A disturbing portrait of one segment of German society in a time of national crisis.
Journalist Bruhns explores the life of her father, a German officer executed in 1944 for his complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler.
To understand how Hans Georg Klamroth could have joined and then become disenchanted with the Nazis, the author, who was six at the time of his execution, has studied family letters, diaries, photographs and old home movies. She likens the prosperous Klamroths to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrook clan. Her research showed that HG, as he was known, served in the Prussian dragoons during World War I, worked abroad in Curaçao and Denmark in the family business and enjoyed an upper-class life of parties, women and horses in a militarist, nationalist milieu. At first HG viewed the rise of the Nazis with concern, but he joined the party in 1933. Bruhns reports with distaste that he did not object to the Klamroth clan’s written assertion of Aryan purity, nor did he protest book burnings or punitive anti-Semitic laws. In World War II he served first in Poland and then with German counterintelligence in Denmark. The author speculates that he aided the Danish resistance while there, and that when he served in Russia he became disillusioned about Hitler’s management of the war after the disastrous siege of Stalingrad. In 1943 he was back in Berlin, tasked with “preventive nondisclosure protection of military research projects,” in the dense prose of translator Whiteside. Bruhns is not certain who confided in her father about the plot to kill Hitler (she doubts it was his son-in-law, as claimed during the trial), but as a member of military intelligence, “saying nothing ha[d] become second nature”; he did not report the conspiracy. After the assassination attempt failed, he was arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, then hanged with deliberate slowness, so it took 20 minutes for him to be strangled to death.
A disturbing portrait of one segment of German society in a time of national crisis.Pub Date: May 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26281-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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