Sabine Bode Talks to Burkhard Bilger About German Children of War
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2016
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A troubling question looms over the Kriegskinder, Germans were children during World War II: Was my father a mass murderer? These innocent Germans carried the guilt of their nation while their families often remained silent. The New Yorker's Burkhard Bilger, whose grandfather was a Nazi, speaks with Sabine Bode, a journalist who encourages the now-elderly Kriegskinder to speak about their unacknowledged trauma. Bilger wrote an article for the magazine about Familienaufstellung, a type of therapy that has become popular in Germany as a way to work through the damage the war left on this generation.
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| 0:50.5 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Burkhard Bilger talks to the journalist Sabina Boda. Boda is one of the leading chroniclers of the Kriegskinder, Germans who were children during World War II. Boda's work is part of a greater movement in Germany to deal with the lingering trauma of Nazism. |
| 1:11.2 | Burke, you've written about absolutely everything in your writing |
| 1:14.1 | and you've been digging into your family history lately. |
| 1:16.6 | It's an unusual one. |
| 1:17.7 | You grew up in Oklahoma. |
| 1:19.0 | Your parents were from Germany and you've gotten more and more interested in their generation of Germans, |
| 1:24.1 | people who live through the Second World War as children and as babies. |
| 1:29.2 | So how did you become interested in that generation and why dig into it so deeply now? |
| 1:34.9 | Well, my parents are both what you call Kriegskenda, as you say. |
| 1:38.6 | So they were born in 1935. |
| 1:41.3 | What does that mean? |
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