THE PENDULUM

Julie Lindahl’s historical memoir, The Pendulum, is a detailed account of uncovering her family’s dark past as Nazi SS elite. In the vein of Jennifer Teege’s My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me and Philippe Sand’s East West Street, The Pendulum documents Lindahl’s long and tortuous journey to uncover her grandparents’ role in the Third Reich and World War II, and bears witness to how the failure to face long-buried secrets of hate will asphyxiate a family through generations.

All her life, Lindahl tolerated her maternal grandmother's aggressive racist ideology, which lingered in her family, for the sake of maintaining their close relationship and a sense of family cohesion. Based on troubling stories about her grandfather, passed down over the years, and family relationships contorted by the inability to speak truthfully about the past, Lindahl suspected a terrible secret. Her otherwise understanding father forbade her from asking questions about her Grandfather's role during WWII, and therefore the real circumstances that brought Lindahl to be born in Brazil. At age 43, Lindahl began researching her family history. In the German Federal Archives in Berlin, Lindahl learned the truth: her grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party who sought to fulfil his ambition for land through the SS, associated with shocking crimes against humanity, including the murder and deportation of local landowners, before fleeing to South America as a new wave of war crimes trials commenced in the 1960s. Set against the darkest period in Poland and Germany's history, Lindahl's memoir tries to answer the question of how her grandparents became radicalized and if radicalization is a matter of nature or nurture. Lindahl's grandmother, well-read and cultured, represents the riddle of the perpetrator in whom civilization and barbarism exist side by side. From the horrors of WWII Eastern Europe, Lindahl embarks on a fascinating hunt for the truth in Latin America asThe Pendulum explores her grandparent's lives in exile. There she learns the overwhelming secret that her grandmother's oldest child, Lindahl's uncle, is not dead as she had been told throughout her life.The Pendulum presents history's villains alongside today's heroes as Lindahl discovers how far strangers are willing to go to help her tell this important story. The people she meets on her 6 year path to research and write this memoir renew Lindahl's belief in humankind. Julie Lindahl is an author and columnist based in Sweden who travels to America often for speaking engagements and other business. In 2013, Lindahl was named Honorary Research Associate, University College London in connection with their ongoing project concerning reverberations of war and genocide in later generations, and Wellesley College awarded her the Stevens Traveling Fellowship in 2015-16, allowing her to continue researching The Pendulum. A long form article will be published about Lindahl's research in Wellesley Magazine, which reaches their extensive and influential alumnae network. Lindahl speaks widely in schools, youth centers and other institutions in Europe and the US. In 2016 she was invited to deliver public lectures at The London School of Economics' Global Affairs Institute, and at Hamburg University. Through her outreach and advocacy, and abridged version of the events in The Pendulum has become compulsory reading for 9th graders in schools in New York and Connecticut. Lindahl holds a Bachelor of Arts (Magna cum Laude) in English Literature from Wellesley College and a Masters of Philosophy in International Relations from Oxford University. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Frankfurt, Germany and lives with her husband and twin children in Sweden. Lindahl has American, Brazilian, British and Swedish citizenship. Additionally, Lindahl is the founder of Stories for Society, a non-profit organization for renewing the art of story-making among youth for social transformation. Stories for Society is presently working with youth leaders on the theme of inclusion in refugee and immigrant communities in Sweden.