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Angelika Bammer's Born After is a courageous, self-reflexive and conscientious book. It is an intimate account of her personal life story but at the same time it is a story of a generation of Germans born into the shattered and perplexed reality of ‘aftermath’ Germany who were forced to struggle with the haunting shadows of the past. It is a journey for self-understanding and self-reconciliation, where memories and questions of identity are milestones on the way for reckoning with the past - the past that had never passed but keeps on resonating and dictating the present.
Bammer is a gifted narrator and her personal story is both intimately touching and intellectually evoking. The book goes back and forth, from her memories of early childhood in the little German town of Velen, to Canada, to Bonn, and eventually to her maturity as an American, weaving together past and present, historical events and personal memories, raising the most fundamental question about what makes us who we are. Disturbed by the silence wrapping her parents' past, provoked by the ambiguous, sometimes hostile, responses of her Canadian neighbours and classmates to her Germanness, she was driven to explore the hidden history of her family, collecting clues and hints that would help her reveal the unspoken past. As a young German girl yearning to be assimilated into her new Canadian environment, she learned quickly how to ‘shift identities according to context’ (p. 28), while absorbing the diffusive and fragile nature of identity. These early childhood experiences fuelled her anger, criticism and guilt regarding her German roots, and, like a larger cohort of young Germans, she strove to cast her Germanness off ‘like outworn clothes’ (p. 58).
Indeed, Bammer compels us to rethink the very foundations of identity: memory, personal history, attachment to place, culture and, above all - language. Language is the ground upon which consciousness is shaped and the linkages between self and society are sp