My mother-in-law Ursula (name changed) is German, she immigrated to the United States with her family when she was a teenager. Back when we first met, I watched “The Sound of Music” with her. I was really surprised that she didn’t have any reaction to the Nazi-related scenes shown in the film. When I say “No reaction”, it doesn’t mean that she is supposed to hold “being born a German” as a sin, and be obligated to respond with some politically-correct comment to the Nazi history. What I didn’t expect from her was that it seemed to me that she somehow suspended her feeling and mentally detached herself thoroughly from this topic, especially since her early life happened in that period of time. Afterward, I had an opportunity to talk about this observation with a German lady who is close to my mother-in-law’s age and who has also lived in the U.S. for a really long time. She told me that this phenomenon is actually quite common for their generation and also recommended a book to me,  “The Forgotten Generation – The War Children Break their Silence”. What the book is mainly about is “German war children” who grew up or were born in WWII (the birth year ranges from 1930-1945 .)  Even though most of them were really young back then and do not necessarily remember what happened during wartime, they still went through amounts of war scenes that caused a strong impact on them afterward. It is also mentions, that in the process of this generation’s growing up, they developed mechanisms to place their own parents and/or grandparents’ relationship with the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the post-WWII interpretation of “German” also contributes to the generation’s repressed mental status. Those traumatizing experiences have mixed together and piled up, and then crushed every individual on a different level later in their lives. Ursula is clearly part of the generation defined by the author. Based upon the book, I started to juxtapose my observation of Ursula and the information that I learned about the “German war children”.   

Why am I so obsessed with Ursula’s “detachment/ suspension” mode with Nazi History?

In 2017, I made a work called “The Daughter of Time”, which depicted the relationship between my father, Ying-wu Huang, a political prisoner during Taiwan's White-Terror-era, and me, a daughter of a political prisoner, and also the outside context from then to now that we live with. Around the time my father was released from prison, society started gradually building up a fixed narrative/impression about the political prisoners, which was quite different from how my father identified himself as a political prisoner/ social reformer. After figuring out that no matter how hard he tried to explain what his political identity really is to people, the outside world would still misread him as something else, he decided not to talk about his experience as a political prisoner anymore for a long time in order to go against the fixed narrative of political prisoners. My father married and then had me after he was released from prison. As his child, his experience as a political prisoner/ social reformer has transformed into daily life fragments in the family, and has had an influence on me. In simple terms, a historical event (White-Terror in Taiwan) from which I was absent due to the fact that it happened before my birth, has played an extremely important role in my life and affected my perception of the world.  Meanwhile, I need to deal with a society that still continues to establish the fixed narrative of the political prisoners. As for encountering others’ misreading of my father/ me based on this fixed narrative, my speechless status in reacting to the condition shifts to another kind of expression: the heavier my father’s stories are, the lighter the way I describe them. Ursula’s “detachment / suspension” mode and my speechless status are both strategies in responding to a fixed narrative. At the same time, these strategies also reflect the situation that those who are part of the second generation of “controversial people” in history run into, in which we attempt to place ourselves or to escape from the dilemma caused by the after effect of certain ended historical events. I recognize that the situation she is in is one that I am really familiar with, and could not explain to outsiders.

Several years after moving from Germany, Ursula established her own family in the U. S., and it is almost a right-answer-like happy ending for the aspect of the Western postwar narrative (as for what the “fixed narrative” is that Ursula needs to deal with, please watch the video “The Things You Need to Know about My Mom is a Good German” in this exhibition.)  “My Mom is a Good German” were the words that my husband John (name changed) said to his peers when he was really young. As an American boy, who at that point didn’t know a lot about what happened from then to now, and who was also distant from Germany physically and emotionally, he still immediately felt the need to tell people his mom was a good German when he said that his mom was from Germany. It also means that back then, even as a kid, he was already aware of the existence of a fixed narrative. In this exhibition “My Mom is a Good German”, what I have tried to focus on is neither the true/false or right/wrong facts of the fixed narrative, but the situation that people who deal with the difference between the fixed narrative and personal experience, go back and forth with day after day.