Christmas is family time - and sometimes less pleasant family matters come up.
Have you ever spoken to your parents or grandparents, uncles and aunts about exactly what your relatives did during National Socialism?
Whether someone was in the NSDAP, a soldier in occupied Eastern Europe, whether someone became a perpetrator?
Or whether your family benefited, for example from expropriated Jewish property?
It is a topic that sometimes touches on what is kept secret and repressed, on unclarified and tricky questions.
The historian Oliver von Wrochem provided information on how to find out more last week and answered some of the 200 questions from the audience at the SPIEGEL event Deep Dive.
"There's still little talk about perpetrators in the family," he says.
"The generation that experienced the Second World War itself often didn't want to talk about it" - if it did, then about their own suffering and traumatization, "but not about their own involvement in crimes and crimes".
Von Wrochem heads the Hamburg Memorials Foundation and has been offering seminars on how to identify perpetrators or followers in family history for years.
You can see the video recording here.
The Deep Dive series is a digital event exclusively for SPIEGEL subscribers.
We are planning more history talks in this format for the coming year.
In keeping with the topic, we also recommend the current SPIEGEL-HISTORY issue: »Hitler faithful people.
Why the Germans fell victim to National Socialism«.
You can find the issue digitally here, on paper at kiosks with a good range of magazines.
»Being a madame is a miserable trade«
The Christmas mail often brings the wish that 2023 will be less gloomy than this year.
We, too, have often asked ourselves how, given all the bad news of the past few months, we don't completely fall into a doomsday mood.
For example, an article with tasty gossip and gossip from the Baroque period brought some enlightenment: Liselotte von der Pfalz, a German noblewoman who lived at the court of the "Sun King" Louis XIV, died 300 years ago and wrote around 60,000 letters - hence her nickname »Inksea«.
Enlarge image
Liselotte von der Pfalz: »Ink Sea« was her nickname
Photo:
Toni Schneiders / INTERFOTO
"Being a madame is a miserable trade," noted the prince's daughter and slandered everything she experienced in the magnificent Palace of Versailles.
About intrigues, about her husband's affairs or her intimate enemy, the lover of the king: "Your lovers cannot believe how this old woman is a wicked devil and how she tries to set people against each other." Or her daughter-in-law: "My son's Wife is a disgusting person, gets drunk three or four times a week.« Liselotte’s correspondence is a moral mirror of life at court, which is only so glamorous on the outside – definitely worth reading, even if you are otherwise less familiar with the 17th and 18th centuries interested.
After a short Christmas break, we will be in touch in January with the next newsletter.
You are also welcome to look »between the years« for history topics on Spiegel.de, we have a few things planned there for cozy reading evenings.
For suggestions and feedback you can reach us at spiegelgeschichte@spiegel.de and you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Have a good start into a hopefully brighter New Year, stay curious and have a Merry Christmas!
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