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My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders -- An Intimate History of Damage and Denial - Hardcover

Lebert, Norbert; Lebert, Stephan

 
9780316519298: My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders -- An Intimate History of Damage and Denial
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0316519294 ISBN 13: 9780316519298
Verlag: Little, Brown, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

In 1959 the German journalist Norbert Lebert conducted extensive interviews with the sons and daughters of prominent Nazis: Hess, Bormann, Göring, and Himmler; Baldur von Schirach, creator of the Hitler Youth; and Hans Frank, governor of Poland. Then at the beginning of their adult lives, Lebert's subjects were the bearers of notorious names that made them outcasts to some, symbols of a lost glory to others.

Forty years later, Lebert's son Stephan-also a journalist-tracked down these same men and women to find out what had become of them, how they remembered their fathers, and what effect the names they carried had on the paths they had taken. Lebert's account of his conversations, juxtaposed with his father's postwar interviews, gives us an extraordinary and unflinching look at how these individuals have coped with a horrifying heritage.

The stories that emerge are fascinating, surprising, and often disturbing: The young man who refuses military service and is granted conscientious objector status on the grounds that his father is imprisoned by the state--as a Nazi war criminal. The boy who begins his education learning the principles of fascism, finishes it at a Catholic boarding school, and later becomes a priest and a missionary to Africa. The woman who was systematically refused work because she wouldn't use an alias, but who now lives in the suburbs under her husband's name and keeps secret contacts with other nostalgic Nazis. The journalist who writes a scathing magazine article reviling the father responsible for two million deaths, and is greeted with a barrage of letters from outraged Germans--whatever your father may have done, the letters argue, fathers must always be honored.

My Father's Keeper is a remarkable and illuminating addition to our knowledge of the Nazi past and of how this past continues to haunt the present. And it offers a chilling perspective on the way children live with the legacy of their parents' deeds.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephan Lebert (pictured above), born in 1961, attended the DJ (German Journalism School) in Munich. He has worked for the

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and the Berliner Tagesspiegel, where he has been editor in chief since 1999.

Norbert Lebert (1929-1993) was a reporter, freelance journalist, and author of numerous books published in Germany.

Rezensionen

In 1959 the German writer Norbert Lebert interviewed the children of infamous Nazis. After his death in 1993, his son, Stephan, inherited the manuscripts and talked with the now-aging sons and daughters for a second time. They included Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Goring's daughter Edda. Stephan Lebert added interviews with Klaus von Schirach, the son of Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth leader. The interviewees were asked "What does it mean to have a father who participated in mass murder?" The children, in general, defended their fathers' unspeakable crimes. Only one spoke out against his father, saying that he was "cowardly, corrupt, brutish, and sexually stimulated by power" and holding him responsible for the deaths of two million people. This book, first published in Germany in 2000, is an important work, indicating that anti-Semitism is far from dead. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In 1959, German journalist Norbert Lebert set out to interview the offspring of former Nazi leaders young adults with surnames like Himmler and Hess, Bormann and Gering. Six years after Norbert's death in 1993, his son Stephan, a journalist, discovered the interviews among his father's papers and set out to re-interview the children, now senior citizens. Gudrun Himmler and Edda Gering refused. But Wolf-Rediger Hess, Martin Bormann Jr., Niklas and Norman Frank, and Klaus von Schirach were all willing. This is a powerful book, masterfully conceived, brilliant and devastating. The original interviews are interspersed between Stephan's conversations with (or in the case of Himmler and Gering, about) the former young adults who sat with his father. Other chapters explore the parent-child relationship and the nature of evil as they emerge from those conversations. The depth and complexity of the parent-child bond is evident throughout the book, whether the child in question has embraced (Burwitz, Hess) or rejected (Niklas Frank, Bormann) the values and beliefs of the father. Because he's viewing events from a greater distance, Stephan is able to raise a number of wide-ranging questions exploring the reasons behind the national outrage when Niklas Frank published a brutal piece detailing the depth of his hatred toward his father, former governor-general of Poland, and musing on the country's collective denial of individual responsibility during the war. There is much more to be written about the psychology and emotional life of the generation of Germans that fought WWII. But the Leberts have done a remarkable job of breaking a trail through the morass of repression and denial obscuring issues that will continue to disquiet future generations. 20 b&w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Verlag
Little, Brown
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0316519294
ISBN 13 
9780316519298
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Terminal Video
n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com

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