What Motivated Jennifer Teege To Write Her Memoir?

My impulse to write came from a collision of identity and history. One moment I was living a relatively ordinary life, the next I had the knowledge that one of the most infamous figures from the Holocaust was my grandfather. That revelation demanded explanation — not just for me, but for anyone trying to understand how personal and collective memory intersect. I found myself asking: how does one carry such a legacy while also experiencing racism and exclusion in contemporary Germany? The memoir, 'My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me', let me put those questions into narrative form.

Beyond personal catharsis, I felt a responsibility to break the family silence. There were practical reasons too: documenting evidence, interviewing relatives, and tracing archival records helped me move from rumor and shame to documented truth. On another level, I wanted the book to open public dialogue about culpability and empathy. By recounting my own confusion and anger, I hoped to complicate black-and-white understandings of history and to encourage other descendants — of both victims and perpetrators — to reckon with their pasts in humane ways.

I wrote because a sudden discovery demanded an answer. Finding out that Amon Göth was my grandfather felt like being spun into someone else’s story, and I couldn’t just live beside that fact; I had to interrogate it. Writing 'My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me' became the method through which I traced facts, interviewed family, and sat with uncomfortable emotions.

There was also an urge to speak for the silenced — to acknowledge the victims and to refuse the neat comfort of denial. At the same time, the book let me explore the collision of my Black heritage with German history, showing how personal identity can be painfully complicated. In the end, motivation mixed curiosity, responsibility, and a need to make peace (or at least to make sense) with a history I never asked for, leaving me still unsettled but more honest about who I am.

The thing that pushed me to pick up a pen was the exact kind of shock that feels like your life has been mismatched at the seams. I was 38 when I stumbled across a book about Amon Göth in a public library and there, in a photograph, was a face that looked strangely like mine. That discovery cracked everything open — not just the factual shock that my maternal grandfather was a notorious Nazi commander, but the emotional jolt of realizing a secret had been living inside my family for decades. Writing 'My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me' became a way of following that crack into light.

At first I wrote to make sense of identity: how do you reconcile being the granddaughter of a man who orchestrated terror and being the daughter of a Black immigrant who fled to Germany? But the project grew. It turned into an exploration of silence and shame, of how families keep monstrous truths hidden and how those silences shape the next generations. I wanted to honor the victims and also show the messy reality of being born into complicated histories.

There was also a public motive: sharing the story sparked conversations about responsibility, memory, and race in modern Germany. I wanted to carve space for grandchildren of perpetrators to speak without being dismissed, to challenge easy labels, and to encourage others to confront uncomfortable pasts. Writing the book felt like both a personal therapy and a civic act — a mixture of grief, curiosity, and a stubborn need to understand where I came from.