The German Trauma: Experiences And Recollections, 1938-1999

Gitta Sereny

Editions

Review

This is a collection of essays, of varying lengths, containing themes - and subjects - which crop up elsewhere in Sereny’s writing.  The books is highly personal, beginning with an account of the author’s first experience of the Nazis, then of her family’s flight from Austria after the Anschluss, and her work after the war with ‘displaced’ children for the United Nations.  For any reader familiar with Sereny’s work, this background is fascinating, and it partly explains the extent of her engagement with the subject.  As always, her prose flows easily, and she has the knack not only of describing her interviewees in a vivid way, but of drawing on the reader by detailing her own thoughts and reactions to what people tell her.  This sense of intimacy and involvement is at its most evident in her superb biography Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth pbk £12.

There are chapters on apologists and neo-Nazis; on the Hitler Diaries hoax; on the film-maker Syberberg, ostracised in Germany for suggesting that Hitler was not a freak but the product of the German character; on Stangl; on Kurt Waldheim; and on Ivan The Terrible, the hated guard at Treblinka.  Although there is a degree of overlap with previous books by Sereny, it is worth (cf. the chapters on Speer and Franz Stangl) including them here, because it gives us a glimpse of her modus operandi both as author and journalist – Gitta Sereny is not one of those writers who completes one book and then moves on to an entirely different subject: all her books, one way or another, have been about people who do evil, and how they live with themselves, and all her work is thoroughly researched.

This is necessarily a more fragmentary book than others by Sereny, and, consequently, less satisfying; unusually, there seem to be one or two slips in the editing (e.g. on page 290, the Lebensborn, is the organisation ‘set up by the SS to encourage the breeding of “perfect” Aryan children’, but is earlier described as one of the more socially enlightened of the Nazi’s projects, ‘not principally, as has often been claimed, as “breeding farms” for SS men’.  That’s the kind of thing you often get in newspapers, but somehow it’s more worrying in a book…

However, it is still a fascinating collection, and the experiences of the people involved, whatever part they played, directly or indirectly, are brilliantly conveyed.  Some of the most compelling material involves the (German) children of those who were active Nazis, and I was certainly left with the strong impression that, despite protestations to the contrary, there are still many people left – including those born in the 1930’s and 40’s – who have yet to come to terms with Europe’s terrible history. - review by Dan Fenton