My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past (19 page)

When Yitzak Rabin died, hope for peace in the Middle East died with him.

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I HADN’T ANTICIPATED THE ATTACK
on Yitzhak Rabin. The country was in mourning. An Israeli had killed another Israeli. The danger hadn’t come from the outside—not from Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon—but from within Israel’s own ranks. Rabin’s assassination revealed how disjointed the country was.

My view of Israel had been changing for some time: My initial euphoria had been replaced with a deep skepticism. I was living in a highly armed country, surrounded by hostile neighbors. I was aware now of the serious threat that the country was facing, the intractable conflict it was engaged in. And of how one’s view of the world became very one-sided for those that lived here.

I can’t say exactly when the depressions began. All I know is that I found myself walking through Tel Aviv on my own. No longer happy and outgoing, but sad and introverted. I felt no joy and no curiosity. It was as if a wall had appeared between me and my surroundings.

When I breathed in, I didn’t get enough air. I felt like I was being choked.

I grew more and more withdrawn; I wanted to be on my own. I only left the house if I absolutely had to, to go to work or to the library for my studies. I didn’t discuss my worries with Noa or Anat; I would not have been able to explain the state I was in.

What was wrong with me? I could find no obvious reason for my sadness. I wasn’t homesick; I received regular visits from my friends and my adoptive family. My degree program had been the right choice, too—at last I was doing something that I was really interested in.

No matter how hard I thought about it, there was no explanation for my unhappy state of mind. I scolded myself for being ungrateful. I had seen how people lived in the Palestinian refugee camps. I, on the other hand, was living the good life; I had all I could possibly need. Why couldn’t I appreciate that? Why did I find everything so hard?

Perhaps, I thought, the reasons for my sadness could not be found in the present. Perhaps they dated back to something in the past.

I barely managed to concentrate on my final exams. The harder I crammed, the less I seemed to remember.

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Jennifer’s adoptive family came to visit her during that time. Her brother Matthias was shocked when he saw her: “Jenny was completely exhausted. I was alarmed by her lifestyle: She had thrown herself fully into her studies, obsessing about details with an exaggerated intensity—as if she wanted to prove something to us.” Matthias had the impression that Jennifer wanted to demonstrate to her adoptive family what she was now capable of: “As if her worthiness depended on her being the best.”

Noa and Anat also noticed that Jennifer wasn’t well, but she didn’t want any help. Noa says: “We were really close friends, but Jenny still liked to sort out her problems by herself.”

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SOMEHOW I MANAGED TO PASS
my final exams. Afterward, I invited Noa, Anat, and a couple of other friends over for dinner. The following morning, I left Israel.

I went back to Munich and started therapy. I took a part-time editorial job with Bayerische Fernsehen, the Bavarian television network. Shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, I suffered a nervous breakdown—during a conversation with my boss, I started to cry and couldn’t stop.

I spent the following days in bed, the duvet pulled over my head. When a friend of mine called, I picked up the receiver and told her to call me back in six months. I didn’t want to see anyone, only to stay in bed and sleep.

People who have never suffered from depression cannot imagine what it’s like to be depressed. They may assume that depression is like an ordinary emotional low: For a while you “don’t feel so good,” but at some point you’ll start to feel better.

I didn’t start to feel better. I fell into a deep hole. My breathlessness became more and more frightening; I was gasping for air and thought I was going to die. When I was at my worst, I would have preferred to die. I never seriously considered taking my own life, but I hoped that I might cross a road and get run over by a car, so that everything would be over.

I had applied for a postgraduate course at the London School of Economics and been offered a place, but there was no way that I could accept it in my current condition. Instead of going to university in London, I went to therapy three times a week.

The first kind of therapy I tried was classic psychoanalysis. I lay on the couch and talked about what was going on in my life or what was on my mind at the time. Often I would talk about things from my past or about my dreams.

During the many hours I spent with my Munich therapist, the subject of my mother resurfaced. My underlying feelings of being given away and abandoned had not been resolved, but merely suppressed. I also suddenly discovered an interest in who my father was.

At elementary school, the other children had always wanted to know where I was from and why my skin was so dark. I would tell them that my father was an African chief who rode through the jungle on elephant-back. Later, I would claim that my father was Idi Amin, the cruel dictator who controlled Uganda in the seventies. He was the only African ruler I knew of as a child. I thought it would make the other children understand that I didn’t want to talk about the subject and that they would leave me in peace.

When I moved to Paris after my high school graduation, I spent days wandering through the streets of Goutte d’Or, the African neighborhood in Paris’s 18th
arrondissement
. At the market, stallholders sold sweet potatoes and cassava roots next to smoked pikes that looked like shriveled rubber. Street vendors offered roasted peanuts and corn on the cob. The women, dressed in brightly patterned, tie-dyed wraps, carried their children on their backs and their shopping on their heads. At the hairdresser’s, women would have their long hair braided. One of the market stalls flew a Togolese flag.

Africa suddenly seemed very near.

It was a strange world to me, but at the same time I had a sense of homecoming. I liked the beat of the African music and the kaleidoscope of colors. Here, finally, people didn’t look back at me over their shoulders or stare at me from the corner of their eyes.

In Germany, black people are a minority. When we run into each other on the street, we nod and say “hello” even if we don’t know one another. Our skin color creates an affinity.

In the African quarter of Paris, the color of my skin was nothing out of the ordinary. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was among my own kind.

I inherited my dark skin from my father.
Where was he now?
I wondered. Who was he? And who was I?

I decided to find my father, and so I contacted CPS. He was living in a village in Germany.

I sent him a little note to find out if he wanted to see me. A few days later I received his reply, on lime-green stationery, in ornate handwriting and polished German. He thanked me for my letter and said that he had always hoped, and even expected, to hear from me one day. Now a huge weight had been lifted from his mind. He would be excited to meet me, he added, and was looking forward to getting to know me at last, to catching up on everything he had missed out on over all these years.

We arranged to meet in a restaurant. When he arrived, he presented me with a rose.

My father is Nigerian. He told me that he was from Umutu, a small town in the southeast of Nigeria, and that he belonged to the Igbo people, an ethnic group in Nigeria. Originally forest farmers, today they are predominantly traders, craftsmen, and civil servants. The majority of the Igbo belong to the Christian faith.

My father told me that, when he set off for Germany in the late sixties, he was one of the first people to leave his village. At the time, anyone in Nigeria who aspired to a career sought a Western education. Besides, the country was ravaged by civil war.

After he studied in Germany, my father returned to Nigeria, where he worked for the government. He explained how the corruption drove him to despair: Computers designated for schools ended up with employees of the ministry. Eventually he moved back to Germany. Today, he is married to a German woman and has five other children. My half-siblings.

When I was born, he wanted me to be brought up by my African grandmother in Umutu. I learn that my father gave me an African name, Isioma, a traditional Igbo name meaning “Lucky.”

My father gave me two books by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, which I enjoyed very much. The books are about African traditions and about a kind of personal god that the Igbo people believe in: the
chi
that determines one’s life. When a person loses their way, their chi will try to lead him back to the right path, Achebe explains.

I, too, wonder if life is just a succession of coincidences, or if we are guided by some higher power like chi. For a long time I didn’t believe in fate, only in chance. But since I learned about my family history, I have thought differently. We are not free in our decisions—some things about our journey through life are predetermined.

After our meal at the restaurant, we went our separate ways: My father returned to his family, and I went back to Munich, to my old life.

As a child, I had known my mother, and so I missed her. My father, on the other hand, had always been a stranger to me. I had been curious about him and wanted to meet him in order to understand more about myself. But I had never felt a longing for him. Our meeting didn’t change my feelings for him, either. He remained a stranger to me.

I saw him once more, when he invited me to his home. I met his family, his wife and children. I could see that my father was making every effort, but I was overwhelmed by all these new people. We said a cordial good-bye. I didn’t see him again for a long time.

A few months later I moved to Hamburg. A friend had told me about a new media agency there. I wanted to get away from the heaviness of the political issues at the television network. I thought a job in advertising would be more lighthearted. By then, I felt emotionally strong enough to hold down a regular job.

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The photo Jennifer Teege included with her application for the job in Hamburg shows her wearing a summer top and massive sunglasses. She also sent in a number of ideas for TV and magazine ads, as well as her report card from first grade: “Jennifer has integrated well into the class.”

Her application suited the agency, and it suited the times. In the late nineties, the new economy was still booming. The agency was hiring new people every month; there was plenty to do. Hairdressers and masseurs would come to the office; in the mornings there was breakfast for all. The workday started at 9 a.m., and if you went home at 6 p.m., your colleagues in the open-plan office would ask: “Just doing a half-day today?”

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ON MY FIRST DAY AT THE
NEW JOB,
a tall man with a deep voice approached me in the corridor: “Are you new here?” He was the agency boss. Goetz. The man I would go on to share my life with.

Newly in love, I would sit in a top-floor office in the center of Hamburg, writing copy for online marketing campaigns for banks and tobacco, car and furniture brands.

I enjoyed my work. The atmosphere was good, everybody was in high spirits. The campaigns for such a diverse range of products gave me the perfect excuse to act out my curiosity at last. I have always quizzed the people around me; I’m interested in how other people live—from where they go on vacation to what sort of bed they sleep in, what kind of sofa they sit on.

But it didn’t take long for the same old problems to raise their heads again. It turned out that I still didn’t have a grip on my depression. It was no longer a constant issue, but it came in bouts. At some point, every new task would cause me to panic. I would spend days playing around with old texts in order to look busy. Once I pretended I had the flu to avoid having to go to work.

Telling the truth was not an option. The world of advertising is all about perfect façades. No one talks about mental health problems, since they are counterproductive to creativity. At the time, I felt under constant pressure. Once a week, I went to a psychological self-help group. On those evenings, I always skulked off early under some pretext.

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Goetz Teege is a quiet, levelheaded man of few words. Regarding his wife, Jennifer, he says: “It was love at first sight. She inspires me.” Goetz Teege comes from a stable family and has four siblings. He tries to relate to the kind of upbringing Jennifer had: “Her fundamental problem is that she has learned not to rely on anyone.” Despite her difficult childhood, his wife has “enormous strength,” he says. “I was always fascinated by that side of her: Whenever she was feeling low, she fought hard to get over it. She sought to understand, to get to the bottom of it. She always felt that there was something that she didn’t know about. Something that she needed to find out in order to get a handle on her life.”

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MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOETZ BECAME STEADY.
Soon, we were talking about children. He was seven years older than I and already had two children from a previous marriage; he wasn’t sure if he wanted to become a father again. If he had decided that he didn’t want any more children, I would have ended our relationship. I could not imagine a life without children. At age 32, I gave birth to my first son; two years later I had my second.

I endeavored to give my sons all those things that I went without for years: warmth, security. Normality.

Today, the most important thing I want them to come away with is a strong sense of self-worth. I don’t want them to have to work as hard for it as I did, in hundreds of hours of therapy.

At first, I found it incredibly hard to leave the children with anyone. I didn’t have the heart to say good-bye to them. Whenever the babysitter came, I would sneak out to spare them the pain of separation.

Today, I would do things differently. I have come to understand that children can tolerate a brief good-bye, a short separation. It is much worse to leave without saying good-bye at all: If children find their mother suddenly gone, it erodes their basic sense of trust.