3 hours ago
6
My beloved German-Jewish grandmother Gisela was not an affable person. She enjoyed laughing at her own jokes, revelling in the misfortunes of others, and telling people off. If an event combined opportunities for all three activities, so much the better.
When my father was six, he refused to eat the meatloaf that his mother had given him for lunch. Gisela took the piece of meatloaf, now rapidly turning rancid in the Zimbabwe afternoon heat, and served it to him for dinner, and breakfast, and every subsequent meal until he forced himself to eat it. It was the late 1950s – tyrannical parenting was de rigueur, and uneaten meatloaf was the hill that Gisela was willing to die on.
Fast forward 30 years, and I am six years old, surveying the horror-movie tableau of my grandmother’s dinner table in Freiburg: the pungent pink slab of Fleischkäse, the trembling white sausages in a bowl of what appears to be lukewarm dishwater, the slimy cold herrings in pickle juice, the brick of black rye bread that takes 20 minutes to saw through and three days to digest. “I don’t want to eat anything on this table,” I announce to the room, and promptly retreat to the floor, crawling between the table legs to wait out this so-called dinner.
My parents exchange a pained look and shrug in resignation. Gisela is apoplectic, channelling her rage towards my father for being a permissive weakling, but ultimately powerless to exert her will over the next generation. She exacts her revenge for the next two decades: every time we are in company, she recounts this story in detail, my food refusal getting wilder and her reaction more saintly with each retelling, as she works her way up to the punchline. “Then she sat under the table for the whole meal … LIKE A DOG!”
As I spent the last few years researching and drawing Gisela’s life story for my graphic memoir The Crystal Vase, I found these recollections of her gleeful humiliation tactics and self-aggrandising anecdotes slipping in to the gaps between the heavy facts of Holocaust history. Each generation relates to their family history differently, and as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor I found I had a certain critical distance from that lived experience that my father did not have.
In recent years, telling serious Jewish history through family comedy has become the dominant approach for third-generation survivors. A Real Pain director Jesse Eisenberg summed it up as follows in a recent interview: “First generation builds the house. Second generation lives in the house. Third generation burns it down.” “A movie can simultaneously have great reverence for the history while also creating an irreverent and sometimes transgressive tone, because that’s the full and honest way I experience history,” he elaborated.
Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the scene where the impulsive Benji (Kieran Culkin) persuades the rest of his Holocaust tour group to pose for photos as Polish fighters next to the Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw statue. His uptight cousin David (Eisenberg) protests, “Doesn’t that seem disrespectful?” as he is forced to be their official photographer, juggling everybody’s phones while they merrily reenact heroic moments from the Warsaw Uprising, imaginary guns blazing. David’s discomfort is played for laughs, while Benji’s allergy to the tour guide’s repetition of dry facts manifests as this disruptive urge to feel the history bodily, to welcome in the fun and allow it to sit with the pain.
In fellow “grief tourism” tragicomedy Treasure, prickly Ruth (Lena Dunham) travels to Poland with her Auschwitz-survivor father, the exuberant Edek (Stephen Fry), to see where his family used to live. Their exasperated bickering undercuts many of the film’s more solemn moments. When Ruth finally manages to buy back her murdered grandmother’s tea set from the Poles who took over Edek’s apartment in 1940 after the family were deported, Edek is unimpressed. “You have no idea how much this means to me, Dad,” she tells him. “Before this we had nothing, nothing from your past.” “And now,” he deadpans, “you have a teapot.”
Elsewhere, writer Joe Dunthorne goes on a research trip to Munich with his mother in the 2025 book Children of Radium, a wry family memoir about his German-Jewish great-grandfather, a scientist who developed chemical weapons for the Nazis. Dunthorne and his mother (who he describes as a Birkenstock-wearing “cut-throat bastard”) stay in the same apartment rooms where his great-grandfather spent his wedding night. “I don’t think we gained much from this immersive research, eating bowls of our own overcooked spätzle while trying not to visualise the newlyweds going at it in the corner.”
As the last generation to grow up around adult Holocaust survivors and hear their accounts first-hand, it is not surprising that we now have the impulse to record our grandparents’ stories for posterity, and reflect on how they affect us. But why are we choosing humour as our medium? Perhaps it is just our generation’s default mode of presentation, busily maintaining an ironic distance from difficult subjects. Are we so fragile that we need to use humour as a buffer, to make even the bleakest history cosy and palatable?
The bare facts of my own grandmother’s story certainly don’t read like a comedy. Gisela escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 at the age of 18. Her family home in Bad Homburg had been destroyed on Kristallnacht, and her father was beaten, arrested, and taken to Buchenwald. He did not survive the war. Many other family members were trapped in Germany and eventually killed in the camps at Sobibór, Mauthausen and Theresienstadt.
But Gisela went to Amsterdam – where several of her Frankfurt cousins were already living in exile, including her second cousins, Margot and Anne Frank – before sailing to South Africa. She took a train north, and ended up in the first place that would take her: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. Her passport was confiscated when the war broke out, so she was stuck there. So began Gisela’s new life in colonial Africa. She married German-Jewish émigré Hans Goldschmidt, and had three sons.
They stayed in Bulawayo for almost four decades, until the political situation in 1970s Zimbabwe forced them to flee again. My grandparents returned to Germany in 1976 and settled in Freiburg, chosen for its strategic location close to the borders of two other countries: even in retirement, these lifelong refugees were keeping their options open.
After their deaths, our family had to decide how to divide the remaining precious belongings that had been saved from the Nazis. My initial intention was to write a reverential book that honoured my grandmother, who was vivacious, elegant, and a great raconteur (as long as you were interested in stories about how incredible she was).
But in the aftermath of her funeral, my family’s eccentricities rose violently to the surface and irrevocably coloured my experience. I took a fraught road trip across Europe with my father to clear out Gisela’s flat and distribute her belongings to the rest of the family. My aunt deemed four-course lunches more of a priority than packing heirlooms, and my uncle smuggled the family silver across borders in his underwear. I brought Gisela’s collection of moth-infested Persian rugs into my pest-phobic sister’s house, and have never been forgiven. Family secrets were uncovered, everyone fought over heirlooms, we all fell out. In the end, an approach that embraced the humour alongside the tragedy felt like the only way to tell this story.
Making light of one of the darkest horrors of the 20th century is a risky business. Even Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning Maus was initially met with condemnation in Israel due to the perception of comics as vulgar, funny and inappropriate. Spiegelman’s frustrations with his Auschwitz-survivor father are palpable throughout Maus, as he details their complicated relationship.
By being one generation removed, my relationship with Gisela was different – I could be both amused and terrified at a safe distance. The centuries-old tradition of self-deprecating Jewish humour was all but stamped out of German culture in the Holocaust, and this new wave of Jewish diaspora stories is embracing it. Humour and solemnity can coexist while examining tragic events, and I found both helpful when dealing with the mixed bags passed down by survivors. Humour is not a buffer here, but a doorway: it allows access to a narrative. The third generation are taking ownership of our family histories, drawing our own conclusions, and making space for the humour of human foibles, even in our darkest stories.
As for me, I await the eventual tell-all memoir of my own son, who we are raising vegetarian, in which he complains bitterly that his mother never fed him meatloaf.
