Facing the past to liberate the present
[Music]
when you think of the past
where does it lie i’ve always thought of
it as
behind me done known past
until i noticed it was interfering with
my present
after years of inexplicable feelings and
symptoms
i’ve come to understand that just like
we can inherit
the physical or character traits of our
forebears so we can inherit their
unresolved traumas
or wrongdoings that these don’t simply
go away
that they remain among our roots like
wounds
festering in the dark and then erupting
into the present as they seek resolution
my story is one of many stories emerging
from the long
shadows of violent conflict not a
conflict that i myself experienced but
one
that has nonetheless shaped
and harmed me i must have been about 10
when i first noticed that it wasn’t
normal to have a german
second world war general sitting among
the family photos
to me he was just my mother’s father a
face
under a peaked cap with a with a eagle
on top
it was at one of my parents parties we
had a drill for the arrival of the
guests
my younger brother would open the door
i’d take the coats
and my sister would hand them a glass of
sparkling wine
but on one occasion one of the guests
followed me into the room with a
photograph
and she emerged looking horrified and
muttered to her husband
bit tactless of yuta to have a nazi
sitting on her desk
nazi well i knew nothing about the
second world war then
to me germany was all good it was exotic
sweets and candles on
christmas trees i also didn’t know my
grandfather
he had died a week after i was born and
was rarely mentioned except as a
phenomenal athlete who nearly qualified
for the berlin olympic games
and then after the war as a broken man
who smoked 70 cigarettes a day lighting
one
from the stub of the last however
i always felt that we had met that our
paths had crossed
him on his way up and me on my way down
and at the point where we crossed he
handed me a baton
i had no idea of the weight and
significance of this baton
at school i became more aware of
people’s disgust towards the germans
i hate the germans the only good german
is a dead german
bloody crowd at first i tried to defend
them
not all germans were nazis but after the
1979
tv series holocaust i couldn’t
i too felt disgust but
it wasn’t as simple for me hating the
germans meant hating
half of who i was i think that’s when
guilt or maybe it was shame crept into
my soul
and began to derail me i felt
tainted like i belonged to the other
side
the evil enemy of the war films
i became angry and aggressive and
argumentative
and naughty until i was expelled from
school
as a young adult i did what probably
many of us do with
uncomfortable feelings i try to suppress
or escape them through food drink
drugs danger but ultimately
addictions are a dead end
i then began to withdraw into increasing
isolation and depressions
it got very dark at times
i could feel my potential and
sense my future but i couldn’t reach
either of them
it was as if something kept on pulling
me down
every time i tried to skip or fly you’re
bad
you don’t deserve to be happy you have
to atone
but what had i done that was so wrong
nothing in my life no doctor or
therapist could account for the problems
i was facing
in the end i felt so guilty that i
actually put myself
into prison and what’s more i felt
completely at home among the guilty
and broken of society
i spent years in prisons in germany and
england teaching prisoners art
and helping them to work through their
crimes and issues
what i didn’t know was that i was
actually learning the skills
to work through my own the art room
became a safe space for men to lower
their defenses
paint and color gave them a non-verbal
language to feel
and articulate their feelings
being listened to without judgment
help them talk about what had been
unspeakable
i saw how behind the violence and the
crime
so often lay trauma fear
shame i learned how to condemn the
crime without condemning the person
the prisoners saw my work as or
described it as
hauling one prisoner after another out
of the pit
into which they’d fallen but it was
unsustainable
because ultimately i was doing for them
what i needed to do for myself
the turning point came when the past
collided
with my present i just turned 40 when i
saw
the film downfall about hitler’s final
days
at the end i couldn’t stop crying my
boyfriend was bemused the war was over
hitler was dead what was there to cry
about
but in me the past was still very much
alive
when i got home i googled my
grandfather’s name
and the first thing that came up was a
photograph
of the moment of his surrender to the
americans
in may 1945 in northern italy
he looked smart dignified even
standing in his double buttoned coat
between an
american colonel and a translator
i’d never seen this photo before but
like a key to a trapdoor
i knew i was now on a hot trail to
uncovering the source of shame
that had plagued me it lay among my
roots
and they were embedded in nazi germany
and the second world war
using the same tools as the prison work
i now had to call my grandfather out of
the dark pit
into which he had fallen i became an
archaeologist shoveling shoveling away
the topsoil of denial
shame pain and silence to get to the
what lay beneath buried and forgotten
to understand my issues i had to get to
know the truth
about my grandfather from the start i
vowed i wouldn’t look away from the
truth i wouldn’t reject
or blame or judge
i just wanted to understand
i asked my family in germany questions
i looked through photo albums i read
hundreds of my grandfather’s letters
i made art i researched nazism and the
little known history of the losers
i watched hours and hours of devastating
footage refusing to look away like so
many had
and then in quiet moments
my mother’s wartime childhood traumas
bubbled to the surface the bombs
her flight from berlin trauma
untreated sits like frozen fragmented
feelings
in the body cut off from the hole
it causes a person to go numb or be
hyper alert unable to regulate their
emotions
but it’s not enough to know the facts
the harm has to be felt in order for it
to be
integrated i found i could feel most by
traveling to significant
locations standing on the earth
breathing the same air i found
i could access the memories lingering
there
i stood on the same spot that my
grandfather stood
in italy where he surrendered i traveled
to the homes he’d lived in
visited the artillery school that he’d
headed and the prisoner of war camps
in which he was held i visited sites of
atrocity
monuments and museums dachau
auschwitz and then i traveled across
russia
with my 75 year old mother following in
the footsteps that my german grandfather
had marched with his division in the
massive invasion
of 1941
facing the truth of what happened on the
eastern front
was one of the hardest darkest parts of
my research
the sheer scale of death destruction
and devastation i started out
hoping that my grandfather as a member
of the internationally respected vermont
would be one of the good germans
but then i recoiled at some of his
military
soldier attitudes and then i’d soften
again as a gentle poet flowed through
his pen
my heart sank when he fell for the toxic
propaganda
and ached when he felt bound by his
duty and military oath to obey
and then soared when he refused
was i allowed to feel any pride in his
unbelievable bravery stamina
and skills like british
or other countries are able to feel for
their
military relatives as i
felt my way into my grandfather’s
situation
the easy familiar black and white
narratives of
good bad perpetrator victim
winner loser became more nuanced
as i stood in my grandfather’s shoes
i saw myself reflected both good things
and bad things i
came to realize that nothing
absolutely nothing i might find out
about him
could hurt me as much as not knowing had
i realized that whatever i found
it wasn’t me i didn’t do it it wasn’t my
baggage i was just carrying his
and knowing that gave me the courage to
dig even deeper
until i struck gold the truth that would
liberate me
i discovered that my shame
was in fact his shame the shame of his
downfall
from revered and decorated general
to reviled prisoner loser
outcast both he
and germany had lost their honor the
very thing he valued most
to varying degrees we all carry
unprocessed
traumas and wrongdoings from the past
whether familial societal or historical
they sit in our unconscious untold
stories
waiting to be told resolved
neuroscientists psychologists
geneticists
are all uncovering the mechanisms of
transgenerational
transmissions and showing how they
contribute
to the epidemics of addiction
depression violence and isolation
how they trigger the rage of
unacknowledged suffering
that erupts onto our streets in protests
or violence how they perpetuate the
systemic injustices
of slavery colonialism and racism
and how they shape attitudes and
policies to everything from the
environment
to education to wealth distribution
i will never know all the traumas my
grandfather
suffered or inflicted nor how he felt
he was found not guilty at his trial but
when he was released
in 1948 by the british he was an
emaciated
and broken man he ended up selling
yo-yos
from door-to-door i don’t know
if you can apologize or forgive or ask
for forgiveness
on behalf of somebody from the past
though i’ve done those things
many many times what i do know
is that by facing the darkest shadows of
nazism
and the second world war i was able to
step
out of them by getting to know
and understand my grandfather’s story
i was able to free myself of it
i am deeply grateful to him for this
profound
journey and that’s why i’m standing here
today
because to me it seems obvious our roots
don’t just run backwards to our
ancestors
but forwards to our children and those
who come after
and if those roots are severed or
wounded
or in any way what we hand on will
also be impaired
so do we want to continue to
drag these wounds into the future limp
forward patching them up and then
handing them on
to future generations like a baton
or can we find the courage compassion
and curiosity to create safe spaces
for uncomfortable stories to be told
to be heard to be understood
shared and healed
i stand here today with my grandfather
in the hope that telling our story
will encourage you to look back into the
shadowlands
of the past and embark on your own
journeys
of discovery and liberation
so that we can all move forward
lighter and better equipped to face and
meet the challenges of the present
and release the potential and realize
the potential
of the future thank you
[Music]
you