An Invisible Country

Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in An Invisible Country, a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family's story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the "invisible country" surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometers from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather's Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.

Three historical periods play off one another: the years of the grandfather's active manhood, up through World War II; his old age, bitter and disappointed, spent writing his memoirs, periodically confronted by a baffling and rebellious grandson; and the present, which finds the author--now working and writing in Poland himself--reflecting on his family's and his country's past, and on his own troubled relationship to that history as a young activist in postwar Germany.

"Profoundly intelligent . . . Wackwitz's personal study of his nation's dark heritage is a rare gem."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Stephan Wackwitz travels the path of classical modernity, following the footsteps of Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, and their great archive of ars memoria."-Die Zeit