Hans-Georg Behr experienced a remarkable childhood in wartime Austria. His liberal, artistic grandparents belonged to the aristocracy; his mother was a celebrated opera singer; and his father a prominent industrialist. His parents were also rabid Nazis, and the high office his father held in the Ministry of Aviation brought the young Hans-Georg into contact with "Uncle Josef" Goebbels, "Uncle Hermann" Goring, and "Uncle Adolf" himself. As the war advances, their world begins to collapse, though the writer has only a child's grasp of the reasons why—his older half-brother confronts Russian soldiers with his air-rifle and Hitler Youth uniform and is killed, and his half-sister swallows cyanide. Later his grandparents' estate is wrecked by the advancing Russians, while his mother, no longer able to perform, ends up serving in a bar, where her son collects the glasses. The book was hailed as a literary triumph when it appeared in Germany for the way in which Behr recaptures the freshness of his own childhood perceptions and its flashes of darkly ironic humor.
The author of this dramatic but restrained memoir documents a harrowing childhood in Nazi Austria, in which his personal misery blends with the larger national trauma of war and occupation. Born in 1937 to a Viennese former opera singer and a German antiaircraft artillery commander, Behr, who has written for German newspapers, was raised in a punitive atmosphere, routinely beaten by his mother (his father was away at war) for childhood infractions. When Behr stammered and soiled himself, his mother publicly humiliated him. As well, he was sexually abused, first by a Russian laborer on his grandfather's estate and then, after the war, by a priest at the authoritarian Catholic boarding school he was banished to. Behr understatedly evokes these violent episodes by remaining at a distance, referring to himself as "the boy." His father was hanged for war crimes, leaving his wife under Russian occupation, tainted by her marriage to an officer of the defeated Reich. This bitter tale ends with Behr's first taste of freedom, when he manages to escape from his draconian boarding school. (Sept.)
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Behr's memoir recounts his childhood as the son of zealous Nazis in Austria during World War II. His mother was a renowned opera singer, and his father was in the Reich Aviation Ministry. Behr discusses his parents' friendship with Hermann Goring, the second most prominent Nazi after Hitler; Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister; and Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. He addressed them all as "uncle." And there was Hitler, who kissed Behr's mother's hand as Behr watched. Behr's half brother was killed by Russian soldiers, his half sister swallowed cyanide, and his grandparents' home was destroyed by Russian troops. The book was published in Germany in 2002 and in the UK in 2005, and in it Behr brilliantly chronicles his youth in a world tyrannized by the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. George Cohen
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