It took me decades to confront my family’s and my country’s past. Growing up in post-World War II Germany, I went along with the German silence about the recent past. It took the shock of finding my grandfather’s Berlin diaries of 1945 which revealed not only the horrors of life under constant bombing but that my beloved grandfather had been a Nazi.
Perhaps Black Lives Matter today is driving a similar confrontation with our past in the US. What I have learnt is not clear-cut answers but the need to face our national and family past truthfully as a necessary first step to create a better future and reaffirm our common humanity, what binds us all together.