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Last Witnesses
ISBN/GTIN

Last Witnesses

Unchildlike Stories - B-format
PaperbackPaperback
EUR15,00
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2xDussmann das KulturKaufhaus

Product description

Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by The Times and Telegraph

'Astonishing. . . Like the great Russian novels, these testimonials ring with emotional truth' - Caroline Moorehead, Guardian

Extraordinary stories about what it was like to be a Soviet child during the upheaval and horror of the Second World War, from Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich

What did it mean to grow up in the Soviet Union during the Second World War? In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich started interviewing people who had experienced war as children, the generation that survived and had to live with the trauma that would forever change the course of the Russian nation. With remarkable care and empathy, Alexievich gives voice to those whose stories are lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history of one of the most important events of the twentieth century.Published to great acclaim in the USSR in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, this masterpiece offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human consequences of the war - and an extraordinary chronicle of the Russian soul.
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Details

ISBN/GTIN978-0-14-198356-1
Product TypePaperback
BindingPaperback
Publishing date05/11/2020
SeriesPenguin Modern Classics
Pages320 pages
LanguageEnglish
Weight236 g
Article no.16799956
CatalogsZeitfracht
Data source no.200410147
Product groupBU940
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Auf einer Skala zwischen eins und fünf bekommt dieses Buch von mir eine glatte Zehn. - Es ist absolut faszinierend wie klug Rutger Bregman seine Argumentation aufbaut und damit einen Großteil dessen, was uns immer wieder an negativer Geisteshaltung vorgebetet wird, dekonstruiert. Dabei ist das Buch absolut lesbar geschrieben. Die radikale Botschaft motiviert gleich in zweifacher Hinsicht: Zum einen bestärkt sie uns in einer kritischen und mutigen Geisteshaltung, die wir derzeit alle gut gebrauchen können. Zum anderen spendet sie Hoffnung, dass wir unsere kleinen und großen Schützengräben verlassen und in ein neues Zeitalter übergehen können. Ein realistisches, wissenschaftliches Buch für Optimisten und solche, die es werden möchten.
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Ronald Gerste beschreibt diese umwälzenden Entwicklungen auf allen gesellschaftlichen Ebenen packend, spannend und fundiert.

Pageturner.

Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I became entirely fascinated by the ways that the children of Nazi perpetrators reacted to their parents' crimes. So it was with something between excitement and jealousy that I later learned that Philippe Sands was making an (excellent) film about exactly the same topic. As part of that film, he got to know Horst von Wächter, the son of Otto von Wächter, Nazi Governor in Galicia during the war. This stunning book (there is also a podcast) not only tells the story of the elder von Wächter's escape from justice at the end of the War - a story which twists and turns like a John le Carre novel (Mr le Carre does in fact feature!) - but also the story of his son's deeply problematic views on his own father. The younger Wächter, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, refuses to accept his father was a major criminal and Sands's great achievement here is to explore that alongside the gripping tale of the so-called Nazi ratlines.
It's not always easy to praise Nobel Prize juries but in bringing Svetlana Alexievich to global attention, they have (by contrast to giving a gong to a guy with a guitar) done great service to global literature. This is her first book and not only one of the best books on World War Two I have read but also a superb advertisement for oral history as a historical and literary form. Even today, it feels fresh and somewhat revolutionary for giving a voice to the huge range of women who fought in the Red Army nearly 40 years after its first publication. What makes the narrative so compelling that it shows which Soviet narratives were widely adopted by ordinary soldiers but also clearly demonstrates this was not a perfect process. And while the horror of war is its central theme, it also shows how fighting could for some (but again not all) female Soviet soldier be emancipatory. A stunning book which is set the stone for her subsequent entirely Nobel-worthy corpus of work.
In Joseph Conrad's short story "Heart of Darkness" the madmen Kurtz utters a sentence which has become infamous: "Exterminate all the Brutes". This story as well as the infamous sentence are indispensable to Sven Lindqvist's attempt to intertwine historical and biographical fact and fiction. It is also the outset for the author's journey through the history of Europe's expansion at the heart of which lies capitalistic greed and violent contempt for otherness. While the journey's result is a harrowing account of the depraved methods of imperial Europe's colonialism, it is also a detailed examination of the brutal submission and extermination of people who were regarded as inferior. The book itself is a mixture of memoir, travel diary and history book and is narrated by a man whose powerful quest for truth and justice rings through every page.
We might all once have felt that the moment of saturation for books about the Third Reich might be approaching when British writers start writing fairy in depth histories of not very significant Bavarian villages during the period. And Julia Boyd is not even the first British person to analyse the social history of smaller places in the era (I think Ian Kershaw might be able to make that claim). This book is however a valuable and well-written addition to the popular history of Nazi Germany. Boyd's cast of characters is kept small enough to mean you begin to understand the internal politics of the village and she faithfully tells stories in an unembellished way. Boyd is not an academic and it sometimes shows in both positive and negative ways. There are a few small inaccuracies in the book but her empathy for her characters shines through (occasionally to an almost jarring extent). In short, even if this is the moment of saturation, I think we might be best off just adding more water.
Perhaps this is not the time to be reading about examples of suspicion of mainstream medicine in German history. Monica Black's research into spiritual healers in post-war West Germany could be read as a harbinger of Impfskeptiker to come. However, this would be a bold reading indeed - one of Black's points is in fact that the craze around witch doctoring petered out as Germany began to tackle the history of the Holocaust in the 60s. In general, I thought this was a superb piece of historical research which focuses on Bruno Gröning, a Christian healer who emerged in Herford, a small town in West Germany, before becoming subject of a national cult at the end of 1940s. If I were to criticise Black, I would point to the fact the book really is just the history of Gröning with a few other examples of witch crazes thrown in to back up her narrative. I would also say she can occasionally draw big conclusions from small facts but generally this is an excellent, thought provoking book.
There are a number of books one could read to try and make sense of the current situation but this one is definitely a good place to start. Originally published seven years ago, it chronicles Pomerantsev's experiences in the early noughties, when he was pursuing a career in Russian TV production. His highly readable account focuses on several cultural phenomena, such as the gangster turned film producer, the rise of Russia Today and the deeply ingrained corruption. I suspect this was once a more light-hearted read but in the light of recent events, it is almost scarily prescient and underlines once again the argument, that the war on Ukraine shouldn't really be a surprise but is rather the result of a development that someone could already knowledgably write about in 2014.

Author

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'.Richard Pevear, along with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky, has translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They both were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). They are married and live in France.

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