| Date: 23 May 2011, 04:15
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This is a novel about an American who guides walking tours in Berlin, a city where the only history is Nazi history. One of the many oddities of contemporary Germany is that the concentration camps, the Hitler Bunker and other destinations are haunted by people who used to live and work there. They're all of retirement age now, and so they hang out for attention, for money, or just because they have nothing better to do. There are the old survivors, the old storm troopers, and the old crazies, and it's often not easy to tell the difference. One self-declared Dachau inmate in 1994 was enough for me, but Ida Hattemer-Higgins made her living in this twilight world for several years. Imagine a waxworks of horrors, with the real-life horrors regularly dropping in to visit. A Grand-Guignol theater with special guest performances by reanimated cadavers, real killers, and crazy people who think they died or think they killed. Imagine working there for a good long while. And imagine the whole country is a little bit like working there: ubiquitous, minor, passing, forgivable, utterly understandable complicity. Proud little stories. I won't give away anything from the book, but I heard one of my own, Grandpa Gunther served in the Ukraine, so of course when the bakery lady fainted from the heat, he jumped over the counter, picked her up and raced her to safety. You know, like she was his Wehrmacht comrade, and another village was burning. And then there's the general uncanny atavistic ferality in the Teuton air, the self-seriousness of the nation of Mercedes-Benz, descended from the inconceivable brutality of the Thirty Years War and farther back, from the barbarians who lived naked in lightless forests, terrified Tacitus, had no land, only cattle, and chopped more than one Roman general and emperor into very small pieces.
The effect of this country and this employment on an impressionable and literary young lady from Cincinnati? Delirium. Fantasy and reality can blend, especially when reality is the worse of the two. My own experiences, my reading of the book and my sense of the author's tenor at a reading I was lucky enough to attend -- all these things convince me that The History of History is a veiled work of creative non-fiction in the tradition of the New Journalism. The prose is better than real life, but the rest strikes me as just about right.
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