i=German - or not
My other grandmother, the New England one, is staying with us for a little while. We keep trying to ask her stuff about her family and childhood, but she hates talking about it, and yesterday basically told us that she hates her parents ('That's a terrible thing, isn't it!' she said, and laughed). Her father was born in the U.S. but was the child of German immigrants - pacifists who ran away from Bismarck in the 1870s - and I have never met anyone so racist against Germans in my life as my grandmother is (and I have lived in Britain, so that's saying something). Whenever asked to explain her father's faults, she just says disgustedly, 'He was Cherman' (as she always pronounces it). 'I hate the Chermans. Uch!' She doesn't even see the need to explain what she means by this, I guess she thinks it's self evident. Her mother, on the other hand, whose own mother's family were old time New Englanders, gets to take personal credit for her malfeasance. I asked why she would behave in a particular bad way, and my grandmother said, 'because she was a horrible, narcissistic, infantile person.' Um, okay, fair enough!
The weird thing is that my other grandmother's father was also the child of German immigrants, and she also hated him. There are weird parallels between the two great-grandfathers - both intellectuals (a chemist and an architect) who could fly off the handle into rage and violence. Grandma Jean's father was also an alcoholic, though, while I guess Cecily's was merely Cherman. But Grandma was not too fond of her father's people either. ('He was a real German,' she would say distastefully, like it was a slur.) Although Grandma, at least, didn't totally throw the baby out with the bath water - as an intellectually voracious person she still appreciated the best of German thought and culture, and could speak a tiny bit of German from college, and would even start singing this little ditty she'd learnt from her aunt with an impish, amused kind of air. Cecily, though just as smart as Grandma, sees these things more personally than Grandma did. She quotes her own great-aunt saying 'Gott im Himmel!' in the sort of voice that suggests that just by being in German, it was somehow offensive.
In any case, the effect of all this is that on both sides of my family, a significant part of our background is basically erased, and the American side (New England or Southern) left standing alone in our self conception. My German great-great-aunt only died when I was 13, while I never even met my New England great-grandmother (nor my Southern one); but the presence of the American ancestors is still intense with us, while of the Germans, nonexistent, except as a bitter aftertaste.
The weird thing is that my other grandmother's father was also the child of German immigrants, and she also hated him. There are weird parallels between the two great-grandfathers - both intellectuals (a chemist and an architect) who could fly off the handle into rage and violence. Grandma Jean's father was also an alcoholic, though, while I guess Cecily's was merely Cherman. But Grandma was not too fond of her father's people either. ('He was a real German,' she would say distastefully, like it was a slur.) Although Grandma, at least, didn't totally throw the baby out with the bath water - as an intellectually voracious person she still appreciated the best of German thought and culture, and could speak a tiny bit of German from college, and would even start singing this little ditty she'd learnt from her aunt with an impish, amused kind of air. Cecily, though just as smart as Grandma, sees these things more personally than Grandma did. She quotes her own great-aunt saying 'Gott im Himmel!' in the sort of voice that suggests that just by being in German, it was somehow offensive.
In any case, the effect of all this is that on both sides of my family, a significant part of our background is basically erased, and the American side (New England or Southern) left standing alone in our self conception. My German great-great-aunt only died when I was 13, while I never even met my New England great-grandmother (nor my Southern one); but the presence of the American ancestors is still intense with us, while of the Germans, nonexistent, except as a bitter aftertaste.