Jennifer Teege
Jennifer Teege is a German-Nigerian author whose memoir My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, published in Germany in 2013 and in English translation in 2015, became an internationally recognized account of one of modern history’s most harrowing personal discoveries. Born in Munich in 1970 to a German mother and a Nigerian father, Teege was given up for adoption as an infant and raised by a German Catholic family. She spent years not knowing the full story of her biological family.
In 2008, while browsing a Hamburg library, Teege came across a book about her biological grandmother — Amon Goeth’s mistress Ruth Irene Goeth. Amon Goeth was the SS commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, immortalized as the sadistic villain of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Teege had met her biological grandmother as a child without understanding who she was. The discovery sent her into a severe depression that required years of therapy to work through.
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, co-written with journalist Nikola Sellmair, alternates between Teege’s personal testimony and Sellmair’s contextual chapters on Goeth’s history and the psychology of perpetrator families. The book grapples with questions of hereditary guilt, identity, and what it means to carry the blood of a war criminal — questions made more vertiginous by Teege’s identity as a Black woman who would herself have been a target of the regime her grandfather served.
Teege studied in Israel, including at the University of Tel Aviv, and has spoken about her experience at Holocaust memorial events in Germany and internationally. Her memoir is taught in courses on Holocaust education, family memory, and postcolonial identity.
