The discussion questions below are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Api’s Berlin Diaries and Better Homes of South Bend.
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Discussion Questions
- What struck you most about the story?
- Why is this story of 75 years ago of interest to us today?
- How have your ideas changed by reading this book?
- How responsible do you feel for the beliefs or actions of your parents, grandparents, and beyond?
- Have you ever thought about the influence of the past on your own life?
- How the long shadow of the Nazi past caught up with Robinson and why she wrote the book
- We are not responsible for what our ancestors did but we are accountable. How Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family helped Robinson overcome her reluctance to tell her story
- Ordinary citizens in totalitarian regimes. A doctor’s daily life in Berlin 1945. Conditions in medical bunkers
- Effects of a steady diet of propaganda and lies
- The process of de-Nazification
- German guilt and German silence
- All our political responsibility. What would I have done?
- The power of stories to create empathy
- Why and how to tackle a difficult past
- Robinson welcomes your questions and insights on telling your own story.
Discussion Questions
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin, 1963
- What does the story tell us about the importance of fair housing?
- What is situation where you live?
- What makes a group of houses a community?
- Jim Crow in the North, then and now. The situation in South Bend
- Redlining and housing segregation in the North
- What has changed since the 1950’s and what has not?
- The importance of home ownership for future generations: the children of Better Homes
- Your ideas what can be done today?
- What does it show us about how to work for social change?
- A case for reparations?