A footnote but one that will appeal to careful readers of modern European history.
A blink-of-the-eye episode in the history of the Third Reich sets the events of Kristallnacht in motion, anticipating the years of terror that followed.
In 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy living in Paris, angry at the maltreatment of his family in Germany, bought a gun and, “never before having fired a weapon in his entire life, shot down the first German diplomat he saw.” It is a matter of some irony that the diplomat in question had “denounced Hitler as the antichrist,” writes Koch (The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles, 2005, etc.), but no matter; propelled to instant fame, Herschel Grynszpan provided an excuse for the Nazis to launch sweeping anti-Semitic campaigns in their homeland. When France capitulated, he disappeared into the judicial machine of the Third Reich with the idea that he would be brought up on a show trial to prove that the Jews had really started the war in Europe. Though young and seemingly without much guile, Grynszpan threatened an ingenious defense. Rather than allowing it to air, the Nazis effectively erased him from history—a history in which, by Koch’s account, he was a pawn, though one who may have understood exactly how he was being played and resisted accordingly. Koch is fond of arty flourishes (“While these demonic plans were being laid, this very young man, so recently a child, confronted history—monster history—alone and entirely defenseless”) but careful on matters of causation, noting that something like Kristallnacht would have happened anyway. Throughout, he places seemingly minor events against a much larger backdrop that takes in the murderous intent of the Hitler regime, the devotion of servants such as Joseph Goebbels to Nazism’s “Big Lie” (his service of which, Goebbels believed, would further “the transformation of humanity into a new order”), and the ultimate fate of the Jews of Europe.
A footnote but one that will appeal to careful readers of modern European history.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-144-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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