The son of non-Jewish Germans who were children during World War II, Roger Frie was awarded the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of history and a 2018 Western Canada Jewish Book Award for his memoir Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Frie grew up in Canada but maintained a close relationship with his grandparents in Germany. Only later did he learn they had an unspoken Nazi past. Frie’s book traces the moral obligations of memory, asking in effect, what it means to be the grandson of a Nazi party member. From a life lived across German and Jewish contexts, he explores the connections between racial violence of the past and injustice in the present and sheds light on the threads that connect us.

According to Erna Paris, "Roger Frie's riveting exploration of inter-generational war memory and submerged guilt will be read as an instant classic." His book's Foreword is written by Anna Ornstein, a survivor of Auschwitz.

Frie has also edited History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust and the Importance of Empathy (Routledge, 2018) in which German historians, historians of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts of different disciplinary backgrounds address the synergy between history and psychoanalysis in an engaging and accessible manner. This volume includes an extended dialogue with the historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut in which he reflects on the study of German history and the Holocaust at the intersection of history and psychoanalysis.

Frie is a psychologist, historian and philosopher who writes and speaks widely on questions of collective trauma and historical responsibility. He was educated in London and Cambridge and is professor of Education at SFU and affiliate professor of Psychiatry at UBC. He is also Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology and associate member of the Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory in New York.

BOOKS:

Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017) $36.95 978-0-19937-255-3

History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust and the Importance of Empathy (Routledge, 2018)

[BCBW 2021]  Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit