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"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it." So writes Reiner Schürmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schürmann'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 Académie Francaise. In close collaboration with the author, this translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schürmann'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.
List of contents
5 - 6 Foreword to the English Edition (Reiner Schürmann)7 - 34 How I Learned to Clench My Fists (Reiner Schürmann)73 - 104 How I Take a Midnight Bath in Jaffa (Reiner Schürmann)105 - 138 Why a Jew Swallows Aspirin in the Black Forest (Reiner Schürmann)139 - 178 Why War Surplus Makes a Quebecker Yawn (Reiner Schürmann)179 - 210 How a Polish Woman Takes Me Apart and Puts Me Back Together to Forget the War (Reiner Schürmann)211 - 242 How I Try to Sell Myself to the Americans (Reiner Schürmann)243 - 270 How with My Whole Body I Smash the Past (Reiner Schürmann)
About the author
Reiner Schürmann (1941-1993) wurde in Amsterdam geboren und verbrachte seine Kindheit und Jugend in Deutschland. Nach einem Aufenthalt in einem israelischen Kibbuz studierte er ab 1962 Theologie und Philosophie in Essonne, München und Freiburg i. Br. 1970 wurde er zum Dominikanerpriester ordiniert, verließ den Orden 1975 jedoch wieder. Seit Mitte der siebziger Jahre lebte Schürmann in den Vereinigten Staaten und lehrte ab 1976 an der New School for Social Research in New York, an der auch Hannah Arendt wirkte. 1993 starb Reiner Schürmann an Aids.
Report
"Exciting in its uniqueness. . . . [Schürmann] writes under the influence of a 'masked language' that whispers to him at every word that the blood in his veins is the same as Adolf Eichmann's." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (on the German edition)
