A profoundly disturbing yet ultimately hopeful story of a young man's passage through the heart of darkness. Hasselbach was once considered the golden hope of the neo-Nazi movement in East Germany. Standing over six feet with blue eyes and blond hair, he was the perfect ``Aryan.'' According to Hasselbach, as a young man in the GDR, he was repulsed by the arbitrary power and intimidation of the state. This, along with an ambivalent relationship with his father (a radio announcer considered ``the voice of the GDR'') and an abusive relationship with his stepfather, combined to foster a tremendous feeling of resentment against all symbols of authority, especially the state. Here are some subtle insights into the nature of rebellion and hatred. He came to see the neo-Nazi movement as the only available means to protest against the state. And in that movement, Hasselbach found the solidarity and community missing in both his family and East German society. Some of Hasselbach's revelations are shocking: He writes, for example, that in unified Germany, right-wing terrorists received more lenient treatment than left-wing terrorists; he reports on the well-coordinated international network of neo-Nazis (including the American movement); and, perhaps most provocatively, he notes the connection between neo-Nazism, homosexuality, and the S&M scene. The cast of characters in this real-life bildungsroman is indeed fascinating and horrifying, from sadistic youths to little old ladies demanding more desecrations of Jewish cemeteries. Eventually, Hasselbach recognized ``the psychological horror at the heart of everything we did'' and broke with the movement. Then, hunted down and marked for death by his ex-colleagues for his ``treachery,'' Hasselbach struggled to convince the authorities, the public, and his former enemies on the Left that his conversion was sincere. An ominous look into contemporary German society that reveals a thriving neo-Nazi ideology. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43825-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
