A German French journalist views amnesia about the Holocaust through the lens of her relatives’ lives—and raises an alarm about far-right movements.
Schwarz’s grandparents defied a Hollywood trope of Europeans caught up in the cataclysms of World War II: They were neither Nazi thugs nor noble resistance fighters. Her German Protestant paternal grandparents, Karl and Lydia Schwarz, were Mitläufer, people who “followed the current” of the times and, by looking away, helped to keep Hitler in power. Karl was an opportunistic rather than ideological Nazi Party member who profited from a policy that allowed him to buy a small oil business cheaply from Jewish owners but paid up when proprietors’ heirs later sued for reparations. In this exceptionally timely and well-reasoned debut, the author makes a powerful case that seeds of the recent resurgence of far-right nationalism in Europe were sown first by the denial and rationalizations of millions of people like her grandparents and then by postwar mythmaking that preempted the “memory work” needed to correct faulty recollections of Nazism. Germany has done heavy repair work—from creating Holocaust memorials to accepting more than 1 million refugees by the end of 2015—but France, Italy, Austria, and other countries lag far behind. Even in Germany, a backlash has arisen: After the Berlin Wall fell, “Eastalgia” parties sprang up in venues decorated with East German flags, banners, and other propaganda, and an extreme-right party holds its first Bundestag seat since 1949. Europeans used to be able count on American support in opposing tyrants, but that “safety net” unraveled with Donald Trump’s election, and Schwarz draws extended parallels between the president’s tactics and fascists’ (“first, stoke fear”). History doesn’t repeat itself, but “sociological and psychological mechanisms do,” and this book, a deserving winner of the European Book Prize, shows clearly how a willful amnesia can poison nations that have sworn never to forget the Holocaust.
The granddaughter of a Nazi Party member makes a powerful, convincing moral case for resisting toxic nationalism.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9908-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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