A book about the collective guilt of a nation

 

Excellent condition. PB. 156pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The six essays that make up this compelling book view the long shadow of past guilt both as a uniquely German experience and as a global one. 

Bernhard Schlink explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. 

He considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behavior, how to reconcile a guilt-laden past, how the role of law functions in this process, and how the theme of guilt influences his own fiction. 

Based on the Weidenfeld Lectures he delivered at Oxford University, Guilt About the Past is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how events of the past can affect a nation's future. 

Written in Bernhard Schlink's eloquent but accessible style, it taps in to worldwide interest in the aftermath of war and how to forgive and reconcile the various legacies of the past.

The File by Timothy Garton Ash

 

Excellent condition. PB. 259pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

" Eloquent, aware and scrupulous . . . a rich and instructive examination of the Cold War past." --The New York Times

In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom.

Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash--who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe--returned.

This time he had come to look at a file that bore the code-name " Romeo." The file had been compiled by the Stasi, the East German secret police, with the assistance of dozens of informers. And it contained a meticulous record of Garton Ash's earlier life in Berlin.

In this memoir, Garton Ash describes what it was like to rediscover his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then to go on to confront those who actually informed against him to the secret police.

Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of British intelligence to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, The File is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.

"In this painstaking, powerful unmasking of evil, the wretched face of tyranny is revealed." --Philadelphia Inquirer

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

 

Mint condition. PB. 216pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An exceptionally powerful novel exploring the themes of betrayal, guilt and memory against the background of the Holocaust. An international bestseller.

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined.

The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems.

Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal.

Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make sense. But then suddenly, and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret.