the literature was viscous, I'm surprised that the author worked as an editor at some point in her life, I would have preferred a book that was true to the title: Being German, without the added bits of history, Thoughtfully written and carefully examined, this is a memoir from a woman whose first decade was in impoverishment and flight, along with her E, Prussian family, during the throes of Hitlers warring, She incorporates her mothers recollections which parallel the little girls vivid memory, After the war and the horrors further revealed, her Mother and returning soldier Father both shut down from the realization of such national shame under the Nazi regime, Doris and her sister spent their adult lives in two different adopted nations trying to make sense of what happened and why, Doris, raising a family in America, speaks of the enmeshed, crippling shame of “being German”, “All this did not get better with time, it got worse”, She worked through her depth of reaction later in life with help and her own determination to read widely, understand European history, the reality of the holocaust, the nature of shaming, and how any nation or individuals within nations can move forward not repeating such trauma.
She quotes an interviewer during the Nuremburg trial who asked what we all wonder: “, . . the great decisive question here at this trial is how Hitler could keep up such a betrayal like that, How could he manage to delude the people when hundreds of Allied radio stations were saying the truth” Hans Fritzsche, a senior official under Goebbels in the Ministry of Propaganda, answered: “the reason for my not believing it was that it had been drummed into us that the Allies were telling lies in the form of propagandaThis is the Satanic triumph of propaganda.
It simply closes ones ears to what is right or what is wrongWhat I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life, I mean the realization that the crime does not begin when you murder people, Crime begins with propaganda. ”
Finger pointing, blame casting has never solved human misery, As Doris details, “it only got worse”, At a time now in America where too easily groups are being labeled as evil by other groups, purposed propaganda being defended and other views marginalized or cancelled, we must humbly, seriously listen to those who have suffered terribly under lies, and those around us now who hold different opinions than those we may be convinced are right.
It is true of deception that it deceives, There is a reason Jesus warned those in the last times of trauma ", . . see to it that you are not deceived" See to it, A heartfelt, personal exploration of the struggle, shame, and guilt of growing up as a nativeborn German post WW II, In the author's case, she was born to German parents a few years prior to the beginning of the war and later emigrated to the U, S. As someone who was born to German parents a few years after the end of the war, her story was fascinating to me, Although I have not experienced struggle, shame, and guilt to nearly the extent she has, her story is still very relatable to me and gave me further insight into some of the questions regarding my parents' and the German public's war experiences.
The author does a good job with a few exceptions of not diminishing the atrocity of the Holocaust, but of also simultaneously portraying the intense hardships that many ordinary Germans, especially young children, experienced during the war and its aftermath.


As a side note, there are several chapters in the second half of the book that describe, not the author's personal experiences, but rather the preWW II history of Germany.
While the postWW I history is somewhat relevant to the author's experiences, I personally did not find the preWW I period so, nor did I find these chapters as engaging in a memoir/personal narrativetype book.
Fascinating read. That said, her editor needed to step in and not have her give a history of Germany, I understood why it was included but it was just too much and moved this was a solidor possiblereview to a shaky, This book was enlightening for me to see the hardship that the German people endured during WW, Raw honesty from the author stirred me, This book certainly was very educational, I learned a lot about Germany's and Europe's history though I had to skip many pages due to the notsointeresting style of its presentation,

I saw this book more likeessays patched together: author's mother's traumatic memoir of the postwar experience followed by the author's repetitive description of the same period history of Europe during the world wars Nuremberg trial proceedings.


The postwar experience of this family was heartwrenching, and I was deeply moved by the excruciating details of their suffering, However,

I wished author combined the memoirs of mother and daughter in a way to reduce repetition,

I felt for the author having to defend the innocence of the Germans she knew as a child, I tend to agree with the author's argument that it is not fair to put all Germans in one basket as cruel, heartless Hitler's agents,

In the section of history and the Nuremberg trial details, I wondered if the editor had done a through job historical details, authors comments, comparisons of SS defendants comments were running haywire making it rather tedious to read.


I finished the book thinking to myself whether this could have been a much better read if properly edited, In the second half of my life, my thoughts and feelings have centered around one thing: the Holocaust, In my younger years I avoided that subject, be it in literature or in entertainment, whenever I possibly could, That was not easy. Television was full of programs in which Germans looked stupid and heinous, My own children watched these things with glee I fled into another room, Since I have always read a lot, I was at least aware of the avalanche of books that were published about the Holocaust, Still, I kept my blinkers on, I firmly told myself that it was not my business, since I was just a child during that time, Sooner or later such an attitude will have to come to an end, It did for me after I fled a difficult marriage and finally began to examine my life, This was a slow process, aided by a patient psychiatrist, Now, years later, I want to write about my life and about the conflicted feelings such a search will cause in a woman of German nationality, .