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
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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