Family, memory and the burden of Germany's past

In this episode of Explaining History, Nick is joined by acclaimed author Anne Weber to discuss her new book Sanderling (Indigo Press, 2025) — a deeply personal and philosophical exploration of family, identity, and the shadow of Germany’s past.

Through the story of her great-grandfather Florens Christian Rang — a theologian, lawyer, and close friend of figures such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber — Weber examines four generations of her family to ask profound questions:

• What does it mean to be German, then and now?
• How can one man’s moral convictions coexist with his son’s later embrace of Nazism?
• How do history and guilt pass through families and nations alike?

Weber and Nick discuss Rang’s life and writings, the moral tensions of Germany’s unification and imperial period, and how Weber’s narrative approach — blending travelogue, reflection, and history — reveals how the past extends into the present.

The conversation also turns outward: to Europe’s shared colonial legacies, the persistence of national myths, and the uneasy balance between remembrance and denial.

“It’s a little bit like discovering your father was a serial killer,” Weber says, describing the weight of Germany’s historical consciousness. Yet through her writing, she transforms that burden into a journey of understanding — and of reckoning.

📖 Sanderling is published by Indigo Press on 4 November 2025.

Find it in independent bookshops or directly from the publisher.

Also available from Indigo Press: Weber’s earlier book Epic Annette, the true story of a French resistance fighter and doctor who defied two wars and two empires.

🎧 Listen now for a moving discussion about history, identity, and the limits of inherited guilt.

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