Visual-Textual Encounters with a German Grandfather: The Work of Angela Findlay

In this article, I consider the artistic and literary work of Angela Findlay, the daughter of a German mother and English father, and the granddaughter of a highly decorated Wehrmacht soldier. Working as a visual artist, public speaker and writer, Findlay moves between representational forms in order to express the complexities associated with her dual heritage and the "legacy of shame" that she carries with her. I take Findlay's In My Grandfather's Shadow as a case study that foregrounds new forms of visual-textual witnessing in the descendants of the war generation. I conclude that, by moving between different artistic practices, Findlay is able to encapsulate the complex and transnational experience of being a descendant of both Germany and the Allied nations; in so doing, she challenges the reader to question the conceptual boundaries of testimony, straightforward perceptions of perpetration, and the diluted, but nevertheless affected and affective, experiences of subsequent generations.