The granddaughter of a Nazi Party member makes a powerful, convincing moral case for resisting toxic nationalism.
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. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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