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| Genre/Form: | Nonfiction History Biographies Biography |
|---|---|
| Named Person: | Stephan Wackwitz; Andreas Wackwitz; Wackwitz family.; Stephan Wackwitz; Andreas Wackwitz; Andreas Wackwitz; Wackwitz family.; Stephan Wackwitz; Stephan Wackwitz; Andreas Wackwitz; Wackwitz family. |
| Material Type: | Biography, Internet resource |
| Document Type: | Book, Internet Resource |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Stephan Wackwitz; Stephen Lehmann |
| ISBN: | 1589880226 9781589880221 |
| OCLC Number: | 57613652 |
| Description: | xiii, 254 pages ; 23 cm |
| Contents: | Ghosts -- An unexpected reappearance -- Silence -- Chameleon years -- Anomie -- Invented story -- Four wars -- In the emperor's palace -- An island in the South Pacific -- Invisible country -- Five professors, dreams of Jürgen Habermas -- Abandoned rooms -- The Jacaranda of Madeira -- Tale of the snake -- Murder -- Minor prophets -- The dead -- Shipwreck. |
| Other Titles: | Unsichtbares Land. |
| Responsibility: | Stephan Wackwitz ; translated by Stephen Lehmann ; foreword by Wendy Lesser. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime [Auschwitz] were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and clarity, Wackwitz breaks this silence in An Invisible Country-an original, learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family's story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the "invisible country" surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometers from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather's Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.
Three historical periods play off one another: the years of the grandfather's active manhood, up through World War II; his old age, bitter and disappointed, spent writing his memoirs, periodically confronted by a baffling and rebellious grandson; and the present, which finds the author-now working and writing in Poland himself-reflecting on his family's and his country's past, and on his own troubled relationship to that history as a young activist in postwar Germany. Book jacket.
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