The Turbulent World of Franz G%C3%B6ll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

In a time when public self-disclosure and blogging seem almost de rigueur, examining the diaries kept by a German everyman for the better part of the 20th century is both curious and refreshing. Born in 1899, Franz G%C3%B6ll chronicled everything from the years before the Weimar Republic to the Reagan era%E2%80%94telescoping between personal intimacies ("deeply entwined with his relations with women"), psychological analyses, family history (G%C3%B6ll wrote a complete memoir within his diary), and global change%E2%80%94without traveling much beyond his own borders. Though Fritzsche (Life and Death in the Third Reich) doesn't present extensive English translations of G%C3%B6ll's writings (the originals were impossibly voluminous), the quotations he includes are superb and include many of G%C3%B6ll's poems. He meticulously contextualizes them, convincingly argues the noteworthiness of their rediscovery, and reveals them as subjective attempts to fashion coherence out of increasingly violent times, as conflicting "ego documents" penned by a figure who decried his own passivity and seemed "caught endlessly between the fantasy worlds of poems and panties." Taken together, they are also a sobering record of modern life's impact. G%C3%B6ll's diaries, begun in 1916, when he was 17, and continued until his death in 1984, offer an invaluable and absorbing look at the preoccupations of a turbulent century. (Mar.)