Susan Reid

About Being German, Volume 3 Susan Reid

I went to Germany to see if the people were human. I'd grown up among them, but lived in English speaking countries since I was twenty-two. Though I remembered perfectly well that Germans were human, I'd adopted the Anglo-Saxon view that they were not, a view at once justified by German conduct under National Socialism and at odds with much of what I'd grown up with. The self-division between rejecting German culture and belonging to it pushed me to a tour of places associated with a tradition of being human that contradicts accepted views of German culture, patriotic or hostile. I hoped this might help me to accept my being German. Most of the figures of this tradition are women, Caroline Schlegel, Bettina von Arnim, Käethe Kollwitz, Sophie Scholl, Sigrid Damm. They make up a line of bold creative intellectuality, defiant of the tangle of convention and oppression that may pass for culture and rich in its imagining of freer ways of being human. My accounts of these figures are at once my tribute to them and my educating myself in a German tradition in which I look for self-confirmation. But this recovery by visiting and writing did not heal my self-division about my German heritage. If anything it made it more acute by setting in the history of my country. the human possibility held out by this women's culture-making against the inhuman drive of National Socialism.