In the Cellar

Amid a rash of politically motivated kidnappings and assassinations, Reemtsma, a German social critic, philologist and multimillionaire, was kidnapped by thugs in 1996 and held captive for 33 days in a dark cellar, chained to a wall. His nightmarish situation led him to reexamine his life, the fear of death, the roots of violence, modern alienation from self, crime and punishment--all with passing references to Freud, Descartes, Sartre, Augustine and Wittgenstein. Reemtsma feared that his abductors were right-wing terrorists angry at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which he founded and which had exposed the crimes of the German Wehrmacht in a recent exhibition. But they were simply extortionist hoodlums, who released him after payment of a huge ransom. Writing of his ordeal in the third person to achieve clinical detachment and reproducing the kidnappers' messages and phone calls as well as his letters to his wife and son, Reemtsma painstakingly reconstructs his day-to-day anxieties and hopes, his violent revenge fantasies, the irony, grim humor and other mental strategies that helped him survive. He lambastes the press for the media frenzy surrounding the ""deluxe kidnapping,"" as some stories termed his ordeal (he was given books and newspapers to read). His harrowing tale also has moments of black comedy: the cops bungled several attempts to deliver the ransom, and the thugs, rank amateurs, used voice-distortion equipment on the telephone, which rendered their demands almost incomprehensible. In addition to offering an example of what happens to a sophisticated mind under extreme duress, Reemtsma's chilling account of his terrifying ordeal reads like a philosophical police procedural. (Feb.)