Abstract
Under National Socialism and Apartheid, propaganda concerning the importance and sanctity of the family unit existed simultaneously alongside government policies aimed at destroying the familial bonds of the racialized “other.” During these two periods, the concept of the family took on new meaning for those on either side of the racial divide. In Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family, Barbara Henkes presents a multilayered analysis of family dynamics across time and space. Henkes’ focus on “transnational kinship networks” in six different case studies demonstrates the utility of the family as a lens with which to understand larger political, cultural, and social developments. While Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family is first and foremost a story of family dynamics across borders, Henkes skillfully traces the role that “whiteness” played in dictating the limits of reflexivity. By including multiple stories of arrival in and departure from the Netherlands, Henkes demonstrates how individuals understood their own changing allegiances when their proximity to violence and victimhood altered.
Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family is divided into two main sections. The first half of the book examines how the integration of two German women and one German-Jewish man into Dutch society impacted their social and familial relationships and sense of identity. The second half of the book switches to a discussion of Dutch nationals in South Africa and the realities behind the two countries’ rhetoric of a shared past and culture. Drawing on the fields of memory studies, family history, and Dutch and South African history, these transnational histories demonstrate the entanglement of systems of violence and oppression on a global scale. While each new case acts as a window into the personal, social, and political lives of German and Dutch nationals, Henkes seamlessly blends these disparate experiences into a cohesive narrative about the manner in which individuals reflect upon their own positionality in the face of the oppression of others.
Henkes begins with the story of Ingrid Gebensleben, who arrived in the Netherlands as a young girl after World War I. Temporarily placed with a wealthy Dutch family as part of a program to help children recover from the deprivations of the war, Gebensleben eventually returned to the Netherlands nine years later to marry one of the sons of her host family. The second chapter features Rie Ton-Seyler, who also left her family at a relatively young age. She spent several years with a figurative aunt and uncle before she was forced to return home to live with her mother and step-father. Her dissatisfaction with home life and the constraints placed upon her by her new surroundings led to a job as a maid with a family in Frankfurt at the age of sixteen. It is here that Ton-Seyler experienced the freedoms of a liberal political and intellectual environment for the first time. Needing to find more stable economic footing, Ton-Seyler left to the Netherlands in 1933. The last case study in this section follows Lukas Plaut, who was born in Japan to German-Jewish parents. Unlike the two other women, much of Plaut’s adult life is dictated by the constrictions of Nazi racial laws. Despite the absence of a traditional Jewish upbringing, the treatment of “Jewishness” as a racial category meant that Plaut faced constant hurdles in his romantic and professional life after 1933. By placing these personal histories in conversation with one another, Henkes demonstrates how one’s pre-war family dynamics impacted their adoption of a Dutch national identity in the midst of changing German social, political, and cultural norms.
The second section switches to a discussion of the migration of Dutch Pim Valk, Wendela Beusekom-Scheffer, and the Huisman family to South Africa. All three cases explore the realities of Dutch and South African propaganda on the historical and cultural ties between the two countries. The young Pim Valk only becomes interested in relocating to South Africa once he begins writing to a South African pen pal. In the letters between Valk and Lena Dusseljee, themes such as the exoticization of South African life, Protestantism, and colonial histories feature heavily. The shared racial and religious background of the two young letter writers dictate the content of the letters and the lack of confrontation with the racial hierarchies their countries uphold. Similarly, Wendala Beusekom-Scheffer brings her own conceptualizations of race to her time in South Africa, an experience that only serves to reinforce her perception of Black bodies as racially inferior. Her letters home to Amsterdam, in which cultural and racial markers are discussed, emphasize her own participation in the creation of Dutch-South African community predicated on whiteness. The last case switches from Henkes own investigation into the lives of single subjects to her analysis of a Dutch migrant family in South Africa. In this case, documentary filmmaker Maarten Rens travels to South Africa to shoot a film based on his family’s life during the period of apartheid. Even without added commentary, the film provokes discomfort and even anger among his relatives. Similar to the response Beusekom-Scheffer has in later interviews with Henkes, several members of the Huisman family (Rens’ relatives) sidestep their own complicity in the system of apartheid by citing their ignorance and distance from the problem.
Henkes interrogates the nature of transnational familial relationships by examining the contents of personal correspondence. In accessing the details of letters written between family members and friends, Henkes analyzes how those who left their national community responded to changing political and social dynamics in their home country and whether these conditions influenced their sense of national belonging or alienation. Despite utilizing letters as source material, Henkes is acutely aware of how personal correspondence and diaries have been used to misconstrue what people knew or did not know during the Holocaust. Rather than using these letters to isolate how individuals behaved in public spaces, Henkes is more interested in how individuals related to family members once they no longer shared the same national community. Far from relying solely on letters, Henkes interviews some of the letter-writers decades later to document their reflections and how they presently understand the repression experienced by targeted groups such as Jews and Black South Africans. By including herself in the process of memory recollection, Henkes encourages the subject to reckon with their past in a way that might not have occurred otherwise. In two of the six cases, other family members have taken the responsibility of curating letters or filmed interviews. The shaping of family archives is then added as an additional layer of analysis, in which Henkes underscores how absence and silence are equally important to the construction of collective memory.
Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family showcases how those who adopted transnational identities often utilized what Henkes refers to as “safe stories” in order to sidestep difficult conversations with loved ones and minimize disagreement. In the case of the German migrants, each of them internalized the conflict based on their individual need to retain a link to their German identity. For example, Ingrid Gebensleben continued to write to her German family members throughout the war. She expressed disdain for National Socialism while also sidestepping more direct conflict with her parents over their enthusiasm for the new regime. Caught between her new life in the Netherlands and her German family, Gebensleben avoided disputes by either commenting on what she perceived as positive developments under National Socialism or highlighting the commonalities between the two countries. Once the war ended, it was easy enough for Gebensleben to regain a sense of normalcy and reconnect with her German identity without needing to reckon with the persecution of Jews and other minority groups. Henkes’ inclusion of Rie Ton-Seyler’s experience provides a direct contrast and an opportunity to interrogate the role of identity politics in shaping reactions to National Socialist violence.
Primarily based on interviews and autobiographical writings, Henkes analysis of Ton-Seyler’s response to German and Dutch culture shifts the focus to “undoing nation” and the search for belonging. Despite her participation in Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation, Ton-Seyler does not frame her activism as exceptional. The war years resulted in a fundamental shift for Ton-Seyler, her embrace of a Dutch identity grew as a result of her rejection of Nazism. But as Henkes points out, Ton-Seyler’s identity and her understanding of the world around her was shaped less by her engagement with German or Dutch peers and dictated more by her love of literature. Her complex family history and experience in Germany and her inability to feel truly “Dutch” meant that Ton-Seyler oriented her identity around her connection to cultural markers. Her dedication to opposing fascism and the persecution of minority groups did not end with the Second World War, Ton-Seyler continued to participate in organizations tackling issues of racism and discrimination. Here, it was her intellectual and cultural “family” that influenced her lifelong commitment to social justice.
The last case study in the section on German migrants to the Netherlands details the experiences of Lukas Platt and his wife, Stien Witte. In comparison to the first two cases, Platt’s entire adult life was dictated by the antisemitic legislation enacted by the Third Reich. Forced to begin again after the losing his job at an observatory in Germany, Platt moved to the Netherlands, retook his B.A., and eventually earned his doctorate in 1938. But, as Henkes shows, his ability to remain employed was disrupted by the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation. Even his romantic happiness was impeded since the International Marriage Convention signed by the Netherlands and Germany outlawed the marriage of German-Jews and Dutch citizens. Platt and Stien Witte eventually married but she lost her Dutch citizenship since Dutch law conferred nationality based on male citizenship status. At each turn, Platt found himself a target, no more so than when he was arrested and sent to a forced labor camp in Hevelte in 1944. Many of his letters included “safe stories” as to not cause his wife, who was at home with two young children, any distress. Even as a victim, Platt emphasized his wellbeing and cautioned his wife from taking additional measures when he was once again arrested after escaping from Hevelte on Dolle Dinsdag (“Mad Tuesday”). As the only case study focused on the experiences of a victimized individual, Platt’s story makes real the consequences of discrimination and persecution under National Socialism. His marriage to Stien and their children anchored him to the Netherlands and prevented him from deportation East. On the other hand, the harrowing experience of the occupation period impacted Stein differently. Writing, “One cannot say, it is over. You just have to learn to live it,” to a relative after the release in 1972 of three Nazi war criminals sentenced to life imprisonment, Stien’s grief and anger over the events of the war and the deep rootedness of antisemitism in Dutch society transformed her own sense of national belonging.
Henkes investigation into migration’s impact on conceptions of family and national identity alerts us to the role of race in dictating cultural assimilation and belonging. The specific focus on white, Christian life stories raises questions about the responsibility and complicity of individuals who entered into spaces that afforded them rights and freedoms denied to others. Viewing Dutch migrants in apartheid South Africa as implicated subjects, Henkes sidesteps terms such as bystander and perpetrator. Implicated subjects, as defined in Michael Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford University Press, 2019), refer to those that “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. Treating Pim Valk, Wenda Beusekom-Scheffer, and the Huisman family as implicated subjects emphasizes their response to and actions within South African society, but also demonstrates how whiteness enabled their smooth transition into unfamiliar environments.
In the epilogue, Henkes comments on Dutch memory culture in the aftermath of National Socialism and Apartheid. The life histories of individuals who traversed national boundaries illuminates the prolonged Dutch struggle to come to terms with collaboration during the Nazi occupation and the glorification of a shared Dutch and South African heritage. By highlighting the stories people tell themselves and their relatives to avoid reflecting on their own complicity and privilege, Henkes demonstrates the utility of the family as a site of investigation. It also adds another layer to our understanding of collective memory and generational change. It is only in the past few years that the Dutch colonial past has taken center stage in debates over Dutch identity and history. Ultimately, Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family serves as an invaluable resource those working at the intersection of race, family, and migration.