A Journey into Family History  The Great Silence

In her new book, Judith Hermann travels to Poland in search of traces of her Nazi grandfather. Even more so, however, she writes about the silence within families and the impossibility of closing the gaps that remain.

Ever since her highly successful literary debut Sommerhaus, später (English translation: Summerhouse, Later, 1998), Judith Hermann has been one of the stars of German-language literature. Like all her previous works, her newest book Ich möchte zurückgehen in der Zeit(I Want to Go Back in Time), in which she traces the story of her grandfather – a convinced Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS – has received considerable attention both in the arts pages and among readers.

A number of literary reviews, however, have been negative: it is said to be an “unfinished-seeming book”, that Hermann’s tentative literary approach does not do the subject justice, and that the “literarisation” of the grandfather – the blurring of fact and fiction – is even “offensive”. At the same time, the book has been defended and, despite critical debate within the jury, awarded first place on the SWR List of the Best for March 2026. Critics argue that the book is being judged by the wrong standards: it is not an attempt to work through contemporary history, it does not tell the story of a perpetrator, but rather of the gaps and absences within family narratives. In Hermann’s distinctive tone, the author conveys how difficult it is to live with a dark suspicion of crimes committed in the past.

“You are literarising it”

Hermann’s new book can be seen as a logical continuation of her Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (published in 2023 under the title Wir hätten uns alles gesagt,  English translation: We Would Have Told Each Other Everything), in which she also touched upon her fractured family relationships. Her new memoir is not only about the Nazi grandfather, although he is the focus of the first and most extensive part. Here, Hermann recounts her research trip to the Polish city of Radom, where there had been a subcamp of the Majdanek concentration camp and a ghetto holding more than 30,000 prisoners, which was brutally cleared in April 1942. Her grandfather was stationed there at the time. Yet no one in the family knows anything about him. Only one photograph remains, showing him in July 1941 in an SS uniform on a motorcycle in Radom.

The narrator’s almost eighty‑year‑old mother has only fragmented, contradictory memories of her father, who left the family after the war when she was still a child. A cloak of silence surrounds him, stemming not only from ignorance. The mother, in particular, is suspected of a certain unwillingness to remember. She, in turn, accuses her daughter of making a “thing” out of the grandfather. “You are literarising it”, she repeatedly tells her writer‑daughter.

The grandfather, a cold case

The grandfather is the great void within the family – and “a terribly blind spot… My grandfather is a cold case in every sense.” The narrator approaches this case with a somewhat investigative mindset. She researches – without results – in the German Federal Archives. After her mother suffers a temporary global amnesia, the daughter travels to Poland. What follows is a search for traces in the vague and indeterminate, without clear goal or plan.

As “a pale German woman in a woollen jumper and wrist warmers”, she wanders through Radom, observing herself. Sitting in a café reading Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn, she feels like a “performer”, “clearly dubious, if not simply entirely inappropriate”. Thus, the journey remains without results, though not without consequence. It fails literarily, she believes, but could not have succeeded: “If a text about such a journey had succeeded, it would at the same time have failed.”

Time as a black hole

A second part follows, in which the narrator travels from Kraków via Vienna – where she visits an exhibition on the Holocaust in family memory – to Naples, where her sister lives with her family and works as an archaeologist. In the sister’s life, too, the dark aspects of the world must be silenced – to protect the children: “My sister quite reasonably believes that the dark things in the world will reveal themselves soon enough… But until then, one cannot speak of them.” The grandfather makes a brief appearance in the narrator’s imagination at the end of the Naples episode, as a ghost stepping onto a stage, only to “fade again. Slip back into the darkness.”

The third and shortest chapter concludes the book, titled with the beautiful Danish expression “Tidslomme” (Time Pocket). Here we learn that the narrator’s parents‑in‑law once disappeared for days and never spoke of what had happened. This, too, remains a permanently unspoken void about which one can only speculate. Life is full of such loopholes in time; the grandfather’s life is a veritable “black hole, a cavern into which a maelstrom pours”.

Hermann anticipates the criticisms mentioned at the outset. In an SWR interview, she explains that Ich möchte zurückgehen in der Zeit is not a book about the ghost‑grandfather, but about “silence within families” – and it is an introspection of the narrator. The work of coming to terms with history may always remain an effort in which complete success is impossible. Literarily, however, the book has not failed. It ends with a beautiful parable: in the ruins of post‑war Berlin, the mother – then still a child – plays a game called “Secret” and buries small objects: “Tiny sarcophagi, some of which endured, others not.”

April 2026