Wounds of Silence

Interviewed about the "online resource launched by German newspaper Die Zeit [to] discover whether relatives were card-carrying members of the Nazi party, Roger Frie, the author of Not in my Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust, says the tool has enormous importance. 'There's always been this focus on collective ... responsibility for the Holocaust, whilst at the same time, there has been a hesitation to research [one's] own family.' Prof. Frie, whose next book is about silencing dark histories, believes this initiative is particularly significant given the current political climate, with antisemitism on the rise, including on the far right in Germany. 'It suddenly shifts your perspective. It's no longer abstract, it's no longer back there.' * The Globe and Mail *
With all the empathy and acumen of a trained psychotherapist, Professor Frie offers us a profoundly personal and moving meditation on the legacies of trauma, obligations of memory, and ethical demands of history in perpetrator societies. Even as we in the USA currently contend with an alarming rise in antisemitism and a sweeping public erasure of historical injustices, this work combats silencing and denialism, urges reckoning and responsibility, and affords timely and compelling insights. * Professor Joseph P. Gone, Ph.D., Harvard University Native American Program *
In this moving personal inquiry into the structures of silence that sustain the persistence of historical trauma across histories, geographies, and generations, Roger Frie listens with openness, care and compassion to survivors and descendants of the Holocaust in Germany, Indigenous genocide in Canada, and racial terror in the United States. This ever more timely book offers us ways to grapple with human capacities for destruction by modelling a relational practice of healing and repair. * Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust *
Wounds of Silence is a fascinating, disturbing, all too timely inquiry into the ways in which otherwise thoughtful, caring human beings can shut out the atrocities occurring in their midst. Harrowing though many of the scenes he describes are, Frie avoids being sensationalistic or moralistic. As an historian, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, he is first and foremost a careful, astute explorer of the human condition whose main aim is to speak the truth of painful pasts, unadorned, and with his stories in hand, to chart a path forward for remembrance and repair. An immensely important-and, in its way, hopeful-read. * Mark Freeman, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society Emeritus, Department of Psychology, College of the Holy Cross and Senior Fellow, Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, Boston College *
This book offers a rare and important analysis that draws on the author's lived experiences and on rich and useful comparative insights from fieldwork in Germany, Canada, and the United States. Roger Frie articulates the multiple meanings of silence with nuance and intellectual grace and provides a timely contribution to literature on remembering, trauma, and repair after violence. * David Mwambari, author of Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda (Oxford) *
We live in places haunted by histories of violence and injustice. Roger Frie astutely mentors us to turn toward and reckon with these histories, replacing denial, silence, and ignorance with acknowledgment and accountability. While addressing the past, this compellingly wise book points us toward building the more compassionate and just futures that we deeply desire. * Mary Watkins, author of White Work and Reparative Genealogy: Reckoning with Ancestral Debt as a Path to Racial Reparations *