{"id":206381,"date":"2025-11-29T11:18:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T11:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/206381\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T11:18:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T11:18:11","slug":"why-the-story-of-chancellor-friedrich-merzs-grandfather-matters-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/206381\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the story of chancellor Friedrich Merz\u2019s grandfather matters \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last September, German<\/a> chancellor Friedrich Merz<\/a> stood in a synagogue and wept.<\/p>\n

He was speaking at the opening of a renovated Munich temple about the burdens of German history. Quoting from a memoir, he repeated a question that plagued a young girl, the child of Holocaust<\/a> survivors, in postwar Germany: \u201cDid nobody help the Jews?\u201d<\/p>\n

As he read that sentence, Merz\u2019s voice broke. He sobbed, tears came, and it took a moment to gather himself.<\/p>\n

Friedrich Merz is a talented speaker and a political professional, but this was new. Watching, gripped, I realised: this is real, but what is it?<\/p>\n

Just four months into office, I thought, perhaps the long days and endless crises \u2013 Russia, Gaza, Trump, the economy, the far right \u2013 were getting to him? But these looked, to me at least, less tears of exhaustion than sadness \u2013 and deep, personal conflict.<\/p>\n

Did no one help the Jews? The sad answer to the question in Germany is: too few did. In Germany, historians say even the most generous calculation \u2013 of 200,000 people who resisted the Nazis and helped their victims \u2013 would amount to just 0.3 per cent of the 1940s population. <\/p>\n

Yet when Germans are asked about their own families, some 18 per cent \u2013 nearly one in five \u2013 claim their families helped or hid potential victims.<\/p>\n

That study from the University of Bielefeld showed that the same number \u2013 18 per cent \u2013 admitted having perpetrators in their families, while 69 per cent denied.<\/p>\n

By this subjective truth, Germany had as many perpetrators as helpers, yet the fascist death machine still claimed around six million Jewish lives around Europe, as well as Sinti people, homosexuals, communists and Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses.<\/p>\n

\"GermanGerman chancellor Friedrich Merz at Berlin’s Neue Wache memorial during commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the second World War on May 8th. Photograph: Sean Gallup\/Getty <\/p>\n

It seems strange given how, for decades, Germans have toiled away at what they call Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung \u2013 or coming to terms with the past. Given all the effort and money spent on museums, institutions, memorials, books and films, why are things so skewed?<\/p>\n

Historian Jens Wagner, director of the Buchenwald Nazi camp memorial near Hanover, eastern Germany, has one answer: \u201cGermans like to celebrate themselves as world champions in memory work, even if that comes to a halt at their own front door.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, still pondering the teary Friedrich Merz synagogue speech, I decide to visit his first front door.<\/p>\n

Brilon is a pretty and prosperous small town of 35,000 people in the middle of western German nowhere. Local families built their fortunes here from iron and lead mining, then textile dyeing.<\/p>\n

\"JosephJoseph Paul Sauvigny, the maternal grandfather of Friedrich Merz. Photograph: Stadtarchiv Brilon <\/p>\n

A century ago, one of the most prosperous men in town \u2013 with a patrician mansion that still stands off the main square \u2013 was Josef Paul Sauvigny. He was the maternal grandfather of Friedrich Merz, who grew up in the house with his family until he was 10. A year later, in 1967, Sauvigny died.<\/p>\n

Nearly six decades on, eyewitnesses to the Sauvigny era are few. By chance, in a town cafe on my first morning, I strike up a conversation with Gertrud, an older woman who says she once worked as a maid to the retired mayor and his wife.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe died just as I started,\u201d she said. What does she remember about his politics, particularly in the 1930s: Catholic opposition? \u201cThey were strongly Catholic but … \u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Hometown holds goodwill for Friedrich Merz, but coalition leaves him in a bindOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Sauvigny was mayor of Brilon for 20 years until 1937, four years after the Nazi takeover. According to a recent Brilon town history, the former mayor showed a \u201chigh degree of adaption\u201d to the new fascist order.<\/p>\n

As the conversation with Gertrud peters out, I wonder if her \u201cbut\u201d is one source of Friedrich Merz\u2019s conflict?<\/p>\n

Sauvigny was born into a Catholic family in 1875 in the nearby town of Bestwig. It was just four years after German unification and Sauvigny grew up in a climate of state-lead discrimination and attacks against Catholics.<\/p>\n

Like his chancellor grandson, Sauvigny studied law and entered politics, becoming mayor of Brilon in 1917 aged 42. He was a member of the conservative Centre Party, the political home of German Catholics at the time. Though many Catholics then had a natural wariness of the state, a profile describes the new mayor nevertheless as having a \u201cpro-monarchy disposition\u201d and an ear for the \u201cupper\u201d echelons of Brilon.<\/p>\n

Sauvigny served two terms as mayor, though the precarious interwar era of economic crises and political upheavals. He also witnessed how his Centre Party drifted rightward and eventually backed the Enabling Act of 1933, sealing the Nazi dictatorship.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe market square in Brilon. Photograph: Ina Fassbender\/Getty <\/p>\n

(Months later, a bilateral agreement \u2013 or Concordat \u2013 agreed between Hitler\u2019s Germany and the Holy See in July 1933 forced the withdrawal of clergy from daily politics and saw many Catholics yield to the new regime.)<\/p>\n

How did Josef Paul Sauvigny react to the new political power in Germany? Surviving speeches, reprinted in the local newspaper, suggest an opportune adoption of NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Nazi) rhetoric. It\u2019s worth remembering the popularity of many Nazi promises at the time, in particular to end the political and economic dramas of the interwar Weimar era. Anti-Semitism was always part of the package, yet the Holocaust was still some way off.<\/p>\n

In the Brilon town archive, housed in the smart mansion of a Jewish family terrorised out of town, the local Sauerlander Zeitung (SZ) newspaper, is available in bound editions. It carried many of Mayor Sauvigny\u2019s speeches, such as his May 1933 praise for the Nazi revolution that had \u201cwiped away the filth\u201d and \u201cpoisonous fumes\u201d in the recent years of \u201cmisunderstood freedom and impotent self-destruction\u201d.<\/p>\n

He concluded his speech with a toast to \u201cthe embodiment of German loyalty, Chancellor Hitler\u201d. A week later he hoped a new school principal would \u201ceducate and inspire our local youth … to participate in Germany\u2019s struggle for its resurgence\u201d.<\/p>\n

August 1933 saw Sauvigny decry the \u201cthe physical effeminacy of our defenceless people [which] may have been one reason for our spiritual decline as a people\u201d. He hoped \u201cthe spirit of the F\u00fchrer becomes effective everywhere and the spirit we need to regain our former power\u201d.<\/p>\n

In September 1933, Sauvigny told a local NSDAP gathering that Briloners should \u201call stand with body and soul for the wellbeing of our new German fatherland, even more vigorously and openly\u201d.<\/p>\n

No records exist of anti-Semitic remarks by the mayor, though one telling incident arose in the run-up to Christmas 1933, long before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that legalised discrimination and exclusion of Jews from German life.<\/p>\n

Mayor Sauvigny received a written complaint from a resident asking why state vouchers to workers were \u201cbeing accepted in non-Aryan stores\u201d.<\/p>\n

In response, the SZ reported Sauvigny\u2019s order on December 18th, 1933 that \u201cnon-Aryan stores are not permitted to participate\u201d.<\/p>\n

Even as early as 1933, with four years to run in office, Sauvigny welcomes townsfolk to events \u201cin the name of the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party\u201d.<\/p>\n

Official records indicate Sauvigny joined the NSDAP party just as he left office, in 1937. But a yellowing file in Brilon\u2019s town archive, held together by string, tells another story.<\/p>\n

It suggests Sauvigny was so determined to join the party just after Hitler took office in 1933 that he fell victim to a scam.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0As Dresden commemorates its darkest day, some are hoping to rewrite historyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The file contains a ruling from December 1937 \u2013 \u201cIn the name of the F\u00fchrer\u201d \u2013 from a NSDAP party court in nearby Paderborn against Brilon man Willi Hartmann, a local Nazi leader and town councillor.<\/p>\n

In May 1933 the Nazi party, swamped with new membership applications, imposed a moratorium until it could clear the backlog.<\/p>\n

\n

If more people dealt with their family histories I think we would do a better job in Germany with what is happening today<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Oliver von Wrochem<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hartmann told Sauvigny, anxious to join the NSDAP, to pay him directly the application fee and membership subscriptions, promising to get around the moratorium.<\/p>\n

\u201cMayor Sauvigny paid the membership contributions until March 1936 of 10 Reichsmarks and six Reichsmarks, for himself and his wife as well as a [child] sponsorship,\u201d according to the ruling. \u201cThe application was not passed on by the defendant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ruling adds that Hartmann pocketed an additional 100 Reichsmarks from Sauvigny in exchange for a party membership card.<\/p>\n

At some point Hartmann\u2019s fraud was exposed. Sauvigny had him removed from his roles as a town councillor and as a secondary mayor. He was also suspended for a year from his local party and banned from wearing his group leader uniform.<\/p>\n

Hartmann went on the attack, smearing Sauvigny in a January 1937 article in Der St\u00fcrmer, the NSDAP party newspaper, for \u201cdoing business with Jews\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0An Irish historian\u2019s new theory of Nazism. \u2018The idea makes people nervous\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The object of his outrage: a lease Sauvigny held on some land belonging to a Jewish resident of Brilon, Gustav Neuwahl.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wonder that such a man is still in office,\u201d Hartmann wrote, pointing to a 1934 town council decision to exclude from city contracts anyone found doing business with Jews.<\/p>\n

In its verdict, the party court did not find enough evidence for wilful deceit and gave Hartmann a caution for \u201cdisparaging the mayor\u2019s reputation\u201d and not settling the dispute with the mayor \u201camong comrades\u201d.<\/p>\n

A month after that verdict, Sauvigny was retired prematurely and, in a farewell speech, praised for having \u201clead his office always in a Nationalist Socialist spirit\u201d.<\/p>\n

A decade later in 1947, with Hitler long dead, a postwar \u201cdenazification court\u201d reviewed Sauvigny\u2019s record and classified him as a grade 3 \u201clesser offender\u201d, banned the 72-year-old from holding public office again and cut his pension to 60 per cent of the total.<\/p>\n

\"AA Friedrich Merz election poster in Brilon, his hometown. Photograph: Ina Fassbender\/AFP\/Getty <\/p>\n

Sauvigny protested, insisted he had always \u201cinternally\u201d opposed the Nazis and had been forcibly retired. He said: \u201cWith me there is no question of personal guilt.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1948 he was reclassified as a grade four \u201cfollower\u201d, allowing the restoration of his full state pension for the remaining 19 years of his life.<\/p>\n

There was no pension for Gustav Neuwahl, the Jewish cattle trader who leased land to Sauvigny. In 1937, a ban on his trade for Jews plunged his family into a financial crisis just as his wife died.<\/p>\n

After the November pogrom of 1938, he was arrested, along with other Jewish men in Brilon, and imprisoned for days beneath the town hall \u2013 130 paces from Sauvigny\u2019s town house. Neuwahl was released after signing documents to sell his house and land and collapsed and died at work in 1943. A postwar note says that, in 1942 and 1943, his two daughters \u201cmoved to Poland\u201d. No one helped those Jews.<\/p>\n

In November 1938 Brilon\u2019s synagogue \u2013 opened just seven years earlier \u2013 was set alight as part of the nationwide Nazi-backed pogrom. An eyewitness claimed \u201cthe fire brigade used old hoses so the water didn\u2019t spurt properly\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 1956, a city report said: \u201cNothing is known about the destruction. Also, no persons are known who participated in the destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the city archive reading room, I find retired teacher and hobby historian Hans-G\u00fcnther Bracht.<\/p>\n

Now 79, he remembers Germany\u2019s postwar silence on the Nazi era but is wary, too, of recent decades of memorial work that over-identifies with the few resistance figures and many victims of the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n

He sees Mayor Sauvigny as an ambivalent figure: not hugely pro-Nazi, for all his public rhetoric, yet reliable enough to be kept on by the NSDAP after the 1933 takeover.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my perspective he was a good little cog in an engine where lots of little cogs kept it all working,\u201d said Bratsch. \u201cAll of this happened not because of too little resistance but because too many people fell into line or saw something in it for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

A short walk away, Brilon\u2019s grand 12th century town hall stands on the main square. On the inside walls, portraits hang of previous Brilon mayors \u2013 but not Sauvigny.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s mayor Christof Bartsch, a popular Social Democrat in his second term, says it is up to Friedrich Merz whether to discuss in public how Sauvigny acted in the circumstances of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an emotional subject,\u201d he says, \u201cand, as bystanders, we cannot judge if the time has come [to discuss].\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to point out that Friedrich Merz carries no guilt or responsibility for what his grandfather did or didn\u2019t do in the Nazi era. And the Merz family story has a very different side.<\/p>\n

The chancellor\u2019s father Joachim, still alive at 101, spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. After the war, Joachim Merz served as a judge in a local denazification court. In interviews, Friedrich Merz has said he was inspired to study law from studying his father\u2019s case files.<\/p>\n

Prof Klaus Schubert, political scientist at the University of M\u00fcnster, sees the two sides of the Merz-Sauvigny family as a unique way to tackle the rise and rise of the far right in Germany: the personal is political.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis family reflects \u2013 and helped shape \u2013 German fortunes in an exemplary way, before, during and after the Nazi period,\u201d Prof Schubert says.<\/p>\n

But is it naive to expect a Merz speech on lessons in the present from his family past?<\/p>\n

Yes, says historian Jens Wagner, director of the Buchenwald memorial.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe historic Haus Sauvigny, the childhood home of the Leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz is seen in Brilon, western Germany, in January of this year. Photograph: Ina Fassbender\/AFP\/Getty Images) <\/p>\n

Even eight decades on, most families look away for fear of what they might find \u2013 and from feelings of family loyalty.<\/p>\n

\u201cInternal family histories trump national historical narratives every time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Equally pessimistic is historian Oliver von Wrochem, director of the Neuengamme camp memorial near Hamburg.<\/p>\n

He perceived Merz\u2019s tears as \u201cvery authentic\u201d. Many people are emotional when they reflect on the Nazi era and its victims, he says, but he sees \u201conly ever marginal energy to engage emotionally with perpetratorship at a personal level\u201d.<\/p>\n

For him, that is one of the dilemmas of modern Germany politics: \u201cIf more people dealt with their family histories I think we would do a better job in Germany with what is happening today.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a day at the archives, I head to an evening event attended by the great and good of Brilon where everyone nods their heads worriedly at Germany\u2019s economic present and its political prospects.<\/p>\n

Most here are proud of Friedrich Merz, the local boy made good. But there is doubt, too, that his centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) can deliver on its reform promises in the current coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).<\/p>\n

At the gathering, a local CDU man tells me that an alliance \u2013 formal or informal \u2013 with far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is something the party will have to consider sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

Many think the line was already crossed last February, when the Merz CDU accepted AfD support in a Berlin Bundestag vote on migration policy.<\/p>\n

Some say another line was crossed this week, when a leading German business association said it would now no longer shun the AfD, given its 25 per cent support in polls.<\/p>\n

Some 90 years after his grandfather adapted to political extremism, Friedrich Merz warns that yielding to the AfD siren song would \u201cdestroy\u201d his party.<\/p>\n

He told a recent biographer that this position \u201cis shaped by\u201d his family background, including research into Josef Paul Sauvigny. He declined to respond to written questions from the Irish Times. Might sharing those answers \u2013 and encouraging others to engage with their family past \u2013 be Germany\u2019s last, best vaccine against a slide into political extremism?<\/p>\n

\u201cA situation like this is no time for waffle,\u201d said Prof Schubert of the University of M\u00fcnster, \u201cWe need clarity from Friedrich Merz about what was, and what we can learn from that today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last September, German chancellor Friedrich Merz stood in a synagogue and wept. He was speaking at the opening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[113297,9,10,113296,13,14,6622,6621,6,11,12,15,16,5,30114,113295,7,8,2212,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-206381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-afd-alternative-for-germany","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-christian-democratic-union","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-friedrich-merz","15":"tag-germany","16":"tag-headlines","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-news","22":"tag-second-world-war","23":"tag-the-holocaust","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories","26":"tag-weekendreview","27":"tag-world","28":"tag-world-news","29":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115632715589316224","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}