Synopses & Reviews
The Silences of Hammerstein, the latest work from one of Germanyand#8217;s most significant contemporary authors, engages readers with a blend of a documentary, collage, narration, and fictional interviews. The gripping plot revolves around the experiences of real-life German General Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children. A member of an old military family, a brilliant staff officer, and the last commander of the German army before Hitler seized power, Hammerstein, who died in 1943 before Hitlerand#8217;s defeat, was nevertheless an idiosyncratic character. Too old to be a resister, he retained an independence of mind that was shared by his children: three of his daughters joined the Communist Party, and two of his sons risked their lives in the July 1944 Plot against Hitler and were subsequently on the run till the end of the war. Hammerstein never criticized his children for their activities, and he maintained contacts with the Communists himself and foresaw the disastrous end of Hitlerand#8217;s dictatorship.
In The Silences of Hammerstein, Hans Magnus Enzensberger offers a brilliant and unorthodox account of the military milieu whose acquiescence to Nazism consolidated Hitlerand#8217;s power and of the heroic few who refused to share in the spoils.
Review
"Hans Magnus Enzensberger is one of Germany's leading public intellectuals. He belongs to the same generation as Gunter Grass and Jurgen Habermas, although he has been less bien pensant, less predictable, than either. His early poetry, lyric verse with a strong political content, won him the Georg Buchner Prize and he is now widely regarded as Germany's foremost living poet. Enzensberger is the most important postwar writer you have never read."
Review
"Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a well-known German poet and writer, has delivered a fascinating account of the family, based on a large quantity of new material from archives and personal collections in Russia, Germany and elsewhere. This is not a conventional academic study and#8211; there are no footnotes and the text is punctuated with and#8216;posthumous conversationsand#8217; in which the author interrogates the ghosts of many of his subjects and#8211; but it is compulsively readable, beautifully translated by Martin Chalmers and full of startling details about this unconventional family that make one think again about German aristocratic life and culture in the first half of the 20th century."
Review
"The Silences of Hammerstein is a book only a poet could have written. Form is just as important as content here. Enzensberger moves forward and backward in time, describes events out of context, and returns again and again to the gaps in the historical record. What emerges is a brilliant and horrifying representation of chaos."and#8212;New Republic "The Book" blog
Review
"[Enzensberger is] one of the holy trinity of German postwar literature (alongside Grass and Walser)."
Review
"I found Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Silences of Hammerstein a virtuoso combination of research, reportage and imagination, as good an introduction as any to the Weimar Republic, impossible to put down."
Review
"So you thought there was nothing revealing left to say about the collapse of the Weimar Republic? Think again. One of Germany's most revered poets and literary polymaths has produced a book, part history, part novel, that sheds new light on an extraordinary time through the eyes of an extraordinary family. . . . Butand#160;Hammerstein and#8211; and especially his older daughters, Marie-Therese, Marie-Louise and Helga and#8211; are haunting figures. They tell us what it was like to endure the Berlin of the 1930s. And, in their amazements, they help us understand."
Review
"It is an astonishing story of betrayal and human decency, about the possibilities of resistance of the most various kinds. . . . A book without heroes but with heroic moments and small gestures of resistance. By an author who doesn't know the truth but in his determined search for the truth has written an unbelievably thrilling book."
Review
"In writing about Hammerstein, Enzensberger is not just telling the story of a man, or of that manand#8217;s remarkable family. He is investigating the moral value of intransigenceand#8212;the combination of principle, arrogance, and willfulness that prevented Hammerstein from falling into line with Nazism, when so many of his fellow officers did. For this reason, Enzensberger eschews the usual conventions of biography: the book proceeds in short narrative sections, often out of chronological order, interspersed with documents and passages of analysis and rumination. There are even imaginary, posthumous interviews with people Enzensberger is writing about, in which he can speculate on their true motives. Indeed, the bookand#8217;s idiosyncratic power comes from the fact that it is not just a work of history, but a record of the authorand#8217;s struggle to understand and judge thatand#160;history.--New York Review of Books
About the Author
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, often considered Germany's most important living poet, is also the editor of the book series Die Andere Bibliothek and the founder of the monthly TransAtlantik. His books include Lighter Than Air: Moral Poems and Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia.
Martin Chalmers (1948andndash;2014) was a Berlin-based translator from Glasgow. He translated some of the best-known German-language writers, including Herta Manduuml;ller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Table of Contents
A difficult day
The exemplary career of a cadet
A very ancient family and a suitable marriage
The sinister general
A couple of anecdotes
A posthumous conversation with Kurt von Hammerstein (I)
First gloss. The horrors of the Weimar Republic
A posthumous conversation with Kurt von Schleicher
Second gloss. A tangle of manoeuvres and intrigues
Difficult times
Three daughters
Official duties
Cover-up
A strange pilgrimage
A veteranand#8217;s story
Herr von Rankeand#8217;s adventure
Entrance of a lady from Bohemia
A posthumous conversation with Ruth von Mayenburg (I)
Last-minute efforts
Third gloss. On discord
The invisible war
A dinner with Hitler
Attendance list of 3 February 1933
Moscow is listening in
A posthumous conversation with Kurt von Hammerstein (II)
Fait accompli
Hindenburg sends his regards
A posthumous conversation with Kurt von Hammerstein (III)
A posthumous conversation with Werner Scholem
A born intelligence man
Two very different weddings
A Prussian lifestyle
The massacre
A settling of accounts of quite a different kind
Sidelined (I)
A posthumous conversation with Ruth von Mayenburg (II)
A posthumous conversation with Leo Roth
Soundings
A posthumous conversation with Helga von Hammerstein (I)
On criminal case no. 6222
and#160;A posthumous conversation with Helga von Hammerstein (II)
A birthday and its consequences
A quite different life as an agent
The mole in the Bendler Block
Yet another double life
From Leoand#8217;s cadre file
Without Helga
From the thicket of deviations
A message from Moscow
The inquisition
The third daughter in the espionage web
Fourth gloss: The Russian seesaw.
The marshaland#8217;s greetings
The beheaded army
Helga or loneliness
Fifth gloss. On the scandal of synchronicity.
Visits to the country
A farewell
A posthumous conversation with Ruth von Mayenburg (III)
War
Sidelined (II)
From Fand#252;hrer headquarters
The funeral
Sixth gloss. Remarks about the aristocracy.
A room in the Bendler Block
A posthumous conversation with Ludwig von Hammerstein
Flight
In remembrance of a druggist
The reaction
Family liability
The necrosis of power
Berlin, at the end
The return
The mother
Journeys back to normality
A beginning in the New World
The sleeper wakes
Border issues
A posthumous conversation with Marie Luise von Mand#252;nchhausen
Helgaand#8217;s final years
Seventh gloss. The silence of the Hammersteins.
Why this book is not a novel.
Postscript
Translatorand#8217;s notes
Sources
Acknowledgements
Photographs
Index of Personalities