Lost Roots

How twentieth-century junk science and tribalism defined a family's identity and falsified their origins story. A soldier goes missing two days before the Armistice ends World War I. A decorated pilot encrypts his account of a failed diamond deal. A national police officer is executed on Stalin's order. An industrialist loses everything, first in part to the Nazis, then totally to the Communists. A shopkeeper is arrested by the Gestapo and both he and his wife spend years in a forced labor camp and their sons are put in foster care. A civil servant hires a genealogist to prove German ancestry, changes his birth record, and dies in the rubble of the Third Reich. These brothers sought - with mixed results - to survive a half-century of virulent nativism, war, revolution, occupation, and repression as citizens of three different countries: Germany, Poland, and America. In Lost Roots: Family, Identity, and Abandoned Ancestry, Karl von Loewe reveals how a single family was affected by rampant ethnic nationalism of the time---how each used it and was used by it---and how the secrets were kept.

Author: Karl von Loewe

Publisher: Atmosphere Press

Publication Date: Sep 01, 2022

Number of Pages: 210 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback/Biography & Autobiography

ISBN-10: 1639883428

ISBN-13: 9781639883424