The tortured history of modern Germany is refracted in the story of a 19th-century villa and the lives of its diverse inhabitants. The literary device of the house as metaphor or microcosm has a long tradition, and Hafner (Cyberpunk, 1991) utilizes it to good effect. Through interviews, private memoirs, and public documents, she tells the story of the villa, situated at the foot of the famous Glienicke Bridge connecting Potsdam and Berlin. Built in 1845, it passed from the Prussian aristocracy to Hermann Wallich, son of a prosperous Jewish banking family. Wallich bequeathed the Italianate villa to his son Paul. A staunch assimilationist, Paul Wallich committed suicide ten days after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht in 1938. With the Nazis in power, the Wallich family was scattered to three continents. Oddly, the history of the house during the war is omitted. After the war, the GDR used the villa as a child-care facility for working parents. Karl Marx would have pointed out with satisfaction how the house passed from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the children of the proletariat, symbolically confirming his theory of history. But after that theory suffered a blow with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 (on the anniversary of Kristallnacht), new problems generated by unification became apparent. Under a law that sought to return to their pre-1933 owners properties seized in the former GDR by the Nazis and later by the Communists, the Wallich family attempted to reclaim their villa. Hafner chronicles their effort—and the almost tragic plight of the children's home as it struggled to remain open. Hafner's structure—each chapter is devoted to a person or family whose life intersected the history of the villa—is a bit repetitive, but her central conceit remains powerful. As she observes: ``The Potsdam villa came to represent less a house in Germany than Germany itself.'' In probing the history and reconstruction of a house, Hafner sheds light on the complicated and delicate reconstruction of memory and history. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19400-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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