My Father's Country by Wibke Bruhns Vintage, HK$136
Wibke Bruhns was six when her father, Major Hans Georg Klamroth, was sentenced to death for conspiring to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. When she saw documentary images of him in court she realised she was looking at someone she didn't know. To make sense of the family pact of silence she started sifting letters, diaries and photographs, which revealed the story of the Klamroths, their ideological underpinnings and, by extension, the mindset of many Germans at the time. Klamroth came from a wealthy industrialist Prussian family who felt wronged by the Treaty of Versailles. A committed nationalist, he was only too keen to join the SS. 'Does he know that he's joining a gang of murderers?' Bruhns writes, in one of many personal comments that sound like questions she wishes she could have asked her father. About her mother, Else, who rages about Kristallnacht, saying, 'These are cowardly and unworthy fighting methods, unworthy of a highly cultured nation,' Bruhns writes, 'It would be petty to ask her why her philippic contains not a word of sympathy for the afflicted Jews.' Hard-edged and devoid of sentimentality, My Father's Country is an absorbing memoir.
