Out of Passau: Leaving a City Hitler Called Home - Hardcover

Rosmus, Anna

3.95

62 ratings by Goodreads

9781570035081: Out of Passau: Leaving a City Hitler Called Home

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1570035083 ISBN 13: 9781570035081

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Pr, 2004

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Anna Elisabeth Rosmus began her life's work unexpectedly at age 20 when she wrote an essay about her hometown during the Third Reich for a national contest. She never dreamed her youthful research would be the start of a distinguished publishing career and that her life would be the basis for the 1990 Academy Award-nominated film The Nasty Girl. Passau, Germany, her entire life, yet she was unaware that the father of Heinrich Himmler had once been a professor at the college-preparatory high school she attended or that Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazi party members had grown up just across the Danube River in Austria. Since Rosmus had no knowledge of these and other Nazi affiliations and activities in her hometown, she embarked on her essay project confident that the Passau citizenry would be proud of her findings. Rosmus had no inkling she had just begun what would become a lifelong effort to uncover Passau's buried complicity in the crimes of the Nazi state - an effort that would bring overwhelming gratitude from the international Jewish community but contempt and ostracism from the people whom she had known all her life. about her fateful decision to expose her hometown's Nazi past. In this volume Rosmus recounts her determination after years of persecution, threats and physical attacks to immigrate to the United States. Despite the praise she had earned around the world, officials and citizens of Passau continued to obstruct her work. In this memoir, Rosmus relives her turmoil over whether to stay in Passau or to leave; describes the more open-minded world she found in Washington D.C.; and discusses how she has been able to carry on her research from the United States.

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From the Inside Flap:

"It is a paradox of the Holocaust that the innocent feel guilty and the guilty innocent. Nowhere is this more true than in the actions of the young Germans. Anna Rosmus’s Against the Stream is a riveting account of one young woman’s uncompromising attempt to discover the hidden past of her community and the hidden history of her town. The guilty feel so innocent that they created myths of resistance and heroism to shade their history of complicity and submissiveness. They did not allow unfettered access to archives even for an innocent girl writing a term paper; and beginning as a girl and growing into a bold and brave woman, Rosmus confronted the truth and refused to go along with the comfortable fables that disguised what really happened. Against the Stream is written with passion and honesty and without any self-aggrandizement or attempt to portray oneself as a hero. Rosmus’s work is formidable; so too her person. Her work is essential for the future of German! y, for the only way to overcome the past is to do as Rosmus has done—face it honestly, openly, and bravely and let the truth set you free." —Michael Berenbaum

"The real Nasty Girl is an intellectual firebrand, a rigorous researcher burning with a passion to tell the story that must be told. Anna Rosmus stands up to the secrets of the past and the fears of the present with a true-life tale that makes us all question how we would act and what we believe." —Marc Fisher, The Washington Post

About the Author:

ANNA ELISABETH ROSMUS is the recipient of numerous awards for her struggle against bigotry and anti-Semitism, including the Conscience in Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Sarnat Prize from the Anti-Defamation League, and the Holocaust Survivors and Friends' Holocaust Memorial Award. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

IMOGEN VON TANNENBERG is director of translations at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation established by Steven Spielberg. She lives in Venice, California.

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