No Innocence
Late afternoon and early evening TV for me usually are given over to study and seminar prep during soup operas and Ghost Hunters. ButThird Reich: The Rise and Third Reich: The Fall aired on History Channel last evening. What these things document is vital to see and know for generations and ages to come, because no society of human beings is exempt including our own. Power creates bullies. And leaves indelible shame.
The personal side of the documentary is darker to me than just viewing history. In my growing up years, the English origins and heritage of my family name were a source of peace and pride, deepened by the generations-long family tradition of Episcopal clergy. Last year came the stunner: the “English origins and heritage” were a fancy, apparently of my grandfather’s brother, an Anglophile -- from whom we had a faux “family tree” going back to emigration from England before the Revolutionary War. It was a source of pride in heritage and also an assurance of innocence during World War II.
Last year it came to me that the facts were very different. Not at all English, my Weller ancestors were Alfred Daniel (1872-1964), Reginald Heber (1828-1903), George (1790-1841), George (1757-1825), Andreas (born 1721, Furthen, Hamm Kreis, Westfalen, Germany, died 1769 in Waldoboro, Maine), Hans Heinrich (b. 1679 who may have died in Broad Bay, now Waldoboro Maine), Lorentz (d. 1690 Dillenburg, Germany), Johann (d. before 1678, Westfalen), ...
Last year it came to me that the facts were very different. Not at all English, my Weller ancestors were Alfred Daniel (1872-1964), Reginald Heber (1828-1903), George (1790-1841), George (1757-1825), Andreas (born 1721, Furthen, Hamm Kreis, Westfalen, Germany, died 1769 in Waldoboro, Maine), Hans Heinrich (b. 1679 who may have died in Broad Bay, now Waldoboro Maine), Lorentz (d. 1690 Dillenburg, Germany), Johann (d. before 1678, Westfalen), ...
Not rational for the revised heritage so to distress except for having grown up during WWII when our anti-German propaganda was formative and rampant. May 1945 newsreels of liberated concentration camps. William Shirer. Documentaries like Third Reich: the Rise and Third Reich: the Fall. MS St. Louis. Claims “We didn’t know” and “We were lied to” that to this day ring hollow: they knew, were sympathetic and complicit, watched and did nothing, were summoned to the thousands of concentration camps in Spring 1945 to bury the millions of murdered. Guilt infested society, population, each one. My cousins, my kin, my own flesh and blood. The guilt and shame that spill over into my generation are inexpressible, unspeakable. It may take the rest of my life to work through it.
A trip at least to the c.a. 1533 church my ancestors would have attended seems possibly healing. Former St. Georg now Evangelische Pauluskirche, Südstrasse, Mann, Westfalen, Deutschland
A trip at least to the c.a. 1533 church my ancestors would have attended seems possibly healing. Former St. Georg now Evangelische Pauluskirche, Südstrasse, Mann, Westfalen, Deutschland
TW