One life /

Actually, it's eight very different lives in Nazi Germany, each structured into narrative from correspondence, state records, and other documents. For Wilhelm K., it's the story of a long career in Nazi bureaucracy in Belarus and a conflicted relationship with the cultural assets of the East. The story of Wilhelm H., on the other hand, is narrower, limited to the trial and execution of an aged pensioner who crayoned anti-Hitler graffiti in a public toilet. For pathos, though, the narrative about Mirjam P., the runaway teenager whose petty adolescent crime leads her to the gas chamber, is most haunting. There is also the curious account of an attack dog that bites as an extension of his master. Lampert's stated intent is posterity: to present individual stories without commentary or moral evaluation. Such will to documentary purity is quite rare and, in this case, special. Readers who skip the foreword to this book may find themselves quite engrossed before they realize that the true stories they find so captivating are in fact as firmly grounded in primary-source evidence as most dissertations. --Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2004 Booklist

The author, an American-born scholar living in Berlin, documents the Nazi era in Germany through eight largely unconnected stories of lesser-known figures-some perpetrators, some victims, one a vicious dog at Treblinka (or perhaps it's really about Konrad Lorenz, a former Nazi party member and later Nobelist who testifies on the dog's behalf). Despite Lampert's prodigious research, he is less than successful in meeting his intent "to alleviate some of the moralizing pressure... that make[s] it impossible to think concretely about... the Holocaust." He wants readers to see that not all perpetrators were evil, nor all victims innocent. Miriam P. is a young, criminally destructive Jewish psychopath executed by the Nazis in their roundup of mental patients. Erich B. is a ruthless SS executioner who loved his children and suffered greatly from physical ailments. The most nuanced and compelling chronicle is that of Karl L., who headed the Jewish police in Theresienstadt, obsessively pursuing stealing and corruption by prisoners; later, when accused of Nazi collaboration, he defended his actions as in the best interest of the inmates. But it's not news that some Nazis, like Wilhelm K. in the title piece, tried to save some Jews, or that some Jews may have collaborated with the Nazis. Does knowledge of this interfere with clear moral thinking about the Holocaust? Though his tales are fascinating, Lampert's purpose in telling them seems muddled. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Fragmentary portraits of quotidian life--at least life of a kind, as lived by less-than-ordinary people. Lampert, an American writer resident in Berlin, works the margins of history, probing the fates of eight Nazi-era Germans who ended up on both sides of the barbed wire. The young woman called Mirjam P., for instance, tries in Lampert's account to make a home in Palestine, does some modest swindling in Zurich, and ends up in a German mental hospital, where she meets her end through newly promulgated Nazi provisions for what was called "mercy killing of incurably ill patients." More fully developed is a case study devoted to an endlessly complex author and political operative named Wilhelm K., who, even as a high official in the Nazi-occupied Russian province of White Ruthenia, can never quite figure out what he really believes in; he orders some Jews killed but many others saved to work in his palatial headquarters, and he professes to be bothered when his fellow Nazis kill them in an apparent effort to irritate him. Grandly, Wilhelm K. proposes that the bombed-flat city of Minsk be renamed Asgard: "It is of Gothic origin and has yet to be used as a city name." Alas for Wilhelm, he is blown apart by a partisan grenade, and perhaps fortuitously: "Himmler is reported to have said that K.'s death was a blessing for Germany, since otherwise he would have had to put him in a concentration camp." Fascinating, too, are Lampert's other tales: of an elderly man in just such a camp, put there for having written anti-Hitler graffiti in a toilet stall; of a Jewish veteran of WWI made to organize a police unit at Theresienstadt, for which "war crimes" he is arrested after the Allied victory but then released, "shortly after several former members of the Ghetto Guard have been interrogated by authorities and described L. as a strict but just superior"; and of a vicious murderer who is only following orders. A small but potent piece of work, up there with recent, influential banality-of-evil scholarship, such as Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.