An Invisible Country

Novelist, essayist and director of the Goethe-Institut in Krakow, Poland, Wackwitz has crafted a profoundly intelligent memoir that offers a clear-eyed appraisal of his late grandfather, who served from 1921 until 1933 as pastor of a German Protestant congregation in the then Polish village of Anhalt, 10 kilometers from Auschwitz. Wackwitz tasks himself with looking "behind and between the factual, tangible, and historically accountable events of my grandfather's life as told in his memoirs, in order to see its dream figures and phantoms, who have in turn haunted my own life." Wackwitz brings into focus the complex figure of his grandfather, and without reducing him to a mere symptom of history, Wackwitz deconstructs the old man's unashamedly racist diatribes and defiantly right-wing posturing, and uncovers his intimate connections to Germany's unspeakable 20th century. With honesty and wit, also weighs his own past in relation to his country's legacy, from his confused 1960s student radicalism, to a period of self-exile in Tokyo, the reading of philosophers whose works helped to liberate him from the self-satisfied authoritarianism of his grandfather's generation. Excising ghosts, analyzing the history of German-Polish relations, German colonial Africa and the impact of both world wars on his family, Wackwitz's personal study of his nation's dark heritage is a rare gem. (Aug.)