| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Book Reviews |
August 2005 |
By Alidė Kohlhaas
I have just completed the reading of three books that in a sense form a perfect triangle, the centre of which is Germany and its Nazi past. Two of the triangle's sides pose direct questions about the how and why of this past. The third side, which may be called the base of the triangle, looks, albeit in an indirect manner, at what has been called Germany's collective memory loss.
The two books that ask direct questions fit into the category of biography as they are based on real people and true events. For that reason, these two books, Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow and Martin Doerry's My Wounded Heart are reviewed as non-fiction books and can be viewed on this website by going to that section, or by clicking on the above name.
The bottom side of the triangle, as stated, deals with memory loss. It is a novel and, therefore, its story is pure fiction. Of the three books, this is the first I read and is the first to be review here. Its title is spies. It was written by a fairly young German author, Marcel Beyer, born in 1965, and considered one of Germany's more admired poets. This is his third novel, and the first to cross my path.
It is, in many ways, a very German novel, in a literary and sociological sense. By this I mean it is obsessively introspective, literarily dense, and full of metaphors that allow the author to avoid direct confrontation with history, and with the present. In some ways this avoidance is good because by doing so Beyer steers clear of preaching to his readers. But it is also irritating because there is no way of knowing . . .
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