Difference between revisions of "10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree"

Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein and I'm here today with author of the pendulum. Julie Lindhal. Julie, welcome.  

So Julie, we're doing this in a little bit of a different situation than I usually do. You're you've been staying with us here in Los Angeles in our home for several nights. And we did not know each other beforehand, but you are on a book tour. Is that right?  

Yes. Well, I am a cosmopolitan, who ended up 24 years ago settling in Sweden. had the pleasure and surprise of ending up living on a small isolated island in Sweden for about a decade where I had some time to start to reflect about my family's past and also grew some roots to start to, to be able to become grounded in order to be able to do the work. I didn't know I was going to do the work. But then in April 2010, I went to the Bundesbank Eve in Germany, and asked whether they had any material on my grandparents who were German. I was born in Brazil in 1967. My mother was born in occupied Poland in 1941. And most people around me always laughed a bit that I hadn't put two and two together. But I guess I had tried to look away from those facts. And so the documents I received there set me off on a very long journey. I didn't know that it would be that long, six year journey, through Germany, Poland, Brazil and Paraguay to learn about the role my grandparents played in the Third Reich.

Wow, that's a hell of an answer to a question. So here you are talking about, I guess, secrets deeply hidden from you about why a German girl would be growing up in Brazil. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your evolution as to how you came to understand that there might be something fairly interesting in this family story?  

Well, first of all, there's a part of me that's German. So my mother's German. But my father was an American, which also made matters more interesting. Because I also had an, I guess an outside perspective as well as an insider's perspective into my German heritage. The way it started is hard to say but the way I usually think of it is back in a time when I was a two year old and put into a German Dirndl, so a traditional German dress whenever my German grandparents came to visit from the interior because they were settled on an estate, near the Brazilian-Paraguayan border, and I noticed from the albums that I always had one of these traditional dresses on when they came to visit, which to me seemed very strange, given that I was the daughter of an American and a German and I was living in Brazil.

There are large German communities there. So maybe you could argue it that way, but it was a little strange and in that girl's eyes, I can see and I also remember growing up, bearing very considerable shame. And the nature of shame is different than guilt. When your guilt, when you feel guilty, you know what you've done. It's a reaction to something you think you've done wrong. But shame is something else. It's a feeling of self self worthlessness.

Then I got educated. But I had a very close relationship with my grandmother. Whose affection I guess I sought it because I didn't have a close relationship with my mother. And my grandmother remained a devoted Nazi to the end of her life.

I just didn't know. I hadn't. I hadn't realized that she was a Nazi.  

Right? No, no, no, of course. But one senses from a little bit that you've said that the commitment was made, and there was somehow no digging out of it, and so it was just kept going full speed ahead.  

No, I think you can can compare it to the commitment of some people today to alternative facts. At some point, you've just gone too far and you can't back out. But it does leave its devastation. You know, she was not free of nightmares and depression and so forth after the war. But anyway, she and I became quite closer. So I thought she was a well read person. She loved classical music. She loved nature. We spent lots of time together even more time when I got a Fulbright in Germany.

Well, she loved, she loved the classical German composers, particularly from from the north of Germany. She also loved Handel. She listened to a lot, piano music, German piano music. I'm trying to think of, its not coming to me right away now, all of them that she liked, but, you know, she listened to Beethoven and Bach, and Mozart and all of those.  

So very clearly, culturally High German culture.  

Absolutely. And High German literature. She She passed on a number of the books that were her favorites to me. And a lot of it you know, well known High German literature. So when she then started tossing out shards of this old ideology during our meetings in her apartment in southern Germany, where we were having a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. I was always stunned and shocked, and didn't know what to do with it, except to get up and go do the dishes. And over time, though doing that gets to you, because you end up in the position of the bystander.  You end up feeling rotten inside, when you don't stand up and say, but that's wrong. That's not true. And this was particularly so when she tried to convince me that the Holocaust was a plot by the international media to keep Germans down. So after the war, and I was at that time studying international affairs.  Later on, I went on to study German Polish relations in the 20th century at Oxford University. So I knew what she was telling me was, of course, completely wrong.  And yet, I didn't say anything to her because I was so frightened of losing her affection.