'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books I think capture so well the sense of a life
broken for ever by trauma and guilt' - Sunday Times'An unsparing honest and insightful memoir
that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' - Hilary MantelIn 1965 the German
journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt where 22 former camp guards
were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men women and children. Twenty
years after the end of the war this was the first time that the German people were confronted
with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their
midst.The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s in an attempt to understand
'how it really was that incomprehensible time'. He had grown up in a Berlin suburb among a
community of decent lower-middle-class homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit
processions and endless ranks of marching SA men. Here people lived ordinary non-political
lives believed in God and obeyed the law but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the
promises of Nazism. He had been Krüger realised 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who
were never Nazis and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'.This
world of respectability order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger's older
sister decided to take her own life leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the
inexplicable. The author's teenage rebellion his desire to escape the stifling conformity of
family life made him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only
to be sent to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step a family that had
fallen under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it.Written in accomplished prose of
lingering beauty The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an
unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book's themes also chime with our own
times - how the promise of an 'era of greatness' by a populist leader intoxicates an entire
nation how thin is the veneer of civilisation and what makes one person a collaborator and
another a resister.
