Fatherland

Caesar invented Germany, some historians say. Yet even the Romans changed their minds about where its borders lay: Caesar drew the line at the Rhine, but later maps lumped both sides of the river into Germania Superior. The Rhine was easier to cross and less culturally isolating than the Vosges Mountains to the west and the Jura to the south. And even if Gaul did end at the Rhine, as Caesar claimed, and most Gauls stemmed from Celtic rather than Germanic stock, the Celts themselves had come from across the Rhine hundreds of vears earlier. Their ancestral homeland lay in what is now Austria and southeastern Germany.

Where, then, did Germany end and France begin?

The names didn’t help. The Franks conquered Gaul in the fifth century, and Charlemagne was crowned emperor of Francia in 786. But the Franks were a Germanic tribe, and Charlemagne seems to have spoken an archaic form of High German. (The Germans call him Karl der Grosse and claim him as their own.) When Charlemagne’s empire was divided up by three of his grandsons, the western third became the basis for modern France and the eastern third for modern Germany. But it was the middle kingdom that was the most coveted. It ran from what is now the Netherlands to Italy and included Rome and Aachen, the seats of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. While France and Germany had distinct languages and natural borders the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, the Baltic – the middle kingdom was a random patchwork of territories and tongues. And Alsace was at the center. It wasn’t long before its neighbors were playing tug-of-war over it.

And so it went: French and German, Frank and Goth, Gaul and Alemann – all flip sides of the same coin. Yet nothing mattered more than which side you were on. Alsace became the great fault line of Western Europe: a strip of land only thirty miles wide that changed nationalities six times in twelve centuries. The Germans annexed it in 870, ceded it to Louis XIV in 1648, then took it back in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War. The French reclaimed it in 1918, lost it to the Germans in 1940, and got it back on November 23, 1944, when Allied troops marched into Strasbourg.

Forced sterilization was nothing new. In the United States, eugenicists like Charles Davenport and John Harvey Kellogg – inventor of the corn flake had been promoting it since the early 1900s. Their goal was to protect the population from undesirable traits, at least by their racist standards. Blacks, Jews, immigrants, and indigenous peoples were deemed genetically inferior, as were the poor, criminal, and disabled. Their genes had to be kept separate or removed from white, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon stock. By 1937, forced sterilization was legal in thirty-two states. Davenport set up a laboratory at the Carnegie Institution that kept index cards on nearly a million ordinary citizens and advocated for strict immigration laws and sterilization of the unfit. When the first German eugenics research was done in the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation helped fund it. Josef Mengele, later known as the Angel of Death for his medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, was among those Rockefeller supported.

The Nazis went on to forcibly sterilize nearly four hundred thousand people. Then they went much further.

What do we owe the past? Why does it have such a hold on us? The more I know about my grandfather the longer I stumble along in his footsteps – the more those questions echo beyond my own family history. What seemed like a German problem when I began has become an American one, too – though of course that was true all along. Friends who used to nod sympathetically, or with carefully blanked expressions, when I talked about my grandfather now tell me about their own ancestors who owned slaves, or their great-uncle who was a McCarthyite or a member of the Klan. They talk about their cousin or sister-in-law who believes in Anon or white supremacy. They feel both betrayed by their history and implicated in it. What to do with our poisoned heritage? How to make peace with it without perpetuating its wrongs? We live in an unforgiving time, impatient to pass judgment and rectify the past. But the guilt that drives us can reach beyond penance or restitution to a conviction that something in us, or in our culture, is broken beyond repair. That our history is irredeemable.