Editing 10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree

|title=Shaking the Poisoned Fruit of Shame out of the Family Tree

|image=[[File:The-portal-podcast-cover-art.jpg]]

|guest=[[Julie Lindahl]]

|length=01:40:05

[[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] sits down with [[Julie Lindahl]], author of ''The Pendulum''. As an ethnically German girl growing up in Brazil, Julie became curious about finally making sense of the puzzles inside her family history, in order to stop a mysterious cycle of dysfunction within which she found herself trapped. In her new book ''The Pendulum'', she shows us just how much it can take to find a portal out of intergenerational trauma. Eric welcomes his houseguest Julie Lindahl to tell her extraordinary story on this emotional and challenging episode of The Portal. The episode is raw and recorded at home on a handheld device; there will be no video.

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Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein and I'm here today with author of [http://www.julielindahl.com/the-pendulum.html 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'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. I 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 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 [https://www.bundesarchiv.de/EN/Navigation/Home/home.html Bundesarchiv] 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany 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. 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 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirndl 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 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 worthlessness.

Then I got educated. But I had a very close relationship with my grandmother whose affection I guess I sought 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 realized that she was a Nazi.  

So your grandma was a was a Nazi to the end of a fairly long life.

A 103 year life.

Oh, wow. So it's pretty amazing to think about it, there are Nazis in 2014.

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 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 close. 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 the classical German composers, particularly 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_literature# 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, 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.  

That's really an interesting conundrum that we can all worry about, but you've really been been through this where you're you realize that your deepest emotional and loyalty connections are running to people who are a mixture of pure evil and pure normal and goodness. I mean, you know, an educated family from from everything I can discern, a family where there was love and caring, and then there's just this horrible festering. I don't know what even to call it. It's just some stain that can't be removed.  

Yeah, absolutely. And which is why when I go out to schools and talk about this, I take out an image which is painted by an artist in Michigan called [https://www.keemogallery.com/shop?category=Prints Keemo].  It's a face that has many different surfaces and dimensions, and you can't really figure out where exactly the face is at some level. But the point is that there are many different facades.  And that's what I learned, speaking with my grandmother and when I think about her today.  But our conversations as time went by ended up troubling me a lot, and particularly my own reactions troubled me. I was also troubled by the fact that I was influenced by her perspective of Jewish people. Because she kind of imparted, in various ways, that Jewish people were dangerous to us, which was kind of a reaction of her generation because they were being punished for what they did in the Holocaust. But I didn't know that at that time, of course, and I did a number of kinds of crazy things to try to counteract that inheritance of mine. To really dig deep into myself and blow the whistle and say, "Hey, that is a totally insane idea. Jewish people are not dangerous to you."

I don't feel that way at all. I feel very well taken care of.

So, do you think your mom knew a great deal of this history that you, somehow, were screened out of? Or do you think she was also in the dark about it? Or even the idea of how much we know about our histories? Is that word too sharp and that there's some need for a kind of layered concept of knowing where you sort of know something but maybe you don't know. You don't keep a copy of it that's too crisp in your mind, because it's too dangerous to have it in that state. What's the right question I should be asking?

No, she didn't.  I know that she didn't, and neither did her siblings, and neither did their mother. Because my grandfather went to war in the autumn of 1939. And first of all, not all of that is documented what those men did in Poland. Secondly, a lot of the documents were destroyed. Thirdly, they haven't seen any documents. I'm the one who has bothered to go and find the documents and read them, and there were a lot of them, and so I probably know more than any family member because I've read primary documents specifically about what my grandfather was doing and also just what people around him we're doing in the areas where he was.

Can you name your grandfather, so that we have an individual?

I just call him opa. I don't name his name because there are people who are alive who bear his last name and I don't want to make their lives difficult.  

So opa for the purposes of this podcast?

Yes. And as to these layers, I think you're right, very right there. In my experience for the sake of the family unit you look away from certain very glaring facts. I did that. I think my mother and her siblings did that. The family has been our most important unit of survival since forever, and so that's probably a natural knee jerk type of thing to do. I think my, or, I know that my family knew that my grandfather was in the {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel SS], because later on I met an uncle. So he was the oldest of the siblings. I met him in Paraguay.  

So he knew opa not only volunteered in 1939, but went straight for the SS.  

He joined the SS back in 1934 already  

So he joined the mounted SS. I think what you should remember is that the SS in 1934 was a primarily political organization. And the buffin ss are the military wing of the SS emerged out of this as the 30s went on. But he joined as one of Hitler's political soldiers and specifically the mounted SS in 1934. Mainly because, well, the mounted SS was very prestigious. The organization was also, the mountain SS was created of riding associations that were drafted into the organization. So, you, some people argue that they didn't have a choice, but it's more complicated than that. But so he, he was pumped full of propaganda throughout the 1930s, because he was a member of the SS throughout. So that by the time he got into Poland, he was really quite full of it. And, you know, Hitler and Himmler and the other Nazi leaders didn't really give very precise instructions to the SS when they went into Poland.  Because they trusted that they pumped these people so full of propaganda that if they just unleashed them, they would fight a very brutal racial war, which is exactly what they did.

And with no documents indicating that they've been instructed to do so. So that in part, I think this has a lot of relevance for today. So let's just go there. One way of making sure that your fingerprints aren't on something is to pump people full of ideology, and then we know enough about how ideology sits in the human mind to know what's likely to happen next. I mean, there's you know, this famous example from history of the king saying, "Will, no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" He doesn't have to give an order to execute he just has to say this idly to himself and then he knows what happens, and then there is no record. So in effect, there is no trigger pulling finger from the Central Command.

No. And this is also reflected in the way my grandfather and others who had a similar role as he had, as the war went on in occupied Poland, is reflected in the way they behaved. Because he became engaged in a mission set by the Ministry of Agriculture under the Third Reich to transform West Central Poland to the breadbasket of the Third Reich.  Because he was a trained estate manager he knew something about agriculture. And that can sound benign. What it in fact means is deporting or murdering the existing landowners, enslaving the local laborers and murdering anyone who's slightly troublesome, and torturing people on a more or less daily basis. Early on in the war, Himmler passed a law which established that these estate managers were the law in their estates. There was no higher law over them. It's exactly what you were saying. It's a law that says "I don't need to know, do do what you have to do."

 

Okay, so here you are a young woman who has grown up in this unusual developmental environment. You went to college with my wife. You guys knew each other, perhaps vaguely, and you're living this very modern American existence at that time. How is this playing out? I mean, America, you know, American father, you're in an American college. You're somehow also the granddaughter of an SS member. Who has. You have an inkling at this point that your grandfather's done unspeakable things in Poland or not?

 

Not so much at Wellesley. I didn't think about it so much, although I was very affected by it. Because these types of secrets when they're this heavy,

Okay.  

Yeah. I mean, I was very sick. When I was at Wellesley, I didn't eat most of the time and so that was the way it expressed itself there. In fact, Pia and I worked out that we didn't see each other that much, probably because I was hiding out a lot from people because I, I had pretty serious eating disorders. But these were all connected to a feeling of low self worth that were connected to the shame that I went around with, so I knew that there was something wrong. My relationship with my mother was extremely troubled. And as the years went by our family relationships, in fact, all of them became quite troubled. Because when you have something like this in the family that the adults knew something about, they didn't know the whole story, but they knew enough and that they try to keep from themselves. It's not so much they're keeping it from the next generation. They're trying to keep it away from themselves because they don't want to think about it. Then it starts to strangle their relationships. And that was already going on at that time. And that affected me at a cellular level. And so, when I returned to Europe, remember I only spent three years going to college in the US that was my American experience.  

And this is what needs to happen everywhere where it can, especially among individuals, who have quite a lot of hurdles to jump in order to, you know, who, who, where there are a lot of a lot of emotional, difficult emotional feelings that you need to overcome in order to strengthen that bond. This is has also been true for me in my interactions with the Islamic community. I've been approached by people from the Islamic community, who know that there has to be Holocaust education in their communities, but who also know that their communities will not welcome hearing it from a Jewish person or you know, a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, which is terrible. It's not always the case. But it is the case sometimes, because there are lots of Descendants of Holocaust survivors who generously give their time to go around speaking about what happened to their parents and grandparents in the Holocaust, but often, at least what I have encountered in Sweden is that in in a number of Islamic communities, it's they just can't. They can't emotionally break through. They can't get over the hurdles, they can't sit down,