Germany Books

This is a novel that any lover of classic music will enjoy. After Beethoven and Schubert opened the era of romanticism, a constellation of talented young musicians followed their path, and produced perhaps the most beautiful music ever written. This novel follows the lives of Clara Wieck, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, but Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner are as important in this novel, as fellow musicians of the time, that related to each other socially and professionally. The author uses known reliable information sources through the great deal of correspondence available, at a time when letters were the standard of communication. However, Mr. Desai is careful not to overwhelm the reader with academic information. Instead, he shows us the characters as real individuals, enmeshed in the artistic dilemmas of their times, that oddly enough, appear very similar to the present. The central "Trio" story of Clara, Robert and "Hannes" (for Johannes Brahms) is well known, but it is told as in real time. The beautiful love story of Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann is always a sheer pleasure to revisit. The real life adjustments for a talented woman, the foremost pianist of her time, married to a musical genius in the 19th century appears very similar as the conflict that "career" women face today. Her struggles for independence from her domineering father are also well known and are described in a very entertaining fashion by Mr. Desai. The conflict between those musicians who wanted to compose as they felt it versus those who were only pampering to their contemporary audience is made very clear, and sounds eerily familiar with present times. Also the conflict between the proponents of the "new music", as proposed by Wagner, and those who believed in following the steps of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart, are also shown in a day to day "conversational way", that makes it very entertaining and didactic for those of us who are not experts on the subject.

The reading of Trio was an extremely enjoyably experience. I wish the follow up is coming soon, to show us more of the lives and times of Brahms and Wagner with their genius in full bloom and their divergent approaches to the art of music, a conflict probably alive today.

rafducos@bellsouth.net

As a new US administration faces a Europe less in need of the old NATO protective canopy, and a more self-assured Germany asserts itself within that new Europe, the implication for future transatlantic ties should be of interest to more than just foreign policy buffs. Americans who grew up on a steady diet of WW II books and movies will find Heneghan's updated German story gripping as well as enlightening.

Wannsee House and the Holocaust
by Steven Lehrer (McFarland, 196 pp. $32.50)

For most of the years after January 20, 1942, the three-story villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58, on the shore of Berlin's popular recreation lake, was a footnote in the accounts of the Holocaust. Finally it merits its own book.

Steven Lehrer, a radiation therapist, has documented the history of the infamous site where the Third Reich officially implemented the Final Solution. His book is a companion piece to his forthcoming Hitler Sites (McFarland), which is a historical guide to 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with the life of Adolf Hitler.

Wannsee House traces the villa's background from its construction in 1914 by a prosperous Berlin merchant and its sale in 1921 to a right-wing industrialist to its purchase by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich with plundered Jewish money as a vacation spa for Nazi security police. Ultimately, it was the location for the conference at which genocide was plotted.

"'God will give him blood to drink!' was the curse of a man hanged for witchcraft that fell upon the inhabitants of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of The Seven Gables," Dr. Lehrer writes in his introduction. "The Wannsee Villa bears a certain eerie resemblance to Hawthorne's fictional creation, its inhabitants cursed by the evil period of German history to which the house stood witness."

The book, organized as a series of tightly written vignettes, emphasizes that the Wannsee Conference was not the administrative genesis of the Nazis' plans to annihilate European Jewry. Rather, it coordinated and consolidated what was already under way. "By the time of the Wannsee Conference...the Einsatz groups, operating behind the army frontlines, had murdered more than half a million people. Thus there was no need of a decision at the conference to commit mass murder. The Wannsee Conference facilitated the killing."

After World War II, the house became a center for political seminars, then a youth hostel. Fifty years later the building was inaugurated as a historical memorial. In its halls are photographs of Nazi persecution; one room is dedicated to Auschwitz.
The German decision to make the Wannsee house a shrine to victims is another part of the society's effort to remember its past. This book ensures that Wannsee will not be forgotten. --Steve Lipman.

I. The Wannsee Villa and Fritz Haber

II. Friedrich Minoux Buys the Wannsee Villa and Enters Politics

III. Aryanization, Friedrich Minoux, and the Plundering of the German Jews

IV. Friedrich Minoux Defrauds the Berlin Gas Company

V. Reinhard Heydrich and the Nordhav Foundation

VI. Planning to Murder the Jews of Europe

VII. Ordinary Germans, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust

VIII. The Wannsee Villa After the Wannsee Conference

Appendix A. A Jew Defined; Appendix B. Letters; Appendix C. The Wannsee Protocol; Appendix D. Biographies of Wannsee Conference Participants; Appendix E. Eichmann's Testimony in Jerusalem About the Conference; Appendix F. Notes on the Film "The Wannsee Conference";

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index

"I just had a fascination with it because of what happened there," says Lehrer. It means the Holocaust.

The Upper West Side resident kept going back because of curiosity. And because of his books.

"Wannsee House and the Holocaust," which describes the background of the villa on a Berlin lake where the Final Solution was plotted by a small group of Nazi leaders in early 1942, was published recently by McFarland & Co., a small firm in North Carolina. "Hitler Sites," a historical guide to some 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with Adolf Hitler's life and career, will appear later this year. It's also being published by McFarland.

Lehrer, 56, who works at the VA Hospital in the Bronx and teaches at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, calls both books the first in English on their topics.

His name on the Wannsee book identifies him only as Steven Lehrer - no Dr. "My medical degree didn't exactly relate to this [subject]," he says.

Working first at a typewriter, then later at a computer, Lehrer has written six books since 1979 on such topics as great medical discoveries, cancer treatments, and examining patients by their heart and lung sounds. He also wrote an introduction to a reissued collection of stories by American adventurer-hunter Frank Buck.

"I guess I'm interested in different things," Lehrer, a Los Angeles native, explains.

His interest in the Holocaust, in how a society where Jews apparently were fully integrated could produce the most-systematic genocide in history, sent him back to Germany some 15 times.

How? One answer, the doctor says, is the people. As a Jew - with a German-sounding name - Lehrer says he felt anti-Semitism, in Germans' eyes and in their words, wherever he traveled. "It hasn't changed at all" since World War II, he says.

First Lehrer did the "Hitler Sites" book. He visited the houses and the schools and the homeless shelters and the infamous Munich beer hall and the Berlin bunker where The Fuehrer supposedly died.

"It's difficult for people to understand how he did what he did," Lehrer says. "If you actually go and see these places" - many of them places of poverty - "you see what made him so angry and bitter. You see the level of anti-Semitism that still exists in these places."

The Wannsee book grew out of his research for the sites book. Lehrer toured Wannsee, a government-administered Holocaust memorial since 1992, five times. "Everything there was in German," discouraging foreign visitors. He couldn't find a book in English about the building and its history. So he decided to write one.

"I felt this was a place American Jews should know about," he says.

Based on research from more than a dozen German books and the on-line archives of German newspapers, he relates the history of the villa, the fates of the 15 participants in the Jan. 20, 1942 conference, and the largely unknown story of a Holocaust survivor who lobbied for the site's designation as a national monument.

The book reads like fiction.

"I like to tell a story," Lehrer says. "I've always been a great admirer of Barbara Tuchman," the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who related historical events through the eyes of their participants. "I've tried to use her approach."

Lehrer's next project is a study of "Jewish entertainers in the Holocaust." That means more trips back to Germany. "I have a reason," he says.

Lehrer doesn't encourage his readers to visit the places he has visited. "I think reading about it is enough."

That's just the visual treats the book provides. The written descriptions give the required information - powerplant, dimensions, performance, armament, etc. Where there were prototypes, modifications and variants, details are also given. Of interest to me, and highlighted by the book, is the fact that much of the history of the Luftwaffe is also a story about designs and designers. Experimental designs were almost a rule rather than the exception. The great designers like Willy Messerschmitt, Ernest Heinkel and Claudius Dornier live on through their wonderful planes, even the great 'what might have beens' (Me 262, He 162, Arado 'Blitz' and my personal favorite, the revolutionary Do 335). All are beautifully depicted for us here.

Pros: Very complete, includes all the front-line types plus some of the most interesting experimental planes. Interesting text, planes arranged in alphabetical order. Most pictures in black and white, but it has many color side-drawings for camouflage illustration. Many cutaway and double-page illustrations.

Cons: Would have liked it more if it had included all the second-line types as well.

Hardcover, 253 pages, profusely illustrated. Reviewed by: Eduardo Ahumada M. Antofagasta-Chile.

Thirty years later, I picked this one up with some trepidation; we've all struggled through classics of two hundred years ago, baffled by arcane language & outdated usages. However, to my very pleasant surprise, the book is terrific, combining an Iberian travelogue with delightful tales and legends of Moorish Spain. Irving's travels are interesting enough in themselves, but it is the tales, which have everything from flying carpets to hidden treasure, that really make the book.

GRADE: A

It is not a short read for a 5 year-old, but it held his attention again and again. It is one of his favorites.

I bought this book because I love the illustrations of Ms. Hyman. We have read "Bearskin" by Howard Pyle, "Little Red Ridinghood", and "The Fortune Teller", all illustrated by Ms. Hyman. Her colors are vibrant and exciting. It seems that every book Ms. Hyman is involved with includes a great story and a great story teller.

"The Water of Life" has it all, love, tests and trials, devotion, greed, and betrayal. It gives us, mother and son, lots to talk about. I recommend this book heartily.

Don't believe me? Well, when I was no more than five years old my father got this book out of the library, but nine years later, all I could remember was a certain illustration that depicted the prince escaping from the enchanted courtyard. It was such a narrow escape as the gates closed on him, that his heel was torn off. This picture and the narrative stayed with me all those years, till I picked up another Trina Schart Hyman book, whose style of illustrations seemed vaugely familiar... After some typing on the public library's search engine "The Water of Life" was refound, and I stood in the library parking lot staring in amazement at the illustration that had stayed in my head for over nine years.

Well enough reminising, I'll get to the plot of the story. It is based on the Brother Grimm story, but unlike other retellings of their tales which "shear" certain components of their narratives, Barbara Rogasky keeps in all the details and subquests that make the story so intricate. If you've ever read Brothers Grimm you'll know that the pretty little stories you usually see nowadays are very unlike their original counterparts. Often the Grimm Brothers would go off into tangents in their storytellings, adding unexplained or irrelevent people and events, which made them slightly confusing, but all the more colourful and fascinating. "The Water of Life" tells the story of three brothers whose father was very ill. After the two eldest brothers go, are rude to a small dwarf traveller and therefore trapped in a ravine between two mountains, the youngest son rides out to find the Water of Life and cure his father. He is not so coarse to the dwarf and so gathers some useful advice: that the Water is held in the fountain of a courtyard in an enchanted castle, guarded by iron gates and fierce lions. The Prince enters this place and there meets a beautiful Princess. You guessed it, it's love at first sight, and the Prince gathers the Water for his father, promising that he'll return to wed the Princess in a year's time. But his treacherous brothers have other plans - to have their brother destroyed and claim the Princess for themselves.

It has all the components of a traditional fairytale: an ill king, three feuding brothers, a castle under a spell, a dwarfin companion and a beautiful princess, but here appear like brand new under Barbara Rogersky's working of the mysterious narrative. There are passages of intrigue and detail galore: the table of enchanted princes, the youngest son's travels with the magic bread and sword, the huntsman sent to kill him, and the wise Princess's own plan to secure her true love. Yet despite the darker tones of the tale, the morale shines through: that of honesty, love and truth always coming through in the end.

And then of course, there's Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations. They evoke a beautiful and deep medieval/fairytale world, and perfectly echo the story, as well as creating an extra depth of their own. Long after the dwarf disappears from the narrative, he features in the illustrations, peeking from behind trees and watching the action from high bluffs. Likewise, the lions that guard the gates of the castle appear in the narrative only as "watch-dogs", but continue to appear at the Princess's side like overgrown house cats. There are stories within stories, as the tapestries in the king's bed chamber seem to tell an unknown but fascinating woodland tale, and there is no picture more intriging than the table of enchanted princes: one with butterfly wings, one with stag's horns, one with a unicorn horn, another with a bird's head... Likewise, the sight of the two elder brothers wedged between two mountains on horseback is comic, claustrophobic, inventive and completely realistic. Finally, everyone may groan at the "love at first sight" passage, but Hyman's incredible details create love and adoration between two figures that *make* you believe in it. Her details and use of colour are perfection, and out of all her works, "The Water of Life" is one of the best.

Children are some of the most underestimated creatures in the world, and they deserve to have this wonderful story read to them. Turn off the T.V. and open "The Water of Life". Hopefully Amazon will place a picture of the product on this webpage so that everyone can see for themselves and not just take my word for it just how beautiful this book is.

This is the gold standard of Kaiser Wilhelm II biographies.

You could learn the speed, range or how many guns of each airplanes from tones other books, but you won't be able to learn the feeling to fly all of them by the same person from them.

This book was published long long time ago, but don't think the data and describtion is also old. Those experience is never faded away.