Géraldine Schwarz’s riveting account of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II is an urgent warning against forgetting the lessons of history in the dangerous rise of far-right nationalism in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. In her book, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe, Schwarz weaves together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning with fascism. She explores how millions were ensnared by ideology; overcome by a fog of denial after the war; and, in Germany, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility.
In this program, Schwarz explored the lives of citizens in moments of crisis – political, social, and cultural – to underline the dangerousness of mitläufer (those who followed the current) with Nicholas Kulish, correspondent for The New York Times.
Géraldine Schwarz is a German-French writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin. After her long tenure as a Germany correspondent for the news agency Agence France Press, Schwarz now publishes in various international media. For her book Les Amnésiques (Flammarion), translated into more than twelve languages, she received the European Book Prize in 2018. Those Who Forget won the European Book Prize, Germany’s Winfried Peace Prize, and Italy’s NordSud International Prize for Literature and Science and is currently being translated into twelve languages. It was longlisted for UK’s Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the American Anthony Lukas Prize.
Nicholas Kulish is a correspondent for The New York Times. He spent seven years as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief. He is the co-author of the book The Eternal Nazi, about the decades-long, globe-spanning hunt for the Nazi war criminal Dr. Aribert Heim. He also served as East Africa correspondent and was part of teams that won the George Polk Award for military reporting for a series about Navy SEALs and a citation from the Overseas Press Club for coverage of Saudi Arabia. He is the author of a novel, Last One In.
