I imagine my grandfather Ernst sitting outside and holding his overcoat shut against the constant wind, the only person on deck as the ferry makes its way from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. The other refugees have stayed inside the main cabin, but he doesn’t want to listen to them speaking in German so he’s come outside to let the sea-speckled air blow away that tainted language, and replace it with the sounds of the gulls calling to each other…
In the late 1930s my Jewish grandfather Ernst fled his hometown of Frankfurt for the safety of the UK where he spent the rest of his life, and in 2020 I made the journey in reverse. I had the legal right to ‘reclaim’ my German citizenship, because Ernst had had his stripped from him. The administratively straightforward but emotionally complex process of applying for this citizenship triggered my desire to find out more about Ernst’s life, and make a connection with him across the rupture of the Nazi regime.
Deutschstunden weaves together the past and the present; a chronological account of Ernst’s life is interspersed with my explorations of present-day Frankfurt, a modern and successful city which is home to people from all over the world, yet also a place where the past is literally buried underground. The past can also be located in the sky; I draw a connection between what I find out about Ernst and our emerging understanding of the Universe. I consider what it feels like to be officially German and unofficially Jewish in a country whose citizens are required by law to learn about the Holocaust, but which nevertheless is host to rising racism. Can I be anything other than a ghost, an uncanny reminder of bygone horrors? The book attempts to strike this balance between past and present with chapters about my emerging understanding of Ernst’s life juxtaposed with my own life in Germany. It also encompasses Einstein’s thought experiments, the Jewish legends of the Luftmentsh and the Golem, the post-war reconstruction of Germany, and the chemical link between Ernst’s belongings salvaged from Nazi Germany and astronomical photography.
Deutschstunden is published in German translation (by Zoë Beck) by CulturBooks. It was launched at the Leipzig Buchmesse in March 2025, you can watch the launch here. And you can listen to me talking about it on SWR Kultur here.