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
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 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.
