Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited: New Echoes of My Father's German Village

by Mimi Schwartz

Mimi Schwartz’s father was born Jewish in a tiny German village thirty years before the advent of Hitler when, as he’d tell her, “We all got along.” In her original memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times , Schwartz explored how human decency fared among Christian and Jewish neighbors before, during, and after Nazi times. Ten years after its publication, a letter arrived from a man named Max Sayer in South Australia. Sayer, it turns out, grew up Catholic in the village during the Third Reich and in 1937 moved into an abandoned Jewish home five houses away from where the family of Schwartz’s father had lived for generations before fleeing to America a few months earlier. The two families had never met.

Sayer wrote an unpublished memoir about his childhood memories and in Schwartz’s new edition, Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited , the two memoirs talk to each other. Weaving excerpts from Sayer’s memoir and from a yearlong correspondence with him into her book, Schwartz revisits village history from a new perspective, deepening our understanding of decency and demonization. Given the rise of xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism in the world today, this exploration seems more urgent than ever.

318 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2021

About the author

Mimi Schwartz is an award-winning author of memoir, personal essay, and narrative nonfiction. She is Professor Emerita in Writing at Richard Stockton University in New Jersey--and also writes about and teaches creative nonfiction nationwide and abroad.

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the small German village that the author's father grew up in (and left early in the Hitler era, before the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom). She interviewed numerous Christian residents who lived through the Nazi era, as well as former Jewish residents (most of whom were, like her father, lucky enough to leave before the Holocaust).

The key theme of her book is that relations between German Christians and Jews were quite good here, even in the first few years after Hitler took power. Although the local synagogue was attacked during Kristallnacht, local residents did their best to protect it, and protected its Torahs from destruction. The author recounts numerous small and medium-sized acts of kindness (which may have actually happened, but may also have been the product of the rosy glow of nostalgia as memories fade and become distorted over time). On the other hand, after deportations begin in earnest, nobody tried to hide Jews from the Nazis (unlike in Berlin, where thousands of Jews went underground, and some survived the war).

Why did things go so well as they did? The author points out that only 16 percent of the village's residents voted for Hitler; the village was entirely Catholic, and Catholic areas often supported Catholic political parties rather than Nazis. Acts of persecution were (allegedly) usually caused by Nazi officials coming in from out of town, or by local youths who had been more thoroughly indoctrinated into Nazism by their elders.

On the other hand, why wasn't the village more heroic in the 1940s when things got more dangerous? Why didn't anyone hide Jews? The author doesn't directly address the issue. But she does mention a local firefighter who was sent to Dachau for protecting the synagogue. In a small town where everyone knew everyone else, such acts of persecution may have been more effective in intimidating local non-Jews than in a bigger city where such risks might have seemed more abstract.

As I was reading, I compared Jewish villagers' experience to the experience of my grandparents in Berlin (who did not survive the Holocaust) and my father (who hid out and survived). Schwartz leaves the impression that life for the village's Jews was pretty normal before Kristallnacht, and deteriorated very quickly thereafter. By contrast, my sense is that my father's and grandparents' life started unwinding as early as 1933, and deteriorated more rapidly. To them, I suspect Kristallnacht was one small step in a long succession of small, horrible steps.

[Eliot Daley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the very many books I have read about the rise of Hitler, the Nazis, and anti-Semitism in Germany, none has taken me so personally and deeply into the mystifying complexity of human response—the humans caught up in the moment, and the humans gripped in later years by the need to understand what really took place. Mimi Schwartz carries us with her as she probes the truth—or truths—behind her father’s curiously fond feelings for the small village in Germany they fled in 1937 for safer life in America. She becomes both a detective and a dowser, researching like a disciplined scholar but, even more compellingly, interspersing her intuitions about what people still there tell her and don’t tell her about those bad old days. Her vexing challenge is to reconcile the sometimes-contradictory accounts that have been revealed in what she has learned with what she has inherited.

Time and again I was struck by how essential her own thoughts, reactions, voice, and nearly-casual observations are. Absent them, it might be “just” another reporting of that piece of history. But she guides us through every step of quest. We hear the ever-present voice of her father and other family members, we are in the room with her as key witnesses struggle to recall or forget, and we startle as she does when her interpreter cautions against naïveté. Her depiction of the excruciating ambivalence and/or dissembling of the witnesses and their legatees and her corresponding ambivalence about reaching conclusions produces an extraordinary tapestry that puts Good Neighbors, Bad Times—Revisited in a class by itself, bringing those days—and people—indelibly into our own naïve lives and these very troubling days.