Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
![Loading indicator](/images/ajax-loader-bar.gif)
“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.
(Source: Diaphanes)
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
![Loading indicator](/images/ajax-loader-bar.gif)
Subjects
Fiction, generalPeople
Reiner Schürmann (1941-1993)Showing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1 |
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2 |
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
3 |
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
4 |
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
Book Details
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Links outside Open Library
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?History
- Created April 30, 2008
- 5 revisions
Wikipedia citation
×CloseCopy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help?
January 26, 2022 | Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten | Merge works |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
December 15, 2009 | Edited by WorkBot | link works |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |