They met at Harvard in 1996. A native Bostonian, Anna O’Brian was a student in the graduating year. Reading history was her favorite hobby. Anna met Christoph when he was visiting his friend, Josh, at the university. Christoph knew more about history, music, and architecture than anyone Anna had ever known. “Disarmingly handsome,” he was everything Anna had ever dreamed of. She couldn’t wait to be with him, to visit him after he returned to Germany, his homeland. Her two Jewish roommates, Jess and Susie warned her, “Don’t go” adding, “He’s German.” No one could keep Anna away.
Christoph quickly immersed Anna into the “German party scene” at a hip-hop beer garden. Anna was dizzy, disoriented with the beer-drinking German-speaking crowd. She wanted to be alone with Christoph but he urged her to experience his fencing fraternity, “The Verbindung.” There among the noise, the foils, swords and trophies hanging on the walls, Anna’s thoughts turned to war. Her grandfather’s unit had been the first to liberate Dachau, first, to see inside the Eagles Nest, Hitler’s Alpine residence. After her grandfather’s death, Anna found his scrapbook in a box also containing his uniform and a Nazi flag—a souvenir he kept hidden along with photographs of the atrocities he saw during the war. Christoph never spoke how his grandfather spent the war.
Their next outing was Nuremburg. Anna wanted to see the Palace of Justice the courthouse where the trials of Nazi criminals took place. Instead, Christoph proudly chose to tour the Durer museum, followed by the “charming square” in the center of town. After lunch of bratwurst and weisbeir Christoph bought her a pink chiffon scarf gleefully exclaiming, “Now you look like a German girl.” When, at last, they had toured the courthouse, Christoph became inexplicably angry, curiously philosophical. He quoted, Habermas, the German philosopher “even those born after the war are responsible.” Surprisingly thereafter, Christoph revealed his grandfather was a soldier in the Wehrmacht but quickly added--not the dreaded SS. Moreover, in 1943, Christoph continued his grandfather abandoned the army and fought in the “German resistance” forging documents. Anna loved Christoph’s honesty.
Her former roommates, now working in New York, doubted Christoph’s sincerity-- “it’s only two generations after Auschwitz “they reminded Anna, adding, “all Germans are Nazis.” Anna defended Christoph’s post-war, German identity. She vehemently disagreed with her friends’ proclamations, despised their abhorrent racism.
To her delight on her next trip to Germany Christoph invites Anna to meet his family. Christoph’s home is elegant with a piano room, a library filled with paintings, lush carpets, antiques. She’s certain his family did not profit from the loot the Nazis stole from Jews and distributed it to elite, German families. In conversation around the dining room table Christoph raises Hannah Arendt’s controversial book, The Banality of Evil. To Christoph nothing is banal about the Holocaust. He’s a new German. Not an antisemite. And yet when they are alone Anna feels moments of “disquiet” around Christoph, haunted by thoughts about Christoph’s grandfather and the war.
Inspired by the author’s grandfather, The Scrapbook by Heather Clark is an unputdownable read.