The Silences of Hammerstein (The German List) - Hardcover

"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." (Eric Hobsbawm The Guardian)

"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. . . . But Hammerstein – and especially his older daughters, Marie-Therese, Marie-Louise and Helga – 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." (Peter Preston Observer)

"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." (David Blackbourn London Review of Books)

"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." (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagsz on the German Edition)

"In writing about Hammerstein, Enzensberger is not just telling the story of a man, or of that man’s remarkable family. He is investigating the moral value of intransigence—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 book’s idiosyncratic power comes from the fact that it is not just a work of history, but a record of the author’s struggle to understand and judge that history.--New York Review of Books (Adam Kirsch)

"[Enzensberger is] one of the holy trinity of German postwar literature (alongside Grass and Walser)." (Philip Oltermann Guardian)

"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."—New Republic "The Book" blog (Aaron Their New Republic "The Book" blog)

"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 – there are no footnotes and the text is punctuated with ‘posthumous conversations’ in which the author interrogates the ghosts of many of his subjects – 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." (Richard Evans The Historian)