Lügen und Scham

With "Lies and Shame," the renowned sociologist Dirk Kaesler presents a combination of fate and self-discovery memoir. Kaesler discovers that he was not only born in a "Lebensborn" home of the National Socialists, but that his father is not the husband of his mother who fell in the war, whose name he bears. The truth of his life is that his mother, as an employee of "Lebensborn," had a romantic relationship with an SS officer. This unknown man is his biological father. A quest for answers and a grueling yet clarifying dialogue with the past begins. It is also the story of a higher daughter, Kaesler's mother, whose dreams were shattered by her widowhood and abandonment during and after World War II. A woman who had to struggle under the most difficult conditions with her son and pathologically clung to him as a substitute for a man. The liberation from this suffocation is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the political upheavals of that time. The systemic breaks between the agrarian life of his grandparents in the Empire, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the bleak post-war period provide the framework for a decades-long family drama filled with lies and shame that has been carefully suppressed. Dirk Kaesler has created an extraordinary book about German lives in the 20th century, finely composed, profound, and emotionally moving. With "Lies and Shame," Kaesler delivers the foundational theme of German post-war societies.