An Invisible Country

by Wackwitz, Stephan

• ISBN13: 9781589880221
• ISBN10: 1589880226
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-01
• Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Dist

Summary

Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in 'An Invisible Country', a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family's story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the 'invisible country' surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometres from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather's Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.

Author Biography

Stephan Wackwitz is the director of the Goethe Institute in Cracow, Poland. Stephen Lehmann is a translator and the author of Rudolf Serkin: A Life. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Wendy Lesser	vii
Translator's Note	xiii
1 Ghosts	3	(4)
2 An Unexpected Reappearance	7	(6)
3 Silence	13	(16)
4 Chameleon Years	29	(13)
5 Anomie	42	(7)
6 Invented Story	49	(17)
7 Four Wars	66	(24)
8 In the Emperor's Palace	90	(12)
9 An Island in the South Pacific	102	(12)
10 An Invisible Country	114	(11)
11 Five Professors, Dreams of Jürgen Habermas	125	(30)
12 Abandoned Rooms	155	(11)
13 The Jacaranda of Madeira	166	(12)
14 Tale of the Snake	178	(9)
15 Murder	187	(20)
16 Minor Prophets	207	(8)
17 The Dead	215	(15)
18 Shipwreck	230	(15)
Notes	245