cover image A European Past: Memoirs, 1905-1945

A European Past: Memoirs, 1905-1945

Felix Gilbert. W. W. Norton & Company, $19.95 (229pp) ISBN 978-0-393-02552-1

Gilbert refutes the notion, still prevalent among certain Germans, that Hitler's regime would have been acceptable were it not for his Jewish policy. In this pungent if impersonal memoir, the noted historian, raised in a family of Jews who converted to Christianity, looks back through a glass darkly. He recalls Berlin of the 1920s; turbulent years of revolution and civil war that hardly touched his bourgeois world. The lengthening shadow cast by Nazism is evoked through a series of letters reprinted here. Bleak, atmospheric chapters cover his exile in London where he arrived in 1933 and remained during the later German bombings. As an American officer in 1945, Gilbert was a member of the mission that determined the boundary lines that still divide Germany today. In measured prose he weighs the past against the present, linking his personal sense of dislocation to the ruptures of history. (July)