The German Table: The Education of a Nation

Meticulously detailed and eloquent in its account of the plight of assimilated Jews living in Germany after WWII, this fictional memoir can scarcely contain its bitterness and anger. Hermann Reichsmann is born in London in 1940, the son of German Jewish refugees who had fled Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. Five years after the war is over, the family returns to Hamburg, where Hermann's father, Hans-Markus, once again takes the reins of his business, a profitable junkyard, which was Aryanized by Hitler. Luckily, Reichsmann's partner, Klaus Fleischer, is a decent human being and acknowledges Reichsmann's rights. Ten-year-old Hermann goes to school, makes friends and hears nothing about the war. Even his parents compare the war to ""a bad case of the flu, and now it's gone, the leaders are dead...."" No one he knows talks about it, except for the intransigently Nazi-identified parents of an odious fellow student, Heiner Lang. Hermann keeps his mouth shut at first about his Jewish background. But after Germany normalizes in the '50s, the silence that reigns over its recent history is eventually broken. The first surprise for Hermann is that Jutta, the blonde girl he has a crush on, is the daughter of a German father and a Jewish mother. After the televising of an epoch-making documentary called The Twisted Cross, which shows footage from the camps, pent-up resentments are violently aired. Later on, Hermann's self-identity becomes tangled up in his obsession with the far right underground, and even as an adult, he ends up feeling that ""Hitler was Germany and Germany was Hitler."" Still, he chooses to live in Berlin, although his parents move to America. Diamond's modest but deeply felt memoir/novel cuts back and forth between biography and lessons in German history and current affairs, testifying to the struggles of an impossibly conflicted people. Miraculously, Hermann is not, in the end, crippled by bitterness, and that is the redemption the novel offers. (Nov.)