Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Broken House, The: Growing up under Hitler
Author: KRUGER HORST
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/06/2021
Imprint: BODLEY HEAD
Price: $33.00
Publishing status: Active
In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where
22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men,
women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the
German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by
‘ordinary men’ still living in their midst. The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the
1930s, in an attempt to understand ‘how it really was, that incomprehensible time’. He had
grown up in a Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class
homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit processions and endless ranks of marching
SA men. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the
law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been,
Krüger realised, ‘the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without
whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work’.This world of respectability,
order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger’s older sister decided to take
her own life, leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the inexplicable. The
author’s teenage rebellion, his desire to escape the stifling conformity of family life, made
him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only to be sent
to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step, a family that had fallen
under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it. Written in accomplished prose of
lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an
unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book’s themes also chime with our
own times – how the promise of an ‘era of greatness’ by a populist leader intoxicates an
entire nation, how thin is the veneer of civilisation, and what makes one person a
collaborator and another a resister.
ISBN: 9781847926357
Pages: 256