Book Review of The Broken House by Horst Kruger

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(Based on a free review .pdf of the English translation by Shaun Whiteside, from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk)

This is a compelling memoir of the author’s growing up under Adolf Hitler in the middle class Berlin suburb of Eichkamp and subsequent events. It was prompted by the author’s experience attending the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in February 1964, and the chapter dealing with this is where the author (by then a professional journalist) started writing. Having written about the trial and the apparently ordinary German men who were the defendants, he wondered whether he might have, if ordered, committed similar crimes. And he couldn’t really explain his answer to that question without going back to his beginning.

The writing of this book was obviously a deep emotional process for the author and this is evident in the way certain subjects and people only enter the narrative when he is ready to deal with them. His sister is not mentioned until the chapter which deals with Ursula’s suicide and the author’s two NAZI uncles come, with other relatives, to her funeral. The author’s parents were not NAZIs and did not want their son to ever become one, but there were NAZIs in the family, as was normal in Germany. This is what the author is willing, determined, to face.

Life in Eichkamp is described, often in fairly bleak detail, but not entirely without affection. When, as a young man, the author is arrested by a local policeman and his dog on behalf of the Gestapo, he’s eating his favourite dinner (pease pudding with bacon) with his parents. He’s arrested with about a hundred others for high treason. His parents come to the jail and plead for his release, saying that he’s a good boy really and the investigating officer treats them courteously at least. It turns out that the Gestapo have investigated him in such minute detail that they cannot really argue with his parents and in a midnight committal hearing the proper green form is filled in and he’s let off. His half-Jewish Russian Communist friend is convicted and sent to prison, though. This secures his survival, because he must serve his sentence and cannot be released from jail on such a serious charge merely to be exterminated. In a world ruled by NAZI bureaucrats, it’s sometimes the bureaucracy and not Nazism that prevails.

The author goes on to serve as a “paratrooper” in the Luftwaffe. (To explain, because the author doesn’t: after the shockingly wasteful airborne invasion of Crete, German paratroopers were used as extra infantry and there were no more major airborne operations.) Apart from describing how he crossed the front line and surrendered to the US Army, persuading the American commander to advance and take his comrades prisoner rather than simply staying where he was and shelling the Germans to oblivion, the author tells us about his military service only to show how much he had in common with some of the defendants at the Auschwitz trial. And having been arrested and taken to court himself as a young man under the NAZIs, he finds it easy to imagine himself in the dock at the Auschwitz trial. Indeed, a policeman helpfully finds him a chair immediately behind the defendants, so he very nearly is in the dock!

It is a measure of how much the perceptions of the author and other Germans of the NAZIs, was shaped by the NAZI’s own lies, that he is surprised and baffled to find that most of the SS defendants at the Auschwitz trial are accountants and bureaucrats, much like his father and uncles. He had thought that the SS were all men of action, brutal superheroes. If you are talking about the Waffen (“armed”) SS that would be true. But the majority of SS men were in the Allgemeine (general) SS and they were indeed mostly bureaucrats: lawyers; economists; accountants; college administrators. Since 1945, Germans have not been encouraged to understand how the NAZI state actually functioned, and it was the Allgemeine SS who controlled government and industry for the NAZIs, both in Germany and in the occupied territories. I would recommend “The SS Officer’s Armchair” by Daniel Lee, which I have also reviewed, to any readers of The Broken House who want to understand how the SS supplied the Reich with vital administrative as well as military muscle. It is important that we all do understand the bureaucracy of genocide, because it is beginning to happen again in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia even as I write.

The Broken House by Horst Kruger is published in the UK by Bodley Head on the 17^th of June 2021

Book Review of Pelagia by Steve Holloway

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A Science Fiction novel full of ideas.

This novel is a Science Fiction adventure thriller used as a platform for a wide spread of the author’s ideas. All of these are worthy and interesting, but there’s a lot of them and the narrative occasionally stalls, mid-novel, when characters are used to explain ideas to the reader via speeches to each other when, perhaps, they could have been better explained through the narrative, or saved up for another novel. It’s almost as if the author thinks this book is his last-ever chance to communicate his vision to others. I will be mortified if this is literally true, but I suspect that it’s a misapprehension and in any case the best way to proceed is as if you’ve always got another book ahead of you.

The pace picks up again and a lot happens before the end.

The author’s primary idea is marine-farming and marine ranching, which leads him to describe a society which could not only make those complementary endeavours work, but also thrive as a culture and as part of the future world economy. That in turns leads to the ways in which that society might protect itself and what the threats to it might be. There are a lot of clever technological ideas inherent in all of this. The author also covers religious extremism in a way which sets neither Christianity nor Islam up as wholly bad, in that there’s no wrong way to believe in God: what’s wrong is for extremists to believe in their own power and ambition instead of believing in God. (The author doesn’t say so, but the logical extension of that is that completely atheist political activists might also believe in their own power and ambition more than they do in their ostensible political dogma. Sometimes, you don’t have to say something to get a message across and this novel could have been better if the author has been willing to let his readers discover a few more ideas for themselves.) Changing one’s beliefs, as some of the characters do, is not a betrayal if it’s a falsehood that’s being discarded -and this novel’s Turing test is that the machine intelligences cannot really comprehend the concept of God. (None of them act maliciously, though.)

I recommend this with four stars because, despite all the shortcomings, there’s an awful lot of ideas here and that’s really what Science Fiction is meant to be about. To get five stars, the treasury of ideas probably needs to be presented in a different format to a single-narrative adventure novel. In the mid evening of her career the Science Fiction writer Ursula le Guin wrote a “future anthropology” entitled “Always Coming Home” which presented stories, both from a common narrative and from outside that narrative but in the same world and culture, together with descriptive articles, songs and even recipes. She was able to write something which immersed the reader in her ideas about a future society and culture (which included something very like a future evolution of the internet and Wikipedia, neither of which had happened at the time of writing) rather than having characters in an adventure give set speeches. (Which Greek or Roman readers might even have wanted.) I don’t expect Steve Holloway to do exactly the same thing, but I hope he can find a better way of putting his considerable number of ideas across.

 

 

Pelagia by Steve Holloway is published by Lion Hudson Ltd on the 18^th of June 2021. 

Update 2/12/21: This is a link to the author's website for this book.

 

Book Review of The Keepers of Metsan Valo by Wendy Webb

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This novel gradually transforms from a crime thriller with a supernatural undercurrent into a tale of the supernatural. As such it makes for a good read and it is an excellent story about stories and their power. The heroine, Annalise Halla, returns to Metsan Valo, the family seat of the title, in order, so she thinks, to lay her late and beloved grandmother to rest. In the process she has some terrifying experiences before she learns that, for centuries, the wealth, prestige and indeed “power” of the Halla family has depended on at least one member of the family always being in communion with the Vaki, which the author uses to mean the elemental spirits from Finnish folklore (the story, though, is set in a small community on Lake Superior). Annalise does not know whether to believe any of this, and she certainly does not know whether she really wants to get involved with the Vaki, should they really exist!

It becomes clear that the help which the Vaki give to the Halla family comes at a price, the dilemma is whether or not to pay this, but a more pertinent question is whether or not Annalise is really being given any choice at all. The author’s view of the Vaki ends up being a little rose-tinted, and it is worth pointing the reader towards other novels which offer another view. Sally Magnusson’s “The Ninth Child” has a very clear message that Scotland’s equivalent to the Vaki are completely ruthless and delight in sacrifice rather than mercy.

The big problem with most modern treatments of folklore about the Vaki and similar beings from other cultures, is that they habitually confute a beneficial balance of nature with keeping on the good side of (paying unfailing homage to) supernatural beings who are wholly unnatural. They, themselves, do not obey or respect the laws of nature, nor do they love anyone but those who love them -and that entirely on their own terms. To commune with such is to abandon both the physical laws of nature and any objective moral law by which one may tell good from bad.

This book may be read and enjoyed as a fairy story, which is precisely what it is. It is telling, though, that the large white dog called “Pascal”, the bravest and most sensible character in the book, is left stranded by the author as soon as she takes the story towards honouring the Halla family’s ancient bargain with the Vaki. 

 

The Keepers of Metsan Valo is published by Lake Union Publishing on the 5^th of October 2021