An unforgettable memoir of growing up in Nazi Germany.

First published in Germany in 1966, The Broken House is a memoir of growing up in Nazi Germany. Born in 1919, novelist and journalist Horst Kruger was fourteen when Hitler came to power. He was part of a resistance movement, escaped serious punishment and eventually was conscripted into the German army. When all was lost, he surrendered prematurely to the Americans and gave them vital coordinates, helping close down a battlefront early.

Kruger looks back to his youth in Eichkamp, Berlin, to try and figure out what the appeal of Hitler was. The enigma of the century, why was Hitler so popular, how did he get away with the murder of six million Jews? The irony, as he writes it, is that the sentimental, suburban, middle-class Germans who adored Hitler were not paid up Nazi members. Although in one passage Kruger describes his mother buying him a “pretty” swastika to put on his bicycle. It was this broad cohort of non-political Germans, Kruger maintains, who created Hitler. Without them Hitler couldn’t have existed. Indeed, it’s easy to see how respectable middle-class Germans turned a blind eye to the looming Holocaust. Jewish neighbours were disappearing left, right and centre, yet no alarm bells went off. People merely shrugged their shoulders.

In other chapters Kruger describes the strange middle class preoccupation with respectability. When his sister commits suicide, what seems more important, to his mother at least, is that appearances are kept up. They lie to the neighbours about her sudden and dramatic ambulance journey and Mrs Kruger is relieved that she died a virgin, her sacredness intact.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing and compelling chapters is the description of the trials for war crimes. A parade of unremarkable men – doctors, academics, public servants – are assembled in court. A seemingly innocuous bunch. It’s hard to put these respectable images next to the hideous crimes they performed. A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.

For anyone trying to understand this incomprehensible period of history, The Broken House offers the feel, smell and mood of a Germany that thinks itself innocent, having emerged from the humiliations of the 1918 Versaille Treaty. Hitler offers the country self-esteem, hope and a bright future. But anti-semitism is everywhere around these simple German folk. It’s essential to Hitler’s madness. Failure to see these wrongs will form a large part of Germany’s downfall.

For some reason this fascinating time capsule has only recently been re-discovered in Germany, republished in 2019. It appears now in English for the first time. With the novelist’s gift for narrative, lyrical description and compelling character studies, Horst Kruger’s memoir is both aesthetically pleasing and of deep historical value. 

The Broken House: Growing Up Under Hitler, by Horst Kruger. Published by Jonathan Cape. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A highly readable history of modern China that will answer many questions about the country's development and its current political challenges.

Jonathan Fenby's sweeping history of China covers the modern period from 1850 right up to today, finishing with Xi Jinping (updated in 2019 for the third edition). The book starts by chronicling the last days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), which featured prominent figures such as the Empress Dowager Cixi who was the power behind the throne for close to five decades.

Upon the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the country was run by a disparate group of warlords until civil war broke out between the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, and Mao Zedong's Communists. In 1949, the People's Republic of China was declared. Mao's rule, from 1949 to 1976, would see some of the worst crimes against humanity, with millions killed due to unnecessary famine and ideological warfare. Mao's Cultural Revolution tipped China into a veritable state of madness. Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping would start to open up the country's economy and herald a new era of rising wealth. Despite liberalising trade and lifting living standards, politically China remains authoritarian. Many Western thinkers have presumed that China would follow the West into democratic government due to its embrace of capitalism, but this hasn't happened.

China's last 170 years have been turbulent, violent and full of terrible suffering for its people. The humiliations it suffered at the hands of the Japanese and Western powers has left its indelible mark on the nation's psyche. Descriptions of the Nanking Massacre are beyond horrific. Yet despite many decades of tragedy, China has managed to rise and become a formidable global power.

One of the main questions the book raises is the contradiction between China's liberalised economy, which has brought much wealth, and it's autocratic government, with more and more power concentrated in the hands of Xi Jinping. This contradiction is causing much tension in Chinese society and it remains to be seen whether this is sustainable. Will public unrest breakout and destablise the country, or will China retain its repressive government?

For anyone looking for a bracing recent history of China, Jonathan Fenby's brilliant book won't disappoint.

The Penguin History of Modern China, by Jonathan Fenby. Published by Penguin. $35

Review by Chris Saliba

Social historian Hallie Rubenhold presents the harrowing biographies of the Jack the Ripper victims.

The five victims of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – are often assumed to have been prostitutes. This assumption, stubbornly in place for 130 years, has allowed a terrible misogyny to go unchecked. These women it has long been thought were “just prostitutes” who had put themselves in harm's way and were therefore in some way the authors of their own misfortune. While no one deserved to be brutally murdered, that it happened to these women was somehow considered to be understandable.

Social historian Hallie Rubenhold has done a stunning job in getting to the truth of the matter. Researching the lives, social milieu and economic circumstances of “the five” she has created nuanced portraits of Victorian women and the brutal, unforgiving society they had to navigate. It's a story of alcoholism, domestic violence, economic exploitation, sex trafficking, hard labour in workhouses and endless childbearing. Women had only one career option, marriage, which mainly involved looking after a husband and an ever growing brood of children, often on a limited income.

Poverty was the main reason Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane were targets of Jack the Ripper. Most had their throats slit while they were sleeping rough on the streets. One one of the women, Mary Jane, worked professionally as a sex worker. Elizabeth Stride, like many poor and destitute women, reluctantly performed some sex work to keep her head above water, but most likely would not have identified as a prostitute. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes were not prostitutes.

Most of the women had problems with alcohol, some cases severe. The most bracing parts of the book describe some of London's most notorious quarters, with their desperate poverty. Women who lost a male partner or fled an abusive husband could find themselves soon sinking fast, living in crime riddled neighbourhoods and rubbing shoulders with all sorts of unsavoury types. The only other option besides living rough on the streets was to enter the workhouse, often considered a fate worse than death, with its abuses and punitive regimes.
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The Five demonstrates how much popular thinking still likes to blame the victim. Hallie Rubenhold redresses this error, bringing to light the many injustices against women of the Victorian era.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, by Hallie Rubenhold. Black Swan. $19.99

Review by Chris Saliba

Garry Linnell’s portrait of escaped convict William Buckley is a stunning triumph.

William Buckley (1780 – 1856) is surely one of the most intriguing and enigmatic characters of Australian history. He fought Napoleon as a soldier in the King's Own Regiment in 1799, but later came undone for receiving stolen goods - a bolt of cloth. He was given 14 years and sent to New South Wales, arriving upon the Calcutta in 1803. Exhausted and terrified, Buckley soon bolted with three other prisoners. The group separated and Buckley spent weeks on his own, living off shellfish. He probably would have expired, if not for the contact he made with the local Aboriginal people who thought he was a ghost, one of their ancestors who had died, then “jumped up” again as a white man.

Buckley spent the following 32 years living with the Wadawurrung people. He was respected by the Wadawurrung and was influential in trying to preserve the peace between different clans and groups. In 1835, Buckley re-entered European society. He was given a pardon by Governor Arthur and worked as an interpreter. This role as intermediary took its toll on Buckley, who saw many abuses of First Nations people and moved to Van Diemen's Land for the rest of his life.

Garry Linnell takes an interesting approach in Buckley's Chance, presenting the narrative in an almost fictional form. In some ways the structure of the book is like an 18th century epistolatory novel, with Linnell addressing himself to an imaginary Buckley, posing questions about his emotional state and responses to key events. Almost like speculative fiction, this style of writing gives the book a tone of intimacy and humanity, asking the reader to imagine Buckley's personal conflicts and psychological states of being. The narrative is interweaved with thorough research and quotes from key contemporaries, making the book invaluable as an early history of New South Wales, Tasmania and most notably, Victoria.

The portrait that emerges of Buckley himself is of a sad and tortured soul, caught between two cultures, one exterminating the other. His two years working with the Port Phillip Association, most notably with John Batman, was extremely painful as he assisted the land grab that saw widespread dispossession of the Wadawurrung and other peoples. Yet for all that we have on the record, plus Buckley's own memoir, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley written by journalist John Morgan (Buckley was illiterate), the man himself remains frustratingly distant and mysterious. He was often portrayed as a dolt, but surely knew more than he let on.
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Buckley's Chance is a tremendous achievement. Engaging, passionate and fascinating it's a book that invited the reader to re-imagine Australia's formative years, a time that was harsh and often horrific.

Buckley's Chance, by Garry Linnell. Published by Michael Joseph. $34.99

Review by Chris Saliba 

In 1945, a shocking wave of suicides spread across Germany...

As Soviet troops advanced on Nazi Germany, and all seemed utterly hopeless, large numbers of German citizens chose not only suicide for themselves, but suicide for their families as well.  Florian Huber pieces together a chilling, tragic and sometimes bizarre narrative of ordinary Germans trapped in circumstances of their own blind making. Once Hitler had committed suicide, on April 30, 1945, there was no conceivable path out of the national madness he had created. Hitler was all; extraordinary numbers of Germans believed he was a virtual messiah, come to save them. When news got out of the death camps and gas chambers, Germans muttered that Hitler couldn't have known. If he had known, he wouldn't have allowed it to happen. Popular delusions ran deep.

Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself (named after a father who gave his daughter a gun, told her to run and then kill herself) has two major parts. The first is a history of that wave of 1945 suicides, the story of a people immobilised by fear and lacking any moral compass; the second part tries to analyse why Germans got taken in by Hitler. The harsh terms set out for Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, after the First World War, goes some way to explaining Hitler's popularity, but not all. So much still remains an enigma.

The most fascinating parts of the book discuss political scientist Hannah Arendt's experiences  on returning to Germany after the war. Ordinary Germans, she discovered, remained indifferent or unwilling to face the crimes of the Nazi regime. These callous, self-pitying responses left Arendt in a state of shock.

A fascinating addition to the history of Nazi Germany, using contemporary diary entries and letters to explain the mindset and attitudes of ordinary Germans who created for themselves a  horrific nightmare.   

Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945, by Florian Huber. Text Publishing. $32.99

​Review by Chris Saliba