Death steals everything except our stories. Jim Harrison once used that line to end a poem. I thought of it last week when Stephanie Golightly Lowden told me how she got her mom on audio tape late in her life and at one point her mom said, “I remember when they burned all the German language books.”
While her mother’s memories inspired “Jingo Fever,” Lowden first learned about anti-German bigotry in Wisconsin when she came to Madison in 1970 with a work-study opportunity under E. David Cronon, a noted professor of history at UW-Madison and later dean of the College of Letters and Science.