A bestseller in Germany, and deserving a wide readership elsewhere in the world.
A remarkable account, dug out of a drawer, about daily life in Germany during the rise of Nazism.
Haffner—a journalist who left Germany in 1938, married a Jewish refugee in London, and enjoyed a long career as a foreign correspondent and columnist—offers a surprising view of the German character: “As a nation,” he writes, “Germany leads a double life because almost every German leads a double life,” one summarized by the Prussian motto “Hard outside, soft inside.” This dichotomy, one supposes, helps explain George Steiner’s famous conundrum: how it could be that concentration camp guards could conduct their business without emotion but weep over Beethoven at night. It certainly explains the German penchant for irony, why dour civil servants such as Haffner’s long-suffering father could be secret lovers of literature, and why law-abiding citizens could welcome a murderous regime but insist that they knew nothing of its deeds. In contemplative pages reminiscent of the best of Elias Canetti, Haffner ponders other German qualities that, he avers, led to Hitler’s rise: a love of sports and therefore of winners (“We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the fatherland”), a fondness for the theater and the carnival (“While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews, there was a certain Lamberty in Thuringia who wanted to do it by folk dancing, singing, and frolicking”), and a fatalistic worldview that assumed the inevitability of evil (“If it makes no difference anyway and everything is lost, then why not be bitterly, angrily cynical and join the devils oneself?”). In that climate, resistance to Hitler came slowly and sporadically, expressed mostly by a world-weary clenching of the teeth—which, of course, was completely ineffectual, and which made true acts of resistance seem rare and strange.
A bestseller in Germany, and deserving a wide readership elsewhere in the world.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16157-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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