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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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