Widerspruch (English shop)

Nicht alle waren damals Verbrecher

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Table of Contents, Datei (26 KB)
Preface, Datei (45 KB)
Extract, Datei (110 KB)

In this book, the author Heide Elfenbein has a certain Helga Goldstein recount her childhood and youth during and after the Third Reich. Most of the events reported by the main character refer to experiences that the author herself, or people she knew particularly well, had during this period. This lends the biography narrated by this Helga Goldstein an added sense of reality.

In her book, the author contradicts a currently common and often one-sided portrayal of history. It was not only the Nazi criminals, she emphasises, who left their mark on it; rather, as always and everywhere in the world, there were also good and decent people who took great personal risks in order to help and protect those endangered by the regime. Among these ‘Schindlers’ there were even some who were adherents of National Socialism. Elfenbein describes them as the true heroes of a terrible chapter of our German history. May their courage and their moral steadfastness be an example for future generations!

In her preface, the Englishwoman Charlotte de Blois points to the close connection to current political and social parallels of our own day, especially when one considers the narrator’s post-war experiences as described here.

An afterword was written by Kevin Mc Pherson. His father was American, his mother German. He grew up and was educated in Germany as a German. He too poses the question of our present-day understanding of history, above all that of his own, a younger generation, and answers it from his perspective as one ‘born afterwards’.