David Baddiel has said he makes comedy to process the intergenerational trauma passed on through the experiences of his mother and grandparents of fleeing the Holocaust.
Baddiel’s mother was born in Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK as a baby in 1939 after her father was persecuted during the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.
Speaking about his book My Family: The Memoir, for the first time, he told an audience at the Hay festival in Powys: “The reason I do this, and I do comedy for a living, which is an extraordinary thing to do at some level, I think it’s primarily about [being] someone who wants some kind of witness. I think I need a witness because the story isn’t containable in keeping itself for me. I think that’s to do with trying to process trauma.”
Depression, breakdown and broken relationships have dogged his grandparents, parents and brothers throughout their lives, he said.
“There is definitely trauma in our lives, it’s partly referred trauma from the Nazis and the terrible stuff that happened. The way my mother decided to process her trauma was quite strange and very transgressive. She was very open about this, and clear to us as kids it was going on, and was very sexualised,” he said.
Much of Baddiel’s new book focuses on his mother, teasing out the comic elements of her public affair with a local golf memorabilia collector, to whom she wrote erotic poems about golf. “For me, I can’t see it completely as trauma, that’s why it’s not a misery memory; for me comedy has been my salvation for all this.”
He described his mother as a “fantasist” who “did not have the gene for shame”, adding that he “definitely picked that up”, and said she was very open about her affair and love for sex throughout his childhood.
Baddiel recalls in the book a time his mother appeared on his show Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and said of his brothers: “How do you know they were all from your father?”
Noting “I apologise for this, it was the early 2000s, I wouldn’t say this now”, he replied: “That’s not a comeback, that’s calling yourself a slag.”
She said: “No, it means I had a good life.”
Baddiel reflected on how “it’s such a 70s thing to say, using sex, and slightly transgressive sex as the marker of a glamorous and interesting life”.
Through writing the book, he has arrived at a new interpretation of her behaviour. “I think my mother in her affair, the golf, in everything else she did was chasing something, was chasing the life she lost. My mum, my grandparents, before the war were very rich in Germany.”
Had it not been for the war, she might have “married some kind of Prussian prince and had a very glamorous life”, and “instead she’s with this Welsh working-class bloke in Dollis Hill”.
Baddiel, whose earlier book Jews Don’t Count argues that antisemitism is treated differently to other types of racism, also reflected on some of his experiences of antisemitism growing up.
Although he doesn’t share the “internalised shame” that many Jewish people have, he recalled teachers inferring that “of course” he had cheated in sports day because he’s Jewish, or being told that “everywhere you go there will be someone who hates Jews”.
He added that he felt his experience was not captured in the diversity questions now asked by broadcasters.
He said: “I was doing one a little while ago, the director ticked that box because his mum was a single mum, lived in Liverpool, worked in a bar so he covered a social class thing. I can’t tick that box and my mum was a Jew born in fucking Nazi Germany, that seems a bit unfair to me because that was about as rough as it could be.”