An arresting and unusual portal into the mind of a fighter in the Nazi forces.
A debut memoir chronicles a German soldier’s travails during World War II.
Recollections of World War II are usually told from the side of the victors, often Americans detailing their heroic triumph over a barbaric adversary. Pappert, however, served in the German Wehrmacht and fought against the Allied forces, an experience that provided him with a unique vantage point from which to parse the violence and chaos. The author’s father was a staunch and prominent Christian as well as a principled critic of Nazi tyranny. As a result, Pappert’s eyes were opened wide to the depths of Hitler’s depravity, and he found solace in a faith outlawed by Nazi ideology. In 1942, the author was compelled to join the RAD, essentially a national labor service, as a prelude to his induction into the military at the young age of 18. After working as a “war reporter,” a job that relieved him of more tedious manual labor, Pappert was eventually sent to France, Clermont-Ferrand in particular, and was hypnotized by the beauty of the country, including the magnificence of Paris. (The book is translated from French into English.) He lived in constant peril—one day he was shot in the neck from a sniper in a tower, though thankfully the wound turned out to be a minor one. Later, he was nearly killed by grapes poisoned by the French Resistance. The author also constantly feared the Gestapo, who zealously scrutinized even its most decorated soldiers. In a stroke of luck, he was chosen to decamp for Italy rather than the much more dangerous Eastern front, though he knew this only delayed a terrifying encounter with the much more powerful American military. Pappert’s prose is by turns charmingly humble and affecting. He was riven with internal conflict—a devoted Roman Catholic who despised the Nazis, he still considered it wrong to show disloyalty to his own nation at war. At one point, he was given the chance to flee and join the French Resistance, and he demurred: “I am a German soldier and while I detest the Nazis that does not mean that I would betray my country. Even if I did, the Resistance would always look at me askance, a deserter who cannot be trusted. I cannot accept your proposal.” The first of two volumes, this is a beautifully crafted remembrance that depicts an underrepresented perspective.
An arresting and unusual portal into the mind of a fighter in the Nazi forces.Pub Date: May 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5328-6144-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: WAMFAM Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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