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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
