Started yesterday, finished this morning: this is the first adult picture book I’ve wanted to read, and as anticipated, I couldn’t put it down.
I suppose you could shelve this in some rather specific way. The ‘my grandparents were Nazis’ memoir shelf. Or the ‘ordinary people in the period 1930-1950 in Nazi Germany’ shelf. For me, I’d put it under ‘everybody should read this’. It asks all the questions, without coming up with any answers. But keeping those questions on the tip of our collective tongue is vital to stopping such horror in the future. We need an autistic attitude, we have to feel that these things have just happened, and could happen any moment again. I do believe that the reason we are seeing the resurgence of the extreme right now is at least partly because our memory is slipping, too many feel like it’s a past that isn’t connected to the present. But it is. By blood, by education, by culture, by belief, by greed and by all the bad features of being a human which are after all, the reason why we created society in the first place. To try to hold them in check.
Thank you Nora Krug, for your search for answers. It is your contribution to our never ending discussion about the meaning of life.
