"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it." So
writes Reiner Schurmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account
of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s.
Schurmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of
escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him
are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and
destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness,
too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents
itself as a continuous quest for--and struggle to free himself
from--his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his
fractured identity--in his childhood at his father's factory, where
he learns of the Nazi past through a horrible discovery; in an
Israeli kibbutz, where, after a few months of happiness, he is
thrown out for being a German; in postwar Freiburg, where he
reencounters a friend who escaped the Nazi concentration camps; and
finally, in the United States, where his attempts at a fresh start
almost fail to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Originally
published in French in 1976, Origins was the winner of the coveted
Prix Broquette-Gonin of the Academie Francaise. In close
collaboration with the author, this meticulously crafted
translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schurmann's
premature death in 1993 prevented its publication process and, as a
result, one of the most important literary accounts of the
conflicted process of coming to terms with the Holocaust and
Germany's Nazi past has been unavailable to English readers until
now. Candid and frank, filled with fury and caustic sarcasm,
Origins offers insight into a generation caught between
disappointment and rage, alignment and rebellion, guilt and
obsession with the past.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
