Off the Record — by Mimi Scwartz
Before I left for my father’s village in Germany, the historians at the college where I teach warned me about trusting what German villagers might tell me. Rely on the archives. Memory is unreliable. People don’t want to put themselves in a bad light. They said I shouldn’t be naïve. Then, it turned out, I heard the same thing from my young translator in Holocaust Studies, who accompanied me on the trip. Don’t be naïve. How funny, I thought, that a young Protestant German (whose one grandfather was a Nazi) is warning me, a Jew, about being naïve.
When I wrote that in my journal, I suddenly knew how to solve the problem. Rolf was not just my translator; he was part of the story that I was uncovering. My task, I realized, was less about finding THE RIGHT ANSWER about the goodness or badness of Germans in my father’s village and more about the complexities of finding out. The story had a drama unfolding about how past and present shape each other—something you can’t find in the archives.
I chose present tense to tell the story so the reader would be right beside me, struggling with the issues of trust, belief, fact, and memory as I did. Maybe we’d reach the same conclusions, maybe not. And that’s when I, too, became a character in my story. Before this point, I thought I was writing mainly about others: that this project was investigative journalism. But in writing “Off the Record,” I realized there was a memoir here: of my coming to terms with a past that I, the first American-born in the family, had ignored. The result, several years later, was Good Neighbors, Bad Times- Echoes of My Father’s German Village, of which this chapter is a part.
