An engrossing, haunting journey for bibliophiles and World War II historians.
An erudite exploration of the systematic plundering of libraries and book collections by Nazi invaders.
Looting books by mainly Jewish owners, collections, and libraries was an effective way of stealing Jewish memory and history, as this thorough work of research by Swedish journalist and editor Rydell attests. From early bonfires of objectionable publications (by Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, among others) in Berlin in May 1933, staged by enthusiastic German student federations, to the desecration of synagogues and sacred texts on Kristallnacht to the methodical plundering of libraries in occupied areas during the war, Rydell ably delineates the spiraling destruction, city by city: Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Thessaloniki, Vilnius, Prague, etc. The Nazis believed libraries needed to be “cleaned up” and “un-German” literature destroyed—i.e., “degenerate,” “Communist,” Free Mason, and “Jewish” works. As the author emphasizes, however, the Nazis were not anti-intellectual; on the contrary, they were building a whole new “intellectual being, who did not base himself on values such as liberalism and humanism, but rather on his nation and race.” The most valuable books (e.g., antique and medieval works) were claimed by chief Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s plundering organization, ERR, which grew into a frightening international organization focused on confiscating “thoughts, memories, and ideas” and enlisted intellectuals and academics as librarian foot soldiers. Rydell considers the millions of volumes confiscated, such as the priceless Yiddish library in Vilnius, essentially the repository for Ashkenazi history and culture. In the “model” concentration camp Theresienstadt, Hebrew scholars were saved from immediate murder by being forced to catalog the thousands of confiscated books in what was called the Talmud Command. Rydell visited many of the rehabilitated libraries (which are still sorting the stolen books), and he traces some of the volumes that have since been returned, such as a cherished book belonging to Berliner Richard Kobrak, deported with his wife to the gas chambers in Auschwitz in 1944.
An engrossing, haunting journey for bibliophiles and World War II historians.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2122-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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