Father of the Land

Two emotionally weighted projects inform Kempe's thoughtful exploration of present-day Germany. In one, Kempe, editor and associate publisher of the Wall Street Journal Europe, travels throughout Germany searching for the present and future of the country poised to regain its position at the political center of Europe. In the other, he examines his own family's links to Germany's Nazi past. The two-track structure works. Kempe, who was raised in America by German-born parents, introduces us to a fascinating array of characters: ordinary Germans who play on his basketball team; leaders of both the secular and Islamist German-Turkish community; German-born citizens who display thinly veiled racism. His personal search, meanwhile, leads him to look beyond the pro-German sympathies of his father and to uncover the past of a relative who was more involved in WWII atrocities than anybody in the family ever cared to know. Yet this is not a book that dwells on German guilt. Instead, Kempe struggles to understand how Germany understands itself as it steps back on to the center of the European stage so soon, historically speaking, after its total degeneration and defeat. He raises--but does not answer--the question of whether Germany's regeneration is as deep as it has been rapid. (May)