The good Nazi soldier TIBOR FISCHER The Broken House
Bodley Head £14.99
I feel sorry for publicists sometimes.
They know that ‘Look – here’s another book’ isn’t a winning line. So they are driven to extremes of absurdity in the hope of attracting attention.
Horst Krüger’s Broken House, we are told, is a ‘forgotten masterpiece in the mould of Alone in Berlin or Stoner’.
Well, for a start, isn’t a novel. It’s a memoir, rests on the fact that Krüger grew up under Hitler and had a fleeting involvement with a left-wing resistance movement. Now available to the English reader in a translation by the estimable Shaun Whiteside, it is certainly in the running for the title of masterpiece.
