Esslingen 2005
“In 1961 we spent 15 months in Germany for study purposes on a scholarship for the first time and we came to Göttingen with three children with some fears, but quickly felt comfortable because we got to know people with whom we had a lot in common. We got to know people who were in the resistance, who were in concentration camps, who were originally communists and then later, after learning what communism was, became social democrats. We got to know people who were in exile during the Nazi era and who came back. Then we got to know the parents of our children’s classmates.
So I never believed in collective guilt because we knew a lot of decent people before we emigrated and of course a lot of people afterwards.
We came to Göttingen, just as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the reaction naturally interested and captivated me and so we then … we are slowly being naturalized again. Then after ‘66 - and that was unusual - we also had very close contacts with the GDR.”